In my years of reporting on China, I’ve never encountered this
During the gloomiest days of lockdown, I would sometimes hike to Mitcham to do my permitted shopping at the Hoo Hing Chinese supermarket. It wasn’t just for the noodles and excellent frozen dim sum. The meat cleavers, bamboo steamers, clay pots of Tianjin pickled vegetable, tableware, calendars, and orange bottles of Shaoxing wine were also a reassuring reminder that a world existed beyond my daily trudge around Tooting Common and nightly television updates on the death toll. There was a place called China. I hadn’t just dreamed it.
But in those dark months, it seemed certain that long-haul flights would not be possible for a very long time. And China, the epicentre of the virus, might be off-limits for years.
In January of this year, China finally reopened its borders to international travellers. Virgin Atlantic immediately started planning its return and put tickets on sale in February for a daily schedule that resumed flights to Shanghai in May. That’s breakneck speed for a commercial airline, which usually sells tickets a year in advance. “Regardless of what happens in the world, we wanted to be back in, because China is the UK’s second biggest trading partner after the US,” Yuja Jarvinen, Virgin’s Chief Commercial Officer told me. I boarded one of the newly scheduled passenger planes at Heathrow, having got hold of a visa by the skin of my teeth. I wondered what on earth I would find when I got to Shanghai.
I first travelled to mainland China in 2002. On that first visit I found the country baffling, polluted and intimidating. I was in no hurry to return. I reasoned to myself that since I’d loved Russia since I was a teenager, there was probably only room in my heart for one vast, authoritarian country. Ten years passed until I visited again. In 2013, I went back to make a film about the difficulty of finding a wife in a country where millions of women had been terminated in utero. The following year, I followed Siberian models who dreamed of making it big in the Shanghai fashion industry. And in 2017, I filmed wannabe pop-stars, rebel hip-hop artists, and dissident punk rockers as I tried to make sense of the links between China’s politics and music.
I can’t pinpoint the moment, but sometime during that second visit, my feelings about China started to change. I loved being there. I found its size and energy intoxicating. Away from the cities, the countryside was beautiful. Outside of the occasional encounter with over-zealous officials, I found people friendly, pragmatic, open and easy-going. I never felt a scintilla of anxiety about my personal safety. The food was always amazing, and encountering its cultural heritage, spanning millennia, was like peering into a starry galaxy.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to visit Beijing many times and spend time in the economic powerhouses of Shanghai, Hanzhou, and Chongqing. Most of all, I’ve loved my glimpses of provincial China: the dreamy resort town of Yangshuo on the Li river; the terracotta warriors of Xi’an; a wedding that I ended up in the province of Shaanxi where my Mandarin-speaking companions were baffled by the local dialect.
By the time of my last visit in 2018, I felt that my initial cool response to China was turning into a lifelong romance. I belatedly started dabbling in Mandarin. I was certain that I would be back soon. Then lockdown happened. Three years ticked by. The frozen food of Hoo Hing had to stand in for all the treasures of the Tang, the Ming and the Qing Dynasties.
Arriving in Shanghai on a Tuesday morning in May, I was surprised by how little seemed to have changed. The traffic was the same – bad. The feeling of economic energy was still palpable: the Teslas, the high end fashion boutiques, the swish hotels and restaurants which pay stylish tribute to the city’s legendary years in the 1920s and 1930s. The major difference was the absence of foreign faces on the streets of what is usually China’s most international city. The heart of Shanghai is the Bund, the waterfront on the Huangpu River where buildings built by 19th and 20th century British and European business tycoons stare across the water at the incredible 21st skyline of Pudong. Pudong’s most futuristic building, the Oriental Pearl Television Tower, with its odd bulbous shape, recalls a structure from the adventures of Flash Gordon.
These days it’s rivalled by the newer skyscrapers around it which appear to have been built on a single-line brief to the architect: “Make something amazing!”. There was barely a sprinkling of foreigners, but Chinese tourists, bouncing back from the restrictions of lockdown, posed enthusiastically in front of the views. At night, when the towers across the water are lit up in an extraordinary display of lights, there was a celebratory feeling. The streets were packed with happy, mask-less Chinese people in an almost carnival mood.
The rigours of lockdown in China might go some way to explain that. “It was pretty much a nightmare,” one Shanghai resident told me. Forbidden to leave their homes for any reason, some people had struggled to get enough food to eat in the early weeks.
One Wednesday night in the rooftop bar on the 29th floor of the Edition hotel, I was struck by the amount of alcohol being consumed. Shanghai is no stranger to heavy drinking. In fact, the last time I was in the city, I had gone to a hot pot restaurant with a friend and been put off my food by the sound of someone in a neighbouring private room loudly vomiting. But there seemed to be a seize-the-day single-mindedness to the revellers on the top floor of Edition. And I understood why. Remembering those three lost years, we were all determined to make the most of Shanghai.
Wandering around the shopping districts of Xintiandi and Tianzifang in the centre of the city during daylight, I felt overwhelmingly happy to be back. Tianzifang still preserves the atmosphere of early 20th-century Shanghai. It’s the period of jazz bars, glamorous women with cigarettes in holders, marcelled hair and cheongsam dresses; émigré White Russian aristocrats driving taxis, and gangsters with colourful names running the neighbourhoods. I windowshopped designer clothes, bought an elegant nose-hair trimmer, and watched a woman eviscerating a quail in a local market that seemed untouched by gentrification.
Driven by apparently bottomless budgets, the appetites of super-rich consumers, and talented architects and designers, Shanghai today gives the appearance of entering another hedonistic Jazz Age. At the Liangshe restaurant, for the equivalent of £300 a head, diners can enjoy an 18 course dinner of incredible food with paired wines that uses immersive projections to recreate the glories of the Tang Dynasty. The price is steep, but it was done with such elegance and imagination that I’d happily sit through it again. The first course was a tiny black ball made out of preserved egg and a white one made out of a jasmine gel that is supposed to evoke the yin and yang of the Taoist creation story.
