A whiter shade of grey

Stepping out of the customs hall in Shenzhen, having navigated the antiseptic metro system of magnificent Hong Kong and the nonsensical signs at the border (“China non-visitors this way”; “Foreign non-tourists take second queue”) you’re greeted by an urban vista which would make you vomit, but for the fact your first breath of the thick, fetid air got there first. The city is grey – but then, so are many around the world, and you can’t expect the self-indulgent prettiness of Florence or the colonial elegance of Phnom Penh everywhere you go. And calling Shenzhen polluted does an injustice to the word. Breathing is like fellating an SUV exhaust pipe while the driver hits the gas. But again: Athens is polluted, so are LA, Bangkok and Mumbai. Shenzhen is different, though. It’s worse. It may be the most miserable place I’ve ever visited outside of Utah. Or Agra.

Shenzhen today exists within the Shenzhen Economic Zone (SEZ), created in the 1980s to be a sort of Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China. At the time, the city was little more than a collection of fishing villages with a combined population of about thirty thousand. It now has 8 million inhabitants. It has increased 300-fold in my lifetime. I’d be beyond surprised if in the history of humanity, any part of the planet has industrialised at that pace before.

China, as nobody with a newspaper needs telling, is for better or worse going to be the dominant global player of the coming century. Choose any measure you like of growth, of change, of the accumulation of wealth, and you’ll find this enormous country of over 1.3 billion people breaking astonishing ground. Perhaps with the exception of Shanghai, nowhere exemplifies Chinese growth better than Shenzhen. It calls itself “China’s richest city”. I don’t know how they come about that claim – productivity, perhaps; maybe GDP – but it’s a stomach-sinkingly awful place. Look beyond the pus-yellow smog that you feel clamming onto your skin, and the horrific stench (not the rotting refuse and bundled humanity smell of India, but the putrid reek of coal and exhaust and concrete dust and metallurgy), and you see what Dickens and Engels must’ve come across in Victorian London and Manchester. Factories as far as the eye can see (further, actually, considering you can barely squint beyond your outstretched arm), belching coal smoke into a dank sky which would make anyone who’s every been fortunate enough to leave the city open their wrists upon their return.

But of course, the millions of workers who slave away in this, the richest city of what will one day be the richest country, never get to leave, except for a few days every year when they return to their home villages for Chinese New Year, and hand over their meagre earnings to a family which can barely afford enough rice to eat. Just a couple of weeks ago, China’s worst weather in five decades brought the south-east of the country to a standstill over the new year holiday. 800,000 people were stranded for days in nearby Guangzhou train station itself, patiently waiting to take their annual few days’ respite from the inhumane backache of factory existence. In only the most recent of God’s nasty little jokes, many were prevented from seeing their families (their children included) for yet another year. It’s so obvious it goes without saying, but it puts one’s own pathetic little disappointments in perspective.

This area (Shenzhen, Guangzhou and their environs) is the part of China that produces much of the crap we buy on a daily basis. As a little experiment, I’ve just emptied my daypack which is sitting next to me in a smoky café in Yangshuo, and examined both its contents and done an inventory of what I’m wearing. Aside from my laptop, PDA, mobile and camera (all of which naturally are made in China), so too are about four fifths of all the other useless shit I have with me. If time and inclination moves you so, do the same. China is dressing you from shoe to brassiere to sunglasses and more. Statistics aside, these guys are producing everything.

And other than when Nike or the Gap gets caught in a PR glare by some do-gooding NGO and is then forced to renounce its use of sweatshops in south-east Asia, and the media momentarily trains its lens on such practices before the audience’s attention reverts to Wife Swap 3, it’s too easy to forget the real face of industrialisation. It’s not just ‘globalisation’, either – that’s an oversimplified cop-out by those whose main concern is losing jobs in their own manufacturing bases. It’s industry per se: the production of stuff in order for its consumption in order for growth in order for its further production. I’m by no means an agrarian utopianist; I’m very proud of and inspired by much that man has achieved. And exponential population increase naturally requires production to keep people alive. It’s just that stepping into the murk of ashen-faced Shenzhen and into a consumptive, Bladerunnerish gloaming, you can’t help but wonder what report card some of our ancestors might give us were they to see all this. Sometimes, it’s just not clear if we’re progressing at all.

