Two hours prior to the anchor’s emotively-worded but utterly deadpan performance (which, along with her tearfully hyperbolic North Korean counterpart, deserve Oscar nominations), I had been discussing humorous cat anecdotes with a few of the Chinese people at my local gym. One of them, coincidentally, was a CCTV presenter, who told us her cat had learned to move its feces from its litter tray and onto the kitchen floor, thereby incriminating her pet dog. My boyfriend joined in the discussion. That afternoon, he had stood up in his office to announce the death of Kim Jong-il, China’s great pal, the guy whom the CCP never gets tired of shielding, and was met with utter indifference. “I don’t care about him,” remarked his deskmate. “I’m busy.”

Official portraits of Mao and Kim.

Kim Jong-il’s name wasn’t mentioned once in my office the following day, apart from by myself and the other two foreign employees, who were keeping up with The Onion‘s rolling-out of every back article it had on everyone’s favorite communist oligarch. I had personally witnessed my boyfriend’s parents teasing one another for crying after learning of the death of China’s own Dear Leader, Mao Zedong:

“You cried!”

“No, YOU cried!”

The endless footage of Mediterranean-style weeping helpfully provided to China’s state mouthpieces by North Korea’s even more ridiculous state media agency may have been a popular source of amusement on the Chinese blogosphere, but the Chinese, at least those in my immediate vicinity, seem pretty much unmoved. Compare this to the tears when staff at my previous place of work found out about Michael Jackson’s death in 2010. My boyfriend entered a deep mourning for the loss of his favorite pop icon, joining in the bidding wars on eBay for one of those precious few signed albums, so that he might own something his idol had once touched. To this day, Michael Jackson tributes and rip-offs dominate Chinese talent shows and the few other “entertainment programs” permitted to exist by the Party’s newly-zealous media czars. Hell, I’ve even seen Jackson referenced in advertisements for the children’s TV channel Kaku and the utterly ineffectual brain medication Nao Bai Jin.

I doubt the same treatment, whether reverent or shamelessly exploitative, will be meted out to Kim. Of course that’s entirely due to the media blackout imposed when it comes to mocking North Korea’s potato-faced ex-leader, but even if such a blackout weren’t in place, not even China’s countless brands of undrinkable alcohol would be able to up sales with a grinning Kim clad in a Tang jacket, proffering one of their products from the side of a bus.

The fact that CCTV was compelled to offer up this shameless smorgasbord of communist solidarity is further testament to the decline in its relevance to the sociopolitical views of the Chinese people. Time was that the television was the principal source of both entertainment and information in a Chinese household, and CCTV’s word had gravitas. Now, whether it’s slamming the Nobel Peace Prize committee, depicting the heroic actions of police in hog-tying and humiliating prostitutes, or offering up pronouncements from the Central Committee as if they were engraved on tablets of stone fresh from Mount Sinai, Chinese people have learned to switch off. If we may return to my gym for a moment, lack of a satellite or cable connection means the TVs are eternally tuned to domestic channels, but it’s curious that as soon as a news, current events or “lifestyle” show comes on, a staff member switches over to a nature show, TV drama or kung fu movie. That’s what people want to watch.

North Korean and Chinese propaganda posters.

You can’t liberalize education, open the floodgates to the Internet, sanction overseas travel and expect people to swallow the same propaganda they did in the 1970s. I doubt even the most voracious Party cadres in China looked to Kim Jong-il as an example. While his unique brand of belligerent Stalinist autocracy was a goldmine for satirists, it ran utterly against the Chinese government’s often painful efforts to appear non-confrontational and universally friendly. China rejected the cult of personality with the inauguration of Deng Xiaoping. It realigned its planned economy towards profitability—shrewdly funneling profits to the center in the process—and shaping China into a “rich country, poor people” nation modeled on 19th century Britain. In every sense other than name, the Communist Party of China and its North Korean equivalent have parted ways. And yet, at least on CCTV, they seem to be placed on an equal footing, with Kim’s death treated as the martyrdom of a fellow comrade who, of course, died of “exhaustion” and not a heart attack induced by a blowjob on a luxury train journey, or whatever Kim was more likely to have been doing when he finally shuffled off.

Why not be objective? Show the North Korean footage, sure, but at least acknowledge public opinion by keeping declarations of grief as low-key as possible. Chinese people overwhelmingly pity North Koreans—they compare North Koreans to Chinese two generations ago. The average Chinese youngster, many of whom will have come into contact with someone who has visited the hermit dictatorship on business, sees North Korea as what would have happened had the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward both come at once. Starving, brainwashed and helpless in the face of an absolute despot they have to pretend to worship as if he were a mix of Jesus, Che Guevara and Santa Claus. Sure they’ll cry for the cameras, but don’t expect that of the comparatively well-off and infinitely better-informed Chinese. Not only is it patronizing, it has the potential to be politically incendiary.

If CCTV continues to speak for the Chinese people (as Rui Chenggang famously did for Asia), and what it says continues to run directly counter to popular views, the only result will be that viewers will simply switch off their sets altogether and either immerse themselves in the relative freedom of real world or, more likely, Internet debate. CCTV and print media have had their day as China’s principal source of mind control, and yet they remain massively over-funded when compared to the most effective tool of State control: the education system. Schools in China are screaming for funding, with principals having to pay for school buses out of their own pocket, teachers underpaid and offered minimal training, and children who respond to the absence of authoritative teaching by reaching across borders via the World Wide Web for information. In the few instances where the government has gone all-out to enforce ideology, such as safe sex or anti-Japanese sentiment, the results have been startlingly effective.

However, rather than getting them when they’re young and impressionable, CCTV has the unenviable task of preaching to hardened cynics who, increasingly, are uninterested in hiding their real thoughts and feelings. Now, thanks to their utterly disingenuous coverage of Kim’s death, that distance from China’s social reality, is showing itself with greater clarity than ever before.

I ended up watching this lithe young gentleman writhe around to this God-awful piece of Korean bubblegum-pop (if you care, it’s Push Push Baby by SiSTAR) over and over again. Of course, my reasons for enjoying his performance were largely vicarious—according to comments on Sina Weibo, more than a few gay men, and even more straight women, of all colors and nationalities shared my appreciation of this 18 year-old ethnic Hmong fellow and his shameless webcam performance. I shut the sound off after 15 seconds.

Jia Baoyu's meizhengtai beauty from Dream of the Red Chambers.

However, beyond titillation, I felt a tug of pride at the broader statement made by this grainy video. Only in Asia, it seems, is a tradition valuing the androgynous beauty of the meizhengtai (美正太)—the beautiful boy—enjoying a revival. Increasingly, the meizhengtai is seen as on par, if not exceeding, the appeal of his more typically masculine counterpart, the nanzihan (男子汉). While we have our androgynous sex icons in the West, too—Johnny Depp, Taylor Lautner and, though I shudder to say it, Justin Bieber—the sexuality of these people is always kept rigorously beyond doubt, at least in the media.

Here is where East and West divide. Sexual ambiguity in males, unlike androgyny, is not looked upon with favor by either men or women, and appreciation of the beautiful and unapologetically gay man remains taboo. Sure, we had our dandies, our fops and our New Romantics, but there have been countless casualties along the way.

Federico Garcia Lorca, almost as famous for his passive role in sex as for his wonderful plays, was murdered on the orders of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. When Truman Capote published his “coming out” novel Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, the back cover featured a photograph of the young Capote reclining seductively and giving the reader his best “come to bed” eyes, causing a furore in conservative New York, with both Capote and photographer Harold Halma accused of “contemplating some outrage against conventional morality.”

Even today, performances by Adam Lambert (the artistic output of whom, I admit, is execrable) evoke howls of shock and outrage. People have come to terms, to a degree, with homosexuality. What they have yet to embrace, however, is the distinction between passive and active gay men—with the latter receiving most of the press while the former continue to be treated with distaste, disdain, even hatred. This is why gay hate crimes remain a serious problem even in otherwise progressive U.S. states. On the other side of the fence, gay men often resent and even dislike other gay men who seem “too straight”—they see us as somehow traitors to the fictitious “gay community,” believing that “straight acting” automatically means “closeted.”

We have to reach back into antiquity—the pederastic pornography of the Warren Cup and the homoerotic poetry of ancient Greece, to find an equivalent to the popularity of the younger, receptive partner in a gay male relationship—the shounan/shonen (受男), who are now, as in times past, held up by countless men, women and girls in China and Japan as the epitome of male perfection. Their female fans even self-define as 腐女—literally “rotten women,” meaning women who have been corrupted by their obsession with effeminate, young gay men.

