Bread and circuses
Aidan Hartley Beijing Iam in Beijing making a film about the Olympic city with an ex-Lancashire police constable named Andrew. We spend our days aimlessly zooming around vast building sites. Most of the skyscrapers are covered with what resembles sanitary tiling. I feel we are trapped in a giant bathroom, with all the humans being flushed down eight-lane highways. As with the big red bungalows of the Forbidden City, what hits you about new Beijing is not architectural skill but the sheer scale, the purpose of which is to make you feel like a termite.
'What stories do you think we should cover?' I asked the press officer at the Olympic Media Centre. 'No idea,' he replied. You can't visit the monstrous Bird's Nest stadium. You can't interview communist officials. The athletes can't talk. China's new open media policy means inviting hacks in to completely ignore them. Or, the idea is to regurgitate lists of statistics such as the fact that China uses 45 billion disposable wood chopsticks each year, which consumes 25 million trees. All I want to do is either doze off or have lunch.
Beijing food is a revelation, though it's hell for SPC Andrew, a strict vegetarian. I will give most things a try but I draw the line at certain items on offer here such as braised baby donkey leg, duck blood with leek, hot and sour crisp intestine, fish visceral organs in dry pot, or marinated gluten (four types).
I have no idea who makes this stuff up. The communists probably have a state body devoted to concocting recipes aimed at soaking up surpluses of commodities for which nobody has a use.
'Right, your ingredients today are old socks, wilted flowers, limescale and magpie gizzards. You have until sundown, comrade.' It reminds me that at Oxford, before he became a famous TV chef, I shared a house with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Once, in a temper, when his spaghetti didn't work, he flung the saucepan's contents on to the kitchen wall, where it stuck for days. Coming home drunk one night and feeling peckish, I peeled off the blister of pasta and found it quite edible apart from the paint chips. In today's Beijing I reckon I could make a fortune opening a restaurant serving vinyl-based dishes inspired by Hugh's early genius.
Reporting from societies that are not yet free is a true privilege, because you get to see the sausage being made. Elderly people who have spent their lives cowed in silence sidle up to you and whisper with a big smile 'We're ruled by bandits,' or 'Communists are bastards, tee hee!' One man said to me, 'Give me freedom or death!' and later in the conversation he added, 'I am a great admirer of the Anglo-Saxons. Mrs Thatcher was a true hero.'
The authorities may not want to talk to hacks, so instead they deploy their goons to follow us around. At one point I noticed we were being filmed by three plainclothes men while a couple of others gabbled into mobiles and radios. Our fixer became deeply paranoid after deciding that every man in the buffet queue of a hotel restaurant was a spook. What seems to help make them back off is that SPC Andrew talks to them in the tone of a copper about to breathalyse a motorist.
Naturally, I have fallen in love with Beijing's dilapidated hutongs, the narrow old lanes where citizens sit about smoking and playing cards among the overcrowded, unsanitary courtyard houses. Most of these neighbourhoods have been demolished to make way for apartment blocks and shopping malls. The destruction of old Beijing is an act of cultural vandalism that closely resembles the tactics of British urban planners.
By the authorities' own acknowledgement, the city that has replaced the hutongs is an atomised society of high-rise blocks for the poor on the outer periphery beyond the smoggy horizon. And in downtown Beijing, there's a population of Chinese yuppies presumably bribed into silence by cheap designer clothes and very bad pop music. It's all bread and circuses. Where I come from in Kenya, the place is a mess of poverty and corruption, but Africans are free people who speak their minds openly.
I think about all of this as I sit down with my menu to choose between jellyfish with pork knuckle, drunken shrimps, fish lips in a sauce of bamboo fungus, pig ears, birds' nests and goose webs.
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