In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  Is that too much to ask?

  You're probably thinking, 'This place is a modern marvel, host to the 2008 Olympic Games and the world's second largest economy. Where's the danger zone here?' Well, despite all the international fawning over China (let's face it, it pays to be mates with the world's next superpower), it's still an authoritarian, highly militarized totalitarian regime; there's little freedom of speech, no political party except for the Communist party and there's widespread corruption. More importantly for me, China's relentless drive for economic growth has devastated agriculture, created a huge gap between the urban rich and the rural poor and caused comprehensive social damage. In spite of all this, I'm sure I'll find that China is a spectacularly successful country full of rich and complex characters – all I need is to find them.

  It's taken me three months to get clearance simply to visit China to make a film about food, and I've been warned by the BBC to expect all manner of official intrusion. In order to get a permit I must agree to have a minder at all times, and to pay $100 a day for the privilege. And we're under strict instructions from our bosses not to mess them around and film things we shouldn't, otherwise the authorities could ban the BBC altogether.

  Welcome to the Kung Fu Restaurant

  I arrive at Beijing Airport to a murky soup of a day. The dust blows into Beijing off the Gobi desert, blotting out the sun and creating a shroud of general misery.

  I meet my guide Yan Yan and the China TV (disconcertingly called CCTV) minder Penny, who couldn't look less like the miserable communist cadre I'd been expecting if she tried. She's a tiny, sweet and disarmingly pretty media student who says that she plans to make herself useful carrying bags and keeping an eye on the van. And another eye on us, presumably. I get the sense that there's going to be conflict between Yan Yan, whom we've employed to get us access to things, and Penny, whom we've employed to stop us getting access to things.

  We drive through Beijing and I'm struck by the relentlessly shiny and spectacular forest of high-rise buildings. I don't know if it's urban heaven or dystopia. It's also a mess of advertising – every spare inch of the place is covered in high-tech signage.

  Our hotel turns out to be the child adoption centre of Beijing, full of Russians and Italians road-testing babies. Disconcertingly, they are in the lifts all the time (maybe it's a way of getting the kids off to sleep). The parents gaze with newfound love at their little babies who are busy screaming their heads off, whilst a Chinese person explains, through a bouffant-haired interpreter, that everything is going to be fine.

  My first taste of food in a new place is invariably at breakfast time, when I'm feeling least adventurous. Luckily, breakfast in the hotel is a festival of dull stodge: congee (a sort of steamed rice porridge), steamed dumplings, fried noodles and lots of doughnutty-looking things.

  I venture out and visit the Kung Fu fast food joint, which sits right next door to one of the hundreds of McDonalds in Beijing. Kung Fu uses exactly the same colours as Maccy D's for its sign, but with the additional image of a fighter taking a boot at the Americans. It's one of China's relatively few successful attempts at brand-building, and it's a marvel of capitalist modelling. This is slightly disconcerting: I wanted to see a bit of communism.

  As I walk through the door of Kung Fu the entire staff – about 30 people – yell at me and raise their right arms in a scary fascist salute. For a nanosecond I wonder if Beijing has been experiencing a spiritual crisis and they think that I'm their Messiah – I always wondered if there was something special about me. Then someone else walks in and they do the same thing. Apparently, much to my disappointment, they are just saying 'Welcome to the Kung Fu restaurant'.

  I'm surprised at this Japanese-style zeal for service. During my visits to the former Soviet Union it seemed that service was a dirty word, and customers were treated like muck, so I was expecting the same from the Chinese, but these guys are as eager as a bunch of puppies. The childishly enthusiastic manager fits me out with a polyester polo shirt in the team colours, a polyester Kung Fu baseball cap and relieves me of my wedding ring and watch.

  He shows me everything in his cramped high-tech kitchen – his cupboards, steamers, temperature gauges (his fascination for temperature regulation borders on the psychotic), trays, taps, and lord knows what else. After half an hour of inspecting catering equipment, I put a stop to it, much to his dismay, and ask him to teach me how to cook their most popular dish.

