Bilal wiped a few drops of tea from his beard, sat back in his chair and told me how much he had been enjoying life in Beijing since he arrived from Pakistan last summer. His postgraduate course would last for two years but he was already thinking of ways to extend his stay, probably by going for a doctorate.
He said he would be happy to spend the rest of his life in China and I asked him what he liked most about it.
“The freedom,” he said.
There is much to be said for China, and especially for its people and their achievements but it is seldom singled out for acclamation as a land of liberty. The harshest limits on personal freedom are well documented by human rights groups and foreign governments but many others are apparent in everyday life.
Numerous websites and apps, including Google, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp are blocked, although many Chinese people access them using a VPN. Social media posts perceived to be critical of the government are removed quickly by platforms that often temporarily suspend offenders’ accounts or shut them down altogether.
Public performances require authorisation from local authorities, who vet in advance the words to be spoken and the lyrics to be sung. Recently, the authorities in Shanghai and Beijing have clamped down on Halloween with police briefly detaining people in fancy dress and big, outdoor New Year’s Eve celebrations have been discouraged.
None of this mattered to Bilal, whose father had forced himself and his brother into marrying the daughters of a neighbouring farmer. His marriage made himself and his wife unhappy and their lives were lived under the shadow of their parents, so coming to China alone was a liberation for Bilal.
“I can do whatever I want here and nobody is watching me or talking about me,” he said.
The first Chinese friend I told what Bilal said about freedom laughed so hard he couldn’t speak for a couple of minutes and then started laughing again. Serge, a Congolese PhD student in Shanghai, laughed too before saying Bilal might have a point.
“I think I know what he means,” he said.
Like Bilal, Serge is one of tens of thousands of students from the Global South studying in China on scholarships that cover their tuition fees, offer free accommodation and pay a monthly stipend equivalent to a few hundred euros. It is a generous scheme and because food and other essentials are very cheap in China, the stipend is enough for each of them to save some of it every month.
If Bilal cherishes being free from the prying eyes of his family, Serge feels liberated by the lack of crime and the safety of China’s big cities. Some western visitors feel oppressed by the cameras and facial recognition systems that help to make crime a risky business in China but Serge finds them reassuring.
He prizes the feeling of physical safety all the more in view of what is happening at home, where Rwandan-backed rebels have taken control of the city where his family live. He complains that his parents conceal from him the worst of what is happening and he tried to persuade them to leave before the rebels arrived but they refused.
“There have been so many wars where we fled and they lost everything and they had to build it all up again. My father said they’re too old to do it again,” he said.
He grew up in a family that spoke French at home, worked hard at school and enjoyed European high culture, especially music. We went to a recital of German lieder by a celebrated tenor that ended with Richard Strauss’s Morgen, which begins “Und Morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen” (tomorrow the sun will shine again).
“I don’t cry but a few seconds more and I would have,” Serge said.
Back in Beijing a few days later, I was having coffee with my painter friend Song when Serge messaged to say he had received bad news from home. One of his friends was found “tied up and dead in some bushes”, shot in the neck and the face.
“I’m glad I live in China,” Song said.
A little later, he asked me if the Two Sessions, China’s annual legislative meeting, was over. He had been trying to order spray paint for something he was working on but it becomes unavailable during big political events to limit the risk of unwelcome messages appearing on walls.
“I suppose they’ll let me have it now,” he said.
