All this week, Brendan O’Neill reported from Beijing. Read his whole Beijing Diary here.
China borrows from Chairman Brown’s Little Red Book
‘Safety is more important than happiness.’
So says Chen Gang, the vice-mayor of Beijing. We’re in the ornate surroundings of the General Office of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government, and Chen Gang wants us to know how seriously he cares for the security and wellbeing of the athletes, tourists and, of course, Beijingers who will attend the forthcoming Olympic Games.
And that is why, he says - occasionally shifting uncomfortably in his seat - there will be a early-morning curfew on socialising (to prevent public drunkenness), restrictions on car use (to protect the environment), and a system of security searches (to weed out potential troublemakers). Yes, fun is important, he says through an interpreter – but ‘being safe is more important’.
It is tempting to think: ‘Oh here we go, the miserable old Stalinists are using the pretext of a sporting event to launch yet another Red Book-style clampdown on behaviour and morals.’ In fact, the most startling thing about Chen Gang’s calm and measured outline of how the Beijing authorities will monitor and control people during the August sporting bonanza is… well, how Western it sounds.
Chinese authoritarianism – killjoy, increasingly evidence-based, dressed up in seemingly commonsensical lingo about everyone wanting to be safe (I mean, who would say ‘I’d rather be in mortal danger but happy, thanks very much’?) – is not a million miles away from our own.
At first, arriving at the imposing building of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government is culturally jarring. It is more like the Vatican than the trendy onion-shaped office complex inhabited by someone like the mayor of London and his dressed-down, chilled-out staff. (Where Boris Johnson has the cheeky nickname ‘BoJo’, I could never imagine anyone calling the serious Chen Gang ‘CheGa’.)
Armed guards secure the entrance to the building. It is eerily quiet within – like a monastery – and we are regularly shushed by our guides. We walk along a red carpet, past glass cabinets packed with gifts from mayors around the world: a statue of a bear eating a fish from the mayor of Tokyo; a weird ornament of a bald man with his hands behind his back who is staring into space (from the mayor of Reykjavik). We’re given clear instructions about the order in which we must enter the meeting room in which Chen Gang ‘will appear’; when someone steps out of line and screws up the entire Entering-The-Room Plan there’s a fleeting moment of pandemonium. It’s like waiting to meet the Pope. I hope we don’t have to kiss Chen Gang’s ring.
Inside, we take our seats. Two women in pastel-coloured suits appear, as if from nowhere, and, using metal tongs, hand to each of us what can only be described as a BOILING HOT facecloth. It scorches my hands. I juggle it from one hand to the other, and when it cools down (a little) I mimic our host, the vice-mayor, and lift the cloth to dab my face. Ouch.
Then we’re ready to begin – and things become more culturally familiar. After explaining in great (one might even say grating) detail how beneficial the Games have been for Beijing, the vice-mayor says that one of his key priorities is security; the Games will be absolutely safe, he assures us, even if that means inconveniencing people every now and then.
Some of my colleagues raise their eyebrows in alarm; they demand to know if this will kill the spirit of the Olympics. Yet that Spirit has been on the losing end of a boxing match with Security for quite some time. In justifying citywide clampdowns in the name of ‘safety before happiness’, Chen Gang is taking his cue, less from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book or from edicts issued by the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, than from today’s general, free-floating, panic-ridden attitude towards people-packed international events.
A view of the Water Cube through an art installation at the Olympic Central Venue
During the last Olympics, in Athens in 2004, the Greek authorities spent 358million pounds on security and had 58,000 police and military staff on daily duty – more than triple the number in the Sydney Games in 2000. A mini-occupation force, comprising intelligence agents from Britain, Spain, Germany, France, the US, Israel and Australia, monitored Athens around the clock. Greek officials openly boasted that it is ‘hard to find another city in the Western world that has such extensive security measures as Athens’. The US ambassador to Greece was most pleased, arguing: ‘The job here is to put as many locks, sirens and alarms on the house called the Olympics so the burglar goes to some other house.’ And then the fun began…
We do not yet know what the security arrangements will be for London 2012. But considering that the office of the mayor who won the Olympic bid – Ken Livingstone – once referred to New Year’s Eve as a ‘public order problem’, and considering that ‘Red Ken’ once said ‘we didn’t bid for the Olympic Games because I liked sport; I have never been to a sports event in my life’, we can be pretty confident it will be heavy on killjoyism and light on happiness.
Strikingly, many of the Beijing officials I’ve spoken to have cited the uncertainty of our post-9/11 world and the security precedent set in Athens as justifications for their wide-ranging security clampdown. This suggests, first, that China is no longer capable of appealing to the integrity of its own ‘People’s Republic’ or ‘people’s revolution’ in order to impose its will on the Chinese masses – and second that Western culture has become so authoritarian that even the People’s Republic of China liberally steals its ideas in order to force through illiberal schemes.
The Olympics logo, literally branded into the pavement
China faces no international terror threat; instead its nod to 9/11 shows how that one-off attack on American soil has become part of a global script that is used by governments everywhere – from terror-free Sweden to the relatively safe China – to rein in liberties and shore up state authority. At the same time, Beijing officials’ continual nod to what went down in Athens in 2004 – ‘They also restricted car-use for the Olympics, did you know that?’ said an official in the Olympic Tower earlier this week – reveals a new level of defensiveness amongst the PRC’s once cocksure elite.
Other measures being introduced by the Beijing authorities seem to have been lifted straight from Chairman Brown’s Little Red Book. In May this year, Beijing finally caught up with the UK by banning smoking in public places, including sports venues, government offices, transport stations, schools and hospitals, in the name of ‘cleaning up the city’s image for the Olympic Games’. The city has recruited 100,000 inspectors to ensure the ban is observed throughout the Games; in Britain the government recruited the entire population to enforce the smoking ban through its shop-a-smoker telephone hotline campaign.
The Beijing authorities’ clampdown on late-night drinking has echoes of London’s recent ban on booze-consuming on public transport, and of curfews imposed on errant youth by some local authorities in the UK. As of this weekend, in a last-minute bid to make Beijing’s skies more blue than grey, car-drivers will be banned from the roads on alternate days, according to whether their license plate starts with an odd or even number. It’s like a zanier version of London’s congestion charge, which started life as a way of preventing traffic jams but speedily morphed into a moralistic, green-tinted campaign to demonise selfish, planet-destroying car-drivers.
Often, China – still an undemocratic, unfree state – is treated as being otherworldly in its authoritarianism. One commentator says ‘paranoia is taking hold’ in Beijing, and ‘when the [CPC] leadership is in a mood like this – and it has not been since the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 – many of the old regulations and habits of this former police state are trundled out’. Well, it doesn’t bode well for Western democracies, does it, when you discover that some of the CPC’s ‘old habits’ include the kind of measures they have instituted over the past decade?
The Chinese people still live unfree lives. But they are not pathetic victims labouring under a super-alien regime who need Human Rights Watch to ride in on a white charger and rescue them from the CPC. We would do better to offer them some meaningful solidarity, and to share ideas about how they and we can shake off the attentions of our security-wired, anti-fun, terror-obsessed elites.
Beijing: a universal city
Too often today, China is treated as ‘the Other’. In Western circles, from the old right to the new left, the Chinese have become the No.1 whipping boy of the twenty-first century.
Ageing, white-haired right-wingers in the US, envious and offended by China’s economic rise, seek to nurture a new Cold War-style stand-off with the beast in the east. Western environmentalists discuss China’s progress, its often inspiring economic growth which has liberated literally millions from absolute poverty, as something dirty, disgusting and a threat to the existence of the entire planet.
Cartoonish Maoists in the 798 Art District of Beijing
Human rights campaigners call on Western governments to put pressure on China to improve its human rights record and to negotiate with the Dalai Lama over Tibet. The implication of their campaigning is as clear as it is ominous: there is something so unusually cruel and exotic about Eastern human rights abuses that even Western democracies – the authors of the war in Iraq and the rollers-back of liberty over the past 10 years – have the moral authority, if not the White Man’s Burden, to do something about it.
