
DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9711010642

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A19  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR 

                                            LENGTH:  292 lines

GLIMPSES OF JIANG'S BEIJING IMAGES FROM CHINA'S CAPITAL ARE CONFUSING AND CONTRADICTORY.

THE PHOTOGRAPH out of Colonial Williamsburg the other day bordered on the ludicrous. There stood Jiang Zemin wearing a dark, I-am-here-on-business suit and a broad, politician's smile - and someone had stuck a Colonial tricornered hat on his head as if he were, well, a regular Yankee doodle dandy.

Then off he went, the president of the People's Republic of China, on a whirlwind, American Cradle of Democracy Tour: Williamsburg to Washington to Philadelphia to Boston.

Wonder what he'll take back home with him - besides the hat, of course - from all these ritual visits interspersed with diplomatic dialogue. What sort of images of America will this man have, this man who heads a country where it is probably still imprudent to shout, ``Give me liberty or give me death''?

Probably about as confused and contradictory as the ones I formed of his country earlier this year after I stood in Tiananmen Square feeling especially ludicrous wearing a shapeless, olive-green Chairman Mao hat with a plastic red star on the front.

Three-plus days in Beijing, Jiang's hometown, to see what China is all about. Hardly enough, of course, but then that's about what the average tourist spends to form from-the-bus-window impressions of the capital of the most populous nation on earth.

``Welcome to our country,'' says the smiling young tour guide who met us at the airport late in the evening. She says her name is Li. ``I understand you are all journalists.''

Uh-oh. We had been told that when we filled out our visa applications we should put anything but ``journalist'' in the blank beside occupation. Thinking I was about as clever as Sidney Reilly, ace of spies, I had decided I would be an archaeologist.

Uh, well, yes, we are travel journalists. (Maybe she will understand the American term ``splitting hairs.'') We write about tourism, and all of our readers will probably want to come here and spend as much money as they have.

Li laughs.

We will be going directly to our hotel after all and not to wherever they put the Sidney Reillys of the world and forget about them.

On the way into the central city I spot a Hard Rock Cafe with a decadent, running-dog, capitalist-pig American Cadillac convertible perched above the entrance. Li says it's very popular with the yuppie locals.

Goodbye, perceptions. Hello, Beijing.

Day breaks with the sun involved in a titanic struggle with the smoggy yellow-gray haze. It is terrible. Soft coal smoke and exhaust fumes. China burns megatons of coal. They know it's bad.

Li says, ``Air pollution is a serious problem. After a day you will find your hands and face very dirty.'' That's why, they say, they want nuclear reactors, why they are building the largest dam in the world to harness the power of the Yangtze River.

The sun wins a split decision about 9:30, but the haze hangs around in a petulent mood.

Breakfast in the coffee shop is interesting, as it is in many Asian cities. There is an enormous buffet to accommodate the unresolved differences between East and West over what constitute real breakfast food. There is music playing: ``Jambalaya, crawfish pie and fiddle-dee gumbo, son of a gun we'll have big fun, on the bayou.''

The China World Hotel is wonderful. There are many Western-style hotels in Beijing, and service and facilities in the five-star properties are on a par with the best hotels anywhere. On Sunday afternoon the China World brought in an orchestra to play for afternoon tea.

In the lobby a sign says, ``As per government regulations we thank you for not smoking in public areas.'' China's 350 million smokers - the entire U.S. population is about 250 million - consume an estimated 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year, 30 percent of the world's total. Don't count on the ban working overnight. There is a man standing beside the hotel sign smoking. Well, the sign is in English. He is Asian.

Beijing's Big Three tourist attractions are the Great Wall (which is actually 42 miles from city center at its closest point), the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. We head first for the Forbidden City.

On the way, near the U.S. Embassy, is an enormous cluster of little street-side stalls selling clothes - everything you'd never be seen wearing. Li says mostly Russians and other third-world Eastern Europeans come here to shop.

The streets are dirty, dusty and congested, like somewhere in Central America. Most seem to be under repair. Barbers set up stools on street corners and cut hair. Li says there are 8 million bikes in Beijing and 1 million motor vehicles - 60,000 of them taxis. A homemade Xiali car costs about $10,000 U.S. money; a Jeep Cherokee goes for twice that.

Apparently nobody has tallied the horse carts, rickshaws or mopeds. Mopeds are on their way to replacing bicycles as the principal mode of transportation. ``Mopeds and movable (cellular) telephones to some extent are the new symbols of wealth,'' according to Li.

The traffic is as bad as the fumes, but not as bad as in Taipei. Or Manila. Or Bangkok. Most intersections have traffic lights and policemen. Still, driving is an adventure.

The Forbidden City is a giant rec-tangle of courts and palaces locked in two miles of moated, gray-rock ramparts 32 feet high. It is called the Forbidden City because for about 500 years after it was built (1406-20), ordinary people were forbidden to enter. Emperors, 24 of them over time, and nobles only. Plus, of course, concubines, up to 9,000 of them at one time. The Chinese, officially, call the 200-acre layout the Palace Museum.

