Illegal baby part 2: I fought the law (and the law won)

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Will Moss

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief became a father earlier this year. Having a child requires new parents to undertake many unfamiliar responsibilities. These include the obvious, such as the care and feeding of an infant, and some things that you really just don’t think much about in advance. Among those are the bureaucratic hoops that the parents of new children have to go through, especially in China.

There were some things that I anticipated. In my mind I had a pretty clear idea of the set of bureaucratic steps we’d need to go through for Imagethief Jr., a.k.a. “Z”. 1) Apply for passports (Z is a dual citizen so there are two passports). 2) Apply for a visa. 3) Apply for a certificate of temporary residency. Simple. Easy. Logical.

And missing  one critical step. I didn’t know that I’d have to actually register Z’s birth separately with the Chaoyang District police. After all, it wasn’t like I’d bought a weapon or imported an exotic car. It’s a baby, fer chrissake. The only things he’s a threat to are diapers, teething rusks and the thoroughly detonated sleeping habits of his parents.

I discovered the police registration requirement for newborns by accident when we went to apply for Z’s visa. Mrs. Imagethief and I had waited a while to do this because we hadn’t applied for the passports right away. We were, as you might expect, a bit overwhelmed by the presence of a newborn and didn’t have any immediate plans to travel. When we finally got Z’s US passport, which was the one under which we intended to apply for his Chinese visa, he was about two-and-a-half months old.

My company helpfully pulled together a letter and assorted business registration documents for me. We had Z’s Chinese birth certificate and shiny, new American RFID passport. For linguistic help I drafted my assistant from work to accompany us. Mrs. Imagethief, a Singaporean, speaks pretty competent Chinese –far better than Imagethief himself– but for bureaucratic situations a local can be useful.

In fact we’d had some rumblings of possible trouble already. That same week a friend of ours had attempted to get a visa for her new baby, who was almost exactly the same age as Z. Informed by the Beijing Entry and Exit Authority that she had missed the critical registration step and could expect to pay a fine of several thousand RMB she had stormed out of the building in a rage. I, cocky in my  various successes wrestling with the Chinese bureaucracy, was optimistic that no such misfortune would befall us.

Pride, as is widely known, goeth before the fall. My pride had goeth-ed and my fall was not far behind.

At the Entry and Exit Authority we waited in the snaking queue for the better part of an hour before arriving at the counter. Around us swirled the usual motley collection of immigrants dealing with their visas: West African families; necktie wearing businesspeople with Chinese handlers; visa agents with fistfuls of other people’s passports and so on. Other than the tax authority, which I am pleased to have avoided having to visit in China, there is no clearer glimpse into the soul of a government than the waiting room of its immigration bureaucracy. You rapidly get a picture of whose life is made easy, whose is made difficult, and the average level of desperation inflicted on the gathered applicants, supplicants and itinerants.

At the counter the uniformed young lady fiddling through our paperwork was quick to spot a problem.

“How long have you had his passport?”

“We just got it. It took a while to arrive.” This was kinda true. It took a while to arrive because we took a while to apply for it. Zach’s Singaporean passport had taken nearly three months from application to delivery, but the US passport had only taken a week.

“Do you have a receipt that says when you picked up the passport?”

“Uh, no.” This was true. The US government does not give you a dated receipt when you pick up the passport. Just the passport itself. I pointed out that that passport had an issue date in it that was within the prior two weeks.

“No, I need a receipt. Can you get a receipt?”

I weighed the likelihood of getting the US State Department to write me a letter saying exactly when they had given me the passport in anything less than a matter of weeks, decided the yardage was too far and elected to punt.

“I don’t think so.”

She promptly ran my punt back for the touchdown. “We can’t issue a visa now. Your baby is not properly registered with the police. You’ll have to register him and pay a fine.”

“How much is the fine?”

“Five thousand renminbi.”

I didn’t see the relationship between the passport issue date and the missing police registration, but there it was. At this point I decided to unleash my masterful china-hand negotiating skills.

“Isn’t there anything else I can do?”

“No. Take him to the Chaoyang District police post on Ritan Donglu. Next!”

Damn. She knew how to negotiate. I had no choice but to make way for the extended West African family crowding up to my counter.

Early the next day we were off to the Chaoyang District police post. I had expected a massive, bustling metropolitan police station out of American television fantasy. Cops banging out reports on IBM Selectrics; perps being hustled past; a crowd of prostitutes flirting with grizzled sergeants while waiting to be booked. This was exactly wrong. It was more like something out of rural Indonesia. There was a quiet front courtyard with a couple of idle police cars. Inside there was exactly one desk with one bored looking officer sitting at it. We were the only other people in sight, although there was one officer in another room that the guy at the desk shouted occasional questions at. Sultry May air had penetrated the lobby, completing the languid, tropical feel. On the wall behind us, watched by nobody in particular, an Olympic countdown clock ticked away the months, weeks, days, minutes and seconds (no picoseconds?) until 8/8/08.

I’d rather expected a stern police haranguing, but to the officer on duty this was clearly just a trivial bit of paperwork in a long, uneventful and somewhat sweaty day. He asked me to tell him what happened, which I did with as much honesty and clarity as a PR man can muster. He took copious notes and, when I was done, explained the bottom line to me.

“As a foreigner are legally required to report the birth of your baby to the police within thirty days. Your baby is seventy-seven days old. That means he has been illegal for forty-seven days.”

Good heavens, I thought. I have an illegal baby! I never thought this was the kind of thing that would happen to me, a good Silicon Valley boy who’s sole scrap with the police was being ordered off of Santa Cruz’ Seabright Beach after official closing time.

The next part, explained the officer, was important:

“Did you break the law intentionally or were you ignorant of it?”

So there it was. Are you a criminal or an idiot? Even I could see which way this one would cut, so I cast my lot with idiot.

“I had no idea.”

He grunted and finished the paperwork, which turned out to be my confession that I had accidentally but most definitely transgressed against the laws of the People’s Republic, was contrite, and agreed to accept such punishment as the authorities had decided to mete out, which in this case was five large. This was read back to me to make sure I understood my idiocy in complete detail, which I did. Anxious to transform my illegal baby into a legal baby, I signed. It was my first confession to anyone other than my parents. I did feel a new lightness washing over me as I unburdened myself of my sins, but it may have just been the lightness caused by the extraction of RMB 5,000 from my wallet.

Or the psychological impact of imagining RMB 5,000 being removed from my wallet, since I didn’t actually pay at the the police station. Instead, I was told to present myself again at the Entry and Exit Authority the next day. A representative from the police would meet us there and we could pay the fine and complete the registration of our illegal baby.

It seemed a little odd that the police would send somebody round to meet us and deal with this, but this is China and I’ve learned not to be surprised by bureaucratic eccentricities, such as the fact that the residency records of my neighborhood are apparently maintained on paper in a library’s worth of binders arranged by estate and danwei. Or the fact that although I live in the bustling, commercial heart of Beijing’s ever-extending central business district, our local paichusuo is on the other side of the Fourth Ring Road in a remote,down-at-the-heels neighborhood called Balizhuang that is being rapidly flattened to make way for god only knows what. It’s these sorts of things that remind me that the area I’m now living in was farmland and industrial estates just a decade ago.

Of course the police didn’t send someone to meet us. We discovered this as we waited like idiots (fittingly, since I’d already officially confessed to being one) on the foreigner floor of the Entry and Exit Administration, scrutinizing every cop who came in to see if it was one of the two we had seen at the Chaoyang District police station. Following a half hour of gathering flies, some investigation revealed that there was a police desk on the floor that apparently existed for the sole purpose of paying fines. It was doing thumping business.

We presented our confession and various chopped documents officially certifying our idiocy and tipped RMB 5,000 into the government coffers (possibly used to help pay for last week’s space launch), at which point we were once again duly authorized to stand in line and submit our visa application for Z. A week later we got his passport back with visa in place. We went straight off to the  to register him for his certificate of temporary residency, and I’m pleased to say he’s been fully legal ever since.

Thinking back on this episode, it’s clear in retrospect that the attendants at the hospital where Z was born told me as we were checking out to register him with the police within thirty days. I had confused this fairly rigid, visa-oriented requirement with the certificate of temporary residency registration that foreigners need to complete with 24 hours when they arrive in China or move to a new address. Despite sounding very urgent, I’d always found the enforcement of temporary residency registration to be pretty squishy. I’d often been late –once in Shanghai by a staggering six months– and never got more than a lecture for my sins, if even that. But the baby requirement is different, and in the period leading up to the Olympics nothing about the enforcement of China’s immigration laws was squishy.

Honestly, it’s a lot of bureaucracy for new fathers, who aren’t the most competent of creatures at the best of times. Z was born in a hospital where little English is spoken, so combined with the linguistic gulf it was a recipe for trouble. Maybe they should have simply tacked the fine onto my bill at the hospital and saved everyone the trouble.

It also would have been nice if my company’s HR department had thought to warn me of the baby registration requirement, but apparently not too many of our foreign staff have had babies in Beijing and it’s simply not on the checklist. So if you’re a foreigner living in China and expecting a baby, remember you have thirty days to do the paperwork. True, the Olympics are over and things might be getting a bit squishy again, but RMB 5,000 pays for a lot of diapers, so why tempt fate?

