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2月22日 Google Trouble, AgainI'm surprised, as I guess are a lot of journalists, that the Beijing News can run this: not about the part which says Google.cn doesn't have a Chinese ICP license, but about the part dealing with the US Congressional hearing, and that Google.cn may replace Google.com for all Chinese language searches originating from China.
This is bitter-sweet news. On the one hand, as I said, this is exactly what I fear the most --not only as a journalist but as an ordinary Google user. If this were to materialize, then the Congressional hearing only pushed Google towards doing more evil. In such a scenario, I would only hope that English-language searches still go to Google.com, coz that's a major part of my work-related searches. But of course the Chinese language part is equally, if not more important, to me and other Chinese journalists as well.
By the way, did people notice that the Chinese version of Google News reads "Google Information, China Version" instead of "Google News China version"? Is the word "news" becoming a sensitive term to Google too? Shame shame shame.
On the more upbeat part, the Beijing News did a fine job raising this issue. They mentioned the Google.cn censorship and the Congressional hearing. I would naturally have guessed anything about and from that hearing is off limits. And their original reporting has spawn a couple of follow-ups by other newspapers(1, 2). Some of my journalist colleagues say the replacement of top editors may not change the newspapers completely. I hope they are right.
And this brings me back to a saying by a senior colleague of mine: "traditional media have lost a lot of their guts and sense of shame, but they still have some left; as for those who pass themselves off as Internet media, they don't even know what shame is from the very beginning."
And yesterday, Yahoo Mail was inaccessible to a lot of Internet users in Beijing for many hours, which naturally stokes fear that Yahoo may be getting ready to shut its email service in China for good. I don't know how practical that would be, but are these companies forming an alliance and taking revenge for their public humiliation by doing something worse, or even going to the extreme? Up to this stages, there really can't be many more surprises. But we'll see. 2月20日 Something to Look Forward ToSpring in Beijing is worth some great expectations for the joy it'll bring. But this spring, we've got something more fun to expect -- the March 1 issue of China Youth Daily.
Now that everbody knows a particular weekly supplement (it has been erroneously decribed as a "weekly journal", "weekly newspaper", "weekly magazine", by so many pretty famous western newspapers that I don't know what the hell it is now, but of course these are all stupid mistakes by arrogant editors back in New York of DC, right?) of the newspaper is going to be re-published after it was "suspended" three weeks ago, a lot of my fellow journalists are looking eagerly forward to that issue. Not to celebrate its rebirth but to have a good laugh over it.
I hardly remember any other surefire piece of crap getting such high expectations -- after all, this is what we call an "essay on a given topic", a propagandists-commissioned rebuff of Prof. Yuan Weishi's offending piece (amazingly, still on the newspaper's Web site) that was supposed to be the direct cause of the suspension. I don't count myself as a fan of the original article, but I certainly have a right to exhaust my most contemptuous, sarcastic and vile expressions on its opponent.
If contemporary history of the official press means anything, this piece is even going to be scorned and snubbed by the most hardcore official mouthpieces, according to a knowledgeable senior colleague. Even Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily refused to rerun some vicious pieces of political venom during the Cultural Revolution. And the March 1 issue of the supplement is going to be exactly that. Bag Half a BrickMy colleage was telling the story of how she almost got sliced in half by the rear view mirror of a car that was driving "50, 60 miles an hour" out of the parking lot near our building. She didn't see it coming at all, and didn't even have time to bang on the top of the car before the young lady driving it rounded the corner and sped off.
A Beijing resident for a mere seven months, she was still amazed and angered by this kind of stuff. After the commiseration, my advice was, "carry half a brick in yoiur purse if you can."
I took that from an urban legend (maybe not) that during rainy days, Beijing's bycicle commuters usually put half a brick (which makes it a good square shape and just heavy enough) in the basket attached to the handle of their bikes. So whenever a rude motorist speeds by without slowing down and splash dirty water all over them, they have something to fight back with -- a smashed rear windshield serves as a decent reminder to be a human being and respect those not fortunate enough to drive a car in the rain. Apparently this happens (the smashed glass), but probably not as often as people would have me believe.
