The Kaleidoscope of Ideology

In the end, it always comes down to ideology.

As hard as I try to get enthused about the oddities of the food or the perplexing social gestures; differences in music or attitudes to religion or sex, I find myself most often intrigued by government, and its various guises around the world. This probably stems as much from a self-reverential pondering on how to start a society from scratch (a hypothetical recently posed by a friend on a long car journey and which provided hours of merry dreaming) as anything else. But curiosity as to the structure of society and the role of the State is heightened when circumstances conveniently conspire, and you find yourself in an important place when something important is happening. Being in China the past few weeks has been just that.

List – if you will – the most potentially fraught geopolitical relationships in the world today, and there’s a fair chance they’ll all involve China. There’s the unsustainable – and growing – Sino-US trade imbalance. The age-old mistrust and resentment the Chinese have towards Japan. There’s Taiwan, which is only ever one mischievous pro-independence candidacy away from seeing about a million young Chinese conscripts wandering around in smart green tunics carrying Kalashnikovs. There’s North Korea, Kashmir and China’s endless thirst for oil. Tinderboxes all.

But Tibet is the elephant in the room. Long the pet cause of Hollywood liberals and the European Left, it’s a particularly bewildering issue, inasmuch as nobody realistically expects anything ever to change. The world’s dependence on China’s factories and the Chinese need for “face” – a need born from millennia of foreign invasions, humiliations and declines (the “sick man of the east”, as China was called in London’s 19th century gentlemen’s clubs) means that there’s no way China permits Tibetan independence. So in that sense, it’s moot.

But China’s opening up. It’s a statement made by every journalist who visits, and as sound bytes go it’s true, but it’s eye-wateringly complex as well. China in 2008 is littered with contradiction. It’s an awakening giant liberated by the free market but crippled too with a debilitating lack of self-esteem; arrogant and pathetic as much as visionary and ambitious. Everyone I met there, from factory workers to cab drivers to hostel owners to students and teachers added layer upon layer of paint to a picture already daubed thick with colour.

So Tibet erupted into the worst violence in a couple of decades while I was there. I was guiltily pleased to be able to watch Beijing waver and fumble and fool. It began, naturally, with the Internet. Which deserves a small digression.

China now has more Internet users than any other country. PCs are becoming affordable for the urban Chinese for the first time (the PC division of IBM – that venerable American behemoth – was bought by China’s Lenovo a couple of years back – a rather embarrassing fact most Americans chose to ignore). Most Chinese, though, still don’t have computers at home, so they cram by the thousands into Internet cafés the size of football fields to watch pirated VCDs and furtively stream porn – but most of all, to play online games. Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (or MMORPGs – honestly, could nobody come up with a better acronym than that?) are a phenomenon the significance of which not enough people yet fully grasp. While I was at the CSFI, we produced papers and organised seminars on the subject. They’re the stepping-stone between a world of indisputable reality on the one hand, and one of virtuality on the other. Remarkably, half a dozen young Korean men supposedly drop dead every month in Internet cafes from playing these games too much. Leaving aside the rather obvious point that these kids would be better off playing football, reading or trying to get laid – and the rather elegant Darwinism of their demise – it was in China that I got to see the phenomenon first-hand. Zombies, row upon row of keyboard-tapping ghouls slaying dragons or building wizard points or whatever to triumph in battle over some snot-nosed and pimple-faced adolescent sitting in his parents’ attic in Copenhagen or Auckland or Durban.

So the young Chinese are using the Internet for the wrong things – stop the presses! That’s their problem and their prerogative and I won’t say any more about it. But what’s far more significant is not what’s on the Internet, but what’s not.

The existence of the so-called Great Firewall of China isn’t news to anyone. It’s annoying while you’re there to find Wikipedia blocked – presumably someone had the nerve to refer to Taiwan as a “country”. It’s even more exasperating to find that online bible Wikitravel likewise unavailable. But as useful as Wikipedia is for becoming a minor expert on a subject as quickly as possible, it’s a flawed product and everyone knows that. China’s blocking of the BBC, on the other hand, is a whole other matter.

