Headspin

A Strange End to a Turbulent Year

Jan 05, 2023

In the spirit of renewal that New Year brings, here are a few of the challenges we’ve encountered recently; examples of the lessons China has to teach us all as it grapples with the overlapping crises that define our age.

12/11/2022, 06:37

Sitting on a makeshift bench cobbled together from scrap wood by local street sweepers on a winter morning, I watch as the dogs scratch about in the long grass. It’s a few degrees above freezing, but the sight of them enacting their species-specific behaviour of browsing and sniffing gives me the usual feeling of warmth. Then I remember the rumours, and a stab of anxiety punctures my contentment. I get up and head towards home with the dogs loping reluctantly behind me.

“There’s a psycho on the loose,” said Jin casually, looking up at the phone above her face. Fond of taking naps at work, she recently unlocked the recline function on her office chair so that it flips from a seated to a horizontal position whenever the Principal isn’t around. She extended her phone towards me: “So terrible…” The screen showed an image of three street mongrels lying stiff as boards on a Chengdu pavement, their tongues swollen and extended.
“A psycho,” I replied, turning away from the screen. “Perhaps not just one — it’s been happening all over town.” I held out my own phone, displaying an official list of districts in which dog killings occurred — 30 so far, with one just two kilometers from our own neighbourhood. “Seems like more than one person, possibly an organised group...”

Tamzin had first heard rumours of the dog killings a few days before, while volunteering at a shelter in the countryside south of Chengdu. Workers warned of food that was being scattered all over the city that contained poison and even razorblades, claiming the lives of dozens of stray animals. In a country without a legal framework for animal rights, whoever killed them wasn’t technically breaking the law, but once distraught dog guardians began reporting the presence of a mysterious powder that killed their pets within minutes of them sniffing it, the police took an interest. Poisoning pet and stray dogs is common practice in the dog meat trade – a marginal industry aimed at domestic tourists with no real ties to Chinese tradition. However, in this case the dogs’ carcases were left in situ after they’d been poisoned, suggesting another agenda was driving the attacks.

As bizarre as this scenario may seem, it hints at the cultural and generational divide that exists around attitudes towards dogs in China. Despite the fact dogs were first domesticated here as long as 33,000 years ago, many older Chinese residents view them as farmyard functionaries at best and dangerous pests at worst. These attitudes conflict with the middle-class, dog-loving population that has flourished in China since the 1990s. Although dogs are still universally banned from public transport, the older generation are forced to interact with them on a daily basis, and noisy conflicts often arise when dog walkers let their animals get too close to fearful elders or their precious grandchildren. While this all provides useful context, it doesn’t make us feel any better about the poisonings. Like the viral video of a quarantined woman’s pet corgi being beaten to death by pandemic workers, or the alarming trend of residents killing or abandoning their animals through misguided fears of Covid 19 transmission, these recent killings are a reminder that as long as we remain here, our dogs will never be truly safe.

Dogs Dropped Dead After Sniffing a Mysterious Powder

PEOPLE ARE SCARED OF FOREIGNERS

17/11/2022, 11:38

Sitting on a bench in a nondescript shopping mall, trying to slow my heart rate by breathing into my diaphragm like a boxer between rounds. I don’t know why it got to me this time – why I reacted – but everyone has a breaking point.

I scribbled those words on my lunch break shortly after an unpleasant incident in a coffee shop. I was waiting in line when the word 外国人wàiguórén, ‘foreigner’ was whispered loudly by a woman sitting with her daughter a few metres away. I turned, and the sight of my (masked) face seemed to alarm her, as she started frantically searching among the plates on the table. Finally, she produced two napkins, which she and her daughter clasped across their mouths, breathing into them heavily as if they’d just narrowly escaped a round of mustard gas. Something about the humiliation of the moment – combined with the sense that a parent was actively fear-conditioning her child against me – sent a bolt of electricity up my spine. I left empty-handed, slamming the door so hard it must have rattled every coffee cup in the building.