Personally, I would rather carry a gun if I could, or a big knife. I certainly feel the urge every day on my commute to shoot the driver that honks at my for no particular reason, or who refuses to slow down and let me cross the road on a marked pedestrain pass.
Half a brick. That's less than what I think of the car-owning class too. Not every motorist in Beijing is mean and selfish, but those who are certainly never fail to make their presence known, every second of every day. It's not exactly a class thing -- in the last century we Chinese are not particularly known for our good manners, of all things. But being rich, powerful and rude makes the far more damage than being poor, abused yet mean -- at least the latter have an excuse. Of course, it would also be interesting to notice how the pedestrian complaining about the vehicles yesterday would drive exactly the same way today if he/she becomes rich enough to buy a car.
This story, I must repeat, is a very good example of what's so wrong about China's car-owning class -- some might call them middle-class. While pundits and bored journalists try to determine exactly what that word means, it does seem to be growing bigger and bigger by the day.
In 2004 when I returned to Beijing, the debate over the newly proposed traffic law -- that the motorist shoulder 100% responsibility in an accident involving a vehile and a pedestrian, regardless of who broke the law (in fact this was a gross simplification of the real law, but gets the gist and controversy of it) -- was at its fiercest. I would certainly have voted, had I been given the chance, without hesitation for the pedestrian camp. This was also the time I was most upset by the driving manners of my fellow countrymen, and I had imagined that this would also be the majority position, for the mere fact that there are more non-car-owning people in Beijing than otherwise. But I was wrong. In the newspapers, op-ed pieces were overwhelmingly against the proposed law, and I rarely find anyone echoing my views, even among my carless friends (soon-to-be carred of course). The law was struck down and revised in favor of motorists, no surprise in there. And there I got my lesson -- car-owners may not outnumber pedestrians but they certainly outpower them in control of public opinion -- the non-owners are generally just too busy making money to buy a car to write to the newspapers. Most journalists, no surprise in there either, are car-owners or potential ones too.
It may not take very long before I can afford a car, but I would rather save the money for travel and continue to hate the car-owners. If someday the Chinese society splits into two by exactly that distinction and a civil war starts, I would picture myself a leader of those blowing up gas stations, roads and -- yes, burning tyres in the streets. 2月15日 Anniversary, Oil and Looming WarThe Iranian Embassy in Beijing near the Liangma River hasn't seen so many guests for a long time. The occasion was the 27th anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution, not really a well-rounded number to justify the huge turnout -- several hundred guests packed the spacious two-story main building of the embassy. Lots of diplomats and military attahces of course, fairly small number of Western faces though, and many business people, even a copper-embossing artist specially invited from Iran for the ceremony, "Master Zand", cheerfully chipping away on a plate of copper in the lobby to admiring guests.
Embassy officials said the turnout was extraordinarily big. I wonder if most of the guests were there to show political solidarity with the Iranians against the Americans, or to check out out the latest business opportunities for themselves. I was searching the crowds for chiefs of Chinese oil companies, and them I found.
In a corner of the main hall, the Chinese were stealing the spotlight from their hosts. Diplomats and businessmen were lining up to speak with a senior board member of state-owned oil giant Sinopec. A Somalian embassy official was practically begging for an appointment in the next two weeks, and a Middle Eastern oil consultant was pitching important ideas for China's next oil ventures -- in the Republic of Congo and Somaliland ("not Somalia, but Somaliland"). But I doubt if Mr. Sinopec is going to be available for the next several weeks -- he is travelling with State Development and Reform Commission director Ma Kai to Iran in a month to officially sign the landmark US$ 100 billion deal to develop the huge Yadavaran oilfield in southern Iran. If anything, the threat of war or "surgical attacks" by the Americans were simply dismissed as a minor, short-term risk in these conversations. So RelievedI am, upon reading in the Beijing News that "nobody in China has ever been arrested solely for comments on the Internet", according to Liu Zhengrong, deputy director of the Internet Bureau, the State Council Information Office.
Yeah, right. I feel SO protected. 2月14日 A Loud, Expensive Toy to Pamper the Public With-- Fireworks.
To clear the grounds first, I am strongly against Beijing scrapping a ban on fireworks this year, all factors considered: environmental pollution, injuries, costs, preservation of traditional culture, etc.
