The human scale of almost anything in China is predictably shocking. I go to a city I'd never heard of -- say, Zibo -- and learn that it has about as many people as Chicago. I go to a city I have heard of and learn that estimates of its population are accurate only within a couple million. And of course we now have the staggering figures coming out from Sichuan province and its surroundings -- about 900 children trapped in one school, tens of thousands missing in another town, whole villages being swallowed up by landslides. America has never known mass tragedy on this scale -- or even on a pro-rated version of this scale. China has of course known it many times.
Here is a classroom picture from last fall, at a high school outside Sichuan province but close to the earthquake zone. These are the kinds of schools and classrooms you're seeing in "after" pictures now. (Yes, there is a ringer in this picture, whom I couldn't photo-shop out.) These are the kinds of children who have been affected.
Here, from a middle school, is a dormitory room where 18 girls sleep each night and eat all their meals. They sleep side by side, nine on the bottom bunk and nine on the top, with their heads to the left of the picture and their feet to the center. All of their clothes and belongings are in the gray lockers in the right background.
Some of the students at that school. Although multi-child families are more common in rural areas than in the cities, most of the children involved in the earthquake would have been their parents' only child.:
The masses in China are overwhelming; the people in them are vividly and irrepressibly individual. Via Rebecca MacKinnon, here are some ways to contribute to relief efforts in China.
Yesterday I mentioned that Network World had run a Q&A (with me) about how the Great Firewall of China does and doesn't work. Just now they've put up a nice conceptual slide show on "How the Chinese Internet is Different from Yours," here. Worth a look, and includes at least one thing I didn't know before.
After the break, two first-person accounts of the earthquake and its aftermath, from foreigners in Chengdu. These are long and, to me, vivid in their detail, but skip past if you're not interested. I'm providing them here for real-time documentary purposes.
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Last summer, from villages in the hills of Sichuan province near the center of yesterday's earthquake. These are the kinds of people who have been affected:
1) Ethnic Tibetan children playing on the way home from school (click for larger):
2) Other children getting a ride home in a truck:
3) Men waiting for a bus:
4) Dr. Tang Chunxiang, who has lived at the panda reserve in Wolong for more than 20 years and who told me, "The more I know the panda, the more I love the panda." As best I know, there has been no communication with that reserve since the earth quake -- road blocked, telephone and internet lines down, wireless phone coverage out. Update: according to CCTV at 7:30pm China time, the pandas in a base outside Chengdu, and their care-takers are fine, but there are not yet reports from the main panda reserve in Wolong.
In the new issue of the tech journal Network World, I have this Q-and-A, with Carolyn Duffy Marsan, about the workings, weaknesses, and evolution of China's "Great Firewall," expanding on this article in the Atlantic two months back.
Most of the channels on the (state controlled) CCTV are running the normal game shows, Olympic warmups (especially torch-relay updates), teen music shows, etc. But the CCTV-1 news channel is having all-out coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province. Brief cultural notes:
- The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster.
- News channels from Taiwan, which we are watching in alternation with the mainland coverage on CCTV, have extensive video footage from Chengdu, estimates of casualties, etc. So far no on-scene video footage that I've seen on CCTV-1, and no casualty figures. (The state news agency, Xinhua, is saying that 7600 people, or more, may have died.) Channel-surfing, we see that the German, Japanese, and Korean networks are also running Chengdu footage. It could have been on CCTV when I wasn't watching, but it's certainly not featured. CCTV is mainly running telephone interviews with correspondents in Sichuan and talking-head analyses in the studio. Possible background: controlling coverage within China until being sure exactly how the story should be presented. (Update: just saw a 20-second video clip from Chengdu on CCTV.)
- To help place this disaster: it is in almost exactly the same area I described in this article about the Wolong Panda Reserve, northwest of Chengdu, and this slide show about the reserve. A long, twisty road from Chengdu to Wolong, which had been undergoing years of reconstruction, passes right through the earthquake area. I assume it could be a long time before it is restored to even its perilous previous condition.
Good luck to all in Sichuan, including Dr. Tang Chunxiang and his colleagues in Wolong.
I previously had posted a quick item about the minor disruption in Beijing this afternoon after the earthquake hundreds of miles away in Sichuan. In light of the emerging reports of possible large loss of life, including children, I thought it was better to remove that and simply express sympathies for these latest probably-rural, probably-poor victims of natural calamity.
I have not said anything about the disaster in Burma, because I haven't had anything to say beyond "It's a disaster." And, that people should call the country Burma -- as the Bush Administration, Senators Clinton, McCain*, and Obama, and the Washington Post do -- rather than Myanmar, the term chosen by its junta and now accepted by CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.
My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.
A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in "lucky" denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.
Unfortunately, saying that the regime is evil doesn't automatically indicate how to help its unfortunate people. Invasions -- even for humanitarian purposes -- should be a very last resort. And without spelling out the whole reasoning, the U.S. is not in a great position now to be organizing an international invasion force, no matter how noble the cause. As the international frustrations of the last week have suggested, the main option is the unsatisfying one of putting together as much pressure from as many sources as possible, including China**, to force the regime away from its outrageous refusal to allow aid workers in.
(*About McCain: if it really is true that he has given a major convention role to a lobbyist who represented the Burmese junta, McCain needs to dump that person forthwith -- or be pilloried for not doing so every day between now and the election. Update: I see that the lobbyist, Doug Goodyear, has just quit the convention job. Next, maybe giving back the $300,000+ the generals paid him, to a human rights group? **About China: the latest outrage by the Burmese generals should not become the latest reason to threaten China with an Olympic boycott or disruption. The Chinese government has some influence over the Burmese regime -- but just some. It is better to make China part of the solution to this problem, by pointing out that a regime's refusal to save its own people is the strongest possible reason for an exception in China's "non-interference with other sovereign states" doctrine.)
