Ed’s note: Portrait of a Beijinger is an original video series for the Anthill by Tom Fearon and Abel Blanco. Each month, Tom and Abel will profile an ordinary Beijinger with an extraordinary story. The first episode in the series, along with Tom’s description of meeting its protagonist Liu Xinran, is republished with permission from the Anthill.

Liu Xinran has a face many Chinese women would envy. High cheekbones, smooth skin and a narrow chin give him a coveted guazilian or “melon-seed face”. He introduces himself in a voice much softer than the one that will fill the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre in a few hours time.

“Did you find your way here OK?” he asks.

“No problem at all,” I reply, shaking his manicured hand.

We step into the 300 year old theatre. It is empty except for a couple of janitors whose vacuum cleaner drowns an erhu (Chinese fiddle) strummed by a young woman in glasses by the side of the stage.

Dressed in a knitted pullover, grey trousers and cloth shoes, Liu struts around stage waving a wand-like prop and warming up his vocal chords. He stares into the camera as if confronting an intruder on stage, his eyes as piercing as his voice. Each delicate step is timed to the downbeat of the erhu. A passionate argument of falsetto versus fiddle ensues, begging for an opera gong to weigh in and restore calm.

Peking opera has the shortest history of the hundreds of Chinese opera styles, but remains the most influential. The curtain fell on it during the Cultural Revolution when it was denounced as bourgeois, but curious tourists, nostalgic locals and state-run drama academies are providing a modern encore for a national treasure.

Liu, 38, is a rarity. Unlike many of the performers in his troupe who were trained as children, he took up the craft after quitting his job as a publicity clerk for the Beijing Meteorological Bureau in 2010. His parents protested, but his destiny had been sealed four years earlier when he won the top prize at the Beijing Amateur Peking Opera Competition.

He also stands out as one of only around a dozen active nandan performers in Beijing – men who portray female characters in Peking opera. I ask if he is inspired by the most famous nandan, Mei Lanfang, whose black-and-white portrait eyes us solemnly from the back of the theatre. But Liu says his mantra on stage is innovation, not imitation; copying Mei will lead to the “death of my artistic life”.

After the interview we head backstage. An old man irons sequined loose-sleeved costumes as the cast trickles in. There are no makeup artists or hair stylists; all preening is done by performers themselves. Eyes locked on their rapidly transforming reflections, they chat excitedly about plans for the upcoming Spring Festival.

An announcement prohibiting photography during the show is made as the audience settles into cushioned wooden chairs, but we are told it doesn’t apply to us. Apparently, we aren’t alone. Smartphone shutter noises click between cracking sunflower seeds throughout the show, but the performers aren’t fazed. Having their photos beamed on WeChat feeds might draw new faces the next night.

Later, Liu shows me his other passion: his beverage can collection. We walk down a narrow concrete corridor stained with cellphone numbers towards his eighth-floor apartment. A thick haze lingers overhead and firework debris dances below. Liu’s home is tidy, with a framed calligraphy scroll in the living room and an impressive collection of scotch and other expensive liquors. But he explains his year-round drink of choice is hot water, to protect his voice.

The cans are all in mint condition. It is a collector’s (and trash peddler’s) heaven. Sorted by age and location, each can contains a memory of a certain place or performance. Liu picks out a dozen of his favourites and gives them a gentle polish before lining them on a table in the living room for our slow dolly pan.

Before parting, Abel and I offer him a token of our appreciation – a nice bottle of Spanish olive oil and some TimTam chocolate biscuits from Australia. Mementos from our respective countries, to add to his collection.

Text, interviewing and subtitles are by Tom Fearon; cinematography and photos are by Abel Blanco.

Tom Fearon is a writer and editor who has lived in China since 2009. He worked in Chinese state media for many years, and previously as a print journalist in Cambodia and Australia. He now works in communications at an international school. You can read his poems for the Anthill here.

Abel Blanco is a videographer based in Beijing who formerly worked in broadcast media in Spain. You can see some of his other short films here.

Next month’s video is about a deli owner in Changping with a military relic museum in the basement. To recommend a person to be profiled in the series, please contact Tom.

This post originally appeared on the Anthill, where there are more photos of the performers.

