Google’s threat to stop filtering content in China reminded me of my only visit to the country, which took place twenty-five years ago. For reasons I still can’t fathom, BBC Radio Two’s John Dunn Show had been granted permission to broadcast live from Beijing (it was the year we came over all politically correct and stopped calling it Peking) on three consecutive evenings.
Now, if you’re wondering why the Beeb would bother spending all that money just to broadcast a bunch of Matt Monro tracks in ludicrously difficult circumstances, you never heard the programme.
Early each weekday evening, John Dunn, an extremely tall, courteous and professional broadcaster, presided over a weird but listenable hodge-podge of a show that simply wouldn’t get made these days.
For starters, it didn’t seem to have a music policy – producers bunged on anything that took their fancy (“very refreshing”, you might say – but, then, you never met the producers). There was a half-hour interview each evening at seven o’clock with what we’d now call a “celebrity” – all very trad.
But, scattered throughout the show, there would be three shorter interviews with an assortment of experts, mostly new to radio, on a bewildering array of subjects: no politics, music or human interest, but lots of science, history, art and anthropology – in other words, pretty much anything the two researchers (of whom I was one), wished to include. I can’t remember the host vetoing a single item (although he grumbled now and then when we threatened to break the obscurity barrier). So, while much of the music was straight Radio One, much of the chat was pure Radio Four.
Nowadays, it would have BBC marketing types reaching for the smelling salts while hyperventilating about key demographics and brand values.
Still, who was I to complain? It got me a (late) start in broadcasting and it enabled me to visit places I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise – for instance, China.
For the China shows we ditched the main interview and did eight shorter ones each night instead. Apart from the inevitable technical glitch delaying the start of the first show by five minutes, it all went off without a hitch. These days, after a quarter of a century of technical advances and the opening up of China to Western tourists and businessmen, this probably sounds mundane. But back then it was dead exotic.
During my two-week stay, trying to set up interviews in the face of an implacable and suspicious bureaucracy, there were daily reminders that I had definitely left Kansas.
There was the inevitable throat infection (everyone – literally everyone - gobbed on the dusty pavements, after which the wind would swirl it all up to ensure we all got a dose of whatever was going round).
Then I discovered that the hamburger I was tucking into in our Western-style hotel’s café was absolutely raw in the middle, resulting in… well, let’s just say it’s hard to think of a more effective means of losing weight rapidly.
And I finally proved, to my own satisfaction at least, that it is physically impossible to pee into a hole in the ground in a large room masquerading as a public urinal while several dozen people stare at your equipment (at least nobody laughed – thank God for good manners).
If you’d told me then that China would become an economic superpower, I’d have demurred. After all, on our arrival at the hotel, we’d watched a sort of Laurel & Hardy comedy routine as five uniformed busboys tried but failed to figure out a way to remove six items of luggage from our bog-standard minivan: we had to intervene when one of them, laughing goofily, tried to cram a full-sized suitcase through a tiny triangular window at the back of the vehicle. Given the general smart-as-a-whipness of the Chinese we’d just left in Hong Kong, I had to assume the disparity in competence was down to the political systems which had produced them.
This impression was reinforced that evening when, after four of us had enjoyed a leisurely open-air meal at a rather good restaurant in a park near our hotel, we discovered that there was absolutely no way of paying for it, because the staff - without any mention of us settling the bill - had locked up the place and gone home. (The chances of that happening in Gerard Street are, I imagine, relatively slim.)
The walls of the studio from which we were to broadcast were lined with seriously fancy-looking equipment. Our technical wallah became quite exercised at the sight. When our minders were out of earshot, he told us that we were surrounded by several generations of the best and most expensive foreign broadcasting equipment money could buy. But none of it had ever seen action, and much of it was still safe within its original packaging. By contrast, the stuff we’d actually be using for broadcasting purposes was straight out of the 1950s.
Someone – or, rather, some group, because we learned that committees, not individuals, made decisions – had blundered. Or, more likely, generations of Chinese broadcast engineers hadn’t wanted to lose face by admitting they needed capitalistic running dogs to teach them how to make everything work. We finally plucked up enough courage to ask one of our minders why all this equipment had never been used, but he pretended not to understand the question.
Now that China manufactures or assembles so much of the world’s electronic equipment, I imagine this sort of thing no longer happens.
We had a glimpse of the reality behind the savage lunacies perpetrated under that homicidal psychopath, Chairman Mao, when we visited a dingy little flat occupied by a distinguished elderly academic at the University of Beijing. As we set up the interview, I watched his wife, an Englishwoman to whom he had been married for decades, down, in two gulps, the contents of a huge tumbler filled to the brim with neat whiskey. She refilled it immediately, and glared at me angrily, so I turned away.
I have never seen two people with eyes more dead and haunted, or been in a home where the atmosphere was so thick with despair and disappointment.
We learned later that one of the couple’s children had denounced them during the explosion of pure evil that was the Cultural Revolution, and both had subsequently suffered years of imprisonment and torture.
One afternoon, near the end of our stay, while Dunny was recording an interview about the marble boat built by the Dowager Empress Ci Xi with money meant to fund a genuine navy, one of the Chinese people who’d been helping us – who had naturally deflected all previous attempts to find out what his life was really like – suddenly opened up.
Glancing around to make sure there was no one near enough to overhear, he explained that he hadn’t chosen his career – the authorities had – and that he hadn’t chosen where he lived – the authorities had - and that if he should ever wish to get married, the authorities would have to approve the match.
Did he mind that? Yes, he hated it. He asked me some questions about life in Britain, and said how much he would love to live in the West. He wanted “freedom”.
Then another minder suddenly hove into view – probably worried by what was obviously a fairly intense conversation – and that was that.
Now, Chinese culture is far more communal than ours. If you’re sitting on a bus surrounded by empty seats (unlikely, I’ll admit) a new passenger will come and sit down right next to you rather than sprawl across two other seats on their tod. Judging the Chinese way of life entirely from the perspective of Western individualism would be extremely patronizing: I imagine that if the Chinese ever think about us in any context other than business, many might view us as sad, solitary beings, driven to distraction by the countless decisions life imposes on us.
Nevertheless, the prospect of having petty officials control every meaningful aspect of one’s existence – which is, after, what totalitarianism means - made me feel a choking sense of claustrophobia. I told the rest of the team what I had learnt – we’d all grown fond of our minder – and the result was curious. On the way back to the hotel, our minivan was held up by a sizable crowd clustered around what we assumed was the victim of a bicycle accident. As we stared gloomily out of the windows at the scene, our producer muttered, “Probably haggling over his bicycle clips”.
Within a few seconds of that admittedly callous remark, five BBC employees were shrieking and rolling about and crying with laughter which, to the bemusement of our minders, lasted all the way back to the hotel. We kept apologizing, but we just couldn’t stop.
I’m still not sure what that was about: maybe the blissful realization that we didn’t live under constant supervision in a vast prison.
We raised a small cheer when our plane took off from Beijing Airport. And I raised another one when I heard that the person who had confided in me on that hot, sticky day in the shadow of the Dowager Empress’s ludicrous boat had somehow got out of China.
Whether or not he ever returned, I hope he’s doing what he wants to do.
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