In the Danger Zone (35 page)

It's an authentic Disney French-Chinese folly full of cheesy baroque statues and lots of shiny faux-gold light fittings. As I enter this ersatz Disneyland version of France, I'm struck by the acres of expensive marble and chintz.

China's President Hu Jintao has spoken of social inequality and corruption as the biggest threats to one-party rule. He is particularly nervous about unrest over the financial relationship between business and party officials, but that don't cut no ice with Zhang who asserts that, 'You can't receive high-profile guests in two-star hotels.' Quite so.

The hotel rooms in this weird place are vast and implausibly opulent – so implausibly opulent that the BBC budgets don't stretch to a night here (although I'm disheartened to learn that Channel Five were happy to pay for Paul Merton to stay here some time later). I wonder how on earth such a massive waste of cash has landed here somewhere north of the capital.

I wander around until I stumble across the back lobby, where three huge model villages are laid out, with a frightening crew of estate agents showing baseball-cap-wearing octogenarian Chinese couples and their sunglass-wearing brats around.

And then it all falls into place. The chateau is basically a white elephant that serves as the venue for gruesome weddings, corporate gigs and product launches for big, often Western, firms. Also, it serves as the centrepiece for a massive development of houses for the new rich of China. The models show a scary, Stepfordesque world of perfectly manicured lawns and closely packed mansions with tiny gardens. The brochure screams 'Find your Dream'.

These are homes for the burgeoning middle classes of China. Now, I wouldn't deny a bit of prosperity to anyone, let alone the previously desperate Chinese peasantry, but it just seems odd when the government of this bizarre country hangs onto the ideological label (and excuse for totalitarianism) of communism. This isn't politics any longer – it's hegemony, a way for the elite to assert control and retain power through patronage. This could be modern Russia, with its Tatchell-beating, ridiculously partisan appliance of justice and economic patriarchy. This, together with Penny's constant needling not to film or say anything even vaguely negative, is making me start to dislike China, and that wasn't the plan at all.

Zhang himself isn't in when I call at the chateau, so I meet his assistant, a lovely young lady by the name of Nancy. After a great deal of haggling she reluctantly lets me drive around the estate in the company golf cart (I've always loved driving electric vehicles). We fizz around the grounds chatting away, and Nancy is very happy to talk until I ask her if the land that the chateau is built on had been taken away from the peasantry, at which point her understanding of English suddenly collapses. This was just farmland, she says, as if that means it was wasteland.

Questions such as 'How does this extreme of wealth fit in with the principles of communism?' and 'How have people's lives changed over the last 20 years?' all fly into the ether, accompanied by the bad smell of political intransigence.

This might sound like an isolated case – there really aren't that many exact copies of French chateaux lying about the Chinese countryside – but it does highlight a huge, devastating problem for the majority of Chinese – the confiscation or rezoning of agricultural land to make way for development, industry or simply private ownership. Twenty per cent of agricultural land has been lost since 1949 due to soil erosion and economic development, which is catastrophic for ordinary people. Sadly, Penny and her Communist party friends didn't allow me to meet many ordinary people, so I can only imagine the worst for them. However, we do know that 70 million farmers have lost their land in the last decade and unemployment in the countryside has reached a staggering 130 million.

And as with many of these great leaps forward, there appears to be collateral damage here at the Chateau Zhang Lafitte. In the nearby village I find a chap called Li Chang who used to farm the land that the gaudy chateau now sits on. Penny is not happy about the meeting, but I somehow bully her into letting me speak to him. Li's a fabulous bloke, with eyebrows of such magnificent bushiness that he could compete at international level. He was kicked off his land to make way for the chateau and is clearly angry. He expects to be punished for speaking out against party-sponsored development, but says he is too old to care about the consequences.

In China, land has never been owned – at least not until now. Farmers would lease it from the state for 30 years at a time, with pretty much automatic renewal as long as you hadn't pissed off the party. Now, farmers are finding that they can't renew the lease, and that it's being handed over to business-minded party members or their friends. It's a woefully unfair system of patronage that smacks of wide-scale corruption.

