Taipei and Beijing: Nibbling the World With Chopsticks

A month or so to the journey, a letter did arrive from him confirming that he has arranged a three day programme of visits to places of interest in and around Taipei, the capital, that will dovetail with the opening of the IPI congress on Sunday, September 25. We discussed the offer at our Executive […]

A month or so to the journey, a letter did arrive from him confirming that he has arranged a three day programme of visits to places of interest in and around Taipei, the capital, that will dovetail with the opening of the IPI congress on Sunday, September 25.

We discussed the offer at our Executive Management meeting, and in line with our policy, it was agreed that while I could accept the hospitality of the Taiwanese government for three days, the company would buy my ticket and there should be full disclosure when writing about my experience. The Taiwanese were happy with this arrangement and they also agreed to waive the visa fees for all the twenty or so delegates from Nigeria who attended the meeting.

As it turned out, I missed my flight due to the chaotic traffic that evening on the Abuja airport road and had to go to Lagos the following day to make another connection. That left me with only two days of tour, after I had spent two days of flying to reach Taipei the evening of Thursday, September 23. Though I was a little knackered after the long haul flight that took me from Lagos to Amsterdam, and then to Bangkok and Taipei, the prospect of encountering a completely new culture invigorated me, and I plunged into my now compressed program with enthusiasm.

At the airport to receive me was Mr Vincent Yang, a director in the Department of African Affairs of the Taiwanese Foreign Affairs Ministry. Mr Wang had served his country as a Trade Representative in many countries, among which are Malawi and Gambia in Africa. Taiwan, which China considers a break-away province, has full diplomatic relations with just a little over 20 countries, but their Commercial Representatives are Ambassadors in all but the name.

In the long car ride from the airport to the hotel and over dinner, Mr Wang and myself discussed developments in Africa. He did not know much about Nigeria, but he was particularly excited about the presidential election in Zambia, where the opposition candidate, Mr Sata was in the lead. President Sata (he eventually won with a respectable margin), had taken a position against the growing Chinese dominance of Zambia’s economy, which must have pleased the Taiwanese, but Mr Wang had also personally met the new president when he was envoy in neighbouring Malawi, which also gave him added pleasure.

My first appointment the following morning was a visit to the United Daily News, one of the oldest and biggest newspapers in Taiwan. UDN its a family newspaper which recently celebrated is 60th anniversary. One of it’s editors showed me around it’s modern newsroom where two things impressed me. The first is that the newspaper has achieved the ‘ convergence’ that has become the buzz word in media business. This means that it’s reporters and editor work together as one (increasingly small) team, in a state of the art newsroom, to produce a print edition, constantly update the online edition, as well as upload video clips as part of the digital edition.

The second aspect that surprised me is that a sizeable number of the reporters and top editors are women. Later, I will learn that this is not peculiar to UDN, but a common feature of most work places. Taiwan, like many developed countries is becoming a “Knowledge Economy” and women seem to have taken advantage of this, because it’s now a contest of brain not brawn! Later, during the IPI conference, which was attended by a large delegation of Taiwanese, it was not unusual to find on my left and right Taiwanese women with PhD’s in all sorts of subjects.

My first full introduction to the joy of eating in Tapei was during lunch at an elegant restaurant, hosted by Ambassador Samuel Chen, who is the Director-General of the African Affairs Department of the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry. I know that even at private dinners and in restaurants, it is not unusual to be served six or seven course meals. So, the solution, I told myself, is to politely skip some of the dishes. But the beauty of Chinese food is that each serving is small and it is also irressitable! So, in between the diplomatic talk and the insistence of my host, the food kept disappearing from the table!

But there were more meetings ahead of us, so Mr Yang and myself dashed out for our next appointment with the National Association of Small and Medium Enterprise. A dozen or so members of this association had gathered at their office to meet ‘the chairman’ of a Nigerian newspaper (like Nigerians, the Taiwanese are also sticklers for titles), and I hope I did not disappoint them! They made inquiries about trade prospects in Nigeria. They are very polite and well informed, but they must have quickly realised that this ‘chairman’ is a rookie when it comes to the wheeling and dealing of Nigerian business.

