By Roger Watson:
Your correspondent is back in China for the first time in three and a half years. My last visit was to Wuhan in December 2019, but I decided to get out as people were dropping dead in the streets and the government was threatening to weld people into their apartments. I decided to return to the safety and sanity of the UK where, surely, we would not lose our heads over a dubious virus…and the rest is history.
Getting into China is always a hassle from having to visit a visa centre in the UK in person, the multiple photographing, fingerprinting and form-filling to the prolonged processes at immigration. Once in, it looks and sounds very different from home but all the usual features are there and life proceeds pretty much as normal. Remarkably, there are fewer signs in China that there ever was a ‘pandemic’ than there are in the UK; no social distancing stickers, no signs in shop entrances and remarkably few people wearing face masks. But in my absence over the period of the deadly virus there have been some changes.
One of the changes that I noted were some brand-new designs of cars which looked like something out of a futuristic movie. Huge, sleek machines with every possible mod con. Clearly, while we cowered behind our masks, worked from home and agonised over scotch eggs, the Chinese had not been wasting their time. These space-age cars—the Chinese brand name means ‘Dream’ in English—are everywhere; they light up when the owner approaches, the door handles appear, and they are mostly electric. I asked if there were plenty of charging points in town and was assured there were.
My wife was transported around (while I had to make do with the university mini bus) in one of these machines. It had 360-degree sensors which displayed the view (including an aerial view) on a large screen; the console had a screen for the passenger where dozens of film channels and music channels were available, there were contactless mobile phone charging pads, and the seats could be adjusted simply by touching them. The car could even drive itself provided the driver kept watching the road ahead (the car could tell). Many of these features are only available in top of the range cars in the west but these cars seem reasonably accessible to a wide range of people. Lest I sound like some fawning shill for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), read on.
I may simply be more sensitised to it after watching Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Adam Curtis, remarkably a BBC documentary series, but this time I was acutely aware of the saturation scrutiny by CCTV, ‘speed’ cameras and facial recognition cameras. They are absolutely everywhere you look. They were probably there before but I decided to look around me wherever I was to check and there is barely a square inch that is not under surveillance, at least in the cities.
I stay in the old town in Luzhou and there are plenty of back alleys joining the main roads which I use regularly. Even here, every nook and crannie is covered; it was the first time I had noticed this. Admittedly, it would be very hard to commit a crime in China. However, if Chinese statistics are to be believed, China is one of the safest and crime free countries in the world; it is doubtful if CCTV cameras are solely responsible. Perhaps it is their world record breaking number of executions per capita. Those would be capitas that end up spread over the floor of the execution spot, the favoured method of dispatch in China being a bullet to the back of the head with the bill for the bullet being send to the deceased’s family.
Finally, there is the Chinese currency, or lack of it. China is printing less money and there are fewer places where it can be used; it is even a hassle to use a credit card. All financial transactions are conducted using the ubiquitous smart phone app WeChat. I have been in enormous shopping centres in Beijing (take Westfield in London and multiply by ten) where absolutely no cash transactions were possible. People are tracked wherever they go, whatever they do and whatever they purchase. There are reports that people who do not toe the line, usually by showing sufficient approval of CCP policies on social media, can be prevented from buying rail and air tickets and luxury goods.
Thankfully none of this is could ever happen in our own country.
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
