The Hindu : Chinese lifestyle goes Western

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 01, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Chinese lifestyle goes Western

By C. Raja Mohan

BEIJING, MARCH 31. Who says Communist-led cities have to be dour? Go, take a walk on Sanlitun in Central Beijing on weekend nights. Sanlitun radiates the youthful vigour of the new Beijing. Littered with an unending row of bars and pubs, Sanlitun draws in hordes of upwardly mobile Chinese youth and the Western expatriates in a resounding endorsement of China's drive to globalise. At the Poacher's, one of the many bars with British sounding names, there is no standing room. If you manage to take a step through the door into the bar, a blast of secondary smoke hits you. But no one is complaining; for the music, drinks and clean fun are too good to miss.

If you are too old to stand all night at the Poacher's, there are any number of other picks that offer Chinese singers doling out Western music from the 1960s and 1970s. And there are Jazz bars too! Unlike the major metros of India, where Western executives complain of the lack of places offering normal fun, Beijing and other cities in China appear more integrated with the Western and now international lifestyle.

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What about the morning after Sanlitun? You join the hordes of Chinese and foreign tourists in the national pastime of shopping. When you enter Xiujielu or the Silk Alley, be prepared for a touch of claustrophobia.

The nearly mile-long Silk Alley is less than 10 feet wide, with shops and aggressive saleswomen pushing every possible garment — from clothing for infants to mackintoshes for men. Every designer label you know of is at prices that make you swoon. It is nearly impossible to stand still in the middle or move across to the other side; for the stream of customers can just push you down. Bargaining is an art in the Silk Alley and hordes of other shopping areas in Beijing. One good rule of the thumb, resident Indians here say, is to start by offering to pay one-fifth of the salesgirl's first quote. But that is just the beginning — an initial throwaway line.

The real bargaining begins when you start walking away from the shop, and are called back. And communication is no real problem. Most salesgirls do speak a smattering of English; but since when has language come in between those who want to buy and sell?

Before they are satisfied, the buyer and seller must go through the full charade of quoting the "best price'' the two sides have to offer — many times over. In the end, the smart customer gets products at unbelievably low prices and the salesgirl is happy, if unconsciously demonstrating China's current incredible dominance in manufacturing reasonable quality goods at low cost.

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The Chinese Government has once again shown its ability to take quick decisions. The very day the first direct flight from New Delhi landed here, Beijing announced that India would now be among the list of preferred destinations for Chinese tourists.

That should let tour operators in China bring large numbers of newly prosperous Chinese to India. Chinese tourists and Indian shoppers might indeed from a new bridge between the two societies.

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In his meeting with the External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, the Chinese Premier, Zhu Rongji, talked about promoting "comprehensive understanding'' between the two societies. Tourism is certainly one way of doing it. But New Delhi and Beijing should look beyond shopping expeditions and tourist flights to encouraging systematic studies of the other society.

Here India is way behind China. As the subcontinent's profile rises on China's radar screen, Beijing has set up two new South Asia Study Centres — one in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province that lies so close to eastern India and another in Beijing under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. India needs to get its own academic act on China together.

It is also time to think of setting up an India-China foundation with resources from the Government and the private sector to promote Chinese studies in India and encourage young Indian scholars to spend quality time in China.

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