We spent a large part of the summer holiday exploring China: Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Guilin, and Yangshuo, all by 高铁 (bullet train).
I could write a vast tract about how much I love the comfort, efficiency, and value of China’s high-speed trains, but I don’t imagine anyone would be terribly thrilled by that, so I’ll settle for noting that at about time we were zooming from Shenzhen to Beijing, my brother was taking a train from the south of the UK to the north. Our journey was 1200 miles, his was 300; his took six hours, ours took eight; and ours was cheaper, even though he was wedged into second class while we were lounging in first.
Anyway… Beijing.
We stayed in a tiny set of rooms in a hutong near the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower. The hutongs are the historic neighbourhoods of Beijing: vast warrens of alleys and courtyards between low grey-brick buildings. They’ve more of a feeling of community than the high-rise areas, with older people sitting and watching the world go by, and families running tiny restaurants in their front rooms.
Swathes of the hutongs have been razed and replaced with more modern housing. It’s easy see why this has been done – the hutongs are a profoundly inefficient use of space in a huge city, and awkward to upgrade with modern utilities – but to feel at the same time that the remaining ones are rather lovely, and hope they survive.
Beyond this, it’s hard to know what to say of Beijing. It’s a city of 25 million (!) and we were only there for five nights. We visited various cultural relics (the city has no fewer than seven UNESCO world heritage sites) and other parks and such. They were all splendid to varying degrees, and all unbearably warm, but I’ve nothing original to report about any of them.
What does perhaps bear comment is how very safe we felt in Beijing.
Actually, that’s misleading. Really, what bears comment is how safe we have felt in our daily lives in China generally. It struck us powerfully early on, but I hesitated to write about it for fear of over-extrapolating from life in Shenzhen. Now we’ve taken in nine quite different cities, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shenzhen is representative of quite a lot of the country.
One simply doesn’t encounter, for example, groups of loud, belligerent drunks; some people do enjoy a drink or five, but it doesn’t seem make them aggressive, or even particularly raucous. B feels much safer coming home at night here than she did in our last UK city, which was by no means a comparatively deprived or crime-ridden area. We can wander where we will, rich areas and poor, day and night, vague and confused and obviously out of place, and never feel nervous.
More widely, low-level anti-social behaviour simply does not seem to exist. We have never – literally never, in more than a year here – noticed evidence of vandalism. Perhaps half a dozen instances of graffiti. Litter is more prevalent, though it’s hard to make a comparison to the UK, because public spaces here are so frequently cleaned. Teenagers are largely indoors doing homework, studying for the famously hard zhongkao and gaokao examinations; public spaces are filled with people having dinner after work, older men playing cards, older women line dancing, groups of intensely earnest small children having roller-blading lessons.
A few aspects of Chinese manners can grate a little on Western sensibilities. Spitting in public is not considered rude. Queuing can be dicey. Modes of speech can be blunt. But in some quite important ways, daily life in the big cities we’ve visited here feels more civilised to me than back home.