One obviously successful member of the Association, who swept into the meeting when we were more than half-way through, said he had made attempt to import diesel from Nigeria and had gone as far as opening a letter of credit, but his Nigerian partners failed to deliver at the last minute. He asked if I could be of help in this area. I told him I know next to nothing about the oil business in Nigeria, and I did not have a special ‘connection’ with the Presidency or Oil Ministry. But I did promise to spread the word, so over to you oil businessmen!!

I left the meeting admiring the determination and focus of the average Taiwanese. Located on a small island on the edge of the world, they have broken through their isolation to be a significant player in the world of business. One reason for this, which Taiwan itself and the world now takes for granted (remember when sub- standard foreign goods in Nigeria are dubbed “Taiwan”), is the focus on small and medium business. As the president of the Association said, thirty years ago, every house and farm was a small factory in Taiwan. People were busy making and selling things and slowly, but surely, wealth and skills were being created.

Some of these small companies (and the products we used to look down on), have become hugely successfully global brands. The irony is that Taiwnese products have become too sophisticated and therefore expensive for the average Nigerian consumer! So, we have turned to it’s big neighbour China, which caught the capitalist bug later than Taiwan, for cheap manufactured goods. This is what happens to countries that are preoccupied with consumption rather than production!

It is fitting that after my interaction with the small and medium size entrepreneurs, I should visit the Hsinchu Science Park, which points to the future for Taiwanese business. The Science Park is a vast complex on the outskirts of Taipei, established and nurtured by the government to promote research and innovation. Unlike white elephant projects elsewhere, the evidence of it’s success is in full display. Many of its inventions are already in the market, but many others are newly minted and not patented.

There are three universities nearby and also, many high tech companies, including foreign ones, who have been taking advantage of a location where industry meets knowledge. This kind of ‘knowledge city’ is not unique to Taiwan. You see it in Dubai for instance. But here, it is rooted and real, and not some real estate or tourism gimmick. There are students and professors and the outcome of their years of labour is available for application. In the neighbourhood are companies that can fund and use the results from this continuous assault on the frontiers of research.

I did not spend all the two days of touring visiting research centres, newspapers and talking to diplomats and businessmen. I also visited the Night market, which is where ordinary Taiwanese relax and shop after office hours. With the bright lights and food stalls and small shops, the Market has the ambience of a village fair in the middle of a big bustling city. Preening young couples and families with children in tow, throng the narrow alleyways. It’s the kind of place you are tempted to over-eat and go beyond window shopping, because there are no windows or doors, separating you from the wonderful array of goods that are a touch away.

Very different from the Night Market, is the National Palace Museum, where I spent a few hours to savour the stunning art and artifacts of ancient China. When they were forced to evacuate to Taiwan in 1949, ahead of the advancing Communist Red Army that conquered most of Mainland China, the Nationalist naturally moved with as much ancient treasure as they could. This is now housed at the Palace Museum, which people from all over the world, including from Mainland China, come to see.

Ancient art is of course not democratic. It is about the lifestyle of emperors, aristocrats and rich merchants. But despite the fact that some of the most awe inspiring monuments and works of art were made by starving workmen for the pleasure of a few, they give a glimpse of the attainment and quality of life of such civilisations centuries ago. Nowhere more so than in ancient China, where the abundance of workmen and the rapacity of emperors, has produced buildings, furniture, utensils, ornaments, jewellery, statues, paintings, decorations and other play things of the rich. Such is the sublime quality of some of these items on display at the Palace Museum.