The BBC radio world service is the most listened-to station in the world. The BBC television world service – along with CNN International – is the world’s foremost 24-hour news provider. And, please, excuse any green-pastures, rose-glasses Anglophilia, but the BBC remains the world’s most respected news source. It just is, and it’s a disgrace that the Chinese have blocked it for so long. )Although at the time of writing, they’ve just removed the block – probably more to do with international opprobrium over their latest lashing-out at Tibet than my own repeated entreaties. But whatever – it’s a good thing).

The BBC, though, is only a part of the story. Google has famously – infamously, really – agreed to allow censorship of its search engine in China, a example of obsequious, cost-benefit pandering of which an otherwise admirable company ought to be ashamed. Google ‘Human Rights’, ‘Tiananmen Square’, ‘Democracy’ or ‘Taiwan’, and you’ll find your internet connection drop out. I know – I tried it every day I was there. Curiously, Myspace is blocked too. Apparently depressed, 14-year old goth kids in Nebraska and aspiring rock bands in Sheffield pose a national security risk to the middle kingdom. Facebook isn’t blocked at all – presumably because the bureaucrats in Beijing and their IT lackies don’t appreciate that that’s where real dissent and criticism will manifest in the years to come – along with the blogosphere of course. The blogs are blocked too, but only in part. I could update my own blog by logging in, but not actually open and view the URL. This would make some sense from the perspective of the Chinese officials, if it weren’t so pathetically easy to bypass the firewall they’ve constructed. I’m not what you'd call IT savvy – I’ve never written a line of code in my life – but I could get around all the blocks in no time. Moreover, to compound the counter-productive effect of censoring the Internet in the first place, the bureaucrats have overlooked that the people who may formulate insurrection or dissent – young, urban students – are the very same people who’ll be able to figure out how to bypass the restrictions put in place. It’s been the folly of communists from time immemorial: the utter counter-productivity of lashing out. Like the Soviet imprisonment of dissidents in the past, they’d be better off abandoning the premise that communism is incompatible with dissent, and instead just levelling with their people. If the current rise of Östalgie in the former East Germany and USSR demonstrates anything, it’s that people are not always, under all circumstances, opposed to a strong, centralised State which is more involved in their lives than in the West. What they loathe is the suppression of speech and the fear and oppression that engenders.

So, to the crusty old cadavers in Beijing who probably think the Internet to be a conspiratorial series of pipes and who are so desperate to retain their one-party model, my advice is this: open it up. Your young, English-speaking students – the ones who are going to cause you trouble down the track – are smarter than you. Telling them what they can and cannot read on the Internet – surely a force for good to rival agriculture and the Gutenberg press – is going to come back and bite you in the arse. Loosen up, you octogenarian fools.

And so, back to Tibet: Naturally, the propaganda machine went into overdrive as the Chinese PLA began shooting protesters in Lhasa, leaving perhaps 150 dead. Or so the US, Australian, British and French media were reporting – and as they had reporters on the ground, I’m going to take them at their word. By Day Two, and as the Chinese state news agency was reporting that brave PLA troops had been attacked by Tibetan radicals (including, rather amusingly, Buddhist monks who Beijing would have you believe were rampaging through Lhasa like blacks in LA after the Rodney King verdict) YouTube went down. This was pretty irritating – you never know when you’re going to be struck by the need to watch grainy home footage of people falling off trampolines or lip-synching to Celine Dion – but it turned out, unsurprisingly, that someone had impertinently uploaded footage of Chinese troops beating the living shit out of unarmed Tibetans on the site. So there went YouTube.

By the end of Day Two, CNN, the Guardian and MSNBC articles on events in Tibet were blocked too. I still read them – as I said, it’s not the hardest thing to bypass the firewall – but bit by bit, I came to begin to understand the true nature of the Chinese government and its paranoia of lockdown. It’s the reactionism of a government that lacks faith in its own purity of virtue to trust its people to know the truth. Tiananmen Square couldn’t happen again I don’t think. The Chinese government was stunned by the tonnage of international opprobrium which landed on its doorstep in 1989 but has probably learnt enough not to machine-gun its own students in the centre of its capital. Mobile phones and digital cameras no longer permit such an atrocity to be kept quiet from its people. And say what you like about the Chinese predisposition to authoritarian rule – and I could say plenty – I don’t believe they would tolerate a repeat of 1989 in one of their own cities. Even the most policed police state in the world cannot suppress a truly widespread uprising among its people, and the Politburo in Beijing may be stupid, but it's not that stupid.

