There is a common myth perpetrated about China — that everyone speaks “Chinese”.

There is in fact no single “Chinese” language.

There is an official language, Mandarin, taught at schools and used on the airwaves, yet even the government admits that only about half the country’s 1.3 billion population speak it fluently.

But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other Chinese languages spoken in the country. The government calls them dialects, but linguistically the likes of Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese are as distinct and mutually unintelligable as French, Spanish, German and English.

Linguists consider them separate languages, though many others are genuinely dialects. Mandarin has been promoted as a single unifying tongue by the Communists, and the Nationalists before them, as otherwise somebody from Guangzhou would find it impossible to speak to somebody from Beijing or Shanghai.

That makes total sense. But Chinese “dialects” today are increasingly marginalised, which is, I think, a great loss for Chinese people and their centuries-old culture, both in China and abroad.

I love going to Singapore and hearing people chatting away in Hokkien, Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese and Cantonese, even if my knowledge of these languages is limited to being able to say “pai sei” (”I’m sorry”) and “ti a bo” (”I don’t understand”) in Hokkien — phrases I picked up from my time in Taiwan, where the language is normally known as Taiwanese.

I’m sad to hear more and more young Singaporeans speaking to each other in Mandarin, and more than one Singaporean friend has told me that they think they’ll be the last generation who can speak so-called dialects.

In China, there is now a recognition that dialects form an integral part of the nation’s fabric, though there are no moves, as far as I know, to introduce teaching in dialects at school, as happens to a limited degree now in Taiwan.

Tang dynasty poetry, taught to every Chinese schoolchild and extremely beautiful, sounds a lot better read out in Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.

At the time they were written, the court language more closely resembled these southern Chinese tongues. Today there is only very limited official support in China for dialects: a few radio shows in Shanghainese or Cantonese, and the odd academic trying to protect dialects in danger of dying out.

Yet two places in the Chinese world buck this trend — Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is still very much alive and kicking. The more racy newspapers fill their columns with stories written in colloquial Cantonese, using Chinese characters which only exist in Cantonese, and make no sense to a Mandarin speaker like myself. I now have a Cantonese dictionary to try and make sense of some of these words.

And in Taiwan, where the Nationalist government once ruthlessly supressed Taiwanese and Hakka in a bid to get everyone to speak Mandarin, Taiwanese is once more very much back in the limelight, thanks to the Democratic Progressive Party of President Chen Shui-bian, which has tried to promote the island’s native culture. Taiwanese words are liberally peppered into everyday speech, almost as a fashion statement, and appear in newspapers. I learnt a new expression in March when in Taipei to cover the presidential election. “Ao bo”, meaning “dirty tricks”.

Now that I have mastered Mandarin (I would never dare call myself fluent as I’m not a native speaker), I’d like to learn another Chinese language. It would either be Cantonese or Hokkien — both have some great swear words. Yet the one thing that rather daunts me is the number of tones in these two languages.

Mandarin has just four, and it took me rather a long time just to master even them. Hokkien has 5, 6, 7 or 8, depending on how you classify them and in what part of the Hokkien-speaking world you are in. Cantonese has around 9. Again, there is debate on that. I think I’ll be sticking with Mandarin in the short term.

Picture of a sign promoting the use of Mandarin by Alfred Cheng Jin

A lot of rude things are written about Chinese pop music, often referred to as “Mandopop”, as opposed to Hong Kong’s “Cantopop”. That it’s syrupy nonsense and all the lyrics are the same — boy/girl meets girl/boy, they fall in/out of love, it’s all so tragic/happy etc etc.

I beg to differ. Mandopop rocks.

It’s all a matter of who you listen to. There are plently of interesting artists, who sing plently of interesting and unusual songs. I actually learnt a lot of my Mandarin from singing Chinese songs at karaoke in Taiwan, the spiritual home of Mandopop.

Visitors to this year’s Beijing Olympics will no doubt be subjected to a barrage of songs about the Games (most of which really are not that good). But I recommend you go into one of the many coffee shops, bars or restaurants that abound here, and the chances are you will hear some really cool songs.

Though China does have a growing popular music scene of its own, artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore tend to dominate. So here is a little list of some of my favourite singers, and some of my favourite songs.  

1) Faye Wong. The goddess of Mandopop. Though she started out on the road to fame singing in Cantonese under the English name Shirley Wong, she is Beijing born and bred. And her music has just gotten better and better as she gets older, though she has more or less stepped away from the music scene of late. She has done Chinese covers of songs by Tori Amos, the Cranberries and the Cocteau Twins, and on her album “Fable” even experimented with trip-hop. Unusually, she also writes some of her own songs. Her understated cool, effortlessly glamorous image and fairly stand-offish public persona have all added to her popularity.  

