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Thundering over continents of snowy moraines and ice-floes, China Air Flight 982 time traveled through 14 hours of uninterrupted daylight; when it finally landed in the morning, it was already tomorrow night.

Instantly on arrival, Chinese health officials, toting electronic monitoring equipment in trendy Converse messenger bags,  boarded the plane and began individually screening  passengers for flu like signs and symptoms. Since reporting its first laboratory confirmed case of the H1N1 virus on May 11, 2009, China has experienced a surge of diagnoses resulting in more than 1,000 confirmations of the virus on its mainland in just over one month’s time.  In light of its public relations disaster over its handling of the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the Chinese Ministry of Health is cracking down.

Using  a digital temperature scanning probe resembling a gun, rattled passengers submitted, as officials took aim at their foreheads, and fired. One degree over normal, and the entire flight risked quarantine.  

Outside, Beijing was  cloaked in dusk.  The smog swirled like steam, and as you exited the terminal, it felt like you were suddenly standing over an open manhole cover in mid-town Manhattan during August.

Along the Jincheng Gao-su, a 1,600 km strip of highway connecting Chengdu to Beijing, a series of sleek overpasses coiled and slithered through the city above the traffic; the off ramps were illuminated from below and were curved like the underbelly of a snake. 

Gun-metal gray bicycles carrying two and three passengers at a time jerked and stuttered with the flow of traffic as second hand mopeds wheezed between them. Barrelling through Beijing’s canyon of steel and glass, the rows of boxed trees and hedges separating the highway on either side were the only reminders that this was still planet earth. 

 Or was it?

For all you knew, that plane ride was really a rocket-ship to some otherworldly dimension. One look at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium and you would swear you were on a different planet.

You were…it was Planet China.

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At 5:00a.m., on the Tsinghua campus, along the edges of the lotus pool, while the sun is still red, there is the whirring sound of a man fanning the sidewalks with his Xiao Zhu (a small home-made switch).

Kerplunk! goes someone’s fishing line into the pond. Behind the fisherman, an older couple practices their Tai-Chi; an exercise in balance, breathing, single-mindedness and flexibility. A woman jogs by in her work clothes, while others are pounding their thighs and stomachs as they walk, enhancing circulation.

By mid-morning, the scene is the same, except now there are thousands of people; fishing, pounding, stretching and staring out over the edge of the great pool.

Hundreds of rollicking elementary school students converge near a statue of Confucius in the center of the gardens. Rallying their enthusiasm around two kiosks selling ice cream and soda, off they went, bobbing their heads, licking and sipping their way down some cinder path in silence.

Today is an occassion for them. In China, all children with access to an education are taught to memorize, at an early age, a very special essay called, ”The Lotus Pond by Moonlight,” by, Zhu Zi Tsing. For most of these students, this will be their first visit to the actual pond which inspired its writing nearly 100 years ago.

Staring at it slack-jawed, they clung to their popsicle sticks as if they were holding tiny torches about to fizzle out, as huge clots of ice cream plopped down on their sneakers. Tugging at one another’s shirt, they pointed and fluttered, oooing and ahhhing, unaware of the greater meaning of this peculiar sensation that gripped them. That, through the windows of their own imaginations, they had discovered something authentic, and it had left them fascinated. 

Soon, the gardens emptied, and were restored with fresh moonlight. Rising up to greet it, were the wilted blades of  grass that had been stomped on all day. Sandy footprints dissolved, and the aching stones were all calmed, as evening breezes cooled their backs with its breath. The lotus pool and the moonlight were again, as Zhu Zi Tsing had left them.

Swallows depart, they will come back again; willows wither, they will be green again; peach flowers fade, they will bloom again. But, clever as you are, please tell me, why do our days pass never to come back again?

I don’t know how many days I have been given, but I do know that something is slipping from my grasp little by little…..like a drop of water from the point of a needle into the sea…my days are dripping into the river of time….-Swiftly by, Zhu Zi Tsing

As remnants of the last Chinese dynasty, the gardens at Tsinghua glowed this way at night for many men; for many centuries. 

I am drinking deeply these days spent in China.

