Books Excerpts

Why China Will Never Rule the World

Prologue

‘China, China, China.’ It seems it’s all you ever hear these days. At least it seems it’s all I ever hear these days. I live in Taiwan, Republic of China, the island Beijing regards as a renegade province, so all the hubbub is a little hard to ignore. ‘People in China are well educated, highly skilled, inordinately industrious, exceedingly clever, English speaking, shrewd at business, and generally not to be messed with,’ my adult students had routinely informed me over the years. “Tamen dou hen lihai,” or so went the common refrain: “They’re all so very formidable.” ‘Soon, we won’t be able to compete with them,’ the sentiment usually continued. ‘No one will. It’s just a matter of time before they start to shape the world.’

I used to chalk up all this adulation to cultural bias. However, I couldn’t help notice that attitudes in the West tended to mimic this outlook. From the concerned parent’s, “Gosh, they make everything over there now, don’t they?” to the businessperson’s inspection of China book titles (When China Rules the World, China Shakes the World, The China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power) to the university student’s enrolment in Mandarin classes, it seemed as if Westerners were finally starting to sit up and take notice, and not solely owing to the country’s impressive economic performance, although that certainly was a large part of it.

Since having joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, China had doubled its share of global manufacturing output, had seen its annual trade surplus reach as high as $218 billion, had enjoyed an average annual growth of more than 10 percent in all but three years, and had amassed foreign exchange reserves in excess of $2.4 trillion; half invested in US Treasury bonds (China is now the world’s largest holder of US Treasury bonds) and half invested in notes. Not only had the country experienced a colossal commodity boom fuelled by rising incomes and the emergence of a bona fide middle class, but there had been minimal inflation, nominal unemployment (if official reports are to be believed), a colossal sum of foreign direct investment (China is presently the second-largest recipient of foreign direct investment) and – most significantly – no real sign of things slowing down, at least until the global recession came along, but even that wasn’t enough to stagger the leviathan. In 2009, China’s economy reportedly grew by 8.3 percent, surpassing World Bank expectations by nearly 2 percentage points. Even if it wasn’t the double-digit growth the country had become used to, China could always console itself with the trillion or so dollars it held in US debt. It could also take comfort in its currency, the yuan or renminbi or RMB, a non-tradable unit not subject to speculation or volatility. China’s cheap and seemingly bottomless labour pool was something else it could be chuffed about.

In mid-2010, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. Goldman Sachs has predicted it will outstrip the United States economy by the year 2027.

By 2020, or so pundits were predicting, the Middle Kingdom was slated to become the world’s foremost tourist destination, evidence to suggest that, for the first time, large numbers of non-Chinese were taking more than just a casual interest in China’s history and culture. Indeed, Chinese culture was finally beginning to make inroads abroad, or at least beyond the superficialities of takeaway, tattoos, and The Tao of Pooh. In the West, Mandarin had made great strides in the realm of second-language study. China’s Ministry of Education estimated that there would be 100 million learners of the language outside of Greater China by 2010. A portion of this cohort would take classes in both Mandarin and Chinese culture at one of the Chinese-government-established Confucius Institutes, of which there are more than 145 spread over some 50 countries. In addition to language, educated and progressive people everywhere have shown an interest in Chinese calligraphy, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Tai Chi, and even fengshui. There was just something so very intriguing, so very Eastern about it all.

Of course, not everyone was besotted by China and its media-touted meteoric rise. To be certain, something of a pitched battle had begun between a wide range of individuals and interest groups essentially over whether China was friend or foe. Politicians, Sinologists, other academics, journalists, authors, businesspeople, talk-show hosts, and casual observers were all weighing in on the matter, and, consequently, were facing off against one another in the rough capacity of Sinophile vs. Sinophobe, or panda hugger vs. dragon slayer, as they had contemporarily become known.

