Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  “All I know is that the average party cadre in China is without morals or scruples,” she says.

  Watching the men enjoy easy company, fresh seafood and cold beer, I have trouble picturing these petty bureaucrats through Viv’s highly critical prism. They’re forces of conformity, behaving just as they are told. But then I have trouble feeling, as Viv might, how such officials might threaten my precious freedom, how their hypocritical ministrations might attempt to govern my whole world, suffocating me beneath their self-important mediocrity.

  “At the end of high school, I was sent to the party school,” Viv suddenly confesses. “I did my time, learnt Marx and Mao, and then moved on. I declined party membership.”

  We return to the hostel. The coarse clamour of drunken Aussies stumbling back to their rooms serenades me to sleep.

  The next morning, we make a quick escape from the hostel. We have but a day to spend in Qingdao, as a flight will carry us on in the evening. Our first stop is the Tsingtao brewery.

  Tsingtao beer is one of the only remaining legacies of German China. It’s a crisp Germanic lager, brewed according to an old recipe. For many years, Tsingtao beer was one of the few recognizable exports out of China. The company claims itself to be at the vanguard of the new Chinese economy.

  In the late nineteenth century, the great powers were racing to keep up with the vast British maritime empire. Unified Germany had become a formidable terrestrial power, but it realized that its place of prominence at the table of nations required it to maintain colonies and a worldwide trade network. So Germany too barged its way into China and set up operations at the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. Qingdao was a useful port for the Germans. Its occupation by Germany marked the Kaiserreich’s greatest expansion. Steamers from Hamburg and Königsberg might make their final stop at the wharfs of Qingdao before beginning the long return journey to the fatherland. At Qingdao, ships could be restocked with coal, water and grain. Steel hulls could be repaired. Lutheran missionaries and their families would disembark. Local entrepreneurs would load the ships with cheap textile or meat products or beer, for sale in far-off metropoles.

  In Qingdao, beer is the only commercial activity remaining from this era. With its sharply peaked roofs and cobbled courtyard, the old Tsingtao brewery is an emblem of this bygone age of brick, iron, oak and coal.

  When Japan was granted Shandong at Versailles, it exploited the area much in the same way the Germans had. Its excellent port, fertile land and sizable population base made the area a natural industrial hub to bolster further imperial expansion. During this time, the brewery began to grow, exporting beer up and down the Chinese coast and to neighbouring inland provinces.

  During war or peace, beer is usually available. Tsingtao kept churning out the beverage through the Second World War, supplying soldiers on fronts across Asia with the beer they craved. Production did not cease with the Communist Revolution. The Communists could not afford to shut down such an essential industry. Through shortages, a huge decrease in foreign trade and various radical reorganizations of the economy, the Tsingtao brewery kept making the good stuff. Beer, like coal, was a necessity of industry.

  Deng Xiaoping finally redirected Chinese society toward wealth creation in the late 1970s. He abandoned Mao’s impossible obsession with self-sufficiency and embraced foreign trade once more. The brewery was once again poised to thrive. The very factors that had allowed it to survive all these years—good water, good soil, a good port and a good recipe—would make it a competitive export product. In the 1980s, Tsingtao beer may well have been one of the first Chinese industrial products to break its way back into Western markets. Cheap, crisp and clean, it was the natural beverage to accompany the familiar egg rolls, hot-and-sour soup, sweet-and-sour pork and General Tao’s chicken.

  In Qingdao, electronics, hardware and textiles have now surpassed the first exports of beer, tea, canned bamboo shoots and mushrooms, disposable razor blades and the like. The city has become yet another Chinese hub feeding the globalized market’s hunger for manufactured products.

  Viv has set up a meeting with a man who works for a large export company. The firm deals in home-improvement tools, one of the markets that has exploded over the past decades. “I should let you know, he’s my ex-boyfriend,” Viv says. “We dated when we were studying in Beijing.”

  “What did he study?”

  “Engineering.”

  “What kind?”

  “You will have to ask him the particulars. But I think it was some kind of mechanical engineering.”

  “You’re on good terms, I assume?”

  “Yes, of course. He has a new girlfriend now, and I’ve met her.”

  We meet Gan in a city square in front of some kind of Rathaus, typically German, with a prominent clock tower. Gan is a polite and friendly bespectacled young man. In the Chinese way, his quiet studiousness glitters with an inner intensity. We head to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Little is said along the way. At one point, he even tells Viv with a smile that I can ask him anything that I would like.

  “I understand that you are in import-export.”

  “I’m in export alone. I’m a manager in the sales and expedition department.”

  “The company is state owned?” I ask.

  “It has various owners, including the different levels of government.”

  After further exchanges about the company structure, I gather Gan’s employer is the prototypical Chinese business entity. It’s a government enterprise formed from both local and central government elements but with ill-defined yet growing private participation.

  Gan studied mechanical engineering at Tsinghua University. He did his doctoral work on high-precision velocity sensors. But he got frustrated and left before finishing his dissertation. “Too much focus on reverse engineering in the department,” he explains. “It wasn’t interesting to me. Frankly, there’s little room for real science in China.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of politics,” Gan says. “How can you have a legitimate pursuit of science when the leaders of the university are first and foremost politicians, not scientists? Even the professors are ranked according to their political power, not the quality of their work. Students are judged for whatever advantage or prestige the professors can personally extract from their work. I witnessed professors selling their students’ research projects as their own. I got disgusted.”

