Sunday, May 21, 2000

Russia may not offer that insane Soviet existence for the visitor


Russia may not offer that insane Soviet existence for the visitor, but it is still tourism through a glass darkly

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 21 May 2000

I'm just back from Moscow, where the citizens of Russia were wrapping themselves up last weekend against one more blast of winter. What? Snow and arctic winds with 18-hour daylight and the trees already in full leaf? Luckily I remembered that the haunting of foreigners was always a speciality of this city.

Sombre music, the threat of mutual annihilation, blonde chess geniuses and the frozen face of Leonid Brezhnev: the Soviet Union struck me as an excellent place for tourism, even when I was a child.

Tourism has always been possible in Russia, even at the height of the Cold War, but a holiday in Moscow as long ago as the 1970s was never too likely where my own family was concerned. They were insufficiently left- wing, they did not have beards, they were not chess boffins; they preferred the Dordogne to the Don and bordeaux to borshch.

But what a drag not to have been allowed to see (for example) the Lubyanka, the massive granite home of the KGB, while it still inspired fear! Had I made it to Moscow back then, I would gladly have trodden through snow in search of spy-issue shoe-prints, and made secret assignations beneath the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later I might have stalked Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. I would surely have hidden in palatial underground train stations, squatting in niches while booted men in long coats walked past carrying pistols. I would possibly even have dropped secret notes at the feet of blonde women with furry collars and cuffs, impersonated the soldiers guarding Lenin's mausoleum, obtained entry to the Kremlin using false papers, formed a liaison with a ballerina, attended a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre and spotted a dead man, through my eye-glasses, sitting upright in a polo-neck sweater with a plutonium pellet in his leg.

Had we known that the Soviet Union would cease to exist in 1991, would we not have made more effort to get there while it still existed in all its insane magnificence? I managed to sneak in a couple of visits - as a grown-up - shortly before the end, but by then Gorbachev had already started his thaw and the sinister monolith was no more.

As for today's Moscow, it is of course located in a different country altogether. There are posh shopping malls next to the Kremlin. Dzerzhinsky's statue has gone; the KGB has changed its name and now offers group visits to tourists to raise money. Only at night, on the wet cobbles of an empty Red Square, with a Siberian wind whipping your face, and an old man trying to sell you his stamp collection, do you get a half-glimpse of the ghost of a country that died long ago.

Thursday, May 18, 2000

Let's talk about sex


Let's talk about sex


A new documentary about a sex clinic in Shanghai provides a frank insight into modern-day China. And, as Jeremy Atiyah explains, it demonstrates just how far-reaching the Cultural Revolution was

Jeremy Atiyah
The Guardian,   Thursday 18 May 2000 15.35 BST

"Doctor, my penis is a bit short," says the caller, live on air, "and I'm wondering if you can help." "Certainly we can," comes the friendly reply, "but don't forget that your size only matters in relation to the size of your partner's vagina."

What's this? A late-night educational chat-show from some corner of Denmark or Holland perhaps? Actually it's prime-time in the Chinese city of Shanghai, and listeners are putting their questions to sex therapist Dr Chen Kai - the man who has taken upon himself the job of teaching 1.2 billion people about orgasms and foreplay.
You have to admire the nerve of the man. China is a country where, until 15 years ago, sex for hundreds of millions of people occurred solely for the purpose of producing babies, or (at best) for satisfying a biological appetite akin to defecation.
But here is Dr Chen running a sex clinic, chatting about sex on the radio, giving sex lessons to school children and even keeping a collection of suggestively shaped rocks. He's definitely not opting for the quiet life.
Are people like Dr Chen leading the latest cultural revolution in China? You might protest that our interest in sex is nothing to do with culture - but Chairman Mao, for one, knew better. By boiling culture down to revolutionary slogans, and by fitting men and women into identical straight jackets and trousers and haircuts, he succeeded in defining sexual feelings as unrevolutionary and therefore undesirable (apart from where it involved attractive young girls overcoming their bourgeois scruples to sleep with ageing revolutionaries, of course).
Sex was a terrifying loose cannon as far as the party was concerned, to be repressed at all costs. For 10 years, revolutionary loudspeakers worked to control its power, by waking you up collectively in the morning, conducting you collectively through your day; even specifying the number of times per week that you should have intercourse with your spouse. Ai (love) and xing (sex) were eliminated from the vocabulary of a generation. Chinese men and women in their 40s, to this day, still complain that far too much of their lives was devoted to "politics". They mean two things: first, that nobody earned enough money, and second, that nobody had enough sex.
How things are changing in the cities of modern China. "In Shanghai today, young people walk hand in hand!" gasps the simple country girl working as a cleaner in Dr Chen's clinic. "They even cuddle in the street!" She hasn't seen anything yet. Given the background of repression against which Dr Chen carries out his work, it's hard to blame him for decorating his name-card with an erect penis.
As a matter of fact, the sex that Dr Chen is teaching doesn't look exactly like "liberal" or "democratic" sex - in fact it strikes me very much as sex with Chinese characteristics. In his clinic we see a male patient being attached to the "genitalia apparatus", designed to stimulate erectile tissue, while at least five other patients look on, with interest. In another shot, a man sits before a forbidding committee of doctors in white coats, and declares: "If I squeeze my willy I feel really good." Privacy, that sinister western concept - regarded as highly suspect in China at the best of times - is notable by its absence.
But this is beside the point. What is interesting is that, these days, urban China can get away with almost anything, as long as it doesn't challenge the party. Explicit pornographic novels written by 20somethings periodically sweep the cities, before the censors have time to notice. People chatter on the internet. Prostitution thrives. Adultery among the urban young is almost mandatory. Now some of the rich ones even go to sex clinics. Who needs to talk about overthrowing the government when they are free to talk about their own sexual feelings, without any ideological or moral strings attached?
"In the old days you had to stay in sexless relationships with your partner whether you wanted to or not, because the party said so," says Carrie Gracie, the former Beijing bureau chief for the BBC. "There was no morality, only restrictions. Now the restrictions have been lifted there is nothing left to contain people. And the criteria people use to decide who they want to be with have been turned completely upside down."
Putting aside the impact of this in terms of broken marriages, another way to see China's urban sex explosion is as an essential ingredient for civil life - alongside things like a broad educational base, respect for law and tolerance of minorities. It's simple: the state becomes less centralised, provincial governors withhold taxes, hooligans set up businesses, rock stars sing of disillusionment, city entrepreneurs watch Taiwanese TV, nutters subscribe to mystical religions, Qi gong masters set themselves up as virtual messiahs - and, yes, people with erectile problems start talking about it on the radio.
In China, it seems, the pluralist society has finally arrived.
• Dr Chen's Sex Revolution, tonight, 9.30pm, BBC2. Jeremy Atiyah is co-author of The Rough Guide to China


