The Straits Times Blogs - Grace Ng

Capitalising on the red legacy

2009-09-25T22:00:00Z

Grace Ng recounts her visit to an 'authentic' Mao Zedong restaurant.

IN BEIJING

IT WAS surreal.

Beer-bellied men and flamboyantly dressed women feasted on huge piles of meat and buns - which could well have cost thousands of meal coupons four decades ago in communist China. They were served by young waitresses clad in Red Guard uniforms, while performers on stage triumphantly sang of Mao Zedong's victory over capitalist dogs.

When I arrived at the "Authentic Revolutionary Red-themed Restaurant" in Beijing - a good hour's drive from the city centre - I thought I would be stepping back in time, enjoying simple village food from Mao's hometown of Shaoshan in the southern Hunan province and watching re-enactments and readings from the Little Red Book of Mao's sayings performed by earnest socialist devotees.

Mini Mao busts and badge sold at Beijing's Panjiayuan flea market.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Mao's Little Red Book, related literature and a Mao-themed
backpack sold at Beijing's Panjiayuan flea market.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Instead, we entered what I'm tempted to describe as a socialist equivalent of Moulin Rouge - apart from the fact that the performers on stage were much more covered up than those in the audience.

We were ushered into a huge room with a two-floor-high ceiling, packed with at least 30 tables - each seating about 10 to 12 people - and festooned with decorations such as pictures of revolutionary soldiers and dispays of badges, busts and other Mao memorabilia. Need I even mention the colour theme of the restaurant?

Obviously, red.

At 7.30pm, an hour-long, over-the-top song and dance extravaganza began. About 15 performers dressed in revolution-era uniforms including the distinctive olive green suit with black belt, red armband and jaunty cap donned by masses of Red Guard students during the Cultural Revolution to spread Mao's teachings across the country. The songs were classic: "Red Sun", "The East is Red" - popular tunes delivered in Beijing operatic style by girls and lads far too young to recall the history of bloodshed and revolutionary fervour couched in those lyrics.

A dinner performance at the Mao-era themed Authentic
Revolutionary Red-themed Restaurant in Beijing.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

The highlight of the performance was a dramatic Second World War-era skit and song where the bespectacled, roly-poly Japanese enemy and snarling, shifty-eyed warlord were defeated by the valiant Red Army.
Everyone waved their wine glasses and little red flags - distributed to all the customers so that they could participate fully in the nationalistic display - and cheered as if they themselves had been just been liberated from the opppression of capitalist excess and foreign domination.

I cheered too - in support of "Xiaohua", one of the waitresses I spoke to who went on stage to perform a dance number waving red flowers and pigtails.

"During lunch and dinner time, we take turns to serve the guests, and during the day, we practise several hours of dance so that we can perform at night," said the rosy-cheeked girl in her early 20s.

Asked if she knew much about the Cultural Revolution where bourgeouis or liberal elements were purged, she shook her head and said: "My parents never talk about it."

It appeared that the audience, mostly locals in their 40s and 50s, had few bad memories - if any - of those tumultous times when Mao's Great Leap Forward resulted in a famine where some 30 million people dying of hunger between 1958 and 1960.

Wu Cheng Jiang, a bric a brac seller at the Panjiayuan flea market in Beijing, holds up badges with pictures of Mao Zedong - some of the Mao memorabilia items that he sells.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Mao-themed watches and alarm clock sold at Beijing's Panjiayuan flea market.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Perhaps they were too busy enjoying the cuisine, featuring oily, salt-laden portions of root vegetables, braised pork and chilli. While the food was not exactly impressive to a Singaporean palate, it must have tasted good - the other guests, who were almost all locals apart from the odd foreign tourist group - ate with great gusto, but even their excellent appetites were insufficient to clear more than two-thirds of the huge portions.

To cap off the rousing performance, the audience were invited to join stand up and march along to the national anthem...and a Happy Birthday song (both Chinese and broken English versions) to a beaming middle-aged lady whose age was discreetly left unmentioned.

Before we left, we casually asked a waiter how good the business is. If his account is accurate, there is very good money from this restaurant, chalking up revenues of over 30,000 yuan a day. Cost margins are apparently low - labour, food and rental costs are perhaps 20 to 30 per cent at most, and the restaurant apparently has quite a large pool of repeat customers and tour groups.

