Imagethief

  • China and the nature of Facebook

    Reports have been percolating for a couple of weeks that Facebook will partner with Chinese search engine Baidu to launch Facebook China, or something similar. Anyone who has followed the history of foreign Internet firms in China knows that this is fraught territory. Chinese competitors are well established, and while many successful Chinese Internet firms have foreign backing of some kind (even Baidu once claimed Google as an investor), marquee marriages between Chinese and Foreign Internet companies have often been troubled.

    There are others better placed than me to speculate on the likely business fortunes of a Facebook China (cf. Epstein, Bishop), but what really interests me are the communication challenge and reputational consequences. Some glimpse of those possible consequences came in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook’s lobbying efforts that ran yesterday. It included the following:

    [Facebook] is talking with potential Chinese partners about entering the huge China market, where the government has been cracking down on dissidents. That crackdown has come in response to the uprisings shaking authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, movements that have used U.S.-based social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter as organizing tools.

    “Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

    Yowza! Better work on those talking points and come up with something that doesn’t sound quite so paternalistic. Read as generously as possible, this is one quote from what one presumes was a larger discussion on the issues of running transnational social networks in countries with different approaches to censorship and freedom of speech. Read less generously, it sounds like a lobbyist for Facebook arrogating to his client the responsibility to decide what constitutes an appropriate amount of free speech in any given country. Risky territory.

    From a business point of view deciding an appropriate amount of free speech might be a practical necessity. From a public communication point of view it’s dangerous. Five years ago, when Facebook was still a plucky upstart too trivial to be noticed, Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft were hauled in front of a congressional hearing to testify on their activities in China and their willingness to accommodate governments with illiberal approaches to free speech. It was not a banner moment for the American Internet industry. “Moral pygmies!” declared Tom Lantos, the principal congressional antagonist. Much of the cast has changed and Tom Lantos has since died, but the issue remains sensitive. (Not all the cast has changed. Facebook’s current head of communication, Elliott Schrage, represented Google in the 2007 hearings.)

    Facebook itself has not committed publicly to anything in China. They also haven’t yet committed any of the blunders that those four firms did (most notoriously Yahoo, with the Shi Tao affair). Finally, Facebook hasn’t made nobility a part of their brand in the way that Google conspicuously did in its early days, something that was used against Google in its China engagement. In fact, if anything Facebook is known for a kind of calculating amorality that may be useful in the ruthlessly sharp-elbowed Chinese Internet world.

    But what’s important here is not how Facebook sees itself, but rather how people at large see it, and how activists and politicians think they can use it to drive their own agendas. Whether Facebook likes it or not, it has been publicly associated with recent events in the Middle East and is widely seen as a force for enabling dissidents and protestors whose causes resonate with western publics and politicians. See for example New York Timesstories here, here and here. Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell might ridicule the notion of social media as democracy tools, but that won’t necessarily dispel a belief that was made clear in the 2007 hearings: American Internet firms should represent American values.

    Companies’ decisions about China are revealing. Facebook’s decision on whether or not to formally enter China will be especially interesting. It will establish something fundamental about the identity of one of the two most powerful Internet companies on the planet. Is Facebook, as some have supposed, the great enabler of democracy? Or is it a company of business pragmatists willing to censor (or delegate censorship) in order to open a potentially lucrative market? The reality is probably more nuanced than either of those positions, but as far as public perception goes it will be difficult to have it both ways. How does one balance groups of stakeholders with completely incompatible views on what constitutes a responsible and conscientious Internet firm?

    The nut of the problem is that, right or wrong, democracy activists, American politicians and the Chinese authorities all tend to see American Internet firms as standard bearers for western values. Facebook’s task is to convince the Chinese authorities otherwise while not making activists or western users in general feel betrayed. I can think of few more precarious communication challenges. The quote above is an unpromising start.

    Update:

    Obama hosted a town hall at Facebook HQ yesterday. Interesting. And likely to be noticed here in Beijing.

    See also:

  • Apocalypse box part two: Apocalypse box

    Bummer, but at least I've got chili.
    Bummer, but at least I’ve got chili.

    Yesterday I posted part one of Apocalypse Box, in which I wrote a bit about the communication problems surrounding the reactor disaster in Japan. I concluded with saying that just because something is unthinkable doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

    It was with the unthinkable in mind (as it were) that Mrs. Imagethief and I set about reconstituting our household emergency kit in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Six years ago, when all the world believed that lethal bird flu was but a sneeze away, the wife and I assembled a reasonably comprehensive household emergency kit. This consisted of two weeks of non-perishable food, drinking water, and various household supplies such as batteries, candles, gloves and such. I called this our “apocalypse box.” To be clear, the box (technically, two boxes) was not really designed for the apocalypse, so much as it was designed to enable us to withstand a run on supermarkets and a temporary disruption of services. But “apocalypse box” sounds cooler than “temporary disruption of services box.”

    There was a return-on-investment calculation at work. Let’s face it: If civilization actually collapses Roland Emmerich style, a couple of cans of Dinty Moore stew and a Bic lighter are probably not going to make the difference between survival and being devoured by feral dogs (just for example). For that kind of Mad Maxery you need a crate of assault rifles, a cave in Wyoming and, of course, the last of the V8 interceptors*. And liquor. Lots of liquor.

    But the investment required for that level of extreme preparation measured against my relatively low estimate of the chances civilization actually collapsing Mad Max-style in my lifetime rings up no-sale. Two plastic bins of food and general supplies measured against the possibility of a run on supermarkets or a temporary disruption in power and goods distribution looks much more rational and less militia-nutcase. Especially in China. It’s not that it might not be useful to have a crate of assault rifles and a fully stocked cave in Wyoming, just in case. It’s just that it seems to me that the resources I would have to invest in such a level of preparation is better spent on, oh, health insurance or rent or cat food (can always eat the cats).

    There is some family precedent for this preparation. I grew up in California where we all heard as children that someday the Big One would come, the state would drop into the sea and that would just be tough shit. Or variations on that story. When I was in high school my mom used to keep a large bin of provisions and bottled water in the garage. My brother used to keep beer hidden in the tool closet. But that wasn’t really for survival purposes so much as to keep my mom from finding it.

    In 1989 I was living in Santa Cruz during the nearby 7.1 Loma Prieta quake. Crouched on my kitchen floor as the cupboards emptied out I actually rather expected to drop into the sea, which wasn’t very far away. (Although as we have learned a couple of times in recent years, in these situations it turns out the sea may come to you.) In any event, Loma Prieta wasn’t The Big One, though it was Pretty Big and did do a lot of damage. There was in fact a smallish run on supermarkets in Santa Cruz after the quake, although everything was back to normal within a day or two. Having also been in Singapore during the  SARS epidemic, I’ve long thought it made sense to have a certain basic level of preparation for extra-weird times. It took the bird flu phantom to kick us into actual preparation, but then we moved to Shanghai and back in 2007 and the apocalypse box went by the wayside for four years.

    I had actually been thinking about the old emergency kit quite a bit over the last few months, and mumbling about doing something about it in the same way that one mumbles about getting one’s teeth cleaned or other disagreeable but virtuous chores. But Fukushima and the great Beijing salt run of ’11 kicked us into high gear. I know from experience that I can go without food for some time, but to leave Mrs. Imagethief hungry is to dice with death. We made a pass through Wal-Mart and Jenny Lou’s and assessed where we stood. Where we stood was on a pile of mostly canned legumes and absolutely no Beano. This begged the question, if the apocalypse actually did strike, would anyone in our house still want to be alive after 24 hours of the farts?