The message seems always to be that the Chinese are not like us. They’re either seen to be harming us (with all their arrogant demands for fridges, cars and other outrageous luxuries), or as needing us to rescue them from the harm of their own ruthless rulers. Continually, the interests of the Chinese people are depicted as being at odds with our own: we’re told that their rise is causing our demise, or that such is our moral superiority that we have a duty to lift these passive victims of the CPC up from destitution.
As Kipling might have put it, they are half-devil, half-child.
It is time to challenge these prejudices, which are an unappetising combination of old concerns about the Yellow Peril and new-fangled fears about the dangers of modernity. After five days in Beijing, I am exhausted, but elated. Here is a city that symbolises modernity and human aspirations for better, wealthier, more meaningful lives, yet where people’s freedom and choice continue to be curtailed. Chinese people’s interests are not at odd with ours; they are the same: for more prosperity and more liberty.
Preparing to leave the city, I feel the urge to paraphrase a dead American president: ‘Ich bin ein Beijinger.’
All this week, Brendan O’Neill reported from Beijing. Read his whole Beijing Diary here.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
Blue Sky Days in Beijing
Today I had an extremely strange sensation: I felt sorry for a CPC official.
Mr Wang Xiaoming is Division Chief of the Beijing Environmental Protection Monitoring Center. Standing in front of a vast electronic map of Beijing – which displays up-to-the-minute info about pollution levels, as beamed back by air-measuring machines erected across the city – he is the image of the old Chinese official: grey shirt; trousers pulled up a little too high; neatly side-parted hair; always saying ‘we have the full support of Beijing’s citizenry’ and similar things.
Every official institution I’ve visited has two sorts of representative. First, people like Wang Xiaoming, traditional-looking and serious-sounding, who were perhaps educated during the Deng Xiaopong era (1981-1989), when China forced through market reforms but hadn’t yet started its love affair with modernity. (Today, by contrast, even a promo video shown to us by the Traffic Police Command Center of Beijing – !! – boasts that China is ‘on a par with rhythm’ and is ‘opening its arms and dancing with the world’.)
And second, people like Wang Xiaoming’s interpreters: a tall young man in casualwear who translates his boss’s words in perfect English with a hint of an American accent, and a young woman who studied in London, speaks English and French, and later tells us where there’s a good karaoke bar. The old and the new – the CPC-trained cadres who speak only Chinese and their youthful assistants who have degrees in Media Management or Conference Interpretation Skills from universities in Westminster and Washington – run this new China.
Communist dragons outside a cafe in the Dashanzi district of Beijing
Wang Xiaoming starts talking about Blue Sky Days. That’s when the air-pollutant concentrations in Beijing are Grade II or lower; if they hit Grade III, it’s a grey-sky day. Beijing has been working flat out to score as many Blue Sky points as possible, in order to satisfy the International Olympic Committee’s demands for a fresh, pleasant, breathe-easy environment for athletes, and because a blue-sky Beijing is undoubtedly nicer – not to mention more conducive to good health – than a smog-cloaked city.
In recent years, the authorities have planted 28million trees in and around Beijing, installed a windfarm in the neighbouring Hebei province, and phased out 8,000 buses and 50,000 taxis and replaced them with vehicles that meet stringent European emission standards. Things are getting better. In 2006, Beijing recorded 241 Blue Sky Days; in 2007, there were 246. I’ve been here four days, and three of them have been Blue Sky. On my first day in the city a palpable grey mist coated everything; in the three days since then, the sky’s been blue, the views have been beautiful, and the people have been licking ice-cream cones on park benches. (I never knew ‘Blue Sky Day’ and ‘Grey Sky Day’ were such literal terms…)
Yet some of the assembled journalists want to know, Mr Wang Xiaoming, why so many of Beijing’s Blue Sky Days just about make the grade? Looking at the stats, lots of these days are borderline Grade II/Grade III – an extra couple of bus journeys or expulsions of dust from a factory and they may well have been grey days instead. Isn’t that amazingly convenient? Hey? Hey?
Then Wang Xiaoming reveals something extraordinary: the reason why many days narrowly sneak into the Grade II rather than Grade III zone is because such is the Beijing authorities’ determination to meet their Blue Sky targets, and such is the intensity of their computerised round-the-clock air-monitoring activities, that they can tell on a daily basis whether a day is going to be Blue or Grey… and if it’s borderline, they take some extraordinary measures. They send officials to ask factories to shut up early; or they put a halt to construction work in parts of the city. These quickfire interventions can prevent blue from blurring into grey.
There’s an instant outburst of cynical scoffing from some of the press. And it’s then I have my flash of sympathy for Wang Xiaoming. When it comes to tackling pollution the Chinese can’t seem to do right for doing wrong. Yes, these special-measure attempts to turn a grey day blue can be seen as cynical efforts by Chinese officials to impress the IOC and others. But if those days had tipped over the edge into grey, then Beijing would be accused of killing its citizens (and potentially some international athletes) with its unacceptable, so un-European levels of smog. When Beijing has too many grey days, it’s taken as evidence of its filthy, sludge-ridden, coal-burning moral turpitude – and when it has too many blues, well there must be some bad ol’ Communist-era figure-fiddling going on. No wonder Wang Xiaoming wears a look of pure puzzlement.
There is then a to-and-fro about which air-quality standards Beijing uses. Are they the same as the World Health Organisation’s standards? How do they compare to American standards? What standards was the BBC using when it recently reported that Beijing’s air quality is worse than the world thinks? In fact, there’s only one set of standards in this debate: double standards.
Traditional Chinese opera singer performing in a restaurant
The international pressure on Beijing to clean up its act, coupled with journalists’ relentless obsession with China’s pollution (some Brits have set up an online magazine dedicated solely to banging on about China’s environment), sends a very clear message: that the East should not – scrap that: it must not – do what we in the West have already done and benefited enormously from (thanks very much).
We now have a situation where British commentators – who live cushy lives precisely because our society went through the Steam Age, Industrial Revolution, technological revolution and even, to a certain extent, the nuclear breakthrough – can write that China, that ‘rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black’, is putting the entire planet on the ‘fast track to irreversible disaster’ with its rush to use the ‘dirtiest fossil fuel of all: coal’. It takes an extraordinary combination of arrogance and lack of self-reflection for well-to-do Western observers to chastise the Chinese for trying to reach the same level of development as we have. How dare they, the ‘dirty’, ‘disastrous’ monsters?
At the same time, labelling the Chinese as ‘pollutants’, even as potential destroyers of global ecosystems (otherwise known as parks in Hampstead where journalists like to drink macchiatos), has uncomfortable echoes of the past. In earlier, more explicitly racist times, the Chinese were frequently discussed as ‘physical, racial and social pollutants’ whose movement Westwards – both in terms of workers and trade – might corrupt Western civilisation. Today, the attacks on China as a place of ‘dust, waste and dirty water’ tend to be made by Western observers who live lives of post-manufacturing privilege and are underpinned by West/East double standards and just a dash of old-school prejudice. Nice.
Yes, China is polluted, but countries tend to get cleaner the more they develop and as their technology improves. You would have to have a warped mind, one might even say a ‘filthy’ one, to come to Beijing and see only its pollution and the other negative side effects of economic growth. Especially when the positive aspects – more people driving around, visiting huge new shopping centres, eating in restaurants, working in the city rather than subsisting on farms – are visible for all to see. Even on a Grey Sky Day.
The myths of Tiananmen Square
The two words ‘Tiananmen Square’ have such an ominous sound that I find myself approaching the square itself with trepidation. It has become synomymous with the massacre that occurred here in 1989.
I am surprised to find it a buzzing hub of Chinese workers, students and families. Under the gaze of Chairman Mao, whose huge portrait still stares down from Tiananmen itself – literally ‘the Gate of Heavenly Peace’: the building that dominates the square – parents and kids stroll along, sucking on ice-pops. Young people gossip and hide themselves from the heat under white umbrellas. A group of men and women in bright blue all-in-ones crouch on the ground and use metal scrapers to remove chewing gum from the pavement; their job is made easier by the sweltering sun, which is melting everything.
Chairman Mao keeping an eye on Tiananmen Square
Walking through the square it strikes me that – almost 20 years on – many people still do not know or understand what happened here. There are so many myths about the Tiananmen Square massacre. The most objectionable myth, without question, is the one that is still peddled by the CPC – that nothing much of note occurred in May and June of 1989. The CPC and its apologists still refer to it as the ‘incident’, a remarkable description of the slaughter of between 300 and 800 protesters. Some of the organisers of the Tiananmen Square protests still languish in jail; the families of those who were killed are still waiting for justice.
