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I thought it got easier to breathe back there in August!
As attentive readers may recall, the air in Beijing through the six months before the Olympic games was almost unbelievably horrible. Lest we forget: this was the view out my window in mid-June, which was not that different from how it had been day upon day through the spring and early summer.
But even as I was wheezing my way around town and truly getting depressed by no view of sun and sky (and being told by a doctor that I should stop smoking, when I'd never started), I
was reporting in the Atlantic on plans to get things cleaned up by the time of the Olympics. The first two days of the Games looked
pretty bleak -- but then a line of thunderstorms moved through, and the air looked far better, and the environmental threat to the Games was averted.
Since then, the air in Beijing has
seemed better -- not
all of the time, God knows, but more than before. How much of the improvement is due to factories being shut down because of the recession? (They must have been running 40 hours a day in the spring, given how bad things were then.) How much because of typically strong late-fall winds blowing in from the northwest? How much an actual long-term change? I don't know.
But, courtesy of a tip from an engineer at NASA, here is new evidence that all the anti-pollution steps taken because of the Olympics really did make a difference in air-quality measures in August -- and, it seems, some of the time since then.
The NASA map below will make more sense if you read the full report,
here. Highlight version: the deep red west of Shanghai and north of Hong Kong (where Shenzhen and Dongguan are), plus through the central coal-and-factory belt in places like Shanxi province, is a bad sign. The light green around Beijing is relatively good! (The red zone on the coast just east of Beijing is the city of Tianjin.)
As the NASA report says of Beijing's special Olympic anti-pollution rules:
During the two months when restrictions were in place, the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) -- a noxious gas resulting from fossil fuel combustion (primarily in cars, trucks, and power plants) -- plunged nearly 50 percent. Likewise, levels of carbon monoxide (CO) fell about 20 percent.
Why does this matter? Because it shows that corrective steps can improve even the most hopeless-seeming environmental disasters.
It's worth trying to do something, rather than just hunkering down in bed and trying to
take very, very shallow breaths -- my strategy in the months from April
to July.
In other words, Yes We Can.
Paradise Beijing
I have a slight modification to propose to the International Olympic Charter. I suggest that the Olympics, and the Paralympics, be run back-to-back, nonstop, month after month and year after year -- and always in Beijing. It could be tough on the athletes, but think of the golds they could win! And with this system, the city might continue to enjoy the phenomenal blue skies and beautiful weather that have prevailed for most of the last four weeks. This morning, Sept 12:
Yesterday afternoon, Sept. 11:
The traffic and factory shut-down rules that started on July 20 will still be in effect for eight more days, thanks to the Paralympics. The Paralympics have been moving and impressive in ways I'll describe later. For now, we're enjoying these moments while we have them; assuming nothing about the future; but hoping that the Chinese citizenry and leadership have noticed how transformed the city is when it looks like these pictures -- and not the one from two months ago, mercifully after the jump.
Continue reading "Paradise Beijing" »
A farewell to 加油
It's the first day of the rest of Beijing's life. I have no further thoughts to offer about the Games and their aftermath, so I bid them adieu with these few notebook items.
I also take leave of blog-land for the next week, because of (happy) family gatherings and other duties. The Democrats in Denver and the tennis players in New York will keep everyone occupied:
- The most riveting detail in
today's NYT story about Olympic TV ratings success is fingering the person responsible for scheduling the games in the hottest time of the summer. It turns out to have been NBC's Dick Ebersol, and not, as everyone I've talked with had assumed, some astrology-conscious faction within the Beijing Olympic Committee that was obsessed with having the opening ceremony on August 8. Of course that's 08/08/08, heavy on the most traditionally "auspicious" number in Chinese culture. Details in the very interesting NYT story. Years' worth of pop-culture analysis of modern China, right down the drain!
But maybe it was local people who added the flourish that the ceremonies start at 8:08 pm.
- The last big-deal event I saw was a big deal indeed: gold-medal football/soccer match, Argentina 1-0 over Nigeria. (Tickets offered by a foreign friend at the last minute.*) As a viewer, I was reminded that soccer is the sport that suffers most in the transition from in-person to TV. TV can capture a whole court's worth of action in basketball, and tennis, and usually baseball and football, though each is different when seen for real. But the soccer field is so big that what you see on TV is little isolated chunks of action rather than any larger flow -- or else, in the wide shots, a whole field with tiny dots moving around and kicking.
Despite the appeal of on-scene viewing, despite the Argentinian team's long-standing popularity among Chinese fans, despite the gold-medal stakes, and despite everything else,
once again the arena was not full. As at most venues, the cheap upper tier seats, where tickets had been opened for sale to the public, were all occupied. A lot of the fancy seats were flat empty. (Click for larger.)
Note in the shot below the Chinese participants who I think edge out the opening-ceremony cheerleaders for the gold medal in stoicism. During the entire match, they had to look constantly into the crowd. This was presumably to be on guard if anyone tried to charge the field or -- much worse! -- take out some kind of banner. How you could sneak a banner in through the security screenings is mystery on its own. Not once did I see a one of them turn around, even when the crowd roared and the stadium seemed to pulse with excitement. They didn't move or flinch at all. Assuming that they were actual people and not mannequins, I say: Well done! Jia you!
(Note also the optical illusion in the shot: with the curved lines, it looks as if the picture is a trapezoid, with the bottom edge sloping up toward the right, rather than a rectangle. Or maybe the Games have destroyed my eyes and mind.)
- Speaking of empty venues, the photographer Zach Honig went to the Olympic Green some 12 hours after the closing ceremony, and: ghost town! You can see more of his pictures
here.
Enjoy the convention and the US Open. Signing off from Olympic coverage and all things Internet for a while.
_____
* I benefited from the strange ticket distribution system, in this way. Before the games, my wife and I felt lucky to have come up with any ticket whatsoever: a first-day, standing-area only ticket to preliminary heats out at the rowing center. Over subsequent days, we ended up seeing quite a lot of the action, in every case because people who had gotten tickets overseas or through companies ended up with spares. Thanks to our benefactors Tom B, Ken S, Andy R, Howard S, Eliot C, and Melanie C.
** For those joining us late, the headline refers to the Chinese phrase 加油,
jia you!, which means roughly "let's go!" and was the
de facto motto of the Games.
Catching up on two Olympics points
1)
Nationalistic coverage. Background: previous comments about the quite impressive Sino-centrism of what China Central TV chooses to broadcast.
Right now as I type, some of the marquee events of track and field, on the last night of competition, are underway at the Bird's Nest Stadium a few miles from here. And CCTV is showing instead: a ping-pong match between a Chinese player and a Swede, a diving contest involving two Chinese stars, interviews with a foreign coach of a Chinese team, and
replays of week-old swimming events in which Chinese athletes did well. These are at the very instant that the men's 5000m is underway. Same thing during men's 800m. Will this apply to the men's and women's 4x400 relays?? Arggh! One world! One dream!
Update: Indeed,
nothing from the final night of track & field was carried on the normal Chinese stations available on our normal Beijing TV set -- except, who knows why, the women's 1500. No problem, no one from China was in any of the races, but still I don't see even the "nationalistic" NBC doing it just this way. Similarly, we're getting the bronze-medal women's basketball game, China-v-Russia, but not the gold medal women's volleyball game, US-v-Brazil. (And now we're getting a
replay of a taekwando match rather than the volleyball championship. This makes me realize that I haven't ever seen on CCTV the live-action cutaways taken for granted in US sports coverage: "Let's go now to the Water Cube, where the final round..." ...) But whenever I feel down, I realize: we've got wall-to-wall ping pong.
2)
Translation vs Transliteration. Background: some people have written in to hint -- gently! -- that I might be exaggerating in saying that crucial maps and guides for international visitors to the Olympics were written in Chinese characters plus transliterated "English" versions of those Chinese words. After the jump, proof that I wasn't!
Continue reading "Catching up on two Olympics points" »
Blue skies
For the last week, Beijing's skies have been, mostly, glorious. I went for a long run this afternoon, and got sunburned while doing so, a risk I had not previously feared.
Out the window today
Same window two weeks ago (and much of the preceding six months)
All credit to whoever and whatever made this happen, from the Chinese scientists I
quoted a few months ago saying that it would play out more or less the way it did; to the Chinese officials implementing the factory- and traffic- shutdown plans; to the
American scientist who
accurately predicted that the wind would shift to the proper, cleansing direction two or three days into the Games; to whatever powers were fundamentally responsible for the change of wind. The Japanese concept of 神風 --
kamikaze, "divine wind" -- unavoidably comes to mind.
In the bleak days just before the opening ceremony, I wondered whether the air could be such a problem that it would, through sheer shock, force a reconsideration of China's environmental policies. Now it's possible to imagine the opposite prospect: that Beijingers, having for once seen how transformed and pleasant the city can be when not under a pall, might resist being pushed back into the blear. As Jake Barnes once put it in different circumstances, Isn't it pretty to think so.
On the ages of the female Chinese gymnasts
I haven't watched any gymnastics, live or on TV; don't follow the sport; and have no opinion on how old members of various teams look and how much that matters.
But
this new post, from the Stryde Hax blog, does an impressive technical job of finding information that has not yet been removed from caches of official Chinese sites. At face value it makes a strong circumstantial case that one of the gymnasts, the double gold-medalist He Kexin, was born in 1994 rather than 1992, making her 14.
The post also includes links to two cached screenshots of Chinese
birth records that, for now, still exist. (Many others have been very recently removed.) See them
here and
here. No harm in saving or printing a screen shot..... These are Chinese charts that show name, sex, date of birth, place of birth. The name in question is 何可欣, and one of the lines where it appears says:
618,"
何可欣","女","1994.1.1","湖北"
(# 618, He Kexin, female, Jan 1 1994, Hubei)
Worth further looking into. A very nice touch is that Stryde Hax shows us all his work, so the searches are checkable. (Thanks to John Scott and of course Slashdot.)
Update: Really, I don't care about gymnastics! And as noted before I'm delighted that China is doing so well in these games, and sorry about Liu Xiang. What interests me in this case is the technical sleuthery of the guy who found the cached pages, and the deeper issue of "transparency" in the Chinese system. Revising public records is not something Chinese people or outsiders should want to see.
Take me out to the ball game (Beijing version)
Monday night fun, watching Team USA take on Team China at the Beijing Wukesong Olympic baseball field. The Olympic basketball stadium, which stands next door, is destined as a lasting addition to Beijing's sporting patrimony. The baseball field, like the velodrome and (sigh!) the beach volleyball area in Chaoyang Park, is destined to vanish as soon as the games are done.
Beforehand, much good natured cross-national cheering in the stands. The US team was the favorite but this was not necessarily a gimme. The Chinese team had, for the first time ever, beaten the Taiwanese. (I mean, the team from "Chinese Taipei.")
Stands were almost full! Perhaps because of the unmolested presence of hordes of scalpers outside. At many venues, scalpers can't do much because you need a ticket to get within a mile of the arena. Oh, yes, also it's illegal. In the jovially packed house, there was a polite cheering alternation as one group of fans would yell the ever-classy "U - S - A! U - S - A!" and then the other would give the equally imaginative
Zhongguo! Jia You! Zhongguo! Jia You!
Then everything became a mess, as detailed in
this story. Executive summary: China's best player, the catcher Wang Wei, was knocked out of the game when American Matt LaPorta bowled him over and scored. In the next inning the backup Chinese catcher was knocked over in a similar play. When LaPorta next came to bat, the pitcher promptly drilled him right in the head -- the ball bounced so hard off LaPorta's helmet that it came nearly back to the mound.
In the end, LaPorta left the game (but is apparently OK), the US won 9 -1, and the Chinese fans got some satisfaction when the backup catcher, Yang Yang, hit a 9th inning home run. Yang showboated as he rounded the bases, leading to apparent ill feelings on the field. But most in the stands seemed to miss it, and a relatively good mood prevailed in the crowd on departure, considering.
Main athletic point I learned by seeing this in person: most noticeable overall difference between US players and Chinese was how hard and accurately they threw the ball. It was not just the difference in the pitchers: the US starter Jake Arrieta throwing above 90mph early in the game while China's pitchers were in the 70s and low 80s. I think the one that hit LaPorta was clocked at 68. The throws across the infield and from outfielders also looked different. It's always amazing at Major League games to see the ease with which the 3rd baseman pegs it across the infield or the center fielder throws toward home. From the stands, that was the easiest way to tell the teams apart.
Update: Ouch! Team China's final game was tonight against the mighty Cubans. The game was called by the mercy rule at 17-1, after the Cubans had batted only six times. On Friday Cuba meets the US in one semifinal, with South Korea vs Japan in the other,
Empty-seat mystery, cont.
