Couchsurfing in China: Holidays in the Surveillance State

How do the Chinese tick? What is the rapid change of the country with the people? To find out, I traveled through China for three months. From Shenzhen in the south to Beijing in the north, from Dandong on the North Korean border to the forced labor camp province of Xinjiang in the west.

I met with ordinary people who have regular jobs, not economists, researchers, or politicians who are usually journalists' favorite conversationalists. With the website Couchsurfing.com I found hosts where I could live for a few days. I was at home with dozens of young, hospitable people trying to explain China to me. Three of these encounters are especially memorable.

Of course, the following three snapshots can only depict a tiny part of this highly complex country. But they all show how people handle the current development at supersonic speeds. (All names have been changed so as not to endanger the other party.)

Steven Chow

Stephan Orth in China: Surveillance cameras are omnipresent in big cities.

Location: Shenzhen (12.5 million inhabitants)
Hostess: Qing, 35, a policewoman

When the waiter places two steaming soup containers in the middle of the table, policewoman Qing pulls out her brand new Huawei service cell phone. "Look in the camera." She presses the trigger. "This is a police app that can detect faces, but you're not in the system yet."

Within seconds comes the evaluation: My head agrees to 78 percent with a black-haired guy from the Xinjiang province, to 57 percent I'm an American called Marc. "We use this when we arrest someone who does not want to show ID."

I've had some weird dates, but this conversation in Shenzhen, China, is way up in the league table. Qing's graceful appearance does not quite match her voice, whose sharpness makes everyday sentences sound like a reprimand. She wears a light blue jacket, white jeans and white sneakers, her hair tied into a ponytail.

We are sitting in a branch of the hotspot chain "Haidilao", and we are gradually piled up with raw delicacies for simmering. Lamb fillet slices, fish balls, lotus root, bamboo, squid, peeled quail eggs, Chinese cabbage. Everything fresh and high-quality, in the app Dazong Dianping ("Many People Evaluation"), the restaurant comes to 4.7 out of 5 stars. Qing orders a few extra dishes with the help of an orange tablet computer that serves as a menu.

While eating, she explains the benefits of surveillance technology to me. "Every crime is solved, and when someone escapes from prison, we know he will not get very far." Recently she scanned an image of her favorite teacher from a newspaper article with the app - and actually found it. "It was great to meet him again after 20 years."

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In a system called "Skynet" facial and personal data are stored centrally. Soon, social credit systems will ensure that every single moment of life is evaluated by digital technology - from timely rent payments to political opinion. Qing is not too scared of it. "It's nice when the quality of people improves," she says. "Chinese people do not know this differently, even from their own family, my parents control me to this day, which often annoys them, but they mean well."

She asks the waiter for the bill and pays by mobile. Then she quickly passes through her current position in a police app, for an internal ranking among colleagues. Each time she reports her whereabouts at leisure, she receives five points. At the moment she is in eighth place in her police station. She can call up the table at any time. "It's good to be in midfield," she says.

On my journey through China, I always notice how strongly people have already accepted various types of rating systems in their everyday lives. There are apps like "Honest Shanghai" or "Sesame Credit" that reward good behavior with perks, and even more so than we are trusted to customer reviews for restaurants, hotels or goods.

Chinese take new technologies into their everyday lives more naturally and more quickly than Europeans. Paying apps like WeChatPay or AliPay are also very handy and extremely common: Every time I pay in cash on my journey, I feel like a Stone Age visitor.

Stephan Orth

Passer-by in Dali: On the chest a swastika, a rather uncommon tattoo in China

Talk about Nazis

Location: Foshan (7 million inhabitants)
Host: Yangwei, 24, car salesman

Yangwei works as a salesman at Volkswagen in a suburb of Foshan in southern China. He wears the insignia of the guild "Bachelor in IT": black horn-rimmed glasses and unbalanced hair-dryer with pony. Actually, he is a trained programmer, but his parents wanted him to sell cars. Because of the better earning potential.

In a restaurant on the main street we order Lanzhou-style Lamian noodle soup. We talk about cultural differences, about China, Europe and Germany.

"If you talk about Nazis, you get arrested, right?" He asks suddenly.

"No. But it is forbidden to deny the mass killings in Auschwitz or to hoist a swastika flag in the garden."

"But last year, Chinese people got into trouble in Germany for talking about Nazis."

"What?"

"Yes, in such an old building, you say you can, but the Chinese are getting stressed, it's so unfair."

Yangwei is seriously outraged, especially as Germany always presents itself as an open country in which freedom of expression applies. News about Chinese tourists who have been badly treated or even robbed during their trip to Europe is currently on the rise in China's state news. Citizens should always be reminded that they are better off in their home country elsewhere.

