Calling the people

My final exam in my history IGCSE, which I took only a week ago, was on the Cold War, from the end of WWII up until the 1960s. This was paired with a unit on the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Feeling, as all 16 year olds do, masters of the subjects they have just taken, I was glad to experience life in a  real communist country, having missed the relative excitement of the 1980s!

I must profess, whilst I spent two years studying communism, it was only of the Soviet variety, and so my communist knowledge comes from its relation to Russia and several books (Balzak and the Chinese Seamstress is one) I read along the way. I have very little practical or concrete knowledge, only general themes and vague ideas of the reforms put in by Mao.  My experiences, therefore, are just passing observations and comments, and they are as follows...

• Digital hiccups 

Our stay in China has been hampered a little by a state firewall, called “the great fire”.  Most Western email providers, social media apps and other means of communicating aren't available.  To download anything, we must search for it in Chinese on BaiDu (Chinese Google-alternative). Sounds easy, right? Well, to search in Chinese, you need a Chinese keyboard - which conveniently, our Korean phone doesn’t have. So, we had to search for an app in Chinese to download the Chinese keyboard to search for apps.... vast copy and paste challenges ensued. 

• Loudspeaker Address Systems

Something that seemed to derive from Orwell was a series of public loudspeakers in the Temple of Heaven Park. They played relaxing Chinese music and seemed to broadcast announcements and poetry. The Chinese was too fast to catch for me, but I'm told that it was the same in the USSR - governmental advice and phrases, including aphorisms for encouraging better personal health, all for the benefit of the public workforce. 

• Slogans and graffiti

You'll find a variety of slogans pinned up in public street corners. Signs read: “If we all care for each other in the community we can keep each other safe” with hammer and sickle. These community messages are spliced with little entrepreneurial adverts scrawled in the corners. Below, somebody seems to have started an informal business selling dogs - a different price for the different sizes. 

If you’re interested, a large dog is 60元, or £6 roughly, a “medium” dog is 40元， and a small dog is 15元。