On Tuesday the 18th, 8pm at iQiYi cafe opposite the Bookworm [Ed's note: the event sold out iQiYi, so it's been moved to the Bookworm; more tickets are now available!], I’m on the panel for Blogging China, part of the Bookworm literary festival. It should be a free ranging discussion of English language blogs about China, hosted by Anthony Tao from Beijing Cream, with Mia Li from Sinosphere, Tao Stein, and Jeremy Goldkorn.

George Orwell, in his essay Why I Write, said there are four motives for writing of any kind: (i) Sheer egoism, (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm, (iii) Historical impulse, and (iv) Political purpose. I figured I’d do the same for why I blog. (By no means an original idea – Andrew Sullivan wrote one of the best pieces of this kind back in 2008.)

The Anthill is, I hope, a bit different from the pack in that it’s about narrative stories, not blogging the news. I also wrote another China blog before it, called Six, which followed the stories of six young Chinese from my days up at PKU and Tsinghua, 2008 to 2010. And I’ve been an RSS addict of China blogs since 2007, so I do have a few things to say.

I’ll keep this short and pithy, imitating Orwell with four bullet points based on his (he was a born blogger). Part of the point of this is to try and tease out if there’s a difference between writers (i.e. authors, columnists), journalists and bloggers, when it comes to why we put pen to paper, finger to laptop, in the first place. So … why do I blog?

(i) Sheer egoism. That’s right, no need to change the first and most powerful motive for any writer. Anyone who deludes themselves that what they have to say is of such interest to the world that they simply must put it down permanently is more than a touch vainglorious. When it comes to blogging, even more so – no one invited you to write, and likely no one’s paying you to do it. Hardly anyone will be reading it either, to begin with. Why bother? Because deep down you think you’re shit hot, and want other people to know that.

Blogging in China adds the extra incentive of expat status – something to set you apart, so you can show you’re not just another English teacher, that you know China, that you’re following the latest news everyone’s talking about, and you’ve met all the big name expats, and know all the cool bars, and your Chinese is crazy good. I should add that journalists, especially news reporters, who blog as part of their job are less vain and egotistical than your average garden blogger.

(ii) Community enthusiasm. Did I just make China bloggers out to be a pack of vain pricks? I apologise. That’s not what I think at all. The English language China “blogosphere” (how I loath that term) is one of the most vibrant out there, full of people who are contributing to our collective understanding of China in a very meaningful way. In that sense it’s a community effort, with blogs linking to and building on each other’s research and analysis in a form of crowd-sourced journalism. Whether that’s a productive conversation or a “circle jerk”, as some would have it, it’s something that writers want to be part of.

(iii) Journalistic impulse. Anyone living in China is confronted every day with things that just beg to be written about. It might be a conversation with a Chinese friend or stranger, a new piece of information that nuances your understanding of an issue, or something you found on the Chinese internet and want to share. One way to tell if you’re a writer at heart, for better or worse, is if when you see or think of something interesting, you feel a need to set it down in words for others – that somehow the experience or thought is incomplete until put into language.

In China, those interesting things are hitting you in the face every day. What’s more, most of them won’t get written if you don’t write them, especially if you’re somewhere other than Beijing or Shanghai. The country’s just too big, and professional journalists can’t be everywhere at once. So the journalistic impulse to record your impressions on a blog is especially strong here.

(iv) Corrective purpose. A lot of China blogs, I feel, exist in part to correct or add nuance to what mainstream opinion gets wrong. Maybe the press have gotten their facts mixed up, but you’re there on the ground with access and time to pick at the details. Maybe the mainstream narrative is over-simplified or single-sided, and you have something to say about that. Maybe, God forbid, Tom Friedman has written about China again. Whatever the spur, correcting the generalisations and misconceptions about China that are so legion is an important reason why we do this.

~

There you have it. My changes from Orwell’s wording are small. “Historical impulse” becomes journalistic impulse, because bloggers know they’re not recording for posterity, only for the moment. “Political purpose” becomes corrective purpose, because we also know we won’t make a difference, and are often only talking among ourselves. “Aesthetic enthusiasm”, i.e. the joy of crafted writing, plays less of a part in blogging, which tends to be more conversational and hastily knocked out – but bloggers enjoy the act of writing, too. Another big motive for keeping a blog, myself included, is to galvanise yourself to write regularly, and to write better and faster.

