Imagethief

Month: December 2007

  • Was the China corruption website collapse story “newsiness”?

    The greatest contribution that comedian Stephen Colbert has made to modern society is the concept of “truthiness”. Reading from the Wikipedia definition, truthiness is:

    …a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

    Miraculously, the entry goes on for another 3400 words on the concept of truthiness, proving not so much that truthiness is an important concept as that Wikipedia is balls-out for pop culture. Nevertheless, “truthiness” has transcended its comic-neologism origins to become a legitimate word, which says something about the zeitgeist.

    Imagethief wishes that Colbert had similarly enshrined the concept of “newsiness”. Borrowing from the definition above, newsiness could be described as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims is important or newsworthy without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts. It feels like news, whether it really is or not.

    This is something that we flacks are familiar with. At our worst PR types trade in newsiness, packaging up bits of corporate dander and passing them off as significant. But we’re not exclusively to blame. Sometimes newsiness arises spontaneously in the form of a story that is less than meets the eye. Last week’s story concerning the collapse of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention’s new website under apparently heavy traffic strikes me as an example of newsiness.

    Foreign coverage of this story can be traced backed to a Beijing Youth Daily article, which I don’t have a link for, and a subsequent English-language Xinhua report that was deftlymassaged into final form by our own Chris O’Brien of Beijing Newspeak. The story was that the recently constituted National Bureau of Corruption Prevention, a relatively toothless body set up to “collect and analyze information” on corruption, launched a new website that included a guestbook function enabling members of the public to post semi-anonymous comments. However the website crashed within hours of launch due to a “large number of visitors”.

    This fits very nicely into one of those social-issue memes that define much foreign news coverage of China, and that often take the form of “a nation struggling with [insert social issue here]“. Examples are a nation struggling with pollution; a nation struggling with censorship; a nation struggling with Internet addiction; and so on. The issues are set up via colorful or heartstring-yanking anectodes often involving stoic, salt-of-the-earth 老百姓 types recalling their woes, and rounded out with a mix of quotes from NGOs/overseas experts/local academics/old China hands and the kind of eye-popping statistics that China excels at generating and that make pretty much any problem here seem thoroughly intractable.

    In fact, much good journalism is done this way and it works well for the home audience that reads one newspaper. But if, like Imagethief, you are a news junkie living in China and you read vast troughs of China coverage from a range of publications, it’s hard not not to notice the formula.

    This system also promotes the dissemination of lightweight stories that simply fit into issues established by precedent. This particular story originated via the Xinhua article, which seems to have originated as a “why our website went down” disclosure formality. It plugged nicely into the “nation struggling with corruption” meme and was duly picked up by the foreign press, almost all of which cited the Xinhua article. The tone and detail of the foreign stories vary a bit, but looking at the headlines and ledes a clear mental picture emerges:

    Reuters:
    China anti-graft Web site felled by “too many hits”
    BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese government Web site encouraging citizens to report corruption crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits.

    AFP:
    China anti-graft website crashes under public complaints
    BEIJING (AFP) — The website of China’s new anti-graft bureau crashed shortly after going online due to the huge volume of messages from the public complaining about rampant corruption, state media said Wednesday.

    Telegraph:
    China’s new anti-corruption website crashes
    A Chinese government website set up for the public to complain about corruption crashed within a day of launching under the volume of cases reported.

    The website was constructed by the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention to collect information on corrupt activities as part of an ongoing purge by the Beijing authorities.

    Associated Press:
    Anti-graft Web site swamped in China
    BEIJING: A new Web site created by China’s anti-corruption bureau crashed after barely a day because too many visitors had tried to log on to register complaints, state media reported Wednesday.

    Washington Post:
    Chinese Assail Official Misconduct With Fervor
    BEIJING, Dec. 19 — China’s new National Bureau of Corruption Prevention thought it would be a good idea to open a Web site for citizens to denounce crooked officials. The idea was so good that the site was immediately deluged this week by irate Chinese, overwhelming the system and causing several crashes during the first two days of operation.

    So what did you see in your head? Imagethief saw an image of zillions of oppressed Chinese people desperately clicking on the NBCP’s web page. This is image was helped along by the recent, widely publicized woes of BOCOG’s Olympic ticket sales website, which really did crash under the fevered clicking of zillions of people. But unlike the Olympic ticketing stories, in which the actual traffic and transaction load on the site was reported, the only figure in any of the stories above is the number of pages of comments, ranging from 16 to “more than 20″. Only the AP story lists a specific number of comments: 250. An NBCP official was quoted in the Xinhua article as saying, “The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations.”

