Imagethief

Author: Will Moss

  • Decadent Beijing suburbanites give me da bomb

    A current of dissolution runs through Beijing’s expatriate professional community. The city doesn’t have the loutish licentiousness of Hong Kong, the world-weary NGO clubbishness of Phnom Penh, or the dangerous-living frisson of Port Harcourt, or some other oil-drenched African hellhole.  But, with limited entertainment options and a large population of foreigners paid more money than can reasonably be spent*, there is a certain inevitable drainage toward the underlit low spots where large pools of alcohol have collected.

    Perhaps if Beijing was more family friendly and developed this would be less obvious. Or perhaps I simply run with a bad element. I am, after all, employed in an industry with a legendary, institutional fondness for adult beverages. I tend to hang out in a crowd rich in fellow flacks, journalists and Australians. If this isn’t courting danger and inebriation, I don’t know what is.

    As befits someone with my godless inclinations, I went for a full-body wallow in the soft, white underbelly of expat Beijing this holiday weekend, resulting in a positively Roman display of indulgence and self-gratification that did superb justice to the pagan roots of Christmas, and no justice at all to the rather more ascetic spiritual aspects. The first stop was a catered dinner on Saturday evening, hosted by a couple who live in a villa in suburban, northeast Beijing.

    The “villas” are to Beijing what suburban Connecticut is to New York, if only Connecticut was ringed with an apocalyptic wasteland dotted with the desolate shells of enormous, uncompleted residential developments. They’re places where wealthy people, often with families, attempt to escape the hurly-burly, in-your-face, gob-on-the-sidewalk lifestyle of downtown Beijing. In a city where the vast majority of people live in microscopic apartments, the villas really are absurdities; gated simulacra of American suburbs complete with wide sidewalks and picket fences. Fantasy re-creations of single-family, detached bliss. If you’re a foreign executive for an MNC who has just been rotated into Beijing for two years, and you have a large housing allowance, a car and driver, and no real desire to interact with the city, they’re the place to be. Many are near the airport, which increases the appeal for frequent fliers, and other people often seen getting the fuck out of Beijing.

    The slightly contemptuous description above doesn’t describe all villa residents. One very good friend of mine, an old China hand who works at home, lives in a villa house because it provides ample space for his family and his business. He’s done his downtown time and doesn’t have much else to prove. And the couple who entertained us on Saturday night probably don’t fit into my angry, stereotype box either. A mixed English-Hongkie couple, both are fluent Mandarin speakers who don’t seem to have any need to insulate themselves from China. In fact, the house belongs to the woman’s grandmother. The two of them were fine hosts once we got past the man’s enthusiasm for a wicked, electronic party game that punished the slow or anxious with nasty electric shocks. I hate electric shocks, and took care not to lose. Our hosts laid on a catered spread that was, by my math, exactly twice as much food as could possibly be consumed by the eight of us who were there. The liquor and tobacco were scarcely dented. Dessert was an all-night love-affair with pancreatic suicide. I ate. I drank. I wept for the sheer joy of it.

    For all my bitter, underprivileged sarcasm, there are certain advantages to villas. This place had a large kitchen, a roaring wood wire in an open fireplace, and a dining-room table that could comfortably seat ten. My dining room table seats four, and only if everybody exhales, we put the cat out and we don’t actually eat anything. Villas also have the advantages that houses everywhere have over apartments: you can play your music loud, and you can set off enormous, dodgy fireworks. We did both.

    When I was young lad, I, as all young lads do, went through my pyromaniac phase. Living with my father in a 100 year old, dry-as-tinder redwood Victorian, this was a particularly fraught period in my life. In a series of episodes that an enterprising therapist could mine for book material, I blew up most of my toys and set the rest on fire, along with (at various times) my hands and eyebrows. While I usually laugh it off as just another bit of juvenile, male primate risk-courting (check it out, baby, I cheat fiery death!), looking back from the cusp of forty it now seems remarkable that I didn’t end up in a burn unit, jail or minus a couple of fingers.

    In those days, fireworks –the feedstock of my reckless entertainment– were illegal in San Francisco. In the run-up to the Fourth of July (America’s holiday for independence and blowing shit up), you could drive down to Daly City, ten minutes to the south, and buy an assortment of decorously restrained sparklers, cones, Piccolo Petes, ground flowers and snakes. Or you could do what I often did and go down to Chinatown to buy black-market bricks of firecrackers sold out of the backs of cars by young Cantonese guys. If you were particularly daring, you could lay hands on cherry bombs, or even the infamous, hand-pulverizing “M-80″, reported to have the lethal kick of a quarter-stick of dynamite. Looking back on it, this may be the start of my love affair with Asia.

    The biggest things you could get that had an aerial component were bottle rockets –enormous fun to shoot at friends and pets– and, of course, the legendary and poetically named Roman Candle, the firework that made “great balls of fire” more than just a Jerry Lee Lewis riff. Neither was capable of delivering significant explosive power onto your target, however. To get any more vigorous airborne, incendiary entertainment you either had to be into actual model rockets, which I briefly was (too much work), or into throwing ground-flowers just before they ignited. I was also, very briefly, into this before being scolded mightily by my father, who could visualize the clause in his insurance policy that said, “we will not pay for your house if your idiot son burns it down with fireworks”.

    Of course, I now live in China, where any firework small enough to actually be thrown is for pussies. This was amply demonstrated outside my apartment last Chinese New Year, when I was treated several hours of nonstop detonations that gave already surreal Beijing something of a dangerous, Sarajevo atmosphere. By the sound of it, M-80s were about the light end of the scale, despite a nominal ban on fireworks inside the fourth ring road. Coming from years in Singapore, where it was considered quite the daring scene when the Prime Minister recently lit a single string of firecrackers for the television cameras (the first heard in Singapore in several years, mind you), this was a refreshing change. Glued to the window of my apartment, with the throaty booms washing over me in waves, the infantile pyromaniac, long suppressed by an adulthood replete with neckties and responsibilities, stirred restively within my breast.

    That’s why I was propelled to Olympian heights of ecstasy at the sight of the climactic firework unveiled on Saturday night by our hosts. China, as we are often told, is the country that invented fireworks. To see the kinds of damp squibs we used to get in Daly City, the sanitized dregs of the Chinese fireworks industry, you could be forgiven for wondering how anyone could be killed in a “fireworks factory explosion”. Too see what we launched on Saturday night was to see that China was keeping the best for itself, and to understand exactly how a fireworks factory explosion could wipe out not only the people in the factory, but also the unfortunates in the next village up the road. It was a gaudily-wrapped cube the size of a filing cabinet, in which were enclosed sixteen cardboard mortars, each with a two-inch diameter. 600 kuai ($75) at your finer fireworks stalls, I was told. Surround with bricks and keep back fifty meters said the ominous instructions. It scarcely needed to add, “this side toward enemy”.  A straw poll was held, and the fireworks were launched from the nearest convenient launch pad, the roof of the servants’ quarters.

    Sixteen ear-shattering booms later we had been treated to a private, Christmas-eve fireworks display of monumental proportions, all the servants were awake, and every car alarm in the neighborhood was ringing. Stupendous, incandescent blossoms, twenty meters across. The lower fringes dusted the roof of the house itself. Oh, baby, where were you when I was hunting for the perfect bottle rocket, all those decades ago? The things you and I could have done together. I used to have to go to Candlestick Park (more recently 3Com Park and Monster Park thanks to the great American rejection of all traditions that aren’t evangelical Christian ones) and stand in the parking lot for this kind of display. Here anyone with a few bucks to spare can muster a Fourth of July fireworks exhibition that would be the pride of any stadium in America. I love China.

    We got home at 3AM, deaf and stuffed, with just enough time to sleep-off our excess before trooping out to the Hyatt’s Christmas champagne brunch with a different group of friends. This was the point at which my Christmas actually descended from indulgence into obscenity. Hotel brunches are nothing more than dares; challenges to eat enough to make it pay. In a world where people are going hungry –in a country with an income per-capita of $1290; or just about 20 times the cost of one seat at this brunch– it’s the ragged threshold of karmic self-immolation, invariably followed by weeks of self-flagellating penance on the treadmill. Mrs Imagethief, the pro nutritionist, has actually diagrammed her attack for maximum value: cheeses, seafoods, meats and desserts. Stay off the breads, potatoes and noodles. Those are sucker plays; cheap filler to woo you away from the meaty, gold-plated nuggets that make the buffet worthwhile. You have to admire the dedication to gustatory suicide.

    The Hyatt brunch is mediocre by international hotel brunch standards (I am a fan of the Ritz Carlton in Singapore – nice selection of food; unparalleled cheese plate; bright, airy space), but that didn’t stop us from working it until we were the last party in the restaurant and the wait-staff were shooting us nervous “please leave” looks. Only two of us coughed up the ruinous 488 kuai for free-flow champagne, and we had a solemn pact to make it pay. Between the pair of us, we managed to bury three bottles of Moet which, on top of the previous night’s festivity, all but ensured some kind of premature organ failure.

    Drunk, waddling and incapable of speaking in anything other than belches and groans, we did the only logical thing. We staggered off to frozen Houhai where my friend, Dennis, and I rented one of the two-seat sled chairs that extended Chinese families make into sled caterpillars and pole along the ice at excruciatingly slow speeds. We did not move at excruciatingly slow speeds. We moved at recklessly fast speeds, taking turns mushing one-another along like demented, Yukon dogsled drivers crocked on shots of Jagermeister and driven half-mad by long, sunless, Arctic winters spent in the company of nothing but Alaskan huskies. You can’t steer a sled-chair in any meaningful way, and we must have scared the bejeezus out of any number of apple-cheeked, pigtailed young Chinese girls who will spend weeks thrashing under sweaty sheets dreaming of maniacal, unshaven Laowais  careening toward them and screaming, “过一下儿!!! 过一下儿!!!” It’s only by some kind of Jimmy Stewart-style Christmas miracle that we didn’t sail through one of the flimsy barriers that surround the slushier sections of the lake, ride our hell-sled into the frigid darkness and end up drowning under the ice like rats.

    Provenance smiles upon idiots. It was the best Christmas ever.

    Imagethief wishes all readers a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, a pious Ramadan and a happy New Year. And, because this is a properly ecumenical site, happy holidays, too.

    *Starving, idealistic English teachers are excepted from this generalization.

    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.
    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.