This isn’t to say that Asian standards of beauty are somehow inherently deviant. Flick through your average glossy magazine and you’ll see ample evidence that the Chinese public like their men muscled, heavily-browed and slick and their women willowy, large-eyed and fair-skinned. I struggle to tell the interchangeable female “presenters” of most TV shows apart, so alike are they in skin tone, body shape, and facial characteristics.

Li Yugang, the modern-day Mei Lanfang.

However, there seems to be a greater tolerance in China and elsewhere in Asia for different varieties of beauty—even those which are in the West inextricably linked with alternative sexualities. The Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber is stuffed with meizhengtai “beauties”—led by the boyish Jia Baoyu, who demonstrates an uncanny power to ensnare both men and women through a combination of coquettishness, innocence and a cultivated bearing. Queer beauties even make their way to the top echelons of the mainstream entertainment industry—female impersonator Li Yugang, to many the rightful heir to 1930s opera star Mei Lanfang, has made a career out of exhibiting a fragile and utterly feminine beauty on stage. In the West, female impersonators outside mainstream gay entertainment are comic figures—while women playing roles intended for men (Felicity Huffman’s spectacular turn in Transamerica or Cate Blanchett’s less-impressive performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There) are commonplace, the reverse almost never occurs outside of comedy. Lady Gaga can get away with costumes and styling even David Bowie would have thought twice about—for the simple reason that gender roles for women are, in Western culture, more fluid than those assigned to men.

Felicity Huffman in Transamerica.

Such feminized, scholarly men remain, in China, one ideal, the other being the tough, muscled warrior. However, neither seems to hold dominance over mainstream aesthetics. For every masculine Huang Xiaoming, there’s a feminine Chen Kun. Some celebrities even manage to straddle a dividing line between masculine and feminine beauty—Korean pop king Rain is a good example of this. As the saying goes, “radish or celery, everyone’s got their own favorite” (萝卜青菜，各有所爱), the equivalent of “different strokes for different folks.” Why is the same not true in the West when it comes to standards of physical beauty? Is it mass media that tells women that the only attractive men are the brutish, hunky hard-drinking types? Or have we just bought in to the notion voiced by Robbie Williams that “all the handsome men are gay,” meaning that the slender, quiet and bookish are ruled out as a sexual prospect for women, making their attractiveness merely an academic debate?

Why is it that we can’t embrace the beauty of a feminine, and most likely gay, man? I can’t help but feel that those people, both Chinese and foreign, who have responded to the Push Push Baby video above with ridicule or disgust are simply made uncomfortable by the appropriation of flirtatious female gestures by a young man. In short, he’s flirting with everyone watching. Men and women in Asia seem to have a knack for learning to enjoy this discomfort, perhaps the way we enjoy secretly viewing naughty pictures online from our office cubicle—we know it’s wrong, but it feels good and adds some spice to our lives. I’m here to tell you that it’s natural to feel stirrings when someone objectively beautiful dances on the dividing line between male and female. Maybe I’m just a rancid old queen who can’t think outside his own perverted brain-pan, but it would be nice if it became okay for all of us to appreciate the beauty of the human form, in all its many permutations, regardless of whether or not the person we’re admiring plays on our team.

Mixed-race romances are always vulnerable to culture clashes. Both parties were raised differently and consequently have very different ideas of what a marriage should be. But, two years after moving in with my Chinese boyfriend, I really thought we’d come to grips with anything that our diverse cultures could throw in the way of contented, marital bliss. After all, we’d got the OK from his parents—no mean feat for a mixed-race gay couple in family-focused China. I was over the moon that I’d been informally welcomed into the fold, though I was careful to remind myself that we’d need to sweeten the deal with grandkids somewhere down the line. But, all in all, things were perfectly idyllic, and I consequently adored my boyfriend’s parents.

Then they came to stay with us. Again and again and again.

As we grow into adulthood, leave home, go to college, get a job and our own place and finally, hopefully, settle down with a life partner, we foreign devils believe that each rite of passage comes with its own itinerant upgrade in equality. By becoming “homeowners,” we arrive in society and finally attain equality with those who gave us life. Which means, in short, mom and dad have their home, and you have yours. Masters in one are guests in the other.

Well, in China, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Confucius set out very clear instructions on how families worked 2,500 years ago. Female bows to male, younger bows to elder, the son bows to the parents. Period.

Success and social standing don’t alter the family dynamic. You’re not even absolved of complete subservience to your forebears when they die—there are sacrifices to be made. Every year. And you’d better look like you mean it. While modern China may have dispensed with many of the social niceties of Confucianism (my boyfriend, for one, seems to be able to wear any hat he likes when in the presence of a government official), Chinese parents have yet to develop any sense of boundaries with their offspring. The normal rules of social boundaries do not apply. Your son’s home, whether or not he paid for it himself (as my boyfriend did) is your home.

As a result, I’ve never invited my in-laws to stay. There’s never been a need—they invite themselves, typically barely a day in advance, duly arriving laden down with bulk-buy food (that I have implored them not to bring) to add to the stockpile we have failed to diminish since their last visit. The only thing they never bring with them is a return ticket, making it impossible to determine how long we’ll be sharing a living space (two weeks is the norm, but my “mother-in-law” has been known to stay longer). As soon as they’re across the threshold, I have to relinquish all claim to my tiny one-bedroom home in favor of the matriarch. Why? Ask Confucius.

The self-appointed lady of the house proceeds to do all the cooking, cleaning and housework. If I try and intervene, I get dismissed or criticized for “not doing it right.” My rugs are taken up, laminated and concealed under the bed for being “too dirty”; my clothes, down to the most intimate items, are rewashed, refolded and reorganized without my consent, and my kitchen surfaces bear scars from having frozen foods bashed against them at 5A.M. which, for some bizarre reason, is the hour my mother-in-law chooses to begin making breakfast. We don’t get up until 8A.M.

Being a guest in one’s own home may appeal to some—meals are cooked for you, your laundry is done and every surface is cleansed, sanitized and polished without you having to lift a finger. However, what we might expect from a hotel is not necessarily what we want in our own home. We all have a routine. I like my rugs. I like my bed. I like my diet. But to my Chinese mother-in-law, it doesn’t matter what configuration her son’s house is in when she arrives, because when she leaves, it will have been reorganized to her specific standards. In short, neither me, nor my boyfriend, will know where anything is. But she will, and that’s what matters.

I am habitually the first to leap to the defense of Chinese culture, at least the good bits. But this manifest inability for parents to cut the cord and allow their offspring to live independently is taking its toll. China is faced with a generation of children incapable of caring for themselves. Kids have gotten used to food, clean clothes and entertainment magically appearing out of thin air. From infancy and well into adulthood, Chinese parents routinely barge into their children’s lives to do all the hard labor. Otherwise, the more undomesticated kids would likely get scurvy.

The trouble is that I am domesticated. Ironing, cooking, vacuuming—from elementary school onwards, if I didn’t do my chores, I wouldn’t receive my allowance. My boyfriend is hardly a Little Emperor either. He cooks, cleans and even sews, having covertly learned these skills through observation rather than tuition. We manage fine. We don’t need Mom’s help—if anything, her zeal is a hindrance to our relationship, usually leading to rows.

Our apartment has floor space of just under 50 square meters. The only door you can close for privacy is the door to the toilet, and even then, whatever you do in there is audible to everyone else in every other room. This is the reason behind the degree of intimacy in my relationship—there’s literally nowhere to hide your ugly side. This is also the principal source of difficulty in my relationship with my mother-in-law. She knows too much, and comments accordingly.

“Oh, he’s going to the toilet again,” is a particular favorite.

I find her level of interest in her son’s physical condition and bowel movements to be on a par with an overly-devoted family doctor, and struggle to understand why this woman doesn’t concentrate on her own life rather than spend her time attempting to micromanage that of her independent, forward-thinking, financially solvent son.

But maybe that’s the point—for a Chinese mother, a domestically independent child means the end of her parental raison d’être. In China, the absence of a more egalitarian, emotional foundation to familial relationships means that children don’t turn to their parents for psychological support—preferring partners, friends, co-workers or, increasingly, the Internet. Parents handle the practicalities, but you don’t “share” much. If my boyfriend needs a shoulder to cry on, he turns to me. I’ve never seen him hug his parents, or call them when he’s in need of reassurance. Whatever emotional crises aren’t dealt with internally are outsourced to me—he has told me that he’d never call his mother for emotional support because she’d fret too much.

