It’s been nine months now since I departed Beijing for Ningbo, in Zhejiang Province. Long enough perhaps to venture some thoughts on the difference between living in a first and second tier city, which might offer some perspective to those living in the capital.

It should be pointed out first of all that Ningbo, while little known outside China, is hardly a backwater town. “A little seaside village of seven million people,” is how I characterized it to friends back home. Like most Chinese cities, the administrative district is much bigger than the actual urban area. Ningbo is not really, for example, as big as London (it’s somewhere between LA and Chicago by population). But it is an ancient city, an important commercial port since the Tang era, one of the “treaty ports” from the colonial era, with its own Bund and what is claimed to be China’s oldest library; tier 1A according to some lists, along with Chongqing, Chengdu, and Tianjin (the tier system having no official status whatsoever).

But the thing that struck me most on getting here was the laid-back atmosphere. Of course it’s still noisy and chaotic, with new subway lines being constructed right outside our apartment. But cars stop at pedestrian crossings, and even at rush hour you can get from pretty much anywhere you need to be in 30 minutes, for under 50 kuai.

Our move to Ningbo was driven, as was our move to China in the first place, by my wife’s career. It was not somewhere we picked out as an ideal destination. But I will not lie, I was more than ready to leave Beijing. In the end it wasn’t the pollution that drove me away, but the congestion. After we moved from Chaoyang out to the wilds of Shunyi, there were still nights when we had to get our Didi to turn for home on the way to the kids’ soccer practice, because after 40 minutes of sitting in traffic it was apparent that we would never get there in time.

But speaking of pollution, that is another significant difference. People here complain of the AQI, but compared to the days in the capital when the poison in the air was actually visible, I find it hard to take these concerns seriously. Ningbo is greener, cleaner, and less stressful. Score one to tier two.

It’s not all one way though. For a city bigger than Chicago, Ningbo doesn’t have a fraction of the Windy City’s cultural heft. I happen to be a classical music nut, and the concerts, operas, and ballets at the Egg in Beijing were of the very highest quality. China’s enthusiasm for music training means that Ningbo has a young, nervous, but perfectly competent symphony orchestra, with a pompous old-school conductor. But they only play two or three times a year. Most of the performances at our nearby Cultural Plaza are of the “Spirit of Riverdance” school of empty spectacle.

Nor does the city have anything even approaching Beijing’s range of restaurants and bars. There are some decent Italian and Indian joints, but nothing to come near the haute cuisine likes of Temple Restaurant Beijing, and even getting a decent pizza or burger can be a challenge.

And despite the significant presence of Nottingham University, the expat community is much smaller. (It will not have escaped the attention of the observant that I’m still working for a Beijing publication, Ningbo being too small to support any quality English-language media.) You soon become accustomed to running into the same people in many different WeChat groups. On the other hand, the smaller community means that people are generally nicer, since the sort of snooty cliquish behavior often found in the capital would not get you far in this town.

If I had come to Ningbo first, it’s possible that I would have found it crushingly parochial. (And I would never have got a job with the best company in the world.) However, after Beijing, it does feel like a breath of fresh air; in many senses. I don’t think we’ll be here forever, but there certainly is expat life beyond tier one.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Adjusting to Life in Beijing
The British School of Beijing (BSB) Shunyi is hosting a free community event on Wednesday October 21, starting at 8.45am. Aimed at those that are new to Beijing, if you’ve managed to get the kids settled in school, your house resembling a home, then you may be thinking what next? This informative discussion will focus on adjusting to life in Beijing, with two speakers covering a range of topics.

Discussions will focus on air quality, what to do in an emergency, immunizations, cultural adjustment, and transportation options, plus the best resources for information, from websites, magazines, and WeChat. Following the discussion, coffee and pastries will be available, and there will be a chance to raise other issues directly with the experts. For more information call 8047 3588, to reserve a seat e-mail nicole.washko@britishschool.org.cn

Liu Guoliang at WAB
On Tuesday October 13 from 6-7.30pm, Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) will be hosting Chinese table tennis legend Liu Guoliang. Olympic champion and coach of the Chinese men’s table tennis team, Liu will be giving a presentation about his life and his sporting success. He began playing at six years old and was selected to join China’s national youth team in 1989 at age 13. In 1991 he made the national table tennis team, and has won several championships and titles. After retiring from the game, he went on to become head coach of China’s national team, leading them to a team gold medal and a sweep of individual gold medals at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. For more event details, click here.

Roundabout Book Fair
The International Montessori School of Beijing (MSB) will be hosting a Roundabout book fair on Saturday October 24, from 10am-3pm. Thousands of gently used books will be on sale, from a variety of categories including fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. All proceeds will be used to help children in need.

Rugby Rivalry
On Saturday October 31, the Shanghai Rugby Football Club (SRFC) will descend upon Beijing to take on the Sports Beijing Rugby team in the U9, U11, and U15 age divisions. This seasonal rivalry started in 2013, when SRFC first came to Beijing. Games will take place from 9am-4pm at Dulwich Legend Garden. After the players are done, the whole group will enjoy the Rugby World Cup final at Fella’s. This event will no doubt be the highlight of the season for the two rugby clubs. For more information, contact 6430 1370, info@sportsbj.com.

beijingkids Shunyi Correspondent Sally Wilson moved to Beijing in 2010 from the UK with her husband and son. Her daughter was born here in 2011 and both her kids keep her happily busy. In her spare time, Sally loves to stroll through Beijing’s hutongs and parks. She is a (most of the time) keen runner and loves reading: books, magazines, news, and celeb websites – anything really. Sally is also a bit of a foodie and loves trying out new restaurants.