    Well, yes, but what were your expectations?

    Hoping to find more information, Imagethief took himself to the site for a first-hand look. As of last Friday there were still about 20 pages of comments, each with fifteen individual posts, for a total of about 300. Anyone who has spent time on a popular Chinese blog or in the forums knows that this is pretty small beer. For comparison, when CCTV 9 anchor Rui Chenggang condemned the Forbidden City Starbucks on his Sina blog just under a year ago, he got 450 comments in 24 hours, on his way to nearly 3000. Sam Flemming’s CIC, which monitors Chinese online buzz, tracked over 4 million posts on automobiles in the three-month period from April-June of this year (full report — PDF, registration required).

    These are not entirely fair comparisons. The degree of freedom people feel to comment about corruption is not the same as they feel to comment on the Chery QQ or foreign coffee shops, and the overlap of corruption victims with Internet users is smaller than that of car aficionados. But it does introduce some perspective on what constitutes a “hot” online issue in China.

    Corruption is a real issue here. The corruption website collapse story is neat enough to tie a Christmas bow around, and the foreign reports are all factually accurate, insofar as they essentially relay the Xinhua report. But what does this incident really say about Chinese society and the problem of corruption? There is a big difference between a site that was designed to support tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous visitors and was still overwhelmed by crushing demand, such as the Olympic ticketing site, and a small-potatoes site that fell over under moderate traffic or because it was designed, programmed or tested badly. Imagethief designed and developed e-commerce sites for many years and can assure readers that this a common problem. But “China anti-graft website collapses under public complaints”, to borrow one of the headlines above, is going to get many more people reading than, “China anti-graft website collapses because of poor programming”.

    Fine. That’s the news business. Gotta get eyeballs on the page, and Imagethief, a subway commuter who reads on the way to the office, likes a punchy newspaper as much as the next guy. No harm in relaying a vacuous Xinhua story (sorry, Chris — not your fault), especially when it fits so neatly into an existing pigeonhole. It’s still “newsiness”, but if nothing else it can help keep our minds off of much more worrying things, like the ever dumber things American politicians are saying about China.

  • Why the Yilishen ant-farming scandal was the perfect China story

    Imagethief recently found himself huddled in a wintry hutong courtyard in conversation with two longtime Beijing-based foreign correspondents. During this discussion we came to the conclusion that the recent Yilishen ant-farming scandal is more or less the perfect China story. It brings together at a stroke all of the elements of the modern Chinese story. And surreal story it is.

    If you’re not familiar with this incident (and you really should be), you can go read Mark O’Neill’s comprehensive article on Asia Sentinel, or any of several other stories which, collectively, have generated something of a bumper crop in pun headlines.

    But if you’re pressed for time here is a synopsis: The Yilishen Tianxi Group, a Shenyang-based company, was manufacturing an allegedly aphrodisiac tonic made from ants, which are widely believed to have medicinal properties in traditional Chinese medicine. But rather than wrangle ants itself (nothing feels as good as bringing in a herd, I hear) Yilishen’s scheme was to sell would-be ant farming “investors” boxes of special medicinal ants at RMB10,000 for three. Along with the boxes came a promise that once the ants matured (read: died), about 14 months later, Yilishen would buy them back for RMB13,250. That’s a 30% guaranteed gain over 14 months which, while not quite pre-meltdown A-shares, kicks the ass of many a hedge fund.

    Except that the Yilishen ant trade was a pyramid scheme, and it went spectacularly bust, leaving tens of thousands of Dongbei punters short RMB10,000 and long three boxes of worthless ants. Not exactly Warren Buffet. Outraged ant farmers from across Liaoning province rioted in Shenyang, the government imposed a news blackout and the wujingarmed police headed north to diligently maintain a harmonious sociey, which is hard under these circumstances.

    You simply could not make it up. Ten Hollywood screenwriters locked in a closet with a kilo of blow, a brick of twenty dollar bills, your sister and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee in boxer shorts wouldn’t come up with this. Even if they weren’t on strike. Only China comes up with this. And not only does China alone come up with this, but the story also nicely draws together all the threads of the modern, Chinese narrative and ties them into a pretty bow. Just look at what this story offers:

    Social Issues
    The Dongbei is China’s rustbelt; a swathe of deep-frozen, fading industrial towns that were once the showpieces of Maoist industrial collectivization. While the cosmopolitan port city of Dalian has blossomed in China’s post-reform economy, much of the region has struggled to keep up with the go-go development of the two Deltas and the capital. Hence the “振兴东北老工业基地” (Revitalize Northeastern Industrial Base) campaign and those tragic stories of families’ life savings being sunk into ants and ant-aunties pooling the funds of their neighborhood taiqi group to go in on a few lucky boxes. Apparently about a million people bought into the ant-dream. Could ant farming be symbolic of the economic desperation of an entire region? Or might it just be a punt? Who cares, because there was also…

