2 ★ FT Weekend 17 August/18 August 2019I
had been tickled and tormented.
Screams unleashed from the
deepest recesses of my lungs. As
I trudged across Disneyland, spent
and emotional, a thought came to
mind: maybe this magical kingdom
was wasted on the young? That is,
what if its most sublime pleasures
were best appreciated by those long
of tooth, as opposed to those still
shedding their baby teeth?
My six-year-old daughter —
who falls into the latter category
— had a grand time this summer
during our Disney visit in
southern California. How could
she not? She started her day
eating Mickey Mouse-shaped
pancakes alongside Goofy, and
finished it rocketing through the
darkness of Space Mountain, barely
tall enough to see outside the roller-
coaster car. But I don’t think her
exhilaration quite matched mine.
This was entirely unexpected.
So many of the landmarks of youth
inevitably look smaller and shabbier
when you revisit them years later. I
worried that Disney might be another
chore in which I guiltily sneaked looks
at my phone while my kids played.
But on my return, the theme park felt,
if anything, more vivid and grand.
By the end of our trip, I found myself
gazing down from the hotel balcony,
musing about the possibility of one day
taking a retirement condo on the park’s
Main Street USA thoroughfare.
This is an odd time to write a love
letter to Disney. Thanks to the
campaign of a Disney heir, the iconictheme park has taken centre stage in
the wider debate about the enormous
pay disparity between chief executives
and the sort of people who don the
Goofy suit and oil the rides.
Its public image as a place of family
joy was further tarnished last month
when a video went viral showing an
epic — and ugly — fist-fight among a
park-going clan. I have my own, more
personal gripe with the parent
company: I wrote about Disney years
ago and found that its communications
executives could be a bit, er, Grumpy.
For the sake of my children, I was
willing to push my lofty principles to
the side. Also, my sister was paying.
Dear Auntie not only sprang for
tickets but also finagled a sort of
oligarch’s pass that came with a
personal guide and allowed us to jump
past those languishing in the theme
park’s long queues. For the eight hoursthat we were in possession of this
golden ticket, I found myself entirely
untroubled by inequality — let alone
the need for universal healthcare. I was
having too much fun riding rides and
cutting other people’s children in line.
Our guide got us into the mood at
the majestic Soarin’ Over California, a
virtual hang-glide over the marvels of
the golden state. This was at Disney
California Adventure, a newish
sister park next door where the
Monsters, Inc.gang and other
Pixar characters have taken up
residence.
We eventually made our way to
Disneyland proper, where many
of the best rides, I discovered,
were still the older ones. They tend to
employ more artistry and stagecraft. It
turns out you spend quite a while
winding through the darkness of the
Pirates of the Caribbeanride before
anything much happens. There is the
creepy anteroom before you actually
board the Haunted House ride. And
the exasperation of being soaked on
Splash Mountain is leavened by the
delirium-inducing chorus of singing
forest critters. In hyperactive
modern moviemaking, thesescenes
tend to get cut.
By contrast, the newStar Warsride
was strangely disappointing. The
Millennium Falcon looks just right, but
the ride itself feels like a whizzy and
abrupt video game. The souk on the
mythical planet of Batuu was also
strangely sanitised, to my mind.
Disney offsets many flaws with the
ubiquity of its churros. While inside theLife
From main: Liu Chaowei
photographed for the FT
by Giulia Marchi outside
his former home in the
hutong; inside the FT
bureau in the late 1990s;
inside the bureau in
August; with the then
bureau chief James Kynge
at the Great Hall of the
People, 2002labelling China as a “relationship-
based” society as if other countries were
composed of individuals barely inter-
acting with each other. But for China in
the 1970s, a society that had so little of
other forms of capital, perhaps social
capital was more important.
To build relationships, one did not
need to charm or dazzle with conversa-
tion — markers of the urban intellectual
elite — but simply to be present, to solve
problems resourcefully, and to lend a
hand when necessary. Like most Chi-
nese men of his generation, Mr Liu
rarely praises anything about himself.
But he does boast of having “extremely
good relationships” with a range of peo-
ple, from the officials he once worked for
as a tailor, to the bureau chiefs he served.
Mr Liu’s relationships extended to a
posse of other drivers he could round up
when the FT’s bigwigs came to town. As
one former bureau chief says, they were
all extremely valuable — “it was very
hard to find people who not only knew
the back and side entrance to every gov-
ernment ministry and think-tank, but
could talk their way in as well.”Mr Liu finished secondary school at
the age of 16 and went straight to work.
Earning a little money made him feel
well-off for the first time: he finally had
a decent amount to eat. In his child-
hood, Mr Liu was hungry by default, but
counts as a blessing that he didn’t learn
to drink alcohol to stem the hunger, as
other boys did — beer did not require
ration tickets to buy, so was easy to get.
