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Who says there are no good jobs left in journalism?
Here is exciting news. The (state-run)
China Daily may be opening a US edition!! Clues
here, with thanks to Michele Travierso. If you're an experienced but job-threatened native speaker of English who can see the
wry possibilities in writing headlines like the front-pager below, your time may have come. I might look into it myself.
A few other keeper headlines shown
here,
here,
here, and
here; and an exploration of the thinking behind this form of journalism
here. (
Update: via
Charlie McElwee of Shanghai, more info from the China Daily-USA
web site.)
Something on my desk that might not be on yours
A Chinese fighter plane! At least, a 1:48 scale model of one, the domestically-produced 歼-10, or
J-10, courtesy of a friend at AVIC, China's giant aerospace company. Click for larger, including a glimpse of the teeny blue-suited model pilot inside:
And just down the street, at the main AVIC building, the full-sized J-10 itself, in a static display that I watched workers prepare shortly before the Olympics:
No larger theme for the moment; I just like having the model, which is made of metal rather than plastic and feels surprisingly sturdy.
Advance review from Publisher's Weekly
I won't do this systematically, because that would mean I'd have to include bad reviews too!, but for the record here is
an early, nice PW note on my forthcoming collection of China writings,
Postcards from Tomorrow Square. It's a "starred" review about halfway down the page that this link brings up. Actual text of the review after the jump. The book is a Vintage paperback original (bargain!) and has a pub date of January. (Links through
Amazon,
B&N,
Powell's.)
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Continue reading "Advance review from Publisher's Weekly" »
A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's
EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen
this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual
Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject
here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
Continue reading "A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China" »
Back to business, and back to China: Why we love the English-language Chinese press (cont.)
A mere 22 hours after we started driving toward LAX at 4:15am through what seemed to be snowfall but in fact was ashfall from Yorba Linda version of the recent SoCal fires*, my wife and I are back in our apartment in Beijing. And reassuringly, we have the joys of the English-language Chinese press to welcome us home. Front page of today's (state controlled) China Daily:
Apart from the picture of the baby-holding Premier Wen Jiabao in his now-iconic role as Beloved Grandpa of the Nation, I invite attention to the headline in the top right corner of the front page:
On line and in print, I have
often marveled at
why Chinese organizations make so many careless and unintended errors when rendering material into English for foreigners to read. (Locus classicus, discussed
here: the huge signs outside an art museum in Shanghai last year. They announced a big exhibit of photos from the Three Gorges dam area and read: THE THREE GEORGES.)
With the China Daily and sister publications, it's a different matter. Judging from the result, it's obvious that native English speakers have a final pass at the stories, headlines, and captions there. They have very few unintended, "Three Georges"-type errors. But it also seems obvious that the British, Canadian, American, Australian, Indian, South African, Singaporean, etc subeditors hired for this role can have a slyly subversive bent. Often little touches show up in the publication that will seem
Onion-like to any native speaker but that even very capable English-speaking Chinese supervisors would likely miss. At least that's what I hope is going on here -- intentional wry precision rather than unaware imprecision. I'm applying an Intelligent Design model in my newspaper reading.
______
* For those who know the LA Freeway system: this was along Highway 91 west of I-605, which we were detoured onto because signs said that I-105 was closed, apparently for fire reasons. The fires were of course aggravated by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds. On the weather report we heard while passing through the ashfall, the reported atmospheric humidity was six percent.
A modest step against "security theater" -- in Beijing!
As recently mentioned
here, with links to many other articles and posts, the phenomenon of "security theater" that both
Jeff Goldberg and
I have discussed in Atlantic articles is an unfortunate world-wide trend.
Security theater is typified by make believe measures that make it seem as if authorities are "doing something" about security but that may have little connection to the threats that are most serious or the ways they might be thwarted. In the old days, an example would be the "have these bags been in your possession?..." catechism at airport check-in counters. These days, the reflexive demand to "show ID" before going into buildings or the ignored-by-all recordings in US airports that begin, "This is a security announcement. The threat level is elevated.."
