So,
three weeks later, I'm still
brooding on modern China because, let's be candid, the place is as
persistent as cheap aftershave in its capacity to keep claiming one's
attention. What thought in particular tends to recur? Well, it's an
image from a Chinese version of The
Shopping Channel
or QVC,
one of those punishment zones on the TV dial where people scream at
you from the corner of a dazzling white studio, urging you to buy
things. In this case I was sitting in my hotel room, stupefied after
a hard day of cultural encounters, while two hyperactive Chinese guys
bounced back and forth across the screen in front of a triptych of
bearded faces, nineteenth-century portraits from the look of them,
Europeans at that, and shouted tirelessly at the camera that what we,
the viewers, most needed right
now
was a discount case of red wine.
Not
having any Chinese beyond Nĭ
hăo
and
Xièxiè,
how could I be sure that that was what they were doing? Because it
was bleeding obvious: they kept gesturing at ziggurats of wine
bottles while numbers and ¥
signs chased
across the screen, staggering bargains of only ¥500 for twelve,
probably Spanish, hence the beards, accompanied by the sales twins
actually crashing deliberately into each other for sheer graphic
effect. For a moment I thought they were a Chinese Sediment
(Chéndiàn)
with a lot of stock to clear;
but then,
a second later, I found myself asking, Do
the Chinese really like wine anyway?
Silly
question, surely. Every supermarket and liquor store keeps at least
few bottles of red (Merlot, often as not) among the beers, baijius
and presentation whiskies; hotels aiming for an international vibe
like to put a few wine bottles out on show (full or tragically
empty, depends on your budget); the Chinese themselves have taken to
wine production with a typical emphasis on scale, coming in as the
world's sixth largest wine producer in 2016, building mock châteaux
(Changyu winery near Beijing) and Italianate castles (Changyu again,
this time near Xi'an) while at the same time buying up French
vineyards and vintages as if they were toys. Wine has currency right
now.
Except,
I don't quite believe it. I'm sure in the faubourgs of Shanghai and
the penthouses of Hangzhou (where the Aston Martin dealership abuts a
Porsche dealer three times its size and the Ferrari showroom is no
more than two hundred metres down the same street) they drink fine
wines all the time. Elsewhere, though? Chinese urban society, despite
its burgeoning middle class, still has
a respectably proletarian feel to it. Most people live in small
appartments where they tend
not to
cook at home - instead eating out at one of their many basic
neighbourhood eateries (and some of them are really
basic, just a hole in the wall with a middle-aged lady and a
two-burner stove), no frills, probably not even a drink: you bring
your own bottle of tea or water and simply scarf up the grub,
checking the WeChat
account on your mobile as you go. Bigger eateries, yes, give you more
in the way of tables, chairs and ceiling fans and, yes, whole
families will be in there, three generations of Chinese all shouting
their heads off as they wrestle with the Lazy Susan in the middle of
the table, and, yes, the food can be surprisingly delicious and, no,
you don't have to be in Sichuan to get internally broiled by devil
spices: we were reliably scorched from Hebei Province all the way
down and for that, you, or at least I, need beer and lots
of it. So, from the look of it, does everyone else.
Which
is as much as to say that neither the cuisine nor the eating culture
seems
that
wine-friendly. You just don't see the stuff being drunk. So why all the fuss about China and wine? I like to think that the very
high-end purchases (wines and vineyards) are being made as a bet, a
classic investors' bubble, the sort of thing the Chinese love; and
that everything else, the hectares of fresh domestic vines (some of
which have already been grubbed up in favour of more dependable
crops) and the gee-whiz fake châteaux that go with them are part of
the greater Chinese experimentation with Western style and taste, a
tiny moment in three and a half thousand years of unbroken
civilisation, but not much more than that.
Perhaps
President Xi Jinping will address the issue at this week's Communist Party Congress in Beijing; although it may tie in with the larger
question, Can
a society make genuine progress without liberal democracy?
Either way, I think we need guidance from the top on this one.
CJ
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