I met one of Shenzhen’s anonymous millions on the sleeper train to Guilin. The sleeper train to get out of Shenzhen comes pretty close to redeeming the city itself. I adore trains – I’ve written ad nauseum on the subject before. I’m not what the English call an anorak – I don’t know one end of a train from the other – I just love the clickety-clack rhythm, I love the conductor taking your ticket and showing you the way to your compartment. I love the sliding doors and the bedside lamps (I’m talking here about real trains with little cabins and hot towels and fold-down beds, not the utilitarian cattle vessels where you sit aeroplane-style in rows and have to ask the corpulent bottom-feeder next to you whose stomach is hanging over onto yours if he’d move so you can get to the toilet. That isn’t really train travel. Unless the scenery is spectacular. And leaving Shenzhen, it surely ain’t).

So assuming you’re willing and able to spend what amounts to a month’s salary for a Chinese factory worker on a soft sleeper ticket, you get a journey of refinement and elegance which the TGV in France can never provide. It’s someone’s job to plump the pillows; another’s to vacuum the carpets on the corridor. It’s one guy’s job to patrol the train telling everyone to keep their valuables safe. As I was sharing my delightful little compartment with two girls who remarkably enough spoke less English than I do Mandarin, this cheery-faced and smartly-attired fellow came to give me his little rehearsed warning. I gave him a look of studied blankness before we both resorted to gestures, with my gestures signifying only that I didn’t understand his. Twenty minutes of this, and he was convinced I was not merely stupid but deaf too, so thankfully he moved on to give his performance to the lot next door.

But after tiring of nervous and uncomprehending smiles from my Chinese bunkmates, I ambled down to hard chair class and found the charming young woman who had helped me nagivate the otherwise unnavigable train station. A nurse in one of Shenzhen’s godawfully grey factories, she was heading home, as she does every weekend, to Guilin. Her name is Helen (her “English” name – her Chinese name sounded like the aluminium death-rattle of a TB patient) and she has an eight year-old daughter who lives in Guilin with her (Helen’s) mother. Helen’s husband left them some years back. I thought it impolite to ask the circumstances, but her sad eyes suggested another the existence of another woman. So the daughter lives with the grandmother, and Helen sees her for one day a week, once you take away the fourteen hour commute each way. The daughter is a gifted violinist, or so she said proudly, whipping out a well-thumbed and tattered album of pictures. Thrusting it into my hands and looking up into my eyes for a glimmer of warmth, I smiled as broadly as I could and said how beautiful her daughter was. She beamed back, exposing dental work that would make a blind man grimace, and invited me to come and meet the daughter and stay with them when we arrived in Guilin.

My heart ached with the recognition of one of those rare moments which are profoundly, palpably real. Here was a woman (she was 28, only a year older than me, but looked middle aged already) whose existence could at very best be called dire. What kind of life is this? Sixty hours a week in a Hadean beehive masquerading as a factory, a shared hovel in a city which Lucifer coughed up, separated from her daughter. A 28-hour return commute on a wooden-slat train bench every week to spend a sole day with her child, and having met a young traveller who was wealthy enough to afford a soft sleeper ticket, she invites him home with the presumable hope he would fall for the daughter and stay. I really can’t say for sure that she was hoping for marriage and a way out of this miserable life. She may just have been so proud of her musical daughter that she wanted to show her off. But although desperation in someone’s otherwise dead eyes is hard to describe, I know it when I see it. I’ve seen it a lot on this voyage. The tuk-tuk driver in Varanasi, the vegetable trader in Siem Reap, the rag-seller in Belgrade, the gypsy mother in Budapest, the beggar in Ho Chi Minh. It’s far too easy to mistake need for want; helplessness for calculation; desperation for envy. Desperation in such places comes in various guises and facing it with sympathy is the only real (however inadequate) susbstitute for empathy. Her desperation was different from theirs, but I saw it in her eyes. A barely educated and prematurely middle-aged single mother, in a country which values only men, with no money, no prospects and no real life worth the word. It was truly sad.

I apologised, explaining that my itinerary forced me to head straight to Yangshuo, and wished her all my heartfelt best. Sitting in the restaurant car a little later (my favourite place on a night train), drinking myself silly on undrinkable Chinese lager, I tried to regain my usual giddy enthusiasm for sleeper travel and for long, nocturnal journeys in particular. Peering out of the window, trying to grasp a glimpse of southern China by night and its tapestry of blackened factories chugging by, all I could see because of the bright lights above me was my own reflection in the glass.