It's funny to notice how Beijing media have scrambled to reassure the public, from weeks before the Spring Festival, how the return of the firecrackers and fireworks is a good thing. Being the cynic and skeptic, I am speculating that they have all received "encouragements" from the minicipal government to suppress negative coverage and instead play up the "good" sides of the explosions.
Therefore you read triumphant stories declaring victory of the first "no-ban" spring festival, with headlines, sub-headlines reading like "No Major Fires, Deaths, Or Eyes Taken Out as a Result of Fireworks Injuiry During Spring Festival" . But there was indeed a death reported before the Spring Festival, in a suburb of Beijing. Guy got his chest cavity blown open by ---- right, illegal, non-government-approved fireworks. That most certainly doesn't count.
Yet the beaming headlines don't necessarily hide the damaging stats, however much whitewash you put over it. A read into the very same story above reveals that there were 384 fires started by fireworks during the Spring Festival, but of course, none "major". There were 838 fireworks-related injuries, 51 of them serious, yet again, no deaths. Isn't it a nice thing to set the standards yourself on what is "serious" and what is "major"? This story reveals that Lunar New Year's Eve fireworks helped push air pollution index from 69 to 144 overnight.
Then let's talk economics. This story tells you that government-licensed retail networks sold a total of 8,000 boxes of fireworks in the for city districts, Dongcheng, Xicheng, Haidian and Xuanwu. But in Dongcheng and Xicheng alone they are still sitting on 2,400 unsold boxes, and now that the festival's over and no more fireworks are allowed, the government is buying them back. I am no retail expert but that's gotta hurt the balance sheet.
And there's more: the government-sponsored Beijing Fireworks Company has announced Spring Festival reveunues of 55 million yuan (US$ 6.8 mil), with the government collecting some 400,000 yuan (US$ 50,000) in taxes. Impressive profits? How's that amount compared with all the fires and injuries mentioned above? Or in this story, the total of 1.21 million people and 4,600 automobiles mobilized to patrol the streets during the festival for "safeguarding" and "fire-prevention"? How much taxpayer money went into that? How about the extra resources that went into cleaning the hundreds of tons of paper shreds left by the fireworks from Beijing streets?
Now, don't nobody dare tell me it's a good economic deal. As far as I am concerned, it's all politics -- "we" the rulemakers are trying to protect the firy cultural heritage of the Chinese nation; we are responding to the desperate pleas of the public from the past 12 "springless" years. Right. Why don't I remember ever casting a vote myself of whether the ban should be lifted?
But the public has spoken. This story claims that 83% of respondents to their survey say the fireworks help them rediscover the "traditional flavor" of the Lunar New Year. Some expensive flavor.
2月13日 Hell Broke LooseIn a painful testimony to the complete failure of the Beijing Municipal Government's efforts to control traffic, hell broke loose this morning as millions more cars returned to the roads after the Lantern festival, the official end of the Spring Festival holidays.
After waiting at a bus stop and watching a bus clumsily inching forward less than 10 meters in as many minutes, I gave up and hailed a cab.
The driver fought and cheated, cursed and kicked and we finally got ahead of about 50 immobile buses, stuck bumpter-to-bumper in front of a completely logjammed intersection. The traffic lights were no use now as nobody could move in all four directions. But somehow we miraculously got past it without being crushed.
The traffic radio was blaring about what a disaster the morning was -- bad traffic everywhere, truck caught fire here, fender-benders and pileups all over the city. Then the two hosts zeroed in on a particularly catastrophic situation: a wedding motorcade came to a halt after the groom's car ran over a pedestrian who was apparently jaywalking on the closed expressway of one of the ringroads. The dumbfounded radio hosts staggeringly described what they saw on traffic cameras in their showroom: the groom went hysterical and kneeled in front of the motionless body and refused to get up after rescuers dragged it from under his car and frantically worked to revive the person. Ten minutes later the hosts announced that the person seems to be dead, and babbled meaningless comforts and blessings for the young couple whose wedding had been apparently ruined.
