Before you scroll through this blog you may enjoy a summary of our trip in 4 short films 

Slow Train to China (4:33' ) using Glenn Miller's cover of Chatanooga Choo choo
(see October posting for more explanation)

Getting Lost in China (2:39') using a recording of a song we wrote and recorded
(See November posting for more explanation)

Ian & Julia's  7 day Chengdu tour (4:31') a film made by a student in Chengdu including clips of us singing and playing

为人民服务 renmin fuwu wei Serve the people (You gotta serve somebody) (4:06) using Natalie Cole singing Bob Dylan's You gotta serve somebody.  I thought of this song after our meeting with Liang Fang (see November posting with reference to Buddha and Mao) so I've used it for a film to pay tribute to all the people in China who gave us such a happy and unforgettable experience.

​As we’ve reached the end of 2018, I’ve run out of time to write in any detail about our two weeks in Kunming (with a three day trip to Dali in the middle of it).  So I’m just going to finish off this blog with a thank-you to all the people who made our trip such a wonderful experience.   You can meet Jiang, Candy, Shirly, Jason, Anqi and Zhouyi in the blog archives for May, June and October.  You can meet Anqi’s parents, Yuzhi and Jianjun, her brother Liujia and other family members in the blog archive for October.  My November post is all about our meeting with Qianqian’s friend San Lang and her mother in Chengdu.  And you can read below about the afternoon we spent with Qianqian’s students, our visit to the Nightingale Music School and the special evening at the Sichuan opera with Qianqian and her friend Shanshan.  

Du Xi is a photographer and when he had to go off to Japan, Zhouyu and her friend Rouyi took us to the new Yunnan Museum and out for “grab hands rice”. ​​

In Kunming we also spent a couple of days with Xing Xing, a schoolfriend of Qianqian’s from their home province of Henan, and her friend Zhangjilai.  

​Xing Xing took us around the campus of Yunnan University, where she and Zhangjilai are doctoral students.  She is hoping to come to the UK on a post-doctoral programme next year but needs to pass an English exam to qualify for government funding.  If anyone reading this has an interest in material metaphysics and would like to help Xing xing practice talking about this in English, please let us know!

and having a massage and ear cleaning afterwards.  ​

​This is an English translation of Mao’s “Little Red Book”.
Inside the front cover, I’d written:
                       Julia Clarke, Bristol, 1968.

​Fifty years later,  I took the Little Red Book with me to China. It wasn't until we got to Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan province, that I found someone to give it to.

Our friend, guide and interpreter Qianqian brought us here to meet San Lang and her 76 year old mother.  ​On the 16th floor of a building whose lower flowers are occupied by a luxury hotel, San Lang has created a kind of sanctuary. In one corner there is a Buddhist shrine.​ San Lang is a dentist, and this room is next to her surgery.  Patients can read, relax, meet or play here before they go for treatment.

While her mother was quietly meditating in another part of the room, San Lang showed us this photograph of her parents.  ​San Lang’s father had been a soldier in the Red Army all his life.  He died less than a year ago. San Lang didn’t want her mother, Liang Fang, to see this photograph, because it always made her cry.  It seems that weeping is seen as something that should be done in private.

​With Qianqian interpreting, San Lang told us that her paternal grandfather (Liang Fang’s husband’s father), was a successful stone carver, a master craftsman, and quite wealthy, with a beautiful house. Following an arranged marriage, his young bride poisoned herself.  Her parents were so angry they locked him up with her dead body for a week. As a result, he never wanted to marry or have a relationship with a woman again. So, in order to create his own family, he adopted a son and a daughter, each from different local poor families, and when they grew up, they married each other and one of their sons was Liang Fang’s husband.  

But the wealthy stone carver became addicted to opium and spent all his money, so they were poor and Liang Fang’s father-in-law didn’t get his first pair of shoes until he was almost an adult, by which time his feet had become twisted through exposure in the bitter cold of winter. (I think this photo is San Lang and her two brothers and parents, so the old man is the adopted son of the stone-carver and the father of the man standing behind him).  San Lang has been back to the village and met the birth families from which her paternal grandparents were adopted.  The old house is now lying empty.​
​
San Lang told us another story, about Liang Fang’s mother (?), who also attempted suicide, by throwing herself in the river.  But she was rescued and lived to raise 14 children, including her own. The other children’s mothers had to work on the farm to provide enough food for them all.  