If you don't have an English-speaking guide, you can rent an English-language tape, narrated by, oddly enough, sometimes Agent 007 Roger Moore.

The beautiful red buildings were largely replaced or heavily restored in the 18th century and later. Most of the riches that once filled them are gone, most carried off by the Koumintang (Chiang Kai-shek's people) during their retreat to Taiwan and now repose in Taipei's National Museum. Which is something these people don't like to talk about.

This is where the movie ``The Last Emperor'' was filmed and where he actually lived. You can see the throne room where the cunning Cixi, the concubine turned dowager empress, hissed her orders to the boy emperor from behind a screen. She was, as they say, the power behind the throne.

Cixi has taken on the persona of the Wicked Witch of the East. Certainly she was one of the nastiest, greediest and oddest characters in Chinese history. I find her marginally more acceptable when I think of her by her English-translated name: Magnolia.

I am trying to listen to this business about exactly how that concubine deal worked - apparently names were drawn from a pot and the one selected was stripped to search for weapons (uh-huh) and then. . . - but I am totally distracted by this guy I see out of the corner of my eye who keeps looking up at me and them looking down and doing something with his hands.

Turns out he is an itinerant artist, and in about 17 ink-brush strokes he has done a passable caricature of me on a small, white china plate. He offers it to me and I buy it for - what? I don't understand this money - a pittance. Unique souvenir. Better than the tacky trash they're selling outside.

Well, I think so.

We have dinner at the Peking Duck. Beijing used to be called Peking. The culinary delicacy kept the old name. This cavernous, two-story restaurant is sometimes called the Old Peking Duck because it is the original. There also are spin-off restaurants called the Cheap Peking Duck, the Big Peking Duck and - I'm afraid to ask why - the Sick Peking Duck.

Can you guess what the specialty is? What do you suppose we have?

These ducks are specially raised on a diet of grain and soybeans. To prepare the dish, the cook pumps air under the dead bird's plucked skin to produce a smooth surface, which is then coated with sugar. Roasting the duck in a special open oven over a fruitwood fire makes the skin lacquer-red and crispy and the meat tender.

At the table the chef cuts thin slices of skin and meat. These are wrapped in thin wheat pancakes along with scallions and a thick brown sauce. They are eaten like tacos.

Speaking of food, Beijing has what I am told is the largest McDonald's in the world. Somewhere else, down a narrow, dusty street, I see a sign in English that reads, ``Ant for eating.''

Everyone here seems to know us Americans, about where we come from and what is important to us. Two examples:

A Chinese man stops me on the street and asks, in quite good English, ``Where are you from?''

``America,'' I answer.

``America,'' he says. ``Oh, did you know if you dig a hole deep enough right here, you will come out in America?''

A hotel bellhop asks the same question, again in pretty good English, of David Tykol, editor of the International Travel News.

He answers ``Sacramento.''

``Ah, Sacramento Kings,'' he responds, speaking of the NBA team. ``Not very good. Best team is the Chicago Bulls.''

Li dutifully warns us about crime. ``Beijing is safer than most Western cities. Still, it pays to be on your toes. Find a separate place for your passport, travelers checks, etc.'' I have a story from the other end of the spectrum.

Jay Clarke, travel editor of the Miami Herald, inadvertently left his expensive camera and lenses in a taxi when we went to dinner at the Shangri-La Hotel. Luckily, he had a receipt from the taxi, and hotel personnel were able to track down the driver, who returned the equipment to Clarke.

Neither the driver nor the manager of the taxi company would accept a reward.

An early morning departure for the Great Wall affords another slice of Chinese life. In every clearing there are people going through their slow-motion tai-chi movements, or, dressed up in costumes, doing folk or ballroom dancing to noisy music.

In other places there are elderly people - almost all of them men - with bamboo bird cages shrouded in blue zippered covers. The men hang the cages from tree branches, uncover them and let the birds sing. The men talk.

``They are retired,'' Li says. ``That's all they do all day, play with birds.''

We pass what seems to be mile after mile of depressing, laundry-festooned high-rise apartment blocks, rectangular and gaunt. This looks like Istanbul or parts of New York. The windows are mostly filthy, but not dirty enough to hide the cramped and shabby life inside.

``Too many people are moving into the city,'' Li says.

She says the average wage is about $100 a month, U.S. money. Workers for foreign companies get $250 minimum. Government workers get free housing and free transportation.

What else? Oh, yes, she says the term ``comrade'' is very rarely used these days. ``It sounds very funny now.''

The Great Wall has three principal viewing points. We go to Badaling because it is the closest. It also is the tackiest. There is a gantlet of hawkers and tourist-trap shops selling everything imaginable, all of it uniformly and incredibly junky.