In this regard, my mother-in-law, being retired, has little to do but twiddle her thumbs, at least until the first grandchild appears. I guess I can forgive her wanting to hang on to the mama mantle a little longer. But she’d better keep her interfering, rubber-gloved hands off my goddamn rugs.

At first, I was tempted to rise above this all-too-obvious jibe at one of the world’s great cuisines, borne of one of the world’s once-great cultures. More than anything, I was bemused that anyone would be interested in David Sedaris’ views on food. It’s kind of like asking for Hemingway’s views on leather galoshes. Interesting? Maybe. Irrelevant? Most definitely.

Sedaris clearly subscribes to the Funny Games school of travel writing. He wants people to cough and splutter, to cry “racism,” and to condemn him to burn in eternal hellfire for his bigoted, ill-conceived views. He wants all of this, because it will sell far more books than well-researched, reasoned analysis. I’m not rising to it. In fact, I’d go so far as to agree, in principle, with his views on spitting, animal feces, and the Chinese penchant for allowing their children to defecate in plain sight. Not that these idiosyncrasies, aside from public defecation, weren’t commonplace in most American cities until recently (only intervention from Harvey Milk saw an end to the heaps of dog mess plaguing San Franciscan parks in the 1970s).

I regularly bore witness to excessive expectoration from British footballers, friends and family until, overnight, the practice vanished in the early 90s when we discovered organic vegetables and Levi’s jeans. Sedaris is fully aware of this. He went to China, as his first paragraph makes abundantly clear, determined to hate it. Which begs the question, if that was the case, why did he choose to focus on the least-hate-able element of Chinese civilization?

I will not stand for this increasingly frequent dismissal of Chinese culinary art by Westerners who can barely use chopsticks. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to criticize—I don’t like shark’s fin, bird’s nest, or seahorse for example. Nothing to do with ethics, I dislike them because they’re tasteless and only used in cooking because they’re expensive. The popular affection for ingredients based purely on their place on the endangered list is my major bugbear with Chinese food. As is the selective exclusion of certain animals (if you like shark’s fin so much, why not tuck into giant panda or golden langur monkey?) However, I will defend Chinese gastronomy to the last. Why? Because I believe it is China’s only art form to have been in an almost constant state of innovation, development, and refinement, and now stands as China’s only living contribution to global culture.

For an American to be so dismissive makes the criticism all the more difficult to swallow. Sure, American cities may be melting pots of deliciousness, but that’s in no small part due to the contributions of other world cultures. Yes, that includes us much-maligned Brits, though I won’t get started on the joys of British cooking for a second time.

Sedaris’ endless comparisons with Japan are especially grating. I tire of this endless China vs. Japan debate—as if it weren’t enough to put up with the endless political back-and-forth living here, now Westerners are treading that ancient path of comparing two countries which, while admittedly crossing over in many areas, are so divergent in others that they might as well be on different continents. To compare attitudes toward hygiene and social conduct in China unfavorably with Japan is tantamount to comparing attitudes toward universal healthcare and education in the U.S. unfavorably with Cuba. The two nations have very different personalities. You don’t like it, go somewhere else. And, when it comes to food, comparisons between Asian nations are doubly redundant. Japan invented artificial cream, red bean-flavored Kit Kats and raw whale meat. Oh, and they also invented the love suicide. A country is only as refined as your perception allows.

So Sedaris visited Chengdu and Beijing. He submitted an article ostensibly about food but wrote, almost entirely, about piss and shit, unable to drag his mind away from the scatalogical and onto the culinary for more than a few lines. Mainland Asia is unhygienic. Thailand, India, Cambodia—filthy, filthy places. With incredible food, but appalling public bathrooms. But who the hell goes on vacation for the public bathrooms? I wonder if he cut the lines commenting on how the dishes he tried actually tasted. Care to offer any insight into the preparation beyond assertions that animals are simply hacked to death and then boiled up any which way? While his fellow traveler’s remark that “this country might have its ups and downs but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here” is hokum of the highest order, I would venture that you’re more likely to eat the most extraordinary meal of your life in China than anywhere else, though you may have to kiss many frogs (hacked up or otherwise) before you find the prince.

The jianbing in action.

I’ve been disappointed by Chinese restaurants many, many times. But I have also been delighted. Anyone can find something they like in China’s endless pantheon of delights. A dear friend of mine, the fussiest eater I’ve ever known, on a recent visit discovered a passionate love for breakfast jianbing. Another two friends, a recently-engaged and resolutely middle-England couple, were less than enthralled by the cuisine forced upon them on their package tour until my better half took them to a Shandong restaurant close to where we live. Now, back in England, they do nothing but rave about hongshaorou (red-cooked pork).

You can dine in China three times a day and never have the same dish twice. If you don’t like it, you move on until you find the perfect match for your taste and temperament. Try doing that at Wendy’s.

Speaking as a passionate chef who spends all his free time in the kitchen, I’ll gladly doff my white hat and admit that China is still home to the world’s most diverse cuisine by far, a fact made all the more astounding by the relative paucity of base ingredients. Most dishes can be conjured up with the meat, fish, fungus, pulse or vegetable of your choice, to which is added one or more of the following: Sichuan pepper, soy sauce, vinegar, cooking wine, salt, sugar, star anise, cinnamon, bay leaf, and, if you’re feeling really flashy, oyster sauce. No Moroccan rose harissa, no buttermilk, no organic kaffir lime. You don’t need to visit Whole Foods and browse for three hours whenever you want to pick up a saucepan. Your spice rack is compact, your kitchen small, your utensils basic, and most all ingredients are available lusciously fresh and seasonal from your nearest wet market. Your repertoire next to limitless.

The phrase goes that French cuisine shows the genius of the chef and Italian cuisine shows the genius of God. But if God were a chef, he’d cook Chinese.

Though I remain indifferent to the books, I have enjoyed the Potter movies immensely, and thus count myself among the die-hard fans of the franchise, pedaling to my local IMAX bright and early on the 14th to secure my ticket for the premiere. My friends and I were planning to go in costume – I was going to be Dolores Umbridge. We’d booked a table at TGI Friday’s. This was the biggest deal since the premiere of The Phantom Menace. Better still, this movie looked like it might actually be good.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that nowhere in or around the cinema could I see a poster advertising Part 2. Kung Fu Panda 2 was still well represented, as was Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a film I knew for a fact was slated for release long after the dust had settled from the Battle of Hogwarts. But still, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint were nowhere to be seen. Questions to the staff produced an evasive reaction – I got no more information than “it’s not currently being screened.” In a panic, I called my boyfriend, certain that he’d be able to find which cinemas in Beijing would be premiering Potter. After all, the previous three films were released bang on time in China, and understandably so, given the popularity of both the Warner Bros. franchise and J.K. Rowling’s novels with Chinese people young and old.

An anxious half-hour ensued as my better half called around and scoured the blogosphere. The result was so gobsmacking I had to sit down to take it all in.

Beginning of the Great Revival (Jiandang Weiye), a film not eagerly anticipated in China, but, in the view of some, infinitely important as the Party’s birthday present to itself, was slated to be the first domestic movie to break one billion yuan at the box office. That’s according to the filmmakers, not the cynical public, whose blogs slamming the film have blipped neatly off the domestic Internet with the regularity of a dripping tap.

Oh, wait, you haven’t seen Jiandang Weiye? No, nobody I know has, but apparently it’s amazing. At least CCTV, the Party, the NPC, and the folks who made it say it is. So good, in fact, that the government have forced all film and box office websites to take down the “comments” sections attached to listings of that movie and only that movie, no doubt because they would otherwise be jammed with postings praising its integrity and historical accuracy. The movie is doing so incredibly well that cinemas are no longer showing it in the evenings, I imagine so they can avoid stampedes and rioting among those unable to secure precious tickets. Anyway, even though it is unquestionably a masterpiece beyond criticism, apparently the domestic box office has fallen a shade short of one billion yuan in the opening week. In fact, to date, Beginning of the Great Revival has made only 0.3 billion yuan. This is including all those free and “compulsory” attendances by Party workers and their families, as well as State-owned enterprises organizing mandatory trips to see the film. There’s not a screen in China not showing it, even though most of them are playing to empty seats.

"Alright, who here thinks the movie we're in is a complete piece of shit?"