​At this point Liang Fang joined us and spoke to us about the China of her childhood, before the revolution, when women had to wash their husband’s feet, serve him and his parents with food and retreat to the kitchen to eat alone.  ​​It was Chairman Mao’s opposition to such forms of oppression which inspired Liang Fang and so many others to follow Chairman Mao and inspired her young husband to join the Red Army.

​I asked Liang Fang about her education.  She told us that she was much younger than her brothers and when they all left home, her parents kept her home to care for them.  But when she was 14, her older brother insisted that she should have an education and she went to live with him.  It was a long walk to and from school but she loved learning, studied hard, and achieved the grades for admission to the best of 3 local middle schools.  However, when she had only been at the middle school a short time, Mao called for people to go and work in the factories and, believing in the importance of developing China for the benefit of the people, she volunteered. 

​Liang Fang worked for two years in a factory, hard work and long hours, but then she was criticised because she had only lived in the town and wore good quality clothes, so she was told she should go and work in the countryside.  Liang Fang worked on a farm for two more years and found it hard because she’d never done farm work before.  But she had happy memories of laughing and chatting with her friends when they went to wash their clothes in the stream.

 Liang Fang said she always believed in Mao’s vision, but as he got old, he lost control of its implementation in practice and Lin Biao drove things in the wrong direction.  Liang Fang did acknowledge, however, that responsibility for the 'mistakes' of the cultural revolution lay with Mao Tse Tung. ​The current government line is that Lin Biao, who was responsible for publishing the Little Red Book, was a counter-revolutionary. 

This poster from the 1970s, exhorts people to criticize both Lin Biao and Confucius. Liang Fang, while supporting the party view that Mao was 30% mistaken, regards Mao’s opposition to Buddhism and Confucianism as the primary source of his mistakes. 

Mao's rejection of Buddhism is denied by the author of a Buddhist-Marxist alliance web site and when I gave Liang Fang my Little Red Book, although she couldn’t read the English, she was delighted when I showed her Lin Biao’s preface in the front.  She glanced at her daughter, as if seeking approval, and took the Buddhist prayer beads from her wrist and gave them to me. 

We shared our stories of love and loss and family and religion (or lack of it).  I told Liang Fang that I’d bought the book in 1968, when we were protesting against the American war in Vietnam.  I asked her where she was in 1968 and she told me that was when her youngest child, San Lang, was born.  Her five year old brother had been charging around and bashed into her, which brought on the labour 2 weeks early, so there wasn’t time to get to the hospital, but someone was able to drive off and fetch a doctor to attend to the birth at home.   

I had been afraid that Liang Fang wouldn’t want to say much, but she said a whole lot which it was impossible for Qianqian to translate in full.  I’d like to have recorded some of it, to translate later, but didn’t want to interrupt or inhibit the conversation.  Also, she talked so much, and by the time Qianqian had summarised what she said, we sometimes lost the flow and I failed to check my own understanding or ask more questions.  So I may have got a bit mixed up in the family saga.

But there was no misunderstanding about the depth of human connection here. In response to comments about Ian and I travelling so far at such a great age, we often attribute our courage to the experience of losing my son Saul (in 2004) and Ian's daughter Sara (in 2015). They both loved life and fought tenaciously for every day and hour of it, leaving us determined to live our own lives to the full. When Ian told a story about Sara’s last days, Qianqian, who was interpreting the entire conversation, was terribly apologetic about her inability to hold back her tears.

We really enjoy going out and getting lost in a city, and a few years ago we wrote a song about it.  So I've used this as a sound track for a collection of images from our trip.   In all the cities we visited in China, we found cheap public transport and we learnt to negotiate our way across roads teeming with electric scooters, bikes, cars and pedestrians all over the place.  Communication was often a challenge with our limited Mandarin, and very few people we met could speak English or read a map.  But people always wanted to help and would sometimes go out of their way to take us where we wanted to go.