  He shows me the mixture of MSG, salt and sugar that flavours the food. I throw half a teaspoonful in my mouth, and it explodes in a cloud of non-specific flavour. I can't speak properly for the next hour as my mouth tries to cope with an extended gauge of tongue.

  We boil a large handful of lettuce with 50 ml of oil, garlic and soy, rendering it into a slimy but extraordinarily tasty salad. Never before has a lettuce contained so many calories. We also cook pork custard, which tastes infinitely better than it sounds. It's a simple steamed egg, water and pork mixture that's delicately flavoured (then boosted with a hefty whack of MSG) and wobbly, a cross between custard and set yoghurt. The food in Kung Fu is cooked to a precise formula of sizes and flavours and, as with McDonalds, consistency is everything.

  The team shows me how to greet customers: as soon as someone walks through the door, elevate your arm to 30 degrees above horizontal, palms outwards to point the customers' eyes towards the menu, and shout at the top of your voice: 'Hwan ying guang lin zhen kung fu. I like this aggressive approach to hospitality – it shows who's boss, whilst giving a cursory nod to servility. The Russians could learn a lot from these guys.

  The boss of the whole company turns up to be interviewed, which is a bit of a coup, although, oddly, he brings his own film crew. They interview me about my experience here, but I don't have that much to offer as I have no frame of reference yet – it's my first lunch in China – but I tell them that it's very nice. They seem tremendously pleased with this.

  Then I get a chance to interview the boss. I ask him how private businesses like this can exist in a communist country. He flinches at the word 'communist', as though I've insulted him. He says that this is part of the new era of private and public ownership.

  'So how can two opposing economic ideologies like capitalism and communism coexist?' I ask.

  He's dismayed – he wanted to tell the BBC about how cheap, popular and nutritious his food is, and how he's ripe for inward investment; he did not expect some fella in a polyester polo shirt to be asking all this difficult stuff. His PR lady huffs and harrumphs, and the boss flails and flannels at my questions until I finally give up.

  After the interview Penny, our CCTV minder, is angry – she thought the programme was about food, not politics. I tell her that it's about the politics of food, and the colour drains from her face. She clearly thought that this was going to be a cushy gig.

  'What's wrong with asking someone about communism?' I ask.

  People don't like to discuss communism – they don't know anything about it'.

  Eh? How can they not know anything about it – they are living in a communist country that's been run by the Communist party for 57 years. I presume that they are highly likely to be communists, and they must have some kind of view on the matter.

  Penny shakes her head.

  I don't understand what's going on. I'm not accusing people of being communist – I'm in China, for crying out loud; surely they're proud of communism, and can tell me all about it.

  Penny looks to the skies.

  I wander into McDonald's next door to have a nose around.

  'No, you can't film in here,' the manager says.

  'Is the food in here healthy?' I ask.

  'No, not really,' says the girl on the till, with a friendly smile.

  Carrefour

  I visit Carrefour, one of the French supermarket chain's 78 Chinese stores. It's now the ninth biggest retailer in the country with sales of £1.3 billion. It's an odd thing, seeing the familiar European approach to f
logging food, and it would feel like home if the place didn't have tanks of live carp to buy and a deli counter full of ducks' heads. The mall outside is full of Benetton, KFC, Sephora and the like. This place feels so capitalist, J just can't work out how the Communist party keeps going in this country.

  I try some Great Wall red wine. It's awful.

  That night I walk around the largest square in the world, and it sends shivers down my spine. Tiananmen Square is vast – 440,000 square metres to be precise. The exact number of people who died during the 1989 protests and its immediate aftermath ranges from 200 to 3,000 depending on whether you ask the government or the student associations. I'd assume a figure somewhere in between. Discussion about the protests is taboo in China (like discussion about the Cultural Revolution) and the news media is forbidden to report anything about it. And now I can't ask people about their fast-food business without terrifying the boss. What is all this about? I'm not even asking tricky questions about whether communism is right or wrong.