Mr Li is angry that all the farmers in the village have lost their land, although as this is a high-profile rezoning, they have all been given some sort of compensation to try to avoid any unnecessary publicity, and the elderly residents receive $45 a month, which has left them much worse off as they now can't grow their own food and have to spend most of the money at the market. Li isn't happy with the money, or the way the state has treated him and his friends, and is one of the only people I meet in China willing to say so.

On the road behind the chateau I find a vast hoarding surrounding the building sites, covered in pictures of dreamy Barratt homes with neat grass and an SUV outside every door. And although it looks ridiculous, I feel mean criticizing it. We like to think that peasant farmers live in bucolic bliss, but that's a Wordsworthian Western ideal that none of the people here wants. They are desperate that their kids don't have to destroy their lives and their health farming and can instead have some level of prosperity. Few people in China want to be small-scale rice paddy workers for the simple reason that although it looks pretty to us, it's a shit life. It's no wonder that they aspire to cars, central heating and running water.

Do Not Speak to the Locals

My guidebook to Beijing leads me to the legendary Quanjude. Abandon hope all ducks who enter here. This place is a veritable temple to roast Peking duck. Sadly, it's also a temple to tourism that's both a marvel and a travesty, an ersatz version of China – a vast corporate slice of tacky pseudo-culture done up in revolutionary red, with crap chandeliers, golden swathes of polyester curtains, gaudy gold fittings, glowing lanterns, women in polyestered traditional costume (offset by wireless order pads) and more roasted ducks than you can shake a chopper at.

I open the menu and morph into Everytourist, squealing with delight at duck foot webs, grilled duck hearts and 'Authentic Whole Peking Duck'. My heart leaps with joy when I spot braised camel hump. I've never eaten camel's hump before.

The duck is theatrically carved at our table by a chef/waiter in an absurdly tall chefs hat and a face-mask. He's taciturn and wearily familiar with Western tourists' wide-eyed inquisitiveness, but he's an expert carver, and he chops our duck into the traditional (or so he tells us) 60 individual pieces. It's predictably sweet and crispy for the first few slices, then cloying after that. The fat is great but so rich that it's hard to taste anything else. Luckily I've also ordered a wickedly harsh rice liquor that strips the fat (and a fair portion of epidermis) from my palate so that I can try the duck webs and hearts. The webs are the size of butterflies, slightly rubbery and very cold, as though they've come straight from the fridge, hence they taste of nothing, although the texture is interesting – like edible Marigold gloves. Someone must have had a beast of a time stripping the webs from the legs, and it's a shame because their time seems to have been wasted.

The braised camel hump comes in chip-sized strips that have been slow-cooked then deep-fried in an eggy batter. They are delicious, a little like Spam, but in a good way. Less delicious are the gelatinous, braised mushrooms served, apparently, in a pond of frog vomit. Yuk.

Yan Yan and Penny get tipsy on a single beer, while I sink half a bottle of the vicious rice liquor. It's only on the way back to the hotel that I realize what happened to the other half, as Mr Hoo, our driver, hoons down the highways.

In a spirit of optimism I visit a vegetable market on the outskirts of the city to speak to some of the peasant farmers who drive in overnight with their produce, sleep in the city with their load until it's all sold, then drive home again. I should have known better, though, because when I get there I'm banned from talking to any truck drivers. It wouldn't paint China in a good light, apparently. Why can't I just go and speak to people? I ask Penny.

'You can't do that in China. It's just not the way it works and we don't want you painting a bad picture of our country.'

'But it would be a lie to show a sanitized version, wouldn't it? Come on, Penny, this is just a market and a bunch of farmers. You can come to my country and talk to anyone you want.'

But Penny doesn't get it. This is a country that's hosting the Olympics next year – what are they going to do when a million visitors wander around with their video cameras? What is wrong with these people? It's a f***ing vegetable market, not a military installation.

We persevere and meet up with the head of the market who, to Penny's exasperation, thinks it's a good chance to shake some hands. He takes us around to see a couple of new market buildings, and I try to speak to a couple of people selling their produce. I ask them where they've come from but the market head stops me and tells the people not to talk to me. 'I was only asking him about his bloody cauliflowers,' I say. But I'm not allowed to film.