2) Sarah Chen. Very old skool. I admit I don’t really know that many of her songs, but every time I go singing I will always sing her “Waking from a dream”. I think it’s the desperate lyrics that impress me most (that and her 1980s fashion in the music video) — “There are some things you can’t ask/There are some people you must never wait for”. She no longer sings, and I’m sad that I’ll never get to hear her sing in person.  

3) Faith Yang. A Taiwanese-Australian indy rock queen. She burst onto the scene with songs like “Stars piled up to the sky” and “Alone”, the later a furious rock track with Taiwanese rocker Wu Bai providing backing vocals. Later collaberations with Chang Chen-yue (”The love I gave”) were equally well received, and she returned last year with a new, much calmer and more mature album.  

4) Jacky Cheung. One of Hong Kong’s “Four Heavenly Kings” of male singing superstars, Cheung is basically popular everywhere in the world where ethnic Chinese have settled. He came to my attention with Cantonese classics including “Why do breakups always happen on rainy days”, but it was his Mandarin mega-hit “Kiss and Goodbye” (bizzarely later covered in English by a European band) that won my undying loyalty.  

5) Chang Hui-mei, aka A-Mei. I will always love this petite Taiwanese aboriginal star. “Can I hold you?” was an album I listened to over and over again, and I screamed and screamed when I saw her in concert a few years ago. It also helps that she appears to be a genuinely nice person, bursting into tears on stage because she is so moved by her fans’ support. You may get to see a lot more of A-Mei as the Olympics approaches — she is submitting a song to be sung at the opening ceremony on Aug. 8.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  

Pictures (from the top):  Faith Yang by REUTERS/Kin Cheung, Faye Wong by REUTERS/stringer, Jacky Cheung by REUTERS/Tim Chong  

Forget Beijing and Shanghai. If you want to see real China, go to some of the country’s third tier cities.

They’re fascinating, and I’ve been trying to go to as many as possible before leaving China for my next post. Places like Chifeng, Ulanhot, Ankang and Golmud.

Never heard of them? Not surprising.

The Lonely Planet and other guides for foreigners either give them a passing mention or ignore them totally.

Why I like going to these cities is still a bit of a mystery, even to me. I suppose it’s for two reasons, and my friends think I’m crazy for it.

The first is I love going to places where foreigners are few and far between. It gives you a chance to talk to people who are not jaded at the thought of seeing yet another “lao wai” (the Chinese slang term for us) on the street, and sometimes the answers to the questions I pose surprise me with their honesty.

“Why on earth are you here? There’s nothing to see in Chifeng,” a taxi driver told me as she drove around the Inner Mongolian city, which has been picked as an Olympic tourism city for this summer’s Beijing Games, though nobody in Chifeng quite understands why.

The second reason is the architecture. Lots of people think the building style that marked a 30-or-so year period starting in the 1950s in China is very ugly.  Lots of sharp angles, big windows and pale colour schemes.

Not me. I think they are startlingly beautiful. And less and less are being preserved in the big cities in the rush to develop. But in the third tier cities they are still going strong. Chifeng has quite a few left, including the train station and tiny airport.

Chifeng airport is perhaps my favourite building in all of China. For a long time a photo I took of it was the wallpaper on my mobile phone.

Yet it’s not always much fun in the third tiers. 

Upon arriving in Ankang, a 40 minute flight south of Xian into yet another beautiful airport, it had just finished sleeting. The air was crisp and fresh in a way you almost never experience in Beijing, but the streets downtown had turned into black sludge.

“I’ve surpassed myself this time. Ankang is truely horrible,” I texted to a friend in Beijing, promptly getting back an “I told you so” reply.

Ankang did have its highlights. The food was great, especially the flat rice noodles they fry in a sharp chili past with lamb and bean sprouts, and the air was at least clean (local people joke it’s because Ankang has no industry).

There are lots of other cities on my list I want to visit. Chaoyang and Jinzhou in the rust-belt northeastern province of Liaoning, Dazhou in Sichuan and Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi.

I just hope that the buildings I’m so passionate about don’t get demolished before I get there.

Pictures of Chifeng (top) and Ankang (below) by staff photographers

I love to shop – I’m not afraid to admit it. And I passionately believe you can never have too many T-shirts, shoes or bags (and that you should never underestimate the power of a good moisturiser either).

One of the great joys of living in China, and especially in Beijing, is the shopping.

Sure, it’s not as sophisticated as Hong Kong or as off-beat as Taipei, and very few places in Asia can trump Bangkok, but China’s smokey capital has its charms when it comes to a bit of retail therapy.