A year ago, during the time of riots and crackdowns, I posted several pictures of what Rangoon looked like just before the fighting began. Here and after the jump, a few other pictures from that time.
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1: Village on the Irrawaddy delta, south of Rangoon, showing why a storm surge would do such damage. (Click for larger version that shows pagoda):
Correct link for VisionWall/Envision -- in China environment article
The June issue of the Atlantic has started to reach subscribers. Not me in China yet, and not a number of friends who've written to ask about it. But enough to remind me to add one point of clarification.
In this issue I have a long narrative article called "China's Silver Lining," arguing a case I had not at all expected to argue before trekking across the country to see a variety of anti-pollution efforts. The argument, in brief, is that the environmental situation here is less uniformly disastrous than most outside discussion assumes -- and that recognizing where, why and how much it is improving (and where it isn't) is crucial for taking the next big steps forward. Those next big steps, in turn, are necessary so that Chinese industrialization doesn't kill everyone in China and half the people in the rest of the world.
You can judge for yourself. (Subscribers will get it in the next few days; online edition goes up in a couple of weeks.) Here is the additional info I am thinking of:
In the article I tell the story of a Canadian-based company whose Chinese operation is called Envision, and which is making a radically more energy-efficient form of window glass. Unglamorous innovations of this sort are significant because Chinese buildings standards have been so grossly inefficient that it takes dramatically more energy to heat or cool a new building in Shanghai or Beijing than its counterpart in a similar weather zone in Europe or North America. Thus merely installing different glass could, over time, spare China the need to burn millions of tons of coal.
The window company I'm mentioning is a small part of a larger drama, and I am not trying to advertise it in particular. Several people have asked how to find out more about it, which might not be obvious from the story. Outside China, it is known by the name VIsionWall, and its site is here. FWIW.
I hope some energetic writer is working on a short narrative book about China, centered on the world pre-Games tour of the Olympic torch. Unexpectedly the tour has turned out to be a vehicle for getting at countless important and interesting themes about the country. The ways in which it has "arrived," and the ways in which it hasn't. What it understands about the outside world, and what it obviously doesn't. What the outside world, in turn, perceives and mis-perceives about China. The role of genuine nationalistic pride, and of government-engineered nationalism. And much more.
At least if I thought such a book was coming out, it would be a reason not to scream each time I come across the CCTV channel that seems to be devoting 24/7 coverage to the torch, as it makes its way through a new city in China every day from now until the opening ceremony on August 8.
Two images to get the research going. The first, as specimen coverage, is the front page of today's China Daily, noting the torch's ascent of Mt. Everest. The second, via my friend Liam Casey in Shenzhen, is the crowd that greeted the torch there -- and Shenzhen, remember, is a city that is geographically and culturally about as far distant from Beijing as you can find in China, the far-southern outpost of pure manufacturing-based market-mindedness. If this many people are being let off from the factories, something is going on.
Academics, journalists, belle-lettrists -- it's open to anyone. If you do write the book, please just mention me on the "I'd like to thank..." page.
My wife's new favorite food is fresh yogurt, which comes in individual ceramic pots at the local grocery store. (Full one in the middle; already-enjoyed ones on the sides.)
The pots are about four inches tall, and quite solidly made. Empty ones could serve as nice little vases or general knick-knacks and could easily go for a dollar or two apiece, or more, in a U.S. housewares store. Here each yogurt plus its pot costs two and a half RMB (35 US cents). It's either two RMB (28 cents) for the yogurt and one-half RMB (7 cents) for the pot, or vice versa. My wife didn't remember which the sign said. We're building up quite a supply. Maybe the foundation of a specialty-import business if we can get them back to America? The spirit of Chinese entrepreneurialism is infectious.
Update: Several correspondents have usefully pointed out that the pots can be returned for a deposit, just like beer bottles. Makes sense! It turns out that my wife knew this (I have never bought them myself) but just didn't mention it to me! Now I know -- the real communications problems are within one language, not across language boundaries -- and we can haul a bunch of them back to the store for pockets full of cash.
CCTV just ran a news feature on the nightmare possibility that someone might copy the official broadcast of Olympic events and then distribute it in a pirated or unauthorized form. The newscaster pointed out that this would be in flagrant disregard of the intellectual property rights of the Beijing Olympics themselves and of CCTV, the official broadcaster.
I can barely imagine the horror of some group in China copying someone else's proprietary material and distributing it outside the proper channels.
(Below, from the latest trip to the local video store. Click for larger version.)
There are various ways in which China will be tested to see if it is "ready" to host the Olympics. For instance:
- buildings, venues, stadiums -- these are well underway, they look impressive from the outside, and everyone seems to assume they'll be great;
- physical infrastructure: the new terminal at Beijing's airport has just opened, countless subway stops are scheduled to open in time for the games, I would imagine that this has been well-planned and will work out;
- social infrastructure: posters appear every day reminding people to spit less, stand in line more, be gracious hosts, etc. There's a big push that seems to have a willing spirit behind it. Over the months I have encountered exactly one Beijing taxi driver who knew more English than I know Chinese, but a big effort in teaching taxicab English is reportedly underway. And all subway lines have signs and announcements in English as well as Chinese.
- natural environment: here's hoping!
Then there is the general and hard-to-pin down question of simply handling the Olympic-scale volume -- for traffic, crowd control, whatever. One proxy is the system for ordering Olympic tickets. Residents of China (foreign and Chinese) had their third opportunity to order tickets starting at 9am China time today -- 45 minutes ago as I write. My wife and I are trying to order some tickets to the rowing events, where (a) huge numbers of tickets are available, and (b) we have some friends involved in the competition. After the jump, a real-time chronicle of how it's going.