At the time of writing, it should have been obvious to most observers that China had more than its fair share of problems. The once steady stream of sanguine fiscal projections, accompanied by snapshots of happy shoppers and glittering skylines, had failed to stem a recurring tide of negative press. Human rights abuses, peasant revolts, pollution horror stories, tainted exports, natural disasters, corrupt officials, growing concerns over an expanding military, unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Taiwan issue, and friction with the United States clearly indicated a nation under strain. Yet, in spite of the rather ominous shadow that such reports regularly cast, the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that China either was the future or that it was scheduled to be an integral part of the future. It was a forgone conclusion. The Chinese themselves were claiming that the twenty-first century was going to be theirs, and panda huggers and dragon slayers were nodding their heads in either joyous or reluctant agreement.

But if China was rising, where exactly was it rising to? This seemed to be the question on many people’s minds.

I found it odd that the focus was on what China might one day become and not on what it is at present and what it had been in the past. Although definitely important to keep an eye on the future, it occurred to me that predictions weren’t one of mankind’s strong suits. It also occurred to me that commentators preferred to focus on the theoretical because they often possessed only a notional understanding of China in the now and a fundamentally formless one of it in history.

I suppose I had become tired of hearing about how wonderful China’s economy was. I was equally weary of hearing China being labelled a superpower or a great nation, with those terms seldom being qualified. I was unimpressed with the bulk of opinion piece forecasts I read in newspapers (‘Five reasons why China will collapse,’ ‘China’s inevitable path to democracy,’ etc.). I remained especially unmoved by China writers and watchers who had, for one reason or another, become smitten with the Middle Kingdom, believing it to be a land of immeasurable achievement and boundless opportunity; a nation that deserved its place in the sun by virtue of its antiquity and what it had endured. To my way of thinking, this equated to a near total refutation of its history. “China’s future is bright. So is its past,” or so went an optimistic blurb I read in a Western news magazine. But that was only true if you’d never studied China’s past. Anyway, with well over 800 Chinese missiles pointed my way, there was never much chance of a conversion. Truly, I failed to see any of the People’s Republic’s charms, although it has been said I lack imagination.

But then, I wasn’t an enormous admirer of Taiwan, Republic of China, either – or at least its particular take on what a nation and society ought to resemble. I mention this because long-term foreign residents of Taiwan are often intensely pro-ROC and, by extension, deliriously anti-PRC. As a comparative model, I believe Taiwan to be superior in nearly every respect, and, admittedly, I sympathize with its plight, yet I feel it possesses a broad spectrum of conspicuous deficiencies which never seem to get acknowledged, let alone addressed. Taiwan, Republic of China is out of sync with the Western world, a world it often claims to be a part of.

I figured that I could bring a unique perspective to the table. I had no vested interest save for a bookish one and was without professional affiliation of any kind. I wasn’t a journalist, so I couldn’t embarrass my publication. I wasn’t an academic, so I needn’t censor myself for fear of being barred from conferences, university lectures, and wine-and-cheeses in, say, Shanghai. Neither did I have to fret about corporate funding being cut off from my think tank should I happen to come to a supremely negative conclusion. In America, China experts are often hired by the government to produce reports advocating “engagement” while they go about beefing up their investment portfolios with Chinese shipping and coal companies. But that wasn’t me. I wasn’t a Sinophile, but I wasn’t a Sinophobe. I was merely an English teacher who had taken an interest. I had spent most of my adult life in a Chinese society, and during that time I had read up on Chinese history, studied the language, read the literature, and spent an immoderate to unhealthy amount of time observing the people and contemplating the national psyche, as it were. I figured I had as much to say as anyone.

I surmised that if China really were going to take its place as a nation among nations, then Western people were going to have to learn something about it; about its people, its culture, its history, and what it felt like to live and travel there. And if Westerners were ever going to do that, they would need to cease exoticizing China and be more discriminating when told what it was. Not that this was entirely their fault, mind you. Thanks to the press and certain writers, China was habitually depicted as alien and unfathomable to the point where it seemed more another planet than another nation-state, and casual observers had been habituated to believe that this perennially recycled perception was the reality. But China is a nation-state and the Chinese themselves are entirely knowable and frequently predictable, despite what all the mythomaniacs would have you believe.

