by Simon Reeve
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The ‘Golden Age’ of Travel
Failing all else, surely the threat of World War Three should alert people to the risks surrounding unrecognised nations.
We left the Caucasus and headed to the Far East. Lack of international recognition is not limited to poor countries. The island of Taiwan has one of the most powerful economies in the world and it has been the tenth largest trade partner of the US, but it has no seat at the United Nations and no major state recognises it as a proper country. It is the wealthiest and most powerful unrecognised nation on the planet, the ultimate place that doesn’t exist.
When Chinese Nationalists were defeated by Mao’s Communists they fled to Taiwan and took over. Taiwan has since become a stable democracy, but Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade province, wants it back, and has repeatedly said it will use extreme force if necessary. Successive US presidents have said they will support, protect and even defend Taiwan.
Everything hinges on recognition. For the past forty years both Beijing and the authorities in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, have had a tacit understanding that Taiwan is actually part of China. Taiwan exists in a strange diplomatic limbo where it takes part in events like the World Cup and the Olympic Games, but generally uses a name like ‘Chinese Taipei’, which China will accept, rather than ‘Taiwan’, which would suggest it is a state, and might provoke fury or worse from China.
Despite sometimes flirting with the idea of declaring independence, Taiwan has never gone the whole hog. In return China has held back its vast army from invading and taking the island. But China has said, repeatedly, that it will go to war, against anyone and anything, even the US, if Taiwan tries to split itself permanently away from China.
It all sounds quite extreme. I wanted to visit Taiwan and see what all the fuss was about. First, of course, I had to visit China.
We flew into Beijing in the mid-2000s when it was a building site. The country was going through the most spectacular and profound transition imaginable, as it transformed from a nation of poverty and peasantry to an economic powerhouse. I had never visited China before, and I felt a sense of awe. For all the human rights abuses, the decades of suffering and starvation, the Chinese government was now lifting more people out of extreme poverty than any other leadership in world history. It was a stunning time to visit.
With a young guide called Rock, who seemed pretty relaxed for a guy who was taking the BBC around a state with all-powerful authoritarian rule, we started our journey by heading to one of the symbolic centres of Chinese power: Tiananmen Square, where demonstrators had been massacred in 1989. Guards did try to stop us filming, but in fairness they let us continue after checking our permits.
Tiananmen Square is colossal. It’s where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Visiting from abroad, and seeing it for the first time, I felt like a witness from a very small, distant land. China seemed so huge, its population so vast. Even at twenty to nine in the morning, hundreds of Chinese visitors were queueing to see Mao in his tomb, and revolutionary and Communist propaganda statues and slogans still dominated public spaces.
But much was changing. We found a Rolls-Royce showroom, something completely unimaginable just a few years before. Then we went to the main antiques market and found piles of Mao memorabilia. In the past he had to be venerated. By the time I was there, he had become for many a curiosity, even a figure for amusement, with his image on clocks and hip-flasks. In a dusty shop I found and bought a poster dating back to the time of the Cultural Revolution which had a slogan that said, effectively, ‘We must recover Taiwan! We must get it back!’ It was classic state propaganda imagery, with five sturdy male military figures carrying a red flag and a picture of Mao. But there was something slightly worrying about it as well. A country that had retained such a focus on one issue for so long would surely find it hard to simply let it go.
There are no direct flights from Beijing to Taipei, so we flew there via Hong Kong, met up with a guide and translator called Sen-lun Yu, and travelled on to the tiny Taiwanese island of Kinmen, just off the Chinese coast. Taiwanese soldiers on the island fought a twenty-year artillery duel with the Chinese. During one forty-four-day period the Chinese lobbed 474,000 artillery shells at Kinmen. Eventually both sides came to a gentleman’s agreement to bombard each other on alternate days. For more than a decade the two sides agreed the Chinese would bombard on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the Taiwanese would return fire on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. On Sunday everyone took the day off.
Then the Taiwanese built the world’s largest neon sign and the world’s loudest loudspeakers on Kinmen and bombarded the mainland with propaganda. They released balloons designed to carry anti-Communist propaganda pamphlets into China, and a few more bizarre offerings: one balloon that apparently drifted to Israel was found to contain see-through underwear. Times have changed and local shops now melt old artillery shell casings into kitchen knives for visiting tourists. I still have a set in my kitchen drawers.
We drove to the coastline which remains the front line against possible invasion. A multitude of signs warned of mines in the sand, but our driver said it was safe so we made our way down to the beach. Just a few miles away the south-east Chinese city of Xiamen was clearly visible through the haze. Sen-lun Yu was a little overwhelmed. She had never seen China before.
I asked her what she had been told about the Chinese when she was growing up and her reply said much about the nature of propaganda.
‘Here we grow bananas and we get to eat bananas, and over there they only get to eat the skins of bananas,’ she said. It was comical to hear, but telling all the same.
I asked Sen-lun what sort of messages the loudspeakers had been broadcasting to China.