The other classic trait of worldwide security theater is the ratchet-like irreversibility of the process. For instance, as mentioned in my earlier post, some of the "special Olympic" security precautions instituted this summer in Beijing show no sign of ever going away. (Like bag screening for all subway passengers.) There is a bureaucratic/political explanation for this, which is that no one is likely to be blamed for the cost or inconvenience of such measures, whereas any public official can easily imagine the resulting witch hunt if a "precaution" were removed and... something went wrong.
But here's an exception! A few hours ago, I arrived at the new international terminal at Beijing Capital airport -- the one with the delightful airport identifier PEK -- and found myself simply able to walk in from the sidewalk through the main entrance door. None of the one-by-one machine scanning of bags, wiping them for explosive residue, or sniffing by bomb-dogs that had caused long lines in the entry corridors all this summer. Those practices started about a month before the Olympics, but some time recently someone apparently was willing to take the risk of calling them off. Worth noticing.
'My Beijing Birthday,' now in Beijing
Last week
I mentioned how much I enjoyed and admired the documentary film
My Beijing Birthday, which was having a special showing in Hong Kong.
This week it's having another screening in Beijing -- tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 28. Details below.
The trailer for the film,
here, which I didn't mention before, will give you an idea of the approach and tone, including the before-and-after of kids who were playful tots in 1996 and have changed in heartening and heartrending ways since. I can't recommend this highly enough.
EVENT DETAILS:
Date: Tuesday 28th October 2008
Time: 18:00 Registration
18:30 Screening
Venue: Saatchi & Saatchi
The Penthouse 36/F Central International Trade Centre Tower C
6A Jianguomen Wai Avenue, Beijing, China 100022
Subversive Panda II: More freedom, more confusion (updated)
Recently I mentioned the winsome advertising-panda of the Dongsishitiao subway stop in Beijing. (Cameo reminder photo below; previous post
here, with link to larger picture.)
I asserted that the English version of the slogan -- "More Freedom, More Happiness" -- was ambiguous in a subtly provocative way. Was the beloved symbol of the Chinese nation really saying, "the freer you are, the happier you will be"? Or saying that only to visitors who could read the English translation? Or saying it inadvertently via mistranslation?
As for the Chinese version of his slogan, 更多自由, 更多欢乐 -- that is, the version that 99.9% of the passersby would pay attention to -- I (wisely!) declared myself agnostic on how that should be read. And I had no explanation for the oddity of a panda talking about freedom in the first place.
The wisdom of the readers:
1) Many people, Chinese and otherwise, said that the ad was really a way of stressing that the pandas of Chengdu and greater Sichuan province now enjoyed bigger, freer enclosures than before and therefore are happier. Sounds like a stretch to me, but: OK. More on the pandas of Sichuan and the now-destroyed Wolong Panda Reserve in
this article and
this slideshow and
these posts.
1A) One man suggested that it was an ad for tea. The cup in the panda's
hand paw in fact says "tea."
UPDATE 1B):
John Zhu and some other native-speakers of Chinese have said that the "freedom" implied by the term 自由 really implies the ease, leisure, and kicking-back approach to life with which Chengdu is associated. By this reasoning, the ad is speaking neither about bigger enclosures for pandas, nor wider political liberties for people, but simply a nice-and-easy vacation in Sichuan.
2) I have had a delightful and instructive introduction to the mysteries of language via emails like the two I list after the jump. Basically the pattern has been this: an expert on the Chinese language who is
not a native speaker (linguistics professor, long-time resident, etc) writes to say: "Obviously the Chinese phrase means X..." The meaning of X varies from one expert to another. Then a native Chinese speaker will write in to say, "I dunno... could mean one thing, could mean the other."
3) And, with gratitude to all who wrote, my favorite reply was from reader KS who said that Subversive Panda "will be the name I suggest for my son's rock band, when he's old enough to have a rock band."
Illustrations of point 2, below.
________
Continue reading "Subversive Panda II: More freedom, more confusion (updated)" »
For old times' sake (updated)
Beijing, 3pm, October 22, 2008 -- 32 days after the Olympic/Paralympic emergency "clean air" rules came to an end. Feels like home again!