I was gasping over the accident, watching the unmoving lines of traffic on the off-ramps and wondering at my own luck as the cab gunned down the second-ring road. Suddenly the front seat slammed towards me and I kissed the LCD screen attached to its back. "Can you believe it, another guy jay-walking on the ringroad!" the cabbie screamed.
Yeah, whatever. Screw all the car-owners, automobile industry lobbyists and above all, the bloody greedy Beijing bureaucrats.
And tomorrow's Valentine's Day, with forecasts of traffic jams all over the city too. How nicely are we gearing up for the Olympics, Mayor Wang.
UPDATE: Read on Sina News later today that the radio hosts had apparently missed the craziest part of the story: the guy killed in the accident was not jaywalking, but someone with the wedding party. After the car got out of the wrong exit on the express way, the driver illegally BACKED UP, trying to make it back on the express way. This guy got out of the car to show the way?! And the car accidentally knocked him down and ran over him. No wonder the groom, or whoever it was, lost it. 2月11日 The net seems pretty bigSaw from the Reporters' Home BBS that the MSN blog of
another veteran Beijing journalist, Chen Feng, suffered the
same fate as the other one.
2月10日 MSN Blocks Another Journalist's blog -- only in China
Sorry, we are required by an order of the Chinese government to block access to this Space due to its content. China Digital News linked to this Chinese journalist's blog only a ouple of days ago. I could log on it yesterday, but today I see this. Apparently it's only blocked in China, as MSN has promised. Things are getting crazier by the day. I wonder if language is my only layer of protection right now. Maybe I'll be taken offline soon too.
Abuse the poor; kill the richNothing better captures the problems accompanying a rapidly widening wealth gap in today's China and the increasingly bitter feelings between people on different ends of the spectrum than this tragic case in Fushun, Liaoning last year.
Oct. 5, 2005. Young woman driving a Mercedes accidentally crushes a bike at a road-side bike repairman's stand. Young woman's parents come to negotiate damages to the repairman. The rich dad has words with repairman, slaps him around. The daughter joins. The 50-plus repairman apologizes, but the abuse continues. Poor guy draws his work knife and stabs dad and daughter. Mom arrives, takes a hammer to him and he stabs her too. Both women die, and the dad is seriously wounded. Repairman flees, attempts suicide but fails, turns self in.
First court hearing opening Feb. 8. Repairman is charged with murder, and prosecution is going for execution. Defence pleads leniency citing self-defence. No verdict handed down yet. The Liaoshen Evening News report cites repairman's acquaintances decribing him as a humble, warm-hearted man, supporting his family by repairing bycicles since his layoff a decade ago.
Sina says readers posted more than 3,300 comments the day they ran the news. Not surprisingly, the majority condemns violence on both sides but are of the opinion that it was indeed self-defence gone awry. Most are opposed to a death sentence.
Why do I have a feeling this news will soon get censored too? 2月9日 Hottest Chinese EntertainerWho's the hottest entertainer in Beijing these days? Most the world may vote pretty-faced Geisha star Zhang Ziyi as the hottest Chinese actress internationally, but here in Beijing this guy is the man.
 Yeah, fat guy on the left. Guo Degang, Tianjin native, 33, self-made cross-talk performner, is the talk of town right now. Xiangsheng, that's what I'm talking about. According to his own accounts Guo started learning the traditional Chinese comic art at the age of eight, and trained under numerous masters ever since. He came to Beijing in his early twenties hoping to make somebody out of himself but spent almost 10 starving years in oblivion, until his tea-house performance started gathering following a couple of years ago.
Now Guo is the indisputable master of Xiangsheng of the time. He has gained enormous respect from Xiangsheng lovers for his insistence on traditional forms of the art -- theater performance instead of TV, the robes, the fan and and on his low ticket prices (20 yuan).
He never hides his contempt for the 1980s generation of Xiangsheng performers whose short-lived, TV-made fame crumbled in the late 1990s, and many of whom have abandoned the Xiangsheng for soap operas and movies, dragging the art down with them. His latest theater performances during the Spring Festival were sold-out, laugh-through-midnight hits, and his appearance on popular TV talkshows during the Spring Festival would definitely win him millions more fans nationwide. But they have to come to Beijing because he sticks to his theater, the Deyun House, in old Beijing's rusty yet bustling Dashilan area.