    In fact, on review the whole assortment seemed very conventionally western. If you’re really going hardcore, you’d want to lay in some things with local value so that they could be traded for ammunition, gasoline, breeding age females, or whatever it is you may need for your bunker. In China that argues for an emergency kit stocked with dried cuttlefish, melon seeds and baijiu. But one of our guiding principles was that the apocalypse box should contain food we’d actually want to eat. This is both so that we’re not completely miserable in the event of an emergency (who wants to be sitting in the light of one guttering candle, banging your hands together for heat and morosely staring at a bag of deep-fried crab snax?), and also because things need to be rotated out and eaten periodically as they reach their expiry dates. Yes, I have a spreadsheet with all the expiry dates.

    Some recalibrating of the supplies yielded a more balanced though rather salty mix of canned meats and vegetables, and calorie-dense dried fruits, nuts and chocolate and such, with the idea being that at least some of the supplies be easily portable in the event of an evacuation.

    That’s right, evacuation. Perhaps I’ll regret this someday, but I am not actually paranoid enough to keep a “go-bag,” a pack with the essentials you’d need to carry in the event of  sudden evacuation. Like the cave in Wyoming, this is just a touch too Jack Bauer for me. But I am paranoid enough to keep a “go-list”, which is designed to save me the trouble of thinking under pressure and tells me exactly what we should pack for two kinds of evacuation.

    The first is a walking trip to the airport (roughly a day’s walk from where we live). The other is an indefinite walking evacuation to points unknown. Both include essential documents, specifics on clothing, a list of easily portable food items, basic tools and such. The indefinite one trades laptops for more food and clothing and some backpacking supplies and such. Alas, the cats come out poorly in both scenarios. I also keep current documents in the cloud and an annual backup of all my important data in the United States, just in case. I mean, who wants to re-rip all those CDs just because someone dropped The Bomb?

    Let me be clear: I don’t think my family is in danger. If I did, we wouldn’t live here. The point behind the apocalypse box is to take a reasonable level of precaution for unforeseen events. It was a couple thousand RMB plus some things I already owned, and it all fits into two stacked bins that double as an end-table in my son’s room. The evacuation go-list has a marginal cost of zero, other than a little thinking ahead. Two weeks ago I had lunch with a journalist friend who’d just returned from reporting in Japan, and he showed me the unused bunny suit his newspaper had issued him. This made me feel completely rational.

    The spreadsheet on which I keep track of all this stuff is public on Google Docs. Feel free to check it out – there are three sheets (hold your jokes). Don’t take that document as definitive – it’s just where we stand now and not meant to constitute advice to you or your family. But maybe it will give you some ideas. Or maybe you’ll see stuff we’ve missed. Or maybe you’ll think –perhaps with some justification– that I’m a complete idiot. But, should the worst ever happen and the supermarkets empty out for a few days, I’m gonna be loving me that chili. And when you’re trading your children to me for chocolate bars, we’ll see who’s laughing.

    *A piece of history. Be a shame to blow it up.

  • Apocalypse box part one: Thinking unthinkable thoughts

    Note: This is part one. Part two is here.

    Apropos of today’s escalation of the Fukushima reactor disaster to “7″ (Chernobyl) on the international scale, there is something about the word “radiation” that bypasses rationality and whispers right to the lizard brain. Perhaps one or two other words have the same power to spook. “Pandemic” comes to mind. But that aside, there is little else I that has quite the same potency as “radiation.” Almost all the connotations are negative: Contamination; the atom bomb; fallout; nuclear waste disposal; dirty bombs; Godzilla; the ugly, yellow trefoil symbol. Even radiation’s positive connotations are negative. Nuclear medicine might save you…if you have cancer! And the New York Times has spent the past year running a series of stories about nuclear medicine gone horribly wrong. Radiation? Duck and cover.*

    All this would seem to make any public communication about radiation hazards tricky. I can’t, however, speak from experience. Perhaps fortunately, Imagethief has never been called upon to participate in crisis communications involving radiation. Or nerve gas leaks or alien invasion or anything with quite the same pilo-erective zing. I’ve done food problems a couple of times. Also, years ago I helped an insurance industry association roll out a chain of inspection centers for mandatory post-collision inspections, which may actually be the closest I have ever come to being between a client and a torch-bearing mob. In terms of public sentiment, insurance and radiation aren’t actually all that different.

    The challenge in a public safety communication situation is to find that delicate line between keeping people well informed and prepared for the worst, and going overboard and triggering a destructive panic. This isn’t a trivial thing. To get an idea of how easy it is for hysteria to blossom in the right circumstances, recall that at the height of the Japan nuclear issue there was a run on table salt (rumored to prevent radiation sickness) in Beijing, 2000 kilometers upwind of the Fukushima reactors.

    What’s the worst that could happen?

    The natural tendency in crisis communications is to undershoot and be tight-lipped. This happens for all kinds of reasons, of which avoidance of panic is perhaps the only noble one. The others include optimism or wishful thinking that the worst is over, poor communication planning, bad communication culture, and the general tendency to choose ass-coverage over ‘fessing up for any number of legal, reputational and personal reasons.

    The problem with undershooting communication in an escalating crisis is that you wind up making a series of hopeful the-worst-is-over pronouncements, each of which is rapidly obliterated by events. TEPCO is a case study of this syndrome. So is BP from last year. Both companies wound up in a kind of reverse-Chicken-Little situation, where public trust evaporated and no one believed them anymore. In both situations, government wrested much of the public communication responsibility away. Getting publicly ejected from the drivers’ seat is not good for credibility.

    If you were forced to choose between timidity and risk of panic, you might choose timidity as the lesser of two evils. But in public safety situations the rumors and misinformation that can drive hysteria are likely to thrive in the vacuum created by poor communication or lack of trust. The Beijing salt-run is illustrative. Ask yourself: strictly hypothetically speaking, how conducive would it be to public order to have an escalating radiation crisis being managed by an organization that no one believes?

    This is the situation that TEPCO appears to have found itself in. A good analysis of their situation from a communication point of view can be found in PR trade The Holmes Report. Paul Holmes introduces consultant Peter Sandman’s useful “hazard vs. outrage” model of risk communication. Hazard is the actual danger to people. Outrage is the emotional reaction provoked. Varying ratios of hazard and outrage inform communication strategies in risk situations. The irony for TEPCO is that the actual hazard has to this point been pretty low. But the outrage factor is, if you’ll pardon the pun, nuclear. Holmes lists some of the key factors driving that outrage:

    • Coerced risk causes more outrage than voluntary risk, and the majority of people living close to nuclear plants did not volunteer to be exposed to the risk;
    • Industrial risk causes more outrage than natural risk, and nuclear is pretty obviously industrial;
    • Exotic risk causes more outrage than familiar risk, and most people are far less familiar with nuclear power than they are with oil and gas;
    • Memorable risk causes more outrage than unmemorable risk, and nuclear incidents—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl—are extremely memorable;
    • Dreaded risk causes more outrage than undreaded risk, and activist groups have been successful in creating and nurturing nuclear dread;
    • Catastrophic risk causes more outrage than chronic risk, which may be the biggest challenge, since nuclear incidents tend to be catastrophic, while fossil fuels do their damage primarily by creating chronic illnesses and environmental problems;
    • Risk controlled by others causes more outrage than risk controlled by individuals (which is why people fear air travel more than car travel), and nuclear power is completely beyond an individual’s control.

    A longer and very interesting analysis of the Fukushima situation by Mr. Sandman himself can be found on his website. Mr. Sandman’s conclusion with regard to crisis communication is: Always err on the alarming side, until you are absolutely 100% certain the situation cannot get any worse. Else risk your credibility and thus your ability to respond. Communications professionals would also do well to read security expert Bruce Schneier’s writings about how people evaluate and respond to risks, which dovetails with many of Mr. Sandman’s points. I recommend Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear. It’s a few years old, but still relevant.

