Walls and Neighbours

Three weeks to go! As we get close to the end of the term and going home, I feel I should make some profound observations on the whole China experience. I am not capable of anything too profound, but I do have some thoughts!

One things that stands out for me is that the Chinese must be the world’s greatest wall builders! The Great Wall was not just an historical aberration. The Chinese really do excel at building walls. For instance, the Great Wall is not just a single wall; rather it is a whole series of walls built all over northern China over hundreds of years. But the Chinese don’t just build walls around their country, they also build walls around everything of whatever value. They like to build brick walls or cement walls and you’ll often see spikes, broken glass or barbed wire on top of the wall. Every little country house has a wall around it. The city homes in the hutongs are called courtyard houses and they all have walls around them. Apartment building have walls around them. I have seen walls around vacant lots! And inside the wall, you likely to find another wall!

Of course, if you have walls, you must have gates; so China has some pretty impressive gates. In fact, the gates are often more impressive than anything inside. You often go through a spectacular gate to find … well, not much of anything inside! Side streets will have big colourful gates leading to little neighbourhood streets. Stores and hotels often have big inflatable gates that are put in place to celebrate openings or different promotions.

Another thing that goes along with walls is guards. Our school has guards standing post at each of two gates and also at the door to the school and our apartment building. The bank next door has guards armed with billy clubs, riot guns and body armour. Between the two buildings, there is another guard for the parking lot. Of course, all the embassies near here have guards standing to attention - try doing that when the temperature is in the 30’s! The guards at our school seem to be about 15 or 16; surely they are older but they certainly seem young. I often wonder what would happen if the guards weren’t there. Would we really be overwhelmed by poor migrants climbing over the walls to loot our apartments?

We also see security cameras everywhere; our school has an electronic surveillance system throughout and in the halls of our apartment building. Some of the cameras are even hooked up to the net – check it out at: http://www.cisb.com.cn/page/zly_cam/index.htm
We are told that the security cameras in other places are often not hooked up to anything. In fact, one teacher lost a bag of hockey equipment (yes there is hockey in Beijing) and sat through hours of digital video trying to find out what happened to it. He said the quality of thev ideo was so poor that it was hard to identify anyone. It turned out that the teacher left his bag in he hall and the ‘ayi’ or cleaner opened it, took a sniff and thought it must be garbage and threw it out! Not a bad guess when you think of what used hockey equipment smells like!

So I wonder about all the walls and security and whether it is really necessary. But it does make you feel a little safer and we have lost almost nothing. I haven’t had any school equipment stolen and I have left my camera and laptop around the school without any problem. So maybe good walls do make good neighbours.