Also inherent in the standard analysis was the implication that the China observer or visitor ought to suspend his or her judgment as China was just, in some undefined way, different. But surely suspending one’s judgment wasn’t the answer. After all, the entire point of investigation is to arrive at a conclusion, not to merely regurgitate the same old stilted phrases (‘the dragon awakes’) or dredge up exhausted imagery (the skyscrapers of Pudong). That’s what Western philosophy teaches us: to continually investigate and scrutinize, and to do so with total intellectual freedom. Many so-called China experts had forgotten this. I thought that China was long overdue for a reassessment.

I felt compelled to see if there were anything to it all; if there were anything I might have missed. I wanted to know what lay behind the headlines and images. Was China really and finally on its way to becoming a modern state, or was it simply undergoing a belated industrial revolution and a period of economic liberalization? Was the modernization pervasive, or was it merely window-dressing; something grafted on to an ancient society and mindset? And what about political liberalization?  Chinese democracy was frequently portrayed as something that was just around the corner. Was there any evidence to support this? Did the people even want it? I needed to know. I needed to know the truth. More precisely, I needed to know my own truth.

To do this, I would have to explore China in its entirety, something I had always wanted to do anyway. I would follow the tourist path when it suited me or stray far from the beaten track. I would comment on aspects of culture, history, and politics, and I would report on what I saw. I would talk to the people. I would observe them. I would note down what they said and did. I would speak Mandarin when it was called for and English when it wasn’t. So as not to draw attention, I would dress and act like a tourist and pretend to know next to nothing. At the same time, I would try not to take it all too seriously. The quirkiness of the Chinese world had not eluded me, and I wasn’t without a sense of humour.

I had been living in the shadow of the red giant for some 12 years, watching as it had begun to warp and distend, as its sway and pull had begun to influence the trajectory of its satellites. And yet, besides a stopover in Hong Kong and a month-long study sojourn in Beijing, I had never really been there. I decided that this had to change. So, blowing the dust off my Mandarin textbooks, I enrolled in language classes in Taipei, dialed up my travel agent, and set aside three months to complete my journey. As Allan Bloom once wrote, “The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.” Absolutely. But in spite of my prejudices, I honestly tried to approach the experience with as open a mind as possible. And I must admit that things certainly started off well enough.

PART ONE

To and from the Western Treasure House

Chapter One

It felt as though I had been submerged in an ocean of tar. Peering through the smallish square, my eye was met with a pitch black void. For quite some time, there existed only this bordered onyx constant along with the familiar and reassuring hum. I was about to nod off when suddenly – startlingly – a phosphorescent streak shot forth, mutely bursting into a tangle of jubilant purple and glittering green before cascading soundlessly into the abyss below. Fireworks. This was the first image I got of China. Other fragments came into view: myriad dots of light, silhouettes of mountains, miniaturized skyscrapers, Victoria Harbour…. It was Hong Kong, and within minutes my plane would be touching down and I would be looking for transport to whisk me into neon-bejewelled Kowloon.

Emerging into an airless night, I boarded a double-decker bus and watched as the impossible hills of Lantau Island gave way to tenement blocks, which duly succumbed to the shops, hotels, and brilliant lights of Nathan Road, Kowloon’s so-called Golden Mile. It was a Saturday evening in June and the street lamps were busy bathing the sidewalks and pedestrians in a soft, mustard-coloured glow. Overhead, incandescent signs alternated between splotchy Chinese characters and upper-case English letters: 永隆銀行, YUE HWA CHINESE PRODUCTS, 大久保日本料理, WANG FAT PAWN SHOP, 信和大藥房, XXX KARAOKE NIGHT CLUB. At Tsim Sha Tsui, the bus doors hissed open and I crossed the street and made my way past an ensemble of Africans, South Asians, and Middle Easterners. “Hey boss! Hash? Rolex? Girl?” Entering a doorway, I was met with an edifice of stale air before finally squeezing into a slow moving lift that took me to one of the 90 or so low-rent, no-frills guest houses located above. This was Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong’s most notorious building.

