No more 'Friendship' in China

A bastion of Chinese socialism - a place entrenched in Beijing lore dating to 1959 and a rival to the Great Wall in visits by foreigners - closed its doors last week.

Known as the "Friendship Store," the three-building complex was off limits to ordinary Chinese until the 1990s. But for diplomats, visiting dignitaries, and intrepid tourists, it was the only place in the communist capital to buy shaving cream, a decent piece of cheese, or a scarf guaranteed to be 100 percent silk.

In today's China - where "every store seems a friendship store," as a local scholar puts it - the Friendship property is a hulking anachronism, with overpriced, outdated products. It suffered itsostensible coup de grâce from the tourist-depleting SARS epidemic. In late June, some 400 out of 800 Friendship employees were laid off, with little advance notice.

The shuttering of the Friendship Store and the sit-in that followed - not a "protest," insist the former workers, which is illegal here - illustrate the complexities of modern China, with its more-open economic climate running up against a regime that still wants to show who's boss.

Last week, as more than 500,000 citizens of Hong Kong flooded that city to protest a new "national security" law that would allow police to jail dissidents and search homes without a warrant, the newly unemployed of the Friendship Store huddled silently beneath two huge red lanterns in a doorway of their former workplace in Beijing.

"I worked nine years here and I was given two days notice," says a young woman, afraid to say her name. "It wasn't really even a notice. Our managers aren't being clear with us. But they are on the inside, and we are on the outside." The workers want to talk to city officials directly, but say their bosses have shut down all efforts at dialogue.

Friendship doors first opened a year after one of the worst famines in China's history and on the heels of Chairman Mao Zedong's "100 flowers" campaign, a brutal purge of intellectuals. In those zealously ideological days, "Friendship Store" was China's way of showing that visitors could still come and find friendly habitation.

The message: "We are abolishing the market system and creating a revolution, but you can still come and be comfortable," one scholar remembers.

Indeed, genuinely eager to have waiguoren, or outsiders, feel at home, Chinese have always pointed visitors to the store. Chinese language texts have pages of dialogue using the phrase "Zhenme qu Youyi Shangdian," or "How do I go to the Friendship Store?" It's a place any cabbie in Beijing can take the lost foreigner.

The ironic truth is that the real friendships spawned by the store involved foreigners going into the shop and buying necessities for Chinese neighbors and colleagues who were forbidden to enter. Mothers asked foreign friends to buy milk powder for babies, quality cooking oil, or soft "Golden Fish" toilet paper, unattainable elsewhere.

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