  • Beijing needs a giant monster attack

    When you are asked to name the great, metropolitan cities of the world, you will naturally consider certain factors. It’s not always size that makes the difference. If it was, then Chongqing would be the capital of the planet, a role I think we can all agree that Chongqing, for all its charms, is not quite ready for. Sure, size has its place, but it’s the more abstract qualities that really elevate certain cities to greatness, and that probably influence your choices: political influence; rich history; culture; cuisine; cosmopolitan buzz; and so on.

    Beijing has most of this –it’s working on the cosmopolitan buzz– but it conspicuously lacks the one other factor that defines many of the world’s other great metropolises: a giant monster attack.

    I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately (a sure sign that the holidays are leading to a work slowdown), and I’ve come to the conclusion that Beijing cannot be a great, global metropolis until it is attacked by its own giant monster. Thanks to the encyclopaedic reference information contained in two invaluable websites, Stomptokyo.com andGiantmonstermovies.com, I’ve been able to research some of the cities that have been on the receiving end of giant monsters. Sure, you all know that Tokyo has had a fifty yearkaiju infestation that has included Godzilla, Gamera and friends. New York got King Kong on multiple occasions plus, as a bonus, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (by the way, that’s 180,000 feet, or about six times deeper than the deepest part of the ocean). London was attacked by Gorgo. San Francisco got the five-armed octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea. The list has also has some surprises, including some of Beijing’s key, regional rivals and a few cities you’d never expect:

    • Copenhagen was attacked by Reptilicus
    • Hong Kong was attacked by Mighty Peking Man in 1977, in an unintentional but apt metaphor for the city’s future
    • Rome’s Colosseum was destroyed by Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth
    • Los Angeles got Them
    • North Korea was attacked by Pulgasari, admittedly in ancient times
    • South Korea’s Seoul has had various monsters
    • Sweden got a monster, although it appears to have been confined to rural areas, in keeping with Scandinavian tidyness
    • Bangkok got Garuda
    • Even neutral Switzerland had a monster, although it was put there by Americans
    • Every tiny town in  the American southwest had a Gila Monster, Mantis or giant Lepus at some point, thanks to the tireless efforts of Bert I. Gordon and his contemporaries.

    As you would expect, Singapore is monster-proofed, although I think a romp by a giant merlion would do it a world of good.

    But let’s get back to Beijing. Those who like to quibble might be tempted to remind us that Mothra appeared in Beijing in Destroy All Monsters, but I am inclined to disqualify that for a couple of reasons. First, that’s a Japanese monster, and, as such, more insulting than terrifying. And, second, the climactic battle didn’t take place in Beijing.

    The problem for Beijing is, of course, that it has no skyline, and no easy monster access. If a monster was going to attack any mainland Chinese city, it would probably make a beeline (monsterline?) for Shanghai. Not only does it have the Huangpu River and the nearby Yangtze, which is more than big enough for your standard-guage kaiju, but it has the glittering Pudong skyline which has “ravage me” spelled out all over it in neon. If the Oriental Pearl Tower isn’t a secret Mysterian headquarters building just waiting to be scaled by something giant, scaly and radioactive, then I don’t know what is. And Jinmao Tower is a close number two.

    But what would a monster in Beijing attack? CCTV Tower? That’s way out west. The Great Hall of the People or the National Museum? Those low-rise, Stalinist wedding-cake buildings just aren’t all that satisfying as monster-fodder. Guomao’s twin towers are step in the right direction, but after Jianwai Soho, there’s precious little else smashable in that neighborhood. I guess a monster could kind of work it’s way down Jianwai and Chang’an Jie like a buffet line, stopping every kilometer or so to work on whatever medium-grade skyscraper or smokestack was convenient, but it seems like kind of a chore. Why waste the effort when the concentrated banquet tables of Shanghai and Hong Kong are so much more convenient?

    And that supposes that a monster could get to Beijing. But this may be easier to solve. Although we don’t have a major waterway nearby, it is conceivable that monster awakened by, say, the depletion of Beijing’s aquifer could arise from the bottom of Zhongnanhai, or perhaps tunnel up from underneath the Shougang plant (which would put it conveniently near the CCTV tower). I guess a monster could rise out of Tianjin harbor as well, and take Tianjin as a kind of hors’d’oeuvre on the way in, but it all seems very indirect. Plus any such monster could get misdirected and end up in Dalian, or, worse, Seoul (which has already had a monster, thank you very much).

    So I think Beijing has a clear mandate. If there is a better centerpiece for a giant monster attack than the 2008 Olympics, I cannot think of what it might be. Forget terrorist attack, I’m thinking giant monster attack. I think Beijing has a responsibility, a duty, to construct a monster-worthy skyline prior to the Olympics (it’s certainly working on this), and then take advantage of the games themselves to trash it utterly.

    Now that would be a spectacle worth staying for, and it would ensure Beijing’s entry into the pantheon of great World Cities far better than any measly athletic competition alone ever would.

  • Chinese restaurant calculation made easy

    A couple of days ago, Imagethief had lunch with four members of his team at a Chinese restaurant downstairs from our office. Choosing dishes was easy –I’ll eat almost anything– but, predictably, there was much debate about exactly how many dishes we should order. And, just as predictably, we ended up with twice as much food as we needed. This is the great conundrum of Chinese dining, and, indeed, most Asian-style dining.

    In the US it’s simple. You decide what entree you want and you order it. The only complexity is whether or not you share appetizers with your friends, choosing the wine (it’s fiendishly easy embarrass yourself oenologically; in college I had a buddy who wrecked a date with a rich girl by breathing the white wine) and settling the bill. In the US, settling a split restaurant bill is the most mathematically challenging task you are ever likely to undertake unless you are a high-energy physicist. And if you’re a physicist, you’ll have purpose-written computer software to help you. There is no software for sorting out restaurant checks, and by the time you and your friends are done sorting out who had how many of what beverages, and which appetizers, and I didn’t drink any goddamned wine, someone always gets screwed. Bitter, trans-generational rivalries have started this way. The Hatfields and the McCoys? That started with a restaurant check. And that was just Arby’s; think how much worse it could have been.

    Chinese dining trades the ordering simplicity and bill complexity for ordering complexity and bill simplicity. All the food goes into the middle, so you just divide the check by the number of people. Only miserly bastards will argue, “well, I had less of the duck tongue, so I shouldn’t pay so much”. You probably don’t hang out with people that anal, unless you are totally anal yourself. In which case, you probably live to dissect restaurant checks to two decimal places, so you’re wasting your time reading this. With even the beers being cheap in most Chinese restaurants, most of the time it’s not even worth adjusting for alcohol consumption. So the check is easy.

    But the ordering, ah, now that’s hard. And it’s not just hard for the obvious linguistic reasons. Yes, you have to learn some food and cooking vocabulary, but that comes quickly if you don’t want to starve. And you do need to get past the Chinese infatuation with cryptic dish names. You’ll never know that “Buddha’s glistening five-taste jewels” is braised camel testicles with sea cucumber unless you ask. But what’s really difficult is figuring out how much you should order. How many dishes should go into the center of the table in order to ensure that your party is sufficiently fed, without causing cataclysmic waste?

    Food is cheap in China, you argue, so why worry about cataclysmic waste? Well, guilt, for one reason. As a Jew, this is an inextricable part of my worldview. You can abandon kosher restrictions, but the guilt is bred in, like eye color and curly, brown hair. Remember all those years your mother told you that kids were starving in China, so you should shut up and eat the damned broccoli? That really comes back to haunt you when you’re actually in China, and you wander around some of the piss poor villages that begin on the far side of Beijing’s fifth ring road and stretch, more or less uninterrupted, all the way to Kyrgyzstan. And, really, who wants to see too much nice food thrown into the grime-blackened oil drums of the slop collectors? These are the poor souls who ply Beijing’s streets by tricycle and (illegally) xiao beng beng after dark, collecting restaurant leavings for the pig farms outside of town where they raise the pigs who will be, well, next week’s meals and, eventually, pig slop. It’s the Circle of Life, Beijing style. You won’t see Disney touching this one.

    Also, of course, when there is a vast amount of food on the table in front of you, you’ll tend to eat it. Now this isn’t necessarily bad, but Beijing cuisine isn’t of the light and heart-healthy variety. It’s of the Exxon Valdez, billions of gallons of oil and salt mixing together variety. Too much at any one sitting will put you into a coma. Too many sittings will put you into a casket. A really big, reinforced casket. And China is short of wood, so this only compounds the guilt.

    So this brings us to one of the truly great questions of our age. It’s right up there with, “is there an elegant, mathematical way to unify classical and quantum physical models?” or “who, in their right mind, thinks Paris Hilton is sexy?” That question is this: what is a truly rational ratio of Chinese dishes to people, assuming average people and an average restaurant? (I’ll assume that you’re smart enough to avoid one of those touristy “imperial” dives where they charge outrageous prices to serve you precious little niblets of bizarre organ meats that you could find being sold on sticks off the charcoal grill around the corner for a kuai a pop.)

    Think about it. You and a friend go a Chinese restaurant for lunch. You probably could survive splitting one dish and rice, but you’ll get a meat (or tofu; equivalent for this exercise) and a vegetable. If you’re aggressive, you’ll get two meats and a vegetable because you feel that you need the variety to justify a Chinese restaurant. But this is a trap, and you’ve now over-ordered. With two people, one dish per person is appropriate. Add another person and you’ll definitely add another dish. Your still at one dish per person, following a classic “one-per-head” rule often applied by Chinese people. But with four people, what do you do? Four dishes for four people might be a lot. You could probably stick with three. Five people? You’ll want four dishes. Six? Dicey…four will instinctively seem too little to you, even though it’s probably correct. Six will definitely be too much. This is touch and go. Seven or eight people? Er, uh…

    So you can see that lot of voodoo is coming to bear to here. And there is more complexity as well. When I say “dish” here, I am assuming one of the standards: a stir fried vegetable or a meat or tofu in sauce. But how do you account for the cold dishes, or veggies, which tend to be lighter? Or a duck, or even the mighty shuizhu yu, which are undoubtedly heavier? What about dumplings? Some places sell by the liang, some by orders of 10 or 12. Well, at this point you’re just guessing wildly, aren’t you?