    In TEPCO’s defense, the playbook for nuclear catastrophe communication in the midst of a general natural disaster is pretty thin. There are exactly zero precedents. Even absent the natural disaster component, there have been only three previous reactor accidents of any scope: Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Only Three Mile Island is really analogous to Fukushima, but the communication there was also blown, as Mr. Sandman points out. But it shouldn’t really matter whether there is a precedent or not. Nuclear power, which has always had a bigger outrage than hazard problem, really deserves over-preparation.

    In his book The Big Short author Michael Lewis proposes that the people who made fortunes betting on the collapse of the American housing bubble shared the iconoclastic traits of both being able to envision the worst happening (the bubble collapsing) and, in the face of social pressure, to act on that vision. It struck me upon reading that book that being able to envision the worst happening and preparing for such an outcome is a really valuable skill for communications professionals. To come back to Chicken Little, it’s not that a PR person should run around screaming that the sky is falling, but a PR person –and indeed any member of a company’s crisis management team– should be able to pose the question, what would we do if the sky fell?

    Even if –and this is important– even if others in the organization suggest that such a thing is unthinkable. After all, just because something is unthinkable doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

    In part two: What the hell is an “apocalypse box” anyway?

    Note:

    *If you haven’t seen the “Bert the Turtle” public service announcement on how to survive an atomic attack, it’s well worth watching. A surreal mix of 1950′s cold war terror and sunny “you can survive” optimism with a Ward Cleaver voice-over that must be somewhere in Billy West’s stack of reference material. “It’s such a big explosion that it can…break windows all over town.” Indeed. It’s a YouTube link, so get your VPN ready. If it’s working.

  • Could better PR have prevented Groupon’s China gaffe?

    Unless you live on Pluto and you’re just in town for the temple fairs you probably know the situation with Groupon and their notorious Tibet ad. From within the China echo chamber it can be tricky to calibrate your reaction to this kind of thing. Those of us who live here are prone to flinch at things that people living in America don’t give a damn about. But we often learn that flinch reaction the hard way, over years of doing business in China and wrestling the occasional PR crisis.

    Groupon, it turns out, is trying to build a business in China. Their well-established irreverent sense of humor aside, you’d think they’d thus have some radar for the things that are likely to get them in trouble here. Media 101: In 2011, all media is global media. Culture 101: What plays in Chicago (where Groupon is from) may not play in Changchun, as it were. Think Tommy Lee Jones in the first Men in Black: “We in the FBI have no sense of humor that we are aware of.” Now replace him in your head with just about any Chinese government bureaucracy, and consider the direct and substantial influence that those bureaucracies have over the fortunes of businesses operating in China. And this doesn’t even get into the reaction of Groupon’s potential customers here. They do have a sense of humor, but not necessarily the same one as customers back home.

    I’m not going to get into the details of how screwed Groupon may or may not be in China. For that, read posts from ChinaGeeks, Techrice or Shanghaiist. Suffice to say that most of us who live and work here in China think the Tibet ad increased the risks to any mainland China operation that Groupon launches.

    The question that preoccupies me as a China PR man is, where was the PR team in all of this? One of the things I learned in my years at Burson-Marsteller was that a good PR person is one who can, among other things, look at business decisions being made and tell the management what those decisions will mean for the company’s reputation among all the audiences that matter. A good senior PR person will use a team and agencies to extend that ability beyond what any one person can cover, and be able to bring that information back to management at a level that can shape decisions. If a company is just using PR to pitch journalists and grind out press releases, then it is missing a big part of the point of a good PR team.

    In the best of all possible worlds, Groupon would have had a senior PR person who was aware of the company’s China plans, was tied into what the marketing group was doing, and was smart enough to spot a risk and bring it to management ahead of time. Message: Run this ad if you want, but it will create real risks in China at exactly the wrong time. Maybe this happened. Maybe the company went ahead anyway, in which case they assumed those risks with their eyes open. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. In the end, they went to market with an ad that has real potential to damage their business ambitions.

    The point here is not to change Groupon’s irreverent corporate personality, but to tune that personality so that it stays an asset as they grow into a global company. Startups often grow their businesses and ambitions faster than their PR capabilities. I have personal experience with this from before I was in PR, when I worked as a project manager and operations chief in a fast growing e-commerce company in Singapore in the late nineties. I thought the PR woman’s main contribution was to introduce bureaucracy and slow down things we had to do right now, and I was full of disdain for her and her work. Nothing like ten years on the opposite side of the tracks to broaden your perspective. I’ve often thought I should write her a letter to apologize for the former me. Come to think of it, some of my prior girlfriends could use similar letters. If any of you are reading this, I’m sorry.

    I have no idea how Groupon runs its PR. I do know that Venturebeat offered them some pretty sound advice on PR late last year, and an industry blogger critiqued their response to the ads in the US. I also know that in the wake of the Tibet issue, they’ve expanded Fleischman-Hillard’s remit from Hong Kong to mainland China, which is better than nothing but a bit after the fact and in a galaxy far, far away from headquarters. If you’re entertaining multibillion dollar buyout offers from Google, planning a public listing, and hoping to expand your business in China, you’d better put some really strong PR people right at the center of management decision making. And if you’re going to try to build your business in China, you’d better have someone on the ground here in the mainland who knows what the company is up to and who has the phone number of the key decision makers in the US.

    If Groupon wasn’t doing it before, now would be a good time to start.

    Update: Word on the street (by which I mean Twitter) is that Groupon is also suing this lookalike site in China. Hope they have a China trademark registered.

  • Physics in the gaze of a thousand grannies

    Imagethief was an indifferent student in high school. My success in any given class was dictated by my level of personal interest in the topic. So I did OK at biology, which I liked, great in English and composition once I found a class that wasn’t numbingly dull, and appallingly in math, which held no appeal for me at all. God bless the University of California for weighing SAT scores so heavily in 1984, because if they only looked at my grades they probably would have assumed I applied by mistake and not even bothered to send me a rejection note. But, befitting someone who lives in China, I was a brilliant test taker and thus built the foundation for the success I enjoy to this day, such as it is.

    Among the courses I blew at was physics, in which I eked a passing grade out by minuscule fractions of point. My problem with physics was that it was largely math, in which I already had little interest, and I really couldn’t see how any of it was going to be relevant to the rest of my life. I mean, figuring out planetary orbits? Isn’t that what NASA is for?

    Life is, of course, all physics, as we discover when we get older and start banging into things. Not that it would help me to be able to work out how many newtons of force are generated when I bang my shin into the coffee table, but at least I’d have a layer of academic appreciation to filter the curse words through. This would be important as I have a young son who has (biology again) the three-year-old’s stupendous capacity to remember all words he hears and repeat them  at inopportune times, like in front of his grandmother.

    Children are also a regular reminder of influence of physics in daily life. Ballistics, gravity, impact, thermodynamics, and, during the diaper years, even radioactivity. My son is the remedial version of the high school physics class I doodled my way through all those years ago. This became apparent a week or two ago when we went down to Houhai to fool around on the ice. I generally enjoy a day on the frozen lakes once or twice a year, although it can get a bit nasty close to the thaw when a season’s worth of dead fish and turtles emerge from entombment. This year, we figured Zach was old enough to appreciate it as well. We didn’t do anything as silly as putting him on ice skates, or letting him walk around on the ice. Instead, I rented one of those sled-chairs that you nudge along with a couple of slender, metal poles. The chairs seat two people, so I put Zach in front and went stroking off across the ice.