But there are other myths, too. The massacre has also been distorted by officials and activisits in the West. One of the greatest myths is that the massacre, being a product of old-style Stalinist terror, was an affront to Western values of freedom and decency. In truth, the massacre occurred, and can be seen as the consequence of, Chinese market reforms throughout the 1980s which were fully backed by the West.
Under Deng Xiaoping’s rule, China encouraged Western investment and introduced market relations. Everyone knows that life under Mao’s Cultural Revolution was horrendous for millions of people, but things did not improve greatly under Deng: China’s then Victorian version of capitalism left great numbers of people jobless and hungry, and large parts of the country in disarray. In Tiananmen and elsewhere in Beijing, the Chinese masses were protesting against the chaos and corruption that accompanied Deng’s market reforms; and they were cut down by a regime that was a close ally of America and Britain, and which was even armed by them.
The myth of the massacre as a strictly Stalinist, Eastern event has recently been rehabilitated in a novel form by radical author Naomi Klein. She argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that the massacre was used to pave the way for marketisation. ‘In the three years immediately following the bloodbath, China was cracked open for foreign investment, with special export zones constructed throughout the country’, she claims, as part of her thesis that wannabe capitalists exploit disasters and massacres to turn a profit.
This gets things entirely the wrong way round. As China expert Jonathan Fenby argues, ‘China’s economic revolution long predated the Beijing massacre, starting in 1978’: ‘Special economic zones began in 1979, followed by economically opened coastal areas and cities being established. In 1984, Guangdong was declared a comprehensive reform experiment zone [and] Shanghai was allowed to attract foreign investment.’ The argument that the massacre was a peculiarly Eastern thing that predated market reforms – and the demand by human rights activists that Western governments, being apparently pure, have a moral responsibility to force China to apologise for it – overlooks the economic and political shifts and relations that drove the people of Beijing to vent their fury, and the Deng regime to get out its machine guns.
Another myth – and an uncomfortable one to question – is that only students were killed. In the public mind, certainly in the West, this was a massacre of brave students who had set up protest camps inside Tiananmen Square. No doubt students suffered greatly, but the reality is far more complex. In their book Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro argue that ‘what took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents – precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended’. Black and Munro argue that the government was out to suppress a rebellion of workers, who had ‘much more to be angry about than the students’. Certainly the most vicious state violence occurred in the suburbs of Beijing, not in Tiananmen Square, on 3-4 June, where there was, in Jonathan Fenby’s words, a ‘far bigger massacre of non-students’. Hundreds of workers were slaughtered in the streets. This is why some insist on calling the ‘incident’ the Beijing massacre rather than the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Yet anyone who questions Western representations of the massacre risks attracting the ire of the powerful human rights lobby. Jay Matthews, writing in the Colombia Journalism Review in 1998, said that if you point out to Western reporters that they have given misleading accounts of what occurred in 1989 they will respond: ‘So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place?’ Matthews says that is ‘an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction’, but a dangerous one. A Canadian journalist I have met here in Beijing says that in some circles in Canada, pointing out that many more workers were killed in the suburbs than students were killed in the square is ‘treated as a form of Holocaust denial’. Anyone who reminds people that many of the protests in Beijing were not Ghandi-style peaceful affairs, but rather that workers responded to the massacre by beating and even hanging some soldiers, is looked upon as a scoundrel.
In China, discussion of Tiananmen Square is severely restricted by censorship. In the West it can sometimes be curtailed by moral opprobrium.
The massacre has been mythologised and distorted for far too long. The CPC continues to insult the dead and their families by brushing this barbarity under the carpet. And Western human rights activists have turned it into a safe, self-serving story of students and professors – people just like them – trying to introduce a bit of civil society into China circa 1989. As the enormous red flags next to Mao’s portrait move almost in slow motion in the Beijing heat, it strikes me that all sides have robbed the events that occurred in this square and elsewhere in Beijing of their agency. The awesome display of the Chinese people’s history-making potential, and the manner in which it was put down, has been rewritten as an ‘incident’ that simply occurred, or as a human-rights morality tale about the need for polite, Amnesty-approved reform.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
The People’s Republic of PR
Madame Wang Hui, director of media and communications at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, looks like she just came off the set of Sex and the City. Dressed in very high fashion (and very high heels), and with not a hair out of place, she welcomes us into the VIP Lounge of the Beijing Olympic Tower, the 19-storey block specially built to be the nerve centre – it’s certainly nervous, tense and buzzing today – of the entire, mammoth ‘Games Project’.
The Lounge – which looks exactly like the kind of room in which the Chinese PM holds stilted, squirming, hand-shaking meetings with George Bush and the like: all low chairs, ornate wooden tables, flowery decoration – is an oasis of calm in the Olympic Tower.
Down in the foyer, super-eager Chinese boy-soldiers (you know you’re getting old when you see a member of the Chinese military and think ‘Ah, bless’) are furiously shoving visitors’ bags through an x-ray machine. Young men and women with clipboards sprint from room to room. Everyone seems to be counting down to the Big Moment. In the gift shop you can buy enamel badges that say ’22 days to the Games’, or ’10 days to the Games’, or ‘1 day to the Games’: presumably the idea is to buy a fistful of the things and wear a different one each day.
At the front of the building a huge digital clock tells me there are 23 days, 10 hours, 13 minutes and 10 seconds until the starting pistol fires. Then it’s nine seconds; then six; then two…. Before I know it there are only 23 days, 10 hours and 12 minutes to the Games, and even I feel nervous.
In the canteen, an army of youthful workers and volunteers wolfs down a mouth-watering array of foods from the daily lunch buffet. (It’s estimated that 100,000 young Chinese have volunteered to help organise the Games: I don’t think they’re all in this canteen, but for a moment I’m not so sure.) The Olympic Tower may just be the most important government building in Beijing right now, where hundreds of people are working 24/7 to make this enormous sporting event cum global public relations exercise a reality. Like all Chinese government buildings, it’s certainly bloody difficult to get inside: not only did I have to put my bag through an x-ray machine and have a hole burned into my face by the stern stares of military guards; I also had to hand over my passport for the duration of my visit. Presumably so that if I was rude to Madame Hui I could be held captive in China at the CPC’s pleasure.
Yet inside, it’s about as far away from a ‘Chinese government building’ as you can imagine. There are no grey-suited, sour-faced officials with black hair dye in their already black hair. The workers packing out the canteen are young, fresh-faced, fashionable, well-travelled. One woman wears a Smiths t-shirt. A young man serving himself stir-fried chicken with green peppers (which was delicious, by the way) wears a t-shirt with a picture of Big Brother from Nineteen Eighty-Four under the word: ‘OBEY.’ Chinese irony. I hope.
Labourers at the Olympic Central Venue
My guide – a twentysomething whose name seems to be ‘Call me Aaron’ – is dressed in Chinos and a Puma t-shirt and regales me with stories about his time studying in Bath, living in London, and having fun in Edinburgh (‘my favourite one of your cities’). Later he says: ‘Your Mr Brown is unpopular. Is it because he has no persona?’ I couldn’t help laughing: a young man working for the CPC bemoaning the blankness of Britain’s own pale-faced little Stalinist. ‘Call me Aaron’ could be caustic, too. I overhear him saying to another journalist: ‘You want to ask a question about Tibet? How original.’
Back in the VIP Lounge, Madame Hui and her sidekick Li Zhanjun, director of the Beijing Olympic Media Centre, are keen to impress what a colossal project the Games are. Beijing will be host to 10,500 athletes, 10,000 coaches and trainers, 30,000 journalists and around 800,000 international tourists, not to mention the literally millions of Chinese who will come to the city. In preparation, the Beijing authorities have built 12 brand new permanent venues (including the epoch-defining Bird’s Nest and Water Cube) and eight temporary structures. They’ve also created an entire new subway line that will serve the Olympic venues – and I get a sneak-preview ride on it later (it doesn’t open until 20 July). We take a subway two stops towards the Bird’s Nest. Reader, I have seen the future, and it is good: speedy, smooth-running, so air-conditioned it’s crisp, and with two TV monitors in every carriage that will show live coverage of the Games, the subway is like something out of Blade Runner.