    Of course you could turn to the waitress for help because she, of course, has a totally disinterested perspective on what represents enough food for your party. This is a variation of the deadly trap in which you ask the waitress to recommend a dish. Yes, sometimes they’ll send you to a legitimate, hidden gem, but nine times out of ten the finger goes straight to the abalone and sharks fin XO supreme in tiger-penis broth at RMB888 a bowl. And, at a restaurant where a plate of yuxiang rousi costs 12 kuai, that can be a quite a shock to the system. In truth, I’ve never felt that Chinese waiters or waitresses were really aggressively pushing more food than was appropriate, but they’ll definitely err high. I can recall dozens of times where waiters and waitresses suggested we order just one more dish, and only one instance where we were told that we might want to take one thing off the list.

    So, can this process be made easier? Can it be somehow defined in a way that will enable you to prove, mathematically, that you have ordered a correct amount of food? Who knows. But it’s Saturday morning, and I have nothing better to do, so I am going to try.

    For simplicity, let’s assume that we want a system that sticks to the Chinese rule of one dish per head. So if you have five people, you want an aggregate score of five. But we also want a system that weights dishes correctly based on their gustatory impact. For instance, there is no way that your pai huang gua or bowl of white rice has the same impact as an oil-and-chili drenched mapo doufu. Now I don’t have time to sit here and individually weight every Beijing and provincial standard that you can order in this town, for Chrissake. But I can roughly categorize dishes in a way that, I hope, makes sense. So here is my proposed weighting system for types of Chinese dishes:

    Underweighted dishes:

    • White rice: .25 in aggregate (assuming everyone orders a bowl – if less than half the party orders white rice, ignore)
    • Dumplings (shuijiao): .25 per liang of five or .5 for an order of 10 to 12
    • Dumplings (guotie): .5 per liang of five or 1 for an order of 10 to 12
    • Cold dishes (pickles, cold meats, appetizers, hua sheng, etc.): .5
    • Plain breads (no meat): .5
    • Desserts: .5 (this is counterintuitive as Chinese desserts are unparalleled calorie bombs, but I’ve always subscribed to the “separate tank” theory of dessert consumption
    • Cooked green vegetables: .75 (that’s stir-fried or steamed green vegetables; di san xian,yuxiang qiezi, or anything in sauce counts as a full dish)

    Standard weighted dishes:

    • Soups and noodles: 1 (soup is a trap; don’t assume that it’s lighter than other dishes)
    • Breads with meat (roubing, etc.): 1
    • Standards: 1 (most meats, poultry and fish; vegetables in sauce or gan bian style; and any cooked or sauced tofu; the vast majority of dishes)

    Overweighted dishes:

    • Shuizhu yu or niu rou: 1.5 (I’m inclined to double weight it, but I’ll be generous)
    • Beijing roast duck: 2 per duck and, yes, a half-duck is 1 point (the duck is greasy and there are pancakes, plum sauce, etc.)
    • “Set piece” dishes: 2 (roast suckling pig, roast mutton leg, anything that serves as a centerpiece dish or that would be served at a wedding)
    • Hot pot: .75 per person (so if you have four people, it counts as a total of 3 points)
    • Intimidation dishes: 2 (bizarre organ meats; exotic animals; anything you are served by people trying to get a rise out of the laowai or that you serve to your “just arrived in China” friends to give them a taste of “the real thing”

    So if you and five of your friends (six people total) are going out for dinner, you have an available score of six. Everyone has white rice, leaving you 4.5 available dishes. Two cold dishes leave you 3.5 remaining slots. Order two green vegetables and two standards, and it’s perfection. Or one standard, a duck and one more cold dish. Or, if this is a duck feast, six people qualifies for two ducks, a standard and two cold dishes. See how easy this is? For the sake of argument, I’ll even allow rounding.

    Global modifiers:
    Global modifiers affect the overall score of a meal. Positive modifiers are added to your available score to allow the addition of extra dishes, negative modifiers subtract from the total allowed dishes. For example, if you have four people, and, thus, a total available score of four, a global modifier of +2 allows you order dishes totaling a score of 6. Conversely, a global modifier of -2 would allow you to order only two dishes. Some global modifiers apply to specific numbers of people, and so must be modified for party size. Simple, isn’t it?

    • Auspicious occasion (wedding, deal closure): +2 for every five people
    • All just arrived in China: +2 (gotta experiment)
    • All female party: -1 for each four people
    • All teenage girls: -3 for each four people
    • Lunch: -1
    • Rugby team: x2 available score
    • In Guangdong: -2
    • In Sichuan or Hunan: +1
    • Any restaurant with a floor show: -2
    • Any restaurant with a government tourism or China Famous Brand plaque: -2
    • Any restaurant at a provincial 办事区: +1
    • Beer and other liquors: no impact

    There. Drop that all into Microsoft Excel or a handy, slide-rule style device and you’re good to go. I’ve tested it not at all and I have very little confidence that it will hold up under rigorous examination. But, in the end, it’s as good as anything else you’ve got to work with. Suggestions for other weightings or modifications can be submitted via the usual methods. The Nobel committee can contact me care of this website.

  • I am Beijing’s decadent man bitch

    When I was back in the US recently I was often asked a deceptively simple question: “What is it like living Beijing?”

    This is a trap. It’s a trap because no-one living in the United States wants to hear in any great detail what your experience of living in another country is like. Most Americans don’t actually believe in other countries, except for France, and then only because they don’t like it. I am sure that most of my friends think I am assimilated bodily into the Internet for eighteen months at a time, beaming in for the odd-week to attend barbecues and weddings.

    I went through this indifference for years  when I was living in Singapore and, despite China’s slightly higher marquee value, the situation is not much different now. It could just be that I am a crappy raconteur. But I think people really just want some short, pithy exclamation or mini-anecdote that encapsulates everything that is exotic and frightening about where you live, provides them with reassurance about their own lives, and doesn’t challenge them with too much history, culture, political analysis or other complexity. Something like, “Well, did you know that, in China, it’s acceptable to walk around without any pants on and that people rub noses to say hello?” (Although, ideally, something true.) Speak for longer than about three sentences on the topic of living abroad at your standard cocktail party and people’s eyes glaze over and their hands start fumbling for a liquor refill. There are, of course, occasional exceptions to this rule from people with a particular interest, but I feel this accurately describes most such situations.

    So I’ve been confronted with the challenge finding a way to accurately sum up the experience of living in Beijing –to transmit the raw, visceral feel of it– without dwelling too deeply upon the nitty-gritty and nuance that washes right over people who’s conception of China is built entirely on takeaway moo goo gai pan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And I think I’ve hit on a solution.

    Beijing is really about a mix of pleasure and pain accompanied by chronic, mild disorientation. I was reminded of this as I stepped out of my lovely, heated lobby this morning (pleasure) and the cold grabbed me by the collar and slapped me hard on both cheeks (pain). This was followed by my morning walk to the subway, amidst the smells of early-opening snack stalls (pleasure) and the open, neighborhood garbage tip (pain). A lovely Hunan meal (pleasure) is followed by the inevitable morning on the can working through an entire copy of The Economist (pain, but with a distraction). An autumn evening on the banks of Houhai (pleasure) is followed by the nasty taste of soot and pollution in one’s mouth the next morning (pain). The triumph of a successful conversation in Chinese (pleasure) is followed by the humiliation of failing utterly at some bit of communication that should be simple (pain). The pirate DVD you bought has a great picture (pleasure) but stops twenty minutes before the end of the movie (pain). You spy a lovely girl (pleasure); and she picks her nose (pain). And so on.

    So I’ve come up with an interactive method that I feel will enable my friends and family in the US to better understand the world  in which I live, without bogging them down in too much didacticism. It works like this:

    If you want to know what it’s like to live in Beijing, get yourself four shots of vodka (technically it should be baijiu, but that’s hard to get in the US), a packet of cheap cigarettes, a ball-peen hammer and a slightly dirty but beautiful, exotic-looking girl dressed in unfashionable clothes. Now,

    1. Drink all four shots of vodka.
    2. Take a drag on one of the cigarettes.
    3. Kiss the girl.
    4. Hit yourself on the hand with ball-peen hammer, really hard.
    5. Repeat.

    I think that about sums it up.

    Of course, being a completely masochistic Asiaphile, I love Beijing’s pleasure/pain duality. In a way, I guess that makes Beijing my nasty, whip-cracking mama, and me her decadent man-bitch. If you are low enough to want to think of it in such vulgar terms. Even now, a year-and-a-half later, my general complacency is often interrupted by moments of utter surprise that say, with knife-point keenness, “hey, asshole, you live in China”. I love that feeling. It was because I had long-since outgrown that feeling in Singapore that I came to China in the first place. I suppose when I no longer get that feeling here, it will be time to leave. But I think it will be a while. My cheeks still sting from the last slap.

  • Harbin aftermath: Government vows to thoroughly scape all goats

    Catastrophes are fun to watch, but not nearly so much fun as the aftermath of kicking, screaming and recriminations as blame is liberally heaped and fingers pointed. Katrina lasted only a day, after all, but the operatic fallout has reverberated for weeks, although less loudly now than it did at first. Chinese post-disaster convulsions are, perhaps, a bit more cryptic and mysterious than the American version, but interesting nonetheless. The aftermath of the Songhua River poisoning is just getting going, and, as it unfolds, the Chinese government and US government are notable for some of their similarities as well as some of their differences.

    The Chinese are following the US precedent by eagerly shoveling blame down onto lower levels of government. The better to distract people’s attention from the fact that the central government, if not directly responsible for the explosion, was apparently directly involved in the subsequent ten-day coverup. But at the same time, they are indulging in the classic central goverment pastime of erasing the inconvenient bits of the story in a way that the US government only wishes it could do.

    My attention was drawn back to this issue by an article that ran on Xinhua’s website today, hopefully titled, “China vows to “sternly” punish those responsible for river pollution“. (I’ve taken the liberty of correcting the spelling of the word “river”.) The article is interesting because it’s a classic bit of PR misdirection. Read this:

    The head of national work safety watchdog vowed Tuesday to “sternly” punish those responsible for a chemical plant explosion in northeast China’s Jilin Province, which caused toxic leakage into the Songhua River, a main water supply source in the area.

    Li Yizhong, director of the National Bureau of Production Safety Supervision Administration, pledged a thorough investigation in the explosion and the ensuing toxic spill in the river.

    Li, who headed an investigation team set up by the State Council on Tuesday to probe the accident, promised to seriously deal with those enterprises, departments and individuals held responsible for the accident.