After collecting ration tickets at a con-
venience shop during the planned econ-
omy of the 1970s, Mr Liu became a tailor
in one of Beijing’s most well-known
clothing markets, which made the high-W
hen Liu Chaowei started
working as the Finan-
cial Times’ Beijing
bureau driver in 1995,
only a year after the
bureau was founded, there was not
much financial news to be written
about. This was China before the eco-
nomic acceleration, a country whose
citizens enjoyed an average annual
income of around $600. The FT bureau
consisted of Mr Liu and one journalist,
and Mr Liu did everything for the
bureau from driving to bargaining at the
antique furniture market.
Since there was so little work to be
done, Mr Liu says, in the afternoons he
would play poker with the officers from
the nearby police station, in the leafy
embassy district where the bureau still
stands. “All the officers were great
friends,” he says. He thinks the poker
sessions had a side effect: “Whenever
there was a problem, you see, I could sort
it out, not like those other journalists.”
That tangle of relationships — who
you play cards with, who you do favours
for, and who you can rely on — was cru-
cial to Mr Liu’s career, and an essential
part of the knowledge of thehutong—
the alleyways of central Beijing where
Mr Liu was born in 1954.
At the start of my assignment in Bei-
jing, I was greeted at the airport not by
Mr Liu — who was off that day — but by a
man he called his “brother”. I soon real-
ised that Mr Liu uses the word in the Bei-
jing sense, referring not to blood rela-
tives but to trustworthy male friends:
his bros. In the office, the most random
problems (“my desk is wobbly”) could
be solved with either a revelation of Mr
Liu’s surprising skills (“Let me take a
look, I trained as a carpenter”) or, failing
that, a referral to a brother.
Finally retiring after a quarter cen-
tury at the bureau, Mr Liu has done eve-
rything from being interviewed on the
sidelines of China’s accession to the
World Trade Organization, to meeting
Chinese premiers Li Peng and Li
Kequiang. In those 25 years, the average
Chinese person has grown 10 times
richer in terms of what they can buy
with their income. Meanwhile, the FT in
mainland China has grown from one
journalist to nine journalists and seven
news researchers.
Being with the FT has changed Mr Liu:
he was one of the first Chinese nationals
to work for foreign media, giving him an
uncensored, front-seat view of the full
messiness of the country’s development— an unusual perspective inwhat
remains a tightly restricted environ-
ment for speech and media. He has also
changed the FT, inducting the dozens of
journalists who arrived in Beijing fresh
from their homes in the UK, US, Aus-
tralia and New Zealand in the most
essential of local knowledge: the logic of
the hutong.When asked to describe life in the
hutongs in the early days of the People’s
Republic of China, Mr Liu says, “three of
my classmates and I lived in the same
small alleyway. We saw each other every
day. We were in the same class all the
way through school.”
That intimate proximity bred rela-
tionships of trust and reliance that
helped Mr Liu throughout his career.
Foreign writers often exoticise the Chi-
nese notion of “guanxi”, or relationships,collared tunic suits popularised by
Chairman Mao and worn by party cad-
res. While cutting the clothing of Bei-
jing’s political elite, he met someone
who was hiring for the foreign ministry,
who asked him to become a driver.
When Mr Liu got behind the wheel in
1986, there were barely any cars going
down Chang’an Avenue, the main road
that cuts Beijing from east to west. He
drove for different embassies, before
being dispatched by the Ministry of For-
eign Affairs to work for foreign media.
To this day, the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs is the body that officially con-
tracts any Chinese nationals working in
embassies or foreign media, although in
practice it mostly rubber-stamps the
hiring decisions of those bodies. Mr Liu
came to the FT, he said, because he
wanted a “quieter life”.In the beginning, it was quiet: there
was Mr Liu and one journalist, and their
most prized possessions were the
bureau car and the brick-sized satellite
phone that, Mr Liu says, “the bureau
chief used for flirting with his wife in
Australia”.
Six years later in 2001, when China
joined the World Trading Organisation
and formally became recognised as a
trading partner that was starting to lib-
eralise its markets, the western world’s
news focus on China started to intensify.
Mr Liu initially drove a Mitsubishi
Pajero, bought in the early 1990s. In
2005, he upgraded to a Honda Odyssey.
The purchase was a fraught one, as it
was made in the middle of anti-Japanese
riots over the publication in Japan of a
history textbook that left out war
crimes committed against China.