During my visit, I ate enough delicious food to keep me supplied with memories for the length of another lockdown: dumplings at Nanxiang Restaurant in Yu Garden; braised goose flippers and sea cucumber at the Canton Table, overlooking the Bund; outstanding French food at the Michelin-starred Fenix Restaurant in the classy PuLi hotel.
In Xintiandi, I ate a fantastic Cantonese meal at Sense8. The name refers to eight gods of Chinese myth. The tableware was decorated with the image of a bat, which seemed like an inauspicious callback to the source of the virus in Wuhan. In fact, it’s a bit of wordplay because the fu in the Mandarin word for bat (bian fu) recalls the fu in the world for luck (fu qi).
A few hundred yards from Sense8, I stumbled into a museum that turned out to commemorate an important moment in Chinese history. The founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party took place here in 1921. The museum was impeccably maintained – presumably it had been overhauled for its centenary. When I asked why the exhibits weren’t labelled in English, the curator laughed at me and said, “This is for Chinese people!”
The presence and influence of the Communist Party is, of course, the elephant in the room where visitors are concerned. It’s not a subject that anyone will discuss with you. That too is something just for Chinese people.
Yet it’s a crucial and unique aspect of the country. China has grown visibly richer over the last 20 years. It’s also got noticeably more authoritarian and tightly controlled. Websites are blocked. Without a VPN on your phone, you’ll be unable to check your email or read the BBC news. High-tech surveillance uses face-recognition to keep tabs on the population. Critical voices have been silenced. Hong Kong has lost its singular freedoms. Muttering about reclaiming Taiwain is louder. Tibet remains unfree. And in Xinjiang, the Uighurs face terrible oppression.
One of my motives for going to China as soon as possible was that the last few years have been so geopolitically turbulent that I have no idea what will happen next. It’s entirely conceivable that a dispute over Taiwan might close China again.
As my visa was being processed in London, I had received a call from the Chinese Embassy. The official I spoke to wanted to lay down some guidelines. “Would I agree to respect the dignity of the Communist Party?” they asked. “Not to foment separatism? Not to undermine the sovereignty of China?”
In my years of reporting on China, I’ve never encountered this. Given the degree of surveillance and the new authoritarian mood, I felt it would be unfair on people to quiz them too hard about politics. I’ll never forget a conversation I had in 2016 when I was doing a story about Californian wine. One of the vineyards I went to was run by the adult child of an extremely rich Chinese businessman. Talking to them about China, I freely expressed my amazement that after years of flexible and pragmatic leadership the country was now in the hands of Xi Jinping, an apparently doctrinaire ideologue. My host listened with a blank expression. “And this, our second wine, has elements of stone fruit and cassis,” they said, firmly closing down the conversation.
The people I met on this current trip seemed generally uninterested in politics. “There’s an old joke about the Shanghainese,” one person told me. “In Beijing, the taxi drivers all talk about politics. In Shanghai, they all talk about the stock market.”
Perhaps economic interests have supplanted political ones. Perhaps they are too busy eating, drinking and socialising to care. Perhaps people are just too smart to be loose-lipped with a foreigner. If anyone expressed an opinion at all, they did it in a very careful way. When I asked someone how the war in Russia was being reported, they said: “The reporting on television is in favour of Russia. The opinion of ordinary people is very different.” Their judicious phrasing still left me in no doubt where their sympathies lay.
Once I’d got over my surprise that the pandemic had changed so little, I started to rationalise it. Between 1959 and 1961, tens of millions of Chinese people starved to death in the Great Famine. From 1966 to 1976, Red Guards ran amok, tearing down the country’s cultural heritage. Compared to the truly chaotic periods of recent Chinese history, the pandemic was a blip. The important thing, it seemed, was to make the most of the freedoms that remained and enjoy the stability and prosperity.
On a trip to the canalside town of Zhujiajiao, I joined visitors in the narrow streets, wandering, eating and window-shopping. An hour by car from Shanghai, it’s one of several river towns in this region, where low tiled-roof houses abut waterways that were once used for transport. It was a bright May day. The place had a holiday atmosphere. It was packed full of tourists, virtually all of them from China itself. Very few people were masked. Family groups and groups of friends were sightseeing together, sharing local delicacies, taking selfies of each other by the landmarks, riding in the single oared boats that shuttle under the picturesque stone bridges.
Away from the crowds, I wandered around the tranquil Kezhi gardens built by the scholar-bureaucrat Ma Wenqing. It’s only a hundred or so years old, but its walkways and traditional architecture evoke the ancient Chinese past and the mood of rustic contemplation praised by the Taoist sage Chuangtzu — the one who didn’t know whether he was a philosopher or a butterfly.
I felt extraordinarily lucky to be spending the day here. My sad wanderings around Hoo Hing supermarket now seemed like a distant memory. And at that moment, as the warm breeze rustled the gingkos, I experienced a passing sense of affinity with Chuangtzu. Who, in fact, was I? A man in the freezer aisle of a Mitcham supermarket dreaming of China, or a man in China dreaming of a Mitcham supermarket? The carp-filled ponds shimmered and gave no answer.
Essentials
Marcel travelled as a guest of Virgin Atlantic which operates daily flights from Heathrow to Shangai, with return fares from £434. He stayed at The PuLi Hotel and Spa (00 86 21 3203 9999) which offers doubles from £292 per night. For a full review and to book click here.
British nationals need a visa to enter mainland China. Applicants aged between 14 and 70 inclusive need to make their visa application in person at a Visa Application Centre. For more information, click here.