A 17-storey labyrinth of small apartments and small enterprises (curry joints, money exchanges, luggage kiosks, mahjong parlours, sweat shops), Chungking Mansions has served as a haunt for foreign backpackers, foreign labourers, and foreign “businessmen” for decades owing to its budget rooms and prime location. With its monstrous veneer of moss-green tiles and obtruding air conditioners, the building sticks out like a bad simile when viewed from without, but is infinitely worse when examined from within. Floors are awash with litter and spittle, and stairwells have been tattooed with cigarette burns. Smoke and a host of nameless odours mingle about your nostrils while surveillance cameras record the movements of the multinational clientele. There is a decidedly illicit air about the place and not much in the way of conversation or even eye contact. Police raids are not infrequent.

I eventually settled on Tom’s Guest House. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it was an improvement over the other two places I’d looked at. An aging Filipino woman with thick glasses and a gold cross around her neck was the acting receptionist. She smelled of booze and the counter behind her was a glass menagerie of rum bottles. When I asked after the price, she said that she didn’t know and would have to telephone the owner.

“Papa!” she screamed down the receiver. “There is man here who wants room. What price I should speak to heem? I said, ‘What price I should speak to heem!?’ No, papa. He’s European. Eur-o-pee-an. No… not Indian, papa. From Europe. I don’t know, maybe England. Okay. Okay, Papa. You get some rest. I said, ‘You get some rest, papa!’” And then she placed the phone back in its cradle. “That’ll be a hundred and thirty Hong Kong dollars, sir.” I paid, and she handed me the key.

In the room, there were perhaps two and a half square metres of floor space. I sent a cockroach scurrying for cover when I turned on the bathroom light and a switch caused the air conditioner to cough and sputter to life. It grumbled thereafter in muffled imitation of a prop plane. Whenever I activated the ceiling fan, the room would suddenly begin to smell of fried noodles. I switched it on and off trying to determine which was worse: suffering from the heat or suffering from the stench. I took an abridged shower and then lay down with a book, careful not to move lest I disturb anything that might have considered the space beneath the bed to be its home. My final thought before falling into a fitful slumber was, ‘If there’s a fire, I’m finished.’

I woke to a stunningly beautiful day and sauntered along store-filled streets and past buildings ribbed with bamboo scaffolding. I headed to Salisbury Road and the Star Ferry Pier. Besides a few text-messaging Filipinos, some camera-clicking tourists, and the odd leaflet-dispensing Mormon, the city was sleeping in and therefore curiously quiet. Purchasing a ticket, I traversed a gangway and plunked myself down on one of the long wooden benches. The pong of diesel fumes hung thickly in the air.

With its unassuming flotilla of rotund boats, Hong Kong’s Star Ferry has been chugging between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island for more than a century, having been conceived of by a Parsee gentleman with the wonderfully melodic name of Dorabjee Nowrojee, who christened his service in an allusion to an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem entitled ‘Crossing the Bar.’ Supposedly, the alternating length of its lines was meant to lend it a wave-like quality.

Sunset and the evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning at the bar,
When I put out to sea,

It is fitting that the ferry’s origin should be imbued with a tinge of romantic legend as there is something inexplicably enchanting about riding it and observing Hong Kong Island as it travels steadily toward you. Here, the eye is met with one marvel of modern architecture after another in a skyline that has been described as “a dream of Manhattan arising from the South China Sea.”

After alighting, I strolled past the stately neoclassical Legislative Council Building, in front of which sat throngs of chatting Filipinos ignoring police requests to move along. Coming to a main thoroughfare, I jumped on a tramcar uncertain of exactly where I was headed, but this hardly seemed to matter.

Although Hong Kong has both a first-rate bus and excellent metro system, the city’s 163 double-deck tramcars are still immensely popular with residents and tourists, seeing nearly a quarter million passengers daily. It was definitely popular with me, and even though I was only being shuttled through a corridor of department stores and glass towers, it wasn’t hard to conjure a vignette-like image of yesteryear, one replete with imposing colonial structures, darting coolies and rickshaws, occasional stout automobiles, overhanging wooden signs, and clattering vehicles identical to the one I was on now. From St. John’s Cathedral, I bought a ticket and boarded another type of tram. As is the norm on one’s first day in Hong Kong, I was “goin’ up the Peak.”

