The Future is A Foreign Country…

by Richard Pooley

High-speed Trains in China - then and now.

Thanks to Dr Ian Wright and his fascinating Brilliant Maps - https://brilliantmaps.com

…they do things differently there. ‘There’ is China, where I and the Conan Doyle Estate's agent, Tim Hubbard, were on business for a week last month. Hong Kong (1 day), Guanzhou (1), Shanghai (2), Chengdu (1), Beijing (3). One train, three flights, eleven meetings, one quality inspection, one banquet, too much excellent food, too little sleep. Oh, and a foot massage which extended to just about every part of my body.

I had last been in China in early 2008: a two-day sales trip from Japan. My chief memories are of the people bumping into me, seemingly deliberately, as I walked down to the Bund from my hotel, and of the nine hours I spent on a Japan Airlines plane at the airport waiting for its wings to be de-iced. I was in Hong Kong for a long weekend in 1997, on the way back to the UK from Japan. I had wanted to see it before the British handed it over to the Chinese. So, when I decided in February to visit China again, I didn’t feel it was ‘again’. I thought I would be going to a new country. I was not wrong.

Have a look at the maps above. In the time it took the UK to propose, to pass laws, to plan and to build some 200km of high-speed rail line from London towards Birmingham (to be finished in 2033?), China created a network of high-speed lines over 45,000 km long, carrying annually 1.3 billion passengers at speeds of up to 380 km/h.

It is the rapidity and enormity of change which is so extraordinary. One of our two agents in China, Nick Ward, a Brit in the aviation field who has been doing business in the country since 1985, flew in to Beijing from Tajikistan to join us for a couple of days. Ten minutes from the airport his taxi driver told him that he needed to get the car’s battery changed. “How long will it take?” Nick asked, anxious not to be late for our next meeting and angry that he had not been warned before. “Thirty” was the succinct response. Assuming this meant thirty minutes, I got an apologetic text. In fact, he arrived in good time. The battery had been robotically removed and replaced at a garage in nearly thirty seconds. Nick would have arrived even earlier if he hadn’t tried to pay the driver in large cash notes. The driver had expected to be paid using WeChat and was not able to give him change. Nick had to go into his hotel to get help. Very different from Hong Kong where every taxi driver expected us to pay cash.

Hong Kong was, superficially, no different from what I remembered – plenty of Sunday shoppers, ferry trippers, and bar-crawling expats.  Different was the welcoming smiles which we got from the airport immigration officials (in contrast to their colleagues at the visa office in London)*. Surprising was the ease with which we could access Western news sites and social media. This was about to change.

We took a high-speed train from Kowloon to Guangzhou. A communication mix-up with our other agent in China, who was meeting us in Guangzhou, meant our tickets were not waiting for us at Kowloon station as expected. We were told at the entry barrier that even if we had had the tickets, we had not left enough time to catch our train. Fifteen minutes was too little to get to the platform? Surely not. We queued to buy tickets for a later train and were frustrated to find that the earliest was two hours later. How could we fill the time? Answer: spend it getting to our train.

We had spotted that there was a separate gate on the station concourse for First and Business Class and had bought First Class tickets (hardly any more expensive than Standard Class). We went through to be met by everyone who had gone through Standard, all trying to put their luggage on the one screening machine. One long snaking line later and another screening machine, we were separated into the true classes – Chinese and non-Chinese. Us foreigners had to go through immigration all over again. More forms, which, as in London, asked for everything but my inside leg measurement. No smiles. Fingerprints. Photo of my face (don’t you already have that in your system?). And through and on to more screening machines. And scowling officials everywhere (from then on, through China, right up to outside our hotel in Beijing, next to Tiananmen Square). As soon as we got on the train, we tried communicating with the world outside – “It’s taken us almost 2 hours to get from the concourse to our train!” – and inside -  “Hi Wang Jin, we’re on the train which gets in at 21.30.” Neither WhatsApp nor my three email accounts worked. We had to resort to ordinary texting. For the next six days we were in a narrow communication tunnel, unable to get any but the most banal news and occasionally finding that one could WhatsApp or send an email…for an hour or two.

And the BBC, The Economist...

Visit a country as a tourist and you see the sites and meet plenty of locals. But the people – hotel staff, guides, waiters, taxi drivers - are there to serve you. When a tourist myself I often wonder how true a picture I am getting of a country and its citizens. When doing business however, it’s easier to get below the surface and past the politeness. I have found this to be especially true in autocracies like Russia. If money is to be made by both sides there has to be some level of trust. Talking, however guardedly, about what is really going on is necessary to establish such trust. But, as I wrote in a WhatsApp message to fellow OC writer, Lynda Goetz, while still in Hong Kong “will anybody [in mainland China] tell me what they really think?” She wrote back: ”Highly unlikely!” I agreed with her, especially in a country which, it is estimated, has one CCTV camera for every two people and probably the most advanced facial recognition technology in the world.

Yet several people I listened to were willing to criticize their government and, in particular, its handling of the Chinese economy. One entrepreneur in his 30s, with whom we were travelling in a taxi, called “the president” “insane”. I assumed he was talking about the Orange Man in the White House. But No, he was referring to President Xi Jinping. The same man recounted the story of his grandfather who had committed suicide during the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61 in which between 15 and 55 million people had died. The grandfather wished his family to have one less mouth to feed. It was clear who was to blame: Mao Zedong and his Great Leap Forward policy. Over dinner later I asked him and his wife if they were not fearful of being overheard in the tiny and crowded restaurant we were in. “Not here” he replied.

A young lawyer told us how he had been selected by a very senior man in a government organisation to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Five months after he had left the organisation, a fatal fire was blamed, unfairly in his view, on several of his ex-colleagues. All were sacked and one imprisoned. But he could not leave the CCP because that would insult his mentor. And end his legal career.

A film director, keen to make a Sherlock Holmes film in China, liked but rejected our idea of having the great private detective help the Shanghai police to solve a crime. Why? Because it would not get past the censors. It would imply that there was serious crime in China and, worse, that the Chinese authorities needed the help of a foreigner to solve these non-existent crimes. My counter-proposal of Holmes seeking the help of the Chinese police in solving a crime among the overseas Chinese in London was thought much more likely to be approved.

Our biggest business problem? Getting across to potential Chinese partners that we could not move as fast as they wanted us to. Everyone we met had a Can-Do attitude, which always meant doing the Do as fast as possible.

We went on to Japan for four days before returning to the UK via Hong Kong (most airlines these days won’t fly over Russia). A week later, on 3 April, the Vice President of the USA, J.D.Vance, said this: “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”  Perhaps, as a self-described hillbilly himself, he thought he was not being offensive in using the word peasant. If so, he was wrong. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman responded calmly but with evident contempt: “To hear words that lack knowledge and respect like those uttered by this Vice President is both surprising and kind of lamentable.”

If Vance really does believe China is a nation of peasants, he, his boss and their millions of MAGA supporters are in for a terrible shock. Their attitude and policies are making China, not America, great again.

 Mongolian cuisine in Beijing

*My British Member of Parliament, Wera Hobhouse, got very different treatment when she arrived two weeks later to see her son and new grandson. She (but not her husband) was refused entry and put on a plane back to London within five hours. Her crime? Being a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance of China, an international group of politicians that has been critical of China’s human rights record and treatment of Hong Kong's democracy activists.