Well, says the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, until we break one billion, you can’t have any fun in the cinema. Until then, Beginning of the Great Revival stays on release until every one of you ungrateful bastards goes and sees it. It doesn’t matter if cinemas lose money in the process – we’ll keep it out there for decades if necessary. It has to meet the government target. It has to. Otherwise, we’ve lost, yet again, to Hollywood.

As a result, the two movies most likely to be massive hits with the Chinese public – Transformers: Dark of the Moon and, wait for it, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two, have had their release dates pushed back. While SARFT isn’t saying so, this is because the two films will push Beginning of the Great Revival out of the domestic film chart within hours of opening, whereas at the moment it currently languishes around the number 8 spot (bear in mind, there are only ever around 15 movies on general release in China at any one time). For Hollywood to crush the Party in the month of its 90th birthday would simply be a bridge too far. As a result, Chinese audiences can wait until July 21 for their annual dose of brainless Bay, while Potter fans have to wait until at least August 4.

Needless to say, this move by the increasingly draconian SARFT has not gone down well. I won’t endeavor to summarize some of the blog posts my boyfriend came across, but the word shabi – “stupid cunt,” was used liberally in reference to the good people at SARFT. One highlight was delivered by a committed Potter fan, whose desperation was eloquently expressed in the phrase, “I hate Jiandang Weiye. Hate it, hate it, hate it!”

So, that’s it. I get to see Harry’s final battle against the forces of evil a good month after everyone else in the world because the Chinese government, having spectacularly failed to make a pointless, unmarketable vanity project successful by fair means, have turned to their old habit of forcing the delivery of an impossible target. Like the agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward, failure is not an option for Party propaganda films. The only way to grant this steaming cinematic turd a modicum of success is to remove all competitors from the marketplace, so horny teenagers dodging their parents will have no choice but to sit through hours of Liu Ye portraying someone who somewhat resembles Mao Zedong while they feel each other up in a dark auditorium. On the plus side for the horny teenagers, at least there’s no chance anyone will see them at it. The government knows that, between them, Bay and Yates would annihilate their little Triumph of the Will, and so, predictably, they don’t play fair. And they ruin my weekend.

Welcome to Cinema with Chinese Characteristics.

When we consider that China has an estimated 1.3 billion people (not including unregistered births), 0.02% of the population choosing to end their own lives annually may not seem so bad. For one, far more will die on China’s roads, or because they lack access to or funds to pay for adequate health care. The suicide rate in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan is far higher than in China, which ranks 66th in the world, although the reliability of the source data is, as with all statistics emerging from state organs, subject to doubt.

Far more alarming, in my opinion, are the mental health statistics. 100 million Chinese living with some form of debilitating mental illness. The CDCP doesn’t go into specifics, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which mental illnesses are the more common, but whichever way you look at it, with almost 8 percent of the population classified as mentally ill, you wonder how it’s taken the central government so long to come up with some kind of response. This June, the first official white paper on mental health has pledged more resources to assist Chinese people living with mental illness. Observers could be forgiven for thinking that this action redefines shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

At the last count, China had a mere 600 purpose-built psychiatric hospitals, and just 16,000 qualified psychiatrists. There’s little hope that even one percent of the 100 million in need of psychiatric care will receive it – few Chinese can afford the luxury of non-essential medical treatment, and even if money isn’t an object, time and traditional perceptions of mental health certainly are. Seeing a shrink may be a rite of passage for the white-collar New Yorker, but in China, actively acknowledging anything less than complete mental invulnerability is a massive loss of face, and, if you did deign to see a psychiatrist or therapist, you’d likely keep it a secret even from your immediate family.

With words like “retarded,” “sicko,” and “crazy” bandied around fairly liberally in China, it’s safe to say the general population has a less than enlightened perception of mental illness. Most families with a member who suffers from learning difficulties or even full-blown psychosis are likely to simply lock them indoors if their condition is too severe. If they are judged sufficiently capable to go out and work, the family is likely to micromanage their lives, carefully orchestrating those social necessities like marriage and job postings in an intricate dance of damage limitation. Many rural wives only discover their husbands’ psychiatric problems after the fact thanks to a carefully-planned courtship and a shotgun wedding. In mainstream society, mental illness is also synonymous with criminality – cold-blooded murderers like Yao Jiaxin are dismissed as having some form of 神经病 (mental disorder), and, without their right to a psych evaluation before they have a bullet put in the back of their heads, who’s to argue?

While the provision for China’s mentally ill is woefully inadequate, the West hardly has an enlightened track record when it comes to helping those in need of psychiatric care. Indeed, we in America continue to deny Gulf War syndrome even exists, and until recently incarceration in a lunatic asylum in Europe or the U.S. was seen as the best solution to severe mental illness. Unwed mothers were among the most numerous inmates of London’s notorious Bethlehem Lunatic Asylum (Bedlam), and it was common practice until the 1950s to lobotomize young people suffering from “diseases” ranging from autism to homosexuality. There is also little evidence to suggest that certain people are at greater risk to clinical mental illness than others. Real psychosis exists in all societies. There’s no definitive solution to the fact that human society inevitably creates a certain proportion of mentally ill people. The human brain is barely understood, and all kinds of experiences and chemical changes can unleash forces so powerful that a person’s consciousness collapses before anyone can react. Just old age alone is one of the leading causes of psychiatric illness, and while Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and common dementia are more heavily documented and arguably better understood in the West, there’s evidence that they’ve existed in some form in all human societies since the beginning of time, and China, like other developing countries, is a major contributor to research into possible treatments.

However, there is another form of mental illness – one which governments, rather than chemical or physiological changes, are instrumental in inducing, directly or indirectly, in the general population. A condition common in places like Congo, Sudan, and Palestine but far less so in Manchester, Amiens, and San Francisco: post-traumatic stress. I can’t help wondering how many Chinese sufferers there are.

I recall a cycling holiday with my parents in Guangxi Province, taking in the karst limestone peaks that resembled sugarloaves from the backs of bicycles. Passing through a small rural village, we noticed a long-haired and wiry man, of about 40 to 50 years of age, walking down the main street, singing tuneless Cultural Revolution marching songs. We noticed him instantly, as there wasn’t a stitch of clothing on his sinewy frame – he simply strode through the village while all those who passed him averted their eyes, disappearing into the distance at remarkable speed. During my time in Beijing, I can recall at least two specific instances of elderly women berating random passersby with admonitions including words such as “landlord,” “class enemy” and “counterrevolutionary,” one particular woman in Houhai screaming her criticisms so loudly I could still hear her every word from the other side of the lake. I also remember passing an elderly man near my workplace, who insisted in no uncertain terms that the Nationalists had surrounded the city, but “we’d fight to the last man.” In fact, my only contact with mental illness, or at least, what I perceived as mental illness, in China has been this unusually regional affliction, something my mother, a therapist for 40 years, has informed me she has only encountered in the inmates of high-security prisons, and in her own father, a World War II veteran.

Considering what every Chinese person over the age of 40 has lived through, it might come as no surprise that some are haunted by the demons of the last sixty years. For the first half of the communist era, the country was run as if it was at war, and the people suffered accordingly. I won’t attempt to conjecture how many of China’s 100 million mentally ill are the way they are as a result of their experiences during the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or the atrocities in the summer of ’89. What I do believe, however, is their suffering can be reduced. Unlike autism, Down’s syndrome, or dementia, the effects of post-traumatic stress can be alleviated in all but the most extreme cases with the so-called “talking cure.” But those who have had their mental faculties eroded by abuse at the hands of cadres, soldiers or neighbors are denied any respite by government policies which either falsify the past or attempt to conceal it altogether. Whereas the citizens of Germany have an open forum to discuss the excesses of Nazism, two World Wars, partition, and all the other horrors embedded in their national psyche, the Chinese have no such luxury, as the subjects that aren’t off-limits are so heavily restricted that the real scars, the genuine horrors, can never be truly acknowledged and, consequently, those whose minds have been destroyed in the name of politics and progress are abandoned to psychosis.

