Stephan Orth - High Tech and Hot Pot: Revealing Encounters Inside the Real China

Copyright 2020 by Stephan Orth

English translation copyright 2020 by Jamie McIntosh

Originally published in German as Couchsurfing in China: Durch die Wohnzimmer der neuen Supermacht by Stephan Orth 2019 Piper Verlag GmbH, Mnchen/Berlin

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-562-1 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-77164-564-5 (epub)

Copy editing by Shirarose Wilensky

Proofreading by Alison Strobel

Cover and text design by Fiona Siu

Cover photographs by Stephan Orth and Stefen Chow

Photo credits: Stephan Orth, except for the photo on

Stephan Orth/Pitu app; and the photo on Stefen Chow.

Map by Birgit Kohlhaas

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

CONTENTS

For Xiao Bai

A grandpa and his grandson admire the view from a hill. The grandson says: The neon lights are pretty because they make the city colorful. The grandpa replies: Before there were neon lights people could see the stars, which was much prettier.

Write an essay on this subject.

An exercise for teenagers preparing for the gaokao exams for university acceptance in the province of Liaoning

12 weeks

Total mileage 9,360 (15,063 km)

BY PLANE: 3,900 (6,276 km)

BY TRAIN: 3,300 (5,311 km)

BY BUS/CAR: 2,120 (3,412 km)

BY SHIP: 40 (64 km)

PREFACE

MY TRIP TO China took place many months before the whole world knew about a city called Wuhan. With 11 million inhabitants, it was one of those megacities that, for a long time, few people outside of China had ever heard of. In January 2020, I was following the events of the burgeoning pandemic from a distance. But since I had been to China recently, the footage of empty streets in huge cities, the thought of people stuck in those high-rise apartments I had visited, stuck for sixty or seventy days without being allowed to set foot outside even onceit all probably felt less far away for me than for people watching the news without firsthand experience of traveling in China.

I was still in contact with some of my friends from the trip and heard about their coronavirus experiences. You will meet some of them in this bookfor instance, Qing, a policewoman who works in a prison. Over email, she told me about her new working routines in the time of COVID-19: guards at the prison were divided into three groups. For the first two weeks, Group A stayed at home, and Group B went into quarantine in a separate guards unit with dorms, which they werent allowed to leave. Meanwhile, Group C, who had already completed the two-week quarantine, did the actual work in the prisonnot going home between shifts, of course. The groups take turns in this rotation, so that every employee spends four weeks isolated from their family and two weeks at home, all to make sure the inmates wont get the virus.

You will also meet the artist Lin, who managed to escape China after I visited her and now lives in another country (Im quite happy about this, as I felt her eagerness to speak up against the government was going to get her in trouble). Recently, I saw some of her social media posts where she criticized China for holding back important facts about human-to-human transmission of the virus.

Another Chinese friend from Beijing (she is not mentioned in the book) started writing a corona diary on Facebook. She has chronicled her anger about the mistakes in the Chinese response and the governments lack of transparency. On February 1, she wrote about the problem of the lack of supplies in hospitals. On February 3, she posted a photo of a line in front of a restaurant where people stood ten feet apart from each other. Three days later, she posted a photo of a completely empty intersection on a weekday along one of Beijings busiest roads. Then, on February 11, she advised her readers to wear a mask and stay healthy, later adding she couldnt believe how slow Western countries were in implementing compulsory masks. Her accounts were like a window into the future and gave me the chance to adapt much more quickly to the changes that became a reality in Europe and North America just a few weeks later. There is something weirdly symbolic about this: my trip to China, the trip you are going to read about, also felt a lot like a look into the future, mainly in terms of high-tech development, surveillance and modern autocratic leadership.

Ive always known it is a good thing to travel and learn from the experiences of people in other countries. But only since COVID-19 wreaked havoc around the world have I realized that such knowledge can actually save lives.

STEPHAN ORTH, May 2020

ARRIVING IN THE FUTURE

IM RACING THROUGH a labyrinth of skyscrapers made of glass and concrete in a flying car. The sky is black and the windows glow coldly; instead of streets, neon light beams show the way. I hear the sound of a horna strange old-fashioned soundand react with a lightning-fast maneuver upwards. Just in time, as I avoid colliding with an approaching flying object that looks like a cargo train. An LED traffic sign displays some information: October 21, 2052, 9:45, 23 degrees Celsius, rain.

Suddenly, a flying black convertible sports car with a huge skull decorating the trunk overtakes me. The driver has a human head with an eye patch and the body of a robot. He brakes right in front of me and shoots a ray at me from his arm that envelops my passenger, dragging her into his car. She has pink eyes and hair, and the metallic limbs of a robots body.

He accelerates and I follow him through the canyons between the buildings and across a black lake reflecting the cyan lights of the city. A couple of police jets come to my aid, swishing left and right around me and ramming the bad guys flying machine. He nose-dives and his passenger tumbles out, but with another lightning-fast maneuver and a plucky hand-grip, I can save her.