A Red Country in Blue Eyes

In an office converted from an old factory workshop in the 798 Art Zone in a northeastern suburb of Beijing…a bare brick wall, dangling staircases hanging over a couch and some big “Welcome to Beijing” scripts all hinted at the location of this famous art space. But what makes this room different from all the other art studios is that it is, in fact, a newsroom, the office of Jonathan Watts, The Guardian correspondent in Beijing.

Jonathan Watts has been in the Chinese capital for almost five years. As he rolled his picture archives on his computer screen, memories of the places he had visited in China and written about unfold: coal mines, AIDS and stricken villagers, the Three Gorges Dam, the ultra modern new National Grand Theatre, and the Qinghai–Tibetan Railway.

He came to China in August 2003. Not long afterward, his mother came and he went to Beijing Capital International Airport to meet her. She came through after collecting her luggage, gave her son a hug and looked around nervously, whispering to her son: “Can we talk here?”

“That was what China was in the minds of people of my mother’s generation – a secretive communist-controlled empire, and that image survives even well after the millennium,” Watts said. “That’s why I believe you have to see a country for yourself.”

His handset rang while he was talking with a group of students majoring in journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He searched all over for the ringing phone, and then started to talk into the phone in fluent Japanese with some British accent.

 Watts now lives in Beijing with his Japanese wife and two daughters. Before coming to China he had been posted in Tokyo by The Guardian for seven years. “Japan understands China better than Europe does,” he said. “The Japanese, including the Japanese media, have come to realize that China is becoming the big story of the 21st century. That’s why I took the opportunity to work here.”

Watts still remembers his editor’s words 10 years ago when he joined The Guardian as a freelance writer: Journalism is about people. “China has more people than any other country in the world, so even in mathematical terms alone, it would be a great place for a journalist,” said Watts, grinning.

He said to be a journalist was in fact the last of the three alternatives he had planned for himself as a child. He had dreamed of playing football for England, “but David Beckham has already done that for me.” Then he wanted to be a sort of James Bond, but he ended up as a journalist. He was once a teacher after graduating from the University of Manchester, but he dropped the job because, he said, “It’s just because I am more comfortable writing than talking.”

But Watts, like many other Beijing-based foreign correspondents, especially those from the West, is often blamed for “tarnishing” China’s image. Sometimes, he continued, they were seen as “anti-China” because of the kind of stuff they write about China. But he insisted that they also write negative reports about their own countries. “For better or for worse the western tendency is to write negative reports,” he argued. “The theory is to find what is wrong, tell people about it, and hopefully it can be fixed.”

Watts was once interviewed by China Radio International. The first question put to him was: Why do foreign correspondents hate China so much?

“We don't hate China, of course. Some of our peers really love China, and love being in China,” he said, he who gave himself the Chinese name “Hua Zhong,” literally meaning “loyal to China.”

 “When you have to give an image of China, maybe one is this strong, frightening, powerful China—old-fashioned, communist,” he said. “And that’s still definitely part of it. But there is also this very friendly, happy, fast-developing modern China. And one of the big challenges for a foreign journalist is to get the balance between the two.”

“There are two sides, and we have to try to show them both,” Watts asserted. He went on searching his “photo gallery” on a notebook computer. There are melting glaciers for an article he wrote about global warming, along with pictures of Qinghaihu Lake on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, the “roof of the world,” which he took for articles about the deteriorating eco-conditions in China’s vast west. Those dismal-looking factory buildings in 798 Art District form a sharp contrast with the gleaming Terminal 3 of the Beijing Capital International Airport, and the neat rows of villas at Huanxi Village, Jiangsu Province, the most prosperous rural village in China, a showcase of China’s effort to develop a “New Socialist Countryside.”

Watts said that his biggest weakness is with the Chinese language. He is taking two to three Chinese lessons a week, though the four tones of the Chinese language are completely turning him around. But he said he wouldn’t give up, hoping he would eventually become niubi in Chinese. All over Watts’ office wall stuck pieces of paper with Chinese sayings on them, making it look like home to language-learning toddlers. One bears the time-honoured Chinese proverb: “Rely on our parents when at home, and on your friends when away.”

Yes, it is indeed difficult to learn Chinese but, when he was back in Britain, many colleagues told him that they were learning this language, which is “semantically rich but phonetically impoverished.” Some even confronted him with this question: “When are you coming back?”

“Obviously they want to go and work in Beijing,” he said.

             

  A “cultural deficit” to fill

 

Before 1999, Hong Kong was The Guardian’s base for its coverage of China. But nine years ago, the base was moved to Shanghai and then in 2003, to Beijing. Watts chose his present office in the 798 Art District, where a bevy of modern Chinese artists live and work.

“798 was a place that knocked me over,” says Watts about why he chose to live among Chinese artists. 798 flourished on the past life of a run-down State-owned factory where Cultural Revolution (1966–76) slogans painted in red can still be seen.

“When I saw that place I thought China is really going to do spectacular great things, not just make lots of products,” Watts said. He said everybody in the outside world wants to buy Chinese products. “But not everybody wants Chinese ideas or the Chinese culture. In terms of manufactured goods, you sell so much more than you buy. But in terms of cultural products, you buy ten times more than you sell. So there is a cultural deficit.”

Meanwhile, he cited things that are changing. From 2004 to 2005, Chinese contemporary art sales went up 10 times at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Works by Chinese contemporary artists topped US$1 million and then hardly a year later Chinese contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong's oil painting scroll “Displaced Population and Three Gorges” doubled the previous record. “China is becoming more important culturally, and the outside will consider buying more of its culture,” he said. 

 

The Olympics—the coming-of-age parade

 

The forthcoming Beijing Olympics is shaping almost everyone’s life in China, and Watts is no exception. Eight months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, The Guardian head office is sending two more correspondents to China. “Then I won't be lonely,” Watts joked. “The Olympics will change the world’s view of China for sure, but maybe it would also change China’s view of itself.”

Watts was most satisfied at a special issue of The Guardian about the Beijing Olympics. “I did it,” he said. For those articles and photos in that issue, he interviewed 18 people, ranging from taxi drivers, hotel waiters to athletes and Olympic officials, as well as architects involved in construction of those Olympic-specific venues, the “Water Cube” and the “Bird’s Net.”

“I tried to give an idea of how the Olympics is changing people’s lives,” he said.

Among the 30-odd construction workers Watts has interviewed so far, one had spent 10 years in Shanghai building over a dozen high-rise buildings before coming to Beijing for the Olympic construction. Near his improvised dormitory is the Lujiazui Financial Centre in Pudong, a “Wall Street” of Shanghai style, “a hustling luxury neighbourhood with Gucci and champagne.”

“That reminds me of the British Industrial Revolution,” he said. “What is different is that Britain took almost a century to complete the process and China, in just a few decades.”

In China, Watts concluded, “I am experiencing history.”