The saddest thing for me to see, however, is that this trend of concealing how damaging catastrophic loss can be shows no signs of abating. The tear-jerking coverage of the horrendous earthquakes that have ravaged Sichuan and Qinghai since 2008 does not focus on the victims – it relegates them neatly to casualty statistics. CCTV coverage revolves around the heroism of rescuers, exploiting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and condensing it into Party PR sound bites, with no consideration of the need for people to heal through acknowledging and engaging with grief. Who wants to hoist a red flag and shake hands with Hu Jintao when their house has been flattened with their entire family inside of it? Like the Three Gorges Dam, the government bulldozes peoples’ memories in order to keep emotion off the table – emotion being the enemy of development. “Bring new ideas, leave old furniture,” went the slogan when millions were evicted from their homes to make way for dams, factories and highways in the 1980s. Nobody gave a thought to how the evictees might actually feel – because those carrying out the evictions had not experienced loss. To this day, journalists continue to posture, talking about their “sympathy” with those who have lost loved ones, failing spectacularly to see the utterly patronizing tone they adopt – how could anyone who hasn’t had a child crushed beneath fallen masonry ever understand how that feels? And when someone tries to help people grieve – for example, when Buddhist monks offer open-house counselling to those bereaved in Qinghai, or Ai Weiwei uses the schoolbags of dead children to create a poignant illustration of the immense losses in Sichuan, the government sweeps them aside, as if grieving solves nothing. It does. It offsets even greater psychological suffering down the road.

It is precisely this failure to engage – induced by a government attempting to manipulate the emotions they can’t eradicate – which provides a fertile breeding ground for mental illness. Only by engaging with the stresses of life – and death – can one hope to develop a healthy mental outlook. This may mean more short-term pain for everyone concerned, but the latent agony concealed within which inevitably bubbles over into full-blown psychosis, could be reduced, even eradicated, if China as a whole were allowed to face its past horrors, the horrors of the present, and the horrors yet to come. That the Chinese people are heroically resilient needs no further proof after the last six decades – but only a psychotic would think that they don’t have a natural need to grieve.

However, most shows I watch grudgingly because I can’t avoid it. Living with a Chinese partner in a miniscule one-bedroom apartment has forced me to accept the ubiquity of the television in the Chinese household—it is switched on in the morning and in the evening, and left on at full volume. Why? Just because. It is only recently that I’ve come to see the striking similarity between the television itself and the programming it broadcasts.

I’m not here to lambast the politics of Chinese news. We’ve all got a viewpoint. China’s leaders merely use CCTV to express their approved public view on world events. This I can accept, just as I accept French TV’s assertion that whatever’s going on across the border can be handled by that country’s media, the naked populism of the U.S. networks following the death of Osama bin Laden, and the simpering monarchism of the BBC during their interminable Royal Wedding broadcast. TV news is supposed to pander to viewers, milk statistics, distort facts, and generally make somebody’s point. Unless you’re in China.

The blatant fecklessness of every Chinese journalist working on CCTV’s news shows really amazes me. Whenever I’ve lived in another country, from the U.S. to Malawi, the golden rule of TV journalism is to make yourself look authoritative. You need your viewers to believe you’re really in the line of fire, digging deep to get the scoops that really matter. Unless you work for CCTV, which seems to be the most cushy junket you can enjoy if you discount being retired from the Politburo. On CCTV News, it seems to be the case that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you look half-interested and get your hair done.

The CCTV coverage of Libya has been particularly risible, with barely a mention of the reasons why tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being evacuated from the civil-war wracked North African state (or, indeed, what the hell tens of thousands of Chinese workers were doing there in the first place). But suddenly, as soon as the U.S. got involved, Libya was everywhere. Go figure. War in Libya became the favorite subject of CCTV’s mannequin-faced anchors, with hours of programming devoted to analysis of the conflict. While the rest of the world struggled to find an angle on Libya, CCTV had no such problem.

"And if you'll look behind me, they are setting up buffet tables but it is unclear, with the recent bombing campaign, if the breakfast will remain complementary."

This was exemplified in a “live link-up with our correspondent in Tripoli” during a broadcast in mid-March which was to give us “the situation on the ground in Misrata,” a city held at the time by rebel forces but under constant siege by government troops. Juicy stuff.

Cut to a well-groomed and milk-faced Beijinger standing in what was transparently the garden of a five-star hotel. Behind his immaculately-styled hair was an impressive floral border flanking an elegant fishpond and fountain. His location flashed up onscreen—”Tripoli.” Not a sound disturbed the perfect quietude. I asked myself why this guy was wearing a flak jacket—he seemed more likely to be hit by an hor d’oeuvre than eviscerated by shrapnel.

“Ok,” I thought to myself. “So, he’s not exactly in the thick of it. But at least he’s in Libya. Maybe he has the scoop of the century.”

“Have there been any developments in Misrata?” asked the overly made-up anchor in Beijing.

“We’re not sure, the Libyan government haven’t told us yet. We are waiting for information from the government.”

Cue five minutes of pointless waffle about Gaddafi’s forces “doing everything they can to prevent civilian casualties,” and “making headway against the government opponents,” blah blah blah. This wasn’t journalism. Nobody had researched a story. Hell, they hadn’t even made a token attempt to look as if they were actually working as reporters. This guy was standing in the garden of his Tripoli hotel offering less analysis than I could have gotten in five minutes on Sohu.

I don’t know what this anchor’s experience of Libya actually was. I am reluctant to second-guess the working environment of any of the dozens of correspondents CCTV has shipped out there in order to look legitimate when in actuality they could have done the same job in Beijing with none of the expense. But reading the interviews with the Chinese people who had been evacuated with such pomp and ceremony when the revolt started, who talked at length about their isolated lives on construction sites and university campuses, speaking Chinese to each other and English to the few locals they might interact with, I have a pretty good idea of what these “journalists” are doing: they’re sitting in air-conditioned hotels in Tripoli while real journalists like Tim Hetherington are being shot to death in firefights in Misrata.

Then it hit me. Chinese journalists aren’t journalists in the strictest sense. They’re more like PR reps. I have spent two years working in the Chinese media, editing the full gamut of dross published here on a daily basis, from lifestyle puff pieces to so-called in-depth news features which read like puff pieces. Working on a lifestyle publication I witnessed the ugly process of regurgitating press releases into microphones and onto microblogs verbatim without allowing a single alternative viewpoint to taint the purity of an approved text. Here, I was seeing the same thing practiced in all openness on a world television network.

"I am currently detained in a secret compound they call a 'resort.' They are treating me well and I am not under duress. Tell my family I love them."

Now I finally understand why my partner’s family scoffs at the Xinwen Lianbo which drones out of every channel at 7 every night. The only thing more predictable than the Party proclamations read word-for-word is the chorus of “哼。骗自己” with which my in-laws greet each news item. CCTV really is fooling itself. Perhaps at one time people actually took the Propaganda Department’s word as gospel. Ok, it’s a fair bet to say plenty still do, but not the people actually delivering the message. When it comes to these journalists, anchors and researchers, they’re most likely aware of the facts, but know that the facts are irrelevant in their particular profession.

As with so much in China both now and in the past, nobody cares what is said, so long as it’s said with sufficient gravitas. Mix in some computer graphics, pad things out with “live broadcasts,” throw in a couple scripted interviews with happy beneficiaries of benevolent Party policies, and keep to the running time. Whether it’s the Libya conflict or the Royal Wedding (during which the Chinese commentary on Star World revolved largely around the anchors spouting banalities about British culture such as our tendency to talk about the weather, rather than offer any insight into the event itself), you see the same pattern. Say nothing, but say it incessantly, and pronounce every word correctly. It’s all about appearances because the content is bullshit.

It’s a bit like singing the American national anthem. We all lose our thread in the middle, but nobody drops their hand from their chest or reduces the volume—if anything, we strive to look more patriotic when we’re just mouthing random sounds because we hope we’re being convincing. And it might just work, if everyone else weren’t in on the scam.

I’ve heard this before. Living in France, the nation that invented culinary tunnel vision about the same time they came up with tarte tatin, my nation’s gastronomic heritage was met with similarly disdainful invocation of “that one British dish.” During a meal of roast capon, petits pois, and pommes dauphinoise, washed down with what, to my primitive taste buds, tasted like the angels in heaven (but something my hosts saw as a notch above brake fluid), the bombshell was dropped: “All you English eat is fish and chips.” It wasn’t open to discussion. My 18-year-old self didn’t object, mainly because I had a serious crush on my dangerously handsome and buff French exchange partner. However, on subsequent holidays to Malawi, Russia, Thailand, and Italy, the same sentiment was repeated, almost verbatim, in a babel of languages. “Oh, British food… you mean fish and chips.” My deference changed to defensiveness, which, when an Australian had the temerity to rubbish my nation’s cooks, transmogrified into bile-spitting bitchiness. “At least we have a national dish, you cork-hatted shark-stroker!”