    People who haven’t tried them don’t appreciate how rigorous using the sled chairs is. The little poles are designed to make your hands cramp, and the chairs offer a spectacular combination of fairly high speed and a complete lack of steerability. The lakes get pretty crowded on midwinter weekends, and frankly it amazes me that more people don’t wind up in the hospital with chair runners through their calf muscles.

    But you don’t have to have a collision to get in trouble with the chairs. You can get in trouble all by yourself. I discovered this when I had a brainstorm to make the chair spin in place. Now, this is where the physics really become interesting. I’d like to introduce you to two equations that I know were covered in my high school physics class, but which I dismissed at the time as being completely irrelevant to any experience I’d ever have.

    First is the equation for centripetal force. This is the force that makes a body follow a curved path, and is often mistakenly referred to as “centrifugal force.” In the absence of a centripetal force, an object previously following a curved path will suddenly fly off on a path tangential to the curve. If you were on the Tilt-a-Whirl at some sketchy Chinese carnival, and the metal mesh behind you that was supplying the centripetal force keeping you on a curved path was suddenly to vanish (bad rust, let’s say), you would fly off on a path tangential to the curve defined by the edge of the Tilt-a-whirl. If you were lucky, you might land on a plush toy. If you were unlucky, you might land in a malatang or roast squid stall. Poor you. Anyway, the equation, courtesy of Wikipedia, looks like this:

    formula 1

    We can ignore the center part. For our purposes force (F) = mass (m) times the velocity squared (v2) divided by the radius of the rotation. In this case, mass is the mass of my son, about 13 kilograms, velocity is (an off-the-cuff estimate) about 1.2 meters per second, and r is about 0.6 meters from the center of rotation to the seat of his pants. So F = 13kg x (1.44 meters per second squared) / .6 meters or 18.72 kg-m-s2 / .6 meters or 31 kg/m/s2. That’s 31 newtons of centripetal force if I’ve canceled the units correctly. But, remember, I nearly failed physics, so this could all be completely wrong. Suffice to say, a distinct degree of centripetal force was required to keep my son from suddenly flying off on a trajectory tangential to the curve.

    The centripetal force in this case was supplied by the friction of my son’s jeans-clad rear end on the smooth, vinyl seat of the ice chair. It turns out that there is an equation for this as well. In this case, the equation for static, dry friction, which looks like this (also from Wikipedia):

    formula 2

    Where the force of friction (Ff) is less than or equal to  the coefficient of friction for the two surfaces involved (mu – the Greek letter that looks like “u” with a hernia) x  the “normal” or perpendicular force (Fn), in this case, the weight of my son. The problem I have here is determining the coefficient of friction. It depends on the combination of surfaces involved, and is often looked up on a table that cross-references different kinds of materials likely to be in contact. Despite a thorough search of the Internet, however, I have been unable to locate the coefficient that describes new denim against worn vinyl, which seems like an oversight (hello, Detroit). There’s lots of stuff for metals, plastics, and even leather. But not my exact requirements. Also, there is obviously some deformation of the surfaces involved since neither is entirely rigid, and that would complicate this equation, but is probably unimportant for our purposes.

    Anyway, the upshot was that close to the end of the first revolution of the chair, the friction of my son’s rear end on the vinyl seat proved unable to provide the necessary centripetal force to maintain a curved path, static friction became trickier kinetic friction (I don’t even want to go here, mathematically speaking), and eventually no friction, at which point Zachary assumed a ballistic trajectory tangential to the curve, at least until he landed face down on the ice. In fact, the coefficient of friction of just about anything on ice being rather low, he may have continued to slide for some time after impact.

    At this point we leave the hard-and-fast world of physics, and enter the much grayer realm of shame. The first thing I did was check for broken teeth, since Zach has already cracked two in the course of regular, boy-like behavior. All teeth were intact, but he had split his lip and lost some skin on the ice. As lip wounds do, it  bled copiously.

    This being China, there is no shortage of aunties and grandmothers willing to tell anyone, especially foreigners, how miserable their parenting technique is. I have been admonished repeatedly for, among other things, bringing Zach out to the Summer Palace when he was an infant (too young!), dressing him inappropriately (he’ll freeze!) and swinging him around in the courtyard (you’ll pull his little arms out!). My wife has got to the point where she scolds people who provide unsolicited parenting advice. I usually take the more zen “I can’t understand you, I’m smiling and moving on” approach.

    In the eyes of Chinese aunties I am sure there is a particularly sweaty corner of hell for people (read: foreigners) who drop their sons face down on the ice. And I could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on me as I slowly poled the chair back to the edge of the lake with my son holding a very bloody tissue to his mouth. This is now one of the three longest journeys of my life. The other two are both aviation-related.

    The good news is that Zach had no injury that a cup of hot chocolate and a trip to Hutong Pizza couldn’t cure, and we were back to winter activities last weekend, riding inner tubes down the slope at the Chaoyang Park snow field without incident. But even now I can imagine what those aunties at the lake were thinking to themselves as they watched me bundle a bleeding Zach back to his mom: If he’d studied his physics in high school, this never would have happened.

    Note: A little knowledge is obviously a dangerous thing, and it’s possible that the math above is completely wrong in ways I can’t begin to guess. Corrections welcome, but don’t overdo the pedantry. This is, after all, a humor post and not an actual physics lesson. Plus, I’m fragile.

  • I suck at Christmas trees

    So I’m back in the US of A for Christmas and based on a sample size of two (my parents), I can report that the political mood here is bleak. My mom’s dog of many years died a week or two ago and one of the pressing post-mortem issues is what to do with the now faintly embarrassing “Obama” dog leash. Two years ago this was the shizznet. Today, like the word shizznet, it pretty much just annoys people.

    When you only come home occasionally, you notice strange things. Tonight I noticed that mom’s new oven, part of her recent kitchen renovations, displays not just the time, but also the day and date. Today, the oven announces, is Tuesday, December 21st, 2010. Why the hell does an oven need to know the date? It’s not like you’re going to put a turkey in and then program the thing to start it three weeks hence, right before you get back from London. I mean, you could, but no matter how you dress that turkey, it’s coming out stew.

    Still, it’s always nice to be back for Christmas. But now that we have a child it’s a much more fraught exercise. There’s nothing wrong with the child himself. He’s handsome, charming and funny — at least, inasmuch as any three year old can be. But he is also, like any three year old, the Amazing Human Vector, capable of introducing disease into any population anywhere. If we dropped him out of a B-2 over Afghanistan, our problems there would be over. Indiscriminate use of biological weapons is technically a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but that kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother us so much any more, so the US Air Force can contact me care of this blog if they’re interested in picking him up for, oh, let’s say 200 million bucks. It seems like a lot for a small boy, but is totally reasonable when you consider the strategic impact and the $2.2 billion sticker on the B2.

    Anyway, speaking of coming out stew, last year the Human Vector gave my entire family some kind of awful stomach illness that destroyed Christmas as thoroughly as if I’d filled the stockings with an emulsion of dogshit and gasoline and set them alight, presents and all. On one particularly bleak night Imagethief read all of Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower” in the bathroom, and that is not a svelte read. So we were pretty sure that by comparison this Christmas would be candy canes and cinnamon pixie-farts.

    With cinnamon pixie-farts in mind, we went over to the little-league field where the Sea Scouts run their Christmas tree lot. My mom’s current tenant had actually left an artificial Christmas tree, but I think artificial Christmas trees are like fat-free ice cream: unnatural simulacra of things that should be by nature joyous and indulgent. If you described a Christmas tree to a police sketch artist from Mars, you might get something that looked like this artificial tree.

