We had been travelling for an hour-and-a-half when we came to the end of the second subway line and Wei ushered me across the platform and on to a driverless train for another 20 minutes.
He had introduced me to some of Beijing’s more far-flung parks in the past, but now we were about 50km southwest of the city centre in Yanshan, a place best known for its oil refinery and petrochemical industry.
“Nobody you know has heard of it,” he said.
The huge tanks and chimneys of the industrial centre are the dominant features of the city, with housing estates known as danwei (work unit) compounds built around them to house the workers. Much of the housing is old by Beijing standards, low-rise blocks built in the 1980s with a standard red cladding, giving the place something of a period feel.
The park is not on anyone’s tourist trail and the other visitors appeared to be locals out for a Sunday afternoon stroll. There was a giant Ferris wheel at one end and, as we made our way towards it, we saw other amusements, including a merry-go-round and a bumper car rink.
It was a few minutes before we noticed that nothing was moving; the Ferris wheel stood still and the other amusements were empty and inaccessible behind wire fences. Then we stumbled on to an area with disused cages, enclosures and pens that might have been part of a mini-zoo.
[ ‘We were wearing green Irish jerseys’: How Irish student footballers made history in China in 1976 ]
It was while we were gazing at the motionless Ferris wheel that Wei told me the reason he knew Yanshan was because he dated a woman from here many years ago. She was one in a succession of potential partners, usually introduced by Wei’s relations, who like all the others ended up with someone other than him.
Wei would visit her on Sunday afternoons and they would take a walk in the park before walking up the hill to Yanshan’s branch of KFC, which was the height of fashion when it opened about 20 years ago.
“Do you want to see if it’s still there?” he said.
It was, but I couldn’t face going in, so we went instead to a place a few doors away that made pancakes stuffed with meat and vegetables, which we ate sitting on plastic chairs at a formica table under fluorescent lights. Looking across the street at one of the old compounds, we might have been in a different era when China’s modernisation and prosperity was still new.
A few days later, I was having dinner with a few friends in a Xinjiang restaurant, pecking at plates of lamb, beef and vegetables from a lazy Susan in one of the private rooms available in Beijing restaurants. My friend Song, who likes to be the centre of attention and gets bored with general conversation, got up and started singing communist folk songs.
[ As EU leaders beat a path to Beijing, their tone shifts ]
Then he sang Better and Better (Yue Lai Yue Hao) a song that became famous when it was performed by Song Zuying at the Spring Festival Gala, the world’s most-watched television show, on Chinese New Year in 2001. A catchy, upbeat tune that she sang in a sweet, bel canto soprano, the song was a hymn to rising living standards in the year after China was admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
“Houses are bigger, phones are smaller / Feeling better and better / More holidays, higher income / Work is getting better and better,” my friend Song sang in an uncanny imitation of Song Zuying.
“Goods are finer, prices more flexible / Mood is getting better and better / Sky is bluer, water is clearer / Life is getting better and better.”
After the reform and opening up of the Chinese economy in the 1980s, the 1990s were a difficult economic period, especially in the second half of the decade. The reform of state-owned enterprises saw big lay-offs and, although China weathered the Asian financial crisis better than its neighbours, the shock took its toll.
By the time Song Zuying sang Better and Better in 2001, the upturn was under way and the economy was growing by up to 10 per cent every year. There was some political loosening, too, as the internet opened up, public discourse expanded and boundaries were policed less diligently.
Song Zuying performed in every Spring Festival Gala from 1991 until the middle of the 2010s and she was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a 2,000-strong political advisory body, for 15 years.
But in 2018 she was caught up in Chinese president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign when it emerged that she was under investigation for financial irregularities and she stepped back from public life, her songs becoming relics of another time.