So by the time I joined my colleagues for the annual IPI gathering that opened at the Shangri La hotel on Sunday, September 25, I had formed some impression of our host country. I will spare you the details of what journalists say to each other, when we periodically gather in five star hotels, to moan the state of the world and even more agonisingly, about the state of our beleaguered profession. But IPI gatherings are not all about long meetings. Usually, business and political elites of the host country find time to come and rub shoulders with the delegates. Our conference opened with a well delivered address by President Ma ying-jeou, and ended with closing remarks by the Vice President. The Mayor of New Taipei city treated us to a twelve course banquet, with an all female band crooning in the background.

Then there was the post-congress tour that I and a few other delegates embarked on to Beijing, the capital of the Peoples Republic of China, which is just separated by a narrow body of water from Taiwan. This, too is an IPI tradition; after the annual congress, there will normally be an option of organised tours to other parts of the host country or to other countries in the neighbourhood, which you book in advance.

From the time we landed at the airport in Beijing, it is clear that we are in a mega city, in a big country. To get to the luggage collecting area, we had to journey for about ten minutes in a light train and then walk along long corridors that were teeming with fellow travellers. But we quickly cleared immigration, there was a flurry of snipping dogs at Customs and then we began to look anxiously for our tour guide, Miss Catherine Hou.

There were four of us on this four day, three nights tour of Beijing, which IPI had contracted a Taiwanese travel company, Red China Express to organise. An Indian Publisher, Mr Lakshmipathy and his grandson, who has already done an MBA in an American university and has joined the family business, Calvin Sims, a black American, who has worked for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Japan and Indonesia, before moving to the Ford Foundation in New York.

The tour promised to show us “old Beijing with new touch” and that is exactly what happened. After checking into our hotel, The Westin Beijing, which is one of the gleaming sky-scrappers in a forest of concrete around the Financial Street, we plunged into our tour with a visit to one of China’s famous landmarks, the Summer Palace.

This pleasure garden on the outskirts of Beijing, is a kind of country home and garden designed to escape the oppressive heat of the city in summer. But because it was built by and for the emperors of China, it is on a grand scale. Constructed in 1750 around a natural landscape of hills and open water, it is considered a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design. There are carefully tendered trees and flowers, some to please the eyes, others for shade and aroma. On the misty horizon of the sizeable lake, one can make out many artificial features such as pavilions, reception halls, palaces, temples, bridges and other hidden treasures that only the emperor may know! This carefully balanced lay- out that combines the natural, the artificial and even the superficial, gives the Summer Palace it’s unique aesthetic character.

It’s Chinese name YiHeYuan, roughly translated, means “Garden of Nurtured Harmony”, and it is to seek harmony with nature that emperors and their entourage escape there in the summer months. These days of course, China has no emperors, so the summer palace has become a wandering ground for retirees (but no drunks and other idlers!) who use it’s serene environment to do exercises, games and while away time.  There are the tourists, many foreign, but the bulk of them from the interior of China, enabled by new freedoms and growing wealth to reconnect with their rich ancient past.

On the second day of our quick tour of Beijing, we started the day with a visit to Tiananmen Square. Who will go to Beijing without going to Tiananmen? The Western media, by it’s hyperactive reporting of student demonstrations there in the summer of 1989, has succeeded in making it one of the most iconic locations in the world. But even without this notoriety, the Tiananmen Square in it’s own right is very impressive and quintessentially Chinese.

To begin with, it is located in the heart of Beijing and it is hard to be in the city for a few days without crossing it. Not only is it the largest square of its kind in the world, the eight lane road that goes by it, stretches for fifty kilometres across the city. The best way to see the square is on foot and it’s nice to wander around and mix with ordinary people either hurrying to work or idling about. This being September 29, the Tiananmen was festooned with flowers and banners in preparation for the annual anniversary of the Chinese revolution which falls on October 1.