    “Anyone, who were found guilty of dereliction of duty, will be harshly dealt with,” he said, “those who break the law will be handed over to the judicial departments.”

    “People who are found to have provided false information to investigators will also be punished severely,” the official said. “Any move trying to cover up the cause of the accident and any passive attitude toward the probe are deemed deception and a defiance of law.”

    ***

    The investigation team will probe the cause of the blast and why there were no preventative measures in place to prevent the benzene from being discharged into the Songhua River.

    An earlier report said that Yu Li, head of the Jilin branch of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), was removed from his post.

    Two other officials, who allegedly held direct responsibility for the plant explosion, were also dismissed.

    Besides, Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), China’s environmental watchdog, resigned after the accident, becoming the highest-ranking Chinese official to resign for an environmental incident.

    Ask yourself two questions. 1) What do you see in this article? 2) What do you not see in this article? My answers:

    What I see in this article:

    • A resolute central government taking action
    • An investigation team created by the State Council to probe the accident
    • Rolling of heads involved in the explosion (and one central government head)
    • Stern threats of punishment for those found to have caused the article through dereliction or negligence
    • Stern threats of punishment for those found to have “provided false information to investigators”
    • This last one is important: stern threats of punishment for those found to have covered up the cause of the accident (my emphasis)

    What I do not see in this article:

    • Any acknowledgment of the coverup of the release of Benzene (as opposed to the cause of the explosion)
    • Any suggestion that the central government was complicit in any way in that coverup (although the resignation of Xie Zhenhua suggests some acknowledgment of responsibility for the initial accident)
    • Any suggestion that a general climate of lax central regulation and control might have played a role creating conditions conducive to the explosion

    This is not surprising in the least, but it lets you see how the story is going to be spun. The accident was bad, and if negligence was involved, it is appropriate to punish the people involved. And this makes a handy flash-bang for catching people’s attention and making them feel that Something is Being Done. But it ignores the fact that the coverup of the benzene release was arguably an equally (or even more) serious crime to any negligence that might have precipitated the original explosion. After all, it was the coverup that exposed everyone living along the Songhua River between the chemical plant and whatever point the Benzene had reached when the coverup was blown to potential poisoning. If anything is going to be investigated, it’s the coverup and the decisions made around it that should come under scrutiny.

    But there is, of course, faint hope of that. The coverup is joining the lengthening list of catastrophic un-events in recent Chinese history.

    I realize this is a deconstruction of a translation, which is dangerous territory. But everything I see is consistent with how I would expect the government here to respond.

    In what looks like another consequence of the disaster, it was reported by the AFP today that a Jilin City vice mayor and environmental chief has died in apparently mysterious circumstances:

    The vice mayor and environment chief for China’s Jilin city has been found dead, the city’s Communist Party press office said, amid accusations he was involved in last month’s toxic disaster cover-up there.

    “He died yesterday,” a spokesman for the Jilin city party press office told AFP, without giving any details as to the cause of death.

    “The police are investigating. We don’t know any more about it. I think the police will make a public announcement after they finish their investigation.”

    Wang Wei, the vice mayor who was also in charge of environment protection, took a high-profile role after a blast at the PetroChina chemical plant in Jilin on November 13 that killed eight people and injured 60 others.

    The accident led to the spillage of 100 tonnes of the carcinogens benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River, one of China’s longest waterways and a source of water for millions of people.

    However officials said nothing of the contamination of the Songhua for nearly 10 days.

    “It will not cause large scale pollution. We have decided not to have a large scale evacuation,” the China Business News quoted Wang on November 15 as saying.

    If the police are investigating, one must assume that Wang Wei did not pass away peacefully in his sleep. A Japanese-style shame suicide, perhaps? Conspiracy buffs may supply their theories in the comment space.

    Update: The Associated Press interprets the story a little differently than I did.

  • Van Nguyen died for your sins: Executions as public communication

    The Australians were doomed from the start, literally and metaphorically.

    They were doomed because they misapprehended the nature of capital punishment for drug offenses in Singapore. They thought of it as retribution, or punishment. This is wrong. Drug-offense executions in Singapore are, first and foremost, public communication. That radically affects how the Singapore government can be expected to respond to noisy pleas for clemency. Mercy is appropriate for punishment, but it is bad for deterrent communication. The louder and more passionate the public please for clemency became, the more inevitable was Van’s execution.

    The Singapore government is fairly transparent about its death penalty. Anyone entering the country by airplane is treated to “the lecture”, in the form of a standardized announcement of the stiff penalties for drug offenses, including death. Immigration entry cards carry the same warning. The country publicizes many of its executions via coverage in the local media. The reason why is that, unlike many nations that apply a death penalty, Singapore appears to have given some thought to how to wield it most effectively as a deterrent.

    In order to be effective a deterrent needs to be two things. First, it needs to be credible. In other words, people have to believe in the threat. Second, that credibility has to be communicated. A deterrent that no-one knows about or believes in is useless. Your trained rottweiler is a credible burglar deterrent. But you still put a “beware of dog” sign on your gate and scatter shredded dog toys, an enormous dog dish and a cow femur around your yard to drive the point home. That’s the communciation. It lets the thief know the penalty for hopping your fence and saves you the trouble of winnowing pieces of human flesh from between your dog’s teeth before his breath goes foul.

    In the US, a death sentence is often an abstraction for those convicted; something sinister that hovers on the horizon, but which is often delayed for a decade or longer by the legal process. In a sense, the death penalty in the US is not credible (“hang ‘em high” Texas possibly excepted). This lack of credibility is aggravated by laws that differ from state to state. Singapore, on the other hand, is very systematic and uniform about meting out the death penalty for drug crimes. It applies strict criteria for when the death penalty applies to drug offenses, and those criteria are openly published. The appeals process is limited and the time from conviction to execution, anecdotally, is generally around a year. That’s immediate enough to make the prospect of death very real and credible indeed.

    The Australian protests over Van’s execution yesterday arguably played right into Singapore’s hands on two fronts. It not only let them communicate their penalty globally, which the Singapore government has no qualms about, but it also let them publicly demonstrate the credibility of the deterrent by refusing to entertain pleas of clemency. The message was quite clear and effective: We are willing to execute a citizen of a first-world ally despite repeated, public pleas from his government and tearful mother. So you’d better believe we will damn-sure hang your narrow, friendless Burmese/Thai/Malay/Indonesian/Lao smuggler ass without a second thought.

    From the Singaporean government’s point of view, the consistent application of the death penalty is the lynchpin of the credibility that must be communicated. Any visible erosion of that credibility is dangerous. You can think of this a bit like you would think of negotiation with kidnappers or terrorists. You can never be publicly seen to give in as that sends a message to others that they might succeed at the same thing. If you do negotiate, you will do it only in quiet situations where there is little risk of public disclosure. If there was to be any hope for Van at all (and that hope was never more than gossamer), it would have come from sotto voce diplomatic communication out of the public view, accompanied by restrained and dignified public silence. Candlelight vigils make nice photo-ops and public remonstrations generate good copy for Aussie politicians. But they essentially guarantee that the Singapore government will follow-through with the execution, because to do anything else would undermine the entire communication strategy around their deterrent.

    Whether Singapore’s death penalty, credible or not, has any actual deterrent effect is, of course, nearly impossible to measure. It’s a truism amongst anti death-penalty campaigners that the deterrent effects of the death penalty are suspect. The fact is that, no matter how stiff the deterrent, Singapore is a strategic trans-shipment location. That is the unintended consequence of making yourself the modern transportation and air hub for one of the world’s most important drug production regions. And in Southeast Asia, and Australia as well, there is obviously a ready supply of people who will risk their lives for a large enough payoff.

    Speaking of public communication, after Schapelle Corby and Van Nguyen, the Australians might want to think twice about having a noisy public protest if another one of their own is booked on drug charges in the next few months. Right now they are looking like the whiny kingpins of the Southeast Asian drug trade. Unfair and untrue, but that’s the perception being created.

    Another spooky aspect of Singapore’s drug laws that is seldom remarked upon is that Singaporean citizens and (gulp) permanent residents can be prosecuted in Singapore for consumption of drugs overseas, even in places where it is legal or barely criminal. Singapore has, in effect, made its drug consumption laws extra-territorial, ensuring that its social values and legal restrictions apply to citizens and PRs no matter where they may live. Drug consumption spans a pretty wide range of activities, from the manifestly corrosive habits of a heroin junkie to the arguably pretty harmless dormitory spliff. The philosophical questions raised by this are, therefore, interesting ones.

    Following the promulgation of that law, in 1998, in another classic piece of Singapore drug-enforcement public communication, a couple returning from a rave in Malaysia a few years ago was famously arrested at the causeway and convicted for smoking marijuana. They were reportedly, and not very credibly, rumbled by sharp border guards who spotted their reddened “addicts eyes”. My Singaporean friends theorized that it was more likely informers planted at the rave who had ratted the couple out. Many Singaporeans I know take it for granted that informers are also cultivated amongst Singaporean student communities overseas. After all, if too many defenseless Singaporeans caught the bong habit in the dorm rooms of libertine Perth, London or Los Angeles, who knows what that might lead to. Reggae, perhaps.

    Disclosure: Imagethief opposes the death penalty in all applications. It is, I believe, a worthless deterrerent, prone to error and more often applied as a tool for satisfying an unworthy social lust for vengeance rather than as a gravely considered sanction of last-resort. In a societies that claim the mantle of modern civilization it is hypocrisy of the deepest level and there should be no place for it.

  • The Harbin water crisis

    A couple of days ago, in response to a link I posted to his roundup of articles on the Harbin water crisis ESWN put this comment up on my site:

    As you are the PR expert, how would you have managed the situation? Would you have own up to the benzene problem way up front? Alternately, how would you handle the ‘clean-up’ afterwards? This is a serious matter because they were clearly way, way out of their depth in terms of what they believe that they could get away with.

    Well it’s always flattering to be considered a “PR expert”, although it’s probably closer to the truth to say I play a PR expert on TV. But the Chinese government’s response to the Harbin crisis has been a case study in bad PR management, and, with ESWN’s prodding, I’d like to explain why.

    But first the disclaimers: I am not a crisis specialist. We have hard-core people in my company who do that sort of thing. However, I’ve been doing PR for a while and there are some generally applicable rules of crisis PR that most of us in the industry know. Also, I am basing my analysis on China’s English language press coverage and on foreign press coverage. My Chinese isn’t good enough to get past headlines most of the time, so I can’t comb through Chinese-language press in any depth. Finally, I was not directly involved in this event and, therefore, do not have full information. Bear all of that in mind.

