“Hello!” At the points most visited by tourists or, for example, in the metro, the scene repeats itself over and over again. Someone scratches a hello in English; Then continue the conversation if you feel comfortable. Or take your smartphone and use the voice translator app. The approach is aimed at having your picture taken with Westerners. Sometimes they even ask about the origin (and it makes no sense to answer Portugal with a Portuguese or British accent: Pútáoyá is the winning formula). The children do not hide their surprise, yawning. Other young people and adults capture images effortlessly and in a more or less discreet manner. Foreigners are still scarce in the Chinese capital, but it’s not the Pekingese who are curious: it’s domestic tourists from the province. In addition to the experience of contact with the Western “savage”, some are in Beijing for the first time – and they all finally feel the end of the zero covid policy. After three years, they can move around the country without restrictions.
In the wake of the Chinese New Year, statistics indicated that domestic travel volume reached 90% of its pre-pandemic level. It was also in January that the regime allowed group travel abroad, or rather, to a group of twenty countries such as Russia or Thailand, two months later to another group including Portugal and Brazil, and since August to Japan, the US or Australia. A very eager market (in 2019 they spent $234 billion on foreign tourism), but according to surveys, the Chinese want a safe environment in terms of covid and the way they will be received. Added to this is the increase in the price of airline tickets (in many cases even doubling) and the bleak economic outlook. For the time being, they prefer to stay at home, fill the main tourist attractions such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City or the Temple of Heaven and at most visit the special regions of Macau and Hong Kong.
On the other hand, there are still few foreign tourists, a fraction of the 136 million who visit the country annually. With no official data available, it seems that most of them are Russians, as you see on the streets and in shopping malls. Not many Americans or Australians are expected as authorities in both countries have warned of possible “arbitrary detentions”.
monitored and digital
Like all Chinese cities, Beijing has a video surveillance system that uses artificial intelligence to recognize citizens. In the capital, the specialist website Comparitech estimates, there are more than 1500 cameras on every 2.5 km2. Just as the visitor doesn’t have to do much more than agree to request photos with complete strangers, surveillance is a given, and in this case more discreet.
In addition to the obligations imposed on it by the regime, society has long adhered to technology. In a country where there are more active smartphones (1.6 billion by the end of 2022) than the population (1.4 billion), they are used for more than just selfies. In Beijing, physical money is on the verge of extinction, with payments being made through the social networks WeChat and Alipay, in the same way as ordering food delivery or transportation services. The biggest setback for a Pekingese is running out of battery, so there is a network of rental car companies power banks a little bit everywhere. And even if there is no impression that the latest fads of the digital age are being pontificated in the Chinese capital, what is certain is that it is possible to indulge in some eccentricities, such as eating a cake or an ice cream with an autonomous vehicle as a seller.
Communist leaders are unyielding when it comes to excesses, especially when it comes to video games, which have been classified as “spiritual opium.” Those under 18 have been restricted to one hour of online play on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays since 2021. Last year, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, limited daily use to 40 minutes for children under 14.
Bitterness for the young
The care now focuses on young adults. This year there will be 11.6 million new graduates entering the labor market than residents of Portugal, as well as many others who cannot find a job. After reaching the historic maximum of 21.3% of unemployment in the under-24 age group in June, the statistical institute announced a few days ago that it would stop publishing the numbers of inactive people by age. The need to improve data related to the workforce.
Western media correspondents have reported the concerns of a generation that is prepared, but for the first time in decades is colliding with a reality that does not match the progress made since the political and economic opening by Deng Xiaoping, which managed to save 800 people to lift. million people out of poverty. The magazine will appear in June The Atlantic Ocean it meant “the end of optimism in China”; more recently the The economist Called “China’s disillusioned youth” because of the economy on the cover. “I can’t sleep at night,” Yang Yao, 21, who moved to Beijing from Zhejiang province in the east, told AFP, but after weeks of actively looking for work, he couldn’t find a job .
