China café

Chinese urban society is reaching a turning point. City dwellers are beginning to think about returning to the countryside. Not to live and work—who’d want to be a peasant again?—but just for the weekend.

It is a gradual process (unusually for China) and it would have been unthinkable a few years ago. As often predicted, the country’s emerging middle class has embraced consumer culture, acquiring first a television, next a washing machine, then a fridge, and more recently a satellite dish, car and iPhone. And now, in a more surprising and less noticed shift, they want to return to the place their poor forebears spent centuries struggling to escape from, or where their parents “learned from the peasants” during the cultural revolution.

Condominiums are appearing in the foothills of Moganshan. They are ugly and badly sited but are selling fast, regarded as investments as much as weekend retreats.

Five years ago, a friend brought his young Shanghainese staff here for a corporate retreat. They asked three questions: what television channels were there, was there any seafood, and why the hell would anyone want to live in such a backwater?



A couple of days ago, I was walking in the woods and ran into a bunch of young Shanghainese, in Moganshan for a corporate getaway. We chatted and then moved on. In the wintry stillness of the forest I heard one of them say:

“Wow. That foreigner sure has found a nice place to live.”

The perfect couple

The young couple looked very much in love. They sat in a corner of the coffee shop and stared into each other’s eyes almost the entire day. They declined to move to a table for dinner, choosing to stay on their sofa, away from the other guests.

I did some gentle prodding and found out they had just become engaged. They were both “overseas Chinese”—brought up outside the country. They had known each other for years and kept in touch while he studied in Britain and she in the US.

Now he was managing a factory in Shanghai while she worked for a law firm in Beijing. They were both charming. The wedding will take place early this year, in Singapore, where her family live. I thought to myself that they will make a perfect married couple, although it seemed that they will continue to live apart.

On the second day, the man slipped into the kitchen for a couple of shots of vodka. It turned out that she disapproved of him drinking. His plea for secrecy was disarmingly honest and impossible to refuse. While he was smoking outside, I spoke to the woman and liked her even more.

On the third day they came to say goodbye. Then the bride-to-be left and the man stayed behind to settle the tab. I offered my congratulations on the wedding and told him I hoped to see them again soon.

“Oh, I’ll be back,” he said, “but with my girlfriend.” Then he laughed and left.

A land without pop music

I took advantage of the quiet winter to sort out my music collection. I have a large collection of Chinese rock CDs that includes unmarked releases from musician friends. I used to be a keen observer of the scene when I published city listings magazines.

Listening to the CDs brought back happy memories of concerts and late-night drinking sessions. Yet they also made me sad. It’s been years since I bought a Chinese music CD. This is partly because I am out of touch with the scene. But it is also because, outside of a small circle of people, most of them in Beijing, there is no interest in popular music, and thus no market or motivation to create it.

Ten years ago I used to joke that in Shanghai, a city of 16m people, there was one rock band and it had never released an album. Now I can wryly complain that in a country of 1.3bn people, there is no popular music at all. You can find albums for sale in dark corners of the bookshops in my local town, but the CDs are imported from the west, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. In China, teenagers never ask each other “What’s your favourite band?”

Leaving aside the well-known piracy issue, the underlying problem was recently demonstrated by a television show. A new drama series about the property market that achieved sky-high ratings was banned because it might “upset social stability.”

If a soap opera about real estate is deemed too exciting for the masses, what hope is there for rock music?