The Chinese government, via the Olympics Organising Committee, is clearly launching a charm offensive of historic proportions. At one point, Li Zhanjun bizarrely tells us that the athletes in Beijing will be able to choose from ‘120 different kinds of food every day, including food for Muslims’. He says religious facilities – churches, mosques, synagogues – will be provided for all athletes. We’re efficient and PC; that’s the message.
Many treat China’s desire to charm, charm and charm again as something super-sinister – as an attempt by cut-off communists to hoodwink the world into thinking they are nice when in fact they are rights-abusing anti-democrats. In truth, there is something more subtle – and in a sense more profound – going on here. The People’s Republic of China seems slowly to be morphing into The People’s Republic of PR. More and more these days, Chinese officials are using PR outfits and media campaigns to shore up their legitimacy in the eyes of the world and their own citizens. And this makes them more like our own rulers than we care to admit.
China currently employs Hill & Knowlton – the global kings of PR – to help ‘improve its image’. Chinese officials haven’t spoken about this very much in public, yet today Li Zhanjun opens up. He tells us Hill & Knowlton has played such a key role in helping to redefine China’s image in the year of the Olympics that ‘it is hard to give just one example of their assistance’. Pressed, he reveals that Hill & Knowlton recently helped China to spin its Olympic death stats. Journalists around the world were saying that six labourers died while working on the Bird’s Nest stadium, when in fact two labourers died. Hill & Knowlton advised the Chinese to change their press release so that it didn’t say ‘Only two labourers died while making the Bird’s Nest’ but rather ‘Only two labourers died during the construction of all Olympic venues’. ‘Very useful advice!’ says Li Zhanjun.
A musician ‘playing the vase’ in the Dashanzi district of Beijing
He tells us H&K has advised Chinese officials to hold ‘Getting to know you’ sessions with foreign reporters, which sounds embarrassingly David Brent. Various PR men around the world are employed to peruse the foreign press first thing every morning and send summaries and suggestions to Chinese officials. ‘This helps us to get to know you!’ beams Li Zhanjun. China’s had its Cultural Revolution – now behold the PR Revolution. It’s rebranding itself, redesigning itself, attaching shiny new logos to everything. In the four days I’ve been here, I have seen only one public picture of Mao (the miserable-git one that still hangs in Tiananmen Square), but literally thousands of Beijing 2008 flags, banners, posters: they flutter from lampposts, flagpoles, on billboards. Even this diary entry about the PR Republic will probably become part of the PR, somehow.
In its dynamism and optimism, it may be a million miles from the West – but in its crisis of political legitimacy China is a close cousin of America and Europe. As Oxford academic Alan Hudson argues: ‘China provides an exemplar of twenty-first century life: with large-scale social and political alternatives off the agenda, managerial pragmatism has come to the fore.’ Unwilling to appeal to its recent Maoist past, and completely cut off from its own people through the dearth of democracy, China instead employs image consultants and brand managers to provide ‘the message’ for its current, seemingly unstoppable rise. As with Western powers that are caught between dead traditions they find embarrassing and living people they do not understand, Chinese officials are allowing PR to fill their chasm-shaped political vacuum. For all the snooty derision about the Chinese elite’s charm offensive, this is one thing that the rising, ambitious, resource-hungry power in the East actually has in common with Western governments: a terrifying sense of isolation.
The kids are all right
China tortures its children – doesn’t it? It sends them to horrible athlete-producing factories where their limbs are bent and stretched by ruthless coaches and their bodies pushed to the brink. They end up as muscle-bound midgets with zero social skills, most of whom are more likely to become alcoholics rather than Olympians. It’s all a sign of China’s inhumanity, obviously. As one commentator says of China’s severe training of its youthful gymnasts: ‘When entertainment requires this kind of self-sacrifice, our values – for willingly watching and participating – and the values of the Chinese are severely out of line with basic human standards.’
Well, I watched such ‘entertainment’ today (though I definitely didn’t participate) and if it was child abuse then I’m gold-medal pole-vaulter. We visit the Shichahai Sports School for children aged 6 to 18 in the West Street section of Beijing, which has produced 32 world-champion sportsmen and women over the past 25 years. I like it immediately. The vice principal, Shi Fenghua, welcomes us into a large cool drawing room to tell us about the history of the school; she is small, unassuming but stern when necessary, just as headmistresses ought to be. The children are taught academic subjects in the morning, in brilliantly kitted-out, computerised classrooms, and given intensive sports training in the afternoons: gymnastics, Tae Kwan Do, badminton, volleyball and my favourite: table tennis.
We watch the kids train. Unusually tall boys play keep-it-up with a volleyball. Boys and girls fly through the air on the badminton court. Others screech wildly as they kick each other in training fights on the Tae Kwan Do court (see below). Children of no more than seven and eight perform remarkable gymnastic feats. And it isn’t all work, work, work. One of the students is napping on a chair outside a sportsroom. There is an ice-cream shop where the kids can cool down. Call me brainwashed, call me naïve, call me a twat who believes everything he sees, if you like – but I will not believe that the image of smiling children in a nice clean school was a massive front operation and as soon as we left the whips came out and the Dickensian-cum-Olympian horror started all over again.
No, the accusations of Chinese ‘child abuse’ reveal far more about Western discomfort with competition – with the sporting ideal itself – than they do about the goings-on in Beijing’s sports academies. So hostile are some Western observers to the Olympian idea of faster, stronger, better and win, win, win that they see self-sacrifice as a denigration of ‘basic human standards’, intensive training as ‘child abuse’, and sport itself as effectively a form of torture. Once again, external prejudices are projected on to China, telling us little about the Chinese but a great deal about Western culture’s distaste for ambition, aggression, drive, zeal, and the stuff of the examined life.
Click below to watch Brendan O’Neill’s footage of Chinese students practising Tae Kwan Do at the Shichahai Sports School on 16 July:
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
Beijing: the new New York?
Rows of immaculately tailored, beautiful young women line the entrance to the Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition Center, forming what can only be described as a hottie guard of honour. They bow their heads as we file by. ‘Welcome, most excellent members of the press’, says Daxin Hu, our guide for the morning, a young man so accommodating that when I say ‘Daxim Who?’, he replies – in an English accent that suggests he’s watched one too many Richard Curtis movies – ‘Never mind. Call me Darcy. It’s my English name.’
Inside, beneath a nine-foot map of Beijing carved from copper and dappled with gold, another young man is playing the piano. It is extraordinary. Our guide tells us he is one of Beijing’s most gifted young pianists, and I can believe it. The assistant curator of the exhibition center – dressed in the killer black suit that is the uniform of Beijing’s go-getting working women – arrives, flanked by two similarly dressed assistants. ‘Come with us, excellent journalists’, she says, through a translator. It’s only the second time in my life I’ve been called ‘excellent’ by a stranger; the first time was by Darcy two minutes earlier.
Daxin ‘call me Darcy’ Hu
They’re clearly superkeen to impress. At press gatherings in Britain you’re lucky to get a lukewarm cup of piss disguised as tea, a stale croissant, and some stressed woman from Shoreditch saying ‘Oh calm down, he’ll be here in a minute’. Here we’ve been treated to the modern-day equivalent of smiling geishas, classical music, and the effortlessly chirpy Darcy, and that is before we’ve been shown a 3-D movie about Beijing’s history, a 4-D movie (yes, 4-D) about its future, and a look at a sprawling, lit-up scale model of Beijing that makes you feel like Gulliver stepping clumsily over a miniature space-age city. If this is the wicked Chinese showing off to the world, I must say I’m quite enjoying it.
The mouthfully named Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition Center is run by the even more stale-sounding Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning – names that unwittingly reveal the main paradox of this city: behind the dynamism so palpable you can smell it there lurks the grey faces of a still brutal, unelected party machine. I feel like the woman in that advert who says ‘They should have called it Oatibix’, thinking to myself: ‘They should at least have called it the Future of Beijing museum.’ They’d certainly get more tourists.