  Viv interjects to say that Gan is perhaps being overly critical. “That sounds too harsh. Tsinghua University still has the reputation of being the finest technical university in China. We call it the MIT of China,” she tells me. “So it’s hard to imagine what he’s describing being so widespread at Tsinghua.”

  Gan calmly counters that stories of intellectual fraud among students and professors commonly appear in the news all the time. Vivien acquiesces.

  “So you left and got a sales job?” I ask him. “I would have thought that sales work would be odious to a scientist.”

  “There’s nothing to it, really,” he says. “My company has huge manufacturing deals with Western retailers. I’m hardly selling them anything. They come to us for a whole series of products that we get from Chinese manufacturers. I am really only engaging the clients on the details of their orders: which quantities of which specific products. It’s an easy and predictable job.”

  He tells me that he doesn’t even have to negotiate prices. They’re set according to purchase quantities. The tools he sells are also usually branded after the purchase is made: foreign clients have their own brand names added to various tools. Often, the same factory produces virtually identical products sold under different brand names.

  “You like your job?” I ask.

  “It’s all right. Boring but steady. No surprises.”

  “Don’t you miss research?”

  “A bit, but as I said, China’s still a long way from doing real research. Values will have to change before deep scientific progress can happen.”
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br />   “Are you optimistic?”

  “Not really.”

  “What needs to happen?” I venture.

  Gan pauses, then says with a dash of fire in his eyes, “War is always a good source of innovation. Maybe China needs one to put things in perspective.”

  “That’s a bold thought. Wars tend to make a mess of things.”

  “Well, something has to change radically, because it isn’t happening naturally. Politics are still involved in everything here. They’re exerting an irrational influence on things. This has to stop if China wants to be a serious country, scientifically and technically.”

  We accompany Gan back to his office in a building down by the water. He serves us tea and shows me catalogues of the product lines he sells. They comprise a vast selection of tools and hardware at incredibly low prices. I can’t imagine any country in the world being able to compete with these prices. Gan doesn’t even have to push the product. He merely takes the orders.

  His bare office has a view of the grey ocean. Hunched over the thick catalogues, Gan seems perplexed, perhaps by his own destiny. His mild manners don’t completely cover his deep, latent frustration. Surely he worked extremely hard to get to the top of his academic field? Surely he made many sacrifices? Maybe he entertained terrific thoughts about China’s capacities to out-think and outperform all other nations.

  Once at the top, Gan found his country unworthy of his efforts. He found only petty greed and a narrow sense of advantage hiding behind ideological dogma. Now he blandly clocks hours as a tiny cog in the global economy.

  China throws it together. Gan gets it to us. We accumulate it. All the while he dreams of war.

  Our next appointment is with Doctor Zhang Beichuan, professor of medicine and public health and publisher of a prominent gay magazine. He has an office on the campus of Qingdao University. Locating his office turns out to be complicated: his address doesn’t correspond with any of the buildings on the street. The guards we consult at several of the buildings claim no knowledge of Zhang’s office. Finally, an old groundskeeper points us in the right direction. Between two main buildings on the university campus, both of them Germanic and imposing, are two rows of brick hovels. The doctor’s office is in a hut at the back. The alley leading to it is a mini-hutong, cluttered with bicycles, water basins and clotheslines. Along the way, we pass a rough-looking elderly woman cooking something on a brick stove. Viv and I exchange perplexed looks. Some place for a university office.

  The good doctor must be about sixty. He’s thin and hunched over and has unruly white hair and thick eyeglasses. He wears a white button-down shirt and a worn pair of polyester slacks. Zhang greets us with muted warmth.

  His office barely has space for us to sit. It’s one long room filled with several tables and cabinets, all covered with huge piles of paper and books. Amid this disarray, the doctor publishes a monthly magazine devoted to homosexual living in China. The doctor’s assistant, a round little woman, exits the office to make space for us.

  “Forgive me for starting with some facts about myself,” the doctor tells me through Vivien. “I’m a doctor of medicine and a professor at this university. By specialization, I’m a nephrologist. But over time my practice has become less involved in case treatment and more and more involved with issues of public health.”

  “So the magazine has a public health focus?” I venture.

  “The magazine’s content has a broad focus, but the magazine itself is a public health instrument. We public health workers often say that disease thrives in the dark. So we endeavour to shed light on things, to remove the stigma that favours disease propagation. This was certainly the case with HIV/AIDS in China for many years. In fact, it was one of the reasons this magazine was started. To educate the people and professionals about something that was being ignored while becoming more prevalent.”

  The doctor then explains how the magazine began addressing homosexuality: “The stigma toward homosexuality has characteristics similar to the one toward HIV/AIDS. There was a concern that homosexuality too was subject to institutional and individual denial. This facilitated the propagation of HIV, but it also had broad health consequences. In medical terms, denial causes suffering.”