    The Sea Scouts were in high spirits, busy dragging one of the volunteer clerks through the ring-like device they use to “net” Christmas trees so they are more compact for driving home. “It’s a boy!” yelled one, capturing in a nutshell what the scene was spookily reminiscent of. But it’s Christmas, so you have to celebrate a virgin birth, even if it’s the simulated virgin birth of an eighteen year old man being passed through a hoop of disposable red-and white netting. While they were cutting him out of the net we found a suitable tree: a six foot noble fir for $51. “Would you like the stand with that?” asked our clerk, who had not been run through the netting machine and was therefore still able to serve us.

    All the Sea Scouts trees come already mounted on broad stands made of green rebar and plastic buckets. The stands cost an extra twenty bucks, but make the tree “ready to trim”, as it were. My mom already has a Christmas tree stand that dates approximately from the Lyndon Johnson administration (really), but which has always been serviceable if a bit fiddly. It seemed excessive to me to pay an extra twenty bucks for a big hunk of rebar that would just get heaved into the recycling along with the tree two weeks hence, so I declined.

    Dumbest mistake ever.

    Here’s a bit of straightforward advice: get the stand. Just swallow the environmental consequences and the measly two bills and get the goddamned included stand. The tree will come in the front door and be ready for trimming and presents. No hassle. And no back problems.

    Ah, the back problems. Part of Imagethief’s genetic inheritance, along with a big schnozz, sweet tooth and tendency to wordy rants, is a gimpy back passed down from my father and exacerbated by years of sloppy gym technique and poor work posture. I am, it must be confessed, a sloucher. This has been my year of back problems. At 43, I should probably be grateful. My father blew his back out like a discount whitewall when he was ten years younger than I am now, and I’ve never found myself laid out on a living room floor for three days like he was. But I did have several spells of pain and stiffness culminating in a stinging pinched nerve that popped up a month ago after an ill-advised encounter with a leg-press machine (never again) and a weekend of vigorous walking, of all things. This made it impossible to run for two weeks.

    I like to run. With my eye on taking advantage of the pristine Bay Area air for some running (while I write this in fragrant Palo Alto, Beijing’s air is once again “hazardous”), I spent the last month carrying myself like an octogenarian grandmother in a Venetian glass factory. I bent from the knees to pick up lint. I even managed to preserve my back while handling my son, who is probably the single biggest factor in its recent deterioration. Three year olds, unlike dumbbells, are prone to suddenly squirm and throw you off balance in ways that can cause discs to rocket out of your spine like ninja throwing stars. They think this is funny and they learn interesting new words when it happens.

    I was rewarded for my care with a pain free back and more or less full range of motion. I even managed to get our two 23 kilo suitcases into PEK out of SFO without re-injuring myself, a feat roughly on par with creating cold fusion using two glasses of flat Dr. Pepper, some kidney beans and a soiled fork.

    But then I had to set up the Christmas tree.

    When you think about it, a Christmas tree is a really ungainly thing. It’s heavy, asymmetrical and the best handholds are buried deep inside, especially when you pay extra for a lush noble fir instead of some threadbare, piece-of-crap douglas fir. I lugged the thing awkwardly from the garage to the living room, only to find that the trunk was too short to fit into the LBJ retro-stand. This meant laying the tree down, going into the garage to dig the hacksaw out from behind the stack of plastic tubs in which my mom’s tenant is apparently storing his collection of lead ingots and anvils, and then getting on my hands and knees to saw the bottom ring of branches off of the tree so it would fit in the stand. Then a little more time on my hands and knees tightening the little collar bolts that hold the tree upright.

    When I was done with this, the tree stood proudly erect but I looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame after a night of rejection and a vicious beating by dockworkers drunk on mezcal shooters. An ill-advised attempt to take an afternoon run lasted exactly one half a block before I had to stop because every step felt like I was driving lemon-zest tent pegs into my hips. With fitness clearly out of the picture, I’ve pretty much been confined to an armchair and living on a diet of chocolate and ibuprofen ever since. I really, really wish I’d just paid the twenty bucks and got the tree with its included stand.

    But the good news is that it’s Christmas and my son, for all his proven lethality, was old enough to enjoy helping with the trimming of the tree and appears to have not imported some terrifying Chinese nursery school pathogen this year. Tomorrow my brothers arrive and the whole family will be together for the first time since last Christmas. In the face of so much good cheer, pissing and moaning about not having a working spine just seems like so much crabbiness. And we won’t be having any of that, will we?

    A merry Christmas to all Imagethief readers.

    Merry Christmas from the human vector.
    Merry Christmas from the human vector.

  • Not enough radiation in your skull and other problems with retail

    Modern Beijing, as distinct from the leafy, 1960s loufang neighborhoods and the hutongs, is an unlovely town at the best of times. No acreage of hanging glass curtain walls can make up for the viscerally alienating nature of the razor-edged, neo-Stalinist SOE office buildings lining the boulevards on the west side of town. The malls and commercial developments of the east side are little better. Wanda Plaza looks like what Albert Speer would have built in Berlin if the Third Reich had lasted into the age of shopping malls. And there are plenty worse than that.

    My own neighborhood is no great prize. It abuts one of those monster intersections on greater Chang’an Avenue that are like urban planning fever dreams – a vast and lethal plane of asphalt ruled by a squawking tribe of crossing-guards that lives in the permanent shadow of a monster overpass, like Brothers Grimm trolls with orange vests. At rush hour the whole thing seizes into gridlock, offering a pretty good preview of what the traffic in Hell will be like. The Guohua power plant’s 500 foot visible-from-space smokestack looms over everything. One of my favorite mental games is looking up at it from different spots in the neighborhood and trying to work out whether it would land on me if it tipped over in my direction. The answer usually is yes.  And people think high school trigonometry is useless.

    Two factors redeem the neighborhood. First, it is within walking distance of the congenial Tuanjiehu, Hujialou and Yanjingli neighborhoods, and the Tonghui canal, which isn’t exactly scenic but is useful for running. Second, it’s convenient, with a subway station, easy access to the Third and Fourth Rings (important for my commute), and a dynamite selection of amenities.

    There is naturally some ebb and flow in those amenities. In early 2008, when Mrs. Imagethief and I returned from a year in Shanghai, we moved into China Central Place Apartments. Soon thereafter workers started converting the previously vacant commercial building in front of  the apartments into an Italian delicatessen and restaurant complex. Having then recently spent a week immersed in the culinary delights of Tuscany, this seemed like a fantastic thing. Exotic sausages and cheeses on our doorstep! Score!

    The reality was rather less inspiring. The Piazza Italia turned out to be three floors of mediocrity: A middlebrow Italian supermarket attached to a cafeteria and an unremarkable restaurant. The curse of the Piazza Italia was demonstrated by its deli. With all the treasures of Italy to choose from, it stuck resolutely to Italian food cliches. I like Parma ham and Parmesan cheese as much as the next guy, but trust me when I say there is much more to Italian deli. For me, the Piazza’s high point came the day Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I ate lunch at the cafeteria and found ourselves dining at the table next to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Say what you will about the Italians, they’re not hung up about who’s in the restaurant with their leader.

    It was thus moderately disappointing but not in the least surprising when the Piazza rolled over and died. I expressed my grief by rummaging through the wine area and buying several bottles of nice Brunello at knockdown prices. Merchants at Sanyuanli market did a roaring trade in surplus Parmesan for several months thereafter. And Mrs. Imagethief and I started wondering what business might occupy the three newly vacated floors of retail space with an eye watering rent bill.