And though I offer a few weak excuses, in the end there is really nothing to blame but my own idiocy. I have a stamped confession to prove it.

Previously:

Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport

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Sanlu melamine milk powder crisis becomes a national issue

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Will Moss

Like on the top-forty radio show Imagethief used to listen to as a thirteen-year old, the hits keep coming in the Sanlu milk powder crisis. Over the past thirty-six hours the situation has evolved from a company-specific Sanlu crisis to a nationwide dairy-industry crisis reminiscent of the glory days of last summer’s product quality crisis.

Here is the latest: Products from 175 dairy companies have been tested (中). Twenty-two of them tested positive. Sanlu is still the champ in terms of micrograms per kilo of product, but some other famous (and not-so-famous) brands are now implicated, including Mengniu and Yili. I bet Yang Liwei didn’t know about this when he decided to endorse Mengniu. But astronauts should be able to digest melamine, which anyway seems like kind of a futuristic substance. Imagethief used to have melamine coasters. No joke. Very “Jetsons”.

Also not a joke is that over 6000 children are now reported to have been affected and three are dead. The Internet is seething. Collars at the State Food and Drug Administration haven’t felt this tight since Zheng Xiaoyu was frogmarched away and shot for corruptionjust over a year ago.

So here are the PR implications:

Winner: Sanlu (sort of)
For Sanlu this is actually good news. All of a sudden what looked like their problem is a nationwide problem in which they are just one of many companies caught in the riptide. In PR we teach an interview technique called broadening. When confronted by an interviewer with a problem or challenge that cannot be refuted you respond by “broadening” the issue to include the rest of the industry, your rivals or whomever. It works like this:

Maria Bartiromo: Your stock price is down by 50% this month? Does your company suck?

You: Well, Maria, market conditions are tough and many companies in our industry have had similar declines but we are key message, key message, key message, yadda yadda yadda.

Sanlu doesn’t need to broaden the issue. It has broadened itself. This doesn’t make Sanlu’s problem go away. They’re still the worst affected, the most apparently negligent and most closely associated with the issue. In the past day or so, the chicken of accountability (a really big chicken in this case) has come home to roost and heads have justly started rolling. But misery loves company, especially in PR, and now the spotlight of attention has spread out a bit. It buys Sanlu some small breathing space at the trade-off of kindling a hotter but more diffuse groundswell of national anger.

Losers: Everyone else
While this broadening might be good news for Sanlu, it’s bad news for everyone else. Consumers have no idea which domestic manufacturers they can trust. Even ice cream bars (sob!) look suspect. Foreign manufacturers such as Nestle may benefit for a while, assuming resentment doesn’t turn on them later, which is possible. Also, Fonterra is now recalling its own Anmum branded milk in China. On top of its involvement in Sanlu, this may be wearing the foreign gloss a touch thin.

The Chinese dairy industry looks like a hopeless swamp incapable of quality control. Production and upstream wholesaling are completely fragmented and obviously subject to only the most featherlight of regulatory scrutiny or inspection regimes. The job of applying quality control nominally lies with the brands that sit between green fields and cow dung and supermarkets aisles and consumers, but they appear to have dropped the ball completely. Honestly: Twenty-two companies and 66 products? You’d sooner trust the Three Stooges with your dairy factory than this bunch of clowns.

The SFDA looks about as wired as it did in July, 2007. AQSIQ, which is separate from SFDA, is also scrambling. Regulatory involvement seems conspicuously after-the-fact in this situation. Sanlu was exempted from inspection because it was recognized to be such a fabulously well-run company. Lesson: No one should be exempted from inspection. More inspections for everyone, in fact, seems like part of the prescription for this situation.

And China in general reminds everyone else in the world of why they are just a touch suspicious of Chinese food products. There are apparently some export products involved in the current situation, although they are apparently exported primarily to the kind of no-hope client-states (think Myanmar) that are unlikely to make too many waves lest they have to start paving their own roads. But the rest of the world is watching.

As, incidentally, are the (ahem) China-based expatriate parents of small children. I am happier than ever that Imagethief Jr. is breast-fed. Mrs. Imagethief may be made of stern stuff, but it’s almost certainly not melamine.

Now what?
Aside from the fact that Imagethief will sadly never look at an Yili ice cream bar the same way again, what happens now?

Unfortunately, the whole situation has got much trickier. For individual companies PR issues can be managed because it is relatively easy to speak with a single voice. Situations that involve entire industries are trickier, because getting a bunch of competing companies to speak with a single voice about anything is like herding giant cats with tens of thousands of employees each. Cats that often want to blame each other. Try doing PR for an industry association someday and you’ll get a taste of this.

The cat-wrangling hat now passes to the Chinese government, which has just inherited the stage from Sanlu. The Chinese government needs to explain why there is a pervasive problem in the dairy industry and what it is doing to solve the situation. (It would be nice to talk about a plan for structural changes in the industry.) It needs to make sure that the dairy brands themselves are singing the same song with one voice arranged to church-choir perfection. It also needs to keep on letting consumers know which products are safe and which aren’t and ensure that people have enough real and timely information that gossip and suspicion don’t become the main drivers of the public response. It needs to vigorously punish offenders who have been sloppy and do its best to convince people that the companies, regulators and local governments are all entwined in one sloppy, corrupt ball. I know that executions will look tempting, but executions alone probably won’t solve the problem of restoring consumer confidence, so let’s think more creatively than that.

Importantly, if there are more melamine skeletons in the closet it is best that they come out soon rather than creep out over the coming weeks and months. The situation has already deteriorated. The sooner it moves into recovery phase the better. More bad news dribbling out over weeks and months will delay the start of the recovery and stoke the fires of suspicion and anger. This is one reason why it’s important to make sure people have enough real information to forestall the worst of the gossip and conspiracy theorizing. For that reason, AQSIQ’s public round of testing was a good thing, even if the news was bad.

But the whole process will be difficult. In yesterday’s post I mentioned all the entrenched and institutional problems that retard the development of public communication in China. Many of them also serve to slow the development of effective commercial enforcement. In a sense the larger challenge for China is not just to prove that it can clean up the dairy industry, but to prove that its commercial environment can evolve into something other than a cozy swamp where insiders get rich and outsiders get kidney stones.

But that’s been the challenge for a long time now.

Suppressing the news is not a PR solution
Hop on over to ChinaSmack and read the new post “Kidney Stone Gate: Baidu denies censoring search results“, which cites a 21st Century Business Herald report on Baidu’s possible involvement in suppressing negative search results for Sanlu:

Soon after the Sanlu poisonous milk powder news came out, a copy of letter from the Teller public relations firm to the Sanlu Group began spreading on the internet. In the letter, Teller advised Sanlu to pay Baidu 3 million RMB to have Baidu manage search results containing negative news about Sanlu (supposedly not all news could be censored but most results coming from smaller websites could be deleted). When Baidu heard the rumors, they quickly denied working with Sanlu. A representative from Teller also said the letter was fake.

Sanlu Group logo: Sanlu is suspected of paying Baidu 3 million RMB to censor negative search results.On September 13th, “21st Century Economic Report” reported that Baidu admitted receiving a “Sanlu Public Relations Crisis Proposal” letter from a public relations firm, but Baidu could not confirm that it was the Teller firm.

There’s more in the post, including a partial translation of the 21st Century Business Herald article. Some evidence is presented in the story to support the allegation that Baidu was complicit, although Baidu denies it. The jury is still out.

However, the basic PR rule is this: Supressing bad news is almost never a viable PR solution. Bad news tends to leak. It tends to percolate through the pores. It tends to squirt around to wherever your grip is weakest, like the air inside a balloon animal. This is particularly true in the era of the Internet, regardless of what Baidu (or even the government) does.

Only an irresponsible PR agency proposes suppressing bad news as the core of a PR strategy. That’s not rebuilding or defending a reputation. That’s admitting you can’t help. But suppressing news is an old tradition here, handed down from the highest levels. It will be a long time before that kind of recommendation stops coming.

Baidu’s statement (中), also partially translated, includes the following:

Baidu’s most important value is to seek truth from facts. (百度价值观中最重要的一条就是实事求是)

One would hope so. But I recall that somebody else in Chinese history used to talk emptily about seeking truth from facts.

oriental-morning-post-sanlu

See also:

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Melamine in Sanlu milk powder? Now that’s a crisis!

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Will Moss

If you want to get people mad –I mean fired-up, torch-and-pitchfork enraged– screw with their pets or their babies. That’s what we’ve learned over the past year thanks to the unfortunate tendency of the plastic melamine to pop up in the strangest places, most recently in infant formula from Sanlu, a mighty Chinese dairy firm.

You would think that after last year’s long-running product quality fiasco people would have learned. Those of you who have brushed the last of the Olympic rings from your eyes will recall that the product quality crisis began with American pet food tainted with melamine thanks to contaminated ingredients from China. It then rippled into lead-tainted toys (repeatedly), antibiotic-laden fish and various other hysterias that collectively managed to knock Dream for Darfur (remember them?) off the front pages. Man, what a summer that was, especially for PR nerds. I get all misty just thinking back on it.

