China cafe: hunting wild boar

There are men with guns on the streets. It is the hunting season. The men work in pairs. One holds the gun while the other acts as spotter, and smokes cigarettes. When the shooter wants a cigarette, they swap over. The prey is bamboo partridge, of which there are plenty, or (more rarely) pheasant. They don’t shoot songbirds—other men catch and sell those.

The village’s top shot is Lao Xu. He is a wily hunter—even if he once shot one of his dogs by mistake. Following a heavy snowfall, he goes after wild boar with his surviving dogs. The scent is easy to find, and the dogs chase the boar into a snowdrift where Lao Xu can walk up to it and pop it in the head. “Then I have to call up my mates to help me carry the carcass out of the hills. That’s the hard part,” he says.

Last season Lao Xu invited me to go with him. I think he actually wanted my dog Charlie, who has a real talent for finding partridge. Just to be on the safe side, Lao Xu mentioned to the police chief that he would be taking me hunting. I got a call immediately. “No foreigner is allowed a gun in China,” the chief said. “Forget it.”

This year Lao Xu says it’s OK, he had a quiet word. But we can’t go far. He suggested the back of the mountain, where the bush is thick with partridge. But that also happens to be right under the military installation which I prefer not to talk about. I assume that the guards are armed.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’d rather not be a foreigner with a gun in that bit of China.”

Out with the old

Winter is also the building and renovation season in Moganshan. Usually, the cheap, flimsy and faded interiors of hotel rooms are ripped out and replaced with brand new, cheap, flimsy interiors.

This year, however, there are some major works. A showpiece state-run hotel has been demolished and rebuilt in almost exactly the same ugly shape and layout as before, but with the addition of the village’s first lift. It is an external glass affair and you could enjoy a stunning view if there wasn’t a large sycamore in the way.

A new spring water plant is being built, at a slightly lower altitude than the original plant which is now to become a hotel. It has been moved because the delivery trucks have trouble on the steep approach road when there is snow and ice. The new location also has a steep approach road, but it is assumed—perhaps rather optimistically—that the 50-metre difference in elevation will put it below the snowline.

Another popular, semi-state hotel, housed in three charming and historic villas, has been gutted and modernised. When I humbly suggested to the architect that he include some public spaces for relaxation, as a western retreat hotel would, he told me, “Oh but it will have public spaces. I have a karaoke parlour.”

Finally, one of my favourite old villas, built by missionaries in the late 1890s and used as offices by certain officials until it fell into disrepair, has had its wooden-slatted, upside-down boat-type upper floor surgically removed and straight concrete walls put up in its place. The charming old wooden windows are all aluminium now.

It makes you want to shoot someone.

Rejected by piers morgan

I hear that I didn’t make the cut for Piers Morgan’s programme on Shanghai, which aired on ITV in January. Obviously my interview by him wasn’t quite such essential viewing as Gordon Brown’s. Although Morgan said he was delighted with the interview, and the director said I was the “dissenting voice” he was looking for, I gather that the producers decided it didn’t fit with the frothy image of the show. I can’t wait to see the programme anyway, for the masochistic pleasure of viewing yet another example of the western media making the China story fit their fantasy. If Piers utters the words “Mao would be spinning in his grave…” I reserve the right to never advertise our coffee shop on ITV.

An online business publication interviewed me by email soon after my non-appearance on television. It was looking for my advice on weighty matters such as the Chinese economy, how to set up a business here as a foreigner, and so on. I gave it to them straight, but, as one does, I tried to leaven my pessimism with humour. I just heard back from the editor. Ironically, my replies were deemed too frothy.

It seems I’m condemned to be a voice in the wilderness. It’s just as well I live there.