    With that out of the way, let’s have some fun.

    The Event and Coverage
    There are some basic facts that should be reviewed first, along with the history of the press coverage. The explosion in Jilin first happened on Sunday, November 13th. While there was some agonizing about the immediate casualties and the potential for major toxic events posed by shoddy chemical plant construction, there was no hint that this event had resulted in a severe toxic release.

    A China Daily report from November 14, the day after the explosion, said this:

    The local government has kept monitoring the air and water quality in the area, and further investigation into the blast is being made.

    So from nearly immediately after the explosion, representations were being made that the potential toxic fallout from the explosion was being monitored.

    A China Daily search for Jilin + Explosion, which I will use as an inexact proxy for press coverage as it should catch most articles, yields zero results from November 15 through November 22, when the announcement of Harbin’s water cutoff was made. A Xinhua search turns up a similar gap over those dates, except for one story from November 16, which carries the following headline:

    Chemical plant blasts releases no toxic substances [sic]

    The headline is based on an assertion by the Jilin provincial government that there is no problem with air quality. The story makes no mention of water. With the benefit of hindsight, this omission looks suspicious.

    So that’s a one-week gap –at least in English press– when there are no newsworthy public announcements about the potential aftermath of a chemical plant explosion next to a major river that flows through densely populated urban areas and into a neighboring country, except for a patently incorrect or deceptive one.

    On November 22, the announcement of the interruption of Harbin’s water supply is made. Initial reports specifically deny any link between the shut off and the Jilin explosion, as is clear from this China Daily article, the first in English language press to report on the stoppage. The article implausibly cites “maintenance and repair” as the official reasons for a previously unannounced stoppage. Although there is vague mention of the Jilin explosions in official statements cited in the article, any connection is vociferously denied by the authorities:

    The common refrain was that the explosion at Jilin city of neighbouring Jilin Province on the upper reaches of Songhua River may have caused a leakage of poisonous substances into the river as it is only a few hundred metres away from the plant. Harbin is located at the middle reaches of the river.

    But an official with the Harbin municipal government, who did not want to be named, dismissed the assumption as “just a rumour.”

    Harbin Water Supply Company refused to comment but sources at the municipal environment bureau said that there was nothing abnormal with the quality of water in the river.

    In corroboration, Jilin said that the local environment bureau found that the water quality was barely affected after the blast.

    In the absence of hard information, rumors flew through Harbin, stoking public anxiety and leading to a run on stores, as reported in that same article. As reported in foreign press, there was a large, voluntary evacuation of the city. Wells had to be dug quickly in Harbin and massive amounts of water shipped in rapidly.

    Only on the next day was there a Xinhua report confirming that the explosion had polluted the river. Interestingly, the admission is made by a central government agency, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). This article makes several interesting statements:

    “After the explosion at the Jilin Petrochemical Company under China National Petroleum Corporation, our observation showed pollutants containing benzene had flown into the Songhua River and caused water pollution,” said an official with SEPA.

    Benzene is a substance harmful to human health.

    The official said upon receiving the report, the administration immediately sent experts to Heilongjiang Province to assist local pollution-control efforts. Quality of the river water is under close observation for 24 hours every day.

    The Jilin and Heilongjiang provincial governments have activated their contingency programs for environmental incidents, and have taken measures to ensure the safety of potable water, said the official.

    He said Jilin had quickly blocked entry of the pollutants into the river and discharged water from a reservoir to dilute pollutants in the river. It also organized environmental, water conservancy and chemical experts to discuss pollution control plans, and beefed up monitoring work.

    Most interesting is the assertion that Jilin had “quickly blocked entry of the pollutants into the river and discharged water from a reservoir to dilute pollutants in the river”. This suggests that the Jilin government knew exactly what was going on. Bear that in mind for later.

    Then the inevitable consequences began to unfold. Public erosion of trust in government was one casualty, as reported by the Financial Times:

    “I am fleeing,” said Pang Shijun, a 50-year-old man among the crowds at the central railway station. He said his wife had already left the night before to go to the nearby city of Jixi. “I just do not trust the government to provide true information on this.”

    Whoops. More from Reuters:

    “It’s worrying, because it may not have a strong smell or colour, so you can’t tell when it’s gone,” said Hong Shan, a retired official exercising beside the river. “It’s up to the government to keep us informed. We can’t tell ourselves.”

    Commentators in Beijing and further afield condemned the “lies” told before the authorities revealed what had really happened. A paper in Harbin itself tried to play down the crisis.

    And, of course, there were recriminations. CNPC and the Jilin provincial government have emerged as the principle villains for running the plant and covering up the benzene release, respectively. Here the New York Times reports:

    “We will be very clear about who’s responsible,” said Zhang Lijun, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, at a news conference in Beijing. “It is the chemical plant of the C.N.P.C. in Jilin Province,” he said, referring to China National Petroleum.

    Mr. Zhang said the investigation would consider whether there was any criminal liability for the spill.

    PetroChina Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Petroleum listed in New York and Hong Kong, is responsible for the company’s domestic petrochemical production, the China National Petroleum Web site says. China National Petroleum holds 90 percent of PetroChina’s shares.

    The official New China News Agency reported that China National Petroleum had apologized. The company “deeply regrets” the spill and will take responsibility for handling the consequences, the deputy general manager, Zeng Yukang, was quoted as saying. The vice governor of Jilin Province, Jiao Zhengzhong, also apologized to the people of Harbin, The Beijing News reported Thursday.

    Zhang Lijun is no champion of transparency, as we’ll see later. Even the China Dailyweighed in, with an editorial yesterday condemning the actions of the Jilin government. They noticed the same thing I did; that the Jilin government has essentially admitted that it knew all along that there was a problem:

    A spokesman from the State Environmental Protection Administration said yesterday at a news conference that Jilin Province and Jilin Petrochemical Corporation had adopted timely measures to stop the toxic spill from being discharged into the river immediately after the explosion.

    This shows that the corporation knew very clearly about the contamination and its possible result but still wanted to keep the secret to itself.

    Leaders from the Jilin provincial government and Daqing Petroleum Administration apologized for the contamination of river water and for the inconvenience and losses the pollution has inflicted on Harbin’s residents. But they never apologized for the hiding of truth.

    We do not know what is behind the cover-up. It might be because they were afraid that they would have to pay money for the losses the pollution has incurred in Harbin, and it might be because they were afraid of losing face.

    But the fact is they have brought shame on themselves by covering up the truth.

    So there is the chronology. Now the fun bit.

    Where They Went Wrong
    No matter how much you prepare and plan, shit happens. That the Jilin chemical plant exploded and released tons of benzene was bad. It could have been incompetence or it could have been plain bad luck. But the actions of CNPC and the Jilin and Harbin governments after the disaster have tarred them with the stink of incompetence and untrustworthiness regardless of the reasons for the original disaster. They were caught in an enormous lie, and that makes everything else they have to say about the disaster untrustworthy. And people will remember.

    Without having been in the boardroom, it is hard to say why the decision to cover up the disaster was made. It may be that Chinese doesn’t provide and incentive for openness about these sorts of things; this is an area where I don’t have enough information to make an informed judgment. Certainly neither the Chinese government nor Chinese business has a great reputation for transparency. The explosion would already be subjecting the plant to scrutiny for safety and operational standards. Perhaps a toxic release would have brought a different level of scrutiny, say from central government as opposed to malleable provincial authorities. And perhaps that level of scrutiny would have turned up some unpleasant truths surrounding CNPC, the plant and the Jilin government.

    All of this is complete speculation. But, of course, that is kind of speculation a cover-up provokes, and why cover-ups are almost always bad PR decisions. I use the phrase “spin doctor” in gentle self-mockery in the subtitle of my blog. Perhaps that’s a mistake, because it perpetuates a myth about PR, which is that it is all about twisting the truth about these kinds of situations. It’s a shame people see PR that way, because a surprising amount of the time, our advice in crises is to be completely honest. And when lives are at stake there is simply no other choice.

    Lives were at stake in this case. The moment CNPC and the Jilin government knew they had a chemical release on their hands they should have first informed the central government (which, scarily, perhaps they did) in order to motivate the appropriate support, and then informed the public. Harbin isn’t the only city along the Songhua river, and every other town along the same way deserved to know what was flowing past their riverbanks.

    How much benzene was released? What are the potential effects? How long will it take to reach key population centers, and how diluted will it be at each stage? What will need to be done to protect those population centers? What help is being offered?

    No doubt people would have panicked anyway, just as they did in Harbin. But after the supermarket shelves emptied out, there still would have been several days in which to prepare alternative water supplies and take other protective measures before the taps had to be turned off in Harbin. And the Jilin provincial government and CNPC, a major government-owned corporation (and, to a lesser extent, the Harbin and Heilongjiang governments), would not have squandered whatever trust people had in them.

    Now, I am applying western PR standards to China, which has a completely different tradition of openness and public communication than developed, western countries. As ESWN pointed out in his comment, the Jilin authorities were clearly way out of their depth in dealing with the crisis and in evaluating what they could get away with. That’s true. And it is a serious problem that the Chinese government needs to solve if it wants development to continue smoothly.

    Government is a Brand, Whether You Like it or Not
    Let’s think of the Chinese government as a brand. This is an oversimplification, but the comparison holds true in many ways. Like all brands, government, in this case Chinese Government (new and improved!), possesses or seeks certain attributes that it believes will help it in the execution of its business. Competence, compassion, pragmatism, security, and so on. For most governments, trust is an essential attribute. The job of governing is easier when people trust what the government tells them and trust that the government will provide essential services and intervene in times of stress or disaster.

    To see how erosion of trust can affect a government badly, look at the current US administration, which has two trust serious issues right now. First, many people saw Katrina as a huge abrogation of trust, and it severely damaged government credibility at municipal, state and federal levels by undermining the compact that the government will help to mitigate severe crisis. Second, a majority of the US public now believes that it was misled about the reasons for launching the war in Iraq. That is eroding public support and making it much harder for the administration to prosecute its plans in Iraq.