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the campus at Tsinghua was created on the grounds surrounding the gardens in partnership with the United States, and paid for with the monies the U.S. received as part of war reparations subsequent to the defeat of the Chinese during the Boxer Rebellion. In 2011, Tsinghua will mark its 100th year anniversary.

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Behind the walls of the ancient city of Xi’an, a shop keeper is kneeling on the floor in the dust; he is making clothes for the dead.

Outside, rows of bare chested men are drinking beers, clacking mahjong tiles and spitting. The shop window is smudged with soot.

Clearly, not the GDP busting economic indicators  you read about on the Internet.

Likewise, In the bleak Qinzhou District of Tianshui, laborers at a small rug factory are toiling at make-shift work stations comprised of bare planks of wood supported by stacks of bricks. Not 50 feet away from its entrance-way, a beastly dog chained to a tree menaces passers-by. The carcass of an animal slightly smaller than the dog rots in the dirt close by; a pocket of flies feasts on the remaining gristle.

Hmmm…that wasn’t featured in the 2008 National Bureau of Statistics’ Urban Economic Report.

Drill down to street level on those enthusiastic numbers and a slightly different picture begins to emerge. There are still certain sectors of China’s vast urban economic engines infected with decay.

A blight to the panorama of Porsche dealers and Pizza Huts surrounding it, the funeral tailor’s shop in Xi’an is an unmarked space trapped in time; a bad time, like New York City circa 1970’s.

As for the Qinzhou District, with a dried riverbed overflowing with garbage as its backdrop, it is simply a ghetto. To get to the rug factory, workers must travel a maze of dirt roads through a series of interlocking courtyards buzzing with flies. Between the courtyards, in alleyways plagued with weeds, half naked kids play with lumps of coal for sport.

“This is what Beijing looked like 25 years ago,” says Xu Yong, assistant to Tsinghua University’s School of Journalism’s Executive Dean, Professor Li Xiuang.

 

By its own account, and according to its own advisors,  China is still at least 45 years away from becoming even a medium sized global economy. Presently, the Chinese Central Government’s primary economic concerns are over the issue of migrant workers, and how it must roil 200 million of them out of peasantry. Data kept on most standard of life issues reflect the rural Chinese as desperately lagging behind their urban counterparts.

In either case, for China, economic growth in all areas will always be dependent on two factors: population and culture. With so many people, and so many different cultures zig-zagging across the Chinese spectrum to suit the needs of one particular group or another, the Hu Jintao Administration has promised to rein in all 56 ethnic groups under one tent, and through committee, decide which cultures directly benefit China, and which one’s don’t. It is called the Chinese policy of “Letting the Past Pay for the Present.”  Ironically, by embedding its fiscal policies into areas of cultural significance, China is now heavily relying on the successful arousal of  those very same social institutions it sought to eliminate just three short decades ago under the reign of Mao.

On the outer rim of the Big Goose Pagoda , a hugely successful national tourist attraction in Xi’an, there is an abundance of modern coffee and snack shops, restrooms, and rows and rows of kiosks selling t-shirts, hats, buttons and baubles. The same holds true at the Maiji Shan caves in Tianshui, the Great Wall at Ji Yu Guan, and at the Magao Caves in Dunhuang. This is China’s past paying for its present. But, it’s going to take a lot more than hawking bird whistles and beads to get it accomplished. 

Soon, all culturally based enterprises like the funeral tailor’s shop in Xi’an will warm under the death ray of the central government’s culture committee. If the committee decides that having yourself cremated at death in period clothing from the Tang Dynasty is central to Chinese culture, then businesses like his will flourish. If not, they will go the way of foot binding.

A society’s opening up will inevitably weaken the narrow local and ethnic consciousness, while strengthening the state consciousness and the consciousness of the Chinese nation.          -The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

When it is mandated by committee that hand-crafted Chinese rugs should be featured as wall hangings in the homes of all eligible consumers, places like the rug factory in Tianshui and its surrounding district will certainly be uplifted.

These principles are key in understanding the differences between market based economies and those economies where the markets are manipulated by the government. In China, the government tells you what the market is and where it’s going to be.

Meanwhile, as social reforms, like work conditions and quality of life issues continue to remain slightly out of step with China’s rapid macro-economic development, it at least recognizes, that in order to sustain the deep economic growth it desires, it  must vigorously continue to fuse every aspect of its culture with commerce.