In several previous posts I've mentioned the paradox of Olympic tickets being flat "sold-out," yet huge tracts of seats sitting empty. Many people have written in to solve the mystery. This, from Alf Hickey, reflects the consensus view:
Large amounts of empty seats are actually quite common at Chinese concerts or sporting events that claim to be "sold out." The reason for this is that a large amount of tickets are given to the bigwigs who organize the events so they can guanxi them out ["build relationships"] as needed. Since the Olympics had so many different organizing bodies, the central government, the local Beijing government and the Chinese Olympic committee, I'm sure there were vast amounts tickets given to various officials.
The reason that these tickets are not used is that by the rules of Chinese guanxi, you don't refuse a gift, especially not from someone connected enough to get Olympic tickets. So the tickets to the rowing finals are probably in the hands of people who have no desire to see the event, but just needed to stay in the good graces of some random Beijing bureaucrat. I suspect that the tickets have already changed hands more than once, passed along like a box of moon cakes that no one actually wants to eat.
Saying something nice about CCTV
As I've harped on before, in posts too numerous to link to, China's state-run network CCTV has been unashamedly nationalistic in choosing which Olympic events to show. OK: most people watching are Chinese.
But the play by play expert commentators seem surprisingly non-home-team in what they say. Sports broadcasting is its own stripped down dialect in any language, and the CCTV team seems about as willing to apply the standard Chinese versions of "beautiful" or "well done" or "not bad at all" terms to a nice dive, three-point shot, good serve by a rival as to one of their own. And they usually say "China" rather than "we" for the home team.
Of course, my sample could be skewed, since I haven't seen any Japan-v-China events.
In a crew race where the Chinese women's team came from behind for a dramatic upset victory, the announcer screamed himself hoarse and raised his voice two octaves as the boat crossed the finish line. But that was straight out of America's own "Do you believe in miracles?!?!?" Olympic play book.
Biggest news of the Olympics for China: Liu Xiang is out
Incredible. During the entirety of our past two years in China, Liu Xiang has been
the face of the upcoming Olympic games. He is China's greatest-ever track and field athlete, defending Olympic gold medalist in the 110m hurdles, the man whose smile and whose action-shots soaring over hurdles we have seen in maybe ten thousand TV ads, billboards, subway signs, and every other medium.
In happier times, as Olympic champion in Athens:
He
stumbled just now in a heat in which someone else false-started; then he withdrew from the event. As I mentioned
a month ago, Liu has probably been under more individual pressure than any other person involved in these Games. It would be as if Michael Phelps were the only American ever to have won a gold medal in swimming -- Liu's position among Chinese male track and field athletes -- and would be racing only once, in the 50-yard freestyle.
Liu has known for four years that a billion-plus people in his country would be watching -- and that, in something less than thirteen seconds, he would be celebrated forever as the man who helped glorify the Olympics and his country, or reviled as a big disappointment. I don't have them on hand at the moment, but there have been many recent quotes to the effect of: "If Liu Xiang fails to win a second gold, on his home soil in front of his countrymen, everything he has achieved so far will be dirt." Etc.
Probably there's something so wrong with his foot or Achilles tendon that he couldn't even try to compete in the re-run of the heat. But it would be natural and human if it were something more too: perhaps better not to try at all than to be captured forever on tape coming up short. It's hard to feel sorry for someone as rich and celebrated as Liu Xiang. But you can sympathize.
Halfway through: #4 (and last for now)
4) The imposed order and
absence of protests is creepy, to say the least.
Before the Olympics, I had thought that the most likely way the whole event could go wrong would be this: Someone, somehow, was
sure to mount a protest about Tibet, human rights, or any other issue. When that happened, the authorities, bast on past performance, were sure to over-react.
As it turns out, they've over-reacted in advance by buttoning everything up so tight that no dissent of any sort shows. Three big venues have been set aside for "authorized" protests, but these last few days it's been clear that no authorizations will be granted. (And that smart Chinese groups realize they shouldn't try.) I see that Nicholas Kristof has today
published a column on this very topic, so I needn't explain any more.
Related: papers in Australia and the UK have been publicizing what they say is a leaked memo from the Chinese propaganda ministry, with 21 do's and dont's for the Chinese media in covering the Olympics and possible protests. One version of the text, from the Sydney Morning Herald, is
here (background
here) and includes this item:
9. In regard to the three protest parks, no interviews and coverage is allowed.
I can't be sure whether this leaked memo is legitimate. Most China veterans I've asked say that it probably is, since it sounds like other, similar guidelines (including one I quoted in
this article about the Great FIrewall) and in fact is not news at all, since it reflects no more than established policy.
Halfway through: #3
3) Logistics. On the whole, they've worked pretty well. In particular, the new subway line 10 has been a godsend for getting people to the main Olympic venue. Sometimes line 10 shuts down earlier than the Olympic events do, but that's a detail. And the young volunteer guides are numerous, friendly, and eager to help.
There are three notable exceptions, which I say based not just on general reports but on repeated personal experience with all of them.
-
Food. Spectators are searched for food and drink on the way into the venues, and any consumable item is confiscated. (After previous confiscation episodes, my wife got away with smuggling a small Toblerone bar into a stadium. The guard held it up skeptically and asked what it was. "Medicine," she said in Chinese. He made her taste some, which she did quickly without letting him look too closely at it -- and got through.)
The problem is, it is very difficult to find much else inside. The relatively abundant food stands sell snack-junk only: potato chips, popcorn, sweet rolls, ice cream cones, plus cheap beer and Coke. I have not yet seen even one spectator at a venue consuming anything heartier -- say, sandwich, hotdog, you name it. Is McDonald's, the monopoly fast-food sponsor, responsible? It has a huge central outlet on the Olympic Green, but not any at the sporting venues. Some other business obstacle? I don't know. Believe me, I'm not the only one to notice.
Continue reading "Halfway through: #3" »
Halfway through: #2
2)
Medal counts, as discussed
earlier. Both the "Chinese system" and the "US system" of national medal-ranking have obvious flaws. Chinese system =
only gold medals matter. US system = all medals
count the same. Obviously some "weighting" system would be more sensible -- say, 3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze.
Of course the most sensible approach would be to dump country-ranking altogether, given what an odd assortment of sports are aggregated to determine total national "success." Skeet-shooting; hammer throw; badminton; the triple-jump; wind surfing; trampoline; team archery; beach volleyball; one more stop on the pro tennis tour. Compounding this is the imbalance in "medal richness" among sports. Even if Kobe Bryant were as dominant in basketball as Michael Phelps is in swimming, there's only one gold medal to be won in hoops, or a maximum of two for Roger Federer in tennis. (He got one, in doubles.) So individual athletic celebration would be best. But let's stay in the realm of reality.
While the bizarreness of Olympic sport-selection means that not even a sensibly weighted system would say much about a country's overall strength, merits, soft-power, future prospects, average fitness level, etc, the contrast between the "Chinese" and "American" systems does show something about their respective athletic systems.
Mainly because the United States is so much richer than China, a far larger share of its young people participate in organized sports of some kind. Ivy League admissions directors complain that they have to set aside a big chunk of their entering classes to ensure that sports rosters are filled (fencing, lacrosse, men's and women's crew, football, etc). No elite Chinese university has ever had that complaint. The national sports system in China has instead concentrated on picking a few people, very early in life, and training them intensively for specific Olympic disciplines. That is the point of stories
like these, mentioned earlier.
The US system provides a deeper pool of athletes in a narrower range of popular US sports: swimming, basketball, track and field, etc. Australia is the extreme example of this approach, with 1/10th as many people as the US and 1/40th as many as China but still presenting deep squads in swimming and rowing. (For a while on Sunday, with swimming and rowing just done, Australia was #3 in overall medals, behind the US and China.) China has a more systematic approach to developing a few potential champions in as broad a range of competitions as it can cover.
These are different approaches, suiting the wealth and to a degree the social systems of the countries. Not better or worse, but with different medal implications.
Update: I should have read Wednesday's Wall Street Journal when it arrived! Ian Johnson has a story on this same
pattern, pointing out that in theory the IOC discourages country-ranking at all. After the jump, an interesting quote from the story about different opinions on the two systems.
_________
Continue reading "Halfway through: #2" »
Halfway through the Olympics: #1 in a rapid-fire series
1) Never to be forgotten: It's good for the Chinese people and good for everyone else that the Olympics have overall gone as smoothly as they have -- air quality improving, no deal-breaking logistics problems -- and that so many Chinese athletes have done so well. This is notwithstanding a number of the less-positive points we'll get to shortly. Considering all the different ways in which China has interacted with the world in the last 50 years, considering all the challenges ordinary Chinese people have to put up with, it's beneficial and, and, by any rational standard, non-threatening to have national energies channeled into this kind of competition. It's touching to see so many ordinary Chinese crowds cheering for their new heroes.
1A) Related point: Positive Chinese nationalism - the "I love China" decals on many people's faces - should not be threatening to anybody else. History is full of examples of "rising national powers" getting the big head, feeling arrogant, and doing dangerous things. That's not the main feeling I get here. It's negative Chinese nationalism, like what appeared after the protests over the Olympic torch relay in April, that we should worry about. So a confident China is to be congratulated; a victimized-feeling China is the one to be feared.
The Olympics will have to take care of themselves for a while now...
... as actual work impends. Back home at 1:30am from the "afternoon" events. Tales of logistics nightmares, of a phenomenally clear, crisp, and beautiful Beijing day, of the true meaning of medal counts, and other such topics later on. (Stop reading here if waiting for delayed broadcast of tennis games.)
The event that made the hassle worthwhile: watching Roger Federer, seemingly in the course of the first set, pick up the instincts of the doubles game:
At the start of the match, against the dominant doubles team in the world (Mike and Bob Bryan of the US, top seeded in the Olympics), Federer looked mildly chagrined to be out there -- and ill at ease on the doubles court. Every point his Swiss team lost in the very first game, Federer lost himself -- muffed volley that seemed to take him by surprise, ground stroke into the net, etc.
He and his partner Stanislas Wawrinka -- the second-best male tennis player in Switzerland, sort of like being the second most successful presidential candidate in the Clinton household -- won the first set in a tie-break, and in the second set Federer suddenly seemed to find his instinct and place.
The Bryans are made for doubles, but Federer took over, and he and Wawrinka upset the Americans in straight sets.
Happy as I am for James Blake, who knocked Federer out of the Olympic singles with his first-ever victory over him (before being knocked out himself a few hours ago), it is undeniably sad to see the elegant Federer (like Sampras before him -- like
everyone before him) starting to look mortal on the singles court. It was nice to see his revival in doubles -- and it must be a strange kind of milestone for him, that an "upset" means he won.
More on Chauvinism. medals, and Olympic TV
This follows up the
recent item saying that people who are in a huff about America-centrism in NBC's coverage should put things in perspective. (I've heard from many people about beach volleyball-centrism in NBC's coverage too. Agnostic on that.)
1) A
Slate item, by June Shih, whose headline makes the point: "You think NBC is bad? You haven't seen CCTV." CCTV is of course China Central TV.
If you're going to rely on CCTV to bring you your Olympics, you've got to care about the Chinese teams. ...
Instead of [NBC's] soft-focus profiles, what you get
from CCTV is raw, one-sided footage. Predictably, the cameras were
trained exclusively on the Chinese gymnasts. During the early
rotations, when the Chinese unexpectedly found themselves in fifth
place, CCTV broadcast little or no footage of the teams in first,
second, third, and fourth. ....
It was a
reminder that, at the end of the day, [CCTV] is still a large cog in a giant
propaganda machine. NBC is patriotic because patriotism sells; CCTV is
patriotic because patriotism is the law.
Shih, like me, is positive about these Olympics, many of the Chinese athletes, One World One Dream, the Fuwa, and all the rest. But she's describing the same thing I see.
2) From "Traveling Lavalles," by an American family now in Shanghai, a completely true point about varying national conceptions of "success" at the games:
Medals:
Only gold count! Contrary to internal propaganda regarding the country
not being in a quest for gold, that is all that is being counted.... They want the most gold medals - nothing else matters. Locals are frustrated that Yahoo! ranks country performance based on total medals [instead of gold medals]...That would make Michael Phelps something like number 4 as a country as of right now.
It's interesting to look at the
official Beijing Olympics medal-count site, which like all other media I've seen in China ranks countries' performance according to how many gold medals they have won. Right at this moment, it shows China as #1 with 22 golds, vs 14 for the runner up, the United States. Then look at the main US Olympic Committee/NBC
medal-count site, which as of right now shows the US as #1 with 43 total medals, vs 36 for #2 China. We're all above average!
This is kind of an electoral college/popular vote issue. I don't know how it will shake out when all the events are done, but right now the gold supremacy is another cause for good national feelings in China.
UPDATE: More on the medal-count wars here.