UPDATE: After a big thunderstorm last night and passage of a cold front, it's beautiful the following morning. Picture
shortlybelow.
Here is what a good cold front will do! Same pattern during the Olympics. For the first two days of the Games, despite all the cleanup measures, the air was opaque. Then a powerful cold front brought intense thunderstorms, and behind it clear, cooler dry air. Problem is, the fast-moving fronts are much rarer in northern China than in the eastern two-thirds of North America,where they're moving through every few days. Subject for another time.
For now, the view on October 23, 2008, at noon:
Must-see in Hong Kong: 'My Beijing Birthday'
If you're in Hong Kong tomorrow night, October 23, and you're not hospitalized, in jail, running the control tower at Hong Kong airport, or otherwise in possession of a good excuse for not attending, please get to the Hong Kong Arts Center by 7pm to see a screening of the wonderful hour-long documentary,
My Beijing Birthday. Details
here.
My wife and I saw a preview screening of the film before a small audience in Beijing back in July. (The audience was small mainly because of the pre-Olympic Beijing security hysteria. Authorities were discouraging or prohibiting gatherings of any size, for any reason, on grounds of general paranoia.) My main reaction after seeing it was the hope that very large audiences would be able to see it soon.
The set-up and plot-line sound bizarre when described. Howie Snyder, a New Yorker and skillful Mandarin-speaker now in his 40s, was in Beijing twelve years ago attending a school for traditional Chinese "cross-talk" stand-up comics. All the other students in the class were Chinese eight-year-olds. They specialize young here. Part of the film is footage of Snyder and his classmates back then; the other part is a revisit to the school this year, showing very dramatically what the passage of time has meant for Snyder, for the city of Beijing, for the tough-but-heart-of-gold director of the school, and for the kids, now age 20.
The film is funny and poignant in its own right; it made me fonder of Beijing than I would otherwise be; and it is one of the most powerful demonstrations of a theme I've tried to get across in most articles for the Atlantic: that this is a great big country not of a billion-person mass but of a billion-plus highly individualistic people.
See it in Hong Kong, or see it someplace else, as Snyder continues to work out distribution deals. (I believe it is now on the film-festival circuit.) You will thank me.
As if it were all a dream
Next Monday, it will be one month since the special Olympic-era traffic and pollution rules came to an end in Beijing. Through most of the last ten days, the skies and air have been spectacularly clear and beautiful in town. Here, blue skies are reflected in office windows in the Dongdan area a few days ago:
Today - oh boy. Traffic like the bad old days, and same for the smoky skies. Let us hope this is an aberration, rather than the new (and old) normal.
Jackal with a human face (updated)
The new issue of the Atlantic, just up
on line (and available with great photos and
new design for subscribers) has among many other offerings
my article about the ways in which Chinese officialdom so often makes the country look so much worse than it really is. It also includes an explanation of the "jackal" headline here.*
I just know this will be taken by all concerned in the spirit of constructive criticism! That's what I'm saying to friends here in Beijing.
UPDATE: Interesting to see, in
this BBC dispatch, that China's former ambassador to France is making a similar on-the-record constructive criticism of his own government. (Thanks to reader T.H.):
[Former ambassador] Wu Jianmin says China's image problem is caused at least in part by
its own officials because they do not know how to communicate with the
outside world.
He says they waste time using political cliches, talking nonsense, and making empty or outrageous claims.
_____
*Hint: when trying to discredit a Nobel Peace Prize winner also seen as a religious leader in much of the world and by some important sub-groups within China, what subtle imagery would some Chinese leaders choose?
Non-politics: Yellow Sheep River in Chinese
As previously mentioned
here and
here, the Atlantic's
October issue has an article I put a lot of effort and heart into. It was about an idealistic attempt to improve the prospects for children living in China's remote, scenic, and very poor far western regions, including an area called Yellow Sheep River. The article, "How the West Was Wired," is
here, and a narrated slideshow is
here.