    With regards to China, the foreign knee-jerk reaction is to say, “The Chinese government is authoritarian! Why should they give a damn about trust?” But I would wager that most Chinese people trust their government on a fundamental level, or at least want to trust it, and that the Chinese central government places a fairly high priority on maintaining that trust. You can see aspects of this in many of the initiatives the CCP is prioritizing right now. Programs to control corruption and help the rural poor to climb out of miserable poverties are all part of building and maintaining trust. Even propaganda is designed to foster trust in the government. Power may flow from the barrel of a gun, but it is significantly easier to hold onto that power and exercise it effectively when people trust you. The Chinese government is executing several simultaneous, tricky balancing acts. I think they realize that their jobs will be much easier the more people trust them. Unfortunately, they seem unable to break their bad, Stalinist habits.

    Credibility engenders trust, and goes hand-in-hand with it. And credibility is a really serious issue for the Chinese government. Just today, the Chinese government was busyrefuting a report in New Scientist that bird flu deaths in China total over 300. (The Horse’s Mouth blogged the Boxun report that also covered this a couple of days ago – it’s blocked in China.) But people will continue to be suspicious of Chinese government protestations because the track record is bad. If the Chinese government expects to maintain credibility and trust it has to come up with the goods. Statements like this,reported in today’s FT in a good story on Chinese media reaction to the disaster, will not help:

    “There are many ways to release information. Making it public is one way and only informing the local governments and enterprises along the route of the contamination is another,” said Zhang Lijun, a vice-director of the State Environmental Protection Agency.

    The South China Morning Post summed up the Chinese government’s credibility gap (via Howard French’s “A Glimpse of the World”) blog:

    The way in which the affair has been handled raises fresh concerns about the willingness of mainland officials to disclose bad news.

    The PR aphorism is that trust is easy to lose and, once lost, fiendishly hard to regain. That’s why we so often counsel honesty and direct action in crisis situations. So here is Imagethief’s free PR advice to the Chinese government: what works in a closed, Stalinist state does not fly in a modern, open economy. There is no having it both ways. CNPC is a publicly listed company traded in Hong Kong and New York and need to behave like one, even with regards to its operations in China.  The expectations upon you are changing. That is the inevitable price of success, development and integration with the rest of the world. If you expect to continue that success, you will have to learn how you want to communicate around these kinds of events. In the long run, whatever you it is you think you are achieving by trying to hide your disasters, missteps and calamities, you are almost certainly achieving the exact opposite. Honesty in times of crisis can build your credibility. Infinite successful cover-ups add nothing to it. Every failed cover-up destroys it that much more.

    You can only get caught in so many lies before people stop listening.

    Update: Two good roundups of foreign press articles from the Peking Duck, here andhere.

    Also, tough luck if you live in the small villages along the Songhua, as reported by the New York Times here.

    Update 2: This, in particular, is  a good story to read. From the Washington Post’s Philip Pan, it discusses how local journalists broke the coverup story. That’s Chinese media doing its job well. What will be telling is how the Chinese government –especially the central government– reacts. If it is used as an excuse to crack down further on the ability of media to report such things, or if the journalists responsible are punished, it will be a very bad sign indeed.

  • How to write a generic China bird flu story

    Bird flu may not be sweeping through the human population, but it’s sure sweeping through the media. It seems that every newspaper and wire service has packed their Beijing reporter off to the poultry-infested boonies of China (which begin right outside Beijing’s fifth ring road) to report on the dire and pox-ridden scene in the Chinese countryside. As a result, the stories have begun to take on a certain formulaic feeling.

    As a public service to my readership, I’d like to present Imagethief’s handy, paragraph-by-paragraph guide to the standard China bird flu feature story. When it finally achieves Enlightenment and begins recognizing bloggers, the Pulitzer committee knows where to reach me.

    1) Alarmist headline:

    Rural Chinese farms perfect incubators for planet-destroying superbug!

    2) Rustic introductory scene to demonstrate China’s backwardness and ignorance:

    November 8, Choukeng, China: In the remote village of Choukeng, chicken farmer Shen Jifen wades through a veritable lake of chickenshit.

    “Chickens, chickens, chickens. It’s all we know in this village,” said the 103 year old, dirt-poor illiterate farmer as he lazily swatted a wheezing, mortally ill chicken off of his head. “We raise chickens, we eat chickens, we wear chickens. I treat these chickens like my own children. Except for the slaughtering.”

    3) Inducement of disgust to drive home backwardness and ignorance:

    So numerous are the chickens in Choukeng that the entire village is three feet deep in warm chickenshit. To get to market or visit neigbors, villagers pole small, flat-bottomed boats through the fetid chickenshit. The flimsy houses are built on stilts, and anything heavier than a chicken rapidly sinks.

    “Last year three people drowned in chickenshit,” said Shen. “We buried them in coffins of baked chickenshit. It’s our primitive and destitute way.”

    4) Sinister hint of biological menace, amplified by rural backwardness:

    But now the stream of chickenshit is drying up as Choukeng’s once nearly infinite supply of chickens begins to drop dead. Avian flu has arrived here, carried by the Siberian booze-cranes that stop to feed in Choukeng as they follow their migratory route from Smolensk to winter drinking grounds in Lan Kwai Fong.

    Instead of culling their sickening flocks or incinerating the dead birds, the villagers of Choukeng are unwittingly creating an environment ripe for the rise of  pandemic bird flu.

    “When chickens die, we collect the blood and rub it all over our bodies,” said Shen. “The blood of chickens that have died from infection is a well known cure for wind.”

    5) Raise the specter of government incompetence:

    Now the Chinese government has arrived in Choukeng to manage a cull of sick poultry. But instead of helping, they may be making the problem worse. Local officials are using compensation money provided by the central government and intended for farmers to stage bloody, baijiu-lubricated cockfights and to build the world’s largest, free-standing concrete chicken statue in a bid to attract more tourists to the impoverished region.

    6) Gratuitous journalist abuse:

    A journalist who attempted to sneak into one of the cockfighting sessions disguised in a chicken suit was detained by plainclothes police and forced to write ‘I am not a giant chicken’ 1000 times on a blackboard, before he was stripped of all clothing and possessions, sprayed with superglue, rolled in glitter, and turfed out of town with the Chinese words for “dangerous lunatic” written on his forehead in permanent marker.

    7) Alarm bells from the international health bureaucracy:

    “They’re making a righteous screw-job of the whole thing up there,” said Bjorn Neutral-Öbserver, a Beijing-based representative of the World Health Organization. “The Ministry of Health would cover up news of acne if it could get away with it.”

    Mr. Neutral-Öbserver stressed, however, that bird flu remains confined to poultry and migratory birds.

    “For the moment, it’s still perfectly safe to visit remote, unsanitary shitholes infested with thuggish police,” he said before boarding a plane bound for his apocalypse bunker buried deep in the Swiss Alps.

    8) Vox populi:

    Foreigners living in China are paying little heed to the brewing health crisis in the hinterlands.

    “What? What are you talking about? What’s this about chickenshit? And why do you have ‘dangerous lunatic’ written on your forehead?” commented a Beijing based PR consultant and blogger who gave his name only as ‘Imagethief’.

    9) Tear-jerking rural finale:

    But in remote and smelly Choukeng village, the crisis is already all too real.

    “When all the chickens die, the lake of chickenshit will dry up and become hard,” said a wistful Shen. “Our way of life will come to an end. And it will be really hard to pole those little boats around.”

    Bonus prediction: The bird flu story du jour is the closure of live poultry markets in Beijing. Later this week, we’ll hear about black-market sales of live poultry. You heard it here first.

  • American Internet firms in Chinese peril

    I like talking with journalists because, naturally, they have a way of asking interesting questions. The same journalist who got me thinking about corruption in PR hit me with a poser while we were talking:

    “Name a successful American Internet firm in China,” he said.
    “Well,” I answered, “there’s always…er.” And I thought about a bit.
    “What about…nah, they’re not doing so hot.” And I thought about it a bit more.

    Ok, so there isn’t one. American Internet firms are, by and large, doing badly in China. The whys and wherefores of this could fill a few posts, but a few reasons come to mind:

    • Arrogance
    • Poor communication
    • Lack of understanding of Chinese culture, reflected in interfaces, communication tools and services provided
    • A preference for local products among Chinese Internet users

    The large portals are, of course, media firms, and they have also been victimized by many of the same things that have bedeviled traditional media firms coming into China, such as a strict regulatory regime and a sense that the services offered here are sanitized versions of the real thing. While local Internet firms are subject to the same restrictions, they seem to be able to manage appearances better. I think this is in part because they benefit from the (correct) perception that they serve the Chinese audience first. Every time a foreign Internet firm gets involved in a censorship or other scandal, it reinforces that perception. Plus, a little “root for the home team” nationalism goes a long way in China.

    Two bits of recent corporate communication illustrate the problems of foreign Internet firms in China, in different ways. The first is a statement issued by Yahoo! Hong Kong (not China) in response to the controversy over the turning over of Chinese journalist Shi Tao’s e-mail to the Chinese police, and his subsequent arrest. Here it is:

    Yahoo! Hong Kong Statement
    18 October 2005

    As a company operating in the jurisdiction of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, Yahoo! Hong Kong adheres to all applicable local laws and regulations in Hong Kong and our privacy policy. The Chinese authorities have never contacted Yahoo! Hong Kong to request any of its user information.  Yahoo! Hong Kong and Yahoo! China are managed and operated separately and independently of one another.  As such, Yahoo! Hong Kong and Yahoo! China have never exchanged or revealed respective user information to one another.

    This is really interesting for several reasons. First, its an attempt by Yahoo! Hong Kong to distance itself from Yahoo! China. Now, checking the bottom of the Yahoo! China website will show you that Yahoo! China is also operated out of Hong Kong, by Yahoo! Holdings, Hong Kong. So it is, indeed, a different operating company from Yahoo! Hong Kong.

    There are a couple of legitimate reasons why Yahoo! Hong Kong would want to do this. First, they were probably getting a lot of misdirected media inquiries and hate mail. Second, as they serve the uppity and more democratically minded Hong Kong audience, the may wish to distance themselves from something they find unpalatable.

    Nevertheless, from an International PR point of view, this makes no difference. The damage done to Yahoo! by the Shi Tao affair was at the international brand level. Yahoo! Hong Kong, Yahoo! China, or Yahoo! Upper Volta, it doesn’t make any difference. Especially to the liberal minded Americans and Europeans who are still Yahoo!’s bread-and-butter customers. And the continued woes in that department can be seen in this recent, very interesting article from the International Herald Tribune. As previously predicted in this space, the “just following local laws” excuse is now coming under wider scrutiny:

    Yahoo, meanwhile, gets to keep its piece of the gigantic China pie, insisting like most Western companies doing business there that it must abide by the laws of countries in which it operates.