But there will be time for nostalgia later. I want to spend a moment on the word “crisis”, which I used in both the headline and the paragraph above. Like the phrase “mission critical”, beloved of jargon-head business types, “crisis” is a word that is often misused to describe any situation where a company is wrestling with a spot of PR trouble. Chinese nationalist youth are insulting our company on the Internet! We’ve got a crisis! No you don’t. You have an “issue.”

What’s the difference? An easy if somewhat oversimplified way to think of this is chronic and debilitating vs. acute and life threatening. Being morbidly obese with high blood-pressure and diabetes is an issue. But your doctor can prescribe a program that will over time mitigate it. Going into cardiac arrest is a crisis in which the options are immediate treatment or death. In corporate terms this means a situation so bad it threatens the reputation of the company in a way that could rapidly and substantially damage business or shareholder value. Crisis is life-and-limb, billions-of-dollars or fate-of-the-company territory. Cyanide in Tylenol, the Exxon Valdez, Singapore Airlines flight 006; those are crises. Lehman Brothers is was having a crisis (it is now over in the same way that the cardiac-arrest crisis will be over if you don’t get immediate treatment).

Apply the “life-and-limb” test and I think we can agree that Sanlu is having a crisis. Fonterra, their foreign part-owner to the tune of a significant 43%, is having an issue, although it could get worse. More on that below.

Here is the story so far. On September 11th, almost a week ago, initial reports emerged that an unusual outbreak of kidney stones in about sixty infants had been linked to tainted milk power. Naturally the first assumption was counterfeit product, as happened in the tragic Anhui milk powder episode of 2004 and in countless food scandals in China. Since then the story has spread, blob like, in a fashion that reeks heavily of a coverup unravelling. There are now over 1000 affected babies and two fatalities. Genuine Sanlu product has been revealed to be the culprit. There’ll be no palming it off on counterfeiters. A recall of over 8000 tons of product is under way. Sanlu apologized in a news conference yesterday. Heads are rolling, but only at a suitably low and distant level in the great chain of scamming and incompetence.

Deliciously (unless you’re a formula-fed baby), Sanlu and provincial authorities from Hebei, where Sanlu is based, allegedly knew about the problem possibly as far back as early this year, and at the very least in early August, well before the Olympics. We know this because Fonterra execs are now telling anyone who will listen that they told Sanlu and the Hebei authorities that there was a problem but got no action until they got the New Zealand government to tell the Chinese central government. So everyone involved knew the formula was dodgy except for parents merrily feeding it to their babies. The irony of this situation is that foreign involvement is often seen as an indicator of quality thanks to the well documented quality problems of domestic brands.

The New York Times has this quote from Gao Qiang, Vice-Minister of Health, which is solid gold by the leadenly unquotable standards of Chinese officials:

“This is a severe food safety accident.”

You think?

Now the conspiracy theories are boiling to the surface like worms after summer rain (we’ve had a lot of rain in Beijing recently, so this image is fresh in my head).

Some think leading Chinese search engine Baidu may have had an agreement with Sanlu to filter negative search results. I don’t really buy this one, but as a student of the Internet I find the supposition interesting. It says a lot about how people feel about the power of search engines as gateways for information. If it was true it would be really interesting. Note to search engines: The time to come clean about how you will and won’t help advertisers is now.

Others wonder if the story was suppressed because of the Olympics, and invoke the Central Propaganda Bureau’s alleged 21-point reporting guidance for the Olympic period. I find this one pretty credible, and it stokes my belief that in addition to bringing out some of the best about China the games also brought out some of the worst. The post linked to above, from China Digital Times, also has a translation of apparent Propaganda Bureau guidance on how to report the current situation, suggesting that the cogs of harmonization are already grinding through comment on this situation even if they’ve not yet clamped down on it completely.

And then there are claims that Sanlu not only knew about the issue but has also beenpaying off afflicted consumers to buy their silence. This one is also pretty credible, and goes along with established Chinese practice of privately arranged compensation for the families of people injured in industrial accidents and such, often in return for an agreement not to make waves. Coal mines are past masters of this tactic.

Uncoverup
The PR rules for situations involving the endangerment of human life are simple: The company’s priority is to take all steps possible to mitigate danger, and communication should be centered around ensuring that the public is completely and rapidly informed in a way that minimizes the risk of injury or death. If you concede that the contaminated product is fait accompli and that some damage control will be necessary, then such an approach, funnily enough, often pays the best dividends in terms of repairing a damaged reputation. This is because it demonstrates clearly that the company prioritizes customers and human welfare over a grimy buck. In troubled times this a critical message to send, and it helps to remind customers of why they placed their trust in the company in the first place. See the Tylenol-cyanide crisis for the textbook example.

On this count, everybody involved in the current situation fails. They’ve prevaricated their way into disrepute. There were some shockingly basic steps ignored along the way. As of Sunday, for instance, when the formula recall was in full swing, there was nothing on Sanlu’s website to suggest anything odd was going on. No announcement. No recall information. No advisory to customers. Not hotline. No news since August 14th. Zilch. As of yesterday and into today their website has been unreachable.

This is not a surprise. It is perhaps unfair to judge Sanlu by my imperialist western standards of public communication given that the company is the product of an environment in which the relevant authorities have not always led by example. Sweeping scandal under the rug is a favorite institutional pastime here. Read up on SARS if you need a refresher on this, or the Songhua river benzene crisis, or the Xifeng county journalist scandal, and so on. But SARS was blown wide open, and if this was a cover-up it is now blown wide open too.

While acting vigorously in the interests of the public helps to repair reputational damage from a tainted or defective product and rebuild trust, covering it up compounds the problem. Remember when you broke the dining room window and then lied to your mom and said it was the dog? And she didn’t mind the window so much but was gravely disappointed about the lie? And you didn’t even have a dog? You learned an important lesson then (I hope). This is the same thing, only bigger and with the public instead of your mother. And no imaginary dog.

A blown cover-up demonstrates convincingly to the public that you don’t give a crap about them and that you were willing to let them (and their babies) twist in the wind to save your own hide. Now you have two problems instead of one: Your product is poisonous and your company is run by untrustworthy bastards as far as the public is concerned. The natural conclusion is that you now have at least twice as much work to do to repair your reputation, although Imagethief thinks that the repair work actually goes up as the square of the number of self-inflicted wounds, if not the cube (modern media being three-dimensional).

In addition to simply being ethical, coming clean is a good approach because it shortens the time-frame for bad news. Scandals often don’t bust all at once, but drag out over days or sometimes weeks as bad news bubbles to surface in bits and pieces. This can feel a like a very long time when you’re on the pointy end of bad press and public scorn, and can leave a very deep impression on the public. As noted above, the CEO of Sanlu has apologized, but once the story has gone this far it looks like an apology under duress. That simply doesn’t have the power of pre-emptive contrition. (Lawyers take note: I am not suggesting pre-emptively admitting liability.)

While it’s hard by definition to know how many cover-ups succeed, Imagethief expects that most are busted, especially when there is a large public impact. The old mob aphorism holds that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. If a lot of people know about your crisis, better for you that you resist the coverup temptation. Own-up and be seen to get cracking on solving the problem and helping the victims. Or hope that your crisis is so thermonuclear that it wipes out all witnesses and all evidence.

But exhorting transparency is almost certainly pissing into the wind. The problem here isn’t just one of the occasional irresponsible company. And it’s not a problem that one or two or a dozen PR agencies or crazy PR bloggers are going to solve. It’s a problem of endemic business and regulatory culture. There are several factors at work. First, the Chinese government doesn’t have a history of encouraging transparency. Second, the relationship between media and business is often too cozy for the good of anyone but media and business (this is especially true at the local level, which is why the government’s restrictions on all but national news organizations reporting outside of their home areas are so damaging). Third, the government still maintains explicit control over the media and to a degree the Internet, which means that stifling coverage by fiat consistently presents itself as a path of least resistance. Fourth, the government still maintains tight links with major businesses. Sanlu’s majority owner as near as I can determine is the Hebei provincial government, who’s PR philosophy is probably pretty old-school.

The Kiwi’s aren’t off the hook either
But what of Fonterra? They’re not a Chinese company. They come from a different media, PR and regulatory tradition. How has their performance been? From the Financial Times:

The Sanlu board, which has three Fonterra directors, was told of contamination on August 2 when a trade recall began, said Andrew Ferrier, Fonterra’s chief executive,yesterday. A public recall did not start until nearly six weeks later.

“[Fonterra] have been trying for weeks to get an official recall and the local authorities in China would not do it,” Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister, said on television yesterday. “At a local level . . . I think the first inclination was to try and put a towel over it and deal with it without an official recall.”

***

Sanlu could not be reached for comment yesterday, but Mr Ferrier defended Fonterra’s role, saying “as a minority shareholder [the company] had to continue to push Sanlu. Sanlu had to work with their own government to follow the procedures that they were given.”

Not so good, I’d say.

