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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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Continue reading "Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system" »
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.
Continue reading "Olympic air-quality: the experts speak" »
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