(Update: summary of chronicle below is that two and a half hours after the experiment began, the transaction failed and the web site invited me to try again from the start. Five hours after that, at the end of its first business day of operation, the system still wasn't working. Obviously the ticket system is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic coming at it all at once. But that brings us back to the original question about being ready to handle the predictably huge, surge-style peaks of Olympic-related volume. We'll see...)
Extra-final update: Success! At 6:45pm China time, only nine hours and forty-five minutes after first logging on, I landed three bargain seats for the rowing heats, @ 20RMB ($2.85 -- the 30RMB seats must have been sold out). End of the chronicle.
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Beijing must-see: "Tibet of China, Past and Present"
This week the "Cultural Palace of Nationalities" in Beijing -- 民族文化宫 in Chinese, also known as "Cultural Palace of Minorities" -- opened an exhibit on the history and future of Tibet. Let me just say: if you want a quick but thorough immersion in the prevailing Chinese view of this issue, you could do far worse than to spend an hour or two here.
The historical part goes under the general heading "The Feudal Serfdom of Old Tibet." The narrative introduction begins, "Before 1959, Tibet was a feudal society of serfdom, darker and more backward than European slavery in the Middle Ages." The more contemporary part is under headings like "New Tibet Changing with Each Passing Day" and "Emancipated Serfs Become Masters of Their Homeland."
As documentation for the historical perspective, the hundreds of pictures in the exhibit include some of tortured serfs from the old days, and a photo of what appear to be two nearly-whole human skins -- one of an adult, one of a child -- from what is described as a human sacrifice of serfs in the olden days. (I'm just telling you what's in the exhibit, and I am not including a photo of this item.) For the modern part, there are pictures of the progress and prosperity of today's Tibet. Here is a modern Tibetan herder, with a fridge full of beer:
The bright side #4: Why I've missed the (English-language) Chinese press
May 1 edition, China Daily, state-controlled voice to the outside world:
Headline, in case you can't read it: "Happiness abounds as country cheers." (Click on photo for larger version.) Lead paragraph: "Across the country, people yesterday celebrated the 100-day countdown to the Olympics." Picture is of Tibetan university students in Lhasa rejoicing.
There are serious aspects to the enormous gap between Chinese and international coverage of the Olympics, Tibet, etc -- but for another time. For now it's great to see these publications in top form.
May Day, 2008, 10am, view out our window in downtown Beijing. Opening Ceremony for the Olympics now 99 days away. Getting excited!
Update: Reader Paul Camp makes the reasonable suggestion that, in any future photos, I should include the front page from that day's newspaper somewhere in the frame, in the fashion of a kidnap-ransom photo. This is to eliminate the suspicion that I am using the samebleakpicture again and again.
I will confess that I have never actually seen Sex and the City on American TV. (I know, that's a shocker.) In fact, we didn't have HBO in America, so we saw the Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc, via the video store. (And king of them all, The Wire, via pirate-video store in China.) But because I had never seen the Sex and the Cityopening credits, I didn't realize what Danwei.org'sSexy Beijing was making fun of.
Even so, I knew that it was very funny -- and the star Sufei, aka Anna Sophie Lowenberg, is all the more charming when you think of her playing off Sarah Jessica Parker. A sample is below (the subtitling is great). I mention it now because apparently an episode is going to be on the PBS show Global Watch on the night of April 9. Check it out.
Update: 1) I hear from Luke Mines of SexyBeijingTV that tonight's episode is "Beijing Caucus," in which Beijingers talk to the star, Sufei, about Hillary, Barack, Chuck Norris, and so on. Clip here on SBTV's site or here on YouTube. 2) I also hear that SBTV is no longer part of Danwei.org.
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Thanks to many people who wrote with kind inquiries about my terse "going offline" note of several days ago. I had meant merely to be private, rather than willfully cryptic. To be somewhat less cryptic but still discreet: for a while I am out of China and in California, with my father.
Let me mention only one point I would have mentioned earlier, if it hadn't happened just when I was scrambling to arrange a trip from Beijing to Los Angeles: the sentencing of Hu Jia to three and a half years in prison is serious and dismaying news.
Hu is best known for his work advancing the rights of people with AIDS and HIV in China. He was arrested early this year on charges of "inciting subversion of state power," because of quotes and articles on his blog and in foreign papers, and was convicted and sentenced a few days ago. Rob Gifford's book China Road, mentioned here earlier, includes some descriptions of Hu and his work. Except by the Chinese security services, he is widely admired and respected and considered a "reformer" rather than a rebel directly challenging the legitimacy of the Chinese regime.
Here is the one and only mention of his sentencing that I see in the China Daily, official voice of the government to the outside world. That is worth comparing with the statement from the U.S. State Department, hardly a source of rabble-rousing observations about China. Or with this, from Rebbeca MacKinnon. Or this posting by Simon Elegant, of Time. Elegant is writing about Tibet rather than Hu Jia, but he explains the perverse logic, which applies in both instances, by which internal Chinese repression and controls are very likely to be tightened just as the world turns its attention to the country for the Olympic Games, rather than relaxed -- as normal PR instincts would dictate and as the regime promised years ago when China was bidding for the Games. The paradox, as discussed earlier here and elsewhere, is that much of real, daily Chinese life is fairly free-wheeling and uncontrolled. But what the Chinese regime is showing is the most repressive side of its nature, at the time the world's attention is directed there.
Hu Jia's case is on a scale different from the events in Tibet, but in its way it is as disturbing.