Soldiers were already going through their goose- steps and workers and children doing rehearsals for the upcoming parade. Tiananmen in this festive mood is so different from the television image of the 1989 “ crackdown “, where young students confronted soldiers in tanks with deadly consequence. I asked our guide Catherine, who is barely out of the university herself, what the young people wanted to achieve by taking on the mighty Communist Party of China ( CPC ) at Tiananmen .

She said the students were not attempting to overthrow the government as many in the West had hoped, but they were fighting to win more personal and economic freedom from the overwhelming grip of a centralised state (my words!). She added that the battle has been largely won, because the Party and the State though powerful as ever, the demonstrations in Tiananmen has deepened the tentative pro capitalist reform began after the death of Mao Tse Tung, whose massive picture still looks down on you at the square.

Now it seems in China the state and the government are focused on doing what they do best: defence, internal order, provision and maintenance of infrastructure and preserving old monuments. Gradually wealth creation in China is becoming the preserve of the private sector. And as you cannot tell private individuals who make money how to spend it, Beijing and indeed all of China, is seething with pent-up consumerist energy. The Chinese are in a hurry to make and enjoy the amenities and toys of modern life, as if to make up for all those years, when war and communist levelling suppressed their exuberant zest for living.

Our guide Catherine , the only Chinese I had any meaningful  contact with, is an example of the spirit of this new China, that is redefining the country internally and will impact on the rest of the world. She moved from the provinces to Beijing to acquire a degree and she has chosen a career over marriage. Her junior sister is already married, and she said her parents call every day to find out what she is up to in the big city. All the four of us were impressed with her energy and intelligence and convinced that she will distinguish herself among the Chinese billions.

Like most Chinese women (but not Chinese men, a surprising number of who are tall and heavily built) she is petite, but there is nothing small about her spirit. She has a confident and bouncing walk and could hold her own in repartee with worldly wise newspapermen. Clearly, she does not earn a great deal of money from being a tour guide, but since like all young women, she loves fashionable clothes, she let on that while half of her wardrobe is genuine designer, the other half is “ copy”, but most people cannot spot the difference!

The Chinese are ofcourse, the masters of “copy” and we went to an electronic market where we were told prices depended on what copy you chose, A, B, or C. The government of China is sensitive about this subject and even Catherine speaks about it in whispers. But there are markets all over China, selling practically all brands of goods, made locally and without license. So desperate is the consumer demand in China, and indeed in the poorer parts of the world like ours, that like Catherine’s wardrobe, it will take more years yet to distinguish copy from the McCoy.

No tour of Beijing and indeed of China, will be complete, without seeing and reflecting on glory and folly of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China. The Forbidden City, which is now a museum, was for five hundred years, the main imperial palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties of China. Rectangular in shape, it is the world’s largest palace complex and covers an area of 74 hectares. It is surrounded by a six metre deep moat and a ten metre high wall.

It is really a city not a palace because within it are 9,999 (yes nine thousand and ninety nine, numbers mean much in Chinese culture) rooms and all of it is there for the pleasure of one man. The only people allowed inside the city are the emperor and his women (that’s why the rooms are many!), the eunuchs and other servants and officials and visitors who come and go, with the specific knowledge of the Son of Heaven. Even the male children, since they are a potential threat, live outside this impregnable yet luxurious fortress.

This ensures that for five hundred years, while war and famine and pestilence were endemic in China, successive emperors ruled and died quietly on their beds. While they were on the throne, every whims of theirs was catered for with the blink of an eye. Within the Forbidden City, there was a palace for each function, the throne room, reception halls depending on the event, dining palace, dressing palace, music palace etc. The most fascinating is the sleeping palace, because even in this inner sanctum, the old autocrats had left nothing to chance. There was not one but several beds, each covered with pavilions, so that should some angry concubine want to take a chance with a knife, she would be hard put to guess on which bed the emperor was lying.