Here’s the million-RMB question: Did Fonterra have a responsibility to go public in China based on what they knew? To someone not directly involved (such as me) it looks an awful lot like Fonterra sat on its hands despite knowing that customers were at risk, possibly to protect its business and relationships in China. Minority shareholder they may be, but 43% is a big minority and they have three board seats. Their reputation is hostage to the behavior of their partners and right now they look complicit in a sketchy situation.

I am sure it was hard decision considering the prickliness of Chinese authorities and regulators and the likely fallout of ratting on their Chinese partners (see Danone vs. Wahaha for an example of what can happen when sino-foreign business relationships disintegrate). But I wonder how their noisy stakeholders back home in New Zealand, who won’t care so much about the idiosyncrasies of the China market, will react. Several nasty questions present themselves. How bad would the problem have to be before Fonterra blew the whistle? Do they prioritize their China business over the safety of customers? Is China an appropriate market for them to be in under the circumstances? At times like this you’re happy to be a privately held cooperative.

Fonterra has no official statement on the situation that I can find as yet, although I’ve seen references to press releases. Private or not, I think they have some explaining to do.

Lessons from the great milk-powder fiasco of ’08
It has been heartening to see both the Chinese press and the Internet go to town on Sanlu, especially since they’re not my client. While I don’t envy them their PR miseries, the willingness of the Chinese press to take on big Chinese companies that do wrong by their customers is an important development for civil society. While the coverage will follow the Central Propaganda Department guidelines referred to above, the whack of big, negative headlines may still have a salutory effect on other companies. That’s as it should be. People trust brands. The tradeoff is that brands are accountable and the media is an important part of the mechanism for making them so.

It’s also interesting to see that even Chinese companies can have quality problems with their suppliers. At the height of the product quality crisis much was written about the importance for foreign companies of vetting and monitoring suppliers rigorously and continuously. It is reassuring in some small way to see that it’s not just foreign dupes who have trouble managing these problems. Local dupes can have them too. It is, on the other hand, a reminder of how much room for development there is in the Chinese commercial environment.

Finally, as bad as this situation is, it shows that there is an opportunity. Chinese companies do understand the value of a powerful brand and a good reputation. That’s a good first step, but more is needed. Many clearly also learn the value of communicating transparently and aggressively in crisis situations in order to defend the brand and reputation. Nobody wants a crisis, but the lessons learned this way can help prepare the best managed and most progressive of China’s big consumer goods companies to succeed internationally, where the old cozy approach won’t work as well.

An ancient and time-worn chestnut of China journalism is that the word for “crisis”–危机, or weiji–contains the characters for “danger” and “opportunity”, which is sorta-true-but-not-really. As a piece of popular wisdom, it has the unfortunate consequence of trivializing the concept of a crisis. Sure, “crisis” in the classic sense means an inflection point from which multiple outcomes, including perhaps opportunity, may arise. But in the colloquial PR sense it means a grave situation with unpleasant and possibly catastrophic consequences. Thus, Imagethief has always felt that it would be much more accurate if the Chinese word for crisis combined the characters for “shit” and “fan”. I’m sure that right about now executives from both Sanlu and Fonterra would agree.

Still, I’m an optimist by nature, and I do like to look for the upside. Let’s hope some lessons are learned.

See also:

Some observers see a silver lining in the scandal. “One positive result is that people will become more aware of food safety,” says Ren Fazheng, a professor at China Agriculture University in Beijing. “Government and society will pay more attention to this issue … and more inspection agencies will use more methods, so the level of inspection will improve.”

Yet public opinion, even outrage, has limited impact, as evidenced by the stunted efforts by angry parents who lost children in the Sichuan earthquake in May to demand government accountability. While officials are still investigating why so many schools in the quake area collapsed, protests have been curtailed and media coverage on the issue banned.

Still, with Sanlu closed by government decree and its future in doubt, two men charged with crimes that can carry the death penalty, and a government investigation widening, “this serves as an extremely strong cautionary tale for the whole industry,” says Professor Yang.

“Lawsuits have not worked well in China, but the costs are escalating” for companies that cheat, he argues. “Producers realize now how precious their brand name is.”

Perhaps. But as long as some companies feel their brands can be protected through means other than sound ethics and transparency I’d suggest channelling the Gipper: Trust but verify.

Disclosures:

Imagethief once worked for Fonterra’s PR firm in Singapore. Fonterra was not my client.

The founder of Imagethief’s current employer advised Tylenol during their 1982 crisis. Imagethief was 15 at the time, and was too busy watching “Get Smart” reruns and not doing his homework to be involved.

We’re very, very sorry we were caught.

We’re very, very sorry we were caught.

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Will we all burn in a fire made of mooncake packaging?

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Will Moss

Imagethief likes the Mid-Autumn Festival. I like it because even though it actually comes in late summer, it reminds me of autumn, and autumn is famously the nicest time of year in Beijing. In any year devoid of Olympic rigging, late summer in Beijing is intolerably hot, muggy and polluted. This year it was merely hot.

Over the years many people have told Imagethief that the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival falls in summer because of inconsistency between the Chinese lunar and western Gregorian calendars. This is total BS and I see no reason why I should accept obviously finagled explanations from people just because they are “Chinese”. The real reason is that without some reminder of imminent autumn and its much improved climate, half the population of Beijing would commit suicide in late August and early September, in the dregs of the Venusian summer atmosphere. In Scandinavia it’s the lightless winters that do it. In Beijing it’s the airless summers.

If you assume that Beijing has fourteen million people (and don’t bother controlling for migrant labor, tourists, etc.) a one year half-life would leave Beijing with a population of just thirteen people in a mere twenty years. This would obviously be totally unacceptable to government mandarins, who would no longer be able to feel the satisfaction of clearing out an entire lane on Chang’an Ave. and making millions of gridlocked commuters watch them roar past in a motorcade. Roaring past one peasant and his donkey cart on an otherwise completely deserted twelve lane boulevard just doesn’t have the same effect, and anyway the same effect can be had in the new Burmese capital-cum-supervillain hideout of Naypyidaw.

So Mid-Autumn Festival is a good thing. We all agree on that. However, just as the miracle of a Tex-Mex dinner comes with the heartbreak of punishing day-after flatulence, the miracle of Mid-Autumn Festival comes with its own curse: Mooncakes.

Mooncakes are the Chinese fruitcake: Cloying pastries that appears once a year for traditional reasons that everyone has forgotten, generally as gifts, and which, cockroach-like, resist all attempts at eradication. If you must know the history, it’s on Wikipedia. Scroll right to the bottom, since most of the entry is devoted to the culinary characteristics.

Many people complain to Imagethief about mooncakes. Inedible. Gross. Heavy. Burn longer than a tin of Sterno. And so on. To direct all this anger at the innocent and humble mooncake itself is to miss the point. First, Imagethief likes mooncake, albeit in small doses (it’s best cut with Chinese tea on the side). Of course, Imagethief also likes fruitcake. In fact, Imagethief pretty much likes anything sweet. I’d eat gravel if you mixed it with brown sugar.

But the other thing is that is that the main problem with the mooncake is not the cake itself. It’s the packaging, which could be the least green consumer item since the Hummer.

I was reminded of this when the translation company delivered a palletload of mooncake boxes to me and my team as part of the obligatory upward mooncake flow from vendor to client. Each of us received a heavy, embossed and foil stamped bag with rope handles. In the bag was a heavy cardboard box with a tri-fold faux-embroidery lid with faux-embroidery dragon applique. Within the box was a cardboard frame wrapped in a faux-silk shroud and lovingly cradling eight mooncakes. Each mooncake was in an individual cardboard box, a sealed plastic wrap and a plastic cup. Two pairs of wooden chopsticks in a fabric envelope were included for good measure. The theme throughout was tasteful and subdued imperial yellow garnished with dragons.

Gross weight: About two and a half kilos. Net weight: About 640 grams. Multiply by a nation of 1.3 billion people. Sure, not everybody gets mooncakes. But some of us get lots of mooncakes. You can see where the environmental toll will start to add up.

Fortunately, the picture is not as grim as it seems. Like fruitcakes, mooncakes are, if not an infinitely renewable resource, at least an infinitely recyclable one. Every year at this time the hand-lettered “recycle mooncakes” signs go up outside neighborhood shops and on curbside stands. Like overpackaged Chinese brandy sets, mooncakes are infinitely re-giftable. Shanghai, ever the city of commerce, has brought the mooncake recycling market to unprecedented levels of trading sophistication. Rather than give physical mooncakes, it’s common to give a coupon that can be redeemed for mooncakes. These coupons are then traded on an informal exchange of office ladies and household ahyis that offers NYMEX-like liquidity. Like the oil futures market, it seems that the actual mooncakes rarely enter into the final equation. However there is some risk as, like a bank run, its unclear if the system could actually withstand a mass-redemption event.

The upshot is that while approximately four billion tons of mooncakes are gifted every mid-autumn, only about ten pounds are actually consumed. This means that the packaging situation is perhaps not as bleak as it first appeared.

Imagethief sees this as yet another sign of Chinese technological advancement. Like an MRE a mooncake has a nearly infinite shelf life, allowing for century after century of suck-up regifting on a highly leveraged environmental footprint. Surely this is a system worthy of the inventors of moveable type, the compass, paper money, rhinestone dog collars, the Slinky, aerosol breath freshener, etc. etc.

