The air in Beijing is better than it was a few years ago but still there are weeks when it is best to stay indoors most days, and this has been one of them. There are fewer cyclists on the streets and the pavements are emptier than usual because even a short walk is enough to make your nose itch and your throat dry up.
Until a few weeks ago I might have walked over to the hotel across the road for a swim in the pool, which was large, cool and seldom busy. Pool access came with membership of the gym I joined earlier this year after a friend suggested I could do with some structured exercise.
“Why don’t you join the old ladies who dance in the evenings?” she said.
These ladies are everywhere in Beijing: in parks, on street corners or on the side of the road, moving in formation to stirring melodies, sometimes under the directorial eye of a stern, camp, old gentleman. I could see myself in his role but dancing was not for me so my friend directed me to the hotel.
The gym was luxurious, with uniformed staff handing out fresh towels and bottled water, and a post-workout lounge offering free tea, juices, yoghurt, berries, nuts and grains. It was run by a company separate from the hotel and it was expensive but there was a big discount if you paid for a year in advance and stayed away during peak hours.
In the changing room one day I heard a voice approaching from the showers singing what sounded like a soulful ballad in a kind of Bel Canto with Chinese characteristics. The man continued singing as he walked past me and opened the locker next to mine, pausing next to it as he delivered his musical peroration.
His singing had filled the room and we were the only two people in it so I felt I ought to compliment him when he finished. We got chatting, connected on WeChat and fell into the habit of going to the gym together.
He took no exercise, sitting on a mat looking at his phone most of the time and occasionally inspecting what I was doing and telling me to put a bit more effort in. When we were finished we would go to a Mexican bar.
Last month when we were both away he sent me a message saying our gym had gone bankrupt, leaving us all high and dry and we would have to find a new one. The members had set up a WeChat group to discuss our options for redress, and by the time I joined it things were already getting heated.
“Can you publish the photos and other details of the crooks? Those bad people can’t be dealt with by law, they have to be left to die,” one woman wrote.
“Fraudsters, robbers should be shot,” said another.
Some of the members agreed to meet in the hotel the following evening and demand that those who had paid in advance should be given a refund or allowed to continue using the gym until their membership had expired. “When we go there everyone should control their emotions,” one man said. “We should not break any laws and nobody should be able to say we are unreasonable or accuse us of getting together and causing trouble.”
Prepaid cards are common in China for everything from hairdressers and dry cleaners to gyms and restaurants, with businesses pushing hard to persuade customers to pay for as much in advance as possible. The legal position is complicated, and even if customers have a clear right to a refund they often discover that the person they made the contract with was not the legal owner of the business.
After a couple of weeks the property developer that owns the hotel wrote to the members saying that the gym operator had not paid rent for over a year and had been told to stop selling new memberships. “Under the guidance and suggestion of multiple government departments” the developer said it “would like to assume more social responsibilities and to protect consumers’ rights”.
So the developer agreed to honour our contracts after a new company takes over the running of the gym at the beginning of September. In the meantime the pool is closed for renovations that will take two months – just when we need it the most.