Talking of which, an early heads up for a writing challenge. The Anthill is putting on another event in Beijing, again in collaboration with Cuju bar (where we held our one year anniversary party last October). This time it’s a story telling night, with the theme of “Writers and Rum”, and will be sometime in April. If you want to participate by reading a story, get writing now – any short form piece, non-fiction, fiction or poetry, loosely based on the subject of booze (doesn’t have to be China related, but preferably so) is game – and email me with any questions or if you’re interested. There will also be a lot of actual rum involved. More details to come.

Alec Ash, a writer and freelance journalist in Beijing, is the founder of the Anthill, where this piece was first published.

The neighborhood meeting was scheduled for Saturday morning and promised to tackle the Five Great Problems plaguing our housing community, No. 19 Ju’er hutong, Beijing. Separate flyers for the event — one English, one Chinese — appeared a few days prior, lodged in the cracks of our front doors. The Chinese version was printed on pink paper and offered a bit of helpful context. It summarized the Five Great Problems agreed upon in the March 20th meeting — broad categories like “environment problems” and “problems with new arrivals.” The English flyer was more perfunctory, a short welcome letter to an unexplained gathering, really. There were only a few sentences and one of them promised lunch and a tea break.

The offer wasn’t enticing enough, apparently. There are scores of English-speaking foreigners where I live, but my girlfriend and I were the only ones that joined the other two dozen Ju’er residents at 9am. We walked down a flight of stairs inside the neighborhood committee building, signed in and were handed bottles of water by members of our juweihui.

In China the juweihui, or neighborhood committee, is the most basic administrative division of the Communist Party, albeit a grassroots organization usually staffed with local residents and volunteers. The juweihui is the eyes and ears of the neighborhood, keeping tabs on its residents and looking after security. It has propaganda tasks as well. In my community, the juweihui hangs up fresh red banners on the wall opposite the office whenever a new Party campaign is handed down from the local government. The most recent one exhorts our largely foreign community to sign up for military service.

In reality, our juweihui is less Big Brother and more Golden Girls. Retirees like to congregate at the office to chat and gossip over thermoses of green tea brought from home. The juweihui functions more like a neighborhood association would in the West — arranging trash collection, mediating quarrels between residents, posting notices, changing light bulbs — if only that association were staffed almost exclusively with nosey women in their sixties and seventies. The biggest difference between a juweihui and a Western residents’ association is that for all its services to the community, the juweihui ultimately takes its orders from above, not from the residents themselves. This complicates things when there are Great Problems to solve.

We sat down next to a wall covered with computer-paper printouts of brainstorming charts, diagrams with wayward arrows, multi-page lists — the sprawling meeting minutes from previous sessions. Today’s forum was technically organized for residents of No. 19 Ju’er hutong but I recognized a majority of the faces from adjoining courtyards and a few characters from further down the way. This didn’t seem to bother anyone; hutong boundaries are more fluid than numbered addresses suggest. This would be a community meeting.

A woman in her late twenties stood up in front of the group and introduced herself as Meng Yuan. She had a high forehead, wore glasses and dirty pink flats with white bows on the toes. She laughed uneasily and asked us to forgive her, she didn’t have much experience. This bit of self-effacement over, she worked through the meeting agenda, listing points on a sheet of butcher paper stuck to a white board with a magnet. After ten minutes or so, Meng Yuan handed over the reins to a more sure-sounding middle-aged woman who would review what had been discussed at the previous meetings.

“I am a resident here myself,” this woman began. “I know that the best thing about our community is that our suzhi [moral character, breeding] is high!” She delivered this line matter-of-factly. The group sat mute as she scrolled through a Word document on a projector. Now we were getting down to brass tacks.

Issue 1: No. 19 still does not have a natural gas pipeline even though No. 17 has had it installed for over a year. We are still stuck using tanks of natural gas for cooking.

Status: The juweihui has submitted the plan to the authorities and is now waiting for approval.

Issue 2: There are too many safety-related problems. Is it possible to install a security camera? Outdoor lights?

Status: We are waiting for a response from the local police station.

Issue 3: How should we make our neighborhood more “green”?

Status: Waiting to hear from the management company about receiving payment.

We continued listening as the list grew, but I began to notice some faint grumbling from the crowd. When Meng Yuan stood up again, the meeting hit its first shoal.