‘They used to say, “Taiwan is a treasure island, we are free China, we will come to save you from hell,”’ she told me with a smile.
Thanks to Sen-lun’s skills of persuasion, we were allowed to board a Taiwanese coastguard cutter. Chinese fishing boats were encroaching into what the coastguard said were Taiwanese waters, and they were being turned back.
But what completely fascinated me were boatloads of Chinese tourists on packed pleasure cruises who had come out to have a look at an island, and an enormous propaganda sign on a hillside, which they had previously only seen from afar or in news bulletins. The sign had the snappy line ‘Three Principles of the People Unites China’, and was a slogan the Taiwanese used to represent their belief in nationalism, democracy and the livelihood of the people. The principles were said to be the basis of Taiwanese prosperity and featured in the first line of the Taiwanese anthem.
The coastguard crew were grumpily telling the boats to turn around and head back to China, never appearing to realise how ironic it was that until recently they had been desperately trying to convince the Chinese that life was so much better on the capitalist side of the strait. The pleasure cruises were right next to us and turning so fast it was as if their crews were pulling handbrake turns, and the Chinese tourists on board were waving enthusiastically at us and the stony Taiwanese crew on our boat. I actually became a little emotional seeing their eager, excited faces, and the coastguard captain looked at me, baffled, and asked if something was wrong.
I knew they were a symptom of profound change, and the vanguard of a Chinese tourist revolution. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people across on the mainland were deciding they wanted to do what much of the rest of the world had been doing for ages, and get out and explore. On my journeys since then I have seen an ever-growing number of Chinese tourists just about everywhere.
I watched them for ages, really feeling the joy of people who had rarely had the opportunity to travel, before it was time for us to leave and we headed to the Taiwanese capital.
The city is completely dominated by Taipei 101, then the tallest building in the world. It hadn’t fully opened when I visited, and there was still a smell of fresh
paint inside. But we were allowed to take a superfast lift to the top, saw a giant ball on a pendulum that was supposed to balance the tower during an earthquake, and then emerged blinking into the light on top of the building, so high up we could see planes flying beneath us.
I loved Taipei. For me it was a great mix of bling and grime, of culture and excess. The city has some of the finest restaurants in the world, but instead of filling ourselves somewhere classy, we went for noodles in a night market which was also selling medical remedies made from honey mixed with cobra blood. A sign in English said: ‘The snakes sold and cooked at this store are definitely not protected animals. Welcome and taste!’ Clearly some other concerned travellers had been there before us.
Taiwanese cities felt like cleaner versions of locations in Blade Runner. Neon signs lit skyscrapers and the night market, while girls from the Chinese mainland sat outside obvious brothels.
To give you an idea of the options we would consider as a team when heading somewhere for filming, and the research I would put together as the presenter, I have dug out a document buried on my computer with the title ‘Taiwan things2do’. Four pages long and 2,457 words of scribbled notes in total, it stands up reasonably well to scrutiny many years later, and includes simple notes for me to remember for ‘PTCs’ (pieces to camera, where I look directly down the lens and talk to the viewer):
Mainland China is a one-party state. Taiwan is a functioning democracy. China locks up anybody who threatens Communist party rule. Taiwan is alive with combative politics and a lively free media.
Thoughts about what we could do:
Be good if we could try to show how an advanced breakaway state/unrecognised nation develops and matures: e.g. musicians sing about Taiwan and political repression in the Taiwanese language (which used to be banned!).
We ticked that box when Sen-lun took me to see a Taiwanese boy band, who sang of their pride at being Taiwanese, not ethnic Chinese like their parents.
There were also quick notes on what was changing in Taiwan:
And the first passports with the word Taiwan on the cover have been issued.
Some background stats:
According to an annual poll taken by Taipei’s Chengchi University, the proportion of Taiwan’s residents who consider themselves exclusively Chinese has plummeted to 10 per cent from 26 per cent in 1992, while the number who think of themselves as exclusively ‘Taiwanese’ has jumped to 42 per cent from 17 per cent.
And the sort of imaginative wish-list things you can only request at short notice if you are filming a documentary for the BBC:
Very keen to go on 1 of Taiwan’s 2 combat-ready subs. They’re seen as being crucial to defending the island and the US is planning to sell Taiwan more of them – much to China’s fury.
My favourite line, however, is the first:
Is it possible for us to meet the President?? Perhaps he could take us for a Taiwanese meal?? Worth a try.
We never managed to wring a meal out of the Taiwanese President, but he did fly us to see a firework concert in Taiwanese Air Force One, then refused to speak to us and dumped us in a muddy field. I still have a couple of souvenir Air Force One sick bags in my van.
We had a series of strange encounters and experiences in Taiwan, but one of the most memorable was visiting what used to be the biggest school in the world, with more than 5,000 pupils. The children would arrive before 8 a.m., clean the school, raise the Taiwanese flag – yes, they do have one – then be drilled like little soldiers and march back to their classes after an outdoor assembly.