Digressing further if I can, I asked pretty much every Chinese I met about their thoughts on Tiananmen. The most common response? Uncomprehending blankness. They haven’t heard about it. Going to the Square itself – a place I wanted to visit for a moment of personal and solemn reflection – is like visiting Disneyland, but with more flags, fewer Americans and about the same level of excruciating banality. Thousands, tens of thousands of Chinese are running about, giggling, squealing and posing for photographs. In the world’s largest public square, and in a place where not two decades ago one of the world’s iconic modern images – the man martyring himself in front of the tank – was seared into our minds, and where the bitumen is soaked with the blood of innocent students, the sea of Chinese tourists don’t know a damn thing about what happened. The closest I got to genuine knowledge of 1989 while in China was a young, English-educated man of exceptional friendliness and worldliness called Leo.

Leo – the charming director of entertainment on my boat trip through the Three Gorges on the Yangtze – is that rarest of travel finds: the native who’s been overseas and who works in an industry where he meets visitors to his own country. People like him are a journalistic goldmine; he can uniquely understand and express a comparison between not only his own country and others, but between the people of both places too.

He had heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He had the year wrong (ironically, he thought it was 1984) but he knew that some students died. That was about it. The revealing part, though – and perhaps the single most revealing moment of my time in China – was his astonishment that I had heard of it. He was genuinely confused as to why such an event would have made international news.

And there it is. Play word association in the West with anyone who, well, really with anyone who knows how to read. Say the word “Beijing” and they’ll just as likely respond with “Tiananmen Square” as they will “China” or “Olympics”. Say “Tiananmen” and the knee-jerk response is unanimous: “Massacre”.

So, not only has the government managed to bury this tragic, cruel – and really quite recent – event from its people, but has fostered an environment where the people don’t realise what the outside world thinks of that government itself. This will change in time – for reasons I’ve already gone through. Short of DPRK-style, Stalinist totalitarianism, there’s no way to keep a population dumb in an Internet world. But my various conversations with Leo and his other compatriots left me clear: not only is there much the Chinese don’t know, but there’s even more that they don’t know they don’t know.

By Days Four and Five, Beijing was panicking. The reason you can tell is that the tripe coming out of the state media had qualitatively morphed from eyebrow-raisingly improbable to downrightly Orwellian. And then things ramped up further and Chinese defiance grew and grew until a single word – the magic word, really – was muttered in a few capitals around the world. And that word, of course, is “boycott”.

The Chinese had been comprehensively outflanked. The Achilles heel of China in 2008 is the Olympics, an event they've been preparing for in one way or another for twenty years. Hosting the Olympics is a major challenge and a real coup for any country. There’s the quadrennial need to get the Games to run smoothly and have the IOC chairman announce at the closing ceremony that the Games had been “the best yet!” But for the Chinese, much more is at stake. Centuries of various humiliations, the brutality suffered by the Japanese, the Mongols, the Opium Wars and the British, and the decades of development lost to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution have led to 2008’s Games being China’s 'coming of age'. It’s an opportunity for China to demonstrate its position as the biggest, most ambitious – and in some ways, richest – country on earth. They know they’re not going to be overtaking the US economy for decades, but that’s not the point. The point is, they hunger for the world’s respect in an almost pathological way, and an Olympics on an unprecedented scale is designed to get just that.

And these Games really will be unprecedented. China has spent three times as much as the next most expensive Olympics. US$17bn has been spent just on cleaning the air in Beijing (although as always, government accounting transparency in China is not what it is in Europe or North America). Although the IOC’s Jacques Rogge was making noises about the air quality while the Chinese army was gunning people down in Tibet – again, no coincidence but a calculated snark at the Chinese – my own experience in Beijing was astonishing. Blue skies and clean air in a city in which I was expecting to be barely able to breathe. I suspect I was lucky – but one thing is beyond question: the Chinese are working around-the-clock, planning a ban on a third of traffic during the Games and spending a fortune to get Beijing’s air acceptable for outdoor sports, not to mention the US$40bn they’re spending on public transport and skyscrapers. All this, of course, to get the world’s media to write in surprise at how impressive and clean a mega-city it is. It’ll probably work. Unless, of course, there’s a boycott.

