Travel: Beijing

Sunday night at the Workers’ Stadium – or, if you want to be pedantic, in the empty car park outside. Passers-by on the main road to the Sanlintun bar district a couple of miles north-east of Beijing’s Forbidden City can hear the music even above the cacophony of the evening traffic.

A few westerners reflexively reach for their cameras.

I don’t blame them. The first night I saw the dancers, I did too.

We had spent the day at the Great Wall. Yes, of course it’s amazing. Your jaw will drop at its monumentality, your sense of awe will be struck and flabber ghasted. You can walk up to the sentry stations high up on the Juyong Pass, and watch it winding over and along the mountain ridges in front of you for miles ahead. Then again, anything that comes with guidebooks attached can at least be relatively easily understood.

Same with the Forbidden City the day before. Again, it is enormous. Room for 6,000 soldiers behind its high walls, along with a whole court and the half-god at its core, his concubines and his eunuchs. All the crafts of empire, all the administration, a civilisation spread by order of the unforgeable imperial seal.

Or the Summer Palace. The tour guide will give you the dates of the dynasties. They will swim briefly in your mind and disappear. You’ll remember the odd things: the Dowager Empress poisoning her nephew just before she died. Her orders to break all the ice in the palace lake – the size of Loch Katrine – so he couldn’t skate across to the island prison of the concubine who was his one true love. Click, and it’s in the album, and you’ll have forgotten about it completely by the next time you look.

All three are world heritage centres, all magnificent, imposing, worth a visit. All come with tourist shops attached and vendors shrilly begging you to at least come inside and look. But let me take you instead to the Workers’ Stadium car park, because in a way, it’s more interesting.

Take the underground (20p anywhere in Beijing) to Dongsi Shitao station. Get out and walk three blocks to the 72,000-seater stadium. Outside, look at the gridlocked urban ringroad (Beijing has six), cutting-edge architecture, five-star westernised hotels, a McDonald’s, vast shopping malls, and a BMW dealership. There’s even a country club in gardens at the back of the stadium, where bored chauffeurs wait beside limos while their bosses enjoy the finer fruits of capitalism inside. On the other side of the ground is the Mix nightclub where the dukuans (big moneys) party ecstatically with their xiaomis (little honeys). There’s a gay nightclub nearby. The football team that plays in the stadium – Hyundai Gouo’an – even has its own small hooligan problem, and you can’t get more westernised than that.

Now imagine all of this just 35 years ago, when Mao died. A workforce dressed in either blue or khaki. No urban motorways, but mule trains coming in from the countryside with food for the next day’s markets. Hardly any cars, only masses of bicycles. No western fashions, drugs, burger chains, adverts, shopping malls, music, architecture. And, in the Workers’ Stadium, crowds watching denunciations and executions instead of a football team playing rigged matches in a corrupt league.

Can you imagine all that? Really? Because I can’t. I’d try to tell my 19-year-old son, who was with me, that Beijing wasn’t always the kind of place it is now, but where is the evidence? Tiananmen Square, obviously, so we went to see Mao’s embalmed corpse there (my son’s first dead body, though some people think it’s a waxwork). The police museum, because it has fascinating photos about counter-revolutionary plots, like the failed 1950 attempt to wipe out Mao and his top officials in a mortar attack. The National Museum, for its social-realist paintings of Mao being heroic (all the real art treasures were looted long ago by the Chinese Nationalists and the British before them).

But where else could I show him Communist Beijing or what a totalitarian country looks like? Not by pointing out masses of armed policemen because there weren’t too many of them and all the ones I saw (soldiers too) weren’t armed. Obviously the state’s power remains everywhere, but apart from our tour guide’s reluctance to talk politics, you’d hardly see any sign of it. Quite the opposite: the Beijing we saw was as capitalist as Manhattan – maybe even more so, from the advertising in the tunnels between underground stations to the giant billboards like the one above the Workers’ Stadium.

So here’s another question. If China has shrugged off the trappings of its communist past so quickly, has it ditched any attachment to its pre-communist history too? In the National Museum, after all, exhibits used to be categorised as either “primitive”, “slave”, “feudal” or “semi-colonial”. And if you’ve been taught for 50 years that the past is worthless in comparison to the glorious present, doesn’t that mean that the future is going to be materialistic and entirely rootless too?

I don’t know about that. The crowds at the tourist sites are all Chinese, and at the Buddhist temples (banned to westerners within the last decade) too. And then there are the parks....

I love Beijing’s parks. They are exquisitely designed, planted and maintained, but never seem to get too crowded. There is, I am told, no word for “privacy” in China, so it is not unusual to walk by park lakes and hear opera singers practising their arias or choirs gathering to sing – not for any audience, just for the joy of song itself. Sometimes, you’ll come across people writing calligraphy on the paths in water – the words last about a minute before fading in the sunlight – or kite-fliers, staring serenely upwards at the dots they have made in the sky. Even in the consumerist rush, even in a city of 22 million souls, there are such blissful moments of tranquillity.

The dancers gather in the Workers’ Stadium car park every night at about 7pm. We’d stroll down the boulevard to watch them when we could. There were about three dozen of them, mostly women aged between 30 and 60. I can’t tell you who they were or what sort of music they were dancing to except that it was Chinese and not particularly flamboyant. Their dances weren’t demanding either: simple box steps, turns and arabesques. They weren’t showing off or dancing for anyone else other than each other. I loved that.

Why? Maybe I’m just an old counter-revolutionary who’s not wild about consumerism. Maybe I just adore people singing and dancing for its own sake and not for applause. And maybe it’s just that I love paradox and I love not being able to understand a country most of all. China, I just know, would take me years.

The women were dancing in the shadow of a giant social-realist statue of a muscular worker and female gymnast staring meaningfully into a new dawn. That stadium behind them had seen the deaths of enemies of the revolution but had also seen the first western pop group perform in China: Wham! In 1985. It was the time of Careless Whisper.

Consumerism hasn’t conquered everything in China yet, and the dancers are living proof. I hope they’re still there the next time I’m passing through.

THE FACTS David Robinson travelled to China with The Travel Department, which offers 9-night holidays in Beijing with departures from Edinburgh from £655 in March to £805 in April and 11-night holidays in Beijing and Xi’an at £1,329. Prices include flights, accommodation in five-star hotels, breakfasts and evening meals and listed excursions. Tel: [phone], www.thetraveldepartment.co.uk

Nine and 11-night escorted tours with flights from Edinburgh from £1149pp www.thetraveldepartment.co.uk/scotsman