A camera crew approached me as I wheeled my daughter toward the entrance, also known as the Gate of Supreme Harmony. At first, I thought maybe they wanted to interview my daughter; her three-year-old golden locks had been eliciting quite a lot of local tourist attention. But the woman with the microphone marched up to me, and a man with a news camera was standing right behind her. What had I done, I wondered? Was this about the slippers I’d taken from the Guangzhou Hotel? I thought they were free…
"Excuse me," the Chinese reporter blurted. "Where are you from?"
I said I was from the United States but living in the Philippines, gesturing to my Filipino family as evidence.
"Can I ask you some questions? Do you think you were charged more for a ticket to Forbidden City than the local Chinese?" At that point, I sheepishly had to admit I didn’t know how much the tickets had cost; I hadn’t lined up to buy them. She pushed on, though. "Well, what about other places where you have shopped? Do you think you are given different prices or charged more as a foreigner?"
The interviewer’s slant was pretty clear. The TV station must have heard complaints of overcharging of foreigners, and she was out here doing some "investigative" journalism. I couldn’t help her with the exposé though. "Uh, no, actually, I think if you haggle a bit, they end up giving you a pretty fair price." I smiled and she nodded, and the CCTV1 interview was over. A large crowd of people had gathered around us, though, and for a moment it felt like I was in the middle of an APEC summit or something.
This was all pretty weird, and a bit ironic. Before securing a visa for my trip to China, I had been asked to sign a "promissory note" declaring that I would not "practice my profession" in their country. By this they presumably meant no newsgathering, though I’ve never been much of a journalist, even on a good day.
The weird thing is that the interviewer was pretty much forcing me to practice my profession right there in Beijing, by asking me my observations about China. At least, I told myself, this is a sign that journalism in the PRC is getting looser: here was a woman with a camera crew, freely roaming around, asking probing questions of random foreigners.
Either that, or it was a pretext for a statewide crackdown: I grimly thought about what kind of images would greet me on the hotel TV that night, where my comments were sure to be mistranslated before an audience of a billion Chinese:
"Yes, I think the hawkers and vendors are VERY BAD!" would go the translation. "And their brazen practice of free market capitalism without official state approval shocks even a Westerner such as myself!!"
This would be the translator’s version, accompanied by a written description under my face: AMERICAN SEEKS DEATH PENALTY FOR FREE-RANGING VENDORS.
Or something like that.
But in truth, when we rushed home from the Forbidden City to our hotel to watch the news, in the off chance of seeing myself on Chinese TV, all we could find were farm and industry reports and kiddy programs with really obnoxious cartoon characters.
As for the Forbidden City, I have to admit it was a bit of a letdown. True, this could be partly because I missed most of the historical travelogue of our guide, busy as I was wheeling around a three-year-old in a stroller, up and down the non-child friendly gates and temples of the Emperor’s Palace. This is one thing Beijing sorely lacks: ramps for wheelchairs and baby strollers. And the Forbidden City was nothing compared with the Great Wall, which we visited the following day. Talk about a place not to bring toddlers.
But besides that, the Forbidden City lacked exotic splendor, and the color-coded system of gates and nested temples I had come to admire in Bertolucci’s 1988 epic, The Last Emperor. That movie probably brought more tourists flocking to the Forbidden City than any state decree ever could. The Italian director was reportedly the first Westerner granted access inside the secret temples to film. Beijing was less thrilled when his crew started hammering, erecting sets, and adding fresh paint.
In truth, the Forbidden City could stand a few coats of Dutch Boy Latex. It is a bit chipped and run down; a bit drab. But its scale – along with the amazing 44-square hectare Tiananmen Square that lies outside the entrance – is amazing, and you are left with a sense of wonder about the extraordinary degree of fortification put up to protect one man, one ruler of China.
Some four million people pass through the gates of the Forbidden City every year, double the number who visit the Philippines annually. And with China’s economy roaring along at nine-percent growth, and its successful bid to host the next Olympics in 2008, this is a country that is really learning to sell itself to foreigners.
Even the word "communism" is practically non-existent, according to our Chinese guide Peter. "There are only those in the Party who still call themselves communists. We call ourselves a ‘market economy.’" What this means is that the old "iron rice bowl" model for state employees – a socialist vision wherein everybody is guaranteed lifetime employment and steady salaries – has been replaced by a system of incentives. Those who sell and produce more now get higher pay, bonuses and additional benefits. Capitalism, in short.
But there are already some ill effects of such rapid progress in evidence. Pollution is quite a problem in Beijing, at least judging from the relentless hacking and coughing of the local population. Sad to say, we didn’t see any blue skies during our weeklong trip to China.
But you can also see this is a country with endless reserves. It’s got the history to peddle to tourists, the strong government control to move the economy relentlessly forward, and the unprecedented workforce to manufacture and sell everything under the sun to the rest of the world. And there’s even room for a little free-range journalism, as I found out.
Now if they could only install some ramps at the Great Wall, they’d be bigger than Disney.