Here's something you don't see every day
Michael Phelps, finishing second in a swimming race just now:
He's the one in lane 4 touching the wall... well,
second, after a guy from Serbia* in lane 5, who is already looking upward in his white cap. (Click for larger.)
Yes, it was only the preliminary heats of the mens' 100m butterfly; and yes, he had the second-fastest time of the large field overall; and yes, he lost by .11 of a second; and yes, it looked as if he was not trying his very, very hardest. And yes, he's failed to win some other heats in events in which he eventually won the gold medal. Still, somehow disorienting to see!
(
Saturday am update: The "guy from Serbia" was the same Milorad Cavic whom Phelps out-touched by .01 of a second in the finals for his seventh gold medal.)
Saw it this evening at the Water Cube -- last minute tickets from a friend -- and having complained about some Olympic logistics. and kept other complaints to myself, I will say that everything about transportation, crowd control flow, security screening, and all the rest of the tedious practicality of an event was handled very, very well. After the jump, two other photos illustrating things I hadn't known until my wife and I went there tonight:
_______
Continue reading "Here's something you don't see every day" »
Am I the last person to know this? (Fuwa dept)
We all know and love the Beijing Olympic mascots, the
five Fuwa, right?
And I've known they had names.
Bei-Bei for one, I think. Maybe
Pan-Da for the black and white Fuwa? I haven't been quite sure...
It turns out, thanks to my wife the linguist, that there is a very easy mnemonic way to memorize their names -- easy if you're hanging around Beijing these days. Their names, in proper order, are:
Bei-Bei
Jing-Jing
Huan-Huan
Ying-Ying
Ni-Ni
And the
first syllables of those names, put together, spell out
Beijing Huanying Ni ! -- "Beijing Welcomes You!" which is not only one of the official sentiment of the Games but also the refrain of a can't-get-it-out-of-your-head Flintstone-type song playing all over the place these days. So now I know! It's like that "Aha!" moment when you understand the master code at the end of
The Name of the Rose or
The DaVinci Code or perhaps
Citizen Kane.
If there were two more Fuwa, perhaps they could be called
Jia-Jia and
You-You.
Just a thought.
Wednesday evening Olympics, in two parts
The real BeijingBefore the Olympics began, one hypothesis for their outcome was "Potemkin Beijing." All the preparations would have worked so perfectly -- migrant workers dispatched home, construction sites completely finished or else covered with bunting and billboards, no one spitting, everyone standing in lines, the air sparkling blue and clear, the
Olympic Lanes avoiding all inconvenience for Olympic crowds -- that visitors would come away not simply with the proper degree of respect for what China has pulled off but with an unrealistic sense of a magic kingdom.
Jim Boyce, an resident of Beijing who is so enthusiastic about his home city that one of his blogs is called
Beijing Boyce (the other, about the local wine trade, is called
Grape Wall of China) says in a note that he is no longer concerned on this score:
I think we can put to rest the worries of long-term expats that visitors wouldn't see the "real Beijing". The air has been fairly bad, the traffic, while lighter, shows that the "etiquette" rules have not been taken to heart by drivers (I saw a few terrified tourists amid traffic last night as cars did U-turns through the cross walk), every fifth taxi driver has a bad attitude, etc. This is the way it should be -- Beijing doing a good job on infrastructure, the people being friendly overall, and a few warts (traffic, air) for all to see.
The point is actually an important one: giving an impression of Beijing and China that is
on-the -whole positive, with more goods than bads (while having some of both), is more valuable in the long run than the perfect Potemkin effect. Though I imagine the organizers were hoping/ planning for perfection.
It's so crowded, nobody goes there any moreBoth the
Washington Post and the
Wall Street Journal have good stories today pointing out that crowds are disappointingly thin at the main Olympic Green areas -- disappointing for the advertisers, that is, who have paid tens of millions to put up expensive displays.
Anyone in or around Beijing can diagnose the problem here, which the stories also point out:
You can't get into the place. Even to board the special Olympic subway line to the venues you need to have an admissions ticket to one of that day's events. This is entirely apart from the pre-Olympic crackdown on issuing visas for potential Olympic travelers, much discussed by hoteliers. I would have liked to see these pavilions -- if I had been able to get a ticket to swimming, tennis, or some other event at the main site. If and when I do get tickets, maybe I will enjoying strolling without the bother of fighting crowds!
Bonus point, speaking of perfection: The main, official Beijing Olympics site,
English version here, is very, very good. Easy to navigate; fast; accurate; updated practically in real time. This
master-schedule page lets you see exactly who is doing what, and has done what, in any sport. Tabs at the top let you look up any athlete from any country instantly. Nicely done.
Two very eloquent articles about the people behind China's gold-medal run
This
wonderful article by Rebecca Blumenstein in the Wall Street Journal, about
Chen Yanqing, a female Chinese weightlifter who is now a repeat Olympic gold medalist and part of the dominant Chinese weight squad I've been following on TV. The article was published a few days ago, so check it out soon in case it is one of the WSJ articles that times-out in a week and goes off the public site. A sample, from the lead:
As a child, Chen Yanqing was the fastest girl in this
farming village. She often outran the boys. One day at a sporting
match, a coach noticed her throwing skills and took out a tape measure.
She was 11 years old, and the muscles in her arms and legs were
extraordinary.
So was the proposition her parents received: Release their daughter to the state, and she could go away to sports school and improve her future, with possible financial benefits for the entire family.
"It was rock hearted of us, but we had no choice," says her father, a farmer named Chen Zufu. "If we didn't send her away to sports school, she would have ended up a farmer."
Later in the story, Blumenstein quotes the father as saying, "A rich person would never let his child do this." Worth bearing in mind whenever you hear about the "
natural" collective-mindedness of today's Chinese.
Also,
this one, by Adrian Wojnarowski on Yahoo Sports, about the burden Yao Ming is carrying for his country, even though it's not likely to lead to a medal of any sort. (Thanks to Rick Gunnell for the tip.) Both well worth reading.
Jia you!
Wednesday morning Olympics
A little less cheery this time. (By comparison with
this from yesterday.)
1. WeatherThe air today looks the way it looks most days. That is, bad. Well, we enjoyed yesterday while it was here.
2. Media Control DeptHere is a big feature story from yesterday's (state-run, official-voice) China Daily about the adorable little girl who "sang" the patriotic anthem at the opening ceremony.
Today's paper has not a word about the story that is all over the international press: that she was lip-syncing for a recording from another girl, judged not "cute enough" to represent the country at the ceremony. Fortunately the Chinese blogosphere is all over the story, largely in defense of the off-camera girl. For what it's worth, I also have not seen any followup on the
photo-shopped nature of the dramatic "footprints" firework display during the opening ceremony. (If it's been publicized within China, I've missed it.*) This is how it is. Some kinds of news "exist" and are publicly discussed. Others don't and aren't.
*
Update/correction: of course the faked-firework story was originally broken by a Chinese publication,
Beijing Times, which has received credit from nearly all foreign sources for its scoop. I knew this and regret any slight to BJT. I guess what I meant was follow-up discussion on CCTV, which I haven't been aware of. Thanks to Albert Sun for reminder.)
3. More Media Control There are a bunch of illustrations I don't have the time or heart for now. For the moment, here's today's official view of how the outside world judges the games in general.
4. On the brighter side, I've become a big fan of
low-weight-class weightlifting, which is mainly what's shown in the evenings here. These short, square pocket-Hercules types from Colombia, Korea, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and of course usually-triumphant China are inspiring to watch.
Jia you!
5. Update
Bonus Item: On the larger-scale question of what's at stake for China-- culturally, politically, and psychologically -- in the Olympics, I highly recommend
this new piece in the New York Review of Books, by my friend Orville Schell. It puts the questions of "humiliation" and "face" in a clearer and deeper perspective than I've seen elsewhere. After you've read it, take another look at today's David Brooks
column, in wonderment.
Tuesday Olympic Notes - cont
(Following items 1 - 3
here.)
4. The mysteries of the Great Firewall Immediately before the Olympics, there of course was a flurry about whether or not the Chinese government would allow foreign visitors and reporters un-firewalled access to the internet. (As I reported in the Atlantic
early this year, the original idea was to quietly
un-block all IP addresses in hotels or Olympic areas where foreigners were likely to be, so that they'd say: What's this we hear about the firewall? Works fine for me!)
The Chinese government ultimately agreed to open unblock access for the Olympic visitors. For a while, it looked as if that meant blanket unblocking through much of Beijing. My own apartment access has always been firewalled, which I've worked around quite easily with
my VPN. But for a day or two, I seemed not to need it. Now the blocking is back again -- and I'm reminded of what a nuisance that is, since on one of my computers, for odd reasons, the VPN is now no-go.
The real point, of course (as emphasized in my story), is that the very uncertainty of the Firewall's operation tremendously magnifies its effect. You don't know day by day what you can easily see, what you can't, or whether any problems you're having come from your own computer or always-shaky ISP setup.
5. The mysteries of Olympic food.After the jump, an account from a reader trying to buy food at Olympic venues, whose experience exactly mirrored my wife's and mine at the rowing site on Sunday.
That site is really distant from downtown Beijing, and is a big open-air meadow, but on the way in we went through a very, very thorough security search. After I passed through the metal detector with no beeps, a young man poked my right rear pocket several times and said
shenme?, "What's that?" I pulled it out and said, "We call this a 'wallet'. " My wife had brought some peanuts and other little snack-packs, but she had to surrender all edibles at the gate.
After we went through, we found concession stands where prices were very low -- but there was not much to buy! Ah, keeps us fit. Reader's account, and one more point, after the jump.
______
Continue reading "Tuesday Olympic Notes - cont" »
Tuesday Olympic Notes - I
1. 北京加油! 空气加油!
It's a
nice day in Beijing today! Blue visible in the sky, for the first time in
one week. It's warm but not sweltering. It actually feels, dare I say it, good outside. View at 4pm August 12:
The traffic- and factory- shutdown orders, and the weather rockets, and the cold front, and the thunderstorms, and the weather gods, and whoever else helped out, are all now doing the job. Congratulations and thanks to one and all.
2.
Good translation! Most visitors have already learned the two-syllable foundation of Basic Olympic Chinese: the cheer
jia you! It's written 加油!, and for Americans it would be pronounced more or less "jah yo!" --
yo as Sylvester Stallone would say it in
Rocky.
Continue reading "Tuesday Olympic Notes - I" »
My gift to Olympic visitors: great web-based PDF map of Beijing
English-language maps of Beijing are not so plentiful, so comprehensible, or so reliable that the existence of a good one should go unmentioned. Illustration: when my wife and I inquired at an official Olympic Visitors Center booth on Jianguo Lu about getting to the Shunyi rowing center, we were given a map that showed a subway line going straight to that site. Only imperfection: no such line exists.*
This
very detailed map, from MapMatrix, is a 4.6MB PDF file with the following virtues: It is zoom-able, so that as you look at a certain neighborhood the street names appear. It is pan-able, so you can see an overview of the whole city and understand relative locations. And it is search-able, which is a true godsend.
You want to know where Yabao Lu is? You enter that in the search or find box, and it pops up on the map. (In Adobe Acrobat, it seems that the map must be zoomed-in enough to display the text you're searching for. With Apple's Preview, the search seems to work at any zoom level.)
Weller Cartographic offers this and similar maps free, but gently
requests a $2 - $5 contribution to underwrite its efforts. That's less than 14 - 35 RMB -- and I've paid much, much more than that for much, much worse Chinese city maps. I've chipped in and hope others will too.
_____
* For locals: the map actually showed a direct subway line from Sihui station, on Line 1, right up to Shunyi. I threw it away in irritation so can no longer show a picture of it, but that is honest-to-God the info the BOCOG volunteer guides gave us. Update: I hear that the line in question is part of future Beijing Metro plans -- and that maps are printed up with future lines included, for more informed real-estate planning and so on. Fair enough! But the volunteers at the site reassured us, very cheerily and in both Chinese and English, that that was the right way to get to the Shunyi park the next day -- not ten years from now.
Fun with mistranslation, cont.
This follows the earlier "Chinglish" discussion
here and
here.
1) The previous posts explored the puzzle of why Chinese organizations so cavalierly put English words on banners, menus, placards, annual reports, etc, without the slightest effort to find out whether the translations make sense.
Many people have written in to point out that it's not just a one-way process. The main counter-illustration comes from the Westerners, often athletes, who adorn themselves with Chinese-character tattoos that are often meaningless, garbled, backwards and upside down, or unintentionally hilarious. The site
Hanzi Smatter is devoted exclusively to such cases.
Possible mitigating factor: the Chinese-character tattoos are generally used the way English is often used on Japanese T-shirts or backpacks. That is, as pure art and decoration, with no intention whatsoever of conveying meaning to native speakers. That's different from the Chinese case, where the worst errors come in translations made explicitly for foreigners to read. For example....