It wasn’t the first reaction of its kind I’d had that hour, let alone that week. In fact, variations of this exact scenario have played out almost daily since news broke of a deadly zoonotic virus that emerged from a wet market in Wuhan. We’ve counted our blessings a lot during the Covid 19 pandemic, but one thing we have mourned is that China – a place which welcomed us and we’ve come to see as a second home – became paranoid and inward-looking overnight. Despite the fact borders were closed to foreign nationals and 90% of Covid cases in the country during lockdown could be traced to Chinese returning from abroad, people have come to fear the very sight of us. Folks of all ages adjust face masks when we pass, parents pull children across the road and people turn their backs on us in lifts. I believe this misplaced fear may have been influenced by news coverage of Western countries’ mishandling of the pandemic, as well as stereotypes of westerners as people who don’t respect lockdown rules. There was also a well-documented spike in anti-foreigner sentiment online, exemplified by a viral cartoon that depicted pandemic workers throwing ‘foreign trash’ (foreigners) into toxic waste bins. While it’s never reached a point at which we’ve felt physically threatened, the repeated negative interactions we’ve experienced have taken a mental toll.

For sanity’s sake then, it’s important to keep things in perspective. The pandemic has exposed structural injustices around the world, and East Asians in particular have faced inexcusable and at times violent harassment overseas, giving rise to the Stop Asian Hate Movement. In the broad sweep of xenophobia related to the Covid-19 pandemic in China, white Westerners are far from the worst-affected group. In Guangzhou in 2020, myths began circulating that Africans were‘more contagious’ than other ‘races,’ leading to a frenzy of racially-targeted and illegal evictions, exclusion from public spaces and arbitrary detentions that wouldn’t have looked out of place in apartheid South Africa. While Chengdu is widely regarded as the most liberal city on the Chinese mainland, black residents here also faced discrimination. Mohammed, a Nigerian teacher who’s lived in China for twelve years and speaks fluent Mandarin, seemed close to tears as he described over lunch how completely the pandemic has soured his experience.

“We’re no longer welcome here,” he said over a steaming bowl of hand-pulled noodles, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “Clients have become scared of me since the pandemic and pulled their kids out of my private classes. When applying for jobs now I say that I’m British. I don’t wanna lie to people, but how can I feed my family otherwise?” Mohammed is married to a doctor from Chengdu, and their son is in his final year of primary school. “He’s at the age now when it’s sinking in that he’s different from other kids,” he continued, staring down into his noodles. He had an air of total resignation, and would later mention that he’s in the process of trying to move his family to Australia.

Listening to his story, I wonder if my own privilege as a white, middle-class British male has made me so thin-skinned I become ‘triggered’ when it’s me that is singled out for discrimination for a change. Quite possibly, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re finding yourself regularly frustrated, angry or upset it’s probably best to remove yourself from the situation. Therefore, as Covid cases surged like never before in mid-November, we decided to throw in the towel and find a way to leave the country as soon as possible.

That was until something totally unexpected happened, flipping everything on its head and ushering in a new reality.

Xenophobic Cartoons Like This Came at the Peak of Covid-Induced Xenophobia in 2020, but Things Have Never Quite Got Back to Normal

IT’S NOT JUST US WHO HAS A BREAKING POINT

22/12/2022 06:30

I rip open a new packet of coffee beans, stick my nose inside and inhale deeply. Still nothing, apart from that musty smell like old museum cabinets. I exhale and bury my face even deeper into the bag, beans touching the tip of my nose, and take the biggest breath I’ve taken in weeks. Some faint, chocolatey notes flicker at the back of my nasal passage. I decide to make this a daily ritual: building back my sense of smell one coffee-sensitive molecule at a time.

There was a strange relief when we finally caught the Covid19 virus, after three years of living in a bubble of collective fear. A week in bed and no sense of taste during Christmas didn’t dampen our relief at the whole charade being – if not over – then entering its next phase. The central government maintained that the nationwide protests, which started on 24th November and spread across the country during the following week, were not responsible for the rapid rollback of Covid 19 measures that took place in early December. However, it’s hard to see the mass outpouring of dissent as anything less than a core component of this transitional moment.