It used to be that Victoria Peak was the place to reside if you were non-Chinese and filthy rich. Nowadays, you only have to be filthy rich. About $12 million is what you will need for a triplex, although you can spend many times that if you require space in addition to opulence. An infinity pool or tennis court might be included, but, like anywhere, the obligatory sports car is sold separately.

In the past, the Peak’s inhabitants were actually carried to and from their breezy mansions in sedan chairs, an endeavour typically involving an hour of gruelling work. The construction of the Peak Tram in 1888 converted this tortuous slog into a ten-minute jaunt, albeit one that was at a severe angle. Whenever I had seen a snapshot of the vehicle, it was invariably a postcard-like image of it arriving at the summit. I hadn’t been aware that its trajectory was closer to that of an elevator than the sort of leisurely ride one normally associates with the word ‘tram.’

Up through swaying trees and spastic shadows, I peered to my right to note that tenement buildings were jutting straight out of people’s throats. In front of me, an elderly Japanese couple clung to each other for dear life. But it wasn’t so bad; not once you got used to it. In fact, it was quite agreeable. Any one of them – the Star Ferry, the double-deck tramcars, the Peak Tram – was a treat in and of itself. When ridden in succession, the experience was nothing short of superb and had the irrepressible side effect of making you feel awake and alive.

The first order of business was to examine the mesmerizing skyline, which I did under a pagoda with the aid of a chart. This done, I gazed toward the wake-streaked harbour and then to Kowloon and the mountainous New Territories beyond. It was all very impressive, especially when you consider the city’s humble origins. Hong Kong, which means “Fragrant Harbour,” was little more than a listless fishing village until the sixteenth century, when foreign powers began trading here after having set up shop in nearby Macau. As is well known, the territory was ceded to the British, and this occurred in a piecemeal fashion during a period of nearly 58 years. And this, as is also well known, was the result of the Opium Wars, a series of defining events in Chinese history, critical to understanding the Chinese mindset of today.

In attempting to trade with the Chinese, the British were faced with a couple of considerable obstacles. For one, the Chinese didn’t trade, at least not officially. Unofficially, the country had benefited from barter for nearly a century; whole regions prospered from it and the government relied on taxing it. But it could never be sanctioned. Trade entailed a partnership between equals, and China was the greatest civilization on Earth. Hence, the government would only accept “tribute” and “gifts” from vassal states.

There was also the matter of the Chinese not wanting anything. As Emperor Qianlong famously put it to King George III, “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”

During the eighteenth century, this niggling dilemma became more pronounced around the time tea became Britain’s national drink. The British were forced to import the stuff, thus putting a severe strain on the national treasury. Eventually, Britain hit on the only thing the Chinese did want: opium, and lots of it. For the British, this turned out to be a catholicon, but for the Chinese it proved to be an unmitigated disaster. The gummy narcotic had a devastating effect socially, economically, and politically. Addiction spread like wildfire and silver exited the country by the boatload. An already feeble and fraudulent Qing government tottered and swayed under the strain.

After a prolonged period of inaction followed by a lengthy episode of moral exhortation, the Chinese finally concretized their objections with a blockade, the imprisonment of foreign merchants, and the confiscation and destruction of 3 million pounds of the drug. But one thing (among the many) that the Chinese failed to comprehend was that the seized chests of opium constituted Crown property as they had been handed over by the superintendent of foreign trade. Rather than take a sabbatical and reflect upon the ethical implications of running drugs and ruining a nation, as the Chinese had hoped, the foreign devils simply petitioned the Crown for compensation, hence rattling the queen’s jewels and inflaming public opinion.

An armed flotilla was dispatched to put things right, and the Chinese soon found themselves signing the Treaty of Nanjing, whereby Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain “in perpetuity” to be governed “as was seen fit.” The ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen were pried open to foreign trade and settlement as well. Up until then, only Guangzhou (Canton) had been officially open for business. Taking their cue from the British, the Americans and French promptly drew up their own treaties with even more demands (and the British had quite a few demands) and asked that the Chinese kindly sign them.