The center is effectively the brain of the city, the place where its current flurry of skyscraper-building is documented in detail – with scale models of all the spectacular buildings that have appeared as if from nowhere over the past five years – and where its future is revealed, tantalisingly, in specially-made, big-screen movies that come complete with a sweeping Hollywood soundtrack as the narrator says things like: ‘In 2019, no one in Beijing will live farther than five minutes from a state-of-the-art subway station!’ The British equivalent might be something like: ‘In 2019, we will have completed our inquiry into whether it is feasible to install ice-filled air conditioners on the London Underground and will present our findings to 700 quangos for further discussion.’
For the 4-D film, we strap ourselves with seatbelts into aeroplane-style seats, as we are ‘lifted’ (not really) above Beijing as it will look in 2069. If I’m still alive, I’m definitely coming back. The scale models of the numerous Olympics-related buildings reveal just how daring, even cheeky in a decidedly non-Maoist fashion, is Beijing’s current building frenzy. Looking at the buildings as if one was a bamboozled bird thousands of feet in the air, you can see the emergence of a new onomatopoeic architecture: buildings that look like what they were built for. The Digital Beijing Building is designed to look like a microchip. The Loashan Velodrome, where track cycling events will take place, has a roof shaped like a bicycle wheel.
And the Beijing Shooting Range? Yep, from the skies it looks like a gun, complete with a trigger and a menacing nozzle. Britain might have that weird chalk drawing of ancient man with an erection, but what other city on Earth would design a building that looks like a gun from the heavens? The message to any overhead travellers seems clear: come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
The Bird’s Nest on the morning of 15 July
It is really hard not to be bowled over by Beijing’s new architecture. In the commercial district, the new headquarters of China Central Television is the most spectacular building I have ever seen. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, it is an enormous tower block with what looks like a gaping hole in the middle; a continuous loop of five horizontal and vertical sections; a kind of distorted steely, silvery square. Groundwork started in 2004; it will be open for business next year. Beijing is like the new New York. As Kurt Andersen says, ‘twenty-first century Beijing’ deeply resembles that moment at the turn of the twentieth century when ‘modern New York was inventing itself by showstopping leaps and bounds… erecting what would become its defining landmarks’.
This helps explain European elite sniffiness, if not outright hostility, towards modern Beijing: as with the rise of New York 100 years ago, the rise of Beijing reminds Europe’s cultural great and good of nothing so much as their own obsolescence. A writer for the New York Times says the sensation of seeing New Beijing must be ‘comparable to the ephinany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York harbour more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realised, was now culturally obsolete’. And today, Beijing’s ‘fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust’, reckons the NYT.
For Europe’s elites, the rise of Beijing is the Second Great Humiliation (if you will forgive the CPC-style lingo… hope I’m not going native). It is in the rarefied antechambers of the European Union and the leader pages of Europe’s haughty liberal press that you will see and hear the most semi-Sinophobic commentary about China’s filthy, vile, thuggish polluting antics. Europe’s snobs don’t treat China as ‘the Other’ in the way they did 100 years ago when they feared and pitied the poor populous nation; instead their relationship to Beijing is more like their relationship to America from the turn of the twentieth century, underpinned by cultural envy, moral disgust, and a dash of old snobbery that is really a defence mechanism against the explosion of the new. Beijing, with its cocksure architecture, reveals to them their own staleness, slowness and inability to dream about anything big, much less get it done. They’re so vain they think the rise of Beijing is a personal smack in the face.
Revealed: facts about the opening ceremony!
I hope this doesn’t get me thrown out of the country by China’s still authoritarian, paranoid rulers, but I can now reveal to readers of spiked one of the Chinese state’s most madly guarded secrets: what the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will involve.
Workers clean the Water Cube’s vast outer bubbles
Well, kind of. We get to visit the Olympic Central Area, where we see both the Bird’s Nest (the new National Stadium meshed in metal) and the Water Cube (the intriguing aquatics centre that looks like it is covered in massive blue bubble wrap). There is only we few journalists, and some labourers: women whose triangular straw hats clash with their blue Beijing 2008 uniforms sweep the empty sidewalks meticulously; six men sitting on wooden swings hang from the roof of the Water Cube, swinging wildly to and fro, laughing as they try desperately to clean the enormous plastic bubbles with window-wipers.
And then I hear it… from deep within the Bird’s Nest, a practice run of the opening ceremony! I definitely heard drums. And what sounded like singing. Maybe opera-style singing; it was hard to tell through all those vast metal zig-zags. And er, that’s it. Still, you read it here first.
The ‘aflutter’ generation
We wind down in an area known as the ‘798 Art Factory’, a vast, buzzing collection of streets, avant-garde galleries, edgy bookshops and restaurants in the Dashanzi district of Beijing. It’s like the Old Truman Brewery in London – that is, arty and government-funded.
Jazz music leaks from the cafés. Young men and women – including large numbers of Westerners – sip coffee alfresco. Someone is reading a book about Andy Warhol. The area is so uber-cool that, for the first time, I see Chinese people with brown or copper-coloured hair – dyed, perhaps, to show that they are distinct from the uniformly black-haired Chinese in straight Beijing. A young Chinese man wears an old green Mao-era hat with a red star on it, and you can buy Mao posters, t-shirts and postcards – all strictly ironic, of course.
These avant-garde Chinese seem not especially keen on China’s economic miracle or new consumer society. In contrast to the futuristic displays at the Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition Center, one of the main exhibitions here is a collection of black-and-white photos by Yang Yankang celebrating rural and religious life in the Sichuan province. The photos have titles like ‘Women gathering sheep manure’.
You can buy t-shirts that have a grainy black-and-white photo of the Bird’s Nest stadium surrounded by ruins and battered by rain. A vast painting by Wang Guangyi seems to mock Chinese capitalism: it shows Lenin and Stalin flying the red flag under the words ‘COUNTRY. FAITH.’, and then at the bottom of the painting two advertising slogans appear: ‘TIME. OMEGA.’ Other paintings show obese Chinese children competing in Olympic events and have titles such as ‘Always Must Be the Best’. Even the slogan of the 798 district – ‘Thinking Hands’; that is, hands which create art – seems designed as a contrast to the unthinking, labour-intensive hands that are building the new Beijing outside.
There’s a fascinating exhibition of work by the ‘Aflutter Generation’, a group of artists born after 1980 in the prosperous Guangdong region. Their paintings are cartoonish, two-dimensional; they show Mickey Mouse having a nervous breakdown, or consumers being bombed with mobile phones, washing machines, robots and gadgets. The curator tells us that these artists – who were only children, of course, and generally well-off and gadgetised – have led ‘the richest material life ever possible’, but they struggle to make sense of ‘problems concerning real society, life and youth’.
Even in deeply censorious China, there are flickers of disgruntlement in these artworks. They suggest that some of China’s avant-garde art scene is influenced by similar anti-consumer, anti-production trends that are widespread in the West. And that young, materially-secure Chinese want to know: ‘Isn’t there more to life?’ Material wealth has made their lives easier, but what’s the meaning, the narrative of modern China?
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
T3: a cathedral to modernity
Arriving in Beijing – nine hours and 5,071 miles after taking off from Heathrow – I feel like I have travelled forward in time. With weary, aching limbs (‘knowing my luck, I’ve probably got DVT’, complains one British woman), we stagger from our Air China flight into Terminal 3 at Beijing International Airport – a gleaming, Barbarella-style cathedral to modernity that makes Heathrow look like the landing strip for Catholic fanatics in Knock, County Mayo.
Terminal 3 is the biggest building on Earth. And it was built in three years and nine months. Rome, as we know, was not built in a day – but for the Chinese to construct the first building in the world that breaks the one-million square metre barrier (it is 1.3million square metres) in 1,371 days… well, that is mind-blowingly impressive.
Especially when you consider that the inquiry alone over whether to build Terminal 5 at Heathrow took longer than that: four years. The idea of a fifth terminal for Heathrow was first floated in 1982; Richard Rogers was selected to design it in 1989; BAA formally announced its proposals for T5 in 1993; a public inquiry started in 1995; it came to a close in 1999; the government granted planning permission for T5 in 2001; and the interminable terminal – which, by the bloody way, is not even properly finished yet – was opened by the Queen in 2008.