The Great Wall of China was built to protect the empire, not the emperor. It is justifiably touted as one of the great wonders of the world. In most places, including our Hausa city- states, kings build walls to protect the main city from invaders. In ancient China at great human and material cost, this wall was built to protect the whole empire from determined nomads from the north. Just like a gigantic dragon, a potent symbol in Chinese mythology, the Great Wall winds up and down across deserts, grasslands, mountains and plateaus, stretching 8,852 kilometres from east to west of China. With a history of more than 2000 years, some sections of the wall are now in ruins or have disappeared. However, it is still a magnificent architectural achievement and the only man-made structure on earth that astronauts can see from outer space.

Since we were a sort of modern invaders, we climbed a well preserved portion of the great wall, an hour’s drive from Beijing, in the comfort of a cable car. It lifted us to a height of some 3000 feet and deposited us along the wall, to walk as long as we were able.

This massive structure, which is wide enough to accommodate a dozen men walking abreast, stretches in a zigzag formation around the surrounding mountains. At various intervals, in the far distance, one can see where it is interrupted by tall observation towers.  But I must confess that unlike the Mongols, we did not spend a great deal of energy probing the defences of the Great Wall! To begin with, it was very cold and walking up and down an undulating wall is a form of extreme tourism, for which none of us had prepared. So, after a heroic but short walk by Chinese standards, and out of concern for elderly Mr Lakshmipathy (not to mention the half-lame, Mr Yusuf), our small team gave up and took the cable down, to sample offerings in the tea house down below.

All tour operators know that if you want to keep tourists happy, while you are quietly picking their pockets, you stuff them with good food. It does not take much effort to find gourmet meals in Beijing. Every restaurant we visited served excellent multiple course fare. But since we were in the city that gave the world the famous “Peking Duck” (the europeanised version of Beijing), the highlight of our last evening in Beijing was to dine in an establishment that specialises on serving the bird.

Sitting in tables all around us, are chattering Chinese and a few Europeans, tucking into the duck with chopsticks. The roasted duck is brought to your table glistening from the fire, carved and served with other condiments. The American, Mr Sims, had gone off to meet his colleagues working at the Ford Foundation office in Beijing. The two Indians are vegetarians and the Chinese rules of engagement forbids Catherine Hou from eating at the same table with us.

So, I was left alone, face to face with the succulent Peking duck and bamboo chopsticks! I was dubious about duck meat and even more unsure about this novel way of eating it. But as they say in my village, wuyar aiki ba’a fara ba (things look more difficult before you start them). Indeed, so the poor duck discovered, even with the strange chopsticks. In the end, I was glad that Mr Sims could not make it and two Indians, especially the younger and less orthodox one, could only look but not reach for the tender meat.

Let me end by saying from the little I saw in Taipei and Beijing, the Chinese (and despite ideological differences, they are all Chinese on both sides of the Strait) are coming and we better prepare how to receive them. Fully a quarter of the population of the world, they are proud and energetic and ambitious and they want the best of life now and not in the hereafter. China is already producing more millionaire businessmen every year than America and this capital and drive will not remain bottled on the Mainland or the Island. Like a Kung Fu movie, it would soon show up in a theatre near you!

If you think I am making these sweeping statements because Chinese food has got to my head, let me appeal to the man the western media usually gives credit for “opening” China. This is what the former US Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, said in an interview in Fortune Magazine (September 26), which I read while I was in China: “When I first came to China (in 1971), there were practically no automobiles, very limited consumer goods, and no high-rise buildings. The technology was fairly backward. When President Nixon came to China (a year later), we had to bring a ground station with us, in order to communicate effectively and for our media to communicate. It was typical of Chinese pride that they bought the ground station from us so that they were technically not operating an American ground station”.

That was Kissinger’s impression of Chinese know-how then. This is what it is now, in the same interview. “We are the two major economic engines in the world. China and the U.S. interact with each other all over the world. And so the economic progress of the world and peace of the world depend on the nature of that relationship”. This dramatic change happened in the lifetime of one old diplomat, you have to wonder what may happen in the lifetime of our children.