Someone yelled from the middle of the group. “So, you’re saying that whoever has the money calls the shots, am I right?!” It was a man in a gray t-shirt with short gray hair and beady eyes. He shook his fist as he continued shouting while Meng Yuan stood slack. New voices seemed to erupt all at once. Suddenly, two people were arguing about a bicycle garage.

“Can’t we agree we want a bicycle garage? The leaders say we need to talk with the management company about this matter.”

“We can’t consider any other problems until we solve the cooking gas issue!”

“Wait a moment!” Meng Yuan interjected. “There is an order to the meeting! There are rules!” she tried yelling over the din.

“You’ve already wasted enough time!” spat back another woman. She wore a loose green blouse and had prominent creases running along her cheeks. This woman lacked the palpable anger of the gray-shirt man behind her but she was good at interrupting every time Meng Yuan tried to yank back control of the meeting.

“We don’t need this meeting structure!” she continued. “They talk about the trash problem, but they can’t solve the trash problem! We should all be able to say what we want to say and not listen to this list!”

The woman sitting next to me continued her knitting but shouted “right!” in support of this point.

For a while there was no form, no real chain of events or discussion — only an angry mob of retirees all talking at once. As I sat and watched poor Meng Yuan standing impotently next to her white board, the real purpose of the meeting slowly dawned on me. We would never solve the Five Great Problems; no one in the room had any authority to do so. We were all just here to vent.

“Auntie!” Meng Yuan pleaded, her voice trembling slightly with anger. She was struggling with the woman in the green blouse. “Yes! You say you want … Listen to me, listen to me … You say you want everyone to speak. Should we all just yell? Let everyone … listen to me … let everyone have a turn to speak.”

Eventually the group decided there would now only be ad hoc comments, suggestions and complaints. Meng Yuan wrote “parking lot” on a new sheet of butcher paper and taped it to the sidewall. All new issues raised would be sent to the parking lot. The first entry was: “bicycle garage.”

Around this time, another middle-aged woman with curly hair raised her hand, waiting patiently like a teacher’s pet in the bedlam. Meng Yuan called on her formally and the woman stood.

“I live in a pingfang [traditional one-story residence],” she began. She talked in a very exaggerated manner that made me wonder whether she was addressing me directly, embarrassed for the chaos I had witnessed. “We all can agree that we don’t need their list. Now we have this parking lot, so we can all give our comments and put them in the parking lot. Am I right! Now, I raised my hand, we can all raise our hands!” A smattering of applause broke out and she sat down. The woman next to me nodded her approval, hands still knitting.

Meng Yuan eventually retreated to the back wall and the group’s intensity seemed to flag. The original gray-shirt instigator had left and the green-blouse woman appeared more subdued. Two new young people stood in front of the group with a fresh piece of butcher paper on the board and a mind-map diagram began to take shape — spokes radiating out from the word “problems.”

We rehashed the same issues that had already been reviewed from past meetings. Most people were raising their hands to speak now, but occasionally the woman in green got antsy with her hand up and had to blurt something out. Every time someone mentioned a new problem or comment, the new young girl holding the marker asked: “Does this belong in one of these categories or is it a new category?” She just seemed happy that the crowd hadn’t turned on her. We had given up on the parking lot by this point; it languished on the sidewall with its single entry.

After a while, a tall man in his thirties was called on and he uncrossed his long legs. “You know, there are a number of people here who didn’t participate in the last meetings we had on these problems. We are listing the same things we did last time. We need to narrow down the list and take on the ones we can actually solve. We need to discuss how we are actually going to solve these problems!”

The knitting lady perked up at this suggestion. “That’s right!” she cried.

My girlfriend and I ducked out of the meeting soon thereafter. We had only lasted an hour. A few days later, when I returned home from work I spotted a new notice posted near the door of the juweihui office. There would be a follow-up neighborhood meeting scheduled on Saturday to further discuss community concerns and how to implement solutions. I didn’t attend.

Tom Pellman is an editor at the Anthill, where “Great Problems” was first published.

I don’t generally post news on the Anthill, as it’s designed for narrative writing and there are too many China news aggregators anyway. But this is breaking news I discovered myself and have to share: the municipal authorities for the Gulou area of central Beijing have, as of midnight last night, made riding fixed gear bicycles in the area against the law.