A new report from the Pew Internet Project indicates that most internet users in China accept the idea that material on web sites should be monitored and controlled -- and that the government should do the controlling. For instance:
Most readers of the Western press are aware of efforts by the Chinese government to control what its people can read and discuss online. Outside observers and human-rights groups monitor and criticize the government's actions and publicize the techniques through which technologically savvy Chinese internet users can work around restrictions. Some analysts also track and interpret the government's subtler shifts in balance that seek to encourage internet development while still exercising control over it...
[O]ther evidence suggests that many Chinese citizens do not share Western views of the internet. The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the internet.
The report goes on to say that 84 percent of Chinese internet users felt content should be controlled, and about the same number approved of the government's doing so. It also explores some of the reasons behind an attitude that confounds many American expectations about what the spread of the internet "should" mean. The discussion is based on a nationwide survey funded by the Markle Foundation and conducted by a respected Chinese social scientist named Guo Liang. It is very much worth reading, in connection with ongoing stories about mainstream Chinese views of news from Tibet and of criticism on that and other subjects from overseas.
I've been interested in these same issues and explored some of them in a recent article on how the China's Great Firewall works. I should probably mention at this point that the China office of the Pew Internet Project is a little desk in our bedroom, about ten feet away from the Atlantic's China bureau, and that the author of this report, Deborah Fallows, is my wife.
This is the kind of scene I wish I could convey to people who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world.
My wife and I spent the afternoon at a public "High Tech Middle School" in Ningxia autonomous region, in western China bordering Inner Mongolia. The students could not have been more charming or open-spirited. Here's how a few of the girls looked:
There are wearing school uniforms in the picture -- it's a Sunday afternoon, and they'd returned from their homes and villages in a 25-mile radius, to spend the next six days at school. During the week they live in dorms eight to a room. But you'll notice something about the uniforms:
I mentioned recently that the Chinese propaganda apparatus was surprisingly old fashioned, compared with most other aspects of life in contemporary China.
Well, the headline language is becoming more up to date. Front page of Thursday's China Daily (have to say it every time: official voice to the outside world).
The "hype" involved is the idea that the government is encouraging Han Chinese to flood into Tibet, to take economic opportunities from Tibetans and dilute the Tibet-ness of the place.
Hype aside, my impression is that it is hard for people outside China to appreciate how strong and unified is the view on "the Chinese street" about the rights and wrongs of the Tibetan tragedy. From this internal perspective, Tibet has always, obviously, and indisputably been an integral part of China. And just as obviously and indisputably, through 50-plus years the people of Han China have sacrificed time, treasure, and manpower to bring Tibetans out of the feudal age and into modernity. And the thanks they get is.... this destructive outburst?
Americans might consider this blasphemous, but I think the prevailing Chinese view is about as dominant here as was the view on "the American street" about the rights and wrongs of 9/11. In all this is the potential for trouble between China and the outside world, not to mention the trouble for Tibet.
Update: This story by Howard French in today's NYT very well describes the gulf between Chinese and outside perspectives on Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and "splittism."
Recent items about Chinese info-control (#1 in a series)
Intensely in the midst of "real" work at the moment, so just a quick mention of one of a thicket of recent illustrations of a larger point. The larger point, as often argued in the magazine, is that daily life in most of China is less controlled and more freewheeling and chaotic than Westerners would usually guess. But there are clear, controlled, no-nonsense exceptions, among which the general field of information (media, internet, schooling) ranks high.
Today's illustration: maps. I contend that overall "map-mindedness" in China differs from the typical Western approach, but that's for another time. Finding useful maps here, in Chinese or English, can be tricky because roads, buildings, and landmarks are changing so fast. But there's also the official outlook that geographic information isn't something you want to fall into just anybody's hands. Thus this announcement yesterday that unauthorized online mapping services would be shut down:
China cracks down on illegal online map services to protect state security
"...Some websites publish sensitive or confidential geographical information, which might leak state secrets and threaten national security," [a Central Government official] said.
He said those websites would be closed down.
In a way I can understand what they're worried about. For instance, Google Earth makes something absolutely plain and obvious that I don't see on normal maps of Beijing: that there is gigantic airfield on the west side of the city, just outside the 4th Ring Road.* And I'm reading a novel whose plot turns on the discovery, via satellite photos, of unauthorized activity in Tibet. My point at the moment is simply the frequent reminders of the tension between China's opening in many ways and its attempt to bottle up some kinds of information.
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* This site, originally pointed out to me by Joe Reckford, is "Beijing Western Suburb airport," 北京西郊机场, apparently used for travel by top officials and as a military base. Here is a Xinhua photo of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and eventual president of China Li Xiannian at the airfield 45 years ago.
... at how tin-eared and antique the Chinese propaganda apparatus is, compared with the way most other things seem and feel in the country.
Today's illustration: front page of China Daily, official voice to the outside world. Story at top left, about lighting of Olympic flame, contains not one word about protesters who disrupted the ceremony in Greece. (Local Chinese TV coverage also cut away at that instant.) Story at top right, today's update on the Tibet saga, is about the unified outrage of China's web population over Western news distortions. Eg,
"A video clip titled 'Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China' became an instant hit after it was posted on YouTube on March 15. [Hmmm. As I remembered it, the Great Firewall was blocking YouTube around that time.]... The 7-minute clip then lists indisputable historical facts to prove that Tibet has long been an inalienable part of China."
As an indication of what the majority of Chinese people have been taught about the Tibet issue, the story is indeed useful. What is weird is its attempt to sell the "if we don't mention it, it didn't happen" version of reality to outside, English-language readers who have other sources of information on the topic.
Meanwhile, a microscopic story at the very bottom of the front page (picture after jump), right next to the Hooters-Beijing ad, notes that shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange fell by 4.49% yesterday. To be fair, it is linked to a longer story inside.
(Update after the jump.)