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Couchsurfing in China: Through the living room of the new superpower

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I ask Yangwei if he knows more about the Nazi incident. He baidut the story on his mobile. Baidu is the Chinese variant of Google, whose offers are blocked just like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter throughout the country.

"Ah, they did that one thing - with their arms up."

"The Hitler salute?"

"Yes."

"Oh God, that's forbidden."

"How is the Hitler salute?"

"One reaches out his right arm, with the palm of his hand down."

"So, or a little higher?"

"Yeah, that's right, you can take that arm off now."

"But that's right, yes, the angle is right?"

"Yes, but."

Satisfied, he examines the result, from the fingertips to the shoulder, then back to his fingers, as if he wants to memorize the exact position.

"You really could ... ..."

I look around to see if we are being watched. Two guests at the next table look back hastily into their soup plates. The surveillance camera on the ceiling films silently.

"Okay," Yangwei finally says, returning to his meal. "Well, at least the tourists have photographed each other in this way - in front of a kind of castle - here."

The picture in the online article shows the Reichstag in Berlin.

"They were arrested and had to pay a fine of 500 euros, 500 euros, because of a few photos, you have such strict laws in Germany, because you get really scared," says Yangwei.

Stephan Orth

Xi in the sandbox

Location: Beijing (21.5 million inhabitants)
Host: Lin, 32, artist

I get an impression of China's freedom of expression from artist Lin in a suburb of Beijing. She often posts explosive things in Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, often her words are erased by censorship after seconds. When she once wrote "Liberated Tibet", two hours later the police were standing in front of their apartment door.

She uses terms such as "state mafia" and "Nazi regime" when she speaks of the Communist Party. A few months ago her studio was razed to the ground, the police sent two diggers. Officially, she was accused of illegal land development. But she suspects that the political explosiveness of her artworks is the real reason.

Lin lives in an eastern district of Beijing in an apartment that smells of fresh paint and is filled with sculptures and oil paintings. She is currently working on a picture showing Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un in the sandbox.

In her art, Lin criticizes the state, privately she has a lot of arguments with her loyal to the regime, who lives a few houses down. One of these verbal fights I experience live with. Quite a bizarre situation, because Lin interrupts the quarrel again and again to comment on the whole thing for me and to translate into English.

The mother: "Do not say bad things about our country to foreigners who believe our system is not good, we feel better every year, and when you say so much negative, you should feel guilty about being Chinese because you have this Country hates. "

Lin: "I do not hate the country, it pretends that the party and the country are the same, as if being critical of one is automatically a critique of the other as well, which are two different things I've tried so many times before to explain."

The mother: "You are disrespectful, you have to honor the party like your own parents, and accept that you are always right, who speaks badly about his mother is a bad person."

Lin: "I think the government should be a service organization that serves the citizens, and not like the parents."

Mother: "You always complain, life is so beautiful, you have enough food, enough fruit, you have everything, one curry and one egg a day are enough, simple life is the wisest life, what more do you want "Why are not you modest?"

Lin: "I just feel that this government is tightening the screws too tight, I'm telling my mother, no, I'm not complaining, it's just my opinion that I say, if things do not go well, you have to criticize them For example, having a healthy life is not so easy because our nature is so polluted. "

The mother: "We can not change the environmental destruction, you do not have to drink from one of the rivers, you get clean drinking water in the shop."

Lin: "My mother does not feel that things are going in the wrong direction, I often think about leaving her, the mother and the country, the decision is hard for me, and when I go, she'll say, you're one Bad person, because you are abandoning your parents. "

Mother: "You just make this junk and waste your life, why can not you work as a teacher again, marry and have a baby? You're 32. But as stubborn as you are, I'm not surprised you can not find one . "

Lin: "Chinese people like submissive women, sometimes I think I'm weird or crazy, of course nobody likes me, but when I was in Europe people often approached me and men wanted my WhatsApp contact she did not believe me. "

The mother: "And you forgot to do the dishes."

Lin: "Oh, I think she's right."

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Rarely have I learned so much about a country within half an hour as I have learned from this brief argument. And rarely have I learned so much in three months as I did on my trip to China from one couch to the next.

Much of what I experienced there was scary, like a dystopia from the future. But many things I find easier to understand and can better classify it, since I have learned more about the mentality of the people.

China is not an ideal destination for a relaxed vacation. But what has developed there in just a few decades, how the former "sick man of Asia" became a world power - to experience only that, is already worth the ticket.

The text is an edited and modified version of excerpts from the book "Couchsurfing in China" by Stephan Orth, which was published by Malik.