I found this out last night when out on the town with a friend who was wheeling his fixie down Guloudongdajie. A policeman stopped us, inspected the front of my friend’s bike, then shook his head and said we were to come with him. At the police station on Baochao hutong, he pointed out a notice plastered outside, outlining the new regulation.

We couldn’t believe our eyes. Fixies have been made illegal due to “safety concerns,” and there is a 500 RMB fine for riding one in the Dongcheng district. We badgered the policeman for more information, and he (grudgingly) fetched someone else who told us that fixies were not safe (“不安全”) because of their simpler mechanism with no gears and no brakes.

This is patently ridiculous for so many reasons. For starters, it’s only a certain kind of fixed gear bike that doesn’t have brakes. But that’s beside the point. If you’re going to pass a law to protect cyclers, make it mandatory to wear a bloody helmet and have bike lights. It’s like addressing food safety concerns by outlawing eating while walking down the street.

Frankly, this seems directed at the expat population. Fixed gear bicycles are popular in this area of Beijing, and mostly among foreigners. There’s a store on Wudaoying hutong which specialises in them. Poor guys, I guess they’ll be “asked to tea.” What will Beijing’s hipsters be reduced to? Are they going to outlaw Fei Yue trainers next? Or maybe brunch?

I asked the policeman if there was anywhere else this regulation was in force. Yes, the policeman said. The French concession in Shanghai. If anyone is in Shanghai, could you confirm this?

My friend wrangled his way out of the fine by arguing he wasn’t riding the bike but walking it along the street. But this is disturbing news. Everyone please be careful, and leave your fixie at home today.

Alec Ash, a writer and freelance journalist in Beijing, is the founder of the Anthill.

UPDATE, 11:59 pm: 愚人节快乐!

Reflections on how China has changed in two years

As with dog years, so is it with China years – one here is equivalent to several most places else. They just fit more in. When it comes to pace of change, no-one else holds a candle really.

I’ve been out of China for two years. For a dog, that’s ten human years, and you could argue the rate for China is about the same. It’s like leaving London shortly after the millenium and coming back for the Olympics. Recognisable, but look closer and you notice all the new things.

It’s the same with people. In two China years someone will have moved town three times, burned through as many businesses, got married, had a kid, got divorced and become incredibly fat. That’s what I heard happened to one old friend I thought I used to know, anyway.

Blessed with this time-traveller’s freshness of perspective, here are my first impressions of what has changed – and what hasn’t – now that I’m back in town for the long run.

Merry Christmas to you all, and a happy end of the world …

What’s changed?

1. Yes, there are lots of new buildings

Let’s start with the obvious. If you go out of any Chinese city for two years, the skyline is going to look very different when you come back. There’s nothing like walking down a once familiar street to drive home that China’s growth rates are a physical thing, not just a percentage number. Even more striking than Beijing’s new high-rises was a return trip to Xining, capital of China’s Western Qinghai province. When I emerged from a newly built train station out to the west of the city, the taxi ride into the centre took me past row upon row of huge orange housing blocks, all glisteningly alike and no more than plans on a developer’s table two years ago. There must have close to a hundred of them. It was, frankly, awe-inspiring. If you haven’t heard of Xining now, you will have in ten years.

2. Higher prices

Twelve yuan for a haircut! Four yuan for a bottle of beer! You cannot be serious! Alright, it was only eight yuan and three yuan two years ago, but there are more punishing price hikes than paying a dollar more for a bowl of noodles. An apartment in Beijing costs 50,000 RMB per square meter and rising. The price of petrol, gas, water, electricity are all going up faster than salary hikes, while taxes are as various and burdensome as ever. Unsurprisingly, when I ask “the man on the street” (yes, taxi drivers) what he thinks has changed in the last few years, this is the one he moans about first.

3. Higher expectations

Along with a higher price of living come higher expectations of what to get back from your society and government. This is noticeable on a large scale – “n.i.m.b.y” or anti-corruption protests are only getting more frequent, bold and urban – and on an individual level, where a new middle class and online commentariat is versing itself in the jargon of rights and democracy with a small d. This might sound vague, because it’s an impression more than an observation – especially among China’s young generation, whereas their parents grew up learning only what they can give to their nation, not what their nation can give to them.