The regime responded harshly, and then through the voice of its top leader, Xi Jinping. “The countless examples of success in life show that, in youth, the choice to eat bitterness is also the choice to reap rewards,” he said in an article about the younger generation published in Diário do Povo. Xi gave as an example his experience working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong sent 16 million young people from the city to work in the fields. Xi repeatedly used the idiom ‘eat bitterness’, i.e. undergo trials without complaints. .
“Asking us to eat bitterness is like a gimmick, a way of expecting us to commit unconditionally and do tasks that they themselves don’t want to do,” he replied to the New York Times a recent graphic design graduate who went by the name of Gloria Li.
winding times
In addition to the unemployment figures, exports and debt, along with deflation, will also provide food for thought. Western economists say that the economic model based on investment in the country’s infrastructure (averaging 44% of GDP between 2008 and 2021, while the global average is 25%) could be borderline, as could the disproportionate importance of the market real estate in the economy, about a quarter of the total.
The US, which has long called its relationship with China a “strategic competition,” has said, through President Joe Biden, that China’s economy is “a ticking time bomb,” alluding to what some analysts refer to as the temptation to resort to resort to a diversionary tactic, for example with Taiwan. “Certain Western politicians and media outlets have exaggerated the current difficulties in China’s post-covid economic recovery. The facts will prove them wrong,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Webin, acknowledging that “a tortuous process of recovery” is underway.
Lively and relaxed
The potential crisis that awaits us, signaled by the eventual bankruptcy of a real estate shark named Country Garden, is impossible to comprehend when you’re walking through the middle of summer hutongs (traditional neighbourhoods), along the shopping streets or around the lakes, where the inhabitants and tourists share the atmosphere of a center of power in the city and with obvious security measures – for example, the control of passengers’ belongings at the entrance to the stations of the subway.
The safety device combines in parallel with the relaxation of citizens in everyday life, visible, for example, in a relaxed dress code, in the controlled chaos of two-wheeled traffic – in order to save battery life, most drivers of silent electric vehicles do not turn on the engine light at night, making them an object of particular danger – including in varied nightlife or group leisure activities, such as choreography or jianzi (hands-free play with a feathered shuttlecock).
green massif
Even the most distracted will notice the patch of green that covers the city, along the roads, under the viaducts and in the parks and green spaces. The most recent data shows that the afforestation campaigns translate into an urban green coverage of over 49% and that the forested and green area has increased in ten years by the equivalent of 16 times the area of the municipality of Lisbon. The environmental plan was broader and included measures such as the construction of water treatment centers, the restoration and construction of ponds and wetlands, covering a total of 620 km2.
With over 21 million inhabitants and part of a capital region of 110 million inhabitants, Beijing was once one of the most polluted cities in the world. But a series of plans launched with the construction of infrastructure for the 2008 Olympic Games brought about an undeniable improvement in quality of life. Air quality is mainly affected by car pollution and burning coal to produce electricity, among other polluting industries. In response, authorities ordered the closure of the largest sources of pollutant emissions in Hebei province, around the capital’s metropolitan area.
Not so many years ago, the bicycle was the most commonly used mode of transport in Beijing. Now it is gaining popularity again thanks to bike-sharing programs, which work in tandem with the growing public transport offer: in 2000, there were two metro lines with a total length of 27 kilometers; now there are 27 lines over 800 kilometers and another 240 kilometers are under construction. An alternative to the car, not least because one of the measures to combat pollution in the capital is to ban the movement of combustion vehicles one day a week based on their number plates. At the same time, there is an aggressive policy to encourage electric vehicles. Nowadays a motorcycle or microcar on petrol is a rarity. Result: In 2014, a report concluded that the city was on the verge of being “uninhabitable for humans”; In 2021, Beijing met air quality standards for the first time in decades. The particle concentration has dropped by 63% in less than ten years, an unprecedented achievement.
DN journalists traveled at the invitation of the Chinese embassy.
Source: DN
