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My week began with a 30-steel-storey fire across my street and a visit to China’s countryside in a bus led by police cars flashing red lights and halting highway traffic until we passed.

Life in China often feels like living in a well-directed reality show. Your senses stay on alert to try and distinguish between the spontaneous and the staged.

The Huaming museum depicts life before farmers exchanged their land and huts for apartments. (Photo by Reshma Patil)

That was my lingering experience last Monday, when officials of a new Chinatown called Huaming invited two busloads of foreign journalists to visit their ’socialist countryside’.

Next year, if you travel to Shanghai for the World Expo, you too will meet some of the ‘peasants’ who lived in little mud huts on marshland overrun with weeds, where they hunted wild ducks for dinner.

Then someone came up with the idea of exchanging their residential land for apartments. The peasants (who had not heard of the farmers of Singur in West Bengal or the slum-dwellers in Mumbai’s leopard-infested national park) agreed.

By 2007, there was no trace of the wilderness except in the town’s museum with clay huts and statues of poor people. A very quiet and seemingly empty town was born, with brown and white centrally heated apartment blocks, extremely wide boulevards, schools, clinics, and shops for about 45,000 people from 12 villages. A vast swathe was earmarked as farmland and a separate industrial zone is expected to create 2.8 lakh jobs. About 16,000 farmers were trained in industrial and business skills.

China's latest town is built on wetland in the countryside (Photo by Reshma Patil)

I had to see this for myself.

To reach Huaming, we travelled for two hours on the highway from Beijing to the port city of Tianjin that wants to be the modern-day Shenzhen of the 1980s and Shanghai’s Pudong of the 1990s. But Tianjin has none of the frenetic pace of these two mega cities, and its graduates still migrate to Beijing to earn a decent living.

At Tianjin, the officials offloaded us at a shopping street dating to 1327, with KFC opposite its north entrance. The police urged residents who were celebrating the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday to stand back and make way for us. We were thus escorted into the street while the rest of Tianjin stared.

On normal days, a foreign journalist in Beijing spends time faxing invisible powers for permission for interviews. The Chinese customarily don’t say no, so they mostly don’t reply. Spokespersons don’t answer listed cellphone numbers. You cannot enter a government ministry just to have tea with a talkative source. Obscure officials in obscure villages also ignore my requests to visit.

China's latest town is built on wetland in the countryside. (Photo by Reshma Patil)

This was not a normal day.

After another 13 km on an empty highway, we reached the residential area of Huaming. The entire town was on the road to greet us, ordinary journalists on assignment. We were asked to walk through a row of ladies waving silk scarves to music. Families waved through the windows. I tried to wander but somebody told me to please follow the pack. I wondered how they would react if I returned the next week on a real reporting assignment.

Inside a conference room, we watched a five-minute video advertising the town’s transformation, that has led 15 nations to send delegations to Huaming. The rest of Tianjin is also planning new towns on the Huaming model. The video showed smiling couples, tall buildings and wide roads, but gave few details about the new economic plan and how it remains sustainable. Nobody explained how the farmers came to own gleaming cars and flat-screen television sets. As the video ended, our escorts ushered us out before we could ask questions.

Somebody led me into an apartment where an old lady called Zhao, dressed in gold jewellery, taught me how to fold a dumpling. Nice, but my notepad was empty when I got back on the bus and two traffic police cars escorted us till the end of the Huaming country road.

PS: The week ended well. On Saturday, I finally found idlis (pani puri even) at a daylong Indian bazaar in a Beijing schoolroom packed with enough smiling Non Resident Indians to make it look like a Karan Johar movie set.

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Posted by Reshma Patil on Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 7:23 pm 
Filed under China · Tagged Beijing, China, Chinatown, Huaming, shanghai

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