With that it mind, if it were truly serious about deepening its social reforms through economic liberalization, the Chinese government would go ahead and park a defunct tank down on Tiananmen Square during the PRC’s  upcoming 60th Anniversery, and charge tourists 1,000 RMB apeice to stand in front of it while having their photographs snapped.

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A grizzled old woman carrying a kettle of hot water wafts from car to car selling Ramen noodles on the Wei River Highway.

Hemmed in between pagoda shaped mountains and the mouthe of a tunnel, she weaves her way through the hundreds of cars, buses and delivery trucks, including those carrying toilet paper, which are pinned down, and forced to wait out a five hour traffic jam. There are no traffic cops in China.

For the western mind, it is nearly impossible to penetrate the mysteries of China. It is always hyper-focused on what is missing, and subsequently fills in all of the gaps of its understanding with blackness, and even more mystery.

There is no ice in China. When ordering soda or beer, make sure to ask for it “Bing;” which means cold. It  isn’t an absolute that you will get it…bing, but you might get one that’s cool. Chinese prefer a plate full of donkey to be washed down with hot tea, so good luck.

There is no toilet paper in China. There is…but it’s stuck in traffic on the Wei River Highway. There is rolled gauze that is camouflaged to look like toilet paper-but nothing heavy duty is readily available to handle the occasional fish eyed brick you are trying to evacuate. 

There are three public toilets per every 10,000 people in China. (I know this because I used all three) If you are counting trenches that have buildings warehoused over them as toilets, then there are more than three.

At one roadside trough in particular, it was so clogged, that visitors had resorted to depositing their waste ”around” the building, instead of in it. Next to that, a huge sign anchored to a mountainside read: “Support the government. Support the PLA. Treat their families well. Serve the people.”  It should read, Hold your nose, Watch your step, Learn to squat, and Bring your own paper.

There is no milk, no coffee, no bacon and eggs. The showers dribble, the water smells, the beds are hard, and yes, they’re small. Public spitting and indoor smoking are equally acceptable; during a 21 hour train ride from Lanzhou to Beijing, I witnessed a father prompting his four year old son to take a drag off of his cigarette. There is no political correctness in China.

In Beijing, they have Hooters, McDonalds and smog.

In Xi’an, they speak English, and cough from the dust.

In Gao Tai, if you’re hungry, see the guy on the corner without teeth. He’s peddling rotted lychee nuts and bruised fruit curbside, and he’ll take your garbage for free. Try getting a vendor’s license in Manhattan with that get-up.

If it’s your laundry that needs doing, hit the Donfang Hotel in Dunhuang. In less than 48 hours, you’re guaranteed to get at least half of it back. It’s not such a bad deal, considering you also get half of someone else’s; but at least it’s damp. And if you want to make a Chinese person laugh, go through the trouble of having a translator spend 15 minutes explaining to the hotel’s laundry service that your $40 Calvin Klein V-neck T-shirts will shrink in the dryer, so they need to be hung wet. There are no dryers in China.  

There are plenty of pigs’ ears to eat. And fish eyes, and donkey and black boiled eggs. There is squid on a stick, and of course….chickens’ feet!!!!

At the first signs of political unrest in China,  there will suddenly be no Twitter. First hand reports from Tsinghua University journalism students through E-mail exchanges presently confirm that,

“The Internet situation in China now is no Twitter or Facebook.”

                                                -AND-

“FACEBOOK has been blocked in China for a certain period (sic)and I will accept the invitations I have received as soon as it reopens someday”

There is no YouTube either, and on those rare days when a sly piece of pornography manages to slink its way onto Chinese servers in the form of a link, there is no Google.

Former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN, Rebecca Mackinnon explains what it means to be “Harmonized,” (USA Today)

Whenever (a Chinese Internet users’ ) edgy comments were purged from a website, they’d joke online that they’d “been harmonized” — a sarcastic reference to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s calls for a “harmonious society.” Soon, the censors caught on and added “harmonized” to the blacklist.

In keeping with President Hu Jintao’s desire to loosen social restraints through economic democritization policies, ReportingfromNewYork.com is donating the following design ideas:

 

                                                                          -OR-

   

 

 

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