Bathed in the sunlight that leaks through the slits in the roof of Beijing’s young, sprawling Terminal 3 – which is bigger than all of Heathrow’s terminals combined – it’s as if I have travelled not only to a different city and time zone, but to another planet: a planet where things happen and people take pride in them. Designed by Norman Foster, the Terminal is shaped like a dragon, slim at its entrance, rising to become a cavernous, cathedral-like space in its main ‘body’, and then slimming again in its ‘tail’ section.
The most dramatic part of T3 – the bit that makes you feel the same way the plebs of Ancient Rome must have felt when they first stepped foot inside the Coliseum – is the sweeping, swooping, aerodynamic roof.
In keeping with the dragon theme, it has ‘scales’: vast numbers of vents that face south-east, letting in morning sunlight and heat in the winter. There’s very little of the harsh, electric white light that’s forever switched to overdrive in international airports (making you look even worse than you feel when you step off an eight-hour flight). Instead, everything’s dappled in natural light. Courtesy of the awesome roof, the sun and sky are brought down from the heavens, and held in suspension above the heads of the estimated 60million people who will pass through T3 every year.
It’s no accident that T3 has a cathedral feel. That was part of Norman Foster’s brief and aim. The roof is held aloft by vast white pillars; the exposed steel trusses at the side of the building run from yellow to orange to red over a three-kilometre distance, giving the impression of a manmade sunset as you behold the building’s vastness. According to Foster + Partners, this ‘dramatic cathedral-like space’ with its ‘swerving canopy’ is intended as a celebration of ‘the thrill and poetry of flight’.
So T3 doesn’t only receive and process passengers who have flown great distances (and efficiently, too) – it is a monument to flight itself. The roof, which swoops like a dragon’s back and steals light and heat from the sun for the benefit of human travellers, symbolises man’s ownership of the skies. At a time when we Westerners are implored to apologise for flying – to fly only if necessary, and then to log on to some cowboy carbon-counter website to pay penance for our ‘eco-sin’ (as one British bishop recently described manmade flight) – it feels strange to be in an airport that, yes, checks your passport, searches your bags and sells you cut-price Chanel, but which also says: ‘Let us give praise for the miracle of flight…’
Probably not surprisingly, even the speedy building of spectacular T3 has been cited as evidence of China’s inferiority to the West. See, the reason why countries like Britain take 20-plus years to build a drab new terminal at Heathrow is because we are democratic; indeed, we’re ‘paralysed by democracy’, says one commentator, and thus we honourably consult everyone – greens, local residents, noise experts, representatives of the pigeon community (okay, I made the last one up) – about the building of new runways and airports and the like. The Chinese, being undemocratic, ‘brook no dissent’ and just push things through.
Of course, there is no democracy here in China; and of course, that allows officials to do pretty much as they please, including paying construction workers disgracefully low wages. But let’s not kid ourselves that, in Britain, it is our commitment to the democratic process that has spawned the tyranny of consultation. In truth, politicians consult because they’re paralysed by indecision, not by democracy. Endless inquiries over Terminal 5, and now the Third Runway, express British officialdom’s political indirection, discomfort with modernity, capitulation to special interest groups, and doubt about the benefits of manmade flight itself – that most blatant expression of man’s defiance of his natural limitations and his conquering of the elements.
The British elite disguises its abandonment of modernity and human superiority as ‘democratic consultation’. The Chinese put their embrace of modernity on full and frank display for every newcomer to Beijing to behold.
Capitalism in ‘uneven development’ shock!
Any journalist who uses the phrase ‘city of contradictions’ when writing about places like Beijing should of course be strangled with his laptop cable, or at least encouraged to find a job in which it is acceptable to use tiresome clichés. But Beijing is a ‘city of contradictions’ (sorry).
No sooner am I being driven away from gleaming T3 than I see migrant workers, their shirts flung off because of the oppressive, balmy heat, bent over double digging by the side of the road. A truck hurtles by carrying 20 or so young men; it’s so packed that one of them, in a bizarrely bright purple shirt and with a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth, is standing on the rear bumper, holding on to the truck for dear life.
Yet there isn’t a city on Earth that isn’t a ‘city of contradictions’; that, unfortunately, is the nature of capitalism: uneven, unequal, unpleasant sometimes. Whether you’re in Paris, Milan, Amsterdam or Mumbai, every journey from an international airport to the gleaming city centre involves driving past poorer suburbs towards the rich bits.
Today, though, Beijing’s struggling migrant workers are held up by NGOs and the Western ‘human rights community’ as symbols of why development itself is a bad idea: because it creates inequalities. These activists seem to prefer the ‘equality’ that existed prior to China’s modernisation – that is, the equality of non-opportunity, immobility and back-breaking work that united China’s peasant workers – to the higher living standards and raised horizons these workers enjoy in their undoubtedly still harsh and oppressive lives today.
My driver has just enough English to tell me he is a migrant from the Jiangxi province. Then, in Mandarin – despite knowing that I cannot understand a single word he says – he tells me in great length about every new skyscraper we drive past, pointing up excitedly and explaining (I presume) when it was built and what it is for. He seems to revel in Beijing’s newness and shininess. Despite living on the fringes of China’s ‘economic miracle’, he seems inspired by it; he wants in on it.
Western observers horrified by Beijing’s smog-fuelled rush to modernity should stop using workers like him as ventriloquist dummies to express their own distaste for development.
An opera of horn-honking
The first thing you notice driving through Beijing is the cacophony of horn-tooting. Drivers beep each other endlessly. Where in New York they lean out of windows and yell expletives, and in London they sit silently and politely in traffic jams (though occasionally succumbing to the alleged evil of ‘road rage’), in Beijing honking is like a new language of the roads.
Within half an hour I have decoded some of its meanings. One quick beep means ‘get out of the way!’; pedestrians sprint when they hear it. A longer beep is a message to another driver to speed up. A quick succession of beeps means: ‘I’m getting angry now…’ Apparently, the ceaseless beeping is a fairly new addition to the sounds of the city. As more and more Beijingers buy cars and take to the city’s limited road space (the number of drivers increases by 1,000 a day), so new ways of communicating have emerged.
Chinese officials have responded in heavy-handed fashion. The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau has banned the honking of horns around the busy Fifth Ring Road in order to ‘preserve the peace’; dissident beepers can be fined up to 100 yuan (£8). Of course, the ban hasn’t worked. Even from the eighteenth floor of my hotel I can hear the horns. A card on my desk says ‘The Management would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by external noises’. Actually I don’t mind it. The opera of horns is the sound of people negotiating the newfound freedom afforded by car ownership, and evidence that some forms of human communication cannot be curtailed.
All this week, Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Beijing. Follow his Beijing Diary here.
Last summer, in a remote part of Indonesia called Tanah Toraja, I went to a large weekly market where the local people trade buffaloes and pigs. There were numerous stalls and pitches selling the locally grown coffee and vegetables and all sorts of rural entertainments such as cock-fighting. My attention, however, was attracted to a large huddle of people gathered round a hawker selling proprietary potions and elixirs.
The remedies were claimed to cure a bewildering variety of maladies from incontinence to impotence, baldness, pain, cancer and warding off evil spirits. The crowd were captivated by the hawker’s banter and antics. His performance was accomplished and mesmerizing. At the end of his spiel, he asked for a volunteer from the audience and an old crone sallied forth clutching her jaw and saying that she was suffering from toothache - ‘sakit gigi’. He sat her on a stool and proceeded to pour a brown elixir onto a piece of cotton wool and dab it on her tooth. He then produced an extremely fearsome pair of pliers about a foot long from his pocket which he plunged into her mouth to retrieve a large, brown, carious fang. The old crone gave a gummy smile claiming that she did not feel a thing. Having demonstrated the efficacy of his elixir, wadges of money rapidly changed hands until all of his stock was sold.
Some time later, as I was walking back to where our car was parked, I encountered - surprise, surprise - the hawker paying off the old crone who had been in cahoots with him.