So here is a personal list of my favourite top 5 shopping destinations in Beijing, in reverse order to keep everyone in suspense.  

5) Spin. Pottery’s not sexy, right? Wrong. The master craftmen (and women) behind this store sure know how to whip up a storm with the clay. Simple, clean and understated is the order of the day. And it’s not too expensive. Word on the street is a certain well-kown European fashion designer liked the shop so much he snapped up 20,000 sets of plates during a winter swirl through the city. 

4) The cashmere sweater place. Nobody really seems to know what it’s called, but it’s quite well located near the new Dengshikou subway stop. Simply take in a jumper, hat or other top you want copied, pick a colour, and they will produce a copy for you in softest cashmere. It’s very adictive. “I can’t wear anything that’s not cashmere these days,” another cashmere junkie remarked to me recently. And it’s quite understandable. Not cheap, but then luxury never is.

3) This recommendation isn’t one shop, but the part of Beijing’s famous Panjiayuan, or antique market, where they sell old books. I can spend hours here, picking out hidden little gems printed in China’s Communist heyday. This includes glossy hardback coffee table books, sometimes with English text, on China’s provinces. The two books I’m most proud of finding, and have given me the most pleasure, are a book on the remote and rather mysterious province of Qinghai, and another entitled “New China Builds”, full of the brutalist and minimalist architecture that marked the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  

2) I don’t know what this store is called either. All I know is that it is at the Nali mall in Sanlitun, next to Alameda restaurant. But what I do know is they sell the most gorgeous belts covered with traditional Chinese floral and animal designs. My mother disapproves, so obviously I wear the belts all the time. But you can also get funky scarves, socks and bags.

1) Plastered. As the owner of a fine collection of T-shirts (I think I have close to 200 now) I’m somewhat obsessed by this place. Retro-Communist-cool designs from the 1970s and 1980s reinterpreted for the new millenium, and printed on T-shirts. My own little piece of heaven. According to the owner, I am one of only two people who bought the most unpopular design ever — the word “Sharon” printed in black felt onto a pink T-shirt. And now I can’t find it, it having been swallowed into my closet.

Pictures by Claro Cortes IV  

Arriving at Hong Kong’s amazingly efficient, friendly and easy-to-use airport a few weeks ago, my first thought turned, oddly enough, to the Beijing Olympics.

I know Beijing has a new terminal opening soon, but at the time I thought myself I can’t imagine it will ever be as nice as this airport.

And then as we sped into town on Hong Kong’s ultra-efficient airport express train, I had another thought which I shared with a friend.

“Even in 20 years time, I’m sure Beijing will never be like this. Can you imagine how great it would be if Hong Kong had the Olympics?”

Hong Kong will be hosting the equestrian events for the Olympics this year but it is unlikely to ever be the venue for a full Games, making my comment a bit fatuous.

But I still stand by the gist of it, which is that Beijing simply does not “get it” when it comes to attitudes towards service, and to building tourist facilties like airports which are world class.

Take the new Beijing airport terminal, for example.

Without a doubt, the Norman Foster building looks stunning. Yet what kinds of shops and services will be in there is still a bit of a mystery.

Everyone hopes it will be better than the current two terminals, with their overpriced restaurants and bookshops whose main English language titles are government propaganda publications.

Hong Kong, it perhaps goes without saying, has a great selection of reading materials at its airport– not to mention a wide array of restaurants and shops.

And while Beijing is building a light rail service to the airport, at its downtown terminus you will not be able to check in baggage, again unlike in Hong Kong. This extends to many other aspects of the service culture comparison between Beijing and Hong Kong.

Shopping in Beijing can be a harrowing and soul-sapping experience, with surly staff, poor quality products and a buying procedure often too weird and complex to explain in this blog, aside from saying you need about three different receipts stamped by three different people before you can make your purchase.

In Hong Kong, while the crowds can be frightening, the staff at least seem to make an effort to be nice — to tourists if not locals. The selection of shops is world-beating too.

To be fair, Hong Kong has been doing this a lot longer than Beijing, and has a much freer political and media environment. 

Still, Beijing has to do better, especially with the huge influx of foreign visitors expected for this year’s Olympics.

There’s no doubting the enthusiasm of ordinary Beijingers for the Games, and the government’s determination to make sure things go smoothly.

But a little more thought towards getting shop assistants to smile, or the airport to stock a few more foreign magazines, would be great too.

Pictures of Hong Kong airport (above) and Beijing’s new terminal (below) by Paul Yeung and Alfred Cheng Jin.