That word, “boycott”, began rumbling across the global news media within a few days of troubles beginning in Tibet. Nobody in a foreign government with real clout expressly called for it. But the French refused to rule it out, and its not hard to imagine the human-rights Left and the anti-Chinese Right in the US Congress aligning behind it. It’s that rarest of things – a confluence of interests at both ends the spectrum. I’m sure a boycott of the Beijing Olympics won’t happen by any significant countries. But if it did, it would be an event of enormous significance for a variety of reasons. But the biggest of these, I really think, is that it would be unspinnable to the Chinese people. Nobody, not even the most PR-savvy operatives in the world – and none of them seem to work for the Chinese anyway – could put a positive spin on this. The Chinese people would find out why it is the world is choosing to stay away from their magnificent showpiece.

The Tibet thing slowly began to recede and with it, so did mention of a boycott. But watching the government’s paranoia close-up was a spectacle I recommend to anyone who wants to be in a war zone without, you know, having to actually do anything.

China really is such a confusing place. It’s breathtaking and underwhelming in equal measure; admirable and disgusting; a place I want to go back to over and over, and never again step foot in for the rest of my life. You can be so frustrated with the manners and habits of its people, only to then be embraced with grace and kindness. You can gasp through the sooty air of one of its countless megacities – there are more than a dozen you’ve never even of which are bigger than London or Paris – and then find yourself, within an hour, sitting on soil so fertile and land so rich you wonder how it is Mao managed to extract famine from it. And you can be in a food market one minute, stomach turning at the skinned dogs, the barely-alive frogs, birds and snakes kept in unutterably awful conditions and then wander though a door to find a crafts market where families sit together, chatting, laughing, bonding and making baskets or pots.

Single young women can safely walk at night in any city, knowing full well that the punishment for rape or theft (especially against foreigners) is so draconian it serves as a virtually total deterrent. They can take solace in this safety, but wonder too whether it’s right that a mugging committed by an impoverished Chinese should be punished by the State with practically summary execution. They can be pondering that question, and then notice the elderly Chinese out on the streets at midnight on a Saturday, hundreds of them dancing in pairs to some droopy, saccharine Chinese love songs. And they can wonder to themselves how many places in the world there are where the elderly feel safe to be out on the streets at night dancing and socialising, rather than slumped in front of a television watching Parkinson or Letterman re-runs, slowly awaiting Death’s cold embrace.

As I said at the top, It all comes back to ideology for me. It’s the unique (okay, Vietnam has a similar model) political system the Chinese have – the incomprehensible mésalliance of a free market charging ahead like a runaway train, and an authoritarian, bureaucratic and oftentimes cruel State which cannot see the trees from the wood.

Their one-party system, the improbable marriage of communism and capitalism is a prism through which every visitor cannot help but see China. I’m not a communist – I accept the well-trod orthodoxy that liberal democracy is, so far, the least worst system of government anyone’s come up with. (I do think there should be some sort of voting test – a non-partisan, general knowledge assessment of the issues before you get to pull your level – but this is an idea unlikely to gain traction, least of all among those who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour).

But what’s clear from visiting modern-day China is the enormous advantage a one-party model bestows when it comes to solving the big problems. I’m going to devote some space to the Three Gorges Dam, because not only is it arguably the most ambitious project the world has seen in centuries, but it speaks volumes about the capacity of a governing party – when there’s no opposition to argue with it – to actually govern. Say what you will about the cruelties and injustices of authoritarianism, when massive projects are required, projects which could never get underway in the West because of political lobbyists, a litigation culture, and various special interests or advocacy groups seeking injunction after injunction, in China – they get done. Spend a gazillion workers’ salaries on building stadia? Let’s do it! Construct a single airport terminal the size of the whole of Heathrow? Let’s do it! Build a city of 8 million people to belch out smog on the site of a fishing village? Let’s do it! Send a man into space with no scientific rationale for doing so? Let’s do it! Dam the Yangtze? Damn the expense! Let’s do it!!