As for the original treaty, the Chinese were reluctant to comply with its many clauses. They had, after all, signed it at gunpoint. Their intransigence brought about the Second Opium War, which saw another military walkover followed by the signing of another treaty, one which stipulated that foreigners would have the right to establish permanent diplomatic residence in Beijing. However, before the agreement could be ratified, a local army attacked a British one, killing hundreds and sinking several ships. The British responded by allying with the French and invading Beijing, whereupon troops looted the city and set fire to both the new and old Summer Palaces. The second treaty, known as the Treaty of Tianjin (1858, 1859), saw the opium trade, partially banned in 1729 and totally banned in 1799, legalized.

Westerners sometimes take the view that what happened to the Chinese was regrettable but necessary, as if China was somehow done a favour by being woken from its torpor. That the Middle Kingdom needed to realize there were technologically superior societies all around it, there is no question, but lending legitimacy to bald-faced aggression and interference is another matter entirely. That isn’t to say the Chinese didn’t handle the situation badly. That the Western powers felt it necessary to exercise the military option strongly suggests that they did.

In their book, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, authors Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun offer up a spirited challenge to the standard perception that China was, in fact, enslaved by imperialism or that it was a casualty of opium addiction. According to their research, Sinologists are guilty of reproducing an excessively simplistic history of China’s opium years, one formed in the late nineteenth century by prohibitionist missionaries who dealt in the currency of “narcophobic discourse,” as well as foreign journalists and Chinese nationalists keen to broadcast the evils of Occidental intrusion. In solidifying their claims, the writers make some interesting observations. For example, they point out that China itself had a very healthy opium industry of its own; the drug wasn’t always imported. Furthermore, opium is not a single or even uniform substance, so it’s difficult to determine precisely what commentators mean when they refer to it and its usage. The conception of China having become a nation of drug fiends is also deconstructed; most consumption was “light and moderate” without any “serious loss of control.” Like nicotine, opium is a psychotropic substance, meaning it’s taken in determined amounts, not ever-increasing ones. The image of the opium den as a breeding ground for depravity also comes under fire. The writers remind us that W. Somerset Maugham was astonished to note that the opium house he visited was “neat and bright, with clean matting in every room.” Even the League of Nations conceded that opium houses were clean and tidy more often than not. Ultimately, say the authors, academics have spent far too much time focusing on the pharmacological effects of the substance when they ought to be examining its cultural context.

However, by deemphasizing opium’s pharmacological effects, not to mention the topics of addiction and abuse, the arguments in Narcotic Culture quickly lose much of their steam. Opium smoking constituted a highly intricate and complex ritual in which nearly everyone partook, the authors claim. It was a collective experience. But what they fail to mention is that almost everything in Chinese culture is a collective experience. Besides, the complexity or collectiveness involved in consumption is irrelevant, as are many other of the book’s arguments. For example, it is noted that opium was widely available in other parts of the world. It even provided “an escape from the strains of working class life in Victorian England.” An opium house was akin to a pub, and the taking of opium could be compared to the taking of tea, and so on and so forth. That’s all fine and well, but opium is not tea and China is not England. The tome goes on to state that opium was widely used as a palliative against a broad spectrum of maladies and conditions in China, but so was the eating of ash from incense and the powder from “dragon bones.” As late as 2007, residents of a village in the province of Henan were found peddling powdered dinosaur femurs and declaring their product medicine. It ought to go without saying that just because someone believes something to be good for them, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is, and just because a practice is widespread doesn’t signify that it’s valid. Dikötter and company aver that opium had no “serious consequences for the health or life expectancy of the vast majority of its users,” but of course such a claim is impossible to substantiate. Besides, just one page previous, they state that retailers often cut the stuff with tobacco, arsenic, mercury, turpentine, sand, clay, and lead.