  “So the magazine is a way of shedding light on an issue and fighting denial?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is homosexuality perceived in China?” I ask.

  “There are traditional models in China for understanding homosexuality. It has been tolerated at various times. In modern times, homosexuality is not characterized as some kind of pathological deviancy, as is common in Western culture. Instead, great positive emphasis is put on the Confucian idea of filial duty—which means that to get married and have children is seen as necessary. This again is a factor that encourages denial.”

  “So denial is inherently unhealthy?”

  “Yes. Whatever causes human suffering is unhealthy, both physically and psychologically.”

  “Who reads the magazine?”

  “The magazine is circulated throughout China to individuals and to institutions and NGOs. We distribute four or five thousand copies a month. But we also encourage people to make copies.”

  “What about Internet publication?”

  “No,” the doctor says with a humble smile, as though to profess an unfamiliarity with the Web.

  The material surroundings of the doctor point to financial challenges also. Internet publication would surely bring greater political obstacles. And perhaps paper lends itself to more intimate reading than the Internet.

  Doctor Zhang hands me a copy of the most recent issue. Magazine is too strong a word to describe the publication—it’s more of a newsletter or brochure. It consists of a half-dozen short articles printed on white paper. I’m unable to understand any of the article titles, but I’m struck by the images: a series of schematic drawings graphically depict various sexual positions. The drawings are clinical, frank and informative. Viv points out an article on oral sex. Another article is about the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

  I warmly thank the doctor for his time. I am intrigued by this bookish doctor in his obscure cubbyhole of an office.

  “Westerners are such prudes,” I admit to Viv as we leave. “They make simple things so complicated sometimes.”

  “I thought you might find him interesting.”

  “He’s probably right—acceptance of reality makes for much healthier living for everyone. You know what else I found fascinating about him? I couldn’t say whether he himself was gay. I would’ve thought it relevant.”

  “Yes, before I met him the first time, I wondered myself.”

  Our next appointment is with Wei Fang, a businessman Vivien knows. We head toward the water.

  “He’s of the middle class?” I ask as we walk.

  “In China, it isn’t always clear who the middle class really is. I’m not always sure how universal such characterizations are,” Viv tells me, “but Wei owns a computer and network service business. He has several employees. He has a car and money.”

  “Well, he sounds like your typical small businessman,” I say. “What do you think his politics are? For or against the Communist Party?”

  “Businessmen are all the same here,” Viv says. “They don’t care. As long as they can make money, they work with whoever has the power.”

  Wei picks us up on the breakwater along the bay. He’s a tall and well-groomed man in his mid-thirties. He wears the casual but neat golf attire that entrepreneurs worldwide favour. He drives a new car, a Chinese copy of a Korean sedan. He’s confident and generous in his ways. Hardly soft-spoken, he turns to me with a big smile as he speaks. He knows some English but unfortunately not enough to engage in easy conversation.

  “I’m always hoping to learn more English,” he says, looking pensively at the traffic, “but when?”

  We’re driving north.

  “I’m taking you to the most beautiful and famous part of Qingdao,”
he says.

  With its pleasant hills, large protected bay and mellow maritime climate, Qingdao was once favoured as a retreat by foreigners and later by the Chinese elite. They built Italian-style villas, surrounded by lush gardens and manicured woodlands. These now antiquated domains sprawl up the coast from the harbour. After the flight of the denizens of these neighbourhoods, the Communists took control of the quarter. They enjoyed the luxurious abodes or turned them into guesthouses with which to woo foreign visitors. Recently, many of these mansions have been finding their way back into private hands.

  Most prominent among these estates on the water is the stone palace that once belonged to a Russian aristocrat. The villa was later used by Chiang Kai-shek. The ample grounds have now been converted into a public park. We leave the car and set off on foot to meander through the neo-rococo gardens toward the sea.

  Although it is a Monday afternoon, the park is filled with people. Couples and families leisurely stroll the grounds. Vendors have set up stalls along the wooded footpaths leading down to the beaches. As we reach the seaside, I am struck by the sight of scores of wedding parties scattered across the rugged and rocky coast. In the afternoon sun, the irregular coastline is indeed quite pretty: the reddish rocky outcroppings strike dramatic poses against the white sand beaches and the blue-green sea. The wooded hills are dotted with cream-coloured Romanesque villas. Photographers scramble about taking pictures of brides and grooms, all identically dressed in flowing white gowns and white tuxedos. It’s a happy scene, rife with shrieks and laughter as grooms help their begowned and high-heeled brides over the rocks to choice portrait settings.

  “The Mid-Autumn Festival starts soon,” Wei says. “It’s a very romantic time.”

  Viv stops to admire some jewellery at one of the beach vendors. Wei magnanimously buys her a pendant.

  As we walk the coast, I count over thirty wedding couples, and there’s a constant turnover, with new pairs arriving as others depart. Almost every element of the scene is borrowed from the West—the romantic, Europeanized landscape, the white gowns and suits. Still, I find the joyous conformism strikingly Chinese. The same wedding portraits are repeated over and over again by newly arriving couples, dressed identically. The idea is right, so it must be obeyed.