Out of Net range for the next few days, a picture before going.
Looking towards Puxi, from the river, 7pm, on a visit to Shanghai last week:
Our fondly-remembered former home visible in middle distance, but only if you know just what you're looking for.
JMW Turner, some time ago:
Previously in the European Artists Come to China series here and here.
And you thought the Clinton-Obama race was exciting....
The incumbent team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has come out on top in the voting at the National People's Congress, winning a second five-year term! Today's front page:
Essay question: In what basic way did these NPC elections resemble the Democrats' presidential primary in Michigan two months ago, and what does this suggest about the way globalization is bringing us all together?
This month BBC World TV is running a series of short documentaries on China. My wife and I have seen only two of them so far -- one about a little place called White Horse Village that is being demolished to make room for a modern development, another about a year in the life of several public school students, some cramming hard for university entrance exams and others just trying to get by while their parents are a thousand miles away in factory jobs.
If they're aired where you are, they are worth seeing. (Series schedule here. I gather that several of the films have been broadcast before.) They capture some amazing moments -- a bright young high school senior from the boondocks as she learns the scores on the entrance exam that will change her life, a beleaguered rural mother nearly suffering a breakdown when her callous mother-in-law won't help her, a nouveau-riche land developer cavorting with his family while the people he's evicting despair. Most of all, they show what China outside Beijing or Shanghai looks like, in a way TV news rarely does.
Why these are being broadcast with no interference I can't say. In a similar development, unlike yesterday, today both CNN and the BBC, along with the French, German, and Japanese news stations, are broadcasting Lhasa footage without being censored. On the other hand, my experience confirms Danwei's report that YouTube is now blacked out.
Real time update: Whoops! I wrote this yesterday morning, and one minute before it was scheduled to appear -- that is, right now -- I heard in the background a third documentary in the series. In it correspondent Juliana Liu reported on a visit to her hometown of Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and her talk with a colorful local millionaire: the air-conditioning magnate, aviator, and environmentalist Zhang Yue. Who would have guessed -- his campus includes a gilded pyramid and a replica of the palace of Versailles!
Small world. This picture of Versailles-in-Changsha is not from the film but from our story on Mr. Zhang early last year. Maybe this film was shot long before that (though its credit screen said 2008). Further demonstration of our motto. The Atlantic Monthly: today's news one year ago.
As of Saturday night, March 15, China time, in Beijing:
- The screen goes black on CNN one second after any report about the situation in Lhasa begins;
- Similar coverage on BBC World TV has, oddly, come through unmolested -- though BBC has often been blacked out in the past. This evening I saw footage on BBC of riots in Lhasa, cars being burned, accusations of attacks on monks, and so on;
- CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV) has included at least one brief mention we saw, similar to those in the papers previously discussed here, saying that small groups of hooligans have attacked soldiers in Lhasa but that things are under control.
- Just about every blog, web site, or online news source I've tried for info about Tibet has been blocked by the Great Firewall, using one of the techniques I discussed in this article. The URLs for those sites -- say, NYTimes.com -- aren't permanently black-listed or blocked. But when the GFW's filtering system sees troublesome words in the actual content of the page you're reading -- and let's assume the words Tibet, Lhasa, and Dalai Lama now all qualify -- it breaks the connection and interrupts all attempts to go back to the site for certain period of time. So far, my VPN has gotten me around this barrier. But, as discussed in the article, avoiding the Great Firewall is enough of a chore and an expense that most Chinese citizens don't bother. I imagine some people in Tibet are bothering now.
Front page of today's China Daily, the government's English-language presentation to the world. This is on Saturday, March 15, when news outlets elsewhere are leading with the Tibet news:
You can click on the photo for a larger version, but you're still likely to miss the Tibet news, which is in the very bottom left corner of the paper under the headline "Dalai Lama Behind Sabotage." In its entirety it reads as follows:
In case you're wondering how this is playing in China...
.... here is the current front page of the People's Daily website, in Chinese. The English-language site, here, has different stories with different emphases.
Both the Chinese and the English pages may have changed by the time you see them, but as I look on Saturday morning, March 15, China time, the Chinese page is playing the Tibet story as secondary news, just at the bottom of the opening screen. You can find it with these characters for Tibetan Autonomous Region -- 西藏自治区 -- and the story itself is here. The gist, according to me, is that responsible authorities say that a small number of hooligans and saboteurs are creating disruptions in Lhasa.
The English-language story is played higher on the opening page and with the headline, "Tibet Regional Government: Sabotage in Lhasa masterminded by Dalai clique."
As mentioned earlier, no one outside the region can really know yet what is going on or where it will lead.
No one outside Tibet knows exactly what is going on there right now...
.... or at least I don't, but in case observers outside China are in any doubt: This is potentially big, big, very consequential news.
It would be out of character for the Chinese regime (which is relaxed about many things, but not at all about "separatism" in any form) and also contrary to fundamental Chinese doctrine for the government not to respond with very great force to whatever is happening in Lhasa. Among other things, this will certainly change the tone of international discussion about the Olympics, in which China has an enormous investment of pride and "face" and which are now less than five months away.
Again, it is too early and facts are too unclear to say much more with confidence. But as you follow the news, be aware that this is something that could matter a great deal in many ways. More later.
From reader Dan Hobby, a group of soldiers at the Summer Palace in Beijing last year. The soldiers are turning around to look at the little daughter (not visible in picture) accompanying Hobby's in-laws, who are wearing blue jeans and jackets and seen from the back. The girl, age four, had been adopted in China three years earlier. It's worth clicking on the photo to see the enlargement, which shows the expressions on the soldiers' faces.