Both the salesman and Mr Liu, everAs the FT’s Beijing bureau driver for the past 24 years, Liu Chaowei has
enjoyed a front-seat view of a changing China, writesYuan Yang
Wheels of
fortune
sected by the accumulated wisdom of
the hutong. A foreign leader who
arrived with a huge — and costly — reti-
nuemight be described as “bruising
their face to look big”. A counter-
productive action by the Beijing author-
ities might be dismissed as “throwing a
meat dumpling to scare away a dog”.
Mr Liu also had an unerring ability to
distil the defining characteristics of the
FT editors who would visit China on
reporting trips. Most of them had the
“whiff of an English gentleman” about
them, but there were more personalised
descriptions — the “wise one”, the “stern
one”, the “one-who-doesn’t-love-talk-
ing” and a couple of less flattering
monikers.Mr Liu’s hutong friendships have
lasted to this day: he often meets up
with a group of 30 schoolmates, most of
whom are retired, and some of whom
even became successful Communist
Party bureaucrats and officials.
Somehow, Mr Liu attributes working
at the Financial Times to making him
less partial to playing cards and gam-
bling with those schoolmates. “That
hutong culture of mine has been
changed through working every day
with journalists and foreigners,” he says.
“Everyone here is a university gradu-
ate... you hear them talking and learn
many new things.” The word he comes
back to to describe his colleagues is
“refined”, a word that carries class con-
notations and is generally used respect-
fully of educated people.
Mr Liu has seen six bureau chiefs, 14
correspondents and 33 news research-
ers pass through the FT’s Beijing
bureau. When I tell him China’s growth
will probably mean many moreare to
come, and ask him for his advice, he has
only a few pointers: the ones who do
well have humanity, good writing skills,
and manage relationships in the bureau
well. And, he adds, try not to get on the
foreign ministry’s nerves.Yuan Yang is an FT Beijing correspondent‘It was hard to find [drivers]
who knew every ministry
and think-tank — and couldtalk their way in as well’
the pragmatist, argued that since the car
was manufactured by Honda in the Chi-
nese city of Guangzhou, it was actually a
Chinese car, and so it would not be polit-
ically incorrect to buy it.
Nowadays there are 6m cars on the
road in Beijing competing with Mr Liu’s,
compared with 1m in 1995, and as a
result Mr Liu cannot drive the bureau
car every day. Since 2008 , the city has
operated aprogrammethat means cars
with licence plates ending in certain
numbers cannot be driven on certain
days. But that is no big problem, for Mr
Liu’s services have been augmented by
China’s online mobile-based economy:
during rush hour it is sometimes faster
to get around on a shared bike than in a
car, andride-sharing app Didi can take
you anywhere.
As the Beijing bureau expanded its
reporting, Mr Liu came into contact
with what politicians here euphemisti-
cally call “sensitive affairs”, driving the
journalists to the sites of rural demoli-
tions and even prison camps.
It seems surprising that a Chinese
national nowadays would be involved in
assisting in such sensitive stories: in the
past few years, the Chinese government
has increased its harassment of Chinese
staff working for foreign media, accord-
ing to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club
of China. Mr Liu’s adventures may have
been a thing of their times.
They may also have been a feature
of Mr Liu’s background, as a self-
proclaimed “Old Beijinger”, famed
within China for their blunt attitudes:
bracingly honest, humorous and lanc-
ing toward those who awardthemselves
airs and graces.
Riding with Mr Liu to attend inter-
views was to have global events dis-With my golden
ticket, I soon found
myself untroubledby inequality —
I was having toomuch fun for that
A love letter to
Mickey Mouse
park, a churro stand seemed never to
be more than 10 paces away.
I wondered if this could be spread to
the world at large, and, if so, whether it
might be a small way to ease some of
the west’s discontent.
Jelly-legged from Space Mountain,
we paused at one such stand as our
adventure was winding down. As I stole
bites from my children’s churros, I
watched a gallery of faces strolling by,
and so glimpsed Disney’s awesome
challenge: to generate not just
entertainment or experience but life-
long memories for so many customers,
day after day, year after year.
I thought of the Michelin chef who
dazzles a roomful of diners — only to
do it all over again the next evening.
Or, dare I suggest, the daily newspaper,
crammed full of so many words and
ideas and judgments (and arguments)
— and then discarded almost as soon as
it is born. I wanted to weep.
While I was dazzled by Disney, I
wonder if those souls lacking our fancy
tickets felt the same way. I’m pretty
sure that the family in the fight video
did not have their own mouse-eared
VIP guide.
As I pondered this, my nine-year-
old son was excitedly plotting another
Disney vacation. “Next year we
should... ”
“Next year?” My sister and I both
cut him off. The boy did not know that
the trip of a lifetime does not happen
every year.[email protected]; @JoshuaChaffin
Simon Kuper is awayJoshua Chaffin
Opening shot
Illustration: Harry Haysom
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