I am here today to set the record straight about the world’s most maligned and least understood cuisine, which has reached far further afield than most nations are even aware, and is now, I believe, poised to finally take the reins from the garlic-saturated hands of Parisian chefs du cuisine. But, as Britishers, we’ll be dignified about it.

British cooking is one of Europe’s most diverse, dynamic, and consistently innovative cuisines. I’m not talking about the legacy of Empire which made curry and chop suey part of the national storecupboard, or even the more recent attempts to enliven a cuisine left hollow and dead after a postwar flood of processed foods (mostly from America) by simply copying the French, Italians or even in our craziest moments, the Germans. I’m talking about the culinary tradition of a multi-faceted and contradictory melting pot, which had access to not only the finest, freshest produce but also ample fuel, solid trade links, and a consistent lack of foreign invasions from 1066 onward. The French, Saxons, Norse, Danish, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh all made their contributions. The British palate and constitution, refined over centuries of immigration and unimaginable wealth, is one of the world’s most robust. We tuned our tongues to spices such as nutmeg and paprika while the French were still working out which way to point a trebuchet. We were the earliest nation in the world to initiate large-scale pastoral agriculture, giving us high-quality, low-cost meat, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, and cream, which offered chefs a chance to experiment. Fishing was a way of life for everyone on the coast; thus it was the British that were among the first peoples to consume oysters, clams, and deep sea fish on a large scale. Our deep forests were rich in game, and our temperate, wet climate ideal for cultivating grains, vegetables, and fruit.

The Tudor accession in the 15th century ushered in relative peace and prosperity which in turn caused an unprecedented flurry of activity in the kitchen. Henry VIII’s banquets were legendary, with several cows, dozens of sheep, and hundreds of fowl consumed per sitting. We perfected the art of cooking game and developed the savory pie, a dish which has thus far even failed to cross the Atlantic. We developed cold storage so that desserts such as syllabubs, sorbets, and ice cream—traditionally flavored with orange water, rose petals, lavender and fennel—could be properly kept. While Catholics and Protestants pulled Europe apart, Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity effectively made religious tolerance a law, defusing any chance of an English Wars of Religion. As the English Tudors gave way to the Scottish Stuarts (enter oatmeal, black pepper, and some seriously good home baking), despite political turmoil and a civil war, coffee, chocolate, chili, cinnamon, and ginger from our overseas colonies further enriched the tables of the wealthy. Even the poor got a taste of the exotic, with the non-native potato proving infinitely more adaptable than millet, leading to the invention of myriad spud-based dishes. Oh, and lest we forget that little contribution made to convenience foods by the Earl of Sandwich. We have grown to love our convenience foods. A meal that fits in a hand without burning it was what fueled the Industrial Revolution, and Cornish pasties, pork pies, and savory pastries remain a major part of the British working class diet. Development continued almost uninterrupted into the twentieth century (even the stuffy Victorians, while happy to cover their ankles in public, would be mortified if the fresh Scottish salmon sandwiches and buttered, fluffy scones piled with glistening jam vanished from High Tea, not to mention the spice bread, fat rascals, crumpets, muffins, and pikelets).

Wartime rationing and then the postwar mess of powdered egg and processed, chemically-laden foodstuffs imported in bulk from America did a lot to undo this heritage. In fact, if I were alive in the 1970s and you had said to me, “British food is shit,” I’d have had to agree, at least in view of the lamentable state of restaurant dining at the time. Somerset Maugham wrote in the context of the period, that “one can eat very well in England, provided one has breakfast three times a day.” Indeed, the “Full English” of bacon, egg, sausage, baked beans, fried bread, black pudding, mushrooms, and grilled tomato remains on all hotel menus throughout the British Isles, though these days we prefer good honest Scottish porridge, or slightly less honest, but very neutral, Swiss muesli. However, while good British meals out were a rarity, the satisfying comfort of traditional home cooking survived largely unscathed. Well, apart from microwave dinners and Boil in the Bag (if you don’t know what this is, don’t ask). All this changed with the foodie revolution of the late 1990s. A new wave of TV chefs rejected the trends of Delia Smith (Britain’s Martha Stewart) and began to play around—not with aping foreign cuisines as had been the case in the 70s and 80s (the era which saw the birth of chop suey and tikka masala, both in British restaurant kitchens)—but with British ingredients cooked to British methods. Traditional fare made a comeback, with refinements to classics like bread and butter pudding, pork pie, smoked salmon, apple dumplings, and Scotch broth, but new dishes were created by new chefs, all with their own fields of specialism. Gordon Ramsay handled haute cuisine, Gary Rhodes, heir apparent to the far superior, and more British-minded, if permanently intoxicated Keith Floyd, handled British favorites. Jamie Oliver appealed to the young and families, and Heston Blumenthal developed molecular cuisine, which has caused a greater worldwide impact than any cooking movement since Julia Child decided to pick up a pen. Thirty minutes from my house, Michelin-starred chef Andrew Pern serves up delights such as seared black pudding and foie gras with carmelized apple and cider, and fluffy Eton mess (homemade meringues crushed with fresh berries and vanilla vodka-enriched whipped cream). Sure, we borrow ingredients from our neighbors, but then, we also gave the French not only creme anglaise (custard) and creme brulee (burnt cream, developed at Cambridge university), but also their champagne industry (a beverage originally exported to Britain as substandard white wine, where it became a hit with the nobility). Many of our ingredients are adaptations of foreign imports (rhubarb, grown and ignored throughout China, is still cultivated en masse in England for delicious sweet-sour pie fillings or tenderly steamed and dabbed with thick, creamy custard). Now, there are more British chefs with Michelin stars than there are French chefs. We have more artisan cheeses than the French, more artisan beers than the Dutch, Germans and Czechs put together. The waiting lists for Britain’s most prestigious cooking schools are among the longest in the world. Even Americans, whom, I believe, love to slam British food because their own cuisine is so roundly attacked by others, are forced to acknowledge the British onslaught in the kitchen. If South Park singles you out for satire (see Ramsay and Oliver in Creme Fraiche, season 14), you know you’re big.

Which brings me to my final rebuttal to that ill-informed young Chinese lady, who, I am almost certain, has never sat down to a British meal with British people in her entire life. Lady, don’t comment on what you don’t know, and haven’t tried to understand. My boyfriend, Chinese through and through, who also studied in the UK for over a year, shared this narrow view of British cooking, until he began to spend holidays with my family. Now, our storecupboard in Beijing has, standing alongside Sichuan peppercorns, Shanxi vinegar and umpteen packs of dried mushrooms, are tins of Yorkshire shortbread, jars of stem ginger in syrup, Marmite, English mustard, and, until we began to make our own (in the English style, naturally), Tiptree jam. We alternate cooking, and he has Britishized many of his staple dishes (baking red-cooked pork in the oven, rather than on the stovetop, enriching soups with butter and white onions), while I have updated British staples like boiled cauliflower with garlic and baked field mushrooms on toast with a few Chinese ingredients. My boyfriend was in raptures at our Christmas dinner table, where my parents served up roast goose, crispy roast potatoes and chipped parsnips, creamed carrot and swede with salted butter, parboiled Brussels sprouts with white wine reduction, and a choice of trifle (the proper kind, rich in sherry, red fruit, light sponge cake, and homemade vanilla custard) or plum pudding with brandy sauce (though he found our flambéing the pudding while singing rather macabre, a little like a burning at the stake). My parents brew their own beer, distill liqueurs flavored with sloeberries and elderflower, and bottle their own wine. My dad grows all his own vegetables, from the traditional (cabbage and potatoes) to the more refined (asparagus, artichokes, and Romaine lettuce). My parents’ pantries are stuffed with homemade jellies, jams, and pickles, and my mother bakes all the family’s bread. And no, they live in an ordinary middle class suburb, not on a thousand-acre farm with a paragraph in the Domesday book.