If anyone was waiting to read it in Chinese, a translated version, prepared by the "Town and Talent" organization described in the article, is now available
here.
I realize that there is some irony in announcing, in English, the availability of a version for people who are not comfortable reading English. (Like the safety cards in airline exit rows: "If you cannot read these instructions, please let the flight crew know...") Still, I know that many Chinese readers are English-literate but naturally prefer to handle long material in Chinese. Here it is.
Something you don't see every day (Chinese leadership dept)
It's not posted at the CNN
archives site yet, but in a day or two look for and watch Fareed Zakaria's TV interview today with China's premier, or #2 leader, Wen Jiabao. (In the meantime, printed transcript is
here.
Update: video clips are now
available.) Interview appearances by Wen or president Hu Jintao are so rare, let alone with the foreign media, that this session is noteworthy simply for its existence.
It's interesting beyond that for Wen's
relative openness and non-defensiveness on a variety of issues, including the Dalai Lama and China's role in Darfur. (I am grading on the curve.) I have an article coming out pretty soon in the Atlantic about how very closed and defensive official Chinese spokesmen usually are when dealing with the outside world. This is an intriguing exception.
Given China's new role
as America's banker, U.S. citizens should also pay attention to passages like this:
ZAKARIA: There is another sense in which we are interdependent. China
is the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bills. By some accounts, you
hold almost $1 trillion of it. It makes Americans - some Americans -
uneasy. Can you reassure them that China would never use this status as
a weapon in some form?
WEN (voice of interpreter): As I said,
we believe that the U.S. real economy is still solidly based,
particularly in the high-tech industries and the basic industries.
Now, something has gone wrong in the virtual economy. But if this
problem is properly addressed, then it is still possible to stabilize
the economy in this country....
Of course, we are concerned about the safety and security of Chinese
money here. But we believe that the United States is a credible
country, and particularly at such difficult times, China has reached
out to the United States.
I am not sure I buy the claim that Wen has read the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 100 times. Still, that he can talk about it at all is impressive. Also, the small-d democrat in me wishes that Zakaria had not wrapped up the interview by addressing Wen as "Your Excellency." (I didn't hear the way the interpreter rendered that to Wen in Chinese.) That's my only cavil with a very impressive and useful interview.
Something I had forgotten....
.... in the seven years since my wife and I moved away from Berkeley, CA:
This really is the nicest place on earth.
Yes, you have your Tuscanys and your Cape Towns and your Vancouvers and all the rest (including
Duluth!). But when it comes to a locale that is actively beautiful and human-scaled and full of creature comforts and with mild climate,
and where first-rate work of importance to the world is also underway, Berkeley is hard to beat.
Which leads me to: if you happen to be in Berkeley today, Thursday, Sept, 25, I will be there too. Barrows Hall, 4pm,
talking about US-China relations. Then.... back to Beijing to keep learning about that topic.
Back to the future: Beijing after Sept. 20 (updated)
I'm temporarily out of China, but like all other Beijing residents I am acutely aware that today is the day when all the Olympic/Paralympic "blue sky" rules come to an end. No more even/odd license plate restrictions on how many cars can drive each day. No more limits on construction and construction dust. No more sweeping shutdowns for the cement plants, smelters, steel mills, and other heavy-industrial operations anywhere upwind of Beijing.
The emergency clean-up rules -- plus strong seasonal winds out of the northwest, plus what is usually the nicest time of the year -- have made a real difference:
Just before the rule change:
A month later:
Back in August, the
Imagethief blog offered an instantly-popular (if slightly premature) simile for the impending change:
Like a giant kid who's been holding a fart in during a three week
[now eight week] elevator ride, Beijing has apparently relaxed its many industrial
sphincters and let a big one rip.
I'll next see Beijing when the city has had a week to get back to "normal." Can't wait to get a look. It's been nice while it has lasted!
Update: Jim Bishop, who lives in Hebei province southwest of Beijing, writes to report on Day One of the new era: "The air went completely to hell here in
Baoding this week.
As bad as I have ever seen it in over six years." Hmmm.