Ian and I went back to take a proper look at the Er’qi tower.  It’s a memorial to railway strikers who were massacred in 1923 by warlords defending the interests of the companies building the Beijing-Hankou railway.  The working conditions, particularly in the long tunnels through the mountainous regions, were appalling, and strikes by the railway workers spread from Beijing to Zhengzhou, where the massacre took place.  On each of the nine floors of the tower (which we climbed!) there are eulogies to the bravery of these people who stood up to the ‘rule of law’.  This seems ironic in light of the Chinese government’s current curtailment of Trades Unions and the right to strike.  But, of course, the ‘rule of law’ in 1923 was designed to protect imperial capitalists and warlords, the enemies of the Communist Party, for whom this massacre was a decisive moment in the revolution!

Since we came back from China, I’ve been asked about the detention of possibly millions of Uyghur Muslims from Xinjang region in ‘re-education’ camps.  I looked at a BBC report which included a statement from a regional leader describing the camps as 'vocational education centres' designed to 'stave off terrorism'.  Then I looked at another BBC report, using satellite photography to determine the scale of these internment camps. Remembering that our friend Jiang (see May posting) grew up in Xinjang, and talked of schooldays in which his friendships were forged across religious and ethnic differences, I asked him about these reports.  He replied in an uncharacteristically terse message that his Muslim friends in Xinjang said that these reports were exaggerated, and were probably anti-government propaganda.  I realised that this is not a conversation to pursue on WeChat.  So I dug a little deeper and found a report on the US and UK companies, like JP Morgan, currently profiting from all the security and surveillance equipment which is being used to target and detain Muslims. Meanwhile Britain continues to sell millions of pounds worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia and I think I'd rather be 're-educated' than bombed.  

We arrived at the home of Yuzhi and Jianjun (parents of Anqi - see June post) the day before Ian's 87th birthday, so we'd insisted that it was our custom to take everyone out to dinner on our birthdays.  This was the only meal we were allowed to pay for during our two week stay with this generous family.  Anqi's brother, Liujia (2nd from left in the photo) and his three friends joined us, to celebrate their success in graduating from high school and gaining places at universities.  Liujia and one other were going to Wuhan to study engineering, the boy on the right was staying in Zhengzhou to study computer science and the boy next to him, who had done particularly well in the gaokao, was going to Shanghai to embark on a multi-disciplinary foundation course.   On the morning of Ian's birthday, Yuzhi, who spoke no more English than I could speak Chinese, took me out for the day.  She just beckoned and I grabbed my purse and phone and followed her out of the door, with no idea where we were going nor for how long.  We took a bus to the city centre and went round various shops, had coffee in Starbucks, and caused much interest and laughter in a huge supermarket looking for a particular brand of biscuit that Ian had liked in Beijing.  Failing to find it, we bought him some chocolates and then spent another half hour, involving more misunderstandings and laughter as I tracked down the ingredients for Ian to make his own oatmeal cookies.  We went for a pedalo ride in the People's Park (and I'll write another post about the People's Parks including those in Beijing, Chengdu and Kunming). Yuzhi phoned Liujia so he could tell me about the Er'qi tower, which I shall write about in my next post.

After 5 days in Beijing, we took the high speed train to Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, two hours South of Beijing, where we’d been invited to stay with the family of Anqi (see June posting).  When we passed all these clusters of tower blocks, I got a sense of the enormous population of this vast nation as I tried to calculate how many people must be living in each cluster.  But then I wondered where all these people went to as there seemed to be no other signs of urban life around them.  Later, I read an article which describes this landscape as a symptom of "Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles" leaving "... a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines”. 

Despite its size (population over 4 million) and long history, Zhengzhou is not known as a tourist destination.  I read in the China Morning Post that 80% of the world’s iPhones are manufactured in Zhengzhou, ​​while the New York Times puts the figure at 50% . When I asked our Beijing friends about these notorious Foxconn factories  I was told, oh no, China’s industry is all in North and East.  When I asked our hosts in Zhengzhou, they said the same.  But as we drove out of Zhengzhou to visit their home town across the Yellow River, our hosts pointed out a vast Industrial Zone, but said they didn't know what was there.  I guess you might find the  iPhone factory there.  Both Anqi's parents are engineers (now managers) in the construction industry, but we didn't have the language resources between us to ask about the context of their work.

Pictured above Left to Right: Shirly, Julia, Michael, Carole, Ian, Jiang and Candy.
 
