In China, Big (and Baby) Brother is Always Watching

My wife and I had just returned to the tour bus after ogling a thundering waterfall in China’s central Guizhou Province.

That’s when our guide reached out her hand.

“Passports,” she said.

We’d already given copies to the tour operator prior to the trip but in this security-crazed nation, that is not enough. 

Oh no, far from it. 

Your passports are checked everywhere, from hotels to national parks and could very well be inspected by passing strangers on the street, I’m quite sure, if they really wanted to see them.

The guide was required to present them for entry at our next sightseeing stop.

My wife glared at me.

“Where are the passports?

“How should I know?” I responded. “You packed them.”

They were back at the hotel.

Without IDs, our entry tickets at the next stop would be full price, a cost the tour guide would have to absorb, and she wasn’t happy.

The Chinese government is quite anal in its bureaucracy. Tickets at parks and other public places are checked and rechecked every 15 feet, it seems.

And get this: If you’re unlucky enough to lose your ticket, you can’t leave! You'll be detained forever in some sort of Communist jail, for all I know.

My Chinese wife no doubt is well aware of such bureaucracy. In fact, she probably has this knowledge etched somewhere deep inside her DNA.

But she also misses no opportunity to give me a good scolding.

“Never forget your passport!” she huffed.

The tour was her idea. 

While I prefer traveling on my own, seeing what what I want to see, avoiding what I don’t, my wife insists that tours are the best and cheapest way to see rural China. 

Our entire five-day itinerary -- air-fare, hotels and fees included -- equalled the cost of our first two nights at the hotel in Guiyang, the capital city of Guizhou Province, if we’d booked it ourselves.

Still, I grind my teeth at having to follow some pint-sized guide waving a flag so I don’t get lost in a crowd, waddling like a fat duck along with the other Chinese tourists.

The trip was made bearable by the fact that we were traveling with Li Yan, my wife Lily’s best friend, whom she's known since they attended grade school together in Beijing. 

We'd traveled with Yan last year and I already feel like she and I have been friends for years. My wife is our common denominator and translator. I know the two are close. And our mutual affection for my wife has drawn Yan and me closer to one another.

For me, Yan is like a sister.

In Chinese culture, friends and family hold hands and take one another’s arm in public. I often reached out instinctively and took her arm. Or gave her a spontaneous hug.

It was reciprocal. As we walked, Yan often linked her arm in mine, or rested her hand on my knee at the dinner table. The longer we were together, the more I sensed how she craved male attention because, for years, she has endured a sadistic marriage.

“I’m very, very, very, very unhappy,” Yan says.

They rarely, if ever, talk, these two. Her husband Zhao insists that his wife’s looks are so “building-jumping” bad, no one would want her. 

Zhao, Yan says, has an “ugly soul.”

Yan loves cats. Once I asked her when she’s most happy. She said when she’s in bed, surrounded by her three felines. And then she showed me a picture. 

That answer broke my heart.

I made a point to pay more attention to Yan and to compliment her whenever I could. One day, on a crowded airport bus, I called out to Yan, standing several feet away.

“Li Yan,” I said, as people looked up. “I love you.”

I could see her blush.

There was another benefit to traveling with Yan. She handled all the logistics, consulting with the tour office for last-minute itinerary changes, making sure we rose on time each day.

My wife, God bless her, has to be one of the dizziest, least-informed travelers on the planet. She’ll hear a bit of gossip or half-truth from somebody and suddenly it’s gospel. 

On this trip, for example, she’d heard that there is no heat in buildings in Guizhou Province and worried about our more rural lodgings.

This, of course, proved not to be the case.

Yan is patient about all of this. She says this is how the two were as young girls — Yan the practical one, my wife with her head in the clouds. I loved just watching the two interact, knowing the profound length and depth of their relationship.

Even a relationship between the best of friends can be frayed by the demands of travel. But nothing fazes these two, not even when my wife accidentally knocked Yan’s smartphone into a foot of freezing stream water. A passing tourist fished it out, but it was damaged.

Still, there wasn’t a cross word between them. My wife paid to have it fixed in the next town. 

The tour started out, well, pretty first-class.

Arriving in Guiyang after a four-hour flight from Beijing, we were greeted by a white-gloved chauffeur driving a new Tesla, and brought to our five-star hotel, where tickets waited for that evening’s cultural show, transportation provided by another white-gloved driver.

It felt good to escape Beijing. The air was cleaner and websites such as Google and Facebook aren’t blocked here, as they are in the capital city. 