    I was hoping for a three-floor Jenny Lou, which will tell you how realistic I am. Our neighborhood lost its Jenny Lou three or four years ago, which is a shame because none of the other local shopping options is much good for imports. The BHG Marketplace in the basement of the Shin Kong Place ultramall has pretensions, but mostly it just charges otherworldly prices for produce available for one quarter the price 300 meters away. But, hey, you can get Japanese Cokes for 12rmb.

    In that way, BHG Marketplace is representative of Shin Kong as a whole: glossy, but mostly useless. Take out the Din Tai Feng, the food court and the coffee places, and rest is a waste of space. But maybe that’s just me. I am a man of plain tastes and there are only so many Bvlgari trinkets that I need. And, as I discovered when I tried to buy a jacket a couple of years ago, nothing in the department store fits me. I’m much better off at the Jimmy and Tommy Foreign Trade Club in Sunshine 100. So I guess I have no business assaulting the Piazza Italia for being “middlebrow.”

    After it lay fallow for a few months, work finally began on the abandoned Piazza. We asked the security guards what was being put in, but nobody seemed to know. “A car showroom,” said one. The first sign of trouble came when workers erected an enormous, welded hoarding around the building, concealing it from sight. Concealed buildings in China seldom lead to anything good. A second sign came when the hoarding on one part of the building indicated that it was being subdivided into a cluster of luxury watch boutiques. Finally, the took down the hoardings from the other part and revealed…a three story Burberry boutique.

    If you had asked me to make a list of things that they could have put in the abandoned Piazza that would have been of the least use to me, it would have read like this:

    1. A minefield.
    2. A malarial swamp.
    3. A smelting works.
    4. A Burberry boutique.

    The black, plasticky facade of the Burberry boutique would have been bad enough on its own, but it gained that extra measure of vulgarity thanks to that defining architectural cliche of modern Beijing (after the hanging glass curtain wall), the colossal video screen. In fact, it being a corner lot, one video screen wasn’t enough. There are two house-sized video screens from which endless loops of prancing Eurotrash in plaid trenchcoats can be beamed to the entire neighborhood.

    Our neighborhood was already blessed with an abundance of kinetic distractions, including the semi-animated front of the over-lit Shin Kong mall itself and the usual assortment of kaleidoscopic neon signage and red LED crawls in office windows. But if there is one thing I’ve learned over my years in Beijing, it is that there is no neighborhood so tacky that it can’t be debased just that little bit more.

    It’s hard to transmit the effect of these screens unless you stand in front of them. They’re so bright they can etch your shadow into the sidewalk like atomic explosions. When people stand in front of these things you can see their skeletons and surgical implants. They literally cast a glow over the entire area. The first time Burberry started them up I thought it was large-scale welding works reflecting off of the neighboring buildings. At least my apartment gets only what reflects off of the side of Shin Kong. God help the poor souls living on the east side of Blue Castle who will now be bathed in a nonstop glow of high-energy Burberon particles. They’ll have to install lead-lined curtains or eventually the poor souls will all go thoroughly insane and have to be exiled to some remote corner of Hainan where they can wile away their miserable last days fruitlessly banging damp coconuts together in a wretched attempt to rediscover the technology of fire and cook their meager strands of monkey meat.

    Admittedly, a worst-case scenario, but when you see these screens you’ll know what I’m talking about. If this was Ginza, fine, but this is a partially residential neighborhood. A MyGym looks out over that intersection. Think of the little children!

    I presume they’ll take a cue from the Shin Kong mothership and shut down the illumination at 10:30, but Beijing’s winter sunset comes at about 4:30 PM, which is a lot of time to be exposed to a nonstop loop of fluorescent luxury propaganda. And during the testing phase, all bets are off. A few nights ago I woke up at 2AM and the damned things were on, casting a ghostly flicker across my living room walls.

    I should not be surprised. Our descent into neighborhood tackiness began earlier this year when the property office made the catastrophic decision to line the clubhouse in the middle of our courtyard with animated, green strip lights. This not only made it completely impossible to sit at the outside tables at the coffee shops in the courtyard, but it cast the entire courtyard in a color drawn straight from Pantone’s “Radioactive Monster Puke” palette. Giant video screens were a logical next step. Face the courtyard. Face the street. Face the vast power station. You’re pretty much damned in any direction.

    I guess I should count my blessings. Burberry may have colossal video screens, but at least they didn’t stoop to that other well-worn tactic of Beijing retail marketing: a pair of blown speakers outside the front door blasting distorted Mandarin-pop at a volume that can kill small dogs and knock the magpies out of trees two neighborhoods away.

    But they haven’t opened the watch boutiques yet, so that could still be coming.

    Only much, much bigger.
    Only much, much bigger.

  • Seoul and the fermented stingray of perdition

    I’ll say this for Korea: Recently I’ve had reason to evaluate, and at a national level they have by far the nicest, softest bathroom paper towels I have encountered. Fluffy, soft and absorbent, neither the splinter-bearing roughage nor the instantly-disintegrating tissue we usually get in China. I suppose this is a sign of development. Or tender skin. Or who knows what, but you take the small comforts as you can when you’re traveling.

    After fifteen years in Asia it was my first-ever trip to Korea this week. This doesn’t count numerous stopovers at the old Kimpo Airport on the way from Singapore to the US back in the mid nineties. These flights always connected through just after all the snack shops at Kimpo closed, which is to say at about 4:30PM. Kimpo was not an advertisement for visiting Korea. It was kind of like the abandoned parts of the future city in “Logan’s Run” except with fewer homicidal children and a slightly worse selection of food. I also once got trapped in Seoul overnight and got bussed into a hotel, but pride, and the fact that I never saw much more than the inside of the bus and the hotel room, keeps me from listing that as a “visit.”

    Eventually I switched from Singapore Airlines to EVA, which meant my transits switched to the more modern but (at least then) equally amenity-poor Chiang Kai Shek International in Taipei. CKS is now called Taoyuan airport, which is just as well unless the heirs of the Generalissimo wish for the chief impression of him to be that he endorsed the sale of only tea leaves and museum-piece replicas.

    In the years since my Seoul transit stopvers Kimpo has been relegated to the domestic airport and Korea has opened the glittering Incheon International Airport. Incheon is fine as airports go, well appointed with snacks and coffee. It’s only disadvantage is that it’s actually in China. Or at least that’s what the drive from downtown feels like. It’s not one of those urban airports that you stroll right out of and into downtown wherever (like, say, the old Kai Tak). If you stroll out of Incheon, you’d better have a tent and a rifle to hunt with. Although I’m not sure what there is to hunt in the Han river delta. Egrets, maybe. I’ve never had egret, but if egret tastes like what egrets eat, then it probably tastes like frog. This, to my mind, is not an advertisement for egret meat.

    I’m preoccupied with weird foods because I arrived in Korea with something of a culinary agenda. I mean, I also had a work agenda, but a man’s got to have priorities. I enjoy Korean food but I’d never had it actually in Korea, so I was looking forward to having the real thing even if that meant spicy egret meat or whatever. I did not, as it turns out, have spicy egret meat, although I had something almost as weird. More on that later.

    After getting to the hotel, stowing our stuff and doing a hectic hour’s worth of actual work, my traveling companion David Wolf and I struck out in search of dinner. We were staying at the Grand Intercontinental, which is attached to the Ko-Ex exposition center and glitzy hypermall. I should have known that this meant our chance of finding good Korean food was zero. The first restaurant we encountered upon walking out of the hotel was a TGI Friday’s. A circuit of the mall also yielded an Irish pub, a mass-market pizza place, a couple of Italianoid places, Japanese food, Coldstone-freaking-Creamery, and a range of food-court insults including, yes, a Sbarro. But no Korean restaurant.