A fortnight or so ago, China’s state controlled media suddenly appeared with a news flash saying that a railway accident had killed 18 people in the east of the country.

Springing into action, I at once called the spokesman’s office of the Railway Ministry, a number supplied by the Cabinet’s information office along with contact details for spokesmen’s offices of China’s other ministry’s and main government departments, in a bid to raise transparency.

But as my experience with the Railway Ministry proves, this exercise is very hit and miss.

“Where are you calling from?” a very gruff sounding man asks me.

“Reuters’ Beijing bureau.”

“We are not authorised to speak to the foreign media. You’ll have to call our international cooperation department.”

“But are you not the spokesman’s office? I just want to know some details about this train crash.”

The above exchange was repeated, verbatim, about three or four times before he just hung up on me.

The international cooperation department, while at least politely listening to my question, could only respond: “Er, nobody has told us about a crash. Why don’t you call our propaganda department?”

The propaganda department and spokesman’s office are apparently two totally different divisions who don’t speak to each other.

Another gruff sounding man was much more helpful, giving me what information he had on the crash, even if he was not willing to be quoted by name.

One cannot help but wonder what is going to happen over the Beijing Olympics when foreign media try to get answers directly from Chinese government departments in response to accidents, protests, bombings or other incidents. We have the phone numbers,
but what if officials simply won’t talk to us?

Some government departments do seem to be getting it, though.

A scare in Japan over Chinese-made dumplings which were apparently tainted with pesticide and made dozens sick spurred China’s national quality watchdog into action in a very short period of time.

Perhaps scarred by previous global safety scares involving made in China goods last year, the watchdog jumped into action, emailing foreign media a statement about the dumplings within hours of the story breaking, and then calling us up to invite us to an emergecy news conference on the subject.

If only all Chinese ministry’s were as proactive and not as suspicious of the foreign press.
 

Pictures of media at the Athens Olympics by (top) REUTERS/Charles Platiau (bottom) Paul Hanna

One late evening two years ago, a friend of mine was flying to Beijing from a southern Chinese city.      

But upon landing, she noticed the scenery outside did not resemble what she was accustomed to seeing at Beijing airport.      

Only then did the flight attendant announce that owing to various reasons my friend could not quite understand, their flight had been diverted to Shijiazhuang, a grim, industrial city south of Beijing.

The passengers were shuffled off the plane and into the terminal, only to be locked into a lounge for several hours without any airline officials telling them what was happening.      

But the passengers struck back, breaking down the door to the lounge and storming onto the aircraft parked on the tarmac in front of them. Only after the police were called was ordered restored.      

Then there was the time passengers furious at snow-related delays smashed up check-in counters at Shanghai’s gleaming Pudong airport, a tale recounted to me with horror by a foreign lawyer friend who watched the destruction.

Or a similar situation last February, which I saw at Beijing airport, where riot police dragged away screaming passengers who had been stuck for almost 14 hours due to fog with no information from airlines as to when they might be able to leave.      

They had also tried to storm stranded aircraft in their desperation to get out.  

With millions of visitors expected to flood China in this Olympic year, the government is trying to get the nation’s airlines to treat their passengers a little better, threatening to curtail schedules of airlines with too many delays.      

 Of course, it’s not fair only to blame the airlines. Chinese passengers can behave badly too.      

The use of mobile phones is an obvious example. Banned from being used on board, mobile phone obsessed Chinese sometimes fail to heed warnings to switch off despite dire warnings from the captain about potential interference with flight systems.      

I’m not sure which scared me most — the cellphone going off minutes before touch down in the seat behind me while landing at a snowy northeastern Chinese airport, or the incessant ringing 30,000 ft above Mongolia on a flight to Europe. Neither culprit was discovered by the crew.

A common problem is passengers undoing their seatbelts, getting up and taking their bags out of the overhead lockers — all while the aircraft has just landed and is still taxiing to the terminal.      

Another is the mad dash to get on board as though an aircraft is a bus, ignoring the fact that boarding passes guarantee assigned seats for everybody.      

You just cannot help feeling sorry for the poor cabin crew sometimes.

Once on a flight from Shanghai to Beijing, a middle-aged Chinese lady disappeared into the toilet a few minutes before landing, ignoring the fasten seat belt sign.      

A sharp eyed member of crew who had noticed this jumped up and started banging on the door, screaming “Get out! Get out! Get out now! We’re landing at once!”

This continued for about a minute until the lady emerged, looking very sheepish, and went back to her seat with the eyes of the whole cabin on her.  

The wheels hit the runway a few seconds later.

Ben Blanchard is a General News and Politics Correspondent in the Beijing bureau. Picture taken at Beijing airport by David Gray.