So, the Three Gorges Project. They rightfully call it the ‘project’ rather than the ‘dam’, because the dam itself – although the objective – cannot stand alone. It would be like describing football to a neophyte and saying that it’s played by a guy who tries to kick a ball into a net. The overseas media, I think, often misses the primary point of the project. It’s often couched in terms of hydroelectricity, supplying renewable energy for an enormous country industrialising at a scarcely believable rate. This is true – the project is now supposedly providing forty per cent of China’s energy – but often overlooked is the role the Yangtze has played in China’s history. I can think of no country so dependent on a waterway – it’s been an artery for transportation, a source of irrigation and drinking water for as long as China has been populated. I don’t think its overstating it to say that without this river – the third longest in the world and one which zigzags across the land from Tibet to the Pacific – there would be no China as we know it.

The river has always been a curse and a blessing in equal measure and with devastating effect. The river floods every few years, and 400 million Chinese live along or near its thousands of kilometres of winding banks. Catastrophic loss of life has occurred throughout its history – as recently as the 1970s a quarter of a million people were swept away; in 1998 a few thousand died; in the fifties another quarter million. Getting accurate figures isn’t easy. China has been technologically backward for so much of its history, which, in combination with successive governments committed to the control of information and a population so enormous that accurate accounting is impossible, makes all figures relative approximations. Three things, however, are beyond dispute. First, the Yangtze has flooded every few years throughout China’s 5000-year history. Second, the flooding has become more frequent in the agricultural and industrial ages. And third, millions upon millions of people have died. The primary purpose for the Three Gorges project, therefore, was to control the hitherto uncontrollable.

Although the green light for the project was given in the early 1990s, and building began in 1993, the idea dates back at least a century. In 1924, a brilliant young Chinese engineering student returned from Birmingham University in the UK with complete theoretical plans for the damming of the river at Sandouping, creating a 600km-long lake and drowning countless cities in the process as the waters rose. But logistics and a lack of material and technical resources and know-how left this vision consigned to mere fantasy for decades, until in the 1970s a group of American engineers, together with the best and brightest China could produce, began work on plans which took advantage of technological developments, and made the project a possibility. During the seventies and eighties, a trial, guinea pig dam was built 38 kilometres downstream from the Three Gorges Dam – a smaller version, only twenty metres higher on the upstream than downstream sides. In 1993, the decision to go ahead with the main dam was made, and 100,000 workers spend the next fifteen years building it, in three parts. From 1993-97, the river was stopped. This is a notion so stupendous to me I can’t say any more about it. From 1998-2003 the dam itself and the locks for the ships were constructed. And from 2004 to today and until 2009, the generators were installed.

No amount of statistics can really convey the magnitude of what the Chinese have accomplished here. What most of the world knows of the dam is that it’s really, really big, is very, very expensive, and many people – and the environment – have suffered because of its construction. For China’s countless critics, it’s come to exemplify the dehumanised arrogance and disregard for its citizens of a political monolith which does as it damn – no pun – well pleases. What I came to see, though, what I came to understand from speaking to the people whose lives have been affected by the project, is that conventional wisdom outside China is far from the full story. I think can tell when I’m being fed bullshit – like the government tour guide who insisted the project has come in under budget when the foreign media more believably insists it was three times over – and when someone is speaking with genuine freedom and candour. And despite some of the environmental consequences of the dam, it’s done a lot of good too.

A few numbers to begin, though, so bear me out. The dam itself is about 180 metres high – roughly the height of London’s Canary Wharf tower. It’s 2300 metres long, and at its base over 200 metres thick. When the hydroelectric turbines are finished next year, it’ll produce 87.4 billion kilowatt hours per year – or €8bn worth of annual electricity. This is a lot. The lake being created behind the dam is 600 kilometres long. At the time of my visit, the water level had risen from 60 metres to 155 metres above sea level. When the lake finishes rising next year, it’ll be at 175 metres. The water level upstream will be 96 metres higher than downstream. It’s worth taking a moment to think about the amount of water being controlled in the creation of a 600 kilometre long lake, increasing in depth by 115 metres. It’s enough to have created a microclimate above the water – a shroud of mist from the evaporation of a body of water of quite unimaginable volume.