Unfortunately, there was no escape from the incessant traffic. The average speed of motor vehicles throughout China, to my mind, must be just about gridlock. Or even slower.

Driving around Guiyang, I also noticed something unsettling: There were surveillance cameras everywhere, above each traffic lane, snapping photos of every single vehicle that passed below. There were so many flashes it made you think: Who the heck is looking at all these pictures?

Our tour guide gave us a clue: In China, Big Brother never blinks. 

In 2017, as part of its "Operation Sky Net," China installed 20 million of the world's most sophisticated CCTV surveillance cameras -- each with AI technology -- making its populace the most-watched on the planet.

Using artificial intelligence technology, Operation Sky Net cameras can pinpoint a person's age, sex and even the color of their clothes. It also works on vehicles as well.

That's bad news for law-abiding citizens and jaywalkers in Shenzhen to tourists like me.

George Orwell would feel vindicated.

Guiyang has established itself as the nation’s capital of data storage, and that includes bytes of information collected on its citizens. Someone trying to snatch your purse in Guiyang? Let them have it, the guide said. The police will consult their ever-present video cameras and catch the thief within hours.

Most people in China now use apps that allow them to scan their smartphones to pay for everything on the go, leaving a record of each transaction. That, and the rapid advancement of facial recognition, will soon allow the Chinese government to track its citizens and monitor their lives 24 hours a day, our guide said.

The Chinese are developing a way to create an image of a person's face from a genetic sample in a process called phenotyping. Once the images are added to the current surveillance system, the outcome will not be good.

Our guide pointed up to the bus ceiling. There were even cameras there, tracking our conversations and expressions.

I fought the urge to flip a bird.

At one national park, I encountered a surveillance camera perched in the middle of the woods, looming like a lonely spy. As I snapped my own picture of the picture taker, a group of Chinese tourists passed and watched me curiously.

“Chinese police,” I said, pointing at the camera. “They’re always watching.”

“No, no,” they assured me, waving their hands.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “They are.”

But here’s the strange thing about security in the People’s Republic: police cars do not seem at all threatening. All the time, you see black-and-whites with their lights flashing and no one seems to care, like Barney Fife flipping on his lights on the streets of downtown Mayberry.

It’s not at all like cop cars in the U.S., where a Jaws-theme sense of drama looms at the sudden flash of the cherry top or whoop of the siren.

Still, I pray I never end up in the back of one of those Chinese squad cars.

I tried to put all of this Chinese government spying out of my mind as our bus rolled out of Guiyang for a few days on the road. Our guide blathered on in Mandarin about the sites we passed and my wife translated every millionth word or so.

So I just watched the world pass by from my bus window.

I saw jagged green mountains that jutted skyward like shark’s teeth and the tiled roofs of homes in villages that have been here for centuries.

I saw motorcyclists driving in the rain with custom-made umbrellas to keep them dry. I saw a construction worker in a hard hat and sweatshirt whose huge letters read: ANGRY. Seeing the conditions at Chinese work sites, I can only imagine how he felt.

I saw parks and roadsides that were amazingly clean, free from trash and cigarette butts, a cleanliness enforced by women with brooms made of tree branches. I saw one parks scold a Chinese tourist for eating sunflower seeds, dropping the shells as she walked.

I sat in a restaurant and passed on the fish soup after I saw one of the ingredients still flopping inside the broth. Sue me, but I like my entrees dead before I consume them.

I also passed on the fried grasshoppers at one of our tour lunches. Most mornings, I watched my fellow Chinese tour group members — my wife and Li Yan included — clean their public chopsticks with hot tea before digging into massive breakfasts that featured boiled eggs, noodles, dumplings, millet porridge, pumpkin soup, steamed taro and yams and something called Mountain Medicine whose ingredients I was too afraid to ask about.

I heard Chinese men call out for waitresses with booming Stanley Kowalski voices that bellowed "Fu wu yuan" like they would "Stelllllaaaaa!"

As we left Guizhou Province, I had my last chilling encounter with Chinese security.

At the Guiyang airport, I watched a pint-sized security robot slowly roll through the terminal, like some malevolent little r2d2, a Big Brother in a decidedly small package. 

Little dude was more like Baby Brother.

I couldn’t help myself.

I walked up and stood in its path. leaning over him like a western c3po.

As it rolled closer, I waved.

“Hello!” I said, looking down. “I’m John from America. What’s your name?”

The sinister little machine paused, its camera eye whirring upwards to record my face.

As I stepped away, ducking off to the side, the robot turned to follow me, but then apparently thought better of it.

With a whirr and a hum, it slowly turned and went about its plodding way.