2) On the bus yesterday to the Olympic Rowing Site at Shunyi, far outside Beijing. Neither the driver nor the conductor on the bus spoke any English -- fair enough, this is China. The scrolling sign at the front of the bus showed the destination in Chinese characters, which was fine for my purposes, and then in this English "translation":
That's just part of a scrolling transliteration about twice as long as could fit on the screen at one time. It's a phonetic (pinyin) rendering of the original Chinese characters, linked end to end into one Germanic-style foot-long word. (The parts we're seeing are equivalent to "..lympic on-water pa...") An actual translation, meant to be read by foreigners, would simply have said "Shunyi Olympic Rowing Center." Or, "Rowing and Canoeing Center," etc.
Again, no complaint about signs within China being rendered in Chinese. That's part of the fun and satisfaction of living here. But I could tell that a number of the Brit, New Zealand, Aussie, Italian, German, and other Olympic visitors on the bus with us had no idea where it was going, and no one to ask... except us, which is really scraping the barrel. (Plus an English-speaking Chinese woman who was also aboard.)
Hmmm, maybe this explains some of my visa problems?
From the
Fool's Mountain blog, about the opening ceremony:
President George W. Bush was there with his family in suit and tie,
despite strong advice against it from John MacCaine, Nancy Pelosi, Mia
Fallows, and probably his own conscience....
_____
Explaining the joke #1: Mia F is a
big activist for declaring the Beijing Olympics the "Genocide Olympics" because of China's role in Darfur.
Explaining #2: Close study will reveal that her last name is in fact subtly different from mine....
Explaining #3: In contrast to Mia Farrow, I think that Bush
did the right thing in attending the ceremonies and some events -- but also
speaking up for values of liberty and religious tolerance.
Explaining #4: Actually my visa is just fine! Still, it made me think.....
Bonus explanation #5, pointed out by several readers: Pelosi
told him that in the heat he should stick to a nice blue sports shirt. ("...in suit and tie,
despite strong advice against it..")
Maybe old news, but news to me (CG trickery in opening ceremony?)
I haven't seen this in the U.S. press yet, but many non-American outlets are circulating a report that one of the dazzling effects in Friday night's Olympic opening ceremony was faked. This was the dramatic series of timed firework explosions that ran the entire length of Beijing's "Imperial Axis,"* from Tiananmen Square in the south up to the Olympic Green. (For instance,
this report on the 08:08:08 blog.)
Every part of the ceremony had its symbolism, and this one obviously underscored the lineage from old imperial China to the renascent China that was holding the games. The perfectly-sequenced explosions began near the area of Mao's mausoleum, in Tiananmen; directly north through the emperors' Forbidden City itself; then on steadily toward the Bird's Nest stadium where today's Chinese leaders and attendant foreign dignitaries were sitting.
But it turns out -- apparently -- that the event producers were worried enough about visibility and other practical concerns that they produced computer-graphic simulations of how the timed explosions
should look, and then spliced that info into what was shown on the big screen inside the Bird's Nest and to billions of viewers world wide. According to
one account:
Gao Xiaolong, head of the visual effects team for the ceremony, said it had
taken almost a year to create the 55-second sequence. Meticulous efforts
were made to ensure the sequence was as unnoticeable as possible: they
sought advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate
the hazy effects of Beijing's smog at night, and inserted a slight camera
shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter.
This is not a big deal, and there was enough genuine dazzle in the ceremony to satisfy anyone. But interesting-if-true.
UPDATE: Some US viewers have written to say that NBC made an indirect allusion to the artifice of this display. Eg, "You're looking at a cinematic device, it's actually almost animation." OK. But still interesting I think.
________
* An under-appreciated, must-see site in Beijing is the Urban Planning Museum, near the old Beijing railroad station not far south of Tiananmen Square. Like its better-appreciated, must-see counterpart in Shanghai, it has a vast scale model of the city showing every single building, road, alley, etc. Among the city features it reveals is the continuity between the old imperial layout and the new Olympic structures.
Your Olympic weather station
Sunday morning, Beijing looked truly horrible -- here, courtesy of Isaac Kardon, is a screenshot of the CCTV Olympic commentators -- but this time the cause actually was "weather," that unmistakable pre-thunderstorm heaviness.
Around 5pm, the lightning bolts and the drenching rains began. This was a short-term inconvenience for Olympic operations, to put it mildly. (My wife and I were 30 miles out of town at the rowing site, where the last stages of the competition was postponed and then cancelled. More later.) But it could be a long-term blessing. Now, on Monday morning, the skies still have a gray overcast, but underneath the air looks washed and clear(er) in a way it usually doesn't. This is the same pattern -- cold front, torrential rain, successive clear days -- that brought blue skies ten days ago. So it's the first cooperative step by the weather gods since the games began.
Update: 1pm city view not so washed-and-clear any more. Still, the passage of a cold front has got to do something to push out the previous pool of stagnant air.
"Chauvinism" and Olympic TV
Every four years some people moan and hand-wring about American TV's excessive focus on American athletes and the Olympic events where Americans are likely to win medals.
These people need to get out more.
Or at least they need to spend a little time watching CCTV in China. Today's early morning and evening Olympic coverage -- was gone in the interim, at a real Olympic venue about which more later -- focused heavily on events like Women's Air Pistol (Gold medal: China), Men's Air Pistol (Gold medal: China), Women's 48kg Weightlifting (Gold medal: China), Men's 56kg Weightlifting (Gold medal: China), and... you get the idea.
This applied even to coverage of the Sunday morning's swimming finals, Saturday night in the US. This is not a strong category for China, but after each race the replays and interview were with whatever Chinese swimmer had made it into the finals. When that swimmer did well, as with the silver medalist in the 400m men's freestyle, there was a happy-seeming interview. In the other cases, including when swimmers dragged in dead last, there would be a stiff-upper-lip interview with the athlete and melancholy -- I will say mawkish -- shots of the coach or parents getting teary-eyed in the stands.
This is normal! I switched just now to Korean TV, where I saw the Korean team playing soccer. Then NHK, the Japanese network, with a badminton doubles match involving a Japanese team.
The Olympic Games are for "the youth of the world," but they're organized and scored by countries. It's no surprise that countries treat them as vehicles of national pride, and assume that their people will be most interested in their own athletes. So anybody who was saving up to write an angry letter, blog post, or op-ed about NBC's chauvinistic coverage: don't bother! They're actually more above-the-fray than most. Also, their coverage is not shown anywhere except America -- I know, it's because I can't get it that I'm watching Women's Air Pistol -- so can't ruffle feathers elsewhere.
Now, I have to get back to listening to CCTV announcers yell piaoliang! -- "beautiful!" -- whenever Yao Ming sinks a three-pointed in the US-China basketball game now turning into a runaway. (And in fairness, they've said piaoliang! after some shots by LeBron and Kobe too.)
Got Olympic Lane?
A little while ago a visiting VIP remarked that traveling around Beijing had been surprisingly quick and easy, despite all the warnings he'd heard.
"By chance, were you in an official Olympic car?" my wife asked innocently.... As it happens, he was!
Jianguo Lu, looking west toward 3rd Ring Road intersection, 2pm August 9. (Lo-rez camera phone shot.) Left-hand lane: Olympic Lane. Other lanes: everyone else.
Of course it's true that traffic controls have removed a lot of normal congestion, and sometimes the Ring Roads look positively wide-and-open. But sometimes the congestion has just been displaced.
One hour into the Olympic opening ceremony.... (updated)
... which I get to watch live, on CCTV, rather than 11 hours from now in the US on NBC.
My attitude toward Opening and Closing ceremonies is generally like my attitude toward football halftime shows: Time to go get a beer. And after about 35 minutes, that is what this ceremony has degenerated into. (There is a chance it might pick up soon, because the sappy pop-star singing looks as if it may be winding up, and maybe we'll get the torch-lighting and the Parade Of Teams.)
But the first 35 minutes are definitely worth watching; indeed, I can imagine PhD theses being written about the impressive technology and often head-scratching symbolism on display there. Some themes are obvious: the Mass of Happy Minority Peoples (Tibetans, Uighurs, et al) carrying in the Chinese flag. The Fireworks in Sequence up the old N-S imperial axis of Beijing, from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City to the Bird's Nest Stadium. Some seem ill-advised, like the 'Triumph of the Will' Memorial Trooping of Goose-Stepping Soldiers to carry the national flag. And much much more.
Definitely tune in, until you see the segment about the history of tea and the parade of Peking Opera stars. Then safely tune out until about an hour-ten after the start, when the Parade of Teams begins -- as it is doing at just this instant, as I sign off.
Update:
Four hours into the opening ceremony, it is
way too long. But it's worth tuning in, starting about time 3:45 from the beginning, to see the wrapup and torch lighting. Parade of Countries takes at least two hours on its own. (Sure are a lot of countries! Cook Islands??? Sure are a lot of non-athletic looking people marching in with the teams -- coaches and big-shots, I assume, plus for the Canadian team, a foreign celebrity
on Chinese TV known as "Da Shan.") GW and Laura Bush appear on screen only once, for about ten seconds, waving at the US team. Putin and Sarkozy shown much more often. Coincidence?
Punishment? One of many Mysteries Of The Games.
Bonus update: I now have it on good authority that GW Bush appeared on TV a couple of times I didn't see, mainly looking bored. Sorry to have missed it.
Here's one way to avoid incidents in Tiananmen Square
Don't let anybody onto the place! In normal times, views like the ones below would contain the faces, backs, arms, legs, hats, umbrellas, balloons, etc of roughly one zillion people. Today, the day of the opening ceremonies, no one except officials let any closer than the far side of the wide road.
A cop told us that the square would be open again tomorrow. Also, in fairness, anyone who has seen Washington DC get locked down for events involving the Imperial Presidency will find the scene familiar.
Meanwhile, sky looks better than it did this morning, and much better than it did 24 hours ago. Let the Games begin.
The big day is here!
And I simply do not have the heart to show what it looks like today -- August 8, the magical 08/08/08 chosen for its positive auspices for the Olympics. I'll just say, it looks very much like
this view from six weeks ago. This is a disaster.
About six months ago, I interviewed the (impressive) Chinese scientists responsible for monitoring Beijing's air quality and later reported their views
in the Atlantic:
The last PowerPoint slide in a presentation that one of the scientists
showed me read, "We are confident that the air quality goals for
Olympics 2008 will be met in Beijing." When I asked, "Really?" all eyes
turned toward the senior CAS official in the room, a British-trained
scientist. "I personally am sure the goals will be met," he said. Even
if the winds are wrong? "Ninety-nine percent."
So either we're in the one-percent case, or they were fooling themselves. Or required to say what they did. It doesn't matter.
I suppose there's also a one-percent possibility that the international embarrassment will be a Chernobyl-type stimulus toward truly radical environmental action in China and around the world. But maybe that's fooling myself too.
Here we go.
About those U.S. cyclists with gas masks
I don't mean to judge them as people. They did the right thing in apologizing. But in wearing protective masks inside the Beijing airport they were acting like jerks.
Photo by AFP
I grant: these are athletes at the peak of their conditioning. But they can't endure the air
inside a building? While they're
walking, rather than running or breathing hard? And for the few minutes it would take to get past all the photographers and into the privacy of their buses or cars?
Yeah, no kidding, the air in Beijing is worth complaining about. I've done so plenty, starting with
an article I wrote more than two years ago, shortly after I arrived:
Many aspects of the new, improved China will be up for the world's
inspection during the Olympic Games. But there is one little catch: the
air. Unless something radical changes, I do not understand how athletic
events can take place in air as dirty as Beijing's....
Everyone assumes
that when the time comes for the Games, the authorities will do
whatever they have to--closing factories, banning private traffic--to
bring pollution down to an endurable level.... Still. If the marathon runners, or
even the archers, can finish their events without clutching their
chests and keeling over, the Chinese authorities will have accomplished
something special.
But complaints should come in the context of realizing that Chinese officials, companies, and citizens actually have done quite a lot to
try to cope with the problem (details
here) -- and that it's sad in many ways, rather than contemptible, that the first view the world's TV audience will have of spiffed-up Beijing will be of the opaque gray-brown skies. Unless, of course, there's a big cleansing wind out of Mongolia
right now.
It's embarrassing enough for the Chinese hosts that the air looks so bad. It's tasteless, prissy, and showboating for visitors to rub it in this way. (Again, I'm talking about wearing the masks inside, in front of cameras, while standing around -- not sensible precautions for training.)
Why should I rub it in, now that the cyclists have done themselves and their country credit by apologizing? Just to set down an early marker that there is such a thing as dignified and considerate behavior -- even for athletes on the cusp of the competition of their lives, and even when coming to a country where there are ample legitimate grounds for complaint.