Despite the traditional form, the content of his shows are actually quite relevant to today's Chinese. His most popular show featuring exaggerated versions of his own bitter struggles in the past years can easily resonate with the lives of ordinary Chinese in a time of great changes. He even poked fun at the American War of Terror in some of his latest shows. I didn't have the luck to actually sit in one but I heard George Bush is a source of some of the hardest laughs. MP3 recordings of his shows are among the hottest Internet downloads these days, if you can believe that.
I wonder why foreign press haven't picked this up yet -- after all, every happening in China is news to them isn't it? Xiangsheng is very hard for Laowais to get, for sure. But a few of them have actually come to know the art quite well -- I know, Dashan again. It is a universal truth that very Laowai in China hates Dashan, who is probably the best expat Xiangsheng performer ever. I guess this might have partly contributed to Laowai's rejection of Xiangsheng, especially Laowai journalists. Out of all the Laowais, they are probably the ones that hate Dashan the most. I don't like the Canadian much myself but this jealousy-rivalry thing between self-crowned "China hands" is simply stupid. 2月8日 New BanGot word of an new injunction: no publication of the Danish cartoons that have pitted one fourth of the world's population bitterly, even violently, against Europe; no further coverage of the aftermath.
Too bad. I was actually thinking of doing something on that. But the censors certainly reacted too late this time. Guess they don't pull Spring Festival shifts like us journalists do. The "damage", whatever it is, is already done. Domestic media have covered the whole sad affair, the violence included. Although somewhat timidly when it comes to the European papers' defence of and insistence on, their freedom of speech. Maybe this very phrase is already banned in publications.
Most of my colleagues' reaction to the news of the ban was something like "Yeah, right. As if we WERE REALLY PLANNING to run those cartoons", followed by some verbal abuse concerning certain people's potential IQ scores. Even without instruction I think Chinese papers do have the good sense not to do that.
But what about simple, brief and unbiased coverage of the aftermath? Or subtle-worded op-ed pieces on the issue that might appear in the press? Are the censors worried that even this could be harmful to religious and ethnic relations? I guess so but it's almost impossible to stand in their shoes and follow their perverse thoughts. 2月7日 BoycottedThe British Embassy in Beijing put together a seminar on British media regulation on the first day back to work after the Lunar New Year. Two veteran Brit media professionals talked about press and broadcasting regulatory bodies and their codes, and held discussions with participants during the one-day seminar.
On the list of invited participants were journalists from major official and semi-independent news organizations, as well as officials from the General Administration of Press and Publication, and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.
Out of the 25-or-so invited, around eight showed up on the morning of Feb. 6. Mostly journalists, and a couple of low-ranking officials from the General Administration of Press and Publication. Rumors have it that the most powerful "media-regulatory body" that was left out of the invitation list had issued a circular to some of the journalists invited, warning them not to attend. I doubt they did it because they felt slighted -- the Brits would probably have loved to issue them an invitation, but their phone numbers are not listed.
Interestingly enough, the circular didn't seem to reach the ministry-level GAPP, nor Xinhua News Agency, because their representatives indeed sat in the seminar (the whole day, in the case of two Xinhua journalists) and popped some interesting, even insightful, questions and comments.
The seminar in itself is entirely harmless, and might even have offered some fresh thoughts for Chinese censors. What a shame. They may have felt that they are so good at the job they don't need two Brits to lecture them on that. It should be the reverse: them giving lectures all over the world about how to control the media.
This is reminiscent of a visit last year by Hungarian-American financier George Soros to Beijing. A bunch of media outlets were lined up for interviews with the bigshot, and the progressive Hunan Satellite TV practically set up a studio at Soros's hotel to do a lengthy interview with him. But that very night, all media outlets involved received a similar circular from the same censorship body, warning them to cancel all interviews with Soros and never to run any content from interviews already done. Soros must have been higher priority on the boycott list, and that circular much more thoroughly executed than the latest one, because indeed nothing came out of his trip to Beijing.
The seminar is supposed to repeat in at least three other major cities before the Brit experts fly out. It'd be interesting to know how they play out there. |
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