The boss of "Authentic Revolutionary Red-themed Restaurant" is a successful entrepreneur indeed. Just goes to show that capitalising on the red legacy is the way forward in modern China.

Mao badges sold at Beijing's Panjiayuan flea market.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Mao commemorative stamps sold at Beijing's Panjiayuan flea market.
ST PHOTO: Lin Zhaowei

Read related articles in this week's Saturday Special Report here.

Safety more important than dignity

2009-05-07T07:33:00Z

Grace Ng says that Chinese are proud of their response to 'Swine Flu'.

IN BEIJING

THE RECENT diplomatic spat between Mexico and China over the latter's tough quarantine measures to curb a H1N1 flu virus outbreak has become one of the hot topics of conversation among Chinese.

Squeeze into a crowded train - where only a solitary one or two people don masks - and the chit-chat invariably includes an exchange about how terrible it would be if swine flu (nobody seems quite bothered about using its formal name H1N1) broke out in populous China.

"Why are the Mexicans kicking up a fuss about (China's quarantine measures being a form of) discrimmination? The safety of 1.3 billion Chinese people is more important than Mexican dignity," muttered one man to his companion while they read a newspaper plastered with pictures of the Southern Airlines plane that flew to Mexico to collect Chinese nationals, and an aeromexican plane docked in Shanghai to pick up quarantined Mexcian nationals.

SOURCE: AP

Hop into a cab in Beijing and the conversation with the "shifu" usually dredges up a personal account of how the SARS outbreak in 2003 had created pandemonium in the city - and across China - when government officials finally admitted to the full scale of the crisis.

"We were so scared then, and many of us were put in some form of quarantine too," said one driver, Mr Zhang.

"We were shunned by foreigners...and now they are getting a taste of what it's like to be quarantined.

“The Chinese bore with the measures during the SARS period patiently without making noise...and look at how much noise the foreigners are making about staying in a hotel for a week."

Chinese netizens, while overwhelmingly supportive of the government's measures to make sure the H1N1 virus doesn't infiltrate China's densely populated cities, have divergent views about how China should have dealt with the quarantine.

But voices urging moderation have emerged: "I think we should be careful not to just jump on any Mexican or American or Canadian national who enters China and immediately quarantine them - if done badly ("gao by hao"), China could look like a ruffian," one blogger wrote.

Meanwhile, Mr Yang Ya Nan, a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in the Chaoyang district of Beijing, is more disturbed by the Chinese' indiscrimminate discrimmination against Mexican food.

"There has been a sharp drop in customers since May 1," he lamented, noting that there was hardly a single customer during the usually crowded lunch hour and just a handful at dinner time.

"And the customers all avoid pork. The irony is: this is Chinese pork, not Mexican!"

The real cause of Beijing's jams

2009-02-28T08:10:00Z

Grace Ng discovers what may be the true cause of Beijing's traffic jams.

I MAY have just discovered the real, unexpected cause of traffic jams in Beijing: road-blocking demonstrators.

Earlier this week, I was cruising along in a cab at about 3.30pm, usually the lull period before the peak hour traffic. Suddenly, the taxi creaked to a halt and my heart sank at the sight of a mass of honking vehicles clogging up the four-lane road.

"It's strange to encounter a traffic jam at this time of the day," I remarked to the taxi driver.

"Maybe some demonstrators holding up traffic," he muttered.

I was immensely amused: what a great sense of humour Beijing cabbies have!

We inched along for what seemed like eternity, and suddenly spotted a man from afar surrounded by a gaggle of curious on-lookers. He was spawled on the road, chanting slogans drowned out by the din of stalled, croaking car engines.

"This is an unusual road-block." Or so I thought - until the following afternoon, when I walked out of the State Council Information Office building after a press conference by the chief banking regulator Liu Mingkang, along with some 30-odd journalists from local and international news agencies.

We were confronted with the sight of a demonstrator perched precariously on top of a two-storey-tall traffic light on the major eight-lane road. Some security officers were trying to coax the demonstrator down, while a fire engine truck and a few police cars had pulled up underneath, blocking part of the road.

Demonstrator, Mr Li, perching on top of a traffic light above Chaoyangmen inner street.
Source: Grace Ng

But this guy created more than a jam - he generated a media commotion.