End of an era: last pre-Olympic snapshot (updated)
Opening ceremonies tomorrow, August 8. This is the view as of 10am, August 7, from our
same old window in the Guomao area of Beijing. I suspect that a lot of this actually is "mist," very high humidity, etc. That is, it can't be that much more polluted than it was 36 hours ago, when things looked much better, as shown
here. Mainly completing the
chronicle, for the record.
Here is the way the same area looked on a nice day about six months ago. I understand that if I'd been here this previous weekend, I could have seen even clearer views.
Three more views of pretty blue-sky Beijing days in the same general neighborhood are: from early this year
here and from late last fall
here and
here. Ongoing air coverage available on the Asia Society's interactive site,
here. Now I will give the window-camera a rest.
UPDATE: For those interested in the actual science of the Beijing air-quality situation, I also highly recommend the ongoing charts and explanations on Dr. Kenneth Rahn's
site, from the University of Rhode Island.
This
one-page Power Point slide, updated daily, shows the trend in pollution readings in the weeks leading up to the Olympics. (
Warning: it is legible only if viewed in Internet Explorer, not FIrefox or Safari. Don't even bother without IE.)
This
longer presentation explains the readings, including why Beijing's situation is so tough and how much difference the emergency shutdown order for cars and factories actually made. Its trend lines also clarify this important point: while hazy skies don't
necessarily mean polluted air, as Chinese officials ceaselessly point out (it could be fog, it could be mist), in harsh reality the days when you can't see very well are also the days with the most dangerous air. (Thanks to Robert Kawaratani.)
Good to know (Olympic air dept).
This is certainly a relief! Jacques Rogge et al set our minds at ease.
Full text of the story (from the state-controlled English-language official outlet) is
here. It begins:
Beijing's air does not pose any health risk for athletes, officials and other visitors, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Tuesday.
Dispelling all fears over overcast and hazy skies in the city, the IOC said data on Beijing's air quality is being assessed on an hourly basis.
Haze does not mean poor quality air, a senior Beijing environmental official said a week ago.
FWIW, view at noon today in downtown Beijing. No scientific or medical judgment implied here -- it could just be a kind of fog. Simply chronicling how it looks with two days to go. (
PS: for anyone who doesn't know about it already,
this phenomenal site, produced by the Asia Society, gives a searchable day-by-day view of what Beijing's skies have looked like over the last year. Informative and excellently done.)
Much nicer day today
In contrast to yesterday's
heart-sinking blear, today, August 5, three days before the opening ceremonies in Beijing, ended up very nicely!
Jianwai Soho towers, from under the Guomao bridge, Beijing central business district, 6:30pm, August 5 2008:
As always, hoping this is finally a trend...
I don't think "funny" translations are all that funny...
... my theory being, I am allowed to make fun of someone's translation of Chinese into English only when I'm ready to have a Chinese person make fun of my translation of English into Chinese. And I will never be ready to do that.
On the other hand: If I
were going to translate something into Chinese, for a wide audience of Chinese people to read, I might
possibly consider having a native Chinese speaker take a look at it before I gave the final OK.
Which is why I continue to marvel at specimens like this: the always-welcome "moist towelette" from yesterday's Air China flight from Chengdu to Beijing (click for larger view if the point is not clear):
This was not the strangest aspect of the flight, however. As part of a general tightening up of security in China, the screening line in the Chengdu airport required me to do two things I haven't done on any of my 40 or 50 previous domestic flights in the country: remove my belt, and take off my shoes.
It was boiling hot in Chengdu, and I was wearing shorts and moccasin-type shoes with no socks. So when I took the shoes off, I was just there in bare feet. Nonetheless, like the other passengers who had socks on when they removed their shoes, I had to hold my feet up while a young security officer waved a metal-detecting rod around the top, bottom, and sides of them. "Those are my
feet," I helpfully pointed out to her. "For the Olympics!" ("为奥运会!") she said, with what looked like a smile.
Out at the Olympic site
A trip today for a preliminary press event. Good news and bad news.
Good news: transportation! Only 20 minutes via the new subway Line 10 from Guomao station, in the central business district, to Beitucheng station, just south of the main Olympic areas. Line 10 train was populated but not overcrowded. Security check on way into the subway reasonable-seeming rather than too intrusive. (Handbags and briefcases go through a screening machine; people themselves don't have to.)
In theory there is a way to connect at Beitucheng from Line 10 to the new Olympic Line 8. But the cops seemed to be steering anyone without a formal Olympic credential (which I don't have) away from Line 8 and out onto the street. No problem: A few minutes' walk away was a depot for various special Olympic bus lines that circle the venues. The bus-route maps I saw were written only in Chinese -- or sometimes transliterated into Roman characters in a way most visitors wouldn't recognize. (For instance,
Guojia Tiyuchang, the pinyin version of 国家体育场, rather than the more useful-to-outsiders terms "National Stadium" or "Bird's Nest.") But there were many cheery young English-speaking volunteers willing to help puzzled foreigners.
Bad news: Well, it doesn't appear to have just been "morning mist" today, as I speculated
earlier. Below and after the jump, a few pictures from the Olympic site early this afternoon. At this point, 100 hours before the opening ceremony and seven years after the decision to hold the Olympics in Beijing, there is really not anything to "do" about the city's air anymore -- except hope that whatever cleansing wind blew through over the weekend comes again.
National Stadium -- "Bird's Nest" -- barely visible on the left, National Aquatic Center -- "Water Cube" -- on the right, 1pm on August 4. (Click for larger version.)
Continue reading "Out at the Olympic site" »
Four days to go
Just back to Beijing after seven days in parts of China where the concerns are far more elemental than hosting a successful and "harmonious" Olympic event. (Eg, villages being inundated by new dams -- more another time.) Headed out right away for a kickoff PR event.
In the meantime, hoping that this morning's prospect out the window is in fact just morning fog, as is sometimes the case. Heard from friends in Beijing that over this past weekend, the emergency air-clearing efforts had finally paid off (or a big rain storm and wind played their part) and the skies were gloriously blear-free and blue. Indeed on arrival late last night, we could see the moon! Hope more of the same is ahead -- another report this afternoon..
8 am, August 4, 2008, downtown Beijing:
Eleven days to go (updated)
View southward from Guomao area, 8am, July 28, 2008. Eight days into large-scale factory and traffic shutdown. Eleven days from start of the Olympics
Who knows how much of this is morning mist and so on. Once again this is just for the record as
pre-Olympic chronicle.
The next time we'll have a chance to check will be one week from now, when there will be four days to go. In the hinterland in the meantime.
Update: Lead story on
China Daily website, state-controlled voice to the outside world, reassuringly reports that the government has noticed that things aren't working out so well with its air cleanup plan and is preparing more drastic measures:
..the recent hot and sultry weather, with occasional breeze, and the
still high emission level, have raised fresh concerns over the weather
during the Games. ["Weather" is the normal euphemism for air pollution.]
The city has not experienced a "blue day", that is, healthy air
quality in the past four days. The air pollution index (API) has stayed
above 100, the national standard for good air quality. Yesterday's API
in the city was between 103 and 124. [A reading of 100 would be unbearably polluted in most European or North American cities. Over the last year a striking number of readings have come in right at 99.]
Among the measures being considered, apparently, is not an even/odd license plate system but an "exact digit only" system. On a date ending in 9, like July 29, only licenses ending in 9 could drive, and so on. In theory this could cut traffic by 90%.
Considering the past, implacable "everything will be fine" / "pollution? what pollution?" official stance, this is welcome news. So too are airport conditions, as we have just experienced them. On a weekday mid-morning at Beijing Airport's Terminal Three, no big crowds outside the entry doors (unlike a week ago), smooth and efficient security checks, generally an easy flow.
We'll take all these as promising omens for the Olympics -- which, as
mentioned earlier, is what everyone should want.
Why we want the Olympics to succeed
After the jump, a message from a reader who makes very vividly a point that I've been trying to convey for quite a while. Namely, that it is in
no one's interest for the Beijing Olympics to be jinxed, troubled, or in any other way "unsuccessful."
I know that some people outside China have a kind of schadenfreude wish that the pollution, or the mishandling of protests, or the logistics, or something else will backfire on the organizers of the Olympics and stand as a protest for whatever is objectionable in government policy. This is related to the previous idea that it would make sense to boycott the opening ceremonies or the Games themselves.
Unt-uh. As my correspondent points out, the only thing that will happen if these Olympics somehow go bad is a concerted focusing of blame, inside China, on the foreigners who want to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" and hold China down. Outsiders who think that a pollution emergency or a spiraling protest would focus domestic blame on the Chinese government are dreaming. No kidding, everyone should want these games to work well, including with
the air.
Letter is in response to
this post, and comes after the jump.
Continue reading "Why we want the Olympics to succeed" »
Sunday morning Beijing
8 am, July 27, 2008, looking south, twelve days until the opening ceremonies, one week into the big shutdown of factories in nearby provinces and traffic in Beijing.
I'm not sure how much of this is "mist," how much is simple moisture, how much is whatever else it might be, or how the scene might look this afternoon. This is just for the
ongoing record, of what athletes like those I saw arriving at the airport yesterday might see when opening the curtains to look out the window today.
Three hours later: If anything, it looks worse at 11am. I really would love to hear the conversations, which must be going on, between the International Olympic Committee and the host organizers: "Now, you've been telling us for seven years that the air was going to be fine, and... these next ten days really are going to do the trick? Really, for sure? Just thinking out loud now, what if they don't? What's our Plan B?"
Thirteen days to go
Airport in Beijing: great! Arrive on international flight at Terminal Two (not the spectacular and imposing new Terminal Three) mid Saturday afternoon. No wait at passport station -- very short lines, no one seeming to have unusual delays or trouble with immigration officers, I spend maybe two or three minutes in line total. Baggage started appearing maybe five minutes after that. None of the baggage-sniffing dogs or swarms of inspectors I encountered a
few weeks ago.
Air in Beijing: Not so great. Fortunately there are still thirteen days to get it fixed up...
The report with two weeks to go
I'll know for myself when I get off the airplane I'm about to get on, but Friday's reports from Beijing, where the Olympic Games begin two weeks from now, are ... challenging. The air is apparently not getting better, despite the big factory-and-traffic shutdown that started five days ago, and may even be getting worse. For panorama of what "worse" might mean, pictures over the last few months
here.
Transportation is oddly becoming more snarled, rather than less, in the wake of the even-odd license plate rules designed to get cars off the road. The
spiffy new subway lines that have just opened are already overloaded, in part because, as predicted
here three weeks ago, they don't have as many subway cars as planned so trains can't run as often. Also, on most big roads a whole lane has been removed from normal use as an "Olympic Lane," so overall congestion has more or less reached previous levels. Taxis are harder to find. A representative note from one of many I received this morning:
Subway line 10 [a new one] is much nicer than the others. But also super-crowded. Every 5 min departures are too infrequent to prevent huge lines. I suspect that the air con is a big draw.
My airport expway/ring road daily commutes are slower than usual - closing the left [for Olympic Lane use] lane totally negates the "savings" of taking cars off road. Day 1 (Monday 8/21) commute, north Chaoyang to Wangfujing, 9+ minutes of cab "wait time" in stalled traffic vs. the usual 2 min! Big diff. Today (Friday) slightly better, but it's inconsistent.
My office looks east on Chang'An Jie [the main, monumental downtown road, comparable to DC's Pennsylvania Avenue] and it's very gray and soupy
And at our own apartment complex, a notice today of the following "Welcome to the Olympics" preparations. Number two certainly gets my attention.
1) If you have any visitor staying with you at anytime, please ensure your visitor must register at the front desk upon arrival.
2) PSB [Public Security Bureau] personnel may conduct surprised [sic] inspection of our property without notification to examine your passport documents including checking your luggage and personal belongings, etc.
3) Please also take note that all foreigners working or living in Beijing are required by the Division of Entry/Exit Admin of BJ Municipal Public Security Bureau to possess a valid passport, ID, and visa and are properly registered with the Hotels or Residences as their place of residence.
So if I am reading #2 correctly, the police can come into our apartment at any time and look around. When I first came to China in the mid-1980s, this kind of thing was taken for granted. It's not at all the way contemporary China has seemed or felt -- until the magic of the Olympics arrived. Let the games begin.
I'm not there, so I can't say so first hand, but...
... what I hear from My Sources in Beijing is:
- The air is much worse today, July 24 China time, with fifteen days to go until the opening ceremonies, than it has been in the last two weeks or so, even after the Big Shutdown of factories and traffic that began five days ago;
- Traffic is creeping up again toward pre-shutdown levels, as people apparently figure out ways to deal with the odd/even license plate rules (extra license plates, or whatever); and
- New security checks and bag inspections in the subway stations are leading to big snarls and mob scenes as people try to get down toward the trains, despite the
crucial new subway lines that have just opened.