Modern mountebanks
The term ‘mountebank’ was in common usage in Elizabethan times. It describes a smooth-tongued purveyor of patent and quack medicines who usually stood on a bench (hence the name: monte banca). Ben Jonson’s play Volpone is about such a mountebank. Donizetti wrote an opera, L’Elisir d’Amore, which features a mountebank as a central character. When I saw the opera last autumn, it reminded me of the hawker in Indonesia peddling his quack potions. But it also led me to consider whether the self-appointed experts who pop up in the media promoting supplements and superfoods are just modern day mountebanks who hoodwink the public.
How do outlandish claims for supplements and superfoods find such fertile soil among the general public?
In contrast to Indonesia, most of the population in the UK is divorced from food production and preparation, and has become more dependent on ready-prepared food which is produced on large farms, processed on an industrial scale and sold by large retailers such as Tesco and multinational food outlets like McDonalds. The transition has been from what is called ‘slow food’, which involves cooking from basic ingredients, to ‘fast food’, where food is either ready-prepared or eaten outside the home in quick-serve food outlets.
While these foods are clearly popular, we are no longer at ease with our food, despite the ever-greater variety available to us. Instead of worrying about whether there is enough food to feed a family, we are anxious about whether it is healthy or not. Consumers have developed a distorted perception of the risk to health from food, partly due to media scares and partly due to the work of campaigning groups like the Soil Association and Which?.
This distortion is illustrated, for example, by research from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), which found that consumers are more worried about the hypothetical risks to health posed by pesticides and food additives than the real risks to health from drinking unpasteurised raw milk. Consumers have also been scared off consuming foods produced from genetically modified (GM) crops. Yet this does not stop consumers going on holiday to the USA where they are very likely to eat foods from GM crops, which have been in commercial production since 1994. The wider availability of organic food has also undermined trust in conventionally-farmed food.
Yet, some of the claims made for these foods are questionable. The Soil Association has been campaigning with the message that organic food is nutritionally superior, claiming that organic food provides more vitamins and minerals. However, studies which have compared organic with conventional food show no consistent differences and when differences are found they are well within the ranges associated with natural variation (1;2).
Food activists have even called some produce ‘fake food’, alleging that it looks good but has no nutritional value. These concerns have provided fertile ground for those making claims for the benefits of dietary supplements and superfoods.
Supplementary benefits
Despite this surfeit of food, it is perhaps surprising that about 30 per cent of the UK population takes dietary supplements (3), with women more likely to take supplements than men, particularly those over the age of fifty. Consumers give a variety of reasons for taking supplements. Some say it is an insurance policy to guard against deficiencies; parents have been gulled into buying supplements by claims that they will improve their children’s behaviour and school performance; others take supplements because they hope they will protect them from cancer and heart disease. Perversely, while the Department of Health does advise some sections of the population to take supplements of vitamin D and folic acid, few people in the target groups - that is, people who really do seem to need to take vitamins - actually take this advice.
The claim that vitamin and mineral supplements improve behaviour or school performance has never been proven in the UK, though not for lack of trying. The Advertising Standards Authority recently upheld a complaint against a supplement called EYE-Q that claimed to boost children’s intelligence. In a breath-taking example of brazen marketing, the company made headlines in the Daily Mail where it was claimed that a large trial was being conducted on children in Durham which would prove that its fish oil-derived omega-3 supplement improved children’s exam performance. The company selling the supplements passed this off as a proper scientific study. However, there was no control group. The so-called ‘Durham trial’ has since received a considerable drubbing in the media on the BBC Radio 4 programme You and Yours and has filled many inches of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in the Guardian.
However, fifty years ago, cod liver oil was given to all young children, not for its omega-3 fatty acid content but to provide vitamin D to prevent rickets, which was once a major public health problem. I remember well having the foul-smelling stuff administered to me at bath time. Our main source of vitamin D is the ultra-violet (UV) light from the sun; the few food sources are much less important. The consequence of this is that blood levels of the vitamin rise in the summer and fall in the winter.
About a quarter of the UK population have worrying low blood levels of vitamin D in the winter months (4). New research indicates that there is a relationship between lack of exposure to UV light (specifically, to a part of the UV spectrum called UV-B) and increased mortality. Low blood levels of vitamin D have also been associated with increased risk of colon and prostate cancer, cancers that have been increasing in the population for reasons we do not understand.
There is something of a balancing act to be performed here. People with fair skin are much better at making vitamin D than people with pigmented skin, but are also at greater risk of melanoma from excess exposure to UV-B. Clothing is also an important factor determining exposure to UV-B and the trend towards wearing veils and burkhas among Muslim women puts them at risk of vitamin D deficiency. Current advice is that some groups (infants, pregnant and lactating women, the elderly, the housebound and others whose exposure to sunlight is limited) need to take vitamin D supplements. The amount needed to prevent deficiency is not readily obtainable from eating food so in this case supplements are necessary (5).
Folic acid is another vitamin which women are advised to take if they are planning a pregnancy. There is convincing evidence (6) that folic acid supplements reduce the risk of having a baby with a neural tube defect (NTD) such as spina bifida. The effect is greater where dietary intakes of folate are low but there is still a benefit where folate intakes are normal.
Folic acid only protects against NTD when consumed in the first eight weeks of pregnancy. As many pregnancies are unplanned, a significant number of women remain unprotected. Consequently, the UK is considering fortifying flour with folic acid as has been successfully done in the USA and several other countries (7). But at present, the recommendation is that all women who are planning a pregnancy should take folic acid supplements.
On a global scale, dietary vitamin A deficiency is a major cause of death and blindness. In its most severe form, it affects the eyes causing a disorder called xerophthalmia that results in blindness: 10 per cent of all blind children are blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency. Deficiency tends to affect children between the ages of one and five years and is uncommon in adults. Estimates suggest 250million children worldwide have low levels of vitamin A which puts them at increased risk of dying from infectious diseases such as measles.
Areas where this fat-soluble vitamin A deficiency is prevalent are sub-Saharan Africa, India, south-east Asia and parts of Central and South America. In the affected areas, the diet is low in fat and vitamin A and the problem is complicated by a high prevalence of infectious intestinal diseases which impair the absorption of the vitamin. Supplementing children in developing countries with high doses of vitamin A every six months is a very cheap and effective method of preventing deficiency. It costs about 50 pence to save a child’s life by supporting vitamin A supplementation programmes run by agencies such as UNICEF. However, there is no benefit from giving supplements of vitamin A to children in the UK or other affluent countries where the diet contains plenty of vitamin and deficiency does not occur.
Dubious claims about vitamins
Despite this, cocktails of vitamin A, beta-carotene and antioxidant vitamins such as vitamin C and vitamin E are touted as protecting adults against ageing, cancer and heart disease. A quick search of the internet shows that most of the sites offering dietary supplements are peppered with health claims for the benefits of these supplements for adults. However, a number of large-scale randomised controlled trials have failed to answer the question whether these supplements help to prevent cancer in affluent populations.
The Alpha-Tocopherol-Beta-Carotene Study (8) was carried out to investigate if taking such supplements over a five year period lowered risk of developing lung cancer compared to a placebo supplement. Instead of decreasing risk as was expected, the antioxidant supplements substantially increased risk of getting lung cancer and dying. A second study called the Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (9), which was designed to test if giving supplements to smokers and asbestos workers would reduce their risk of developing cancer, also found that the supplement increased risk of lung cancer and death.
Regulatory authorities subsequently stopped further trials using vitamin A because there was clear evidence of harm. The World Cancer Research Fund in its recent report on diet and cancer (10) reviewed all the studies and advised people not to take vitamin A or antioxidant supplements to prevent cancer but to get their nourishment from food.
Whether antioxidants protect against cardiovascular disease has also been tested in several large trials. One of the largest is a UK study (11) where about 20,000 subjects received a cocktail of supplements or a placebo. The study was run in what is called a factorial design where half of the subjects of each groups also got a cholesterol lowering drug called a statin or a placebo. The study showed a huge benefit from taking the statin (12) in terms of decreasing risk of death, heart disease, and stroke and death from all causes but did not show any benefit from the antioxidant supplements. There was no evidence of any protection from cardiovascular disease but there was a trend for the subjects to do worse on the supplements than on the placebo.
