5. Propaganda and KTV

After a day of sightseeing, I attended a barbeque at the New Zealand embassy in eastern Beijing, and with the effects of a couple of beers taking hold, I met Five-foot and his classmates in a Korean bar near his place. They were drinking soju, Korean synthetic wine and most were quietly drunk, and the others not so quietly. After drinking Steinlager at the embassy, drinking soju didn’t sound like a good idea. A few years previously my mother had seen the effects of soju when I had passed out on my bedroom floor after celebrating what I deemed an important rugby victory. After suffering the effects of being dragged to a Korean bar I had never touched the stuff since.

I was served up a few shot glasses, and we left the Korean bar and headed for central Beijing and another bar called Cloud Nine. Catering to the city’s elite, which includes any manner of tourist and ex-pat, Cloud Nine serves NZ$10 drinks which equates to fifty bowls of rice in China, just because they can. Still, we bought them. The bar is elegant, elaborate, and maybe the most distinguished I have managed be served in, which seems quite odd, considering it’s in China, but it isn’t odd really. For all the people who are starving in China, there are millions with much disposable income.

The Koreans and Japanese wanted to play drinking games, so using Five-foot as a translator, I taught them how to play “King Bunny”, a game from my university days. If you know it, you’ll understand why we laughed more than we drank, making a big noise in a very upmarket lounge bar.

KTV is a karaoke extravaganza where groups hire a room with their own karaoke machine. If you've seen a movie called “Lost in Translation”, starring Bill Murray, you've seen a good example of it. Five-foot’s classmates from Korea and Japan dragged us along to this KTV building so they could get stuck into some songs.

It was already well past midnight, and on the seventh floor of a high-rise building, we were shown to our room. A couple of large screens were surrounded by couches seating for ten to twelve available, and we soon had microphones and songbooks thrust into our hands. Being slightly drunk by this time, I knocked out a couple of tunes. “It must have been love” was a bit of a fizzer for me, as I couldn't hit the high notes. I think I sang another song, but can't remember what it was. I’m pretty sure it wasn't Spice Girls “Two become one”. I hope not.

It was difficult to take our karaoke loving friends seriously, as their voices weren’t much better than ours, but they enjoyed singing and didn’t hold back. As each person finished, the group didn’t mock, rather offering a spirited round of applause while the singers bowed their heads appreciatively. Five-foot and I were the only ones laughing at each other’s poor vocal range, or more precisely, attempts to transcend that range.

Surprisingly enough, KTV was actually quite fun. Parties I’ve attended that have had fantastic sing-a-longs really are memorable and I can see how people find this karaoke thing fun too.

After dragging ourselves home at something o'clock, Five-foot and I crashed for a massive sleep, never to touch soju again. The next afternoon, I groggily ticked the karaoke box off my mental list.

As a warning to those interested in KTV, groups of men go there not only for the music and drinks, but also for other special services with the female waitresses. To clarify, we did not.

Five-foot had befriended the owner of a restaurant in central Beijing, and would go back to eat there from time to time for a chat and a drink. The beer would flow, and stories would start, and one night, I was invited.

The man sat with us while we ate a simple meal of vegetables and rice, and we were served a plate sized corn fritter to be torn apart communally, and tasted deliciously sweet. He wore the general garb for the modern Chinese man: polo shirt, dress pants and shoes. A cigarette was never far from his hand and bottles of beer seemed to arrive non-stop via the other staff. After we had finished eating, the drinks continued to be distributed diligently and the man, whose name I never learned, began explaining, through Five-foot’s interpretation, what the people had endured for many years under Chairman Mao and since his death.

He told us that, at its worst, the regime controlled every single little thing people did or could do. Citizens were allocated certain amounts of petrol for their cars but only after providing details of exactly where they were driving to and why. Cyclists would be stopped and questioned, and only permitted to continue if the security service was satisfied there was a genuine reason for travelling, otherwise it was time for a beating. The communist party handed out uniforms dubbed the “Mao suit”, with standardised colours and designs. Everyone had to wear them, or else it was time for a beating again.

He told us it was a horrible place to live as apparently he had seen many people with their necks stretched with rope off the bumpers of vehicles being driven down the road.

Five-foot asked him if he liked Mao, to which he replied in the negative. The government, under his lead, seemed to have committed heinous crimes to preserve their society. If he was overheard saying this sort of thing in the recent past he could have been disappeared from his family or shot right in front of them, but now he seemed to enjoy the freedom to say what he felt. We could see how difficult it was for him to talk about it, but also the immediate glow in his eye after letting what he’d seen be known.

His son joined us and mentioned that Beijing had changed remarkably in his thirty years. According to him, the summer heat had been nowhere near as stifling in his childhood, and he pointed out that with the advent of modernisation, the city seemed to become a sweltering oven in the space of only a few years. I had recently read that the Gobi Desert is encroaching on Beijing and will soon engulf the surrounding areas, adding to the rising temperature. Whether either of these issues are the actual cause I’m unsure, however, the expanding desert has been blamed on the over-harvesting of forests on its borders.