    Sex
    About 98 percent of Chinese medicines are aphrodisiacs. The average Chinese pharmacy is about half aphrodisiacs and half prophylactics with one or two boxes of nasty, herbal flu medicine just in case. The reason why rhinoceros and tigers have been hunted to near extinction is to make Chinese aphrodisiacs. Imagethief himself once appeared in a television commercial for a Chinese aphrodisiac. They’re that ubiquitous. You’d think the Chinese had never heard of p0rn. And what goes better with sex than…

    Corruption
    Yilishen Group turned out to be well connected throughout Liaoning provincial circles. This had apparently helped fuel its rise in the province, but also motivated embarrassed local officials to make the whole situation go away as soon as possible. That left bereft antherds with the usual channels of legal recourse available to the small-time victim under provincial Chinese jurisprudence: none. Therefore, the only alternative was…

    Mass incidents
    Ten thousand ant farmers rioted in a provincial capital. Imagethief asks you: What country other than China could cough up that lede? Mass incidents are the sine qua non of the modern Chinese scandal. In a rare and rapidly regretted moment of candor the authorities once admitted that there were 74,000 of them in 2004, up 28% on the year before (not quite as much as the pre-collapse return on ants, but still pretty good). No pressing social issue is complete without one. Chemical plant going up on your rice paddies? Shanty being expropriated for Olympic development? Local manufacturers turning your once limpid lake into a festering pool of PCBs and heavy metals? Two words: Mass incident! However, this may be the first one caused by…

    Ants
    Ants? Yes, Alice, ants. Imagethief tries to maintain a culturally sensitive respect for traditional Chinese medicine. Indeed, when I pinched a nerve in my shoulder two years ago I took traditional Chinese medicine and had a round of cupping (note to Americans: it’s not as dirty as it sounds). It worked, I believe, only because the medicine was so nauseatingly foul and the cupping so excruciatingly painful that I willed myself to recover so that I wouldn’t have to endure a second course of treatment.

    But, really, an ant-based sex tonic? Hasn’t this ground been trodden before? The image of so many fevered, Chinese investors hunched over their RMB10,000 boxes of magical ants is both funny and desperately tragic. Unfortunately it was all a bit too much embarrassment for the Chinese authorities, so naturally…

    The whole thing was harmonized
    Mainstream coverage evaporated and the search term “Yilishen” went down the Chinese Internet memory hole once the authorities decided they’d had enough. Previously uploaded videos and blog posts dropped gnats in a frost. China’s pre-eminent citizen journalist, Zuola, a veteran of the Chongqing nailhouse and Xiamen PX stories, wasescorted out of Liaoning. To add insult to injury he was apparently made to pay for his own plane ticket. No word on whether he had to pay for the tickets of the goons who escorted him.

    Imagethief has a friend from Shenyang who complained bitterly about the suppressed media coverage. “It’s not like we don’t all already know about it,” she said, admitting that her own parents had been among Yilishen’s legion of ant farmers. “It’s so…” she considered the English word she wanted to use…”insulting.”

    Meanwhile, many of the Yilishen riot videos harmonized from Chinese video sharing sites have found their way onto YouTube. You can’t keep a good story (or a bitter ant tonic) down.

    And that’s all there is to it
    Imagethief in no way wishes to minimize the plight of Yilishen’s investors. RMB10,000 is a lot of money by any standards. My friend from Shenyang also explained that her parents neighbors had invested RMB60,000, and they knew people who had invested a whopping RMB1,000,000. Imagethief also doesn’t think that investors in Yilishen’s ants were stupid. Scams and pyramid schemes thrive everywhere. Successful ones are cleverly engineered to appealed to the society in which they operate. Yilishen was a well known brand that had been in business for several years and had a good reputation. Traditional remedies are still widely used and respected in China, and ants are part of the pharmacopoeia. Virility tonics are popular. Combine all of that with a cultural affinity for gambling and a get-rich-now zeitgeist and you have a China story for the times.

    For sheer swoop and color it sure beats the rise and fall of China’s other great pyramid scheme, A-shares.

    Eat me.
    Eat me.

    Notes:

    • Photo copyright Alex Wild, from his superb ant and insect photography gallery.
    • Imagethief realizes he is a bit behind the story. This post has been in drafting for ten days. Darn those day-jobs.

  • What to make of Edwin Maher?