The mooncake tradition traces its history back to the fourteenth century. How charming and ecologically sensible that the mooncake you are now slicing into may also date back to that same century.

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Why I don’t care about the opening ceremony’s fraudulent footprints

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Will Moss

Or so you would start to believe from the press reports over the last day. Some have dwelt upon the lip-synched singing of hyper-precious Lin Miaoke, the impossibly apple-cheeked munchkin girl who “sang” the laudatory and self-referentially titled “I sing for my motherland” without toppling over in shock at the thought of being watched live by 90,000 people and countless millions on live television. She must have been on ketamine, because I would have frozen like fudge in Fargo. And I generally have no problem with public speaking.

More reports have focused on the somewhat more scandalous replacement of the “giant footprints” fireworks display with a computer-generated special effect.

Here is what Imagethief thinks of both of these revelations: So what?

I got news for you: Li Ning wasn’t really flying either. If they’d really wanted him to fly they would have shot him out of an air cannon in a flaming suit and he could have lit the torch as he sailed over it and out of the stadium into the Great Beyond of the Olympic Green.

Damn, forget Zhang Yimou. With ideas like that, I oughtta plan these events.

The Olympic opening ceremony may have represented many things, but “veracity” was not among them. I thought it was a pretty good show. But let’s face it: it packaged Chinese culture as vulgar burlesque and reduced the legendary 5000 years of history to arena-rock light show. The whole thing was one giant special effect from beginning to end. But I don’t care. I like vulgar burlesque and arena-rock light shows. This was my kinda show!

In fact, arguably Olympic Beijing, tarted up, hyper-sanitized, stripped of automobiles and resolutely micro-managed for two weeks, is something of a colossal special effect in and of itself. Among all this surely one digital process shot can be forgiven.

Even the Olympics themselves can be thought of the same way. Overmarketed, pompous, awash in idiotic pseudo-religious symbolism (remenber the “priestess”-infested torch lighting ceremony?), and rife with doping and age scandals, they’re certainly a yard or two from what most of us would consider “reality”. It’s well off the deep-end of showbiz, and showbiz is all about illusion. And I write all of this as someone who’s relatively excited about the games! But you have to be clear-eyed about these things.

The only grudge I hold about the footsteps is that it was a particularly cool idea. I even said, “That’s cool!” to Mrs. Imagethief while we were watching it on the immense TV that my landlord so graciously installed in my apartment. So, yes, I was fooled. My bad. But I was still entertained by the shot, which is more than can be said for the oxygen-destroying tedium of the totally un-retouched parade of national teams. If anything, I could have used a little less veracity there. (On that note, NBC denies editing the parade to make the US team come out later in the US broadcast. Imagethief suggests that the turgid pace of the parade simply made it seem like eternity before the US team came out.)

As for munchkin girl, of course she was lip synching. While we were watching her I turned to Mrs. Imagethief and said, “The munchkin is lip synching.” This doesn’t make me a genius. It simply makes me someone who grew up watching Superbowl halftime shows, the Grammy Awards, and other lip-synch classics.

In fact, on that note, and overlooking the two hour Grand March of Tedium and my various bitchy comments above, I give the opening ceremony pretty high marks. The first part was legitimately spectacular, and I enjoyed the finale as well. Yes, I think Zhang and the Gang could have done themselves a favor and left out the footprints if they didn’t think it would work. Or simply taken their chances on the helicopter chase. But I’m sure they were all biting their nails to quick during the entire four hour extravaganza already. Has anybody tracked sales of Tums (or the Chinese equivalent) in Beijing over the past month?

In fact, the soporific parade aside, the only other things I’d have voted to remove from the ceremony were the absurd hand-doves of peace, the goose-stepping soldiers and slow march of the Olympic flag around the entire circumference of the field in the statium. The soldiers kindled unpleasant associations for many foreigners, and the flag march simply came way too late in the show for such draggy self-indulgence.

But good marks on the whole. I’d say that the London 2012 crew (remember, there will be another Olympics after this one, assuming the sun doesn’t explode) has its work cut out for them. Imagethief has just one bit of advice for them: Keep it under two hours. At four hours, the Beijing ceremony was longer than the Oscars (speaking of fraudulent). Keep it short, leave ‘em wanting more. Everyone will love you for it. Or at least I will.

And that’s gotta be worth something, right?

What? Me? Sing?

What? Me? Sing?

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Imagethief and the top-secret dam of Panjiakou: A Great Wall diving adventure

Posted on August 10, 2008 by Will Moss

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief recently accompanied Steven Schwankert ofSinoscuba to dive a section of the Great Wall that lies underwater in a reservoir at Panjiakou, near Tangshan. A prior blog post about that trip is here. We had an Associated Press camera crew with us on that trip, and their video ran on various television networks. You can find online versions in which I offer various breathless quotes at at National Geographic and elsewhere.

However, I also shot my own video, both at the surface and underwater. It’s about six minutes long and has a few more details than the AP segment, as well as a bit more of the singular Imagethief wit and the trademark oilskin hat and sunglasses. It’s now posted on YouTube. Enjoy, and consider it a break from the current flood of Olympic content (although there is a tangential Olympic connection).

Various other odds and ends also on my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/imagethief.

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E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home

Posted on July 30, 2008 by Will Moss

Imagethief realizes that he and much of the journalistic and blogging community have been doing a grave disservice to our readers who don’t live in Beijing. We beg your forgiveness. Living in Beijing is such an all-consuming experience that we sometimes forget there is a world beyond the fifth ring road. Although we are, of course, tangentially reminded of this world every time we go to our beloved import supermarkets, which thrive on the business of bringing us Doritos, Haagen Dazs and other nibblicious, western treats from beyond the Great Barrier.

The disservice we have perpetrated is to groan on at length about Beijing’s shabby, noxious air while never giving you, the reader abroad, the chance to understand for yourself what we really mean. Beijing in August is not best experienced as some kind of abstract mental construct based on the fulminations of bloggers, or the moralizing of the mainstream media. It is a physical experience, and has to be experienced viscerally and immediately. After all, reading about a rock band simply isn’t the same as standing in the mosh pit in front of the stacks, with the thump of the bass separating the cartilage from your bones and slow-cooking the fluid in your eyes.

Part of the reason why Imagethief thinks that first-hand experience is valuable is that it provides perspective when one reads the dissembling of official apologists who are doing their best to insist that the air is not really as bad as it looks, tastes or feels in our eyes. In fairness, it has been much better the last couple of days than it was the past week, thanks to a welcome breeze and a touch of rain. But the mandarins have passed much of the last few days demonstrating that they are either disconnected from reality as the rest of us understand it, or that they have a less than satisfactory understanding of the meaning of the word “good” as it is commonly employed in English.

It is hard to know which of these two situations is correct. Imagethief suspects that faulty dictionaries may be the problem, since the word “moderate” is used in SEPA reports to describe air quality that Imagethief would label “hopelessly toxic”, “depressing” or “squalid”. Adjectival nuance can be tricky, especially in a language as eccentric and irregular as English.

It may also be that the authorities are simply trying to be “hip with the times”, and have noted the tendency of English-speaking youth to use negative adjectives as endorsements, e.g. “sick*” (what we who went to high school in the ’80s used to call “cool”, “awesome” or, in the most rarefied of circumstances, “radical”). If this is the case, then the fault is ours and when the authorities say “good” they actually mean “screwed”. Athletes are overwhelmingly young, so this is perhaps a forgivable error in these Olympic times. If SEPA, or its ministerial successor, refers to one of our rare blue-sky days as “sick”, then this theory may gain credence.

The shame of this situation is that Beijing is in many ways a great city. It’s interesting and fun enough that many of us live here despite the often crummy air, which is really saying something. And when, every now and then, the air is truly clear, Beijing verges on beautiful. Colors pop out. The hills are visible to the north and west. The gorgeous parks and temples beckon. These clear days cluster in the brief spring and autumn, when temperatures and winds are favorable (although spring also gets dust storms). By any standard, however, they are rare. An enveloping, noxious fug is far more typical.

Which brings me back to the point. I want to help you, the reader abroad, understand exactly what we’re talking about when we refer to Beijing’s poor air quality. After long experimentation at Imagethief Laboratories SA, I am pleased to report that we have developed a method of simulating Beijing’s typical August atmosphere with nothing more than a few easily obtainable ingredients and a common household appliance.

Here is what you will need:

  • A serving plate.
  • Large bowl that can be used to cover the serving plate.
  • A bucket of water.
  • A Yorkshire terrier, Pekingese or similar small dog (at a pinch, a dog pelt can be used, but a whole dog is more reliable). Important: If the dog is wearing a metallic collar or tags, remove them.
  • A packet of bad cigarettes. Ideally, Chinese Red Pagodas. But at a pinch, Gitanes or Parliaments will do.
  • A non-metallic ashtray.
  • A turd.
  • A microwave oven.