Will see for myself again in two days. I would assume that by the
last weekend in July the air will have to be looking pretty good, as the athletes and officials and correspondents flock into town for an event that starts in early August. Let's hope.
The Olympic countdown continues
I am out of China for a few days. Here are two real-time updates from people on the scene about different aspects of the "we are ready!" front. The first is about traffic in Beijing; the second, the visa crackdown and larger tensions created by the government's attempt to impose "zero defects" control on the Olympics.
Traffic: Context here is that traffic now is ruled by "odd-even" license plate rules designed to keep half the cars off the road each day.But on the main roads, one lane is now set aside as an "Olympic lane," for official cars only, so the declogging effect for other traffic is not as great as it might seem.
Yesterday
was the first "workday" of the odd/even license plate regimen and the result
was "not great". We live east of Guo Mao, outside the 5th Ring
Road and usually hit the first morning commute slow-down near
Gaobeidian, just inside the 5th. There is no "Olympic Lane" on
this stretch of expressway, so one might assume fewer than half the normal
number of cars (odd/even, minus some government vehicles) would result in
speedy passage to the 3rd Ring. No such luck. It pretty
much looked like a normal day between the 5th and 4th rings as traffic moved slightly faster than a crawl at 30 km/h. By the
time we reached the 4th ring and the introduction of the "Olympic
Lane", it was mostly "slow-and-go" with some confused drivers blocking the
Olympic Lane to merge right for off ramps.
Continue reading "The Olympic countdown continues" »
Another traveler reports on the new, Olympic-ready Beijing airport
From a foreign resident of Beijing, on his latest experience coming in through the sparkling, new, and very very large PEK airport. Confirms
this recent report about swift processing and absence of bottlenecks, which bodes well for Olympic-crowd "readiness." Also an interesting reaction to the enormous scale of the airport's new Terminal Three.
I flew in from Singapore on Wednesday and was amazed that; a) our plane was parked at a gate within 3 minutes of touching down, in contrast to several recent experiences of 30+ minutes of taxiing; b) bags were on the carousel within 5 minutes of my arrival there - and I have a diplomatic passport so got through passport control very quickly; c) only even slightly long line was at customs, where every checked and hand carried bag was being x-rayed. Still, a very smooth arrival.
But, what was equally striking was the emptiness of this massively monumental airport. Gave it a real Stalinist feeling - built to overwhelm the viewer but far more than is needed, and without any consideration of costs and returns, and with no commercial buzz. Admittedly my perceptions were affected by having flown in from the new terminal at Changi [Singapore's airport], which was bustling with people and energy, great shops and food outlets everywhere, free internet stations and free movies. The contrast between these two large new super modern airport terminals couldn't have been starker.
UPDATE: Good news and, well, interesting news from my own trip to the airport on the first day of the new security regime, July 20. Good news -- the traffic! Open road all the way, and I counted only a handful of cars that were brazenly displaying odd-numbered licenses plates on this inaugural even-numbered day. (Plus a couple that even more brazenly had taken off their license plates.)
Interesting news: the airport itself.
Continue reading "Another traveler reports on the new, Olympic-ready Beijing airport" »
We ARE ready!
Beijing's subway line 10 opened today at 5:05pm. My wife and I were passing by a station a few minutes later and took our first ride home, avoiding the dreaded Third Ring Road, not long after that. This is many, many weeks past the original target date (word of earlier delay
here), but many hours earlier than tomorrow's promised debut.
Along with line 10 -- light blue on the map below, and connecting many of the places I routinely go through snarled traffic -- line 8 to the Olympic sites (green) and the Airport Express (red diagonal line pointing to the northeast) were supposed to open all at the same time. I trust that riders on those lines had the same happy surprise we did.
Some of our fellow riders on this inaugural ride looked blase. Not us! Another positive sign.
Everything changes tomorrow
This is the view at 10am, July 19, 2008, with 20 days to go until the Olympic opening ceremonies. Not that bad! And everything changes tomorrow.
Tomorrow the even-odd license plate rules go into effect to cut car traffic in Beijing. Three long-awaited subway lines (are supposed to) open. Factories are shut down in the neighboring provinces. Construction projects in the city (are supposed to) stop. And new extra-tight security measures go into effect at the airport, on the subways, in public places, just about everywhere. I'm going to the airport tomorrow afternoon and will leave
plenty of time.
On whether the environmental rules will bring clear skies for the games themselves, I
remain optimistic. By the time I get back in a week, I really do expect a different vista.
That is different from saying that the Olympics will make a longer-term difference in Beijing's horrendous air-quality situation. On the evidence so far you'd have to say they won't, since the steps starting tomorrow are so obviously on a last-minute emergency basis.
Other last-minute notes:
- A few days ago, lunch with a group of professional-class Chinese friends at a software company. I ask what they think about the Olympics.Several of them mention, in a "of course this is common knowledge" fashion, that the government security teams have already been finding and removing bombs that terrorist teams were sneaking into the airport, the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, and other important venues.
Continue reading "Everything changes tomorrow" »
Final words -- for now! -- on Olympic tourism in China
This is an encore-finale to
previous reports about the people who are traveling in China this summer, namely ordinary Chinese tourists, and those who aren't -- namely, visitors from overseas who are being deterred by visa rules, high prices, or other discouragements.
1) From a friend with close connections at BOCOG, the Olympic organizing committee: Initial estimates for total foreign visitors at the Olympics were roughly 500,000. Now the working plans estimate 140,000. My friend comments: "Has any economist run the numbers on what this is costing the government? Frankly I doubt if the government even cares as long as they can hold control of what happens and what is seen."
2) On a brighter note, from Jonathan Tang, an American living in Beijing, about his latest trip through the new Beijing airport (in contrast to
my report two weeks ago).
When I got in from HK last week at just past midnight, after a
delay of three hours, I was dismayed to find all of two officers at border
control, ready to examine the passports of a 767 full of cranky passengers.
However, not two seconds after I got in line, the floodgates opened and all the
counters were manned - I got through in less than a minute.
Who knows - maybe 'we' *are* ready?
3) From Edward Russell of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, a report on the Olympic travel business (not available on the web) emphasizing the importance of the domestic-tourist market:
Continue reading "Final words -- for now! -- on Olympic tourism in China" »
Something familiar, something new
For several days skies have looked better and better in Beijing, and last night I rashly declared to friends that I thought the corner had been turned.
Well, maybe there are a few corners ahead. Here's the view just now,11am, July 16, 2008. Way better than it's been in the
very recent past, but still some room for improvement with only 23 days to go:
Here's the new angle: An
article today in the China Daily, the English-language vehicle for official views, took a much more tentative tone about Olympic "weather" than I'd seen before.
Continue reading "Something familiar, something new" »
Olympic livery for Beijing
In the week we were out of town, street signs acquired a new "Beijing 2008" logo
and red and white banners went up on light posts all over town.
In the space of hours, an instant-reforestation project installed thousands of little bushes and dozens of tree in front of an almost-finished luxury complex. Since we moved to this neighborhood last fall, all view of the project was blocked by an 8-foot-high blue metal wall, which squeezed hordes on a packed sidewalk into a path three feet wide. Now we see what was going on behind the walls, including a huge new Giorgio Armani store. Armani store on the left, with the big black circle. Former tiny sidewalk was part of the zone to the right.
Around Beijing, some tall blue walls are being torn down, to unveil projects that are ready for the Olympics, and others are being erected quickly, to shield construction sites that won't be done when the visitors arrive.
With 26 days to go (updated)
We heard from friends that skies were blue and clear in Beijing yesterday. Here is the view at 10am on July13, 26 days before the opening ceremonies and one week before the emergency shutdown of factories and traffic is supposed to begin.
Perhaps not blue, but better than it was
eleven days ago and through most of the
preceding three months. We'll hope this is a trend.
Update: with 25 days to go, this appears not to have been a trend, at least not a positive one. But only six days now until the sweeping shutdowns. I believe the neighboring factories will close, as advertised. Somewhat more cautious in my assumptions about the cars, since I've met so many people who have mentioned that they've obtained both even- and odd-numbered licenses plates, to cope with the even/odd restrictions on driving each day.
We are ready! Finale
Wrap-up of this exciting week-long series (previously
1,
2,
3,
4,
4A):
Good news: We hear from friends that the skies are blue and beautiful in Beijing today. We're heading back soon and will embrace the idea that, with
27 days to go, the good times have begun.
UPDATE: Just arrived, and it
is beautiful. Lights of whole city spread out in a LA-basin style panorama as the plane came in for night landing at the Capital Airport's new Terminal 3. Along the airport expressway into town and on the Third Ring Road, flashing signs tell drivers that from July 20 to September 20, new traffic restrictions will keep heavy vehicles off the road and apply even/odd-day rules for car license plates. Maybe things really are about to change. Also, in contrast to our
previous arrival at Capital Airport, bags appeared five minutes after we got off the plane, and we were in a taxi fifteen minutes after touchdown.
Challenging news: When it goes on line (there's usually a several-day delay), I will post a link to today's edition of
Dialogue on CCTV-9, the English-language channel of the state TV network. I think this may make clearer to viewers outside China the depth of the, well, communication challenge that lies ahead.
Continue reading "We are ready! Finale " »
We are ready #4A! Special bonus post: why travel to China is down
As mentioned earlier and as reported widely in the press, foreign tourism seems quite obviously down on the eve of the Olympics. When I've asked restaurant owners and hoteliers what's happening, they've usually blamed visa restrictions.
A U.S.-based reader who has just returned from a trip through China adds these extra explanations, which ring true to me and fill out the picture:
We talked about tourism with several guides [who were] pretty open when it came to government criticism and China's myriad problems.
Anyway, they said that the tour traffic is just way down, and business travel is down, too. Most felt like visa restrictions played somewhat of a role. But they felt like there were two other factors that played at least as big of a role:
Continue reading "We are ready #4A! Special bonus post: why travel to China is down" »
We are ready #4! Potpourri of business news
1) Good news: TV. According to Geoffrey Fowler in the WSJ, Chinese media authorities have decided to let international broadcasters transmit live from Beijing during the games. This might sound like a "Duh, no kidding!" obvious and trivial decision, but it forestalls what could have been a big problem.
Yes, yes, the Chinese government had given its OK to real-time broadcasts from the sporting arenas themselves. The whole world will learn at the same time whether Liu Xiang, the defending Olympic champion in the 110m hurdles and all-round spokesman (along with Yao Ming and Jackie Chan) for every product on every billboard in China, can endure the unbelievable pressure on him and win another gold.
But at any big event, TV networks love to swing to supplemental coverage. "Now let's go across town to the Houhai district, where Matt Lauer is standing by live to tell us how ordinary Chinese people react to their basketball team's surprising victory over the United States." Until now, it wasn't clear that the authorities would let anyone do this. They were hinting that all TV broadcasts except from the sporting sites would have to go through a delayed-transmission screening system that would let government censors turn off the signal if anything unseemly showed up on the screen.
People at NBC (official US broadcaster) and elsewhere were obviously not delighted about this, and it was shaping up as a huge running sore that would make the games a nonstop reminder of the most closed aspects of Chinese government policy. Good for the Chinese authorities in doing the right thing, although belatedly, and good for whatever outside officials helped them to this conclusion.
2) Less good news: travel and entertainment business. In these last few days in Shanghai, I've revisited lots of places (restaurants, bars, shops) that are popular with visitors and talked with lots of people I know who operate this kind of establishment.
Continue reading "We are ready #4! Potpourri of business news" »
We are ready #3! A short anecdote and a long email
Previously in this exciting series: here and here.
Context for the entire series: first two paragraphs here. (Executive summary: "No one in China or anywhere else will be better off if the Chinese public ends up feeling under-appreciated or aggrieved about the Beijing Games. So it's better all around if they're a success.")
Short anecdote: well, it's right below.
I've been having big internet problems while on the road away from Beijing. Entire outage for a day-plus. On and off connections after that. The problems, I now know, were purely technical. Bad connections in one part of town, then a router that was failing. But before knowing that, I asked the very nice manager at a modest but nice hotel what was going on. She said:
"With the Olympics coming up, the police are being very careful about the internet. We are sorry for the inconvenience to our visitors that they have closed it down during the summer months."
She was apologetic and slightly embarrassed to have to give the (false, but true to her) explanation. The interesting point was, she thought it was entirely natural that this would be the cause.
Long email: After the jump, one of several interesting messages I have recently received from people involved in or closely observing the Olympic preparations. This person, whose name and background I know, I will identify only as ethnic Chinese man who is now a naturalized citizen of a Western country and who has great professional familiarity with defense and military-technology issues.
