That’s a Wrap

Packing Up Our Bikes Gave Me Pause to Reflect on the Reasons We’re Leaving China

The Time Has Finally Come to Send Our Bikes Back to England.

As Abu builds a bamboo frame in the workshop, Tamzin and I use his comprehensive toolkit to dismantle our bikes outside in the hallway. Fierce sunlight shines through the dusty 11^th-story window, making us sweat as we wrap pedals, forks and callipers in bubble wrap. Teenage Tibetan Monks, nail salon workers and yellow jacketed Meituan delivery riders all squeeze past us as we crouch over the tools, mumbling our apologies.

“Hello… how are you…?”

Surprised by the sound of English, I look up from the tyre I’m deflating to see a boy of about 13, in a t-shirt rendered too small by a recent growth spurt. He’s clearly bored and in search of interaction, but before we can answer Abu strides out of the workshop with hands and arms covered in bamboo dust.

“Hey, 小胖子xiǎo pàngzi (little fatty),” he says with that Chinese bluntness that always makes us wince. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for my next class…” The boy gestures to a door down the corridor, apparently un-phased by the moniker. 

“These guys are busy,” Abu says more gently, picking up a wrench we’ve just borrowed. “Do you want to come in and check out the workshop?”

The boy goes inside, and I walk a few metres to the grey steel door from which he’s just emerged. The words Dance Studio are emblazoned above it in colourful Perspex, yet I’m certain he isn’t having dance classes. It’s likely a ‘training school’ – private academy that provides English lessons on evenings and weekends – in disguise. Establishments like this made up a sprawling, trillion yuán industry until the summer of 2021, when a government crackdown drove many of them underground. Their ‘unqualified operations’; ‘false advertising’; ‘profiteering’ and ‘anxiety marketing’ were identified as psychological pressures that deter young people from starting families. The ‘storm of business regulation’ enacted by the Ministry of Education ended many businesses, while others survived by masquerading as ‘diversified learning environments,’ ‘growth centres’ or ‘dance studios’.

I return to my half-disassembled bike to the sound of the lad bombarding Abu with questions (“What does that tool do?”; “What’s this thing for?”; “What are you doing now?”). He has the curiosity that often arises in overworked Chinese students once they’re unleashed into a non-academic environment. As I twist a crank-extractor into the spindle of my bike, I wonder if the crackdown has had the stated effect of making his life any easier. The fact that almost two years later he’s still spending weekends in this nondescript office block makes me doubt it. 

Despite having quit our training school for kindergarten jobs a few months before the crackdown occurred, it added to an uncertain atmosphere that has lingered since the pandemic. Many of the regulations had a distinctly anti-international feel: references to foreign places or educational institutions – and even the word ‘international’ itself – were scrubbed from school names and marketing material. Recently, an ex-colleague from South Africa had to change the job title on her visa from ‘English Teacher’ to ‘Activity Leader,’ and recalled frantically hiding English-language resources in cupboards during visits from the police.

Even more dubious was the move’s connection to China’s history of population control. Delivered in tandem with the Three Child Policy, it was part of a broader plan to halt China’s population decline and ensure the nation’s continued economic rise. Mostly though, the crackdown felt like an ill-fated ‘quick fix’ to a complex, systemic issue. Alongside the trend of authoritarian environmentalism in China, instances like this don’t bode well for what the CCP’s plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 might actually look like.

We lift our stripped bamboo frames into cardboard boxes and separate them from the moving parts with wedges of polystyrene. The compartmentalised bikes look diminished in their cardboard coffins: like bones unearthed by archaeologists, not the sturdy beasts we built to take on the world. Of course, we’re sad not to fulfil our dream of cycling home on them, especially as Central Asian land borders are finally opening from their pandemic-induced stasis. However, with the Russia-Ukraine war ongoing and the potential for other regional clashes, we’re hesitant to ride headlong into another crazy political situation.

We’re also more than ready to get out of China for a while. As the boy and his ersatz ‘dance studio’ remind us, we simply don’t know what new round of bizarre legislation lurks around the corner. This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to put into words to people outside of China quite how unsettling living through the pandemic here was – especially for Tamzin, who deals with anxiety and spent entire days on the brink of a panic attack. I don’t want to use the word ‘trauma’ lightly, but the feeling of knowing that people could enter our homes, harm our dogs or take control of our bodies at any given moment doesn’t go away easily.

Last week, I got speaking to a 24 year-old journalist from Chengdu named 桑榆Sāngyú, who laughed fatalistically as she said: “Covid was a collective trauma, but Chinese people haven’t been allowed to publicly resolve that trauma.” She explained that media discussion of the pandemic is now largely restricted to feel-good stories such as businesses ‘bouncing-back’ post-Covid, without mention of the myriad ways 防疫fángyì, ‘pandemic prevention’ policies continue to shape people’s lives.  

Closing the boxes and sealing them with thick tape, I hope that the lessons we’ve learned in China may be useful in the struggle for climate justice back in the UK. As the British Conservative Government increasingly aligns itself with authoritarian countries via draconian anti-protest laws and reactionary judges try to stifle activism with extreme prison sentences, I feel a deep call to join a movement in defence of what’s left of our democracy. However, a short decompression period – in which we can process our experiences, reconnect with loved ones and elevate our minds out of the paranoid, reactive state they’ve acquired here – will be necessary.

In his book Healing Resistance, Kingian Nonviolence practicioner Kazu Haga stresses the importance of activists undergoing such a healing process before entering civil resistance, to provide the necessary resilience and prevent movements getting ‘infected’ with the trauma they’re seeking to prevent: 

Because we don’t take the work of trauma healing seriously, many of us are now walking around with those wounds wide open. When our identities become fixated on trauma, we can easily be thrown off keel by any number of things. We become hypervigilant, a sign of someone living with trauma. We begin looking around every corner for the next trigger or the next thing that may traumatize us. We forget to breathe. Our wounds get infected. (Haga, 2020)

I see myself during the pandemic in this description. I also, funnily enough, see our dogs. Our trainer Nicole from Calm Canine Academy frequently reminds us that until we remove MoMo and QiuQiu from the ‘trigger-stacked’ environment we currently live in, their healing process cannot truly begin. While we regularly apply therapeutic techniques to build their confidence, progress is stunted by daily run-ins with local stray dogs, off-leash pets or human behaviours that re-traumatize them through association with past violence.

“You need to get out of there,” Nicole said in a recent Zoom call. “For your mental health, all four of you.”

We we leave the bikes with Abu and his new friend – who’s begun contentedly filing some bamboo tubing with a metal rasp – and take the lift down to street level. A high-pitched whirring hits my ear – like the first mosquito of the year that flew in there last night – as we walk under the awnings of a Tibetan precious stone market. Traversing the rows of stalls, we watch burly men carve beads, amulets and Buddhas out of colourful stones. Their electric drills scream with the violent precision of dental implements. Silicone water pipes spray the men’s hands as they work; suppressing dust and making the stones shine brilliantly.

My mind is pulled from the more negative sides of our time here by a sudden pang of wanderlust. The people and landscapes of the Tibetan plateau were mostly off limits during the pandemic, but we have plans to visit the region one last time. In a few weeks we will be dropped deep into Tibetan Sichuan and get a final taste of high-altitude trekking with the dogs before leaving China for good. 

Walking through the market with a surge of excitement, I remind myself for the hundredth time that for all its flaws, I’m really going to miss this place.

Quotation Source:

Haga, Kazu (2020) Healing Resistance: My Life and Training in the Legacy of Dr King, Parallax Press