1.13 million people have been displaced due to the project – a rare statistic upon which the Chinese government and outside observers are in apparent agreement. Some lived in the cities along what was the upstream river, cities like Badang and Fengdu which now lie in the watery depths of the resulting lake. Others were farmers scattered along the river bank, whose farms now lie submerged for all of time. Standing as I did high up in the City of Ghosts, China’s most sacred place for Daoists and Buddhists, and having my ears burnt with various titbits of unevolved superstitious claptrap, I peered across the lake where the city of Fengdu once lay, and towards New Fengdu – the replacement city they built in the last decade (see photo). I can’t help but come back to my earlier point: the Chinese, with nothing more than determination, labour and money, have built new cities higher up on the river bank to replace those now completely drowned under a hundred or so metres of water. The British can’t get the baggage system at Heathrow’s T5 to work and the US, after three years, still can’t get started on repairing New Orleans. I’m just saying: bitch about Chinese human rights all you like and complain about the shoddiness of some of their exports, but you can’t ever say they don’t know how to get things done.

I wandered around the new cities of Badang and Fengdu – two of many that have sprung up during the construction of the Dam. The buildings are modern and rather elegant, the streets wider and better constructed than most you see in China’s towns and villages. Through a translator I asked – separately - a shopkeeper, taxi driver and a factory worker what they think of their new city and the Project. Their responses were remarkably similar. I’m paraphrasing, “My old house had one sleeping room and one eating room, and eight of us were living there. When the project was announced fifteen years ago, we were sad to have to leave it, and see our city disappear. But the government has built enough new apartments that now we have only two people in each bedroom, and the house is warm in the winter. We don’t have to be afraid of the river flooding any more, and we’re proud that China can do something as big as this. We want everyone to know what China is capable of”.

These were people talking honestly and openly, and I began to see the project not just as a necessary alternative to building dozens of coal plants, and not just as protection for millions of people of the savage whims of a river which has taken millions of lives over generations, but as a way to have improved the lot of those living impoverished lives along its banks. Of course, it’s not all Christmas in Paris. Some farmers can no longer work and have been just paid off for their loss. And the long-term environmental consequences are not yet fully understood. And the people displaced by the project could, of course, not avail themselves of a judicial system which, in the West, would allow them to challenge forced relocation as unreasonable. But before we pile on, as is fashionable to do, I really think credit should be given where credit is due. The Chinese have conquered the next frontier, and if the rampant growth and ambition of this extraordinary and ancient country is teaching us anything, it’s that we can expect them to do much more of the same in the century to come.

All this progress comes at a cost though, and time after time I was told that China’s ‘tradition’ is being chipped away. One expect this from the elderly – old people everywhere never tire of telling anyone who’ll listen (or who is too polite to walk away) that ‘tradition’ is being lost – but I heard it over and over again from the young too. I heard it from the uneducated rural Chinese in the interior provinces and from students in the ugly and indistinct urban centres like Chongqing (incidentally, a city unique in also being a province, and by some measures the city with the world’s largest population – 34 million. It’s a skin-crawlingly awful place). I heard it from the professional classes riding the train with me and, surprisingly, from three odd young students I met in Chengdu and with whom I passed a remarkable afternoon.

I was wandering aimlessly through the city trying not to get run over, spat on or sideswiped by a bicycle, and happened upon the main square. I’ve seen big squares in the world’s cities before, but it says much about China’s scale that in a city virtually no-one outside the country has heard of, and which is bigger than Sydney, Chicago, Berlin, Barcelona or Vancouver, there lies a central square so vast you can barely see the other side. Although admittedly the air has the viscosity of treacle and the colour of apricots, so one can’t always be sure of scale.