    So this is the face of globalization. I built a career in Asia so I could have the option of eating at a Sbarro in a mall food court in Seoul. Either the Koreans are desperate to escape their own cuisine, or they’re catering to foreigners and (with some justifcation) have the lowest possible expectations of what we eat. Given the shocking number of coffee shops and Dunkin’ Donuts I saw in Seoul I tend to favor the latter. This is no exaggeration: There is a main street near the Grand Intercontinental that has a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts on literally every block for a good two kilometers, not even counting outlets of the local and completely ubiquitous Hollys (sic) coffee chain. This from a country that thinks American beef is crime against humanity. Somewhere in the far distance Tom “The World is Flat” Friedman is laughing his ass off.

    Finally, near the threshold of surrendering to what I like to call the cheeseburger gravity-well, we found a Korean place. This place satisfied all my cliche, preconceived ideas of Korean cuisine by serving me a dish called “chicken ribs” which, despite the name, was 10 percent chicken (no ribs), 10 percent rice cake, and eighty percent cabbage and chili paste.

    Cabbage and chili paste is my image of Korean food, thanks probably to the large amounts of kimchi I have eaten over the years. It’s pretty much the front-to-back of what I thought Korean food was, as though the early Koreans stumbled on this frigid, windswept peninsula where nothing but cabbage and hot chilis grew. Well, and egrets. In the dim recesses of my imagination I pictured some kind of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment where two Korean farmers collided: “You got your cabbage in my chili paste!” “You got your chili paste on my cabbage!” And thus a cuisine was born.

    And so I ate a big whack of cabbage and chili paste. And it was good. I happen to like both cabbage and chili paste.

    Here I should explain something: I have some kind of learning impairment when it comes to spicy food. I love spicy food and chili of every sort. Unfortunately, it has a pronounced effect on me. How can I best describe this? Perhaps a military metaphor. For me, eating any really spicy dish is two battles. There is the initial assault on the palate and then, about twelve hours later, what might be best described as a brutal rearguard action. I know that this will happen and, as a result, one of the things I try to avoid is eating really spicy things when I travel. But, you know, I was in Korea and what the hell.

    What an ass. And I mean that in every conceivable sense of the phrase.

    The next morning, after spending an awkward amount of time in the bathroom (the Kindle app on your phone means never being out of reading material) we headed out to the office to spend a day training CJ, our new head of Korea. After a long day in the conference room drilling on messages and scenarios CJ kindly took to us to dinner at a little, family-run restaurant near our office. It was called something like “A ladle full of moonlight”, but the business card is all in Korean so I can’t really verify this.

    It was here that I got my real education in Korean food. Sixteen courses worth. Sure, there was cabbage and chili paste, but there was also pickled cabbage without chili paste, raw fish, grilled fish, grilled vegetables and bean cakes, awesome mushrooms, beef wrapped around vegetables, miso soup (a fair amount of Japanese influence at the high end, it seems), and some kind of porridge made from the burnt rice scraped from an iron cooking pot that my wife has now made it her life’s mission to taste.

    Most of this food was perfectly straightforward to someone who has been in the region for many years. However there was one dish that earned a place near the top of my list of bizarre stuff I have eaten. This list already included most of the usual Asian roadside organ-meat and insect delicacies and, among other things, black market flying fox served in Singapore of all places. I do not recommend flying fox. I tastes fine but it is extremely fiddly to eat and is likely to be frustrating to anyone who doesn’t have an ancient Roman’s patience for winnowing microscopic morsels of flesh from miniscule carcasses.

    The dish that stood out in Seoul was not fiddly at all, and consisted of large chunks of fermented stingray meat that carried a very distinct whiff of ammonia. (At least, I recall that it was stingray, or skate or some other flat elasmobranch.*) Had Wolf and I not been the guest of a Korean I might have thought that the restaurant staff was unloading the old fish on the foreigners. Or in Korea, maybe unloading old fish on people is considered a courtesy. You are our honored guest. Here is a rotten trout. Would you like to marry my daughter? I’m man enough to admit my ignorance about this kind of thing. CJ described the stingray as being “about 20% of the way toward lutefisk”, which, if you know what lutefisk is and unless you have a fetish for both decay and traditional Scandinavian foods, is not really a plus. There is a reason why lutefisk is not among the delicacies offered at Ikea lunch counters.

    The way to eat the fermented stingray is to set a sushi-sized hunk on a similarly-sized piece of fatty pork, and then wrap the whole thing in a kimchi leaf and pop the works into your mouth. Doctrinally-speaking, at any rate. The real way to eat this dish is to have three shots of shochu beforehand and then chase the whole thing with beer. Lots of beer. In this sense, it’s kind of like a Korean boilermaker with fermented stingray where you might place a lemon twist or a maraschino cherry in the sequence of a normal cocktail. Thinking about it, three shots of shochu –or arak or baijiu or whatever your local equivalent is– and a beer chaser will get you through most nasty foods.

    I had two of the fermented stingray things. The fact that I was willing to go for number two suggests a couple of things: First, like many western idiots, I will go to extreme lengths to prove my manliness to foreign hosts. Second, the stingray was a long way from the nastiest thing I have ever eaten.

    Since you asked, the nastiest thing I have ever eaten was balut, or fertilized duck egg, which I had in Ho Chi Minh city (nee Saigon) in 1998 during a night on the town as a guest of the Tiger Beer company. Balut is approximately three orders of magnitude nastier than fermented stingray in all three culinary dimensions: looks, texture and taste. A Googleimage search for balut is only for those of iron constitution. I chased my balut with a lot of beer which, under the circumstances, was not a hard thing to do. So everything in perspective.

    The next morning I paid for my sins. We were taking a taxi from the Grand Intercontinental to the Shilla Hotel, where our product launch was being held. This meant crossing one of the congested bridges over the Han river during rush hour. As we were crawling along, my entire descending colon suddenly filled up with what felt like a combination of magma and caltrops.  ”Urgent” is completely inadequate word to describe how it felt. If you were to use a rusty needle to tattoo the word “URGENT” across your forehead in flaming capital letters and then rub a mix of soot and Rebel Yell bourbon into the raw, bleeding skin you might come close.

    If there is a feeling worse than sitting in a traffic jam on a bridge in an unfamiliar city an unknown distance from your destination with a rectum full of molten sulfur and the previous day’s fermented stingray remains, I have yet to encounter it, and I’ve had two surgeries, a major car accident and extensive dental work (not all at once). Uncertainty in this situation creates a surprising amount of anxiety. My heart was literally pounding and adrenaline was pumping through my pores. This makes sense, since I’m sure if I’d let go in the taxi, wet breeches or no I’d have had to run like Jim Brown to escape a mighty beating at the hands of the driver. I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say that an enraged Korean taxi driver with a tire iron chasing a balding PR man with soiled trousers across a bridge in downtown Seoul rush hour traffic is a sight much of the world would actually like to see, but I don’t wish to be the person to indulge the world’s prurient fascinations. Except in writing.

    To spare you the details, I made it. Once we cleared the bridge I was going to tell the driver to pleasefortheloveofgodstopatthefirstavailablelocation! but the traffic eased up almost immediately and it was only another five minutes to the hotel. I guess the thought of being arrested for public easing on the side of a Seoul bridge on my way to a press conference gave me just enough fortitude to tough it out.

    Anyway, it was in most ways a good trip and I was happy to finally make it to Korea. There is no greater moral to this story other than the obvious: Be a little cautious about the stingray and try to stay away from morning transit after spicy dinners. These rules evolve for a reason, and one forgets them at his peril.

    *Former marine biologist alert.

  • And you thought the milk business was so wholesome…

    The milk business in China just can’t seem to stay out of trouble.