    Imagethief found the LA Times article on CCTV9′s western anchorman, Edwin Maher, quite interesting. I didn’t have time to comment on it when it first appeared, but in general I found the story balanced as it presented both criticisms and defenses of Maher’s choice to work for Chinese state-owned media. It was, thus, interesting to see some of the subsequent discussion that emerged, especially at Black and White Cat, which translated aGlobal Times article excoriating the western press for criticizing Maher.

    Rather than rehash old ground, I will point you to Cam MacMurchy’s latest post at Zhongnanhai, which, I think, does a very good job of answering the Global Timescriticisms and analyzing the original story. It’s well worth a read.

    I will, however, add a few other thoughts.

    What is it about westerners who appear on television that attracts our particular ire? Anyone wanting to look deeper into this phenomenon need only consider Dashan. If there is a foreigner who elicits more widespread contempt from fellow western expatriates I’ve yet to encounter him (or her). One friend of mine attributed this to latent racism. It’s all very well to live and work in China, but to be seen acting ridiculous for the entertainment of the Chinese is taboo. My friend memorably referred to this as the “Dance, monkey!” syndrome.

    Maher seems to have earned himself the same kind of contempt. Even Imagethief has written unkind things about him in past. But everyone who works in business in China is complicit with the Chinese government to some degree. We’re all doing our bit to prop up the State. An explicit part of my job is helping foreign companies to pander to the Chinese government. That’s why we’re always helping companies to talk about their “commitment to China”.

    It’s true that anything having to do with propaganda or censorship touches a particularly raw nerve in people from liberal democracies (including Imagethief), but there are plenty of other westerners working in the Chinese media. Imagethief has met many bright people who work or have worked for Xinhua, China Radio International and the China Daily.  One of them, Xinhua polisher Chris O’brien, writes Beijing Newspeak, one of the best China blogs around. The now defunct Positive Solutions gave us an entertaining inside look at the China Daily for nearly two years. (Positive Solutions author Charlie has since gone on to more glamorous things, like many other western veterans of Chinese media.) Cam himself is a Chinese media veteran.

    But both Chris and Charlie also excelled at taking their employers down a peg, and giving the rest of us amusing glimpses of the mechanisms driving state-owned English language media. I believe they were forgiven because they were seen as our spies inside; people who obviously didn’t buy into the product. And, of course, neither of them was in a publicly visible or bylined role.

    And this is where Maher is different. He is very visible and in the LA Times piece he is unapologetic. I believe that’s what leads those of us who don’t know him personally to dismiss him. We observers of China’s state-owned media have perfected our airs of cynical dismissal. We know how it works. We know the agenda. We can read between the big and clumsily drawn lines. We’re always happy to ridicule its amateurism and censorship. Armed with our prejudices, when confronted with someone who publicly buys into the mission of China’s English language media we are forced to see them as either dupe or collaborator. And also, if you want to be incendiary, as race traitor. None of those labels allows much room for nuance or charity.

    I don’t know Edwin Maher and I don’t think it is fair for me to judge him as an individual. On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly fair for me, or anyone else who watches CCTV9, to judge him as a media professional. Other than as a crude barometer of the Chinese government’s agenda I don’t have much time for CCTV9, or any of the state-run English language media. Their failure isn’t in presenting the Chinese government’s point of view, but in doing so spectacularly clumsily. Maher shouldn’t be criticized for helping the Chinese government to tell its story. If anything, he should be criticized for not helping them to tell it better.

    See also:

    Inside Chinese state TV (Informed Comment – H/T ESWN)

  • I hate Secret Santa

    Imagethief likes the holiday season. He is not one of those December curmudgeons who bah-humbugs his way through Christmas. Give me trees, tinsel, candy canes and a big dinner with my friends. My dad used to roast a goose for Christmas. How traditional is that? And we’re Jewish.

    There is, however, one Christmas tradition that I dread every year, and that never gets any easier to deal with. That is the office “secret Santa” program.

    Anyone who works in a large office probably endures something similar. The way it works in our office is that the office assistant walks around with a box from which you draw the name of a colleague. You then have to buy that person a gift for under 50RMB. The gifts are all presented at a Christmas party at which Santa Clause, played by the white guy who most recently joined the company, calls each person up one-by-one to receive his or her anonymous gift. I did the Santa gig myself my first Christmas with the company, three years ago, and spent a miserable, hot, itchy two hours in the Santa suit pulling artificial whiskers out of my mouth while my colleagues, sat on my lap one by one. Someone else will be pulling those same spit-encrusted whiskers out of his mouth this year.

    I would play Santa every year if I could only get out of the gift-giving, though.