    “What if local law required Yahoo to cooperate in strictly separating the races?” asked Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a widely circulated essay for The Los Angeles Times. “Or the rounding up and extermination of a certain race? Or the stoning of homosexuals?”

    Jim Etchison, an information technology management consultant from Pomona, California, created BooYahoo, at booyahoo.blogspot.com, a site dedicated to urging “freedom-loving citizens of the Internet” to stop using Yahoo services “as a result of their oppressive policies.”

    “I was a happy Yahoo user for about nine years and was so offended by the Shi Tao business that I boycotted them,” Etchison said in an e-mail message. “What begins in China will end where I live.”

    Of course, nobody in China can see Jim’s site because it is on Blogspot and, therefore, blocked.

    The Yahoo! Hong Kong statement is also interesting because it suggests that the legal obligations of Yahoo! Holdings, Hong Kong (operator of Yahoo! China) may be conflicted between Hong Kong’s privacy regulations and China’s demands for more-or-less complete fiat over all media firms operating within mainland borders or serving mainland audiences. But I am unschooled on such things, and this is just a wild hare.

    The other interesting announcement was one from online auction juggernaut, eBay, in response to a zero-fee deal from pesky, Chinese competitor Taobao (part of Jack Ma’s Alibaba empire, recently sold to, whaddaya know, Yahoo!):

    eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY)(www.ebay.com) today issued the following statement regarding Taobao’s pricing challenge:

    “Free” is not a business model. It speaks volumes about the strength of eBay’s business in China that Taobao today announced that it is unable to charge for its products for the next three years.

    We’re very proud that eBay is creating a sustainable business in China, while providing Chinese consumers and entrepreneurs with the safest, most professional, and most exciting global trading environment available today.

    An interesting article in Red Herring looks at the competition between Taobao and eBay. It raises industry observers’ doubts about Taobao’s approach. But it also had this to say:

    EachNet founder and Chairman Bo Shao once dismissed the Taobao approach, pronouncing, “Free is not a business model.” Free-at-first, however, does seem to have worked for Taobao’s parent company Alibaba, the business-to-business (B2B) portal Mr. Ma founded in 1999. Hangzhou-based Alibaba, which Mr. Ma claims is the largest global B2B site in the world, did not charge for its first three years, but Mr. Ma asserts that the company has been in the black since the third quarter of 2002. “We know the difference between investing money and burning it,” he says.

    Jack Ma’s success in building Alibaba suggests that he has some idea what he is doing, so it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds. He also claims, in the Red Herring article, that Taobao can make money on advertising alone, although they plan to go to a fee model eventually. There is another issue with auction sites as well. Unlike a news site, the value of an auction site, and hence its power to attract and retain users, grows as the size of its community expands. The network effect creates a more interesting and liquid marketplace. So if you can afford to spend money to build a critical audience, why not? Indeed, as Red Herring points out, this tactic was used successfully against eBay in Japan already.

    But beyond that, there is the tone of eBay’s press statement. This is the kind of thing that peaks a flack’s interest. If eBay’s plan was to project confidence, it failed. Instead, it projected defensiveness. I don’t think many people suspect that Taobao is “unable to charge”. I think most people suspect it simply doesn’t want to charge until it has to. And there is a strategic argument to be made for that. Free can be a business model…for a while. eBay could have found a more constructive way to make its argument.

    If the ultimate test of a press statement is how journalists respond to it, this one didn’t pass muster. The journalist I was speaking to summed it up in one word:

    “Snarky,” he said.

    Note: Thanks to the journalist cited above for turning me on to both of these statements, and for talking through some of this with me.

  • Are PR and MNCs corrupting Chinese media?

    The week before last I had lunch with a foreign correspondent who asked me if there was corruption in PR in China. Although I was only providing background, and not speaking to him on the record, I was, to put it politely, diplomatic in my answer. Ever mindful of the brand that graces my business-card, it’s an issue that I tend to tread lightly upon. I did, however, send him on to a friend who has been here longer than me and who works independently and is, therefore, inclined to be more forthcoming about such things.

    But the topic arose again last week, courtesy of bloggers Bingfeng, of Bingfeng Teahouse, and Myrick, of Asiapundit. Bingfeng fired the first shot in a post telling foreigners who complain about China’s media restrictions to find something better to do with their time. The crux of his argument was the blocking of any individual site affects only a few thousand people. However, a pervasive culture of media corruption fostered by “foreign MNCs” (multinational corporations) affects everyone in China:

    As we all know, the blocking of these web sites, in its worst situation, influence the life of a few thousands in china, while at the same time, the corrupt journalists/media taking money from firms and various organizations and writing misleading articles to fool the public is a everyday story in china, as i know, the norm of taking money from firms to make favorable media exposures was cultivated by many MNCs in china, which bribe chinese journalists in the name of “media PR” or “marketing PR” activities, and bribe them when they have a “PR crisis”. such collusion affects the lives of millions of people and you could do something to change it, especially a lot of them are related with MNCs in china.

    There is some truth in what Bingfeng wrote. On this site I have previously written, tongue somewhat in cheek, of the “transportation claim” commonly paid to journalists who attend press events in China. According to the journalist I had lunch with, foreign technology companies originated this practice about ten years ago. I don’t know the detailed history. Anyone who does is invited to comment.

    So I agree with Bingfeng to some extent. However, before he makes me his “star of the week” again, he needs to read on, because I’m going to bite later.

    Myrick posted a rather interesting response to Bingfeng. First, he pointed out that he, a foreign correspondent by day, was recently offered 500 RMB (about US$60) himself while attending an event sponsored by a nameless European telecommunications firm. He mentioned that, although he refused the money, three Chinese journalists who were present accepted. I suspect that this was vanilla “transportation claim” (车马费) as 500 RMB is the amount typically offered to journalists who attend an event from out of town, while 200 RMB is the going rate for journalists from in town. If Myrick was attending an event in the town he is based in, then there is some inflation happening.

    I would like to point out that whoever offered Myrick the money, even if it was simply transportation claim, was an idiot or badly trained. Foreign correspondents work differently than Chinese ones on many levels. Any PR firm, local or foreign, that doesn’t train their staff on these differences is courting trouble. In my company we often dissuade clients from mixing local and foreign journalists not only because it makes things like the transportation claim awkward, but because we often have different messages for domestic and overseas audiences.

    In a rebuttal to Bingfeng that I agreed with, Myrick wrote the following:

    Bingfeng is correct that this is a serious problem for China – a 2003 study by the Institute for Public Relations [proxy link – WM] puts China dead last in a list of 66 countries in a study on the acceptability of bribery for coverage.

    Still, by citing the existence of this problem as a criticism of free-speech advocates he is making a common fallacy of argument by evading the issue.

    This is also known as the Chewbacca defense.

    That last link is from the blocked-in-China Wikipedia. I regret that readers here won’t be able to access it without a proxy.

    The problems of censorship in and press bribery in China are related issues, both shape the content of news here. But to say that censorship of a website is something that only affects a “few thousand” is a gross understatement. While it may be only a handful of residents who are affected by a block on a single blogspot site, the control of information in China promotes ignorance, retards democratic development and prevents the building of an educated civil society. This affects 1.3 billion.

    The report that Myrick points to is well worth looking at. The reason why I agree with Myrick’s response, besides correctly calling out the “Chewbacca defense”, is that it points out that there is a relationship between corruption of the media and censorship. I think that relationship is quite deep, and has to do with how the media have evolved here and what Chinese societal expectations of the media are. I also think that relationship should be looked at in terms of corruption in general.

    Not to be dissuaded, Bingfeng came back with the following:

    [The] so-called “bribery for coverage” is more than just giving money to get favorable media exposures, thanks to the cultivatons of MNCs in china, the collusion between media and business has evolved into more sophisticated forms that influence/manipulate the public and they are unfortuantely followed by more and more organizations and individuals. khodorkovski-style chinese firms are on the horizons and their agents are already very active. this imposes an immediate threat to the emerging “civil society” in china, not the censorship.

    “free speech/press fighters” could do something to change the media corruptions, but in the short term i don’t see their chant could do anything to reduce the media censorships. MNCs are the one who set the norms of media bribery, government “PR”, media “PR”, marketing “PR”, etc. and our “free speech/press fighters” could do something to ask them to change the norms or even follow a more strict business ethics. this is a more approachable goal.

    like many things in china, the dysfunctional part of the system is not removed directly through a confrontational approach, but through the cultivations of incremental parts of the system. a less corrupt media will forster an environment that leads to less censorship.

    the only disadvantage of a different roadmap is that hte process will be less satisfying for the moral superiority of some westerners and perhaps doesn’t fit into the political agendas of some of them.

    Here again, Bingfeng is half right. There is “collusion between media and business [that] has evolved into more sophisticated forms that influence/manipulate the public.” We call that public relations, and it’s what I do for a living. But no matter how distasteful you might find it, it is not necessarily corrupt, and seems not to have undermined civil society in most of the rest of the world.

    The origins of the transportation claim notwithstanding, blaming MNCs and PR companies for corruption in the Chinese media is absurd. Complicit though they may sometimes be, it’s like blaming vultures for the death of your horse in the desert. This argument is the reframing of a victimization theme I often see wielded against foreigners and multinationals when discussing problems in China. It plays well on nationalist sentiments and often does a really good job of deflecting attention away from serious, underlying issues worthy of scrutiny. The Chewbacca defense, as Myrick pointed out.

    Furthermore, to suggest that a cleaner media will lead to fewer restrictions on free speech is, quite simply, to put the cart before the horse. I believe the exact opposite is true. Free speech and a less fettered press are much more likely to be effective weapons against corruption.

    Who Are You Calling Corrupt?
    Chinese companies and institutions, as anyone who lives here rapidly learns, are quite capable of corruption without any foreign influence whatsoever. Corruption, in the media or anywhere else, isn’t something that springs up spontaneously, or as the result of the wicked influence of foreign MNCs, who are perennial favorite targets of Chinese nationalism. Corruption is like a gas. It’s always there and it expands to fill the shape and volume of the space available for it.