Sunday, May 14, 2000

A population of one billion might bring a few problems


A population of one billion might bring a few problems, but there are compensations - at least for the leaders

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 14 May 2000

So India has joined China in the one billion population club, a club that one hopes and assumes will remain limited to just two members for the next century or so.
So India has joined China in the one billion population club, a club that one hopes and assumes will remain limited to just two members for the next century or so.
From my experience, individuals in countries that contain a billion people invariably hate it. "If we had a fifth of the population," Chinese taxi drivers complain to me, "we'd each be five times richer." When I point out that they might be one of the four-fifths to vanish, I am generally dismissed as a small-nation meddler.
Nor does a visit to the Chinese countryside get you away from all this urban stress. Trundling for days on trains through eastern China, I get the impression that the villages are, if anything, more crowded than the cities. Oh look! A thousand people digging a ditch! And look, another thousand bending over in that paddy field! Factories smoking, scaffolding swarming. Forget about nice quiet Sunday afternoons canoodling with pandas in the shade of old bamboo groves. Life in the hectic Chinese countryside, I find, is geared solely towards the goal of escaping to the tranquillity of big cities - in short, escaping from the stresses of overcrowding and poverty to the elysium of hair salons and traffic lights. Are these the miseries that India now has in store? Perhaps, except that from the point of view of the country's leaders, a billion people can look rather more advantageous. People pay more attention to the prime minister of India or the president of China than to the prince of Liechtenstein for example. You can raise a lot of taxes from a billion people.
You can build giant walls thousands of miles long, and palatial mausoleums for the wives of old emperors. You can win medals at Olympic Games and have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. You can exert a fascination over the rest of the world. Eventually you may also be able to pack other, smaller countries with your tourists.
Bearing this in mind, I wonder who will be next to join the billion population club? The United States? Unlike other contenders such as Indonesia or Brazil, the USA will at least be able to afford it, except that the USA with a billion people also sounds scarily like a country that would have eliminated any need for the rest of the world to exist at all.
And Europe? With the birth rate per person heading rapidly towards zero? It is a weird thing, but I have calculated that you could - allowing an average of one square metre of space for each person (something like a gigantic Glastonbury festival)- pack the entire populations of China and India into an area of 2,000 square kilometres. What this presumably means is that there is not yet any reason for the prince of Liechtenstein to give up hope of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
So India has joined China in the one billion population club, a club that one hopes and assumes will remain limited to just two members for the next century or so.


From my experience, individuals in countries that contain a billion people invariably hate it. "If we had a fifth of the population," Chinese taxi drivers complain to me, "we'd each be five times richer." When I point out that they might be one of the four-fifths to vanish, I am generally dismissed as a small-nation meddler.


Nor does a visit to the Chinese countryside get you away from all this urban stress. Trundling for days on trains through eastern China, I get the impression that the villages are, if anything, more crowded than the cities. Oh look! A thousand people digging a ditch! And look, another thousand bending over in that paddy field! Factories smoking, scaffolding swarming. Forget about nice quiet Sunday afternoons canoodling with pandas in the shade of old bamboo groves. Life in the hectic Chinese countryside, I find, is geared solely towards the goal of escaping to the tranquillity of big cities - in short, escaping from the stresses of overcrowding and poverty to the elysium of hair salons and traffic lights. Are these the miseries that India now has in store? Perhaps, except that from the point of view of the country's leaders, a billion people can look rather more advantageous. People pay more attention to the prime minister of India or the president of China than to the prince of Liechtenstein for example. You can raise a lot of taxes from a billion people.


You can build giant walls thousands of miles long, and palatial mausoleums for the wives of old emperors. You can win medals at Olympic Games and have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. You can exert a fascination over the rest of the world. Eventually you may also be able to pack other, smaller countries with your tourists.


Bearing this in mind, I wonder who will be next to join the billion population club? The United States? Unlike other contenders such as Indonesia or Brazil, the USA will at least be able to afford it, except that the USA with a billion people also sounds scarily like a country that would have eliminated any need for the rest of the world to exist at all.


And Europe? With the birth rate per person heading rapidly towards zero? It is a weird thing, but I have calculated that you could - allowing an average of one square metre of space for each person (something like a gigantic Glastonbury festival)- pack the entire populations of China and India into an area of 2,000 square kilometres. What this presumably means is that there is not yet any reason for the prince of Liechtenstein to give up hope of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.