4. People are getting angrier

Tempers are running higher along with skylines, prices and expectations – partly as a result of the last going largely unmet. Take the anti-Japan protests last summer, in the wake of the Diaoyu islands curfuffle. What began as nationalist outrage at Japan’s gumption ended with Chinese trashing Hyundais on the street, regardless that they were driven by other Chinese. That’s not focused protest, that’s directionless anger finding a pressure valve. Without political representation, and with certain topics off limits, flash protest, hopeless petitioning and the ever-ubiquitous Sina Weibo are the only outlets for a population increasingly mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

5. Yunnan food is in

And Sichuan food is out. Long time ago. Honestly, get with it. Yunnan food is possibly also out by the time this is published. Maybe baby cucumbers from Guangxi are hot now. Has Beijing (and presumably Shanghai) always burnt through trends this quickly? Quite possibly. Part of it is that before I was living in an “uncool” student area, and am now in the heart of the hutongs, where sports bars and wifi cafés sprout and die like snowdrops. But it’s clear that China’s international cities are only getting trendier and more modern, attracting foreigners – they’re everywhere! – and creating ever more Chinese hipsters.

What’s the same?

1. The bloody internet

Again to begin with one of the first things you notice having been out of the country – getting onto Facebook is still a pain in the ass. In fact, this could sit in the first category, as it’s become even harder. Many of the VPNs (virtual private networks) that are the easiest way to “climb the wall” have themselves been blocked, especially during the 18th Party congress – and incoming propaganda chief Liu Qibao is talking of further tightening the noose, making a morning’s procrastination a real ordeal. Still, internet control is just one symptom of the next big thing not to have changed.

2. Erm, the government

By which I don’t mean the Party still being in power, but that its character is unaltered. The same instinct towards suppression over candour. The same tin ear for public communication. The same bureaucratic mindset. More officials who take bribes and keep mistresses than you can count. Also the same steady, technocratic and efficient approach to improving conditions in China – albeit with certain no-go areas that might threaten the Party – against a rack of challenges. For those who think China’s new leadership might bring new things, including political reform, there isn’t much to base that hope on.

3. It’s still all about me

It might strike you that between rising public anger, the intractability of the system and new communication platforms such as Weibo, something could be brewing. Indeed, all it would take is one of those thousands of mass protests to take place in Beijing and it’s suddenly a nationwide crisis. But listen to people’s complaints and they are all solipsistic – unaffordable property prices/miscarriage of justice/corruption/local environmental degradation is a bad thing if it affects me, but if it doesn’t why should I worry about it?

4. People still spit in the street

And drop trash anywhere. And smoke inside where they’re not meant to. And cut queues. And jostle others aside in a crowded bus. And bike the wrong way down the street. And drive the wrong way down the street. And (while we’re here) the air pollution is just as bad. And the food can be just as unsafe. And attitudes in the countryside can be just as backwards. And life in the city can be just as merciless. I could go on. Don’t be fooled by the bright lights of Shanghai’s skyline – most of China is as much a messy smorgasbord of unlivability as it ever was, and will be for a while as it continues to develop.

5. But we still love it

Or I do at least. China as it goes into the twenty teens feels as much a new frontier as ever. It’s precisely this pace of change that makes it such an exciting place to live in and write about – which is why it attracts such a vibrant community of foreign journalists, bloggers and authors. It’s a cliché, but a true one: there’s a story around every corner here.

And yes, the noodle soup and dumplings around the corner are as tasty as they always were.

Alec Ash, a writer and freelance journalist in Beijing, is the founder of the Anthill. His previous piece that appeared on Beijing Cream was “A Thangka of Blood,” about Tibet.

In this first piece, “A Thangka of Blood,” originally published November 11, Alec Ash sends a dispatch from Tibet that is devoid of politicization or sentimentality, one of the best that I’ve encountered. “In particular I dislike the term self-immolation, which is widely used,” he writes. “’70 self-immolations’ does nothing to inspire the fitting emotional response, and as such is no better than Orwell’s vilified euphemisms. Call it what it is – killing yourself with fire.”

A thangka of blood

Alec Ash is a writer and freelance journalist currently living in Beijing. He is the founder of the Anthill.