  These people are terrified and I can't help thinking that a grown-up, responsible world superpower shouldn't be paranoid about free speech and political comment. Is China really ready to be the most powerful country in the world?

  I visit one of China's largest dumpling factories and again, it's privately owned (I still don't understand how private ownership works within communism, but no one seems able to explain it to me). The dumpling factory is a little like visiting a battery chicken farm – from the calm, quiet exterior it's hard to imagine the horrors within.

  I pull on a pair of white wellies, don a white jacket and face-mask, and walk into one of the vast work halls. Inside is a scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with rows of identical workers (wearing identical clothing and masks, all individuality stripped away) lined along the tables, heads bowed and hands a blur of dumpling and fingers. All the sitting workers are female, but male supervisors stomp up and down the gaps between them, inspecting the dumplings for uniformity. It's a disconcerting but mesmerizing scene.

  The workers take a dumpling wrapper (similar to a square of pasta but made with rice flour), put a spoonful of filling in the middle, then wrap it tight using their fingers and palms to make a distinctive shape. They do this over and over, for hours, weeks on end. The mundanity and repetition must be brain-rotting. They fill a tray of dumplings, put an identifying sticker on it, then place it on the conveyor belt in front of them, which takes it down to the quick-freezing plant at the far end of the factory. There's absolutely no talking, and the only noise is the rumble of the conveyor belts. This is a perfect dystopian image of the future.

  The women are paid per dumpling, and in a ten-hour shift an average worker can expect to earn just under £3. Despite this, it's a sought-after job. I sit next to the factory's fastest worker who tells me that she makes around 7,000 dumplings a day. I ask if she gets bored, but she doesn't understand the question. I try a different tack: 'What do you think about when you're making dumplings?'

  'I think about how to make dumplings faster and better.'

  It's not surprising that she says this – I'm sitting with the boss of the company, and you wouldn't be seen dead in China saying anything that might make your boss look bad.

  Chateau Zhang Lafitte

  An hour outside Beijing lies one of the most extraordinary sights in China. After meandering through tumbledown villages (which Penny won't let us stop in) and filthy peasant street markets (which Penny . . .), I'm suddenly hit by the ludicrous sight of a vast, disconcertingly shiny Renaissance French chateau looming out of the paddy fields. This is Chateau Zhang Lafitte: a £40 million copy of the original 1642 masterpiece built near Paris by Francois Masart, and Penny is very keen that we stop here. The middle name gives the game away – it's owned by Zhang Yuchun, an influential member of the Communist party who somehow found some communal farming land that his party was happy to redesignate as private land to benefit . . . himself. It will come as no surprise that he's a former senior official at Beijing's municipal construction bureau.

  The chateau is set in hundreds of acres of very immature landscaped gardens that used to be farmland but has now been rezoned as land for private housing. It's difficult to describe quite how out of place it looks. Imagine seeing a streaker at the Communist Party Congress. Yup, it's about that weird.

  It's an authentic Disney French-Chinese folly full of cheesy baroque statues and lots of shiny faux-gold light fittings. As I enter this ersatz Disneyland version of France, I'm struck by the acres of expensive marble and chintz.

  China's President Hu Jintao has spoken of social inequality and corruption as the biggest threats to one-party rule. He is particularly nervous about unrest over the financial relationship between business and party officials, but that don't cut no ice with Zhang who asserts that, 'You can't receive high-profile guests in two-star hotels.' Quite so.

  The hotel rooms in this weird place are vast and implausibly opulent – so implausibly opulent that the BBC budgets don't stretch to a night here (although I'm disheartened to learn that Channel Five were happy to pay for Paul Merton to stay here some time later). I wonder how on earth such a massive waste of cash has landed here somewhere north of the capital.

  I wander around until I stumble across the back lobby, where three huge model villages are laid out, with a frightening crew of estate agents showing baseball-cap-wearing octogenarian Chinese couples and their sunglass-wearing brats around.