My point is that British cuisine is simply not something we aggressively export, because we don’t feel we have to. By nature British people are at once arrogant and modest—we simply have so much faith in our own superiority we feel attempting to push it on uninformed outsiders is bad form. We’re the Mormons of national culture, without the immaculate dental work. But that doesn’t mean a British family won’t throw open their arms to a foreigner who shows an interest in our cuisine. If you want to enjoy it, it’s there, and in rich, enthralling glory, but you need to want to connect with it. You can travel to the UK and eat Chinese food your entire stay, and most Chinese students do just that, with an occasional McDonalds meal for variety. We’re not like Italy or Spain—even our most remote rural villages have Indian and Chinese restaurants, thanks to the iron constitution and accepting palate of the Britisher. We love choice in food, lodging, and clothing more than any nation I have yet encountered. The eclectic mix of dishes on the average pub menu—ranging from loaded skins and tomato soup to vindaloo and Moroccan couscous—is testament to this. Just as with our government, we see no contradiction in dunking chips (ok, French fries, though the Belgians invented them) in curry sauce.

And, for the record, fish and chips was developed by Jewish immigrant smallholders in London in the late 19th century. I hereby extend an open invitation to all those who continue to sneer at the concept of British cuisine: let me change your mind.

“You’re a foreigner. You don’t get it.”

When I hear this I begin to feel like the residents of South Park, who, when beset by the tanned and toned buffoons of Jersey Shore, take up arms rather than be fobbed off with explanations of irrational or unhinged behavior as “a Jersey thing.”

I am not claiming any particular qualification or expertise when it comes to China. Despite devoting seven years of my life to fairly intensive study of the language, literature, theater and cinema I still acknowledge my failings to acquire robust insight. I gave up on improving my spoken Chinese after being shot down by too many bilingual foreigners and Chinese alike, and have stuck to a working knowledge ever since. I stopped reading Chinese novels when I stopped being able to locate works by my few favorite writers. I abandoned domestically-produced theater after one too many badly-acted, overproduced “issues” plays that stepped around actual issues, and as for cinema, if you ask me, China ceased to be of interest since it developed a domestic box office.

But movies remain a passion, and I’ve always been an optimistic sort, refusing to close my eyes and ears completely, willing to take in a Chinese movie on a recommendation from a friend. Enter Let the Bullets Fly by the acclaimed filmmaker Jiang Wen, whose output I enjoyed while in college—particularly Devils on the Doorstep and In the Heat of the Sun, which I believe to be China’s most visually luscious film to date. Anyway, a colleague of mine arrived one morning at work raving about how subtly and ingeniously Bullets got its claws into the quagmire of Chinese politics, insisting it was Jiang Wen’s “masterpiece” and would “redefine Chinese cinema.”

Then the disclaimer: “I don’t think you’d be able to understand the political messages. After all, it’s about revolution, and pain, and suffering. It’s very Chinese.”

Right, because only the Chinese have experienced revolution, pain and suffering and the Blitzkreig was just Europeans horsing around. It’s not that my colleague was some hard-bitten veteran of the Long March either—he was a sheltered, spoiled single child. His parents and grandparents had enjoyed relative prosperity right through the Great Leap Forward, side-stepped the Cultural Revolution, and were now making a fortune through government connections in Sichuan. He was no more qualified to talk about the agonies of war and societal chaos than I was. However, I chose not to take the bait, after all I had not seen the movie, and perhaps it was indeed as inscrutable as he claimed. When he started to rave about its “imagination” and its “visual dynamism” that was “revolutionary in itself,” however, I began to feel antsy—we were told similar things about Tron: Legacy.

Regardless, I dutifully tracked down a pirated DVD copy and last night myself and my partner settled down, cushions aplump, and prepared to be blown away.

Let the Bullets Fly is many things. It’s convincingly acted, well produced, and elaborately staged. It makes the best use of star power possible, sinking most of its budget into names rather than production value. It has a healthy dose of humor, is indisputably Chinese in both focus and feeling, and doesn’t attempt to exploit pretty faces for box office gold.

However, it is the most overt, conservative, and unrepentant love letter to Chairman Mao I have ever sat through, and that includes Founding of a Republic.

Zhang Mazi (Jiang Wen, naturally), master criminal, along with his gang derails a train carrying the soon-to-be Governor Shi (Ge You, doing his Ge You thing) and his soon-to-be-pointlessly-killed-off trophy wife (an excellent and underused Carina Lau) to the poverty-stricken Goose Town. Zhang decides to be governor with Shi as his flunky; the wife is seduced by Zhang (but she initiates it, of course, because a true hero never coerces women into sex); and the gang enter into a turf war with the inexplicably rich local warlord Huang Silang (Chow Yun-fat). Zhang comes over all Robin Hood and distributes money to the poor before encouraging them to overthrow Huang by beheading the latter’s body double in the market square to convince the lumpen masses a new era has dawned. But Huang survives long enough to have a cozy chat on his looted lawn furniture with Zhang before getting inexplicably blown up seconds later in his castle turret. Zhang’s gang, now wealthy, ride the gravy train to Shanghai while Zhang trots off into the sunset, the hero incarnate, pleased at a job well done.

See the clever symbolism here? Zhang Mazi is, like, Mao. And there’s his Communist Party. And there’s Sun Yat-sen, and Chiang Kai-shek, and all our favorites! Mao wins and Chiang gets blown up and the CCP go off to get rich while Mao remains as incorruptible and noble as ever. Even though he blew up a train and killed a bunch of people, half of them innocent, but shush.

For a foreigner not to get the symbolism of this movie, they would have to have no knowledge whatsoever of China’s history in the last century. They would also have to never have heard of Robin Hood, which, as I’m a British man, isn’t likely. There’s no great mystery, as my colleague seems to think there is, why this film was not banned by the official censors. It tells one of the many narratives that the CCP have spun to justify their stranglehold on power. Chiang Kai-shek was pure, lecherous evil (even the name Huang Silang sounds close to Lustful Dead Wolf), outsmarted and outgunned by Mao Zedong, a resourceful military hero with no ulterior motives. The Red Army were simple, determined folk of unquestionable loyalty while the Nationalist troops were either imbeciles (portrayed by a scholar-lackey of Huang’s), psychopaths (a warrior-lackey of Huang’s) or perverts (former rent boy Chen Kun, who puts in a good turn as a torturer). The Chinese people (Goose Town’s population) are the most roundly insulted—brainless, craven idiots to a man, emphasized by Jiang’s frankly racist use of Shanxi, Henan or Dongbei accents for all the townspeople—ripping on China’s traditional dumbasses.

Some foreigners might not get the finer points, like the use of local accents, nods to Jiang’s early work, or quips based on Buddhist sutras. Most of the humor went over my head, apart from the sight gags and a few bon mots, but to say a foreigner won’t understand this Zucker-worthy farce is like telling a Chinese person, “Oh, sure Avatar’s great. But you’ll only be appreciating it on a very basic level. After all, it’s an American film. Americans know about colonialism and oppression. It’s in their history.” Avatar’s box office success in China would indicate that, if the film’s message is impenetrable to the average Chinese, they’re certainly trying hard to understand it.

I appreciate having gaps in my knowledge filled by a willing friend, especially when I ask for help. My partner is wonderful in this regard—while he sometimes assumes my ignorance in certain things, particularly Chinese history, most of the time he simply illuminates something I’ve failed to grasp without my having to ask. Throughout Bullets he was by my side, clarifying lines I’d not quite grasped (there were no English subtitles). But there’s a big difference between sharing knowledge and patronizing someone you know to be at least relatively knowledgeable about your culture. This affliction blights almost all young Chinese who have based their worldview on the curriculum they were exposed to in school, who are happy to toe the CCTV line on internationalism, which is that Chinese have little to learn about the outside world that isn’t directly related to science or technology. They’ve got European and American culture down pat because they’ve read Jane Eyre and eat at KFC.

Humility is an important and increasingly rare commodity in competitive China. Selfishness is its natural replacement, and a self-centered worldview engendered by years of social conditioning easily convinces people who aren’t exposed to alternative ways of thinking that their perspective is always the right one, and that nobody’s as well-informed as they are. Americans, British, hell, everyone suffers in some way from this prejudiced view that outsiders will “not get us,” simply because they’re outsiders. This basically writes off our fellow human beings as unable to constructively analyze their surroundings, to perceive and to develop opinions about what they see and hear in unfamiliar settings. Americans and Chinese are particular offenders in this area, as they are arguably the most comprehensively nationalized people on earth due to their relative distance from their neighbors, with Russians a close second.

In my homeland of Britain, we would consider it rude to presume ignorance—far better to embark on a discussion and wait for them to say something. I avoid cricket, rugby league, and pantomime for this very reason. But I still take my partner along to enjoy all three, and, while cricket has yet to grow on him, he has learned a lot both through my patchy knowledge and what he has observed himself. We expect people to ask if they need something explained, rather than explaining it preemptively. I’ve heard tell of Chinese men, on dates with Western girls who’ve lived in China for years, actually reciting reams of ancient poetry without warning, to “educate” their prospective conquests. If a girl wants poetry written by someone else a thousand years ago read out loud, I’m sure she’ll ask.