There is also a KFC outlet with a big plaster-of-Paris statue of Col. Sanders outside. And you can get your picture taken sitting on a live Bactrian camel - the two-humped camel, native to central Asia, shorter and hairier than the one-hump Arabian dromedary.

Of course there are a number of T-shirt shops. The big seller is one that boasts, ``I climbed the great wall.'' Which I did. It is spectacular, which, I suppose, is why they call it the ``Great Wall'' instead of the ``Pretty Good Wall'' or the ``Above Average Wall.''

Much of Beijing, which sprawls over 6,500 square miles, falls somewhere between urban and rural, not unlike Virginia Beach or Suffolk.

Outside the city center you see a medieval lifestyle enveloped in a pall of the exhaust fumes and coal smoke of a 20th century gone awry.

Down a potholed road that seems to be undergoing a widening, there are buildings that are being simultaneously destroyed and constructed.

Everywhere along the roadway, on what passes for a sidewalk, there are vendors - capitalists - with stuff spread out for sale: bicycle parts, fish, apples, something I can't identify, lumps of coal, spices, dead meat with flies, recycled bricks, piles of garbage, dumplings. Lots of sidewalk food, small one-table, al fresco restaurants. But no fat people.

Along a roadside canal, where people are washing clothes and fishing in the dirty water, there is what I can best describe as an open-air HQ, selling everything for the do-it-yourselfer, from logs to cut lumber to clay tile to marble to corrugated metal to bricks. High-rise housing complexes loom in the hazy distance.

In the road there is a mule pulling a cart with the driver sound asleep, a ``honey wagon'' (you don't want to know), pushcarts, bicycles that would be museum exhibits anywhere else. Up ahead there is a truck in the middle of the road that seems to have, well, just fallen apart. BLOOEY. Crankshaft lies on the road. Driver just stands there, not knowing what to make of it.

I do not quite know what to make of any of it.

Finally, Tiananmen Square. This is where the Chinese army put down a student-led, pro-democracy demonstration in a bloody confrontation in 1989. This is the killing field, an indelible image that China has been unable to erase.

As we try with great difficulty to cross the street to the square, Li warns, ``Pedestrians have no rights.''

I think to myself, isn't this where it was brutally demonstrated that humans have no rights?

The square covers 140 acres and can hold 500,000 people, or probably twice that if you count the surrounding streets. It lies just south of the Gate of Heavenly Peace entrance to the Forbidden City, from which a giant portrait of Mao is suspended.

There are thousands of people here. But they all seem to be swallowed up by the immensity of the place.

Li is 25, the daughter of a Foreign Ministry official. She was in high school in 1989. She tries to explain what happened here.

``I didn't agree with the students,'' she says. ``Tiananmen Square is the face and symbol of the city and the nation. It is our showcase.

``Those students stayed on the square for more than two months. They even put up a Statue of Liberty! (She seems genuinely shocked by this still.) That is something that makes this nation ashamed.

``The students didn't have a desire to make their demands more reasonable. They talked about democracy and rights, but they didn't take it step by step.

``When the government tried to make the students leave, they refused. That made the government very angry.

``What the government did was overdone. It was like parents trying to discipline children. But to kill them, that is too much.''

Li thinks the demonstration slowed down what she calls ``development'' by maybe five years. She says the students should have been more patient, should have tried to work through the system.

Jiang Zemin has now been in three places - Williamsburg, Philadelphia and Boston - where our American ancestors revolted against the system, taxation without representation and all the rest, because the system didn't work to their liking, and to a fourth named for the Virginian, George Washington, who led the revolt.

It would be nice to think that his tour afforded him the time to grasp the significance of those places, of what happened there and why.

Back on Tiananmen Square I wanted to - but didn't - tell Li that the government's line, the one she had accepted, was probably not always going to work. People will listen to ``be patient'' and ``take it step by step'' for only so long. Particularly when basic human rights are involved.

For a long time we Americans told some segments of our population to be patient and work through the system, step by step. And they protested. And it wasn't handled at all well.

I found it difficult to say to Li, ``Well, you're just plain wrong,'' when I remember that it took a Civil War to emancipate African-Americans, and nearly a century after that for them to attain full civil rights.

I remember seeing pictures of women suffragettes picked up bodily off the streets of Washington and hauled off to the slammer. I remember watching police dogs in Mississippi go after Dick Gregory and his voter-registration protesters. I remember Bull Connor at Selma. And I remember Kent State. It was American blood that spilled that day, spilled by Americans.

Maybe I see it all in a different light now that I've been to Tiananmen Square and listened to Li.

I hope Jiang leaves America with a different perspective as well.

Travel can be enlightening. ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN HARRIMAN COLOR PHOTOS/The Virginian-Pilot

A boy poses for a photo on Tiananmen Square in front of the entrance

to the Forbidden City.

LEFT: One of the world's most spectacular monuments, the Great Wall

never kept invaders out. But it does bring tourists in.

BELOW: In Beijing near the U.S. Embassy, merchants sell clothes in

an enormous cluster of little street-side stalls.