  And then it all falls into place. The chateau is basically a white elephant that serves as the venue for gruesome weddings, corporate gigs and product launches for big, often Western, firms. Also, it serves as the centrepiece for a massive development of houses for the new rich of China. The models show a scary, Stepfordesque world of perfectly manicured lawns and closely packed mansions with tiny gardens. The brochure screams 'Find your Dream'.

  These are homes for the burgeoning middle classes of China. Now, I wouldn't deny a bit of prosperity to anyone, let alone the previously desperate Chinese peasantry, but it just seems odd when the government of this bizarre country hangs onto the ideological label (and excuse for totalitarianism) of communism. This isn't politics any longer – it's hegemony, a way for the elite to assert control and retain power through patronage. This could be modern Russia, with its Tatchell-beating, ridiculously partisan appliance of justice and economic patriarchy. This, together with Penny's constant needling not to film or say anything even vaguely negative, is making me start to dislike China, and that wasn't the plan at all.

  Zhang himself isn't in when I call at the chateau, so I meet his assistant, a lovely young lady by the name of Nancy. After a great deal of haggling she reluctantly lets me drive around the estate in the company golf cart (I've always loved driving electric vehicles). We fizz around the grounds chatting away, and Nancy is very happy to talk until I ask her if the land that the chateau is built on had been taken away from the peasantry, at which point her understanding of English suddenly collapses. This was just farmland, she says, as if that means it was wasteland.

  Questions such as 'How does this extreme of wealth fit in with the principles of communism?' and 'How have people's lives changed over the last 20 years?' all fly into the ether, accompanied by the bad smell of political intransigence.

  This might sound like an isolated case – there really aren't that many exact copies of French chateaux lying about the Chinese countryside – but it does highlight a huge, devastating problem for the majority of Chinese – the confiscation or rezoning of agricultural land to make way for development, industry or simply private ownership. Twenty per cent of agricultural land has been lost since 1949 due to soil erosion and economic development, which is catastrophic for ordinary people. Sadly, Penny and her Communist party friends didn't allow me to meet many ordinary people, so I can only imagine the worst for them. However, we do know that 70 million farmers have lost their land in the last decade and unemployment in the countryside has reached a staggering 130 million.r />
  And as with many of these great leaps forward, there appears to be collateral damage here at the Chateau Zhang Lafitte. In the nearby village I find a chap called Li Chang who used to farm the land that the gaudy chateau now sits on. Penny is not happy about the meeting, but I somehow bully her into letting me speak to him. Li's a fabulous bloke, with eyebrows of such magnificent bushiness that he could compete at international level. He was kicked off his land to make way for the chateau and is clearly angry. He expects to be punished for speaking out against party-sponsored development, but says he is too old to care about the consequences.

  In China, land has never been owned – at least not until now. Farmers would lease it from the state for 30 years at a time, with pretty much automatic renewal as long as you hadn't pissed off the party. Now, farmers are finding that they can't renew the lease, and that it's being handed over to business-minded party members or their friends. It's a woefully unfair system of patronage that smacks of wide-scale corruption.

  Mr Li is angry that all the farmers in the village have lost their land, although as this is a high-profile rezoning, they have all been given some sort of compensation to try to avoid any unnecessary publicity, and the elderly residents receive $45 a month, which has left them much worse off as they now can't grow their own food and have to spend most of the money at the market. Li isn't happy with the money, or the way the state has treated him and his friends, and is one of the only people I meet in China willing to say so.

  On the road behind the chateau I find a vast hoarding surrounding the building sites, covered in pictures of dreamy Barratt homes with neat grass and an SUV outside every door. And although it looks ridiculous, I feel mean criticizing it. We like to think that peasant farmers live in bucolic bliss, but that's a Wordsworthian Western ideal that none of the people here wants. They are desperate that their kids don't have to destroy their lives and their health farming and can instead have some level of prosperity. Few people in China want to be small-scale rice paddy workers for the simple reason that although it looks pretty to us, it's a shit life. It's no wonder that they aspire to cars, central heating and running water.