On arrival in Beijing we checked into our wedding suite at the Double Happiness hotel!  What a delight to find every comfort and luxury in a beautiful building around a courtyard with delightful staff to help us.  Then we were taken out for dinner by Jiang, Candy and Shirly (see posting from May 2018  for an introduction to Jiang and Shirly). Jiang was living in Shanghai when he stayed with us in February, but was subsequently posted by his IT company to Guangzhou, where he met Candy.  Jiang now has a new job in Beijing as Assistant to the CEO of a company that hooks up Chinese tourists around the world with Chinese-speaking drivers and guides.  Jiang told us that there were over a million Chinese tourists travelling abroad at any one time.  And there were also plenty of Chinese students and migrant workers in the same countries needing a bit of extra cash.  So he was hoping this might become a business on the scale of Uber or Tripadvisor.
 
Candy was in Beijing visiting Jiang while on holiday from her management job (in charge of something like marketing or HR) in Guangzhou, where she had her own apartment.  Shirly, a High School English teacher, also owned her own apartment way out to the West of Bejing.  Our visit coincided with Shirly’s last week of school holidays, so she volunteered to be our guide in Beijing.  While Carole and Michael went off on a trip to the Great Wall, Ian and I sorted out our Chinese SIM cards and then took the subway out to visit Shirly.  The subway was packed - today was the somethingth anniversary of the glorious victory of the People’s Republic over the Japanese - and most people got off at the stop for the military museum.  

​Shirly met us at her stop and took us through her local park, explaining that there had been a big steel works in that area, but these had been moved further out of town and the park had been built so that the former steel workers could enjoy their retirement.  We saw groups of happy old people doing just that. Shirly tried to engage some old women in conversation, but they were too intent on their card game, so we chatted with a guy who was smoking a pipe.  He told Ian he had a much more valuable pipe at home.  We established the fact that they had secure housing and a state pension, and we had the first of numerous conversations about Ian’s great age.  When they congratulated him on his evident good health, he responded with praise for the British NHS!  I understood that Shirly had bought her apartment cheaply from a former manager of a public housing block.  I suspect this may be an example of government officials and bureaucrats profiting from the ‘opening up’ of the Chinese economy to privatisation. 

Shirly’s flat, on the 3rd floor with no lift, was light and comfortable, with a window alcove full of plants. She sometimes lets out her bedroom through Airbnb, and sleeps on her living room sofa (like our airbnb host in Helsinki).  It seems that the first thing you are offered wherever you go is a cup of hot water, and after drinking that, she set to making the dumplings.  I’d asked her to teach me, so I watched and helped a bit, but the kitchen was too small for me to be of much use.  

​That night we went to the Peking Opera with Candy, Michael and Carole, and the following day, we’d planned to go to the Forbidden City with a friend of Shirly’s – a history teacher who used to work as a guide there. When we found that all the tickets for that day were sold out, I was more disappointed at missing the opportunity to talk to Shirly’s friend about the content of his history lessons, than I was about missing the chance to join the 80,000 people trooping through each day.  

While we were in China, I kept up daily reports on WeChat, and when we got to Australia, I put a summary of these on WhatsApp.  So my  postings will now be reflections on the stories we can tell as we process them over the next few months.  To start with, here's a Youtube video of our journey from London to Beijing. Ian says it's "scrappy" (limited by the erratic quality of my iphone photography) and that the sound track is inappropriate and badly recorded.  The latter point is true - I was too lazy to track down a digital copy of Glenn Miller's recording of Chattanooga Choo choo.  Inappropriate?  The people we met in the dining car and corridors - Dutch, English, American, Italian, German, Swiss and Danish - all spoke to each other in (American) English.  There was certainly an American quality to much of the consumer-traveller conversation about the quality of hotels, food and tourist destinations they'd been to or planned to visit.  So a Glenn Miller soundtrack is no less appropriate than any other music for this part of our journey. Communication with the Russian, Mongolian and Chinese train staff was limited to getting our needs met (While Ian flirted with the Russian matrons in the dining car, I got very proficient in asking abbreviated versions of   我可以吗 保持 我的 医学 在你的 冰箱 "Can I keep my medicine in your fridge?")  So we hung out mainly with our cabin neighbours,  Carole and Michael, from Leeds.  As well as sharing the bathroom between our two compartments, we shared politics, values and priorities and Carole had a keen eye for spotting and pointing out eagles flying over the desolate Mongolian landscape. We also found we'd booked into the same hotel in Beijing so here we are meeting our Chinese neighbours in Dongsi Si Tiao (4th alley)