In terms of what caused the protests, the image of a fire truck in Urumqi failing to get close enough to an apartment tower blaze due to lockdown restrictions could be seen as the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. It was part of a broader picture that had been unfolding for several months – footage of Chengdu residents blocked from fleeing their buildings during an earthquake, or a father in Lanzhou prevented from rushing his three year-old son with carbon monoxide poisoning to the hospital revealed the regime to be ideologically committed to the ideal of Zero Covid at the expense of the Chinese people. Set against the backdrop of the Qatar World Cup in which crowds (soon-to-be censored from TV footage in China) appeared to be enjoying the festivities unrestricted and un-masked, the uprisings seem inevitable.

Nevertheless, I was stunned by the boldness of those publicly demanding the CCP step down; something which didn’t even happen during the notorious Tiananmen Square uprisings of 1989. And when I awoke to find the Facebook-style ‘Moments’ feed of my WeChat messenger app flooded with reposts of Do You Hear the People Sing?, the banned song from Les Miserables, the defiant lyrics of which made it the soundtrack to previous demonstrations. The responses of my work colleagues to the solidarity protest on Chengdu’s affluent Wanping Road on 28th November varied wildly. Brian, a young teacher who grew up not far from the site of the carbon monoxide poisoning in Lanzhou, derided the leadership’s stubborn commitment to Zero Covid as a giant attempt to save 面子miànzi, or ‘face,’ the Chinese honour concept that makes it notoriously hard for people in positions of power to make U-turns on their own decisions.

“The older generation don’t know how to admit when they’re wrong,” he shrugged. “So 1.4 billion people continue to suffer as a result.” In his view, the demonstrations were an appropriate response to a situation that otherwise might never end. But Jin, whose husband is directly employed by the government as an airport signaller, stuck to the party line:
“These protesters don’t represent the normal people of China,” she said, flicking through her phone agitatedly from her horizontal office chair. “I think the CIA are involved. And look at this video”: she showed me footage of young people with placards chatting calmly on Wanping Road, then after a few seconds in which I wondered what I was supposed to be looking at, lost patience: “They’re speaking Cantonese! They could be separatists sent from Hong Kong to cause trouble...”

As is often the case with people who live in a totally different online media universe to one’s own, it’s difficult to imagine how the events that unfolded next impacted on her convictions. When the government began rolling back pandemic prevention measures in early December, with a Guangzhou health official even encouraging residents not to panic because Omicron is “less virulent than the flu,” I wondered if protestors were now vindicated in her eyes, or whether her suspicions regarding a sinister foreign plot were deepened further.

But I didn’t get the chance to ask her. By 15th December Tamzin and I started feeling ill, and before long, everyone we knew had been struck down with Covid. Jin was the last woman standing at my workplace, holding out for several days in a near-empty kindergarten disinfecting everything she touched, before she too succumbed. Official reports of fatalities since the rollback began are low, jarring with accounts of crematoriums packed with bodies, as well as latest estimates which put death tolls at around 9000 per day. We’re relieved no one we know has died, even though colourful wreaths and the popup, wigwam-shaped 灵堂 língtáng, or mourning halls where all-night wakes are held for the deceased, have become near-permanent fixtures at our apartment complex.

With everybody now infected, the public’s fear towards us melted away like morning snow. Geriatric locals no longer recoiled as we passed them beside the river, instead asking casually if we had the virus. “Me too, almost fully recovered now!” was one man’s response when we answered in the affirmative. The Vice Principal of Tamzin’s kindergarten displayed more indignanation at people taking time off work than fear of the virus. “I’m Covid positive and I’m still working,” she said in a group chat; a phrase which would have been unsayable just a few weeks ago.

As China opens up, we look forward to spending time enjoying the country without having to take constant nucleic acid tests, face hostile reactions to our presence from locals or live with the fear that the health codes on our phones could change colour at any moment. And as we mentally prepare to bid farewell to China later this year, we hope the next few months can be spent reconnecting with the country we have known and loved, even if it is scarred by this truly bizarre episode in its recent history. Most importantly, I hope that frontline activists for change around the world take note of the Chinese people’s bravery, and of how quickly collective action can cause even the most powerful totalitarian government to change its course.