Somewhere nice to flop

摘要

In the 1992 film "The Story of Qiu Ju", Gong Li, China's best-known actress, plays a pregnant peasant who travels to Beijing to obtain justice for her husband. Among her many tribulations is having to stay in a dingy, unsanitary flea-pit of a hotel. The film cannot be faulted for realism. While foreign visitors are cosseted in plush hotels that are the equal of anything in Tokyo or New York, most Chinese travel-lers-to whom price matters above all else—have little choice but the country's more than 200,000 zhaodaisuo, traditional flop-houses with beds at around 80 yuan ($10) in cheerless dormitories with shared toilets and no other facilities.