    A couple of months ago baby formula maker Synutra found itself the victim of allegationsthat its product was linked to early puberty in girls. Its shares ate a big one on the NASDAQ and the company spent much time defending itself furiously. So furiously, in fact, that I was moved to ding them on Twitter for a CEO quote blaming the situation on “certain parties in the media.” Don’t blame the media was the gist of my message.

    As true as I still think that is in general, Synutra’s CEO may have had a point. Chinese media reported yesterday (and the China Daily relayed in English today) that executives from giant dairy company Mengniu and one of their PR firms, BossePR, have been detained on suspicion of stoking rumors against both Synutra and Mengniu’s chief rival, Yili. Mengniu is denying the allegations.

    Who knows what really happened. As one analyst points out in the China Daily story, baby formula isn’t really a huge part of Mengniu’s business, so why go after Synutra? This is probably true at the board level. I find it hard to believe that the senior management of Mengniu were sitting around the conference table and came up with a plan to slander Synutra. It’s just a touch too Snidely Whiplash for me.

    On the other hand, while the baby formula business may only be a small part of Mengniu’s business, I’m sure it’s damned important to whomever manages it at Mengniu (and is, presumably, judged on its success). There are two reasons why the allegations are at least plausible. First, as anyone living here knows, despite its brand images of purity and healthy, angelic children, the milk business in China is capable of complete sordidness. One need only read up on the now legendary melamine scandals of 2008 to be reminded of that. And there is more where that came from. In our family all the milk comes from one of the expensive organic farms near Beijing. It costs about triple what regular local milk costs, but when it’s your kid you err on the side of less melamine if you have the means. The milk industry in China is like the finance industry in the US now: Trust is so damaged that people are primed to believe the worst of just about any company, and it’s not hard to get the rumors flying.

    The second factor is that using PR agencies and Internet firms to run sock-puppet campaigns attacking rivals is a time-honored tactic here. (BusinessWeek has written a bit about this here, although this story lumps some companies I respect together with some I don’t.) I’ve run into it in both the car and consumer electronics industries. It’s not always incendiary child health stuff like the Synutra allegations. Sometimes it’s just garden-variety griping about products. Even that can be extremely difficult to defend against. On the Internet, criticism is forever and anonymous rumors or allegations can take on a life of their own, at warp speed if they’re salacious or involve the health of children. And it’s generally pretty cheap to do, so the temptation to stoop to such tactics can be powerful, especially in a competitive consumer business.

    I’m a fan of transparency online. When I was on the agency side my advice to clients was straightforward: Don’t astroturf, don’t sock puppet. The long-term benefits are small and the risks to reputation are high (as may be the legal risks). I expect that most international agencies would give similar advice and that most PR managers, especially at international firms operating in China, would agree. At least to your face.

    Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, it seems some companies still take the easy path, and many agencies will do what they need to do to keep a client happy. Also, many large companies use a range of international and local agencies, often reporting to different managers facing different pressures and having different points of view about what constitutes ethical PR. A company without a clear policy or tight management of such things may find that not every department is equally scrupulous in its approach. I wonder if that’s what happened to Mengniu.

    Note:

    After this post was published I also appeared on Blue Ocean Network’s “Chinalogue” program along with Alistair Nicholas of AC Capital Consulting [Note – now of Weber Shandwick – WM] to discuss…PR slime! By which the producers of the show meant the recent Mengniu vs. Yili vs. Synutra PR sockpuppet slagfest. The heavy-breathing title of the segment aside, most of the show was a fairly sober discussion of PR ethics in general. The video is here.

    See also:

  • Alibaba’s Alizila is PR. Be proud!

    I just read a post from Forbes’ Hana Alberts on Alizila, a homegrown company news site for the Alibaba Group. Alibaba has hired an experienced journalist, Time Magazine veteran Jim Erickson, to develop the articles for the site:

    Erickson isn’t “selling out” in the traditional sense of the word, that is, he’s not morphing into a press release writer or a corporate communications executive. He will instead remain a reporter — just one who’s getting a paycheck from the only company on his beat. Call him a corporate journalist.

    …

    Erickson, who co-wrote a biography of Bill Gates, is the managing editor of the site — and, at the moment, its only writer. Alibaba, which believes this initiative is the first of its kind, say it’s not a marketing tool but rather a “quasi-independent news outlet.”

    “All my life I’ve known journalists who have gone over to what we call ‘the dark side,’” Erickson says. After 25 years in journalism and a brutal layoff, he felt Alibaba offered him a middle ground: “I could still be a journalist, but I wouldn’t be subject to the same constant financial pressures.”

    I’ll give this to Alibaba Group: I think they’re one of the few Chinese firms that gets international PR. Granted Alibaba is not cut from the same cultural cloth as the big SOEs and red-chip firms, but even controlling for that they’ve done a good job telling their story.

    Although it still feels like a work-in-progress (and is labeled “beta”), Alizila is a good idea. This is the digital age, and as mainstream media are stretched ever more thinly companies need to get better at telling their own stories directly to the audiences that matter to them.

    But I wonder about two things. First is the effort taken to stress that Mr. Erickson remains a journalist and not a PR person. As a PR person, when I look at this site I see PR: A house platform for telling stories about the company and making the company more visible.

    In the end, can you be a journalist in the sense most of us understand it and report impartially on a daily basis on the company cutting your paycheck? What will happen when there’s a real crisis or serious problem that demands coverage or investigation? What will happen the first time someone in an executive suite wants to kill or amend one of Mr. Erickson’s stories?

    Some of the stories on Alizila do delve into Alibaba’s challenges, but none of them is what I would call confrontational. Ms. Alberts quotes Mr. Erickson remarking on an Alizila article he wrote on Alibaba’s efforts to tackle counterfeits on the site, saying, “I’m certainly not going for the jugular, but if you’re in PR it goes against every instinct in your body, because you are drawing attention to the fact that there are fakes on the website.”

    I’m in PR, and as an outside observer it doesn’t go against every instinct in my body. The availability of pirate goods on Alibaba isn’t a secret that’s being suddenly revealed. Personally, I’d see a post on steps the company is taking to control a known problem, even one that embeds some criticisms or discusses past problems, as generally positive. If that story had been on a third-party news site, I’d grade it as positive with regards to Alibaba because of the emphasis on the company’s actions to resolve the problems and the positioning of the piracy problem as a widespread issue afflicting the entire industry (a classic PR technique, “broadening”). If it had been a story earned through PR, it’d be good PR.

    The second question is why jump through hoops to make this look like a news site rather than harnessing Mr. Erickson’s talent and experience as a straightforward company blogger? He could cover the same topics, dig into general industry news, use a more engaging voice, and probably achieve similar visibility results for the company, without having to maintain what to me seems like an unsustainable air of impartiality. He could be an advocate in the best possible way.

    Perhaps it has to do with how the audience they’re trying to reach will perceive a blog as against something that looks like a news site (although they’re also active on several conspicuously American social media networks). Or perhaps it’s simply the approach that everyone is comfortable with. There is a blog on Alizila, but although the posts seem shorter than the “news” articles, the voice is similar.

    Ultimately, Alizila is PR. There’s nothing wrong with that. They should embrace it and be proud. Get past the “dark side” stuff. Good, honest communication and good storytelling are both part of good PR. And there is certainly a role for journalistic skills in good PR, nutting out the stories and telling them well (which is why our industry is full of ex-journalists, although Imagethief is not among them). But trying to distance such efforts from PR strikes me as disservice to PR and journalism alike.

    With all that in mind, I think Alizila is interesting, especially coming from a Chinese company. I’m curious to see where they take it and if they launch a Chinese version.

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