Steps:

  • Soak the dog in the bucket until wet to the skin.
  • Place the wet dog on the serving plate with the turd and the ashtray.
  • Place three lit cigarettes in the ashtray.
  • Cover the serving plate and all ingredients with the bowl.
  • Microwave on “high” for sixty seconds.

Congratulations. What’s under the bowl is a close recreation of typical August Beijing air. Use a fork or butter knife to carefully lift the edge of the bowl (it’s hot!) and have a sniff. Now you’ll have something to visualize (or “olfactorize”) when you read the inevitable thousands of stories still to come on Beijing’s Olympic air quality. If you’re daring, you may want to get a garden hose, have a few of the frat brothers over and challenge each other to do “hits” of Beijing. You may need more than one dog**.

*Probably already hopelessly out of date.
**Imagethief does not actually condone microwaving yappy dogs, although he does sometimes fantasize about it.

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Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Will Moss

Note: This combines two original posts. In the first part, I suggest something to the Singaporean embassy. In the second part, they respond.

Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport
July 1, 2008

Anyone within earshot will know that Imagethief welcomed his son, Zachary, into the world last March 9th. The nearly four months since have been one long sleepless adventure. Despite my fatigue induced delirium, however, the experience has been a happy one. Like parents everywhere I take the most profound pleasure in things that non-parents wouldn’t even notice. This week’s new talent: Blowing damp, drooly raspberries. I glow just thinking about it. In Imagethief’s parenthood-addled mind, it is but the merest step from a wet raspberry to a full ride at Harvard.

Having a baby means paperwork. Last week’s trip home to Singapore was case in point, as I spent my “holiday” dealing with health insurance for Zachary, life insurance for me, a will for everyone in the family, and various other “responsible parent” stuff. It all left me feeling rather old and grown up.

Having a baby abroad means even more paperwork, as one must go through various registrations with various consulates and embassies in order to ensure that papers are obtained and the relevant authorities (“relevant authorities” is Imagethief’s top phrase for Summer ’08) don’t think you’re some kind of flesh peddler smuggling healthy Chinese babies out of the country for resale to monied but childless Western suburbanites.

The racial distinction in the sentence above is important because Mrs. Imagethief is Singaporean and Zachary is thus Eurasian, with his looks falling less to the “Eur” and more to the “Asian”. Dad’s nose and ears, mom’s everything else if you must know. Considering my nose, this may not be the optimum distribution of features, but so it goes. Imagethief believes that mixed races are the future of mankind and is glad to be doing his part for ethnic homogeneity and conscientious outbreeding. (“Conscientious outbreeding” is Imagethief’s number-two phrase for Summer ’08.)

But ethnicity isn’t everything. While it hasn’t always been the case, the trump-it-all organizing political concept of the last few hundred years has been the nation-state. Imagethief has mixed feelings about nation-states, especially as a proxy for good old-fashioned tribalism, but bows to the prevailing fashion. This means that my boy is a dual citizen, and entitled to both United States and Singaporean passports.

Some people –especially my cynical Singaporean friends– might ask why bother with the Singapore citizenship. Singapore doesn’t permit dual citizenship for adults, and assuming that policy doesn’t change Zachary will eventually have to choose a nationality. But it is important to me that he have a say in that choice. He has roots and family in Singapore, and being part Singaporean will always be part of his identity. There is also a good chance that he will go to primary and secondary school in Singapore, where he will no doubt learn the finer points of Hokkien vulgarity. Should he remain a Singapore citizen or permanent resident, national service will fill any gaps in his vocabulary and ensure that he matriculates with a truly colorful assortment of multilingual profanity. I swell with paternal pride at the thought.

So we duly registered Zachary’s birth at both embassies. And this is where the surprise lay. Singapore has a reputation for bureaucratic efficiency. Having participated in the registration of a business in Singapore, filed taxes there for many years, and applied for both work permits and permanent residency papers, Imagethief can attest that this reputation is largely justified. Singapore’s civil service is cool, crisp, courteous and efficient, and maintains comfortable waiting rooms with widescreen televisions invariably featuring either Mr. Bean reruns or Tom & Jerry cartoons. (Both can be watched silently and neither offends any of Singapore’s established religions or creeds, although I personally find Mr. Bean rather offensive.)

The United States’ reputation for bureaucratic efficiency is less glittering. Thanks to America’s Global War on Terror (TM) this has been especially true in matters of travel and identification, with Vietnam or Soviet Russia seeming better comparisons than Singapore. So I fully expected Singapore to produce a passport within days while the US Embassy waited for the Department of Homeland Security to grind through a months-long analysis of whether my mixed-race, China-born baby constituted a clear and present danger to national security or intellectual property.

I was exactly wrong. The US Embassy approved our application on the spot and had a passport ready one week later. Two weeks after applying, the only thing the Singapore embassy had managed to do was to call my wife and ask her to come back and sign an oath that she had not renounced her Singaporean citizenship. Somehow it didn’t occur to them to do this during her first visit. Going on two months later we have a recently delivered Singaporean citizenship certificate, but no passport. Thus, despite the fact that we travel to Singapore far more often than to the US, Zach’s Chinese visa is in his US passport, and he just completed his first visit to Singapore as a foreigner. I can stay as long as I want, but after ninety days he is baby non grata.

That seems a shame, because Singapore has a problem: No babies. According to the CIA World Factbook, it has the third worst fertility rate in the world, at 1.08 children per woman. Only Hong Kong and Macau (where everyone is apparently too busy gambling to have babies) fare worse.

In fact, that 1.08 is apparently misreported. A 2007 article from Singapore’s Channel News Asia (think CNN stripped of the things that make CNN interesting) gives a figure of 1.24 as the record low, from 2004, with 1.08 being the number for ethnic Chinese women.

But that’s still pretty bad given that the ethnic Chinese are about 75% of Singapore’s population. And it means that the Malays, the most significant minority group, are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to having kids. The government is unlikely to admit this publicly, but I think they’d prefer ethnic status quo rather than a growing Malay minority that may upset Singapore’s carefully nurtured political balance.

In addition to trying to encourage the immigration of educated professionals, Singapore has trundled out the incentives for having children. These apply to everyone, not just the reproductively-indifferent Chinese, and include grants of SGD$3,000 for the first two children, with even larger sums for the next two. But judging from the figures, the incentives don’t seem to have helped much. This is not too surprising. The “baby bonus” is nice, but having kids is a complex, long-term project and SGD$3,000 in Singapore is a couple of months rent even if you live in public housing. Personally Imagethief would much rather have free local childcare and less stress about whether his kids will get into a top school or languish in some also-ran academy for mouth-breathing troglodytes.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Singapore needs babies. And what it really wants, it will tell you over a teary, confessional piss-up (if a nation-state could do that), are the high-potential babies of prosperous, educated people. Precisely the people who don’t have children because they’re too busy chasing the brass ring and spending SGD$150 a pop to tank up their Lexus LS400s.

So, if I may flatter myself, you’d think they’d be going overboard to ensure that the child of an educated, long-time permanent resident who works in China (a country Singapore prioritizes) and an educated, professional, Singaporean woman becomes a Singapore citizen. You’d think they’d have sent salesmen around while we were still pregnant, with brochures explaining why Singaporean citizenship is the best choice for our child. You’d think the embassy would have called to remind us of the top notch medical care and excellent schools that await my child in the motherland. You’d think they’d have had a passport tucked into an immense fruit basket waiting for us outside the delivery room with a letter from the Minister of Babies (or whomever) thanking us for doing our bit for the country’s future prosperity.

But no. Two months later and I’m still waiting for a passport. And no fruit basket either. Which is a shame, because Singapore has outstanding fruit (even if it’s all imported). Meanwhile, Uncle Sam, who ranks near the top of the developed world fertility league tables and has no baby shortage at all, has stolen a march.

Which brings me to complaint two: Singapore’s policy on dual citizenship. It’s not having any, thank you. Hence my boy’s impending Big Choice. For a country that wants to be the Switzerland of Asia, the antipathy to dual citizenship seems surprising, but I understand where it comes from. Singapore’s government fosters a national sense of vulnerability as a political tool. We’re economically fragile, surrounded by Indonesians, could lose it all in a heartbeat, etc. Work harder. A conviction that national loyalties can’t be divided under such precarious circumstances fits neatly into that picture. After all, when the going gets tough, those with foreign passports might just bail and leave the rest treading water (literally, if the challenge at hand is the rising sea level).

Aside from assuming the worst of its citizens, the problem with this approach is that any visit to Western Australia will demonstrate that educated, prosperous Singaporeans aren’t waiting for permission to leave. As always, those who are most desirable will be those with the most options. As a nation that thrives on its international connections, Singapore needs to sell itself not just to foreigners, but also to its own citizens on an ongoing basis.

Even though I’m a foreigner I consider myself pretty invested in Singapore. That’s why I want Zachary to have the option of choosing Singapore citizenship for himself someday. I would even consider taking Singapore citizenship myself if I didn’t have to renounce US citizenship to do it. Sorry, but that trade ain’t happening (America’s stone-age expatriate tax policies notwithstanding). And perhaps that’s QED for the Singapore government. If I’m not willing to make the big commitment, why should I be taken into the fold?