It is always dangerous to generalise from a few selected trials. Some trials are better designed and therefore more persuasive, whereas trials reporting positive or negative results - even if they are small - are more likely to be published and get media attention. The most robust technique is to do a so-called meta-analysis where you combine all the results from well-conducted trials. This has been done for dietary antioxidants and it shows that vitamin A, beta-carotene and vitamin E all significantly increase risk of death (13). Vitamin C and selenium have no effect. In summary, these trials show no benefit from supplementation with vitamin A and antioxidant nutrients among adults in affluent populations.
Beyond vitamins and minerals
Almost every day there is a new story in the media about compounds discovered in food that may be useful in treating human disease. For example, one caught my eye because I had become the proud owner of three large blobs of frogspawn in my pond last week. This was a study that suggests that a protein found in frogspawn may protect against diabetes. The idea that there are naturally occurring compounds in food with potential health benefits has spawned the concept of superfoods. There are now many books and articles about the benefits of such superfoods. They are promoted with zeal and conviction as if they possessed magical properties, rather like the mountebank’s potions. But is all the magic in the marketing?
One of the first superfoods to attract attention was red wine. This claim was based on research funded, not too surprisingly, by Californian winemakers (14). It was known that the French have much lower rates of heart disease than expected - the so-called ‘French paradox’. Some people attribute this to their consumption of red wine, others who are more cynical say there is no French paradox - the difference is due to different methods used to record causes of death.
Red wine however, does contain some interesting polyphenolic compounds including a compound called resveratrol. Some researchers claim this and related compounds have antioxidant properties which may have beneficial effects on blood vessels, causing them to relax, and this may help in preventing heart disease. However, resveratrol has also been blamed for causing migraine in some people. Other, more recent research, suggests that it may have anticancer properties in animals – and while there is no evidence that this compound protects against cancer in man, this does not stop people making health claims.
As it happens, alcohol (whether it be red wine, white wine, spirits or beer), in even moderately small amounts (two or more drinks a day), increases the risk of cancer (10) but at the same time decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease (15;16). Whether alcohol kills you or increases your life expectancy depends upon your age. Below the age of 50, drinking is harmful to health but above the age of 50, moderate alcohol intake starts to emerge as protective, because the reduction in the absolute risk of cardiovascular disease is greater than the increased risk of cancer. If your enjoy drinking red wine in moderation, that it is fine, but you should not fool yourself into thinking that you are justified in drinking it because it is a superfood. Indeed it was PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves who remarked: ‘It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of medical thought.’
Olive oil, especially virgin olive oil, is also promoted as a superfood. It does have a lower saturated fatty acid content than animal fats but it is just as fattening. The healthy image of olive oil has been promoted by funding from the European Commission with the ardent support of our Southern European partners. The foundations for these health claims are based on data from the Seven Countries Study which has looked at the relationship between diet and risk of heart disease over a period of 40 years in various countries (17). This study showed that high blood cholesterol was linked to an increased risk of heart disease and these were both aligned to a higher intake of animal fat and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in Northern Europe, whereas in Southern Europe rates of heart disease and blood cholesterol levels were lower and olive oil was used as the main culinary fat. One interpretation of these results is that olive oil is protective, but in the same study the Japanese also had low rates of heart disease and low rates of heart disease and their diet was low in fat diet and did not contain olive oil. We now know that saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids raise blood cholesterol levels and these fatty acids are mainly found in animal fats and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Replacing these fats with unhydrogenated vegetable oils decreases risk of heart disease (18). There is nothing magical about olive oil.
Fish consumption, particularly oily fish, is associated with a lower risk of sudden cardiac death. There is quite good quality evidence to suggest that this is linked to the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and there are trials that show that increasing the intake of oily fish or long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (19) decreases the risk of sudden cardiac death in patients who have already survived one heart attack.. However, current dietary guidelines encourage oily fish consumption rather than the use of omega-3 supplements.
Another aspect of the Mediterranean diet is a high intake of fruit and vegetables which may be linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. It is uncertain whether this is due to a protective effect of fruit and vegetables or some other associated lifestyle factors (ie, not smoking, being richer). However, the UK, and many other, governments are encouraging people to increase their intake of fruit and vegetables to five portions a day. Fruit juice however, only counts as one portion because it is regarded as a source of ‘extrinsic’ sugar. The sugar naturally present in fruit is regarded as ‘intrinsic’ sugar whereas when it is squeezed from fruit it is regarded as ‘extrinsic’ sugar. This is because if you eat an apple the rise in blood sugar and insulin is quite slow because the cell structure in the intact fruit slows down the release of sugar, whereas the same amount of sugar in the form of apple juice leads to a much greater increase in blood sugar. This difference may be important with regard to risk of developing diabetes. Current dietary guidelines suggest we should limit the intake of extrinsic sugars including added sugar.
Fruit smoothies and fruit juices have been aggressively marketed as superfoods along with rather exaggerated health claims. Earlier this year, an MP was calling for lower rates of VAT on fruit juices and smoothies because of the purported health benefits. A feature published in the Guardian (23 January 2008) rightly questioned the exaggerated health the claims for exotic berries such as blueberries, acai and goji berries and whether fruit juice and smoothies are really so good for us.
The claim that fruit juices and smoothies are packed full of micronutrients is also false; they are not a rich source of micronutrients except for vitamin C and they contain mainly water and sugar. Fruit juice contains eight to 10 per cent sugar and is not really that different from full-sugar fizzy drinks. Smoothies often contain twice as much sugar as fruit juice and both are a source of extrinsic sugars which the Food Standards Agency suggests we should not consume more than 60g per day. Some berries such as blueberries and cranberries are claimed to be rich sources of polyphenols and antioxidants but we do not know if this is a good or bad thing. Some polyphenols found in fruit juice can interfere with the way the body breaks down drugs. For example, grapefruit juice should not be consumed by people taking statins or the anti-hay fever drug terfenadine. Although both fruit and fruit juice are high in sugar, much of the benefit associated with their consumption could be that they are displacing less healthy items from the diet (eg, alcohol, confectionery, cakes, biscuits and crisps).
Functional foods
The term ‘functional food’ describes foods that may have useful effects on health. These are mainly being developed and promoted by the food industry. Examples include plant sterols which are added to margarine and yogurts and are claimed to lower blood cholesterol. These products have been tried and tested and do work, bringing about a useful reduction in blood cholesterol (20). They have also been properly scrutinised by the UK Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, under the chairmanship of Derek Burke, to ensure that they were safe.
Probiotics are another class of functional foods and are heavily advertised as being good for gut health where they are claimed to help maintain healthy bacteria in the large bowel. However, a health benefit has yet to be established for these products, and the advertising claims are running ahead of the scientific evidence. Very recently, there was a disturbing report that found that probiotics administered to seriously ill patients with pancreatitis increased their risk of dying compared with a placebo (21). This is likely to call into question the safety of some probiotics.
Soya-based foods are promoted as superfoods targeted at women, particularly women around the menopause. Claims are widely made on the internet that soya foods relieve menopausal symptoms and it has been suggested that they may protect against breast cancer, something that women of that age are very worried about. Soya contains phytoestrogens that mimic some of the effects of oestrogen and it is thought that they may behave like the anti-cancer drug tamoxifen, decreasing the risk of hormone sensitive cancers such as breast cancer. However, the results so far are not encouraging and one study conducted locally, the Norfolk EPIC study, found that women with higher blood levels of phytoestrogen were at greater, rather than at lower risk, of developing breast cancer (22). Obviously, more research is needed on this topic.
Maintaining a healthy weight is probably the most important thing we can do to prevent cancer, apart from not smoking and avoiding excessive exposure to UV-B and alcohol. A rise in body mass index (BMI) of five points (which is about two stone in weight for the average adult) increases risk of several cancers substantially, especially in women (23). Consequently, there clearly needs to be a greater focus on avoiding overeating and inactivity rather than on the hypothetical risks posed by chemicals in food and GM or seeking protection through supplements and superfoods. Getting out of doors and going for a walk is also a good way of meeting vitamin D requirements. Following this advice and selecting a balanced diet (low in saturated fat, salt and sugar as illustrated by the FSA) will not necessitate the use of supplements for most people. Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that the term superfood is a just a marketing gimmick peddled by modern day mountebanks.
Tom Sanders is professor of nutrition & dietetics at Kings College London. This article is based on his Derek Burke Lecture to the Institute of Food Research on 10 March 2008.
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