This is ridiculous. I throw a journalist's pointless hissy fit at the market manager, who's bewildered but unimpressed, so I leave. I drop into the fish market, where I can film at will, but no one comes from rural China. I do get the chance to see carp being filleted, though. As soon as they are cut open, their float bladders balloon up and sit there like little fishy inflatables. Interesting, but hardly cutting edge.

I wander back to the city centre irritable and frustrated. It's not as though I'm asking particularly tricky questions or expecting to see the worst aspects of society – and I'm paying this annoying woman to be with me, so surely she could help me get to a story occasionally rather than just hinder me.

That night we all visit Little World hotpot restaurant. The system of eating in China is, unlike journalism, very interactive and inclusive, and the hotpot is the perfect example of this. We sit at a table and select from a menu that lists ingredients rather than dishes. We choose a variety of the stranger ones, and the waiter brings a large stockpot divided into two chambers, each filled with a different stock: one chilli hot and the other fragrant. This stockpot is set in a hole in the table, with a gas ring below that will keep it simmering throughout the meal. Into these stocks we throw a handful at a time of chicken gizzards, squid, chrysanthemum stalks, thin-sliced beef, water spinach, shiitake mushrooms, mutton – lettuce, dried bean curd skin, fried bean curd, aubergine with garlic, fish balls and tomatoes. We poach the ingredients to our liking, and scoff them down. Then we throw noodles into the pot to make noodle soup, and by the end of the meal we are stuffed to bursting.

Mr Hwong

I fly to Henan Province to try to get a feel for what's happening in rural communities. I hope that I'll be given a freer rein there, away from the power-base of Beijing.

Oh, how wrong I am.

I am met almost immediately by Mr Hwong and another minder who have been tasked with ensuring that we don't speak to . . . well, anyone really. It's additionally galling that I have to pay him as well as Penny – I've had to bring her with me and pay for her flights. Hwong drives us to our hotel, but Yan Yan whispers that he's taking us on a roundabout route to make sure that we don't see any poor parts of the city.

Hwong is good, blaming bureaucracy, shyness of the peasants, and all manner of delays, sudden sicknesses and interference from above for why we can't film . . . anything. Despite holding his arms out wide and claiming we can film anything we want, Hwong's basic attitude is to bore us into submission with red tape so that we just find it easier not to bother. That night I get slaughtered on strong rice liquor with him, and even though my glasses steam up with the liquor fumes, I never lose sight of my new-found enemy.

It takes quite a while to leave the hotel in the morning – our posse of minders have to bundle into separate cars, swap maps and lay down plans to avoid taking us anywhere that the party deems unacceptable for foreigners to see. The modern facade of prosperous China starts to crack the minute we leave the metropolis and we begin to take in the poverty of rural areas, but filming becomes unpleasant and desperately frustrating. The frustration is orchestrated by Hwong, who has an interesting approach to censorship: whenever I ask him anything he really doesn't like, he ignores me.

Hwong's task is to stop us filming anything that doesn't fit in with the Party image of a perfect, happy, wealthy country, and the fact that this sort of clumsy censorship makes China look ludicrous simply never occurs to him. Despite taking long, circuitous routes to try to avoid poor neighbourhoods, we spot lots of grim peasant shacks set back from the road, and each time I ask Hwong if we can stop, he doesn't even bother to reply.

Months before, Yan Yan had set off around Henan finding rural farmers that we could talk to, but she was accompanied throughout by local Communist party officials – and whenever she found someone talkative and interesting, the officials said 'No'. Instead Hwong and his cronies claim to have decided that we can visit a farmer that they've chosen.

This farmer must be very special because finding him is exceedingly difficult. We meet up with another carload of Communist party officials and everyone consults maps and haggles about exactly where he lives. There are now about 12 minders and officials with us. Eventually we arrive at a laughably cheesy Communist party-run model village. I am unsure why we're here, and my confusion deepens when Hwong drags us off to meet the official in charge of the village, who, for no apparent reason, takes me into a meeting-room filled with photos of him shaking hands with various higher-ranking party members.