Opium is a sedative. It makes you stoned, it makes you lethargic, and it temporarily erodes your linear thinking. These days, the BBC reports on “opium addiction” in poverty-stricken Afghanistan. I wonder how the authors of this book would explain away the term as it relates to the cultural context of that unfortunate nation. The book succeeds only partially in illustrating what the opium era wasn’t, but it is unconvincing in its description of what it was.

Incidentally, what the opium era really was is a matter of interest only to non-Chinese. The Chinese themselves already understand the issue very well, it having been part of the educational pablum they have been fed since childhood. In the Pearl River town of Humen, officials have built a giant pair of hands rising out of the soil snapping an opium pipe in two. At the town’s Sandy Point Fortress, where the British fired the first shots of the Opium Wars, there is a museum where visitors can partake in mock search-and-destroy missions against smugglers. This involves shooting laser guns at grinning, red-haired automatons that shuttle along on tracks saying, “Bastard! I’ll chop you!” Down the coast, there is the Lin Zexu Memorial Hall, where guests can visit the pits where the first chests of seized opium were destroyed. Then, they can fire rubber balls from cannons at images of British vessels painted on a wall.

It’s difficult to find a book about China that doesn’t offer a summary of the Opium Wars, so I apologize for the repetition. Having said that, it’s difficult to understate the significance of the events; the Opium Wars and the shame that they brought may as well have occurred yesterday. Mainly owing to the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, which spends an overgenerous amount of time educating and reminding its citizenry (and military) about this disgraceful episode, the Opium Wars are now portrayed as the starting point of modern Chinese history. A grade-school primer in China called Ten Must-Knows for Elementary School Students, disseminated to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, cites “one hundred years of Chinese people opposing foreign aggression” as the state’s raison d’être. China refers to the hundred years between 1849 and 1949 as its “century of shame,” and the Opium Wars constitute the basis of that shame and the basis of all anti-foreigner sentiment, things you don’t have to search very hard to find. But clearly, here, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I decided to walk around the Peak and was soon sauntering along a welcoming path walled by a dense array of sub-tropical foliage. The walk was lovely and the views fetching. The trees and bushes were buzzing with insects and fidgeting with birds and butterflies. The pathways were nicely-built and featured distance markers and interesting bits of information on the island’s history, geology, flora, and fauna. The trail bypassed several mansions with fences either topped with barbed wire or jagged bits of broken glass. An old couple stood near one such barrier selling grass grasshoppers that they had apparently made. I wound my way back to the tram and used my return ticket to descend and view the crooked skyscrapers in reverse.

Thinking I might spend the afternoon doing a walking tour suggested in my guidebook, I got on yet another tramcar and asked the driver how many stops it was until Sutherland Road. “I don’t know,” he said smilingly. “I don’t know English street name.” This is something that quickly hits you in Hong Kong: despite having been a Crown colony for nearly 140 years, neither English culture nor the English language really ever took hold.

With a population density of roughly 6,300/km² there isn’t much in Hong Kong you can expect to have to yourself, so you can imagine my surprise upon discovering that I was pretty much the only soul out of doors in a district known as Sheung Wan. It was baking hot and I doused myself in sunscreen and craned my neck around at the sights and sounds. I ambled down Chinese Medicine Street, where I peered in at the apothecaries and sacks of foodstuffs, and noted a wonderful old corner store done up in Bruce Lee posters. On Possession Street, I took note of the spot where the Union Jack was first planted. Then I walked by a branch of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the territory’s foremost taxpayer. A collection of men congregated about the entrance and adjacent alleyway where they smoked and silently scrutinized information sheets, each formulating his own winning strategy.

I ended up at Man Mo Temple, located on Hollywood Road. It possessed wax red pillars, hanging incense coils, blackened ceiling fans, and students who had come to pray for good exam results. A sign on the wall advertised fortune telling. It read:

 ‘PEOPLE ALWAYS THINK ABOUT WHAT TO BE IN FUTURE. WHAT’S THE PLAN. OR IMAGINE ABOUT HIS/HER FUTURE GOOD OR BAD. COME IN DON’T LOSE THIS CHANCE TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE DON’T GUESS WHAT IT WILL BE……….. PLEASE COME IN I CAN TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW…..’