I was especially offended by my colleague assuming I wouldn’t comprehend Bullets partly because it is such an obvious film, but also because he knows that I have spent three years living in China, asking questions of him and others, reading news stories, and continuing sporadic research. And, even if I hadn’t, he might have given me the benefit of the doubt that I had at least a nodding acquaintance with its politics, seeing as how I help him edit a political news magazine. The supreme irony was he actually felt he was being helpful, as I’m sure my elderly in-laws do when they ask me if I know who Mao Zedong is, or explain that China has 5,000 years of history.

Lecturing does not educate. Learning is not something you impose on others, though that hasn’t stopped millions of Chinese teachers from trying. Knowledge and awareness must be sought out and developed, nurtured through reading and digestion of a variety of sources. Reciting platitudes like a masticating cow only serves self-importance and narrow-mindedness. I don’t want Chinese people to defer to my knowledge of their culture, I would simply like them to offer insight when I ask, or show an interest, rather than switch into educator mode the minute they spot my skin tone. I am delighted when Chinese friends ask me questions about my own culture, but, aside from my partner, this rarely happens. Because, in China, when you graduate, you know it all. That’s why bookstores are closing here, why iPads are used solely for Angry Birds, and why nobody’s heard of the Kindle. People feel what they need to do with what they learned in school is to recite it for eternity, ignoring the fact that knowledge is organic and ever-changing. I was taught to understand by asking questions, not by absorbing everything people told me like some kind of cerebral sponge. Here is where Chinese education fails and why my colleague, through no fault of his own, patronized me to a degree I felt was so intolerable I’ve sat for two hours to write about it. I am reminded of a remark made by Scotch crofters who were to be evicted to make way for a steel plant in Ayrshire. “We understand you, but you don’t understand us.” This is what I think whenever a Chinese person decides to inform me of a piece of trivia so well-repeated in China that it’s practically a national slogan.

Another quotation, this time from a Chinese source—the former Chinese ambassador to France, Wu Jianmin:

明代郑和七下西洋后的海禁、清朝康乾盛世后遭受100多年列强欺凌以及新中国成立后的大跃进和文革,都是错误地认识世界的结果.

“The curtailment of Admiral Zheng He’s voyages of discovery in the Ming Dynasty, the decline of the Qing Dynasty and subsequent carving-up of China by foreign powers, the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were all consequences of China misunderstanding the rest of the world.”

Internationalism is a two-way street, China. If you want a melting pot, you need to melt a bit.

Editor’s Note: This article has been translated into Chinese and reprinted here. We were not consulted or notified and do not have any connections with the website or the translator. Nonetheless we are flattered and give our thanks to the translator for his hard work.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of China’s politics as being experimental rather than ideological. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” says it all by saying nothing—the ultimate disclaimer. “Chinese characteristics” are as indefinable as “Chinese thinking,” “Chinese fashion” or “Chinese culture.” To a novelist in a crumbling hutong, they may be one thing. To Hu Jintao, they are quite another. What has not been examined quite coolly enough is the project called the Chinese economy. China is and isn’t a part of the world market. It is and isn’t comparable to all other major economies. It is and isn’t a plutocracy. While Ben Bernanke might disagree, the Chinese leadership are not just robotic, money-grubbing ubercapitalists. They are scientists conducting the world’s most costly, long-running, and risky experiment. Their lab is the length and breadth of China, with each region and municipality a workshop for low-level tinkering. This makes over a billion ordinary Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uygur, Miao, Bai, Hui, and, yes, foreigners, laboratory mice. We are the “consumers” that the government purports to assist through their economic policies, the people who will, eventually, benefit from the Solomon-like wealth the Chinese government has successfully appropriated from, well, us in the past three decades. But when does any right-minded entity pass the savings on to the customer? Yes, we can sometimes benefit indirectly from a favorable exchange rate or a temporary policy introduced before an Expo or Asian Games. But we can also suffer. Food prices are still on the rise; I pay as much for shoes here as I would in London, and a sleeper train ticket from Guangzhou to Chengdu over the Chinese New Year will set you back more than a night in the Peninsula.

These aberrations are the result of miscalculations in planning. While they hurt the laboratory mice, the boffins don’t care too much—there are always new rodents to prod, poke, inject, and immolate. What they are interested in is reconfiguring their formulae, tweaking, calibrating, and recording the results. Sometimes it goes wrong. Leasing a Beijing apartment with no elevator or thermostat from the State for a maximum of 70 years will cost you more than most downtown Manhattan condos which you will own for life, but that’s what happens when the scientists running the lab turn the “real estate” sector over to their inexperienced children. Base government performance evaluation entirely on short-term GDP growth, and of course you open the floodgates to reckless investment, mindless construction, the printing of money to cover costs and, finally, rampant inflation. But sometimes it goes right—forcing foreigners who want to transfer their earnings from Chinese companies back to their countries of origin to first convert yuan into U.S. dollars means the banks (i.e. the State) can cream a nice chunk off the top. Forcing returning Chinese tourists to pay tax on all luxury goods bought outside the country costs nothing and makes a tidy sum. Land transfer fees, arbitrary sales taxes, hospitals charging through the nose for essential vaccinations—it all adds up.

Of course, people the world over are subject to taxation as well as the whims of math aces who wasted their otherwise valuable skills to dick around on the stock market.  In America, that very dicking around caused the Great Recession. The difference is that in the West, money controls government. In China the two are interchangeable: money is government and government is money. All the big corporate hitters, bar none, are state-owned enterprises. The State has cunningly created entities like the Agricultural Bank of China, Sinopec, and China Unicom to disguise the fact that you’re only ever buying from the State. Your money, like it or not, goes straight into central coffers. You might as well just pay 100% of your income as tax. Such is planned economics.

Private enterprise is kept small through the judicious use of monopoly, coercion, and red tape. If you want to set up a business bigger than a noodle stand and succeed, you’ll need state backing just to get past the planning stage. Big private enterprises were by and large sweet sixteen gifts from Party officials to their offspring—a chunk of state monopoly with state backing that keeps a steady flow of income back into, you guessed it, the State. It’s an open secret that most of the major real estate developers in China are owned by the children of the Politburo or top National Party Congress members. Same goes for oil, coal, steel, weapons and power. Folks cry “nepotism,” and the government can holler back “Chinese characteristics.” Such is the wondrous middle ground of being able to employ the free market or a planned economy wherever and whenever it suits, and yet, unlike the United States, being forced to pay lip service to neither. As the entire Chinese economy is an isolated, locked-down laboratory experiment, rather than a sacred cow, the government is freed of responsibility when things go wrong, because they can blame economics and justify tightening their stranglehold on the market. If government policy causes a catastrophe—well, we’re experimenting here, things go wrong sometimes. Without those pesky elections to worry about, lean years can be weathered and fat years indulged, because the higher-ups know they’ll remain in power no matter what happens. People will still bank with us, buy their gas from us, and pay us for the food they produce. They have no choice, unless they bury their cash in the backyard, strike oil, or grow their own corn. And even if they did all that, the State could, with minimal fuss, repossess their backyard, oil well, or cornfields, because the land belongs to the State anyway. Thus China is ever more adept at accessing the benefits of market economics (immense corporate tax revenues, bullish growth, limitless influx of luxury commodities) and few of the drawbacks (corporate accountability, private sector tax evasion, the fickle tide of consumer trends).

I don’t believe China is, as is often claimed, moving toward a more liberal economy. I don’t believe any regime run by human beings seeks to relinquish money for a morality. I believe that it is, step-by-step, ensuring that the State becomes so interchangeable with corporate China that they ultimately fuse as one. China’s “sinomists” aim to create a watertight oligarchy that Woodrow Wilson could have only dreamed of. Democracy is the final barrier to a similar state of affairs in the West—the vote remains the one free and open choice the average citizen has. China never had this stumbling block to contend with in the first place, and thus holds its people captive without even having to think about hearts and minds. One economy, one government, one China, fused together in one giant, inescapable test tube. Perhaps those in the labcoats are just opportunistic profiteers, or perhaps they are truly in search of the holy grail that is a perfectly balanced economy. One thing’s for sure, they’ll have to go through a lot more mice before we hear a “Eureka!”