The gist of his point: the reason the Chinese government is being so unbelievably ham-handed in its security measures and irritating the very foreigners it has invited to view its Games is that it is so ill-informed and naive about the real views of the outside world. Also it has such limited intelligence about the terrorist threats it actually might face that it is over-reacting and trying to shut everything down.
My correspondent ends with a plea for outside assistance to save the Chinese government from itself. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen, but his detailed description of the predicament is worth considering.
____________
Continue reading "We are ready #3! A short anecdote and a long email" »
We are ready #2! Advertisers and visas
Previously in this exciting week-long series, here.
If you go to this page of the official Beijing 2008 Olympic site, you'll see a list of the corporations from around the world that have invested most in the success of these games. The 12 companies on the left-hand side are "Worldwide Olympic Partners," with long-term sponsorship of the Olympics. The 11 on the right, "Beijing 2008 Partners," have invested specifically in the Beijing games. In all there are 22 companies represented here (one, Johnson & Johnson, is in both categories), 13 of them based outside China.
One of the non-Chinese companies on this list -- I can't be more specific than that, to avoid getting people I've spoken with into trouble -- recently planned to produce a special, lavish, glorification-of-taut-young-sweaty-bodies and glorification-of-rising-China series of films about the games. They had invested a lot of time and money in preparation for the shoot. Their film crew was set to arrive in China recently to show the athletes nearing their performance peak, the venues being tested and buffed, the whole proud host nation preparing to host their contests and welcome the world.
And they couldn't get visas to enter China, "during the tense Olympic period." Plans called off. Or so I am told by a person directly involved in their now-cancelled visit. I will retract this report if and when I see such films from the company (they were intended to be something no one watching the games could miss).
If you didn't know better, you might have thought in 2003 and 2004 that U.S. government strategy was being set by people trying to make enemies rather than friends in the Arab-Islamic world. And if you didn't know better, you might think that the Chinese government's approach to the Olympics is being set by people trying to make the country look bad.
We are ready! A special week-long series
I am not in Beijing this week, so I don't have much to say about the air. But on the general topic of being ready for the Olympic games, some other interesting things are turning up.
For the record, two important and familiar points of context. First, no one in China or anywhere else will be better off if the Chinese public ends up feeling under-appreciated or aggrieved about the Beijing Games. So it's better all around if they're a success. And second, notwithstanding the previous point, for the last few months Chinese government has been doing just everything it can to ensure that the games don't win China any good will. (Denying visas to visitors, limiting broadcast rights, tightening the vise on foreign and domestic journalists, etc.)
Today's installment: public transport.
I mentioned recently that two subway lines that are crucial to Olympic transport plans -- the airport express, to bring visitors in from PEK airport, and the special line to the Olympic venues themselves -- have had their opening delayed, along with another, Line 10, that is crucial to my own transport happiness. They're all now scheduled to open later this month, immediately before the games.
After the jump, an account from a reader who talked recently in Beijing with two foreign engineers directly involved in getting the subways going. I can't vouch for this personally, but I have heard other accounts that parallel several of these points. (The source also provided other details about the engineers' bona fides.) As an expectant rider of Line 10, I really hope this report turns out to be too pessimistic:
Continue reading "We are ready! A special week-long series" »
Small data points on the "are we ready?" Olympic front (Updated)
No one will know whether Beijing is fully "ready" for the Olympics until the games begin in 36 days. As previously discussed, you can reel off your list of possible concerns -- environment, political climate, etc. And your comparable lists of reasons to think it will all work out.
Two minor travel-related readings from the last 24 hours, involving human flow for the expected crowds:
1) New regulations concerning security and customs-scrutiny at Beijing's Capital Airport, with its spectacular new Terminal Three, went into effect on July 1. Soon thereafter, my wife and I arrived on an international flight. Before, getting through the passport line had averaged maybe one minute per person being admitted, and the bags typically showed up maybe 15 minutes or so after you were out of the passport line.
This time, the passport line was notably slower -- while I watched, it was two or three minutes per person, but in fairness I was in line behind a large group of Turks from a Turkish Airlines flight, so maybe that was somehow a factor. (How could this matter? The government is very concerned about disruptive threats from Uighur activists in the Xinjiang region; ethnically and linguistically, Uighurs are related to Turks; QED.)
The real difference was the bags. After an longer than normal trip through the passport line, we still waited more than an hour before the first bags appeared -- and this on a weekday afternoon when only one other flight (the Turkish one) seemed to be in the works. Flight staffer said: bags were being looked at one by one. On our way out of the customs hall, many more customs inspectors than before, plus sniffing-dogs, and a generally more attentive air. It will be interesting to see how this scales for the Olympics.
Update: Michael Standaert, novelist and author of the China Notebook report on China, writes to report this differing experience at Terminal Three not long after we passed through:
We came through T3 from Hong Kong on Wednesday evening ... smoothest process I've been through ever in Beijing. Only about 4 people deep at the immigration line and our bags were already on the turnstile at the baggage claim when we got there. We were seated in the very last row of the plane though, so that could have made a slight difference... All of this probably fluctuates from flight to flight. I also wonder if, since we flew through HK, if our bags were prescreened there instead of after landing in Beijing like yours were.
Continue reading "Small data points on the "are we ready?" Olympic front (Updated)" »
East or west, home is best
Beijing, 10am, July 2, 2008. Thirty-seven days until the Olympics.
Catching up quickly UPDATED & CORRECTED!
Clamboring toward and through the airport for the long flight "home" to Beijing -- whose own airport has the delightfully old-school identifier PEK -- two items leap out at me from quick exposure to headlines of the past week.
1) The Chinese government has closed down Time Out Beijing. (According to the Times of London, via Paul Karl Lukas.)
What???? As I was discussing ever so recently, the security agencies in the Chinese government have chosen the run-up to the Olympics as the moment to crack down on citizens and foreigners in the most ham-handed of ways. Like its familiar Time Out counterparts in other major cities, TOB is a frothy but very useful entertainment-and-lifestyle guide. And even this is an intolerable menace? As the Times account said:
The decision seems to have been taken not because of any racy or politically incorrect content. Time Out Beijing has fallen victim to the accelerating imposition of restrictions on any aspect of life in the capital deemed to pose a potential threat to a smooth Olympics.
UPDATE: It appears that this episode is a little more complicated than it appeared at an in-airport glance. Perhaps it involved Olympic-crackdown matters; perhaps it was largely a question of following business-licensing laws. Overview of the snarls here, at China Law Blog, with many subsequent links including to Shanghaiist and Beijing Boyce. In the meantime, this will teach me about catching up too quickly or passing on tips I haven't checked out myself. More later.
2) According to Steve Lohr of the NYT, even Intel has decided not to "upgrade" its own computers to Windows Vista? Wow and wow. Out of a sense of sportsmanship and a dim awareness that if I've said something 99 times I may not need to say it the 100th*, I've kept to myself recent illustrations of the ponderous nightmare that the Vista Experience has meant for me. But this, from the other half of the Microsoft-Intel partnership that for years has ruled the PC world, has got to sting.
And it of course is a fitting complement to a related, bonus half-item: the now-widely-circulated and wonderfully expressive and human email from Bill Gates about his own frustrations in using Windows XP. I would really like to see what he said when trying to make Vista work.**
I think I hear the boarding call.
_____
Continue reading "Catching up quickly UPDATED & CORRECTED!" »
This will teach me to be wry... ("Friend of China" dept)
Just before going offline, which I more or less still am, I talked about the many and mysterious ways in which Chinese officialdom is doing its best to screw up the Beijing Olympics. There is a minor risk to the Games as an athletic contest, since officials waited until the very last minute to deal with hyper-polluted air (ie, air still getting worse as of the time I left Beijing six days ago). There is a major possibility that the event will be a general embarrassment to China, because of the crude and increasing efforts to "control" every aspect of their presentation -- which in practice means scrutinizing reporters more carefully, making it harder for foreigners of any sort to get into the country, etc. Detail in original post.
In introducing the point I said something sincere -- really, it will be better for everyone if the Chinese public feels good about the games -- and something a little less direct. Namely that I was a "Friend of the Chinese People." In light of many alarmed and huffy emails that have piled up, mainly from people unfamiliar with China, I apparently need to spell out the intended wryness:
- For any foreigner who has operated here, "Friend of China" is a very familiar and loaded agitprop term. John Pomfret of the Washington Post elaborates on its connotations here. When Chinese government officials apply it, they really mean something like "stooge" -- an outsider who will go along with whatever they say or do. This is why Kevin Rudd, the Mandarin-speaking new Prime Minister of Australia, was careful in a major speech in Beijing to call himself a "true friend" of China, using the Chinese term zhengyou, versus pengyou for friend in the ordinary sense. The implication of "true friend" is someone who cares enough to tell unpleasant truths and point out possible errors. Ie, the kind of friend that China, America, and every other entity and person needs.
- In saying I was a "Friend of the Chinese People," I meant to pay mocking respect to the official parlance but say something different. In specific, this was a reference (and link) to a preceding post about dealing with ordinary people in China. Despite my many aggravations with Chinese policies and practices, despite my wonderment at the self-defeating idiocy of the government's approach to the Olympics, my experience with the varied and teeming humanity of China has been surprisingly positive. When it comes to their own country, Americans have no trouble with the concept that someone could dislike its governmental policies but still like the culture and folkways and individual people. Lots of times, that's how I feel about America myself! The same distinction is, if anything, more important to remember about China, precisely because its individual people are less familiar to most members of the outside world.
So, if you're warming up for an email or blog post about the self-censorship involved in someone professing to be a "Friend of China," save it for someone who actually uses that term! I am happy to be counted as a pengyou of many individuals within China, but as a zhengyou of many institutions here. We criticize because we care! (Note to the wry-impaired: preceding sentence should not be taken 100% at face value.)
Getting this off my chest about the Olympics
This is very long, but for-the-record:
First, a reminder: I think that it will be best for China, the world, the athletes, the spectators, and the Olympic Movement itself if the Beijing games come off as a big success. No one will benefit if China feels disappointed or under-appreciated about how these years of work ultimately pay off.
Also: as I can’t say often enough, I am a Friend of the Chinese People!
And: I’ll be here in August. I want to have a good time when the Games begin.
But I am getting a bad feeling about the buildup to these events. It’s not just the air— I do still believe that last-minute measures will make it acceptable by Games time. (Reasoning and quotes in this article. Also, I'm out of Beijing till the start of July -- giving it a chance!) And it’s not about a lot of the transportation infrastructure, although crucial subway lines that are supposed to be running before visitors arrive still have mounds of fresh construction dirt around some entryways. I am confident that they will handling passengers by the time they're needed for the Games.
Rather I’m puzzled by a series of deliberate and inadvertent decisions that, if you didn’t know better, you might think were designed to turn the whole spectacle into a source of friction rather than pride for China. None of these steps is news on its own. Collectively the pattern is discouraging, and puzzling too.
Some are clearly inadvertent.
Continue reading "Getting this off my chest about the Olympics" »
Forty-nine days and counting (updated)
A little variety in perspective: an outdoor view, 9am June 20, looking toward the nearly-completed CCTV tower in Beijing's Central Business District. Distance to the tower is roughly half a mile, less than one kilometer, in this shot.
I was joking when saying earlier that maybe the factories are running 30 hours a day, 10 days a week, to meet output targets before the expected mandatory pre-Olympic shutdown next month. Now I'm not so sure it's a joke.
Either there is some unusual output surge underway, making the air for the last few weeks the worst I've seen in a year. I have not seen the sun or anything resembling blue in days and days. Or some catastrophic underlying change has occurred, making it all the more challenging to bring the air to acceptable levels in the next 49 days.
Whichever it is, I now get the point and will spend as many of those remaining days out of Beijing as possible. See you at the Games!
Update: CCTV from a nearby but different angle last November, when the building was much further from completion and a strong north wind had just swept through town.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself *
I said recently that I would stop bellyaching about the air in Beijing until the beginning of next month.
Then I woke up and looked out the window this morning. Here we are at 10am, June 19, 2008, fifty days before the Olympic Games are to begin:
I guess I had not imagined how "just in time" the air-cleanup plan for the Olympic Games was going to be. I mean, is anyone from the International Olympic Committee getting the slightest bit nervous?
*Note for the kiddies: Title is of course from the Atlantic's own 19th-century contributor Walt Whitman. A recent noir-novel allusion to Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" may have skipped past me, but not this one! Naturally I think of Whitman's next line, "(I am large, I contain multitudes)", after multi-course banquets in the hinterland featuring items whose provenance I can't guess.
For nerds and Sinologists alike: the Firefox 3 snarl
As mentioned two days ago, the Mozilla organization, creator of Firefox, has been trying to gin up a world-wide effort to get as many people as possible to download the official version of Firefox 3 on its release day, June 17. And if users around the world hit the servers all at once, they could set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a 24-hour span. Great!