Nevertheless, there stood the ubiquitous statue of Mao, a hundred feet high, arm outstretched and gazing benevolently towards his people. I stood in admiration of the statue – it really is something – and started snapping photos. Three young men – English students at the local university – nervously approached and, in English so haphazard and metallic it made me squint, asked if they could help with anything. I was delighted, so asked why it is that in a packed public square, with an enormous monument of modern China’s most important leader, I was the only person looking at it. I asked what the Chinese think of Mao nowadays, and the conversation was moving nicely along to democratic movements and right of protest, when the army arrived.

Frankly, the nervousness I usually get when approached by the military – especially in places where dissent is not allowed and I’m carrying a backpack full of notes which basically refer to them as limp-brained, commie automatons – was trumped by an unexpected desire for some good 'ole trouble. Flashing through my mind were romantic dreamings of a couple of hours of respectful interrogation in a police station, during which I’d embarrass them into admitting that they’d really rather be doing more important stuff than spying on foreigners – and then being expelled from the country only to get on the news back in the West as a poster-child for Chinese intransigence and diplomatic ten-thumbedness. And then I’d write a Pullitzer-winning article about my experience and live off it at dinner parties for the next two decades.

So I puffed my chest up, ready for anything, but not worried about any sort of violence – this is an Olympic year after all, and the Chinese aren’t dumb enough to torture a foreigner when there are so many of their own citizens yet to torture first. Disappointingly, the officials stopped short of dragging me away, but said that if we wanted to discuss such things, a more discrete place would be appropriate. This was not the heavy-handed sino-sulk I had come to expect, but they were serious about it – talking to the Chinese about democracy is permitted, it would seem, as long as you exercise the decorum of not doing it in front of a bloody great statue of Chairman Mao.

So, in what I considered a satisfactorily ironic ‘screw you’, I took my three new friends to Starbucks, and shelled out a Chinese worker’s monthly salary on four coffees.

My new friends included an extroverted and metrosexual Europhile who called himself Hans and professed admiration for everything about Germany, without knowing any more about that country than you'd get from seeing a VW Golf on the street. The second was a whiskery young thing called Chen whose voice would have been irritatingly staccato even without the world-class stammer with which he was sadly cursed. Getting his coffee order out of him took longer than actually drinking the thing. “La-la-la-la-la-la (oh, c’mon!) la- la-latte!!”

Christ.

The third was a charming and soft-spoken introvert also called Chen, who – like most charming and soft-spoken introverts in all places – was the smartest, most thoughtful and most interesting of his group, but consistently treated by the others like a moron. Hans the Europhile Extrovert went on and on, waxing lyrical about the music of Beethoven and Brahms while we waited for our coffee to come, with little indication than he had any experience with those two great Germans other than having read their names somewhere. His extroversion and self-appointment as group leader was made all the more irritating by a periodic excitability in which he would hyperventilate. His friends explained that he was so excited to be speaking with a foreigner he needed a moment to calm down. In retrospect, buying him the double espresso was probably a bad idea.

But after a slow start, a truly revealing afternoon followed. They all study English together at the university – although quite obviously the English is being taught by a Chinese professor who can read it but not speak it, and who knows nothing of conversational nuance. They’re all only children (without siblings, I mean) – my question as to whether they had brothers or sisters was met with a further fit of giggling – and don’t have girlfriends. In the case of the hyperventilating Hans this is really a no-brainer, but they all said that there aren’t enough girls to go around, that the male surplus among the young Chinese has left the acquisition of a mate more Natural Selection than, well, natural selection. What girls there are get their pick of the rich, the foreign or just the very best looking men around. Which left my three young virgins (yes, I asked) with no real prospects of a girlfriend or even a wife. It’s not funny at all, of course. It’s really, really sad. If you can’t realistically leave your country, and if there aren’t enough of the opposite sex to go around, one of an individual’s most fundamental rights – the right to at least the prospect of finding a spouse, of having children – is voided. Amidst all the talk of political censorship, of the lack of voting and the quality of the air, this is something not talked about enough. China’s one-child policy, and the consequent foeticide, female infanticide, and sex-related abortion – both voluntary and involuntary – deserves more international attention, indignation and outrage. I really felt sorry for these guys.