Blissfully aware of the dozens of cameras trained on him while journalists and passers-by rushed to get a closer look at him, the demonstrator raised his voice in the name of human rights and power to the people.

"I can give good ideas to run the country! Give me the help of public opinion!" he yelled, while the flimsy paper sign bearing his name Li and his home town - the improverished poor Laohekou city in Hubei province - flapped in the winter wind.

Perhaps the chill was getting to the thinly-dressed, stocky man - I spied a look of relief on Li's face as the civil service personnel ascended in a moving ladder to pluck him down.

I must admit I could not help feeling rather disappointed that he didn't struggle or even protest; instead, Li tore up his paper sign wth a dramatic flourish and eagerly reached out for help to get onto the ladder. Once on the ground, he was promptly whisked away in a police car.

Anyway, his mission was accomplished - Li got his 15 minutes of media fame in front of a captive 'traffic jam audience'.

"What caused the jam just now?" asked the "shi fu" (driver) when I finally flagged down a taxi.

"Oh, it's a demonstrator," I replied.

The "shi fu" didn't even raise an eyebrow.

No such thing as a free lunch

2009-02-26T06:20:00Z

Grace Ng looks into getting a loan from a cartoon character in Beijing.

IN BEIJING

THE nameless Chinese underground lender had a spiky red hairdo, fierce hairy eyebrows, ruddy cheeks and a toga-like uniform.

He bobbed up and down as I asked questions tentatively, and even made one smiley face when answering me: The "seasonal" interest rate for a 10,000 yuan loan was 12 per cent for three months.

To get my loan application started, I must submit copies of my residency permit (a "hu kou"), identification card and two passport photos.

My first encounter with a representative of an underground bank was on China's popular instant messaging platform QQ.com.

Needless to say, trying to borrow money from a hyperactive cartoon icon which made faces at me on QQ was a surreal experience.

I was in Beijing, and he was in some other part of mainland China, and the only reason I was able to connect online with "Dai Kuan" (which means "loans" in Chinese) was because he had posted his QQ user ID in an online forum ad offering cheap loans to individuals.

What struck me as I was gathering information for my article about underground banks in China was the secrecy and sheer scale of this industry.

Platforms like QQ, online forums and mass SMS advertisements offer the anonymity and the widepsread reach that the tens of thousands of underground banks across China favour.

Some analysts have estimated that the grey banking sector contributes as much as 15 per cent of total bank lending in China.

Underground banks range from sophisticated syndicates of lenders who provide project financing and even foreign exchange transactions for big clients including listed companies and state-owned enterprises, to huddles of family members or friends who pool spare cash to loan out to their contacts, to loansharks with officiously designed corporate websites.

These grey market lenders do not have a license to make loans or take deposits. But they have thrived for decades in China by filling the credit gap left by rigid state-owned banks who may turn away private sector enterprises and individuals because the latter lack a credit history.

Some borrowers also find the loan application process at a state bank too cumbersome.

Nimble and enterprising grey market banks, on the other hand, are said to be more flexible: Manager Liu of Guangzhou XY Company Ltd, for instance, offered a 2000 yuan discount on the interest payment for a 50,000 yuan loan paid up within a year when asked for better terms.

Underground banks are also known to have quick response times - some advertise "one working day" approval for loan applications.

But a prompt response does not mean that they are forthcoming in giving full information.

Take Manager Zhao of JX Loan and Financing Group, who claimed to be located in Beijing despite having a mobile number registered in a different province.

Only after some probing did he reveal that an approved loan of 50,000 yuan for one year actually yields only 45,000 yuan - the interest payment of 10 per cent is deducted upfront.

If the borrower defaults on payment? "We will sue you in court," he said.

Somehow, that threat did not carry much weight for me.

But news stories abound about the strong-arm tactics by other underground banks that do strike fear into the hearts of hapless borrowers: death threats, vandalising property, using connections with provincial officials to create trouble, in order to extort loan payments from borrowers.

The government has been clamping down on illegal lenders. Nonetheless, these grey market shops still appear to be going strong, operating beneath the radar by using anonymous online personas and frequently changed mobile numbers to communicate with their clientele.

When I went on QQ the following day to look for "Dai Kuan" hoping to get a formal media interview, I found that the account had been deleted.

But who knows, perhaps he may surface somewhere else on QQ as a blonde bombshell with pink leggings.