Taiwan is a huge success story. After the Second World War it was one of the poorer countries in Asia. In the decades that followed it built a super-high-tech economy and became one of the top twenty economies. Taiwanese firms make 90 per cent of the world’s laptops. Its success has been partly built on the back of one of the finest education systems in the world. When I last visited it was ranked fourth in the world for maths teaching and second in the world for science teaching. It is an astonishing achievement, partly down to huge investment in education, and partly down to the quality of the teachers – who all have PhDs, and deserve the bow they are given by children at the start of each lesson, even at primary school.
Children at the school were motivated, and encouraged to be competitive, but they were not robots. They were cheeky and fun, leaping around in front of our camera and gurning into the lens. They knew when they could have fun, and when they had to be serious. So how on earth did the teachers keep them in line?
I asked the head teacher, a surprisingly relaxed and friendly woman in a pink suit who carried two walkie-talkies, and was in charge of maintaining order.
‘It’s like controlling a line of Taiwanese donkeys,’ she said, with an honesty that instantly made me smile. ‘They’re all connected to each other by ropes, so you just have to know which one to pull and the rest will follow.’
All too soon it was time to leave Taiwan, and come to the end of the Places That Don’t Exist series. I thought back to my time across the water in mainland China. We had travelled west out of Beijing to visit a section of the Great Wall of China. We puffed our way to the top of a hill on a broad section of steps. It was breathtaking, of course, quite literally. I was amazed by the height of each step, which meant even I had to lift my foot almost to my waist to climb up. Were the ancient Chinese giants? The view out was spectacular, but I was more taken by the view when I turned around, and the words of a guide. ‘Everyone thinks that the Great Wall was just built to keep bandits out,’ he said to me. ‘But the wall was also built to control movement of people, and to try to unify the country within.’
That last bit was crucial. For a large part of its history China was split into fiefdoms. For hundreds of years Chinese leaders believed one of their greatest challenges was to keep the country together, and the people, who are mainly Han Chinese but also come from dozens of other ethnic groups, as one. The fear for generations has been that if Taiwan was allowed to declare independence and break from the motherland, then other provinces might try to follow. Only by unifying the people, leaders have said, can China remain strong.
It was a realisation that helped to shape my thoughts about China, a country that I think many of us still get very wrong, labouring under the misconception the Chinese are automatons broken by decades of Communism who do the bidding of their masters almost without question. Our image of them is often still as little more than units of production on a factory line, churning out plastic consumer goods for eager buyers in the West. If we think any more of them it is usually as money-grabbing nouveau riche. It is a perception that is completely unfair.
From the first time I visited China I met men and women who were strikingly individual and eccentric. Since China began to open up millions have turned back to interests which reveal their depths. They have become intellectuals, Buddhists, vegans, enthusiastic pet owners and artists. Often it is not easy under the heavy hand of one-party rule, but still culture endures. How could it be any other way when their history stretches back thousands of years? The Communist period is barely a moment in the overall history of an ancient civilisation.
I’ve had far too many experiences getting slightly drunk with Chinese tourists singing karaoke on ferry boats on the Yangtze, or meeting experts on the architecture of Iceland or the work of Banksy, to find the country anything other than captivating.
I remember one moment when we were in a far-flung part of the country in a city which was rapidly becoming a megalopolis. We were walking back from a distant restaurant, heading for the godforsaken hotel the BBC had booked us into, and I could hear jazz saxophone playing on a radio. We were a bit lost and went around a corner or two and the music became louder and louder. Then I realised it was coming from the basement of an office complex. Idly looking in as we passed, I suddenly saw a security guard sitting inside in front of banks of CCTV screens he was supposed to be monitoring. He was crammed into the cubicle, but he was rocking b
ack in his chair, wearing a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses and playing a polished saxophone like a 1920s Harlem master. It was a perfect travel discovery.
Life has changed spectacularly fast in China, of course – more dramatically and quickly than anyone thought possible. And perhaps the authorities in China are not always the terrifying human rights abusers many of us might imagine. Filming in another remote city we stopped our cars outside a major Buddhist temple. We didn’t realise at first but our drivers had parked illegally and were partially blocking the entrance to a fire station. As we stood a short distance away filming the temple a stern policeman appeared, but didn’t bash the drivers around with a truncheon. Instead as he was walking towards the vehicles he produced a handy-cam and started filming the parking violation, presumably as evidence for a fine or prosecution. I was surprised. In turn, the drivers, far from being in fear of this agent of the authoritarian state, attempted to stand in front of him and his camera to stop the filming. The interaction was similar to what you might find someone doing to a traffic warden in the UK.
I am not saying the Chinese police are representatives of a benevolent state, or could give lessons in community policing to a Swedish village cop. But I think we still swiftly criticise China without adequately acknowledging the country has lifted more people out of poverty in the last generation than has ever been achieved anywhere in the world. By contrast I think India, for example, often gets an easy ride despite being a place of appalling poverty and suffering. I have seen situations in India that would result in howls of outrage if they were happening in China and result in aid appeals if they were happening in sub-Saharan Africa.