Cultural notes: 1) Chinese-looking daughters with Western-looking parents are a common sight in a few parts of China. In many other parts, they attract universal stares -- and these soldiers could have been country people, who had not seen such a thing before. 2) The frequent encounters with very casual-looking representatives of the People's Liberation Army do not, again, settle any arguments about China's military ambitions, its "asymmetric war" abilities, etc etc etc. But they are frequent.
After the jump, excerpts from two email messages I received from Westerners who have recently lived in or visited China.
Obviously they would not say, nor would I, that the casual/ragtag aspect of Chinese soldiers as encountered in normal urban life is representative of the whole Chinese military, indicates that China does not have advanced weapons or a growing navy, puts to rest all questions about China's ambitions, or so on. But this anecdotal exposure has an effect -- it's pretty much the opposite of the impression one gets from brief exposure to the US military -- and I bet that most foreign residents of China would say that these reports ring true. Certainly they do to me.
Ah! Why didn't I think of that? (Chinese internet dept)
The internet these last few days in Beijing has been like molasses. Pages that take one minute or more to load. Many pages that time out, give up, and won't load at all. As I mention in my article on China's Great Firewall in the current issue of the Atlantic, one reason internet censorship is so effective in China is that you're never quite sure why you can't find the sites you're looking for:
Andrew Lih points out that other countries that also censor Internet content—Singapore, for instance, or the United Arab Emirates—provide explanations whenever they do so. Someone who clicks on a pornographic or “anti-Islamic” site in the U.A.E. gets the following message, in Arabic and English: “We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” In China, the connection just times out. Is it your computer’s problem? The firewall? Or maybe your local Internet provider, which has decided to do some filtering on its own? You don’t know. “The unpredictability of the firewall actually makes it more effective,” another Chinese software engineer told me. “It becomes much harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on guard.”
The same people -- same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites - that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.
These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.
Jeez louise department (China and right-wing bloggers)
Late last night China time, joining in via Skype on an institution I had not been aware of before: a "Bloggers Roundtable" phone call from the Pentagon, discussing the newly released report on Chinese military power. I don't know who else is on the phone call, except for two officials who were supposed to be identified as "a Defense official." OK.
About the report, nothing to say until I have looked at it more closely. About other questions from other people, not my place to characterize them -- tempting as it is to give verbatim the tendentious line of argument / "questioning" from one right wing blogger in particular. But since this same guy (whose boss I have repeatedlymocked) has made it his business to mischaracterize what I said, let me take the unwise step of trying to set a blog record straight.
About a third of the pirate videos we get in China are fine, in the sense that they play properly and are in the advertised language. About a third are studio-promo copies, which were originally handed out "for your consideration" at Oscar time. When you watch these, you see "Property of Columbia Pictures" or some such label across the screen every few minutes, like this.
The other third of the videos are in Russian. (The really cheapo videos, shot by somebody sitting in a movie theater with a concealed camera, and chock-full of audience noise and people walking around, are pretty rare now.) I don't mean movies made in Russia or starring Russians. I mean the standard American or British studio film dubbed into Russian language. For instance, the lightweight Hollywood aerial-action movie about the WW I Lafayette Escadrille, Flyboys. Here's its opening menu
Russian? Why so many films in Russian, and not, say, Spanish or Thai? What does it say about a country that China looks to it as a source of pirated videos? I wonder this every time I play pirate-video-roulette and wonder whether this new video will be another unintended step in my familiarity with the Russian language.
Reader Ed Fisher helpfully provided the answer, which appears to check out:
Regarding your knockoff DVDs: The reason so many of them are dubbed into Russian is because the studios have started releasing movies for Region 5 (which includes Russia) much earlier than in the US, to combat piracy. Of course, it's had the opposite effect - Russian releases are immediately pirated and then either distributed as-is or merged with US audio from the theatrical release.
Next on the trail of gray-zone inquiry: Who, exactly, in China controls the business that makes these billions of DVDs, and how are they so thoroughly protected against enforcement? Like most people here, I have my suppositions; and like most people here, I prudently keep them to myself.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Du (Beijing air watch dept)
(Updated, below.)
Another very good Beijing-byline story by Mei Fong in the Wall Street Journal (link here, if it has not gone behind the firewall), about the ramped-up efforts to clean up the local skies before the Olympic games.
Two interesting details:
- Making vivid what it might mean to "do whatever it takes" to close down factories, traffic, etc long enough before the August 8 opening ceremonies to make the air acceptable:
One plant affected by the Olympic cleanup is a Beijing Eastern factory in southeast Beijing, which will be closed by the end of June, according to the Xinhua news agency. Workers at the plant confirmed that the factory -- which employs about 1,000 people -- will be suspending operations in May and reopening in a new facility in southwest Beijing at year's end. Many workers don't know what they will do in the interim, or if they will continue to receive their wages. "No one knows what will happen tomorrow," one worker said.
- The print version of the story, in the Asian Wall Street Journal, intriguingly has a final paragraph that is missing from the online version. It ends with this quote from Mr. Du Shaozhong, deputy head of the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau, who pleads with foreign journalists to give their readers a more positive image of Beijing as an Olympic venue:
"We need help from the media," said Mr. Du. "Tell them what you see with your own eyes."
Hoooh boy. What I saw with my own eyes today was extremely nice! After ferocious winds yesterday, this afternoon's skies were beautiful in Beijing, and the air was even kind of non-frigid! Jianwai, near Yonganli metro station, looking east, 3pm today:
But if outsiders are going to convey what they see with their own eyes -- well, let's hope it's all like today.
Update: What I am seeing with my own eyes, the next day:
President Bush's last answer at yesterday's press conference has got him into trouble. That's the one where he registered amazement at the prospect of $4/gallon gasoline. But on the question just before that, about the Beijing Olympics, I thought he actually gave the right, somewhat complex answer concisely and well.