So of course when the fun began about 12 hours ago, as the release files went up and users everywhere logged in -- the Mozilla servers promptly froze and crashed.
Let's see. You're a leading internet company, and you're drumming up action from all around the world for what you hope will be a simultaneous assault on your servers, maybe you should be prepared for... a huge surge in traffic?? Just a thought.
And, hmmm, why does this make me think of the Olympics?
Continue reading "For nerds and Sinologists alike: the Firefox 3 snarl" »
New entry for the lexicon of disorders: PAD
When I lived in Seattle, I used to hear about Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, the moodiness that would set in when people went weeks without seeing the sun.
I wonder if there is a place for Pollutional Affective Disorder, PAD? Here is what I see out the window at 11am China time, June 14, with 55 days till the Olympics begin. To be fair, it rained hard last night, and the roads are wet, and some of what's out there could be an ochre-tinted fog. Still. It's looked this way for days, when the city was bone dry.
No more in this vein until early July, when some new Beijing subway lines will have opened; the moratorium on construction will be in place; the shutdown order for surrounding factories will take hold; and some actual officials, broadcasters, coaches, and perhaps even athletes will begin drifting in.
Update: as promised, no pic, but the view the next day is exactly the same.
I dunno, maybe I am getting depressed?
Another summer morning, 9 am. You get only so many summer days in life. The good news is, just 56 days to the Olympics, so very soon now things will be great.
Continue reading "I dunno, maybe I am getting depressed?" »
Two months to opening day
The opening ceremony for the Olympics will be at 8:08 pm on August 8. The first full day of competition will August 9, two months from today.
June 9, 10am, standard southern view from our apartment in Guomao area of Beijing.
Seventy-three days to go (updated)
In my article about China's environmental-improvement efforts, in the current Atlantic, I talk about the Chinese scientists in charge of monitoring air quality in Beijing as the Olympics draw near. They laid out for me the timeline for getting cars, factories, power plants, etc under control so that the air is acceptable before opening day, August 8. Interestingly, the working definition of "acceptable" is "comparable to the L.A. Olympics in 1984."
I wonder whether it's about time for the shutdown and cleanup plans to start? It's been pretty bad these last few days. (May 27, 9am, Guomao area of Beijing:)
I also wonder, only half-jokingly, whether right now the factories are running extra fast (and extra smokily), to get as much produced as they can before the impending multi-week shutdown. As with everything on the "We are ready!" front, we'll see...
Update: I wasn't imagining it! Via Sage Brennan, a reminder of this (Chinese language) monitoring site for Beijing municipal air pollution. It reports the pollution index today in many downtown areas at 500! That is bad. I'm betting it's the top of the scale, too, since there are no readings above that. As a benchmark, on New Year's Day readings were generally below 50. Yesterday, which was no one's idea of a crisp, clear day, they were only in the mid-100s. Jeesh!
'Good Luck Beijing'
The finals of the Good Luck Beijing 2008 track and field event, this evening at the "Bird's Nest" stadium that will be the center of the Olympic Games, was on the whole a promising omen on the "is Beijing ready?" front concerning the Olympics.
On the "hmmmmm" side: Air pollution still pretty bad today, 75 days before the opening ceremonies; interior of stadium, especially bathrooms, showing surprising wear and tear for a place that awaits its official debut; visually-striking exterior beams also already sooty and stained. And whole Olympic area still full of projects with a fair amount of work to do.
But: crowd flow good for the event (it looked as if only about half the seats had been opened for sale, perhaps as a test for handling scale); security screening quite quick and non-intrusive; the stadium's design truly is stunningly impressive, more so up close than from a distance; and hordes of young guides were peppy, helpful, cheery, and ready with English-language "Welcome to National Stadium! Enjoy the games!" greetings.
Most touching moment of the evening, by far: Men's 4 x 100m relay. The Chinese national team bungled the final baton pass and was out of contention. The anchor man for the Japanese national team was surging toward the tape -- when out of nowhere, maybe from fifth place overall, the anchor runner for the Sichuan provincial team stormed ahead to nip the Japanese runner at the last possible instant and win by .01 of a second.
Cheers absolutely rocked the stadium -- 10%, I thought, because the Japanese had not won, and 90% in appreciation for beleaguered Sichuan, which is of course the province devastated by the earthquake.
Triumphant Sichuan Province men's 4x100m relay team on the stadium big screen just after its victory, heroic anchorman in the middle:
Oddest moment: playing of the national anthem at award ceremony for each event. Some 95%+ of all competitors were from China -- a typical event would have someone from Beijing, someone from Guangdong, someone from Shanxi, someone from Xinjiang, etc etc, plus the occasional Malaysian or Australian. But when the medals were given out, it was the national rather than provincial song that was played, as if the Star Spangled Banner were played after each event at a NCAA track meet. We became quite familiar with China's national anthem.
Still, on the whole an exciting and encouraging event -- and touching, thanks to the Sichuan team.
Free book idea: the torch
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.
#1: China Daily, today.
#2: Shenzhen, yesterday:
The horror
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.)
Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system
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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99 days to go!
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 same bleak picture again and again.
Hiatus update, and a China comment
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.
With that, again going dark for a while.
First sandstorm of the season
Out our window, Beijing, 10:30am March 18, 2008.
143 days until the opening ceremony of the Olympics, but the sandstorms will have ended by then.
Out the same window, on a nice day last fall:
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:
A good answer at a press conference by GW Bush!
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.
OK, I really will stop after this
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.
Weirdly, I find this encouraging
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...
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.
(Thanks to Daniel Lippman for tip.)
Six months to go!
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.
Last comment of the year on the Beijing air situation
As promised earlier, I'm not planning to belabor the Beijing-air question while the Olympics are still more than half a year away. And as stated many times, I hope the Beijing Olympics will be a big success. China deserves to feel good about what it is putting together, and it will be best for the whole world if the Chinese people at large feel satisfied about this huge effort. I'm not being flip here: I'm rooting for China to pull this off just right and bask in deserved praise.
Also, these last three or four weeks in Beijing have included a lot of nice-seeming, if cold, days.
But the juxtaposition of the story below, from in today's Olympian, a weekly supplement to the state-controlled China Daily in the months leading up to the Olympics; and the picture below that, a view out the apartment window at 1pm today; and the almost unbelievable NASA satellite shot that is the third image, taken on December 17, a recent "nice-seeming" day, prompts reference to a few other observations. (The satellite image came via Danwei.org and BeijingAir.)
Continue reading "Last comment of the year on the Beijing air situation" »
Are foreigners dissing China by noticing the smog?
After the jump are parts of an intriguing note from Shelly Kraicer of Beijing. He is a Canadian writer and film-festival programmer, based in China for the last four years, who runs a web site on Chinese film, ChineseCinema.org I don't know him personally.
His note is in response to my repeated ."sky is falling" screeds about the disaster of air quality in Beijing nine months before the Olympics. (Note: today, November 16, was a pretty nice day.)
His note raises a question I can't do more than acknowledge at the moment: whether the Western focus on environmental catastrophe in China is, in some way, part of a long process of belittling the Chinese. He recounts the comments of a Chinese media friend:
...who pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they're thinking of China (if at all). ... Now the big idea, Olympics branch, is Pollution Disaster! She pointed out that Athens' big Olympic story was Preparation DIsaster! But since, here, things seem to be generally on schedule, that story is unavailable. So the foul air story is its replacement. I think that what she's describing has an all too predictable undercurrent of looking down from lofty developed Western heights to squalid undeveloped Third World depths ("tut tut, of course they just can't get it right, the way we know we could").
At a strictly logical level, I know that these things are true:
* I personally hope the Olympics turn out to be a big success for China. I'm convinced that the general public here sees them, or has been led to see them, as an occasion of pride for China as a whole, not just "the regime." It would be better for everyone if China ends up feeling happy and successful in its efforts than if it feels embarrassed or, worse, disrespected.
* I genuinely view environmental carnage as Problem Number One for China itself, and as the biggest problem posed by China for the rest of the world. Fewer Chinese people feel as strongly about this because, I think, fewer of them have seen how it is elsewhere.
* And I think that to raise alarms about the air and water in China is fundamentally supportive of the people of China rather than in any way dismissive of them. After all, they are the ones who breathe this air their whole lives.
But I know that more than strict logic is involved in these questions. The note, below, is worth thinking about.
Continue reading "Are foreigners dissing China by noticing the smog?" »
Not just a beautiful backhand: brainy, too!
(With update, below)
I see from outside-world reports that Justine Henin might give up the chance to defend her Olympic gold medal in tennis, because she is so concerned about what the air in Beijing might do to her lungs. She has asthma and recently had to drop out of the last tournament she attempted to play here.
As noted earlier, I am against the idea of any threatened official boycotts of the Olympic games. The Beijing Olympics have become (despite many local grumbles) a source of pride for Chinese people broadly, not just for the regime. But I wonder whether we'll see many more individual "boycotts" of the sort Henin has mentioned.
Continue reading "Not just a beautiful backhand: brainy, too!" »
This is becoming less amusing (Olympic air-quality watch)
Today, noon, downtown Beijing:
I like the painterly juxtaposition of the splash of red, from the (ubiquitous) Olympic poster at lower right, with the chemical gray-brown-ochre of what lies above. It's not fog.
I'll keep taking such pictures but will stop posting them. The point is made. But while I'm at it, a couple more after the jump.
Continue reading "This is becoming less amusing (Olympic air-quality watch)" »
Maybe Nov 3 is out too?
Only days ago I was bragging about how crisp, clear, beautiful, and blue the Beijing skies were on the first three days of November: Thursday the 1st through Saturday the 3rd. Maybe November should be Olympic month?
Then it turned out that, by November 4th and 5th, things weren't looking so great any more. Maybe the 1st through 3rd as a concentrated Olympic schedule?
Now I find a report from an American who actually went for a run on that same blue-sky Saturday, Nov 3 afternoon that had raised my spirits -- only to be laid up as if with a sudden case of emphysema. As a reminder, here is how it looked that day:
And here is what it was like to go for a run:
Well, apparently poor air quality doesn't begin to engulf your lungs until they are stressed... With each passing step it became more painfully obvious that the air had overtaken my lungs. For perspective, it was like a having a large man press against my chest and every attempt to gasp for more air only made him heavier.
Small world dept: He was running along (a different part of ) the very same road shown in the blue-sky picture above, within an hour or so of the time I took it. Which means -- something, maybe that there is stuff in the air even when it's blue.*
So, I guess the Olympic target dates are down to Nov 1 and 2. And if you're thinking that Nov 6 might work, here is the view out the apartment window this morning, with 276 days to the Olympics:
*Small world #2: The runner is a young man named J.P. Fielder, who was with a visiting delegation from the National Association of Manufacturers. When I happened to meet him yesterday at a discussion session, he looked very much like a healthy 20-something specimen training for his next marathon, which I gather he is doing. He just won't do much more training here, I'm guessing. Thanks to Carter Wood of the NAM for posting Fielder's account.
Maybe they should hold the Olympics on Nov 1 through 3?
In Beijing the first three days of November were spectacular, as they had been last year.
Yesterday, November 4, some brown and grey in the sky. Today, some more:
Looking south from our apartment on Jianguo Road near East Third Ring Road.
Two hundred and seventy-seven days to go now. It's probably time to take a picture of the sky every day as the Games draw near, for later chronicling purposes to see how and when the campaign to clean up the air finally kicked in. Assuming and hoping that it does.
Maybe they just need to hold the Olympics in November?
Two hundred and seventy-nine days until the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to a big sign downtown. And -- unlike some other days -- it couldn't be more beautiful!
My family's first two days of residence in Beijing coincide with two days of spectacular weather. Robin's-egg blue skies; not a hint of pollution; the briskness that follows the passage of a cold front from Mongolia/Siberia, without the actual cold.
Looking north from near the Guomao subway stop, toward the half-constructed new CCTV building by Rem Koolhaas:
Looking east along Jianguo Road:
I was here one year ago today, at the time of an African presidents' summit, and it was just as pretty. Maybe this, as opposed to mid-summer, is the time for international games? Just a thought.
Olympic air-quality: the experts speak
Caijing magazine is an indispensable Chinese publication, conveniently now with an English-language website. Its name, 财经, means economics and finance. Its editor, Hu Shuli, is one of the most influential women in China. She and her staff well understand that the one part of the Chinese media with considerable latitude to expose and reveal is the business press. They have consistently used a lot of the operating room this allows them.*
In the latest issue: news on the ever-tantalizing "can Beijing possibly clear up its air before the Olympics?" question. (Previously on this theme: here, here, here, here, and, in more encouraging mode, here.) The magazine interviews Zhao Fengtong, vice mayor of Beijing with responsibility for traffic and related issues. The Asian Wall Street Journal has an English version of the full interview (subscribers only) -- Caijing's English site has only a summary.
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