A group of Chinese ski instructors is being trained on Swiss ski slopes this winter. It’s an initiative by Switzerland Tourism, which wants to exploit the growing interest of the Chinese in winter tourism. swissinfo.ch met two of them ahead of their trip.
We meet over a Mongolian fondue in Xiwanzi, capital of Chongli County. We are 250 kilometres northwest of Beijing, in the Yin Mountains, a range which separates the great plain of northern China from the steppes of Mongolia. We are on the road used by Genghis Khan’s horsemen when they set out to conquer China.
Today Chongli advertises its ski resorts as the ‘Davos of the East’. Twenty-five-year-old Xu Zhongxing grew up here. He and his 23-year-old colleague Liu Jinyu, along with six other ski instructors, have been chosen to spend the winter in the Swiss Alps.
With a week to go before their departure to Switzerland, the two friends, who have never set foot outside their homeland, cannot disguise their curiosity. Should they bring a rice cooker? They have never eaten cheese fondue or raclette, but are happy to try it. «We will get used to the local food as quickly as possible,» says Jinyu.
Belated start
Jinyu’s ties to skiing are based solely on the geography of his birth. He grew up in the area of Yabuli, a town in northern Manchuria, in the Greater Khingan range – the skiing mecca in China. This is also where Club Mediterranean opened its first hotel in China in 2008 and where Jinyu became an instructor.
Zhongxing, whose father is an engineer in the construction industry, has a younger sister. Jinyu is the son of market gardeners. His parents grow strawberries and grapes, and run a small nursery. Jinyu and his two younger sisters helped out with the work in the fields. The two families – like many others in rural China – have not stuck to the country’s one-child policy.
Fate may have raised Zhongxing and Jinyu in ski resorts, but their respective families have hardly encouraged them to do winter sports. At the age of 15 and without his parents’ knowledge, Jinyu got on skis for the first time. His cousin gave him a pair of old skis, which he used to go down a hill near the family home.
‘A useless activity’
Although there is not much else to do in Yabuli in winter than have fun in the snow, in the eyes of his parents, skiing was a useless and costly waste of time. Nothing could replace study and academic aspirations. For two years, Jinyu trained in secret, and it’s only when he became an instructor at the age of 17 that his parents realised that it was possible to earn money through skiing.
Zhongxing tried it for the first time when he was 21. When Chongli’s first ski resort opened in the 1990s, skiing was considered a luxury sport for wealthy idlers from Beijing who came to burn money at the weekend. Zhongxing and his mates were happy to slide down the slopes on makeshift sledges.
Zhongxing studied English for tourists in Qinhuangdao, a dreary industrial city on the Hebei plain. When people asked where he came from, he would describe Chongli as a city where you can ski, but realised he had never skied himself. Finally, in 2009, during the Chinese New Year holiday, he gave it a try.
Ski bug
After some rather inconclusive attempts on the beginners’ slopes, the future instructor took the chairlift and found himself at the top of the slope. A very challenging descent followed. He fell over countless times and the muscle aches lasted several days, but he had got the bug. In 2010, during the university holidays, he undertook intensive one-month training to become an instructor.
Jinyu, the student rebel, found his path quite naturally. His nightmare at school was English, a discipline whose usefulness he failed to grasp and which would be the main reason for his decision to leave school. It was only when he joined Club Mediterranean that he understood the importance of the language of Shakespeare and rushed to learn the communication basics. Just as the staff come from all over the world, so too does the clientele.
For Zhongxing, the choice was less obvious, because his university colleagues all entered public service. Even today, his parents still believe that there is no better career than that of civil servant. «I have my values and I intend to prove that you can succeed by following your own path,» he explains. «A government job, an apartment and a car is not the only honourable way.»
‚See the world’
Friends alerted Zhongxing and Jinyu to the opportunity to go to Switzerland for the ski season. It offered the chance to realise a dream: to go skiing in the Alps, to spend a few months abroad and to see the world.
They jumped at the chance and were selected with six other colleagues, including one woman whom they quickly nicknamed Snow White.
Jinyu will spend the winter in St. Moritz; Zhongxing in Grindelwald. They hope to visit each other during their spare time. Jinyu plans to take the Glacier Express; Zhongxing expects to buy some watches and Swiss army knives.
But what they are most looking forward too, of course, is the skiing.