But it all comes back to that desire to grow the population and encourage successful professionals to make Singapore home. Part of that is being flexible enough to do what’s necessary to make people feel welcome in a long term, raise-my-children-here kind of way. Singapore is afraid of its citizens hedging their bets, but that’s exactly what it does. That’s why my “permanent” residency expires every five years and why Singapore won’t tolerate dual citizenship. It’s a not a big deal for me, but it’s a shame for my boy, who will be part American and part Singaporean for the rest of his life, regardless of which passports he is allowed to carry.

Encouragingly, things change. It wasn’t that long ago that Singaporean women married to foreigners weren’t allowed to register their children for Singaporean citizenship at all. If that can change, who knows what else might come to pass in the sixteen or so years that will pass before Zachary has to choose a nationality. Perhaps he will be part of Singapore’s first generation of dual-nationals.

In the meantime, however, just getting that passport would be a good start.

Illegal baby part 1A: The Singapore embassy sends a fruit basket
July 26th, 2008

About a month ago I wrote about the long time it was taking the Singapore embassy in Beijing to produce our son’s Singaporean passport. Reflecting my frustrations about various aspects of Singaporean citizenship policy, and what I see as the conflict between Singapore’s reluctance to accept dual citizenship and desire to have more citizens, I wrote the following:

[If] I may flatter myself, you’d think [the government of Singapore would] be going overboard to ensure that the child of an educated, long-time permanent resident who works in China (a country Singapore prioritizes) and an educated, professional, Singaporean woman becomes a Singapore citizen. You’d think they’d have sent salesmen around while we were still pregnant, with brochures explaining why Singaporean citizenship is the best choice for our child. You’d think the embassy would have called to remind us of the top notch medical care and excellent schools that await my child in the motherland. You’d think they’d have had a passport tucked into an immense fruit basket waiting for us outside the delivery room with a letter from the Minister of Babies (or whomever) thanking us for doing our bit for the country’s future prosperity.

Well, it did indeed take three months, but last Monday the Singaporean embassy finally came up with Zachary’s passport. Not only did they come up with it, but they sent two Singaporean embassy staff (as oppose to local couriers) around to our apartment to hand deliver it along with congratulations and a personal apology for it taking so long and, yes, a fruit basket:

fruitbasket-corrected

Technically it was more of a biscuit basket (for giggles, say that out loud) than a fruit basket, but the idea was the same. I have no idea if this is Singapore embassy SOP, they just felt they needed to make restitution for the delay or they are (gulp) reading this blog. The latter possibility is a little worrying considering some of the less than worshipful things I have written about Singapore’s government over the years. Any Singaporean readers who’ve registered the births of their children in Beijing are invited to let me know if they received the same treatment.

The apology and fruit biscuit basket didn’t change how I feel about Singapore’s reluctance to allow dual citizenship for adults. But they did go a long ways toward defusing my annoyance at the delay in delivering Zach’s passport. Nothing like a touch of personal service and attention to mollify a disgruntled customer. Especially a blogging customer.

Note: The passport was not actually tucked into the fruit basket. That’s my own arrangement.

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Illegal baby part 2: I fought the law and the law won

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5/12, 9/11 and three minutes on Monday afternoon

Posted on May 21, 2008 by Will Moss

On Monday, May 12th, Imagethief was on the 27th floor of the Kerry Center for a meeting at 2:28PM. We all spent a couple of spooky minutes at the window watching Kerry and Fortune Plaza sway alarmingly, not knowing that it was just the faintest echo of a far-away unfolding catastrophe. As a San Franciscan who has been through countless little quakes and one whopper (1989′s Loma Prieta quake, during which I was living in heavily-hit Santa Cruz), I was at first convinced that our tedious and sweaty walk down endless flights of stairs was an overreaction to a trifling local quake. Only when my colleagues began getting SMS messages from friends in Shenzhen and Chengdu did I realize we’d been at the extremity of something terrible and distant.

An amazing and heart-wrenching story has unfolded in the ten days since. Some of the images that have circulated are still stuck in my head. A journalist acquaintance that I bumped into on Saturday had spent time in devastated Beichuan. He said, simply and soberly, that it would stay with him for a while.

My office is in Oriental Plaza, just about half a kilometer up the road from Tian’anmen Square. Since I had a bit of free time during the afternoon I decided to walk down to the square for last Monday afternoon’s three minute remembrance of the victims, held exactly one week after the quake. I thought it would be a nice way to book-end a sad week and, to be honest, I was interested to see the scene. I’d had lunch that afternoon with Chinese propaganda expert Stefan Landsberger, who had told me he felt that day’s ceremony was an historic public acknowledgment of a domestic tragedy (an opinion also argued by Paul Denlinger at The China Vortex). One only gets so many chances to witness history, especially when it’s unfolding just up the road.

There was a big crowd flowing toward the square. I’d cut the timing close, and people were anxious to be out on the square when the ceremony began. In the final moments people were running through the underpasses that lead onto the square, hoping the beat the announcement and defying the police offers trying valiantly to maintain order in the tunnels. Even I, conspicuously overdressed in a jacket and tie, broke into a jog at the last few steps as I watched the time tick toward 2:18.

There were thousands of people already gathered, with the crowd thickening toward around a roped off area that encompassed the main flagpole. I couldn’t see what or who else might have been there. It wasn’t any of the senior leaders, all of whom observed the ceremony from the fastness of Zhongnanhai. There were also several CCTV satellite trucks and many camera crews roaming about, including one camera high up on a crane, overlooking the crowd.

That wasn’t surprising. The event had a made-for-TV feel about it. An abundance of the little, red, plastic Chinese flags that I associate with National Day made the mood seem at once reflective and oddly festive. Hundreds of people were holding camera phones above their heads, trying to capture the moment. I don’t doubt the sincerity or depth of feeling of the people there, or anywhere in China, but it occurred to me as I watched a camera crews scanning the crowd that I was participating in a moment of crafted post-quake propaganda.

At 2:28PM an sonorous voice intoned Beijing time. The crowd fell silent and horns all around started blaring. There in the gaze of Mao’s portrait we all stood for three minutes with our heads bowed.

At the end of the observance the crowd shifted into life. Some people started drifting back toward the underpasses. From the front of the crowd came a chant of “Go, China!” (中国加油!). In fact, what I heard near me initially was “Long live China!” (中国万岁!). It started scattered but gained strength, ebbing and flowing through the crowd. After a few moments the crowd was pumping fists into the air in unison. A photographer standing on the base of a lamp post nearby was particularly vigorous, rousing the people around him into the chant. Amidst the display of national pride I became acutely aware of my foreignness and decided to move out of the thickest part of the crowd. The chant was still going as I walked back toward the underpass. A video can be found here (H/T China Digital Times).

Honestly, I was surprised. The fist-pumping chant seemed somehow inappropriate for the occasion. Not that the Chinese shouldn’t be proud of their nation and the response it has mustered to the quake. But a solemn remembrance had shifted in moments into a vigorous nationalist rally. I had expected something more restrained, along the lines of a candlelight vigil. But this is the first time the Chinese have had such a public memorial in the wake of a civilian tragedy. There is no template for how something like this should go here.

The scene made me think that Twitter comments, articles and blog posts from earlier this week describing the quake as “China’s 9/11″ might be on to something. (For a spooky, visual 9/11 parallel, go to the NBC News site and watch the May 18 clip “First images of the quake”, showing the immediate aftermath in destroyed Beichuan). 9/11 was a devastating blow to American national pride and self confidence. Could this event reverberate similarly strongly through the Chinese national consciousness?

Looking at the reaction across the country, it is easy to imagine so. The covers of the memorial newspapers, nicely collected in collage by Chinese blogger Hecaitou (H/TDanwei), are reminiscent of the stark and shocked reporting that followed 9/11. The nationwide outpouring of solidarity (also here) and charity and the celebration of heroic rescue workers is also reminiscent of 9/11.

There are other parallels as well. China is no stranger to sweeping catastrophe and mass fatality, but this is the first disaster of this scope of China’s post-reform period. That makes it China’s first true mass-media disaster and, in parallel with 9/11 in the US, China’s first Internet disaster, shared in real-time across the entire country and around the world. In fact, considering technological developments since 2001, the Internet plays a much more important role in the public experience of China’s quake than it did for 9/11, which was largely defined by television images.

The prospect of this being “China’s 9/11″ is perhaps a little worrying. In some ways, 9/11 drew America together. It even briefly brought America closer to much of the rest of the world, including some perennial rivals. But, as traumas will, it also unleashed pathologies. In the US those included the prosecution of a war of choice; elevation of security to national ideology; public justification of torture; a surge of angry nationalism (the Chinese don’t have a monopoly on it) that made questioning of government less acceptable even as fundamental freedoms and balances were eroded; an obsession with shallow symbols of patriotism such as lapel flags; and so on.

9/11 was an external event that allowed much, though not all, of America’s anger and grief to be directed outward. China’s earthquake is an internal event. There are no plausible outside forces to blame. The burning questions being asked now are about why a reported 7000 schools collapsed. These questions are given urgency by the pathetic and politically powerful photos (warning: not for the sensitive) of the bodies of primary school students huddled in wreckage. Interestingly, that image was effectively co-opted by Premier Wen Jiabao when he was photographed amid the wreckage, looking at the bodies of students (also not for the faint of heart). An American president would almost certainly not be allowed by his communications team to be photographed in such graphic circumstances.