But the really interesting part of my afternoon spent with these three oddbods was their hatred for their government – the first real expression of this I’d heard during my weeks in the country. “The only perfection is truth!!”, Hans shouted, slamming his fist on the table so loudly the Chinese baristas jumped a foot. I don’t know if Hans is a scholar of the European Enlightenment or not – my guess would be not – but he and his two sidekicks began to complain about everything from the blocking of the Internet (of which they were very well aware), the propaganda of the state-run media, and their inability to openly protest. They wanted democracy, they wanted a multi-party free market, they wanted reconciliation with Japan, a policy of status quo on Taiwan, they wanted China out of Tibet, and they wanted more to be done on environmental issues. My surprise at what turned out to be a raging torrent of grievances was less that university students would turn out to hold generally left-of-centre views, but that such views hinted at a well of discontent beneath the veneer of order and conformity the Chinese put forth with such conviction.

These debates probably don’t take place within the lecture halls at the universities, and they definitely are nowhere to be found in the state media. But in the bowels of the Internet, on the millions of blogs to which the Chinese contribute (all three of my new young friends were enthusiastic bloggers) and far beyond the eyes and understanding of the bureaucrats managing the Great Firewall, there is a vibrant discussion of ideas taking place. Countless fora are dedicated to free speech, a free press and China’s place in the world. As everywhere else, political and philosophical discussions like these are done in an echo chamber; who can know for sure just how big this movement is? But what I came to understand by the end of a few short weeks in the Middle Kingdom is that just when you think China can’t confuse you further, it can. It’s the anti-Magic Eye. The longer you look at it, the more jumbled it becomes.

The Chinese predisposition towards authoritarianism will never go away, I’m sure. Reverence for and obedience towards centralised power goes back as far as China does itself, and the disappearance of that is about as likely as the Spanish giving up siestas. And it’s probably also true that the late 1980s – the years leading up to Tiananmen Square – represented the apex of the democracy movement in China. The majority of Chinese people I spoke to – and other people’s accounts bear this out – are optimistic and happy about their country and their place within it. For most Chinese, their personal lot has grown in the past decades, and after generations of famine and hardship, having enough wealth to feed and educate their children, own a television, eat in a restaurant now and then and look after their parents is such sufficient reward that voting really doesn’t seem much of a big deal. Fundamentally, people who have always lived a parochial existence care about parochial matters. And in such matters, things are getting measurably better.

But peer further into the kaleidoscope of China and you wonder about the millions of students blogging away, calmly and easily evading the government’s sonar like submarines plumbing the ocean’s dark depths. You wonder what happens when they take public sector jobs to replace the old men in Beijing. You wonder what happens when the first generation to openly criticise the excesses and criminalities of the Cultural Revolution takes power. You wonder what happens when the enforced civil duty for the Olympics passes – after being told to learn how to queue, to stop spitting everywhere, will those superficial changes last? You wonder what happens when the government and the army eventually goes too far, when instead of a couple of hundred protesters far away in Tibet, it’s something closer to home.

The question, I suppose, is whether China in 2008 is like the USSR and the eastern bloc in 1988. Is it a country whose astonishing embrace of the free market will necessarily require an embrace of freedom more generally? Or do the officials in Beijing actually understand the nature of their 1.3 billion people much better than do academics and NGO noise-making dilettantes back in the West? Perhaps they do, after all, and that indeed this odd marriage of consumption and growth on the one hand with rigidity, closure and control on the other, is sustainable after all. Maybe it’s like the Arab wife who, when asked why she agrees to walk behind her husband, defer to his opinion and wear the niqab, answers, “This is what we do. This is what works for us”. Are we, in fact, all the outraged feminist theorist posing the question, who decries that Arab wife’s subservience and disempowerment, but who has been divorced three times herself?

Time will tell whether the economic changes in China translate to political ones, and time will tell whether my three angry little friends are really representative of a burgeoning dissent beneath China’s controlled surface. As I said at the start, though: for me, it all comes down to ideology. I just wish I could understand what that ideology is, in a country so confusing nobody from the outside can ever possibly understand it fully.