Here was the question:
Q In China a former factory worker who says that human rights are more important than the Olympics is being tried for subversion. What message does it send that you're going to the Olympics, and do you think athletes there should be allowed to publicly express their dissent?
In his answer Bush confidently made the point that the Olympics had its own momentum and importance, but that respecting the event need not mean (as the Chinese government would wish) that the outside world must bite its collective tongue about political issues. And he also had a knowing aside about the particular leverage he had in raising such issues:
THE PRESIDENT: Olivier, I have made it very clear, I'm going to the Olympics because it's a sporting event, and I'm looking forward to seeing the athletic competition. But that will not preclude me from meeting with the Chinese President, expressing my deep concerns about a variety of issues -- just like I do every time I meet with the President.
And maybe I'm in a little different position. Others don't have a chance to visit with [President] Hu Jintao, but I do. And every time I meet with him I talk about religious freedom and the importance of China's society recognizing that if you're allowed to worship freely, it will benefit the society as a whole; that the Chinese government should not fear the idea of people praying to a god as they see fit. A whole society, a healthy society, a confident society is one that recognizes the value of religious freedom.
I talk about Darfur and Iran and Burma. And so I am not the least bit shy of bringing up the concerns expressed by this factory worker, and I believe that I'll have an opportunity to do so with the President and, at the same time, enjoy a great sporting event. I'm a sports fan. I'm looking forward to the competition. And each Olympic society will make its own decision as to how to deal with the athletes.
Recognizing the independent athletic (and spectacle) existence of the Olympics, and also their undeniable importance to China, but still speaking freely, plainly, and on live TV about the values the U.S. should stand for and the practices of China's it condemns -- to me, that's something like a policy. Credit where credit is due.
Beijing skyline, February 21, 2008, 10am. 169 days to go until the Olympics
As mentioned earlier here and here , in a reverse-backflip way it's been heartening to see the air quality deteriorate so catastrophically as China goes back to work after a two-week holiday. After all, that suggests that the closed factories and limited traffic during the holiday had some effect. By that logic, I should be growing more heartened by the day.
Two week ago I mentioned that the March issue of the Atlantic -- by that point snugly in subscribers' hands! -- would include my article on how the Great Firewall of China actually works. That article is now online, here. So is the entire issue, which is full of great stuff.
Also, my interview about the article and the general China-tech scene is online here. It was conducted by the Atlantic's estimable Abby Cutler -- as the last thing she did on our staff before leaving to begin medical training. Applying the healing touch in different venues, is the way we like to think about it at the magazine.
If yesterday's Beijing skies were weirdly encouraging, I have to feel even better today! Guomao, looking southward, the city's second day back at work after Spring Festival.
Last on this topic for a while.
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Update: Here is how the sky looked about a week ago, when the city was shut down and a ferocious wind had howled in from someplace cold. This is of course the new CCTV tower, whose two legs have recently been joined. It's not far from the scene above.
After ten days -- or ten months, I've lost track now -- of nonstop explosion-enhanced welcome of the new Year Of The Rat and Of The Olympics, Beijing appears to have returned to work today. That's what I judge from the jammed roads this morning, and the jammed sidewalks this past weekend, full of people carrying suitcases as they come back to town.
And it's what I judge from the air. It's been quite nice these last ten days. But this morning, at 10am, we have:
In the short run, plenty discouraging! So what's the good news here? If closing down China's factories and cars for even two weeks made a noticeable difference, maybe there is some hope that the widely-expected months-long closedown before the Olympics will do the trick. Especially if the famous Chinese weather-modification teams can arrange for some of the gelid Siberian blasts that have roared through the city in the past, blue-sky week to reappear in August. Just a thought...
As I mentioned a few months ago ("Tales from the everything's-slightly-substandard economy"), there is a strange trade-off in a lot of daily life in China. Nearly everything's cheap. But a whole lot of everything is a little bit off, marred in some subtle but grating way, not quite legit, and, well, cheap.
Today's illustration: On my trip to the U.S. last month, I saw that a 14-screen theater near the office in DC was playing a whole bunch of movies I had heard about and wanted to see. Juno. There Will Be Blood. The Great Debaters. No Country for Old Men. Charlie Wilson's War. American Gangster. Sweeney Todd. Eastern Promises. A revival of I'm Not There, about Bob Dylan. And some others I'm surely forgetting now -- whatever was popular a month ago. (Even Golden Compass???)
I thought: hey, I'm here on my own, I'll see a bunch of these. Life got busy, and I saw only one. But this weekend, on the street in Beijing, my wife and I found a good video store -- they're slightly more discreet than in Shanghai -- and loaded up on every movie I've just named, plus a bunch more, at a little under $1.40 each. Extortionate, compared with Shanghai, but the best we could do.
The good news is, we get to see these movies, and they don't cost much. The bad news is, there's something a little bit wrong with all of them. For instance: tonight's showing was The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker, which we actually liked. Here is a typical scene, featuring Denzel Whitaker (no relation to the other Whitaker, or to Washington) as a young Wiley College debater, going up against some snooty Harvard boys:
Sigh. I assume it was a "for your consideration" Oscar-promotion version of the movie. At least it hadn't been dubbed into Russian, like a lot of the cheapo movies we see here. For another time: consideration of what this gray-zone existence might mean for the Chinese economy in the long run.
Outside the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish language and cultural organization (like the Alliance Francaise or the Goethe-Institut), in Beijing . Apparently it's not just Little Havana any more!
Update: Those spots next to the bicycle, in the inset in the bottom-left corner of the map? Apparently they're the Philippines! As reader Andrew Miller points out, counting them in the world of Espanol, even cross-hatched, is a much bigger stretch than counting the United States.