So if this is China’s 9/11, where will the Chinese direct their anger and grief as shock begins to wear off? It occurs to me that the earthquake, a true national trauma, might have two possible effects on the current prevailing mood of prickly nationalism. Either it could feed into the nationalist sentiment, and possibly provide fresh impetus for it. Or it might make the nation take a breath and perhaps refocus its energies more constructively. With the Olympics less than three months off, I rather hope for the latter, but the reaction I saw on the square makes me wonder if the former is more likely. So does the degeneration of the nationwide charity drive into a competition in which job threats, Internet floggings and angry SMS campaigns are directed against individuals and companies, especially foreign ones, seen to have been slow or miserly in their contributions.

One pocket of a nationwide observance is hardly representative, and a poor basis on which to draw sweeping conclusions. A chant is just a chant. Extreme Internet comments are notvox populi. China is not America, and 5/12 was a in the end a very different event than 9/11. The comparison can be easily overblown. Nevertheless, I wonder what place the quake will occupy in the Chinese national consciousness as we slog the rest of the way through this troubled year.

Shrouded in dust: China's 9/11?

Shrouded in dust: China’s 9/11?

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Tibet and the trouble with unassailable national myths

Posted on March 20, 2008 by Will Moss

Outside of Young Frankenstein there isn’t really any such thing as a “good time” for rioting, but this might be an especially bad time for China to have a bout of punishing ethnic unrest. It hasn’t really been a banner start to the Olympic year so far, what with the worst storms anyone can remember, the Darfur activists on a tear, the bizarre Uighur terrorism story, and now this. Commentators are already linking this episode to China’s Olympic fortunes (see also the LA Times, Time, Asia Sentinel and Newsweek), and the French foreign minister has already been spotted talking about a partial boycott. Even Wen Jiabao has suggested that the riots were calculated to damage the games.

Things seem to have quietened down in the last couple of days, although that may simply be because reporting has been stifled. Certainly the flow of news has dwindled a bit, and many publications have shifted into context and analysis mode. But we can probably expect bits and pieces of information to dribble out over the next few weeks, as refugees leave Tibet and a few intrepid journalists break the cone of silence that that the Chinese government has dropped over the troubled areas. In the past few days many of our favorite local correspondents have made a run for the Tibet border, but blog posts, such as fromTim Johnson and Richard Spencer (and again here), suggest it’s tricky getting any reporting done.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has already petitioned the government for better access to the affected areas and circulated a list of incidents in which journalists and camera crews have been detained or hassled by the authorities. It would seem that Olympic pledges of greater openness were tested in the breach and found wanting. This, I suppose, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Old instincts die hard. The Chinese government has also reverted to its common tactic of belittling foreign coverage as intentionally biased. If this happens during the Olympics then, to borrow a line from Gerry Anderson, stand by for action.

Over the past few days, China’s communication strategy with regard to the Tibet riots has become clear. It has consisted roughly of the following:

  • Ban all international access so that Chinese media can monopolize images and on-site reporting
  • Cinch down on the Internet (here too) and international news sources so that messaging to domestic audiences can be tightly controlled
  • Demonize the Dalai Lama as the black hand behind the rioting in throwback, Cultural Revolution language, and drive the point home with images of rioting monks

These three are all true to type. But then it gets more interesting:

For a good overview of the Chinese approach to all of this, see Mark Magnier’s interesting article on China’s PR efforts around the Tibet riots. It includes this damning quote from Chinese blogger and journalist Michael Anti:

“The [Chinese] government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin,” said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. “They’ve learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it.”

In some ways China’s strategy has been effective. They’ve certainly done a good job back-footing the Dalai Lama, who made the mistake of not condemning the violence forcefully and immediately. Domestically it’s been gangbusters as usual. But the Chinese government shouldn’t be too proud of itself yet, because there remains one substantial problem: China has invested so much in its narrative of Tibetan development and growth that it is reluctant take any actions that undermine this story. This prevents them from communicating internationally in a way that foreign audiences will be receptive to, and it stores up serious ethnic problems for the future.

China’s prevailing narrative about Tibet is that China liberated it from feudal brutality and gave it all the wonders of development. The great mass of Tibetan people understands this and is duly grateful. This narrative has been thoroughly sold domestically, but it has never been widely accepted in the West.

While there are elements of truth to China’s version, China’s ability to sell it internationally has always been hampered by the government’s time-honed credibility gap with western audiences. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of getting independent points of view. Reporting from Tibet was heavily controlled even before the riots. Furthermore, International opinion is subject to an effective PR campaign run by Tibetan exile groups and the charismatic Dalai Lama. It’s safe to say that International audiences will never be entirely convinced by a Chinese state narrative that doesn’t even allow for the possibility that there might be genuine discontent in Tibet. China is much better at dictating ideas to a captive audience than at selling them to an open one.

Historically, it hasn’t really mattered to China’s government what International audiences think about Chinese domestic issues. But 2007 was the year in which China discovered the importance of International stakeholders. This began with the product quality crisis that erupted last summer, and it has gained strength over the Olympics in the past few months. The reality is that a global, economically integrated China that has invested hugely in hosting the world’s biggest sporting event is vulnerable to foreign public opinion. That’s why it stung so much when Steven Spielberg (who must be feeling pretty good about this right about now) withdrew from official participation in the Olympics. If it hadn’t stung, you’d have seen a lot less indignant Chinese press coverage about it.

If foreign stakeholders can boycott your products, screw up your outbound investment or trash the most glamorous event you’ve ever hosted, you need to develop some PR game. Unfortunately the mechanisms that have served China’s government so well over the years, a combination of explicit control over domestic media and pervasive state propaganda, don’t translate well to International audiences, and it has yet to learn a new approach. The need to defend the national narrative at all costs means that foreign media have to be kept away from Tibet, lest they reveal the cracks in the edifice. Heaven forbid that those inconsistencies make their way back to domestic audiences and undermine the national myth of Tibetan success and perhaps even government legitimacy. Tibetan integration –or suppression depending on your point of view– is part of Hu Jintao’s personal legacy as former Tibetan party chief and author of the crackdown on the 1989 demonstration. Unfortunately, nothing says, “We have terrible things to hide” to a foreign audience like detained or harassed journalists.

China’s growing international exposure aside, it must be tempting to wave away international concern as interference in China’s internal affairs. Unfortunately, another problem with defending the myth at all costs is that this approach seems calculated to inflame ethnic tensions rather than dispel them. Coverage of the riots suggests that much of the violence was Tibetans taking out their frustrations on Han who simply had the bad luck to be in Lhasa. That’s a shame, and the Chinese authorities are justified in seeking out and punishing those who have committed crimes against people and property. But the job of government is to ameliorate ethnic tensions within the country, not exacerbate them. Xinhua’s heavily spun coverage of the disturbances seems calculated to stoke outrage among the Han majority, and the Internet comment that has been allowed to stand echoes with that outrage, if not universally at least widely. Much of the Han comment reflects common colonial sentiment toward natives: Tibetans are lazy, ungrateful, intractable. Worrying signs for a country that disavows any colonial inclinations and preaches integration.

This is where the “cost” element of maintaining the myth at all costs really becomes clear. If the national narrative leaves no room for entertaining the notion that regular Tibetans might have legitimate grievances, then there is no hope of recourse for Tibetans and no alternative for non-Tibetan Chinese but to see the unrest as pure betrayal and thuggery. It becomes impossible to even acknowledge underlying problems in any constructive way. All that is left is ruthless crackdown and an ever-widening gulf between the two peoples.

Unfortunately, the more the Han majority sees Tibetans as ungrateful, violent dupes in the thrall of a sinister Dalai Lama, the harder any kind of real reconciliation will be. Mutual suspicion, hatred and racism-without-end loom. One wonders what will happen if Dalai Lama dies and there is still unrest in Tibet. Who will they blame then? There is a harder-line coterie of Tibetan exile leaders waiting in the wings, but none of them will fill the role of China’s “Goldstein” as well as the Dalai Lama does.

The best thing China can hope for now is that things stay quiet and the episode fades from view over the next few weeks. But that isn’t a long-term solution. In the end the situation is a tragedy not just because it was violent and ugly, but because it was a wasted opportunity. China could have introduced some transparency, allowed foreign reporters in, and started earning itself greater international credibility at a time when it desperately needs it. China could also have used this as an opportunity to move beyond its propagandistic approach to the problem of Tibetan integration, and to kindle a real national discussion on how to address the concerns of Tibetans in a way that might make integration a reality rather than a propaganda slogan. Done correctly, this need not have looked like succumbing to foreign pressure.

But that’s not how things are done here. That’s a shame, because no matter what wishful thinkers overseas want, Tibet will be a part of China for the foreseeable future. That will lead to continued problems. And as everyone knows, its hard to solve problems if you can’t admit to them.

Horseman of the apocalypse.

Horseman of the apocalypse.

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