A huge statue of Chairman Mao, maybe twenty feet tall and posing with a slight smile and a hand in half-wave, half-hail, of the hail Hitler variety, greeted me as I entered the Military Museum in western Beijing. It’s a familiar sight around the city, with Mao standing at the entrance to any manner of public area. It was difficult to work out whether he was designed as an imposing figure to remind visitors of the might and virility of the nation, or as the face of a wonderful nation welcoming guests from throughout the world.

I had just walked past beggars at the outside gate waving their pots around in the hope of collecting donations to their lunch fund, yet inside, this statue stood in a large foyer surrounded by polished marble walls and floors throwing up sunlight onto the great leader. The smell of concrete baking in the sun outside was replaced by the light taste of cool cleaning fluid due, due in part to the air conditioning. Being indoors in mid-summer Beijing was a privilege.

Venturing around the sections of the massive museum, tales seemed to hinge on the “brave soldiers of the People’s Army” who “battled snow, ice and tormenting weather” and “showed courage in the face of adversity, victorious in battle despite many odds”, and all seemingly to lose when “politicians signed peace treaties that weren’t fair”. This is an abridged account of the museum’s notes on the history of the wars in the 1930’s and ‘40’s between the Communists and the ruling party of the time, the Kuomintang. The museums historical reports seemed to me like propaganda for those who fought for the correct cause, that being the group who govern the country today. Throughout, I saw large, magnificent monuments to the Communist heroes.

I entered a room filled with grandiose statues, a number being of Mao, who was either half waving, half hailing, or had a cigarette in his hand. On all the sculptures, a pleasant semi-smile was on his face. There were more statues of great Communist leaders and figureheads such as Lenin and Marx, and amongst them all was a place reserved for the King of Tonga. I still need that one explained to me.

The extensive historical displays regarding the wars and dynasties, which have taken hold of the nation for thousands of years went into great detail. The Qin, the Han, the Tang, the Ming, and Qing dynasties were all represented, amongst others, detailing rises to and falls from power. Those plus detailed histories of the opium wars with the British, and the Japanese invasions of the early twentieth century made for a massive dose of military history to delve into. The number of times China has been through upheaval, the people wanting change or getting it regardless of what they wanted, is phenomenal. Considering the eighth episode of “The New Zealand wars” program on TVNZ was the “battle” between five men regarding a horse, you get a pretty good idea of New Zealand’s relative historical youth. With such a past, it’s no wonder China has produced many tools and methods distinctly for war, such as inventing gunpowder, and along with it, the first gun-like weapon.

In search of a book or two regarding some of the histories that took my interest, I visited the gift shop, but there wasn’t a book to be found at all. The shop was full of toys and Mao memorabilia, and toys that are Mao memorabilia. Models of military jets and tanks, small toy soldiers, and toy replica guns were all on offer, along with Mao lighters, cards, autographed pictures, and paperweights.

Amongst other interesting things to see at the museum, ruins of several American spy planes filled a square, I took to be paraded as glorious captures. A large missile completely occupied one particular hall, standing in front of a wall shrouded in the Chinese national flag of gold stars on red. This was surrounded by other hardware, such as fighter jets and tanks.

The whole place seemed to me like a message, trying to say the brave, industrious people of communist China are armed and able for war. Whether the outside world could take seriously this message is debatable, as the might and power seems to derive from the struggle for control from within the nation rather than from elsewhere.

I did go delving into evidence of support for North Vietnamese forces against the USA, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and the Communist government’s involvement in the Korean conflicts and their support for Pol Pot. For some reason, there was none.

The soldier standing guard at the exit gate, his rifle slung over his shoulder as he stood to attention, watched out of the corner of his eye as I left the museum. What he was guarding was unclear, but it did add to the overall picture I was getting of a country merging its history with propaganda, forming the idea of a mighty powerhouse.

Before visiting the museum, I was taking photos, looking around and generally not very focused on life in China. The impact of the messages conveyed there was very negative to me. I started reading between the lines and coming to my own conclusions about what much of the place was built for.

As I passed the beggars on the street, headed for the subway, I failed to donate anything.

In Wudaokou that evening, I was standing outside a restaurant waiting for Five-foot to arrive from his apartment and a lady who begged for money from me every day approached with her hand out. I looked into her eyes and saw a desperate, hungry person, and thought of all the times I’d walked away from her and people in her situation. I dug into my pocket and produced a few small notes, placing them in her hand. She counted what I’d given her and looked disappointedly back at me, as if to say I wasn’t very generous.

Noting her expression, I figured she wasn’t happy with my donation so reached to take the money out of her hands. She snatched it away, hiding the money behind her back while she yelled abuse at me, gaining the attention of many passing pedestrians. I shook my head and waved her away.

After dinner, Five-foot and I were walking home and saw the lady eating a burger from McDonalds. For the same amount of money she paid for a burger, she could’ve bought twenty bowls of rice too feed herself for a week.