    The problem is that we are a fairly big company and I inevitably draw the name of someone I don’t know. This is a pain because if it’s a friend you have two decent options: either you have some idea of their tastes and you can get something you will be reasonably sure they will like; or you can get them a gag gift and be confident they won’t take the wrong way.

    But I never, ever draw the name of someone I know well. I always get the shy, new, Chinese girl who doesn’t talk and whom nobody knows. I have a 100% perfect track record of this. And I know most of the people in the company (although given that I just spent ten months in Shanghai there is a slightly higher proportion of unfamiliar faces than normal). It’s like they’re rigging the draw on me.

    In fact, I learned this year that some of my colleagues were re-drawing until they picked the name of someone they knew. I had no idea such a thing was allowed or I would have gamed my own draw. Some people in are office are easy to buy for, such as the company driver (baijiu). But, no, I had to play by the rules and ended up with a new girl who works way at the other end of the office and who has a spartan desk that reveals nothing about her life, loves, hopes, pets, celebrity crushes, get-even list, or anything else that might be remotely useful in picking a gift.

    Not that with 50RMB to spend I could get all that creative. Our offices are in Oriental Plaza, which features a mall where the list of things that can be purchased for under RMB50 is this long:

    • Dumplings.

    Trust me: You don’t want to leave a box of gift wrapped dumplings under the tree for too long, unless you want to deck the halls with vomit on Christmas morning.

    Thus inspired, I invariably procrastinate my purchase until the last possible minute and then end up in one of two places: Watsons or the “Ole!” supermarket. There I end up contemplating the usual range of naff or inappropriate possibilities. Doraemon shampoo? Nahh, toiletries are too personal. Who knows what fragrance this girl likes? Condoms? I don’t want to be hacked to death by her family And anyway, the Japanese ones are RMB75 and thus over the budget. Muesli? Nail polish? Stationery? A fake Rolex? (You have to go outside to buy this.) None of it seems very exciting. And the western get-out-of-Christmas-jail-free card, the gift certificate, doesn’t really seem to exist here.

    I actually thought about breaking the rules this year and spending semi-lavishly just for the hell of it. Why not buy her a real Swatch or Casio watch? Or an iPod Nano? Or a sexy mobile phone? That would rock the party. But it might also kindle jealousy, dangerous recriminations or the (wrong) assumption that a certain Santa was on the make. The program might be “anonymous”, but even a fairly retarded detective could identify the offending Santa by simple elimination. This is especially true as secret Santas tend to out themselves at the party unless they are particularly ashamed of their gifts.

    Faced with these undesirable options I elect to punt: I buy candy. At least, my theory goes, she can share it with her teammates if she doesn’t like it. Having become acquainted with the strange, Chinese fascination for a certain kind of imported candy, and mind controlled by the miles of it on display, I made the inevitable choice. Ironically, even though I have a world-beating sweet tooth inherited from my English, goose-roasting father, I hate this particular candy. How pathetic is that? I  bought this poor girl whom I don’t even know candy that I can’t stand because I was too creatively bankrupt to come up with a better choice. Merry freakin’ Christmas.

    To make this situation extra tragic, I have one-and-a-half boxes of this same candy sitting at home. They were brought over to my house by one of my colleagues when I had a team dinner recently. But these were in a distinctively shaped package, and I didn’t want to give the same configuration, lest my naked re-gifting ploy be spotted. Those candies are destined for my ahyi. She’s from Anhui. She’ll eat anything. Or, more likely, huishou it for cash.

    So bought an RMB45 box of candy I already had and put in a gift bag that cost another RMB20, thus putting me over the limit but, I figure, allowing me to squeak by on a technicality as the bag isn’t technically the gift. I probably should have given her an envelope with cash in it.

    I console myself with the thought that most of my colleagues, Chinese and foreign, aren’t much better at this than me. While buying my “gift” today I bumped into another colleague who was on the same mission. She, however, opted for default choice two, different famous candy brand. A couple of years ago one colleague of mine was so unimpressed with her secret Santa gift –which I won’t describe here for fear of driving someone to suicide– that she “forgot” it in the back of a taxi on the way home from the party. It wasn’t even worth passing to her ahyi. It was that bad.

    At least I have this burdensome task dealt with for another year. But I’ll be on a plane back from a meeting in Japan during this year’s Christmas party. That’s a shame because, secret Santa aside, I genuinely enjoy the Christmas party. But at least I won’t be there to see the look of numb indifference on my colleague’s face when she becomes the 20th person that evening to receive a box of the same candy.

    Ho, ho, ho.

    Note: Slightly edited from the original to add some deniability.