Photos: Jens Schott Knudsen (Flickr), courtesy of WAB, Sports Beijing

I do try to attend some of the programs for adults at the Literary Festival. Some years I am more successful than others.

This year I had high hopes; I even bought a few books on the pre-Festival display that looked very interesting (like Radhika Jha’s Smell, Michael Meyer’s In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, and Tim Cope’s On the Trail of Genghis Khan), but when the schedule was released, the timing for their events didn’t work for me. There were other talks, too, I would have liked to attend, but, again, I couldn’t make them.

There is one recurring event, the annual panel of foreign correspondents, that I have always wished I could see, but often it sells out before I even get in line. I would also feel guilty about buying up seats for my kids that would otherwise be occupied by much more engaged adults. So I usually pass on even considering it as an option when I am mapping out our Lit Fest schedule.

This year, though, after the Festival had started and the tickets had been on sale for a few weeks, I learned that "Committing Journalism" still had many tickets available. It would be the next week, in the afternoon on a day we were already planning on being at the Bookworm. I could not pass it up, especially since the rest of Beijing had their chance to buy tickets already.

The moderator for "Committing Journalism" was Louise Watt of the Associated Press. All four of the originally scheduled panelists were also there: Anthony Kuhn of NPR, Laura Daverio of RSI, Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times, and Laurie Burkitt of The Wall Street Journal.

I had told the kids that they could plug in their headsets and watch something silently on their iThinigies, but I at least wanted them to listen for a few minutes to see if they were actually interested. Brigid was quick to plug in. Myles was about to himself, until he heard and recognized Anthony Kuhn’s voice.

"He’s on ‘All Things Considered!’" he whispered to me. After that he was attentive.

I was surprised to hear that Kuhn was feeling, in general, optimistic about the reporting environment in China. In the recent years the international press in China was shocked with multiple visa-denials, even of long-time correspondents. However, Kuhn remained hopeful about conditions. His perspective was a very long view—he was first reporting from China in 1982, so he recalled a much more restrictive environment that even dictated precise locations journalists could live, something that had been lifted in 2004. He was also recently reporting from Myanmar, where in a relatively short period of time he had witnessed a lot of change toward openness.

One of the things that Myles really picked up on from Kuhn was his mentioning that there were times, especially during his earlier reporting days, when he had to explain to people that foreign correspondents from the US were not government employees. The "National" in "National Public Radio" was misleading to people for whom "National" always translated as government entity. Myles was very amused that Kuhn had even received mail to his office that was addressed to the President. Myles still talks about that.

The others in the panel also outlined some of their obstacles to effective reporting. For someone like Burkitt, who usually focuses on business stories, the opacity of financial data, even with publicly traded companies, is a problem. Daverio sometimes struggles with sources who don’t want to speak on camera; the video often makes its way to the Chinese Internet.

Towards the end, two of the American journalists voiced concern about their fellow correspondents’ ability to secure visas and credentials. Jacobs himself noted that if he were to leave China,  The New York Times may not be permitted to replace him in the Beijing office. While this is certainly troubling for the news organizations, the problem is, as Burkitt said, that the American press needs the Chinese government a lot more than the government needs the foreign press. There was some discussion of lobbying efforts, too, in Washington, to bring this matter to the attention of the State Department, perhaps to get some diplomatic leaning to keep the American press in business. The question I wanted to ask, though I was too shy to try, was that if this were the wisest course of action for the news organizations as it flies in the face of appearing as free and independent of the US government.

Kuhn’s final concern was definitely interesting, too, and it spoke more to the struggles within an international news organization itself. Not just at NPR, but much of the US press have developed a model where a lot of the reporting decisions are made by editors in places like Washington or New York. For instance, his editors were directing him to follow up on stories that were everywhere (ad nauseam, I might add) the week of the event: the purported ban on dancing grannies, the use of gutter oil in planes, and a micro-trend of strippers hired for funeral parties. Kuhn dismissed these with amusing, snappy one-liners (on gutter oil in planes: better there than on my dumplings; on funeral strippers: well, that’s one way to go out). I appreciate what Kuhn was getting at—that there are certainly stronger, more important stories out there that receive less attention while everyone else is talking about these other things. I love a good, amusing, human interest piece, like the reporting that in NPR parlance is called "Driveway Moments." But unless there’s a new angle to something I’ve heard or read already, there’s no Driveway Moment.

At the very end, during the Q&A, Willis Barnstone stood up to comment on his perspective on conditions in China for foreign writers. I was rather gobsmacked to realize he was sitting only two rows ahead of me all that time, and that he stood to speak, that I forgot to record much of what he said. His China experiences stretch back very far, to the 1970s. When I came to my senses, I did write down a very interesting tidbit that spoke to how the political climate can swing like a pendulum in China. Barnstone had translated Chairman Mao’s poetry into English, which was one of the reasons he had been welcomed to Beijing so early for an American. However, when he was to return to China in the 1980s on a Fulbright, his visa was delayed a year because the Chinese government was afraid he would be too sympathetic to Mao.

I understand why "Committing Journalism" is among the most popular of the Literary Festival. There’s something very interesting about the mechanics of reporting and writing, especially given the circumstances of China. After all these years, I am glad I finally got the chance to attend.

This post first appeared on Jennifer Ambrose’s site on April 14, 2015.

Jennifer Ambrose hails from Western Pennsylvania and misses it terribly. She still maintains an intense devotion to the Pittsburgh Steelers. She has lived in China since 2006 and is currently an at-home mother. With her husband Randy and children Myles and Brigid, she resides outside the Sixth Ring Road in Changping, northwest of Beijing.

Photos: Jennifer Ambrose