    The volume of space available for corruption is created by lack of transparency and by well established patterns of government and commercial behavior. While many countries, including the United States, have corruption, China leaves a comparatively wide-open space for it. For some details, sift through Transparency International’s website, which ranks China at number 78, alongside such illustrious company as Morocco, Sri Lanka, Senegal and Suriname. Or this more recent article (subscription) by Andrew Yeh, one of the Financial Times’ Beijing-based journalists, on the OECD’s assessment on the impact of widespread corruption in China.

    However, this isn’t to say that some MNCs won’t collude with corruption. MNCs tend to be amoral beasts that adapt themselves superbly to any environment in which they need to operate. Many governments are aware of this, which explains laws like the United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Companies like mine often help to clean up the mess when MNCs get caught misbehaving. Bingfeng may be shocked to learn how often those cleanup efforts involve absolutely no bribes.

    For the record, in my time in the PR industry in China, I have never witnessed anything I felt to be corrupt. I have never seen anyone in my company do anything I felt was corrupt. Nor, in the course of their work with me, have any of my clients, all MNCs, done anything I felt was corrupt or even borderline. One of my clients’ policies on separating advertising and paid coverage from PR is so strict that we don’t even help with advertorial copy, something I did all the time in Singapore.

    If I was asked to do something I felt was wrong, I would decline to do it and warn whoever was asking me of the consequences. If necessary, I would resign before compromising myself, my colleagues or my company. I don’t think this is likely to happen, so it doesn’t keep me up nights. Our (Chinese) finance director is one of the most scrupulous and careful men I have ever met. He is constantly reminding us of our financial disclosure and probity obligations as part of a listed, international media conglomerate. Furthermore, despite the occasional ghastly scandal, there is no company as aware of the value of its reputation as a global PR company.

    None of this, however, means that Bingfeng is wrong about there being corruption in the media or in PR in China. Within our office, it’s the local, Chinese PR firms that take the most flack for corruption. Chinese consultants in my office have spoken to me many times of what they perceive as the distinctly lower ethical standards of local firms. This may simply be their pride talking, or just empty gossip. Although given how close many of our Chinese consultants are to Chinese journalists, they’d be in a position to hear about anything that happens.

    Now, allow me to pose a hypothetical scenario. If you’re MNC X, and you want to buy some coverage savaging your bitter competitor, MNC Y, in the China market, which of the two following PR firms would you use to arrange it?

    1. The SOX compliant multinational PR firm with public company accounting requirements and an international reputation to protect or,
    2. The privately held, locally owned firm with no international reputation or financial disclosure obligations.

    Simple risk management suggests the latter would be a better choice. Now perhaps, was this to actually happen, it would be a case of a wicked MNC leading an otherwise chaste Chinese PR company down the dark path of corruption. More likely, it would be willing buyer/willing seller. Furthermore, I’d be shocked Smurf blue to hear that Chinese companies, forever battling their own corruption demons, would turn up their noses at these methods. I don’t think they’d need to learn the trick from foreign MNCs.

    In case you are wondering, although I think it’s a bad idea, I don’t feel that the transportation claim is corrupt. Media corruption thrives in the dark, when its influence is hidden. The transportation claim is completely matter-of-fact and auditable. You can follow the trail, from our cost estimate for events to our invoices to clients to the list of exactly which journalists showed up at a press event, and their sign-in signatures. It’s never guaranteed us good coverage, or even attendance at events. Frankly, I think it’s a desperate waste of money, and it will be a good day for the maturity of Chinese media when it is abolished. But that will only happen when the Chinese media decide for themselves to abolish it, or when all companies with PR efforts in China, both local and foreign, decide to abolish it together. It would take a company with a large risk appetite indeed to unilaterally decide no longer offer the transportation claim, especially while their competitors still did.

    Is my position hypocrisy? Or rationalization? Maybe.

    What is this Media of which You Speak?
    I have been working in China for just over a year, and I, as an individual, am not an expert on the Chinese media. But I have been involved in media-related work, one way or another, for thirteen years, my graduate degree is in media studies, and I work in an industry whose stock in trade is an understanding of media. With that disclosure, you may take the following observations as you will.

    The problem with Chinese media is not that it is being corrupted by ne’er-do-well foreign MNCs or PR firms. Rather, it is that the Chinese media are in transition from explicit state control to something subtler and more reflective of modern Chinese society. It has become something that isn’t developed country media, but which looks like it from a distance. Bound up in this transition are the ongoing changes in China’s media regulations as the government tries to figure out what it wants Chinese media to be, and shifting public expectations of what role the media should play in Chinese society. The tremors of this transition have been documented in Chinese media, overseas media and, not least, by the China blogging community. An interesting recent example includes ESWN’s post on fraudsters representing themselves as journalists.

    If all this seems like a recipe for confusion…it is. This shows in, yes, the opportunities for corruption and, more mundanely, in how the media relate to authority, to multinationals and, of course, to PR firms.

    There is a relationship aspect to PR work everywhere. It’s formalized. We call it, surprisingly enough, “media relations”. An ability to build good relationships with journalists is one of our marketable skills. Here in China, our relationships with journalists are especially cozy. Not corrupt, mind you, just cozy.

    This coziness isn’t unique to China any more than media corruption or the influence of corporate or state parent organizations. Anyone who thinks that the US, for example, is immune to this hasn’t been following the salacious Plamegate affair. This has done wonders to illuminate the shameful coziness that greases the operations of both the Washington DC press corps and the spin-obsessed White House. But in China this coziness is more pervasive.

    Although I never did PR in the US, I did do it in Singapore, which also has state-controlled media often accused of pliancy. Even in Singapore, no matter how good my personal relationships with journalists were (and they were pretty good), there was often an adversarial quality to the professional relationship. That wasn’t necessarily expressed in hostility or bad press, but in healthy skepticism, tough questions, and wariness of spin. All qualities of a decent press corps.

    Here in China I find, on average, that it is much easier for us to control a line of questioning or set it in advance, review coverage and quotes before they go to press, suggest themes and anticipate the tone of stories. Journalists here often expect us to package stories quite completely for them, giving us yet more room to set the agenda. We have stenographers at most media events, and send complete transcripts of press conferences and round tables to the journalists who attend them, often on the same day. It is expected that we will do this. When we can package a story more completely, we can dictate its tone more effectively. Among my Chinese team members, the nickname for pliant journalists is “rabbits”. Not the image of ferocity.

    Now, I want to stress two important things. First, relationships are not a red carpet. We flacks in China are not excused from having to come up with good pitches and interesting events. And we’re not immune to bad press, by any stretch of the imagination. We also have real PR challenges that are unique to doing business in China. It’s just that the relationships are more central to how we work. In the land of guanxi, this is not so surprising.

    Second, and most important, my observations above are industry generalizations. I know many extremely bright and motivated Chinese journalists who take real pride in their work. They are capable of asking dynamite questions, picking up killer angles, and writing hard-hitting and intelligent stories. Chinese journalists have suffered and died for their commitment to their work, and for their integrity and many are worthy of the highest respect. (Contrary to what you might think, most PR people are news junkies and really appreciate dynamite journalism, as long as it isn’t causing trouble for our own clients.) Even many of the “rabbits” are good, smart people working in an established system. Please do not interpret my observations as a condemnation of Chinese journalists.

    Some Chinese media pliancy may simply be a result of a wildly booming industry that is hungry for content. The seller of a product that is in high demand, such as particular content, exerts more control. That’s why Hollywood publicists can dictate question lists for stars, whereas corporate flacks like me seldom can. But I think some of it also descends from the Chinese media’s recent legacy of control and management from above. Chinese media are still evolving their editorial standards and modes of operation. PR firms, multinationals and Chinese firms will all figure out how best to operate and achieve their goals in this environment. That might be cynical, and you don’t have to like it, but it isn’t corrupt. Ruthlessly separating my preferences as a media consumer from my objectives as a PR pro, I am under no obligation to tell a journalist to ask tougher questions of my client.

    Mouthpieces or Watchdogs?
    What does China want from its media? Let me return to the idea that started it all off: the relationship between free speech and corruption. The media can be a potent weapon in fighting corruption, given the space to do so. A few years ago, Jiang Zemin appeared to recognize this when he cited media as one of the country’s great tools in its perennial war against corruption. Of course the media themselves were fighting their own corruption demons in ways that went far beyond low-rent payola for good coverage, as 2004 busts of senior editorial staff from the well known Southern Metropolis News and Nanfang Daily Group showed.

    But beyond media’s own corruption problems, counting on them to help unmask corruption demands independence and a culture of enterprise that needs room to grow. The current government seems to have different ideas, as this recent article from The Economist (subscription) reports:

    The Chinese government’s increasingly hardline stance is encapsulated in Document 16, promulgated this spring. Among other things, this banned the practice of yidi baodao, or “reports from non-local places”, with journalists travelling to distant cities where, free of their local minders, they could write harder-hitting stories about corrupt local officials or social unrest. “This was the best hope for China developing an open press,” says Mr [Nicolas] Becquelin [of human-rights group HRIC]. In Hong Kong, papers critical of China, like Apple Daily, are complaining that advertisers are fleeing because of threats to their mainland businesses. Journalists there are suddenly finding it harder to get visas for travel to the mainland.

    These regulations were also covered nicely by the invaluable Chinese media blog, Danwei.

    Even more worrying, some suggest that anti-corruption drives in China are simply tools to clean out the lingering remnants of the previous power structure and, bizarrely, to implement monetary policy, as suggested by this Asia Times Online article. So, even in their role as corruption fighters, the Chinese media face the specter of being cynically deployed tools of state policy.

    Media can, of course, be effective weapons against corruption, whether that’s corruption in government, business or within their own industry. Even if, for no other reason than fulfilling their own business objectives by attracting eyeballs, most publications love nothing more than to break a big scandal wide open.

    But that will never happen here unless the government can decide what role the media should fill in society: mouthpieces or watchdogs. They can’t be both. You can’t state-manage a media industry to effectiveness as anti-corruption crusaders, and keep it muzzled at the same time. You have to do the opposite. Give them space, in the form of freedom of the press, which is just another way of saying freedom of speech. That will help to lift the veil on corruption everywhere including, yes, in the media itself.

    So when we arrogant foreigners rail against the restrictions on the Chinese media, we aren’t ignoring the problem of corruption in the media, or anywhere else. In fact, we are advocating for the unleashing of China’s most potent weapon against corruption.

    A truly free media.