 As I stood there jotting this down, I heard a voice addressing me. “You want your fortune told?” It belonged to a robed, middle-aged man sitting behind a desk piled high with books and papers.

“That depends on how much it costs,” I replied. He then showed me a chart with various prices and corresponding degrees of divination.

“How about you go for the twenty-dollar one,” he suggested. “It’s cheap and only takes two minutes.” Twenty Hong Kong dollars was about three bucks. I agreed.

“Good, now pick a piece of bamboo,” he instructed, and thrust a jar at me. I picked a piece with the number eight.

“Okay, number eight. That’s a lucky number,” he said. “What year were you born?”

“Nineteen seventy-two.”

“Okay, so that’s ‘the year of the rat.’ Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Well… “

“Well what?”

“Well… don’t you have any questions?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Unimaginatively, I asked him what he saw in my future.

“I get the sense that you are making something – creating something. So, slowly – you’re a step by step kind of guy – slowly, next year, or the year after, whatever it is you are making or creating now, that will bring you success.”

“What kind of success?”

“Well, if you wanna know that,” he replied wryly. “You gotta pay another hundred.”

I told him that that wouldn’t be necessary, thanked him, and took my leave. He was pretty slick, I have to admit. If the Man Mo Temple ever becomes a Starbucks (a fate that befalls many buildings in Chinese cities) there would surely be a career for him selling “Rolexes” in southern Kowloon.

Unlike southern Kowloon, with its darting-eyed Bangladeshi tailors (“Suit, sir? Tie? Just have a look, sir.”), electronics shops (‘Tax Free’), massage centres (‘Special – $HK 99’), and probing tourists (“Are these ties real silk, do ya think?”), Hong Kong Island’s Causeway Bay is where fashion-conscious locals go; to eat, to shop, to be entertained, and to see and be seen. The entire district resembled an indoor-outdoor shopping plaza. It was obscenely commercialized, with stores, ads, signs, cinemas, and sidewalk menus competing for each of your 360 degrees. Sinewy, tattooed men unloaded goods in the area’s narrow, race-course like streets. Old women sat fanning themselves as they sold tabloids, comic books, and soft porn from bulky newsstands capped by soft-drink-ad-adorned awnings, and brightly-lit bistros with their back-wall shrines and plastic chairs hummed and sang with business and banter.

In Causeway Bay, it struck me that everything was either slightly too small or much too large; the sidewalks were too narrow, the signs too low, the delivery trucks miniscule; yet there were jumbo TV screens, massive billboards, colossal apartment blocks, and the dark mass of Victoria Peak looming in the middle distance. People fiddled with their cell phones as they queued up for kebabs (intestine kebabs, fish-ball kebabs, tofu kebabs), and vendors sold junk jewellry and T-shirts late into the evening in the middle of the street from makeshift cardboard-box tables. In one of the pedestrian-only lanes, activists had hung a banner: ‘HEAVEN WILL NOT FORGIVE THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY. NEVER FORGET FALUN GONG.’ The place pulsed with people, light, sound, energy, colour, commerce, and heat. It couldn’t have been any more Blade Runner.

Back in my broom-closet room, I watched an interview on CNN with Jung Chang, author of the powerful and nicely-written Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. She had just co-authored a new book with her English husband, Jon Halliday, entitled Mao: The Unknown Story and was in the process of promoting it. Essentially, she was asking the viewers to consider the implications of an up-and-coming superpower that still feverishly revered a madman directly responsible for the deaths of 70 million of his own people. Westerners assumed that those days were long over, she said, yet the truth of the matter was that Mao’s personality cult was still very much alive. His image could be seen everywhere, including on all of the banknotes. This, the author warned, was something we needed to think about. The phone lines, however, were soon lighting up in remonstration. “So he made a few mistakes,” one man whined. “He was trying to help his country.” I set the air conditioner on high, stuffed my ears with toilet paper, and fell asleep.

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TROY PARFITT