We don’t exactly consider Beijing home anymore (we’re really starting to feel like our home is in a couple tents pitched just out of sight from any given road), but we’re coming back! Our arrival is set for the evening of September 13th. And we’re going to celebrate.

We plan to arrive in full bike regalia at Beer Mania in Sanlitun between 5pm and 6pm and hope everyone can join us! Arrival in padded spandex and bike jerseys or with hands covered in chain grease will earn you a smile and a well-deserved pat on the back.

For the occasion, Beer Mania will be offering up local Beijing draught beer at 10 kuai per half liter all night, as well as the full selection of excellent imported beers (the thought of this has kept us pedaling for the last month!) at happy hour prices until 8pm.

So come join us! Sorry this is happening on a Monday night.

Portrait of an LBX Beijing Homecoming

September 13, 5pm

Beer Mania (Map)

Address: 北京市三里屯南街16号泰悦豪庭103

Phone: 010-65850786

By Evan

When last I left off, we had just parted from the Daoist funeral and had to pass up the offer of some female Buddhist monks to stay in their temple due to its unaccommodating location atop a mountain. We rolled on again until around 4:30 to the town of Gaoqiao (高桥镇), where we realized there wasn’t enough sunlight left to continue. The only hotel in town, much to our dismay, had no vacancies, and we scrambled to ask locals where we could stay, half-way hoping one might invite us in. “If you have your own sleeping bags, you could sleep in the government center,” said one man selling raw pork in the central market. Well well well, a government center! That’s just ridiculous enough an idea to make for a good story, I thought. I was not to be disappointed.

Gaoqiao Town Government Center, our home for a night. Photo by Alexis

We proceeded to roll through the complex’s gate and in front of the five-story-tall government center — which possessed all the charms of a Soviet bomb shelter — we began incredulously asking if there was indeed room at the… inn. A Mr. Zhu, office director of the county government (镇政府办公室主任), looked with pity upon our plight and offered the center’s fourth floor spare room to us free of charge. To boot, once we had moved into the room with much fanfare from the other employees, Mr. Zhu, a terse, middle-aged man given to speaking in staccato bursts, took us to the employee cafeteria (员工食堂) for a bowl of rice with some cabbage, eggs, and pork strips — on the house. This world is just full of surprises! Afterward two dopey cops showed up to register us, and after telling us to “cooperate (你们配合一下),” Mr. Zhu left us with them for over 45 minutes as they clumsily took notes and filled in forms on nearly every detail of our lives, down to our religion (we were tempted to answer Communism but resisted) and our addresses in our home countries (were they going to send our moms letters if we misbehaved?). After they left, and just after I had climbed into my sleeping bag on top of one of the short bamboo planks in the free, broken-windowed room, an energetic man in his late 40s sporting a disheveled head of greasy hair, Mr. Wang (汪), burst into the room. (more…)

By Andy

I haven’t written for a while. Evan’s post on the SOE coalmine experience captured the story and insanity of the situation quite handily. The only thing I have to add is a couple thoughts on the separation between the Party and the people and on the definition of LBXs, or laobaixing.

We still have no precise definition for China’s laobaixing. It is most often translated as simply the ‘common people,’ but that doesn’t really do the term justice as it is used in modern Chinese context.

In a slightly less vague context, it is used to mean anyone who is not connected to the Party or the government (the two being approximately the same thing in China). I think this is the way most Chinese people in major cities like Beijing or Shanghai would describe the term if you asked them what they thought about their childhood home being demolished to make way for a luxury mall – “We laobaixing have no power. (我们老百姓没有权利.)” Back in June, an offhand comment made by Lu Jun, a government spokesman in Zhengzhou, a city about 80km from where I write this post, caused an uproar on the Chinese internet, which interestingly acts as one of the few checks against rampant abuses of power by local governments and officials. Lu, when confronted by reporters about the future of a plot of land originally allocated for low-income housing where 12 luxury villas were instead being constructed, first asked, “Will you speak for the Party or for the laobaixing? (你是准备替党说话，还是准备替老百姓说话?) (more…)

Mr. Zhang and Wife by Andy

You’ll have trouble finding our Mr. Zhang by name, as 90% of his fellow villagers are also surnamed Zhang (张). A grandfather in his early fifties, Mr. Zhang has spent most of his life in his hometown, the Hui (Muslim) minority village of Zhangguan (长官), Shandong province.

We met Mr. Zhang by coincidence. We had arrived in Zhangguan a day before and had already visited the 600-year-old Mosque twice. On our third run through the compact town, we were greeted by a man in his forties carrying a baby and two women in front of their doorway, who after a brief conversation graciously agreed to my request to see their house. Once inside, the stocky, lush-black-haired Mr. Zhang emerged from his nook of the complex and most dutifully — as preeminent male of the family — showed us to the central dwelling of their courtyard mini-complex.

Tea already served to us on the sofa and formal introductions aside, Mr. Zhang began immediately by describing how much better life is now than before. “Before we could never get full. Now we always have plenty to eat,” he said as he picked up some flatcakes and an uneaten chicken wing from the previous night’s meal. “This is a new house, built only 5 years ago. Everything is better since reform and opening.”

Mr. Zhang’s business, that is to say the family’s business, like most of the town, is the slaughter of sheep and cattle. Now that he’s a grandfather, his son and nephew handle most of the business. Nowadays he prefers to spend most of his time watching over the children of the extended family or helping out at the Mosque, where he goes to pray five times a day. That’s saying a lot since most of the other Hui we talked to in the town were religious equivalents of what my family calls “Christmas and Easter Catholics.” In a way he reminded me of a Hui version of my uncle Jack, minus the Knights of Columbus.

His family had moved to Zhangguan from Nanjing several generations prior, though the town had been Hui for much longer than that. The second of four brothers, Zhang was the only one who stayed during the “bad years.” The rest of his siblings took their families to the predominantly Muslim province of Ningxia, where the family visits every year.
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After attempting in vain to resolve the situation between the hotelier and police in Wen’an, we begrudgingly set off on the road south out of town for another late start. Power and politics in China has a way of making you feel completely helpless, and it cultivates a natural instinct for self preservation and nourishes it until it becomes a way of life. This often means that a car accident victim will lie on the ground, bleeding from the head, while a crowds will simply look on. It is tempting to identify the phenomenon as part of Chinese culture, but after observing it for some time, I now feel that it is much shallower than that. Rule of law is secondary to the power of people here, and the legal system is not developed enough in most places in China to ensure your own protection if you choose to help an injured person. If the police are involved and the injured is someone of means, you could be arbitrarily punished because they are looking for someone to blame quickly. If the injured is a commoner, a laobaixing, he likely doesn’t have the medical insurance to pay for his rehabilitation and is looking for someone to blame for the accident (the guilty party has probably already fled the scene), and I have heard of numerous cases of someone stepping in to take someone in dire need to the hospital only to be blamed for the accident later. “I was just trying to help!” is met with the response of “What business is it of yours to help this person? You don’t even know him!” by the authorities.

So it is with this background that I recommended from the beginning of our incident at the hotel to try to stay uninvolved. Morally, it is difficult to watch an innocent person suffer, but in the context of power and law in China, it is much safer to let events simply unfold around you.

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