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To spell out the joke for non-Americans or those not sodden in U.S. politics: Tancredo, now disappeared from the Republican presidential race, was the main alarm-raiser about the immigrant menace to America -- especially immigrants from Mexico and points south. How would he feel about a sign saying: "Do you know that Spanish is spoken in more than twenty countries?" -- with a map showing the United States already halfway there??
Noise you are not yourself hearing, like pain you are not feeling or cold you are not shivering through, is hard to take seriously. So unless you yourself are sitting right now in Beijing, Shanghai, or some similar venue, I expect your eye to skid past the assertion that I will have heard hundreds of thousands of loud explosions before this night is through. (Math below.)
But my God! This Fifth Night of China's "Spring Festival," when the God of Wealth is welcomed in -- with explosions!! -- for the year ahead, is one of those moments when the noise is so relentless and inescapable that you can barely think of anything else. The last such time that comes to mind for me: being on the deck of an aircraft carrier, on a reporting trip years ago, with the jets screamingly preparing for takeoff and everyone with a set of protective headsets except for the visitor, me. Right now, in my Beijing apartment, my noise-canceling headset, over a normal set of foam ear plugs, has never seemed so useful.
A year ago, in Shanghai, my wife and I were far enough away from the center of Fifth Night detonations to be able to think: how folkloric! This year, with strings of firecrackers being set off, continuously, just across the street from our building, and fireworks being sent up from the building's driveway and exploding at eye level outside our (21st floor) window, we're reduced to telling ourselves: at some point, this night will end. In the meantime, where are more of those earplugs?
(Math: a string of 1000 firecrackers takes about 20 seconds to detonate -- and we've seen such strings fired off nonstop today. That's 50 per second. Let's generously assume that through the course of an hour the average rate is much lower, say 10 per second. That would be 600 per minute, 36,000 per hour, more than 100,000 every three hours. Or even if it's half that much -- it's a lot. And the night is young.)
(Previously in the Brueghel comes to China series, here.)
Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, Houhai area:
A few hundred years earlier, in Europe:
A friend is doing a story about the odd variety of vehicles Beijingers have adapted to the ice, so nothing more about that now. I will say that on the latest supply run from the U.S. I had brought along an old, crummy pair of ice skates, with frayed and re-knotted laces and blades as sharp as a rolling pin. Imagine my relief in spotting a sign that said 北京冰刀王 -- Beijing Ice Skate King -- and being helped by the king himself, as he put a razor edge on the skates and added a new set of laces, all for 35 RMB (a little under $5).
News of the future: Internet, Olympics, Great Firewall
I believe that the Atlantic's March 2008 issue is already in subscribers' hands. The link on our main web site will be available in a little while. (Another illustration of the "Better than Free" principle laid out by Kevin Kelly!)
In the new issue I have an article about the "Great Firewall of China" -- the government's means of regulating the internet, or trying to. When that article comes out, you'll see why I was so interested in this recent AFP/Yahoo news story, about the government's deliberations over what to do with the GFW when Beijing is crawling with foreigners during the Olympic games. Basically: I have some inside details that complement what the Olympic organizers are now saying in public. Stay tuned.
Six months from this morning, the first Olympic competitions will start in Beijing. Opening ceremonies: 8/8/08 at 8:08pm. The next day, August 9, let the games begin!
At 9am this morning, February 9, with the city practically shut down for Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year), and with the atmosphere cleaned out by an arctic blast from Siberia or somewhere, it looks pretty nice outside! (For past comparisons, including the same out-the-window view on other days, go here.) Because of the glare, it's slightly hard to see in this picture, but roads that are ordinarily jammed have virtually no cars:
An omen that this new Year of the Rat will bring clearer skies, if not fewer cars? And an environmentally-successful Olympic games? Let's hope.
Twenty four hours into Year of the Rat, and safely back "home" in Beijing. Actually feels like home -- or maybe it's just the travel-induced thousand-yard-stare 24 hours after starting the trek from DC. Apartment looks and smells great; Beijing Capital Airport keeps applying various de-bureaucratizing (!) speed-up tactics US international airports could study*;and my wife and I are hoping that the ongoing cannonade of New Year's fireworks outside the window, will, in compliance with "strict city regulations," end as promised at midnight.** Or that we'll be tired enough not to care.
新年快乐, Happy New Year.
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* One-third as many forms to fill out as on our previous visits. Immigration card, yes. But no longer a public-health screening form, which I assume got started during SARS; and no customs form at all, unless you have goods to declare. Despite our huge, groaning suitcases full of supplies from the U.S., we technically had nothing to tell the officials about.
** This might sound like an amusing festive touch, but based on last year's New Year celebrations in Shanghai, it's closer to living through some documentary about City At War, with concussive blasts round the clock. In this new year of pre-Olympic orderliness for Beijing, we'll see how the not-past-midnight rule goes. Outside just now: KABOOM!!!
...where I have (intentionally) spent very little of my previous life but where I have been, for oddball reporting reasons, these last couple of days:
Being in the San Francisco Bay area makes me feel old, since everyone else is 25.
Being in the Boca Raton area makes me feel young, since...
Pretty soon I'll be back in Beijing, where I'll have no time to fritter away on such thoughts, since like everyone else I'll mainly be concentrating on surviving the next traffic jam or "mist" event that would be called deathly smog elsewhere. I am weirdly beginning to miss the focus-on-the-now such daily challenges educe. Rather than "old" or "young," it makes me feel... engaged.
All Things Considered interview with Robert Siegel
From yesterday's (Jan 29) All Things Considered, my interview with Robert Siegel about China's vast dollar holdings here. Original story here -- free! like all our content! -- and update here.