Three from the archives
In the middle of Hellzapoppin news developments on the political and economic and
photo-journalism fronts, I am more or less off the grid for a few days -- out of touch, ironically, because I am immersed in meetings at a company that is all about the internet. For the moment, please indulge me in references to three past Atlantic articles I think are relevant to the day's news:
1) From three years ago,
Countdown to a Meltdown, in the Atlantic. Some parts of this imagined-history of the great American real estate and financial collapse of the late Bush era now seem amusingly dated. But I submit that as a primer on the factors behind the real estate and financial collapse of the late Bush era, it's not bad and is worth another look.
2) From nine months ago,
The $1.4 Trillion Question. The ordinary people of China, via their government's investment of the country's accumulated trade surpluses, are tremendously exposed to the American real estate and financial meltdown. The difference between those Chinese investors and the Americans who have lost their homes, pensions, jobs, etc is that the Chinese are on average so much poorer. Again I think the article stands up all right in explaining how this arrangement happened, and how long the Chinese will put up with it.
3) From this month,
How the West Was Wired. Ok, this isn't immediately connected to the breaking news. But, for me, it puts some of that news in perspective -- and describes a part of China and a slice of the human experience that left a bigger emotional mark on me than anything else I have seen in the last two years of travel through this country. On the chance that it will be overlooked in Lehman/AIG/lipstick frenzy, I mention it once more. Along with this
slide show and this link to a
charitable organization that is doing very impressive work and deserves support.
Back to Hellzapoppin in due course.
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" »
Yellow Sheep River
The
new issue of the Atlantic is in subscribers' hands and up on the web. It includes
my story on a touching and quixotic effort by two businessmen / idealists to bring the good parts of modern technology to a remote village in Gansu Province called Yellow Sheep River. Here is one of the people I write about, Kenny Lin, on horseback near a Tibetan prayer-flag structure in the 11,000-foot highlands outside Yellow Sheep River.
There's an accompanying slide show,
here, narrated with my best Beijing-air-induced chronic rasp, that gives an idea of how completely different China's far western regions look from the images of Shanghai and Beijing now familiar on TV.
The story talks about an odd-sounding but intriguing effort to lift children from rural poverty via ...blogging! In effect, it gives them scholarships that allow them to stay in (public) school, and in return they chronicle their lives in words and pictures on web sites, developing tech skills along the way. Here are some the children he is trying to help:
The main Chinese site for this project is
here; the English language version is
here. It includes an easy way to sponsor students for this work, as my wife and I have done and will continue to do.
In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept)
Through the past year-plus I've
discussed several times the value of Virtual Private Networks, VPNs, for avoiding the hassles created by China's internet-control system generally known as the Great Firewall. I won't give one more plug for the for-pay service my wife and I have been using, since I've mentioned it so often. But at $40 per year, per computer, to us it is worthwhile.
In an
Atlantic article six months ago about the Great Firewall, I noted that $40 per year meant different things to different people:
An expat in China [me!] thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: [$40] is a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.
My reaction to a new VPN offering shows that I may have forgotten my previous point. The service is called Hot Spot Shield, from AnchorFree. It's effective, extremely easy to install and run, designed for both Windows and Mac -- and absolutely free. (To download, and for more info, go
here.)
I first heard about this from my friend
Simon Elegant, and then from other China-based users. I tried it and found it technically very nice and efficient. But I didn't like using it at all. The reason is its "ad-based" business plan. In order to underwrite its free VPN service, it inserts an inch-high banner ad, often flashing, at the top of
every new web page you load or visit. There is a "close" button on those ads, but unless you click it every single time, you have an extra, flashing ad wherever you go.
To
me, on a day at the desk when I might open hundreds of new web sites, it is worth a total of 11 cents not to see a flashing banner at the top of every one. But the
recent surge of interest in Hotspot Shield within China suggests that for lots of people, this is an attractive tradeoff.
Update: Peter Bollig reports that the Opera browser automatically ignores the banner ads. Probably others can be configured the same way, but I didn't take the time to figure out how to do so with IE or Firefox.
Continue reading "In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept)" »
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun