I say “tomato”, you say “massacre”, let’s call the whole thing off

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Will Moss

It is a truism of public relations and communication that he who controls the language with which an issue is defined controls the debate. If you can attach your terminology to a situation, you have leverage over public opinion. Don’t like the inheritance tax? Label it a “death tax”. Is that guy with the AK-47 a gunman or a freedom fighter? Is the person with the explosive vest a martyr or a terrorist? Which label works for you? Did that politician lie or misspeak? War or police action? “Dead-enders”, insurgency or civil war? If you can assign the language you can frame the discussion.

The power of language is especially apparent when words are emotionally charged. There is a reason why there are grinding political conflicts about when and how to apply the word “genocide”. The word demands action and commitment. The obtuse language of diplomacy has essentially developed to allow governments to escape commitment when it is inconvenient. You can debate and prevaricate about “internal displacement”, “human rights” and even “ethnic cleansing”. Once something is accepted in popular discourse as “genocide” the debate is over. Act or be complicit.

“Massacre” is a similarly charged word. The dictionary definition is: “The unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a large number of human beings or animals, as in barbarous warfare or persecution or for revenge or plunder”. Indiscriminate killing. Barbarous. These are the things that “massacre” evokes. It is a word to describe a deed of evil.

That’s why Imagethief has followed with some interest the controversy generated by Ma Lik, Chairman of Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), one of Hong Kong’s political parties. The DAB is often described as “pro-Beijing”, and with his recent comment, Ma has left little doubt. Last Wednesday’s South China Morning Post* reported on Ma Lik’s statments on the front page, under the headline, “Fury at DAB chief’s Tiananmen tirade”. The lede said it all:

Hong Kong will not be ready for universal sufferage until around 2022 because the people lack national identity and many still believe there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the leader of the main pro-Beijing party said yesterday.

***

[Ma] said one example to show Hong Kong society was not mature was people’s belief that pro-democracy advocates were “massacred” in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The quotation marks are theirs. It is the word “massacre” itself that is in contention, as became clear when the story got to the quotes:

“We should not say the Communist Party massacred people on June 4. I never said that nobody was killed, but it was not a massacre,” Mr. Ma told a media gathering less than three weeks before the 18th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesting students. “A massacre would mean the Communist Party intentionally killed people with machine guns indiscriminately.”

Indeed. See the definition above. In addition to Ma’s own comments, the interesting thing in the paragraph above is the use of the word “crackdown” by the newspaper to describe the incident. Newspapers are, of course, wary of making emotional judgments about events, and language like “massacre” does render judgment. That’s why when you Google Tiananmen + crackdown you get a lot of newspaper articles. “Crackdown” has become an accepted, non-judgmental way of defining what happened on that late spring day in 1989.Google Tiananmen + massacre and you get plenty of returns, but fewer newspaper pieces. (You get a lot of CNN online articles, however.)

For the sake of comparison, the dictionary defines “crackdown” as, “the severe or stern enforcement of regulations, laws, etc., as to root out abuses or correct a problem” or, slightly more forcefully, as, “an act or example of forceful regulation, repression, or restraint”. So we get as far as repression.

Massacre or crackdown? You decide.

I wasn’t there, but I’ll inject something judgmental into this piece. It’s part of journalist John Pomfret’s first-hand account of the events of that day from his excellent book,Chinese Lessons:

The soldiers began to fire live ammunition low into the crowd, hitting people in the stomach and legs. The night, balmy with a calm breeze, crackled with automatic gunfire. People fled in all directions. Some returned, rocks in hand. Armored personnel carriers rolled onto the bridge and began cutting the busses aside, cutting a path into the inner city.

I was petrified. Because I had never heard live gunfire before, it took me a few minutes to realize that I, too, could get shot. I was standing about one hundred feet north of the intersection. A crowd surrounded me and began yelling: “They are shooting us! They are shooting us! They are shooting the people!” I saw in their eyes a wild insistence. “You must report this to the world,” yelled one man. Then  the bullets zinged in our direction. I found what I took to be relative safety by lying flat on thw asphalt, pinne dup against a curb. Others ran. I remember thinking they must be crazy. As I lay on the ground with my cheek against the roadbed, I saw several demonstrators fall. The armored personnel carriers had done their work, ramming a channel through the burning busses. Then came the troop trucks, fifty of them rolling through the cumpled roadblock. Random gunfire killed a housekeeper on the fourteenth floor of one building. Another woman was wounded as she looked out of an eighth-floor window.

So is it a massacre? These are the kinds of things we foreigners have to go on when we assign words to events like what happened in Tiananmen Square or elsewhere in Beijing on that day. (In the passage above Pomfret is writing about Muxidi Bridge, to the west of Tiananmen. Pomfret himself uses “crackdown”.)

Citing the above won’t satisfy Ma Lik. Part of his complaint is that he feels that the events of 1989 are being defined by foreigners. Or so I interpret from this quote:

“The government should say what actually happened on June 4… It is not something that teachers can teach whatever they want about. Are saying [what happened] should be decided by gweilos?

The ellipsis and brackets are the Post’s.

In fact Ma Lik is doing two things. One is an extremely clumsy but otherwise garden-variety political language control maneuver. He is attempting to define the language used to describe the events of June 4th 1989 in order to serve a particular political agenda. He may also believe what he is saying whole-heartedly. Attempts to manipulate language are not necessarily cynical or dishonest, although they certainly can be.

But there is a second, and to my mind spookier, part of his statements that I have not seen remarked upon much in initial or follow-up coverage. It is hinted it at in that last quote. This is that Ma Lik wants not only to redefine the language that is used to describe the Tiananmen Square events, but that he wants to institutionalize that redefinition as a pre-requisite for universal suffrage in Hong Kong. According to the Post,

[Ma] said local students had not received proper “national education” since the handover and many still “care nothing” about the mainland.

And later,

Mr Ma, who is not known as an outspoken, hard-core leftist, said universal suffrage could not be introduced before the public adopted “heart-felt” patriotism.

In other words, “you’re not mature enough to be trusted with democracy”. This old saw, played to various melodies, is a favorite of undemocratic regimes across Asia.

Ma has climbed down a bit from his initial statements. A follow-up Post story (paywall) reports:

Mr Ma, who left for Guangzhou after speaking on the radio programme, said he was only trying to call for more rational and balanced views towards the incident. “I think what is most important is to find out the whole truth.”

He also said it was not his intention to ask the Hong Kong government to issue a definitive guideline to schools on how the crackdown should be taught. He only thought teachers should not “teach whatever they wanted”.

I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree with that. No one thinks teachers should have an unfettered reach to teach whatever they want. That’s why we have standards and curricula. In the US, school curricula, especially with regard to things like evolution, are the subject of vigorous, noisy debate. That is as it should be. The difference is that in the US no one who didn’t want to be labeled a crank would argue that a doctrinal viewpoint across society is a pre-requisite for a successful democracy.

That’s the thing about democracy; by it’s very nature it accepts that people will have different viewpoints, different beliefs and different opinions about important events and topics. They will use different language to describe the same thing. They will fight compete vigorously with each other to define the political environment in the language of their choosing, in order to reflect their beliefs and politics. That’s the contest of ideas that is fundamental to healthy  democracy. It is the essence of democracy.

If Ma wants to suggest that what happened in Tiananmen wasn’t a massacre that should be his right in a democracy or any society that allows freedom of speech. After all, you can’t have a true democracy without freedom of political speech, even if that sometimes yields ideas that are distasteful to some. To suggest, however, that homogeneous belief is a prerequisite for democracy is not only to utterly miss the point of democracy, it is also, sadly, to render the very idea irrelevant.

See also:

ESWN: Ma Lik’s comments on June 4th.

*Sorry, I don’t have a link for this article. The South China Morning Post not only has an all-consuming paywall, but it also has the single worst search engine and archiving system of any online newspaper I have ever dealt with.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on I say “tomato”, you say “massacre”, let’s call the whole thing off

Did the “Genocide Olympics” influence China?

Posted on May 16, 2007 by Will Moss

Propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin. Both share the same goal: to enable an individual or organization to shape consensus in a group. They often work together. Censorship eliminates competing ideas, creating a void in which propaganda can be more effective. Having a coup? Seize the transmitters and studios so you control the message. It’s a time-honored strategy. Propaganda and censorship are related in another way. They both work cumulatively, over time. It’s not usually the “magic bullet” that drives consensus so much as the patient steering of discourse over time via many channels.

But propaganda and censorship do have one difference. I wrote recently that the most powerful censorship is what you don’t see. That’s not always the case with propaganda. Brilliant propaganda can certainly be subtle. Think of manufactured word-of-mouth campaigns that cultivate something that feels like a grass-roots public groundswell. But brilliant propaganda can also be right in your face. There was nothing subtle about the 1934 Nazi Party rallies, but they were brilliant propaganda, as was Leni Reifenstahl’s film of the rallies, Triumph of the Will. That was propaganda as sensory overload and religious experience. And it was devastating in cultivating the Nazi mythology.

The 1936 Olympiad was also propaganda, designed to showcase the grandeur of the Third Reich and the physical superiority of Hitler’s Aryan race. Like the 1934 rallies it was also filmed by Leni Reifenstahl. There was a problem with the Olympiad, however. It was hijacked by Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter who won four gold medals and undermined the messages that Hitler wanted to send to the world. Owens was a powerful, visual symbol and he himself became the lynchpin of a public mythology.

Now it’s China’s turn. China is not Nazi Germany, but the 2008 Olympic Games is as symbolically important to China as the 1936 Games was to Hitler, if not more so. It is a monumental affair staggering under symbolic baggage, and it will be, once again, propaganda as a religious experience. Like the 1936 Olympiad, however, it is also vulnerable to being hijacked. Jesse Owens didn’t mean to undermine Hitler’s message. He just wanted to win. But that didn’t change his impact.

China won’t have it so lucky. The Olympics is more than a sporting competition. It’s a global platform that makes a seductive lever for anyone with an agenda that they want to propel into the public consciousness. The modern Olympics has always been seen as an opportunity to make political statements. Hence Owens in 1936, Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’ “black power” salute in Mexico City in 1968, the Black September hostage drama in 1972 in Munich (Germany star-crossed again), and the reciprocating Russian and American boycotts of 1980 and 1984. China’s Olympic games isn’t even the first time an authoritarian Asian nation has used the Olympics to debut on the global stage. That honor goes to Korea, for the Seoul games in 1988, when Korea was at the tail end of its authoritarian regime. You can even make a case that Japan beat Korea to the punch in 1964 when its summer games served as the stage for Japan’s symbolic postwar rehabilitation less than twenty years after the end of WWII.

If all of this makes you feel a little grimy, remember that the modern Olympics exists specifically as a propaganda vehicle (and here I include marketing as a kind of propaganda). The IOC may call it a “movement”, evoking images of grass roots participation and noble sporting ideals, but that is propaganda itself, designed to draw a graceful fig leaf over the reality that the Olympics is a vast business venture –reportedly US$4 billion in revenue over its previous quadrennial cycle– driven by sponsorships and advertising. Sponsors take the messaging opportunity seriously, as well they should considering what they invest.

China, hungry to be seen anew as a great power, had its own agenda in mind with the Olympics. Unfortunately for China, all the debate and controversy that swirls around its human rights, environmental and geopolitical issues is being dragged along in the Olympic slipstream. People have China axes to grind, and that beautiful Olympic fulcrum is too enticing to pass up. The 2008 Olympics was politicized from the moment it was awarded to Beijing, and will be more contentious than any games in modern memory. That’s a big deal considering the Olympics’ propaganda-splattered pedigree. In the PR industry we refer to the 2008 Olympics as “issues rich”, which is a polite way of saying, “watch this space for crisis”.

That’s why “the genocide Olympics” is such a brilliant piece of propaganda. It is as un-subtle as you can get, and it looks like being effective.

The phrase has emerged into the popular consciousness thanks to a campaign by actress and activist Mia Farrow and her son Ronan, most recently in an op-ed piece (also here) published in the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe (and possibly elsewhere) in late March. Mia Farrow is just one of a constellation of people and groups with a China issue. In fact, Ms. Farrow’s real problem is with the Sudanese government’s sponsorship of widespread destruction and killing in the Darfur region. But China’s support for the Sudanese government and its investment in Sudan make it a convenient pressure point, and the Olympics provide that all-important leverage. The editorial says:

[There] is now one thing that China may hold more dear than their unfettered access to Sudanese oil: their successful staging of the 2008 Summer Olympics. That desire may provide a lone point of leverage with a country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism.

Whether that opportunity goes unexploited lies in the hands of the high-profile supporters of these Olympic Games. Corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonalds, and key collaborators like Mr. Spielberg, should be put on notice. For there is another slogan afoot, one that is fast becoming viral amongst advocacy groups; rather than “One World, One Dream,” people are beginning to speak of the coming “Genocide Olympics.”

Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur.

The Farrows don’t take immediate credit for “the genocide Olympics”, and in fact the phrase has been circulating since at least last December, when the Washington Post ran an editorial by that title. The Boston Globe, extends a degree of credit to a Smith University professor named Eric Reeves who advocated the Olympic-China-Darfur link on their own op-ed page, three days after the Post piece ran. A week after Reeve’s piece, theGlobe ran another editorial that cited Reeves and did use the phrase “genocide Olympics”. (The Globe has been banging the drum very hard, and it launched the phrase again in a new editorial from May 8th, here republished in the International Herald Tribune.) The phrase also had a bout of publicity in March thanks to the Farrows, and has been resurrected in the past week or so thanks to the efforts of US politicians, including long-time China critic Tom Lantos and others:

“We don’t want these Olympics to go down in the history books as the genocide Olympics,” said Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on foreign affairs.

***

“It is outrageous that China is using the very symbol of international unity and brotherhood to further grind down the Tibetans and the Taiwanese who simply want to live their lives without interference from Beijing,” Lantos said.

Two things are making this a successful campaign.

First, the campaigners have a brilliant slogan. The genocide Olympics. It sticks in the head and it conjures up the worst possible set of associations. It fits on a T-shirt (which you can order), and it is evocative and emotive at a visceral level.

Second, in a classic PR strategy, the advocates have marshaled what we in the biz call “a chorus of voices”. One angry person heaving around an incendiary phrase does not necessarily make for PR disaster. An expanding group of celebrities, politicians, activists and editorial writers heaving that phrase around does. Over time they will imprint “the genocide Olympics” on the public consciousness. (Mr. Reeves writes more about the campaign here.)

The Farrows did something else brilliant. They appropriated an intensely powerful advocate in Steven Spielberg, who is advising the Beijing Olympic Committee, and they did it in the most audacious fashion possible. The Farrows compared the Jewish film director and Shoah (Holocaust) Foundation founder to Hitler’s own cinematic propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl. The drew a direct and highly visual line from 2008 to 1936, right through Mr. Spielberg’s chest, and turbocharged the genocide concept. Mr. Spielberg obliged by apparently personally lobbying China to take tougher action on Sudan.

So is it all working?

This is debatable. China is notoriously impervious to outside pressure. But China doesn’t necessarily need to be directly persuaded. If the “genocide Olympics” idea gains enough currency, major sponsors and other national governments will start to become queasy. If the activists can pressure Visa, McDonalds, Coca Cola, GE, Samsung et. al. (Lenovo is probably a write-off) then they’ll pressure Beijing and the IOC in turn. And the sponsors, who depend upon the image of the Olympics, control the money that is the life-blood of the “movement”.

Despite its tradition of hard-headedness, China last week appointed a special envoy dedicated to the Darfur crisis. Earlier, shortly after the Farrows and Mr. Spielberg ratcheted up the pressure, China dispatched a “senior official”, Mr. Zhai Jun, to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur. On April 12, the New York Times reported on Zhai in an article titled “Darfur collides with Olympics and China yields”. (Behind the Times paywall but can be read on Ms. Farrow’s website.) The article suggested a direct link between the campaign and the mission. Lest you think China is getting soft, however, Mr. Zhai is quoted in the article describing boycott advocates as, “either ignorant or ill natured”.

Perhaps the link isn’t as direct as it seems. Last week I had coffee with an experienced China journalist who said he felt the article was reaching in linking the campaign directly to Zhai’s visit, and that China had already been in motion on Darfur. Indeed, the article itself says:

During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.

In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. “If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick,” the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.

But the Chinese would say that. After all, if they admit having been pressured once, the floodgates will open. Darfur is only one of the agendas swirling around the Olympics, and other interested parties will be watching to see to what extent the Olympics can be used to pressure Beijing.

In another discussion I had last week, the regional managing director for one of my company’s cross-town rivals wondered aloud to me if China is ready for a “multi-stakeholder world”. That’s a PR flack’s way of wondering if the Chinese can gracefully juggle the pressures that will accumulate from governments, activists, Olympic sponsors, celebrities and everyone else who has one of those China axes to grind. Not every pressure campaign will have the in-your-face impact of “the genocide Olympics”, but more are certainly on the way. I think the success or failure of the Olympics will be determined not by the campaigns themselves, but by the grace and sensitivity with which China can respond to them. Angry rhetoric aside, if there is any sincerity to them them then China’s recent moves with regard to Sudan are promising.

Unfortunately, it will be hard for China to shed its authoritarian and reactionary instincts. Just this week the country responded to a recent Tibet-oriented protest on the slopes of Mount Everest by cracking down on individual tourism to Tibet. That self-destructive move will generate exactly the kind of negative publicity that will remind the world of all of China’s faults, and ensure that the shadows continue to linger over 2008.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did the “Genocide Olympics” influence China?

Asian media vows to make western media cry

Posted on April 23, 2007 by Will Moss

Imagethief was tickled to read today in Xinhua an article from the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual Chinese talking shop, on how Asian media will rise up to challenge western media juggernauts. It seems that Asians take umbrage that they are 96.2% of the world’s population and yet produce only 0.3% of its international media. Or something like that.

The article makes many serious points:

“The world is not flat actually,” Liu Jiang, deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency, said at the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), which was held over the weekend in the south China town of Boao.

“The world is in reality a slop [sic] on which information flows downward from developed countries to developing countries and regions,” Liu said.

“The World Is Flat” by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been frequently quoted to prove an alleged “magic power” of globalization by Bill Gates and other lecturers at the conference.

The book figures out ten driving forces to grind the world flat, in each of which media play an important role.

“Developed contrives, which have one seventh of the world population, have dominated two thirds of the total information flow,” Liu said. “However, globalization does not balance a horizontal world when it is grinding the world.”

“Why do Asian media always yield to Western culture?” Felix Soh, deputy editor-in-chief of The Straits Times headquartered in Singapore, questioned in his speech at the sub-forum discussing globalization and the media.

Imagethief has lived in Asia for over a decade and is a fan of Asia and things Asian. So he will try to address Mr. Soh’s question as delicately and constructively as possible.

It’s because on average Asian media suck. Especially news media.

Now this is not an entirely categorical statement. There are fine Asian newspapers and magazines, and, heaven knows, gifted Asian filmmakers and writers. But in general –and I am truly sorry for purely selfish reasons that this is the case– Asian commercial media is a desperate wasteland that teeters perpetually on the precarious knife-edge of irredeemability.

Mr. Soh himself heads up one of the blazing test cases for the failed potential of Asian media. Imagethief needs to tread carefully here because he is really good friends with several Straits Times journalists, and they are hardworking, smart, talented people. But friends are honest with each other, so here it is: the Straits Times took the last train to dullsville and fell asleep in its seat and missed the stop. I know. I subscribed for years.

The tragedy of this –the great, majestic, swooping tragedy– is that if any country was going to produce a credible pan-Asian newspaper it would be Singapore. It’s in the right place, it’s got the right people, and it speaks the right languages. It really is a regional hub. But it will never happen.

I blame government. Governments, by and large, should not involve themselves in media. But Asia’s governments cannot, for the life of them, keep their grubby mitts off the media. And damned if they don’t have a near mystical talent for boiling the life out of it.

I realize you can argue both aspects of the government involvement equation. The government-run chartered [see note below -WM] BBC, for its troubles, is one of the world’s great news gathering organizations. Too little government supervision of media and you get dangerously irresponsible or corrupt media.

But too much government involvement and you get soul-destroying headlines like…well, just for fun, let’s see what the top story on the Straits Times website is right now:

Need for S’pore to focus on sustainable construction: Grace Fu

THERE is a scope to reduce the stockpile release price for granite from May onwards, Minister of State for National Development Grace Fu said.

Gadzooks! And for good measure here’s the number two headline:

Extraordinary govt, talent keep S’pore ahead, says MM (MM= Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew)

Good gosh, two government headlines in a row. And this is typical. Back in Singapore we used to joke about what the above-the-fold government headline of the day would be.

Arguably, this is what is important to Singaporeans (although this kind of stuff drives my Singaporean wife up the wall, but she married me so she’s probably deranged). And I realize it’s unfair to dump so much on the Straits Times. But if the editor is going to ask rhetorical questions about the subservience of Asian media, perhaps he should look close to home for the answer.

This story is rewritten across the region. As long as Asian governments manage their news, censor their films, and interfere explicitly in culture then their newspapers will be treated as propaganda, their most talented artists will flee overseas and their people will wolf-down tawdry but lively foreign culture.

So my recommendation for the governments of Asia is this: if you want a louder voice in the world, if you’re tired of being walked all over by imperialist western media, if you think you are being misrepresented on the global stage, then back the hell off. Set your own media free. It will probably rise to the challenge, and, I suspect, do it better without you breathing over its shoulder.

But that’s a pipe dream. Here’s the end of that article:

High level forums and meetings have been raised by media groups from China and members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). An agreement of cooperation on communication signed by members of the Non-aligned Movement at Kuala Lumpur in 2005 has shown the developing countries’ strong willing to speak louder in the world.

Delegates of Asian media attending the BFA conference reached the consensus that Asian media should shoulder a responsibility for broadcasting “a harmonious Asia” with “a harmonious Asian image” and provide a value of “harmonious region” to tell the world a real Asia.

A “harmonious Asia”? Oh dear. Pass me the Financial Times.

Note: I do give a tip of the hat to Singapore’s Chinese language daily, Lianhe Zaobao, which is popular in China.

Update: Charlie (in comments below) [comments no longer available – WM] and another reader (by e-mail) have pointed out the important distinction between publicly funded media, such as BBC or NPR in the US, and state-managed media. I should have made that distinction clearer in the text. The BBC is, thus, probably used incorrectly as a positive example above. Unfortunately that kind of bottoms out the list of exceptions to thegovernment involvement = bad rule.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Asian media vows to make western media cry

How to turn one terrible scandal into two

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Will Moss

Note: This includes two posts originally published on back-to-back days.

Part 1: How to turn one terrible scandal into two

Imagethief loves watching companies hang themselves. Unless they are his clients, in which case he has fits watching them hang themselves because it means sleepless nights in the glow of the computer eating greasy dinners out of Styrofoam boxes.

Fortunately for me, China Railway 12th Bureau Group Company is not one of my clients. For one thing, if they were, I’d advise them to change their name. I had to look at the original article twice to transcribe it. I’m sorry, but if you’re not a law firm you have no business having five nouns in your company name.

More importantly, they have just committed one of the great PR sins: the busted coverup. From AP, via BusinessWeek:

Police have detained 10 people in charge of building a new subway line for the 2008 Beijing Olympics after one of the project’s tunnels collapsed, trapping six workers, state media said Friday.

***

Construction company China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co., was suspected of trying to cover up the accident and delaying rescue efforts that might have saved lives, Xinhua said.

Police have detained 10 people including the project supervisor and the tunnel’s designers, Xinhua said. It did not give their names or say if they had been formally charged with any crime.

Xinhua said the construction company sealed the site immediately after the accident, confiscated employees’ mobile phones and ordered people not to talk to police or media.

The company did not report the accident to city authorities until eight hours after it occurred, it said, citing unidentified Beijing officials.

You would think that after the great Songhua River disaster of ’05 people would have learned their lessons about this. But it’s hard to overcome those olde fashioned instincts, and probably even harder when you are working on a marquee project that is part of Beijing’s pre-Olympic rectification program.

By definition, no one really knows how many successful coverups there are. However, I’d bet there really aren’t many. It all comes down to the old adage that two people can keep a secret if one them gets a lead tattoo. I am not sure any peer-reviewed scholarly work has been done in this area, but I am convinced that as the number of people involved in a coverup goes up, the risk of it being blown increases far more than in linear fashion. I betting that risk increases as at least the square of the number of people involved.

So you can confiscate all the mobile phones you want, and you can order people not to talk, but sooner or later somebody will. And probably sooner. And even if they don’t, people –family members and friends for instance– tend to notice a lot of sudden deaths.

Now China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co. (or CR12BGC as I like to think of it) has two crises on its hands: the possibly negligent deaths of twelve workers, plus a mass arrest of its executives and supervisors. Instead of looking negligent, they now look negligent, sleazy and criminal. Congratulations! It’s not easy to self-destruct that dramatically without being discovered trafficking in kiddie pr*n. Good luck explaining all this to the press.

Unless the government bans all coverage of the situation. This is China, after all, and the rules remain a little different. I realize also that CR12BGC is probably not the most progressive company when it comes to communication. But despite the high level of government intervention, China now has a scrappy, modern media that loves a good scandal. The sooner Chinese companies learn how to deal with this, the better things will go for them.

We PR people are widely unloved. There is some justification for this. As an industry we have a history of taking on unsavory clients and disagreeable jobs. But its also unfair in some ways. In crisis situations we spend a lot of time giving variations on the following straightforward advice to our clients:

  1. Don’t lie.
  2. Be mindful of your legal risk and prudent in communication, but don’t try to hide or distort the facts of what actually happened.
  3. Don’t lie. (Again.)

Writ large or small, successful crisis communication is about clearly explaining your side of what happened and being publicly seen to take all practical steps to address the crisis and assist the people affected. You can’t bring back the dead, but you can take care of the living, understand what went wrong, visibly cooperate with authorities and demonstrate a commitment to learning from mistakes. It might not do anything about your legal liability, but it will help your reputation and generally costs less in the long run than the alternatives. And if you do get prosecuted, a constructive approach looks a lot better in court than an attempted cover up.

Plus its hard to work a crisis when all your spokespeople are in jail.

Gasp! It's the China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co.!

Gasp! It’s the China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co.!

Part 2: Beijing subway collapse: Whose crisis is it?

Following up on yesterday’s post about the Beijing subway collapse, I saw an interesting article (subscription) by Mei Fong in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Asia. (I try to get that right ever since one of their journalists explained to our staff in Beijing that it’s not the “Asian Wall Street Journal” any more, and that we had better get with the times.)

Because of its galvanizing effect on everyone with a China agenda, the Beijing Olympics has been described within my industry as “issues rich”. This is PR code for “shitstorm waiting to happen”, and is the kind of thing that usually leaves PR men cackling to themselves and planning expensive purchases. (Or, at my pay grade, grocery shopping.)

Among the many China issues that people get in a twist about is migrant laborers. There are by the government’s own estimates 115 million of them. For perspective, that’s less than 10% of the population of China, but more than 35% of the population of the United States. And I’m not sure the government is counting everyone.

A lot of these migrant workers are currently in Beijing, slaving away on extremely high-profile, deadline-sensitive projects that are part of the city’s pre-Olympic renovation. People have noticed this. Mei writes:

[Beijing’s] haste to meet its construction deadlines has resulted in round-the-clock work for the armies of often poorly paid, badly equipped migrant workers who build most of these projects. Some work shifts that can last as long as 24 hours.

The relatively poor working conditions of migrant workers has come under greater media scrutiny in recent months, causing international labor groups — many already critical of China’s poor human-rights record — to put greater pressure on the International Olympic Committee to improve the situation.

IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said in an email that “our understanding is that all efforts have been made both in terms of safety — specifically putting precaution first, and also in terms of transparent management.”

Does the IOC really believe that? Even if it doesn’t, is there anything else it could say without admitting culpability and precipitating its own crisis? How about:

“The IOC is aware of the widespread exploitation of Chinese migrant laborers, the mistreatment they commonly suffer and the appalling and unsafe conditions they endure. We sympathize completely. But we also believe that during the pomp of the opening ceremony, amidst the pageantry, grandeur and fireworks, no one will be thinking about a few bones in the foundations.”

Maybe not. OK, what Ms. Davies says isn’t as bad as my idiot scenario above. Note the weasel words, though: “Our understanding is…” That phrase is the IOC’s absolution. It transfers responsibility onto BOCOG and the Chinese government. They told us everything is OK. But for credibility it depends upon you and me believing that the chain of honest communication and transparency from labor contractors to construction subcontractors to primary contractors to the municipal government and BOCOG is intact. Do you really believe that? Of the Chinese construction industry? And if you don’t, then should the IOC?

I realize I am dissecting one partial statement out of context here. But that’s what the public will see, so that’s what will inform people’s opinions.

As for BOCOG, it has duelling priorities:

Priority 1) Have a glamorous and untarnished Olympic Games that mark China’s emergence on the International stage.

Priority 2) Get the goddamn thing done in time and on budget.

So which priority will win, and whose reputations will get trashed in the process?

493 days, 6 hours, 51 minutes and 17 seconds to go as of this posting.

Gasp! It's BOCOG and the IOC!

Gasp! It’s BOCOG and the IOC!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on How to turn one terrible scandal into two

The devil wears Prada and won’t rent me an apartment

Posted on March 27, 2007 by Will Moss

Imagethief hates looking for an apartment. Once I am comfortable someplace, I’ll tend to stick with it unless there is some external factor that forces me to move. That could be a raise that lets me upgrade, the relocation of my office, a crack house opening downstairs (if it was noisy) or, just for example, moving to another city.

A few months ago I briefly looked at apartments in Beijing before ultimately bargaining my rent down and staying put. After that experience, I wrote a post (rant, really) that summed up my feelings about apartment hunting in China. My major complaint was that Chinese landlords are unchallenged in their ability to select the worst, tackiest, ugliest possible furniture for any given apartment.

So I was understandably staggered when just a bit over a week ago I walked into a rental apartment in Shanghai that had some of the nicest furniture I had ever seen. The apartment was gorgeous, with a tasteful paint job, reasonable lighting (another rarity in a country obsessed with colored fluorescent tubes and baroque chandeliers), simple moldings and truly elegant and comfortable furniture. It was on Julu Rd., a ten minute walk from my office, and near a wet market and several pleasant restaurants and cafes. It was quiet and had a big balcony. To top it off, the rent was reasonable. Its only drawback was a microscopic, Hong Kong-style kitchen. But Mrs. Imagethief and I figured we could live with it if we kept our elbows in.

There was, naturally, a complication. I have cats. I had warned the agent beforehand that I have cats. “I have cats,” I said, to minimize confusion. “I don’t want to waste time. Make sure any apartment we look at doesn’t mind cats.” This instruction, along with several others of lower importance, like my budget range, was ignored.

As we looked at the apartment I asked the agent, “How does the owner feel about cats?”

“There are some concerns,” he said.

Undaunted, I said that I was interested. He said he would look further into the cat issue and let me know.

The next day I was requested to appear at the apartment along with my cats so the landlady could evaluate them. I explained that the cats were still in Beijing and an introduction would be somewhat impractical. A compromise was struck. Could I bring photographs instead?

I had Mrs. Imagethief send me the most cuddly, harmless, nauseatingly cute, aw-shucks photograph of the cats that she could locate (see below) and I printed it out in color. What I didn’t point out is that the reason the cats are so serene is this photo is that they are in shock from being transported from Singapore to Beijing and spending 48 hours in Chinese animal impound. In a spectacular piece of extra-credit work, Mrs. Imagethief also shot a digital video that convincingly shows that the cats will energetically scratch a scratching post but cannot be enticed to sink their claws into the sofa. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that video into a portable format in time to take with me.

I arrived at the apartment at the designated time and waited along with the agent. When the landlady swished in I knew I was in trouble. She was immaculate. From the perfect hairstyle down to the tiny pair of sparkly, silver shoes, she was a picture of high-fashion perfection. She also radiated a brittle arrogance that I associated immediately with one or two of my particularly fabulous ex-colleagues, a trademark of those Chinese women that have painstakingly and fastidiously elevated themselves above the long-underwear dowdiness that still pervades so much of the country.

She did not, in short, appear to be the kind of person well-disposed to a dusting of cat hair on every surface.

She was also not the landlady. She was the landlady’s good friend. The landlady herself was pregnant in Hong Kong, and this woman had been entrusted with the task of vetting potential tenants. It was a responsibility she took seriously. Where did I work? How long had I been in China? Was I single? Did I absolutely have to keep the cats? Wouldn’t stuffed cats do just as well?

Still, she was supportive in her own way. “I can see that you have good taste,” she said with the deadpan sincerity with which you might compliment an extremely simple third-grader, “because you like this apartment.”

You see, she explained, the concern is that the furniture is all imported. The bed alone, I was warned, was worth some RMB 20,000. And it was nothing against animals in general. She had a dog, after all. (I could picture it — something microscopic and high strung. A colicky cotton ball with a diamond collar, protruding eyes and an angry snarl.) Dogs stay on the floor. But cats, well, they like to jump on top of things. And her friend, I had to understand, was her colleague from Vogue, and she was very serious about the condition of her apartment.

Vogue.

I had watched “The Devil Wears Prada” a week or two before and had laughed off the attitude as Hollywood hyperbole. And yet here it was in front of me, big as life. They reallyare that self-consciously fabulous. I am the product of a bookishly unstylish bloodline and I have no experience dealing with this sort of person. It was like being in the presence of an extremely fashionable space alien. I mean, what common ground do you really have?

Well, she had heard of my company. I guess that was something.

She said she would go back and discuss it with her friend. She also suggested that they would put a list of all the furniture and its values into the contract (actually a sensible idea). Then she turned to the agent and in Mandarin laid down the bottom line on rent. It was incrementally higher than I wanted to pay, and I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t say it directly to me. But it didn’t matter. I had already written off the apartment.

Even if her absent friend had agreed to my tenancy I had mentally abandoned it about the time I was indirectly complemented on my taste. The world is full of imperfect and obsessive landlords, but the thought of having a phalanx of neurotic fashionistas riding shotgun on my tenancy was more than I could tolerate. It wasn’t just the cats. I’m big, klutzy and drop things. I sit on the couch after sweaty workouts. Mrs. Imagethief and I cook smokey, spicy things that stink up the house, and then eat off the coffee table while we watch TV. I drop my underwear on the bedroom floor. Mrs. Imagethief and I would have made noisy, spring-rattling whoopee on that expensive, imported bed. There is a reason why leases have “normal wear and tear” clauses, and that reason is me.

And I have enough stress in my life without having it transmitted at me by a landlady who’s going to worry if I sit on the couch in riveted Levis, let alone do any of the things above.

The next day, even before we heard back from the landlady’s friend, I called the agent and told him to forget it. That was probably exactly what the owner was hoping for, but it spared us all the uncomfortable last dance.

I defaulted to my second choice. It’s in an uglier building and it’s a tattier apartment. The couch looks like it was lifted from a frat house yard sale and the dining room table is so hopeless I told the agent to get rid of it. But the place is big, nicely painted, and has an enormous kitchen and an unobstructed view of the entire eastern half of the city. It’s a five minute walk from the office.

And the landlord doesn’t care about cats. For that kind of serenity, I’ll go downmarket.

Would you trust them on your couch?

Would you trust them on your couch?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on The devil wears Prada and won’t rent me an apartment

A funny thing happened on the way to political re-education

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Will Moss

Imagethief was morbidly fascinated to find a Reuters article over the weekend that explains how the Chinese Propaganda Ministry has launched a point-based “demerit” system to try to encourage proper behavior from the print media:

CHINA’S Communist Party propaganda department has launched a points-based penalty system to try to rein in the increasingly muck-raking print media, a Hong Kong newspaper reported today.

Media outlets will be allocated a dozen points that the propaganda department and the government media regulator can deduct one, three, six or all 12 at a time, the newspaper quoted unnamed sources as saying.

It was not clear how the severity of a perceived infringement would be judged, but penalties would range from warnings and dismissals to closure of the publication, it said.

***

“The new system is a clear message that the top leadership wants a peaceful social environment ahead of the 17th Party Congress and next year’s Olympic games,” the newspaper quoted a senior state media executive as saying.

The media point system was similar to China’s driver license point system whereby deducted for moving violations.

And, in fact, similar to systems used for penalizing motorists all over the world. This begs the question, for the first offence can a media organization send its staff to the Propaganda Ministry’s comedy media school and have the points restored, like going to comedy traffic school for a first offense in the US? After all, the government here has a tradition of political re-education. Why not work a few laughs in along the way?

Sure, right now you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t think the propaganda ministry is a humorous organization. But with a little work it could be. For instance, a favorite disciplinary tool here is the “self-criticism”. Anyone who pays attention to comedy knows that self-criticism is at the heart of much comedy. It’s Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre, after all. Could it be that hard to work comedy into other aspects of media discipline? I don’t think so.

Join me now as we look in on the Ministry’s comedy re-education school. An unnamed media organization has been slapped with three demerit points for unauthorized portrayal of a pig during the Chinese New Year Festivities, in contravention of recently announced regulations:

Cadre: Good evening, comrades. I am Mr. Wei and I will be conducting your political re-education today.

Editors and journalists: Good evening comrade Wei.

Cadre: You know, it’s great to see you all here today. I hear you got sent up for showing an advertisement with a pig in it during New Year. Honestly, muslims, who can figger ‘em out? You know they don’t eat pork? They don’t eat pork! How crazy is that? Say, that reminds me of a joke. A man was walking by a village when he saw a pig with a wooden leg. Not quite sure of what he was seeing, he went up to the house and knocked on the door. A peasant answered the door and the man said, “I was walking by and saw a pig with a wooden leg and I just had to find out why!”

“Well” the farmer answered,”that is a really special pig. Our house was on fire and that pig dragged my whole family out and saved our lives.”

“But why the wooden leg?” asked the man.

“Well,” the farmer replied,”a pig that special you wouldn’t eat all at once!”

Uproarious laughter.

Cadre: Yeah, the great thing about Hanification of the west is that you’ll finally be able to get a decent pork bun in Kashgar.

Chuckles.

Cadre: So how do you think the ministry found out about your pig advertisement?

Editor: They read our newspaper?

Cadre: Nah, somebody squealed! (Rimshot)

Laughter.

Cadre: Honestly, it’s not really your fault. The party believes that religion is the opiate of the masses. It just makes people crazy. (Twiddles index finger at temple.) Say, that reminds me of another joke. A Hindu, a rabbi and a capitalist are driving through thenongcun when their car breaks down. Fortunately they find a farmhouse nearby. The peasant tells them that he has only space for two more people to sleep inside the house. They are welcome to it, but one of them will have to sleep in the shed outside.

Well, after much discussion, the Hindu volunteers to go to the shed. A few moments later there’s a knock on the house door. It’s the Hindu. He explains that there is a cow in the shed, and cows are sacred to Hindus and he can’t possibly sleep in the barn with a sacred cow.

Annoyed, the rabbi volunteers to go sleep in the shed. A few moments later, a knock on the door. The rabbi explains that there’s a pig in the shed and that he, being orthodox, can’t spend the night in the shed with a pig.

So the capitalist says that he will go to the shed. A few minutes later there’s a knock on the door. It’s the cow and the pig!

Hearty laughter.

Cadre: But, crazy or not, the big Hu says we have to promote a harmonious society, right? So what do you think will happen if you publish another pig advertisement?

Journalist: We’ll lose another three demerit points?

Cadre: No, you’ll all be dragged out to the quarry and shot in the back of the head.

Stunned silence.

Cadre: Hey, just kidding.

Nervous laughter.

Cadre: You guys should have seen the looks on your faces. But seriously, folks, you’re a wonderful audience. Give yourselves a big hand.

Yes, it would be a laff riot.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on A funny thing happened on the way to political re-education

Apartmental, a part mental

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Will Moss

As regular readers will know, Imagethief has been on cross-assignment to his company’s Shanghai office in recent weeks. The company is, meanwhile, attempting to persuade me to consider semi-permanent reassignment to Shanghai. I have not yet made a decision about this (and if my landlord in Beijing is reading this, we’ll talk).

In general, I really like the company I work for. They’ve taken good care of me, provided training, put up with my idiosyncrasies, and were patient with me while I spent my early months wrapping my head around the cataclysmic, nationwide fun-house that is the Chinese media. Because of that I was willing to listen to when they suggested that relocation to Shanghai might be good for my professional development.

They say that whichever Chinese city you come to first is the one you build an attachment to. I suppose this argument might break down if your first port of call was Linfen. But I came to Beijing by choice, and I’ve certainly become affectionate for the city. Beijing, for all its impersonal ministries and immense boulevards, has an intimacy and a grungy, eccentric streak that really appeals to me. In a little under three years, I’ve really come to think of Beijing as home.

It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been surrounded by old Beijing-hands who are naturally contemptuous of Shanghai (Schwankert, I’m talking about you), or that I’ve been writing about the city’s eccentricities for That’s Beijing semi-regularly. So I came to Shanghai with the casual, Shanghai? Pfeh! disdain of the confirmed Beijinger.

Imagine my surprise at discovering that Shanghai is really not bad at all. It has a very different feel than Beijing, for sure. As David Wolf said to me over lunch Friday, in explaining the difference, “Beijing was created to be an imperial capital. It has always been a Chinese city. Shanghai was created to be a treaty port, and foreigners have always been a part of its identity.” He also advised me to make regular trips back to Beijing for sanity checks. Fair enough. But I’ve quite enjoyed the time I’ve been spending in Shanghai, and the city has its own personality and charm, if that is the word to use. My office and apartment are both in a very pleasant part of town, which does help.

Speaking of my apartment, however, I have some complaints.

The company provided the apartment for me to use during my cross-assignment. A previous expatriate employee of ours had lived in it for about four months and had then left China. The week before my Christmas break I had quick look in the apartment to see if it was habitable. It was, depending upon your point of view, a relatively high-end local apartment, or a relatively low-end international apartment. Perhaps the latter, given that it had international cable TV channels. It had plenty of room for me and occasional visits from Mrs. Imagethief. My conclusion was that it was generally fine, although I would have to bring some bedding from Singapore. I told our Shanghai office manager she didn’t need to have an ahyi work it over before my return. That was an inexcusable, rookie error. What can I say? It was night, I was rushed. My due diligence was not superb.

I returned from my Christmas vacation in the US on Saturday, January 6th. On the 7th I flew to Shanghai and went straight to the apartment. There, alone with a suitcase in the dark of a Shanghai winter evening, jetlagged into irascibility, the flimsiness of my earlier appraisal became clear. As did the bachelor existence of the previous occupant. I had not bothered to open the refrigerator during my brief, pre-Christmas visit. Monumental mistake. The entire contents consisted of two rotting, three-week old pieces of meat and a box of Ferrero Rocher candies now infused with the smell of decaying flesh. The rest of the food supply was two things of instant noodles and a huge pile of little sugar sachets stolen from every restaurant and bar in the French Concession.

Three years ago when I first moved to China and did my Wordlink Education language program, they put me up in a very similar two-bedroom apartment. It was fine, but made no provision for the fact that some people might like to cook and eat at home. The total kitchen implements consisted of a frying pan, a chopper, a cutting board, two bowls, two Chinese soup spoons (the boat-shaped ceramic ones that are hard to use for sugaring coffee) and some chopsticks. I had to go down to the CRC supermarket in Wudaokou’s Huaqing Jiayuan apartments and buy a saucepan, fork, knife, round-bottomed pan, plastic colander and a plate. (And I only got this far after several tragic days of trying to eat salad with chopsticks. Oil-slicked cherry tomatoes are a bitch to eat with chopsticks, no matter how dexterous you are.)

Buying forks and can-openers when you’re in the heady rush of fresh-arrival and wide-eyed, goldang, lookit that! culture-shock is fine. It’s all part of the adventure. And I was surrounded by threadbare college students, so living like one was a blast of juvenile nostalgia. I went through a somewhat more substantial stocking of my own apartment in Beijing some months later, culminating in the shipping of my accumulated household worth of stuff from Singapore when my move to China become final.

You forget when you’ve lived in a house or apartment for a while just how much stuff accumulates. Some of it is junk, but some of it is really useful. The great thing about my apartment in Beijing is that it has everything I need (and plenty that I don’t): Dishes, utensils, tools, cables, connectors, bric-a-brac, Q-Tips, spare Kleenex, nail clippers, scissors, scotch tape, shoe polish, laundry detergent, a sewing kit, and so on off into infinity. The apartment in Shanghai had a wok, four bowls, four plates, Chinese spoons, chopsticks, a chopper and cutting boards. It also had, inexplicably, an upright piano. I don’t play piano.

Barring the piano, this was so close to the contents of my Wudaokou apartment that for a moment I thought I had slipped back in time.

And here is where I get cranky. I am now thirty-nine and a (semi) respected China business professional. I have lived here for three years. My wife and pets are here. I have a network. I can get around in Chinese. I did not want to have to relive my starving student days by buying a fucking can opener. I believe that if you are trying to woo someone into uprooting themselves from city A and shipping their wife, worldly possessions and fuzzy kitty cats to city B, you need to do everything possible to make that person think city B is paradise on earth. Three months in a luxurious service apartment refreshingly free of carrion and stocked to the gills with conveniences seems like a good place to start. Once they sign on the dotted line you can always pull a bait-and-switch. But remember, it’s bait first then switch.

I also had to come to grips with the legendary consequences of the south-of-the -Yangtze government heating edict. This is one of those remnants of central planning that make China fascinating at an academic level and a pain in the ass at a practical one. My apartment in Beijing seals like a spaceship (although, like a spaceship, you can also run out of air and die if you don’t ventilate it from time to time). I don’t even need to turn the marvelous central-heat on. The apartment stores solar energy.

My temporary Shanghai apartment, however, leaks like a straw hat and is apparently heated by a small man from Guangxi who rubs sticks together somewhere in the duct-work above the ceilings. At least that’s what it sounds like. He needs to rub the sticks together for four or five hours before they generate enough heat so that my breath doesn’t fog in the living room. I needed to sort out the arcane timing system which is based on oracle bones and bedsprings. Apparently I am supposed to set the timer to turn the heat on about one hour after I leave the house in the morning. That will ensure that the apartment is damply tepid about the time I get home, rather than arctic. I think the answer is a vastly larger television that would generate supplemental heat, but for some reason the company isn’t buying my arguments.

I can’t imagine why not.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Apartmental, a part mental

I’m sorry, the government has killed your story

Posted on February 3, 2007 by Will Moss

Colleagues from American and European offices often ask Imagethief how PR in China is different from PR in the west. Usually I give a two-part answer. First I tell them that were they to step into our offices in China they would see many things that they would instantly recognize as garden variety PR. We write press releases, organize events, craft angles and pitch stories to competitive publications and journalists, develop communication strategies and train executives in how to handle the media, among other things. But then I tell them about what’s different, usually sticking to the highlights. In the best diplomatic, spin-doctorese I tell them that the Chinese media’s “ethical framework is not entirely developed”. By which I mean that it is, in many ways, a corrupt swamp. (This is something of a theme in the foreign media recently, having been covered by the Washington Post,New York Times and AP with the Lan Chengzhang case as catalyst.)

The other difference is that the government has explicit power over the media agenda. Most of the time, self-censorship is the rule. However the propaganda ministry –中宣部– also sends out guidance on sensitive issues to major media. Editors who want to keep their jobs are expected to toe the line. Occasionally an acute issue will motivate a directive to halt coverage of a topic, as when media were directed to layoff the Foxconn-Apple scandalof last year. (Recently this has led to proscribed topics sloshing over into journalists’ and editors’ blogs, but that’s a topic for ESWN.)

We were reminded of the realities of government management of the media agenda recently, shortly after arranging an interview between one of our MNC clients and a Chinese business magazine. The magazine in question had requested the interview, with an eye on exploring our client’s business and investments in China. The discussion was vigorous but reasonably balanced and we were expecting a decent article as a result, with publication planned prior to Chinese New Year.

About two weeks after the interview, one of the editors involved called us and said the story would be “delayed”. Apparently the magazine had just received guidance from the Propaganda Ministry to be more “sensitive” in publishing stories that involved foreign investment, particularly around certain industries or well-known Chinese brands. We had not, at first blush, considered the story we were developing to be particularly risky or sensitive. But the journalists and editors at the magazine were, as you would expect, taking the ministerial guidance extremely seriously. So we had to wait, and so did our client.

But clients who make busy senior (foreign) executives available expect explanations about these kinds of things. “Hey, dude, it’s China,” doesn’t really cut it, so we did a little poking around. The back-story is illustrative of one of the challenges of the PR biz in China.

Anyone who follows current affairs in China will know that these are delicate times for discussing the topic of foreign investment. Questions are being raised about the quality of foreign investment and the intent behind it. Early last November the 11th Five Year Plan was published. It put a great deal of emphasis on the quality of foreign investment. In this English Xinhua article about the plan, the money graf –as far as we were concerned– is the very last one:

In response to the rising concern over foreign acquisitions of leading Chinese firms in critical sectors, the document says China will speed up legislation and step up the supervision of sensitive acquisitions and takeovers to ensure critical industries and enterprises remain under Chinese control.

Shortly thereafter, it seems the initial guidance to treat reporting around this topic sensitively was passed on to at least some Chinese media. The publication we were dealing with was government-linked, and had little wiggle-room as far as interpreting this directive to be “sensitive”. Unfortunately, apparently, they had somehow missed the memo and in their previous issue published an article that had raised eyebrows upstairs. This had resulted in a ministerial reminder to toe the line, which descended, Rumsfeldian snowflake fashion, into the in-boxes of the editors of the magazine we were working with the day before they called to tell us that they had to postpone.

My initial response when the Chinese media-relations guru on my team told me that the magazine had to postpone the story because of a government directive was to assume they were giving me a polite brush-off. Similar, perhaps, to what you might get if a Western editor didn’t like the story a journalist had put together on your client, and the journalist in question wanted to tell you something more polite than, “The editor thinks your interview was crap on a stick.”

“Are they yanking our chain?” was the first question I asked her. Some of our other Chinese team members, including one of our government relations people, had the same first reaction, so it wasn’t just foreigner-itis. But after some research and phone calls turned up the story above I changed my opinion. At the very least, if it was an excuse, it was a damn well substantiated one with abundant face-saving for everyone. In which case, my face duly saved, I could sleep well at night.

The net result, however, is that our story went on the back burner, where it remains until the publication feels that it can once again broach the topic of foreign investment in certain industries, or hell freezes over (whichever comes first). And now I have one more piece of due-diligence to do when identifying Chinese media to work with in future.

Such is one of the many things that make PR in China such a rush.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on I’m sorry, the government has killed your story

Fly the feces-free skies of China Southern

Posted on December 2, 2006 by Will Moss

Few things have provided more grist for Imagethief’s gripemill than Chinese airlines. A simple search of this website for various permutations of China+Airline+Travel will make that abundantly clear. In part this hostility is unfair. Chinese airlines are every bit as good as American carriers –although I have heaped scorn on those as well– and in some ways they are distinctly better. For instance, I would recommend Chinese carriers to anyone with a fetish for being waited upon by attractive Asian women as opposed to a fetish for being snarled at by hostile, matronly Americans. Not that no one has that particular fetish, its just that its somewhat more eccentric and self-destructive, like a fetish for self-mutilation, blender worship or Paris Hilton.

And of course, Chinese carriers are every bit as successful as their American counterparts, which is to say they are losing money hand over fist. That’s why I was constipated to readin a Reuters news story (quoting Xinhua) about some of the money-saving steps recently suggested by China Southern Airlines:

A Chinese airline has calculated that it takes a litre of fuel to flush the toilet at 30,000 feet and is urging passengers to go to the bathroom before they board.

As Chinese airlines come under increasing pressure to cut fuel expenditures, China Southern’s latest strategy is to encourage passengers “to spend their pennies before boarding the aircraft”, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

“The energy used in one flush is enough for an economical car to run at least 10 kilometres,” Captain Liu Zhiyuan, who flies regularly between Hangzhou and Beijing, was quoted as saying.

Citing a survey by the company’s logistics department, Liu said carrying one kilogram of items such as blankets and pillows by air for one hour uses 0.2 kg of fuel.

“This means the blankets and pillows on board the aircraft eat up 60 tonnes of fuel every day. If each seat is loaded with three 450-gram magazines, another 60 tonnes will be consumed,” Liu explained.

Well, having taken many flights on China Southern over the past few years, I can tell you that many passengers already consider flushing optional, so it’s debatable how much value such a program might have. I also think that the focus on flushing perhaps ignores the root of the problem, which is that according to this article, airplane toilets are some of the least energy efficient devices on the planet, on a part with M1-Abrams tanks and arc lights. Airplane manufacturers may want to get cracking on this (so to speak). After all, if my home toilet required a liter of kerosene for every flush, I’d just use half the kerosene to burn our daily household quota of excreta in our apartment building’s courtyard (everyone loves a bonfire) and sell the rest on the aviation fuel black market for cold, hard cashola.

But as the article makes clear, cracking down (again, so to speak) on online flushing is really only part of the solution. The real triumph would be to encourage people not to carry any bodily wastes on board the airplane at all. In fact, I think the “pillows and magazines” in this article are really offered as a gentle metaphor for the collection of excreta sloshing around inside of each of us. After all, to the airline, the accumulated fecal matter fermenting in your bowel is just another form of carry-on luggage, and one that they have no control over. And nothing chafes an airline more than the thought that you might be gaming their system. Turds are just the beginning. Next thing you know people will be wrapping their duty free purchases in condoms and swallowing them to evade carry on limits.

Let’s look at this scientifically. Doing some quick research, I note from a highly credible source, the movie Beverly Hills Cop, that the gut of the average American fifty-year-old contains about five pounds (2.25 kilos) of undigested red meat. Chinese are not Americans, but they are eating an increasing amount of red meat so let’s use American fifty-year-olds as proxies for the entire Chinese population and go with that number. It’s this spirit of daring scientific inquiry that led to such breakthroughs as cold fusion and Dr. Hang Woo-suk’s cloning program at Seoul National University. Going further I also note that China Southern is one of the airlines that has ordered A380s, which can carry up to 500 passengers. After performing some complex and rigorous calculations far beyond the reach of lesser cortexes, I discover that a single planeload may be hauling around up to 2500 pounds (1,136 kilos) of turds.

Shocking. If the fuel consumption figures in the article above are accurate, that means that China Southern’s A380s could burn up to 227 extra liters of fuel an hour just dragging around surplus shit. On a twelve-hour long-haul to San Francisco that could mean almost 3000 extra liters of fuel consumed in the name of turd-haulage. Add on another three flushes (conservatively) per person on that same flight and you are looking at another 1500 liters of fuel consumed, for a total of 4500 kilos of fossil fuels –1.5% of the aircraft’stotal fuel capacity– flushed away in the name of airborne waste management. My god, people, haven’t you heard of global warming?

Looked at this way, you can see that China Southern might be onto something. In fact, they might taking too conservative an approach to managing this situation. In the interest of safeguarding this planet that we all share, Imagethief proposes that, like hair gel and toothpaste in the US, human fecal matter be banned from all Chinese flights. Passengers should be required to consume a heavy dose of laxatives the day before flying and to purge thoroughly before boarding. Enema lounges could be installed in all Chinese airports, helping passengers to unburden themselves their ungreen load before boarding. I find a pre-flight high colonic highly refreshing myself, and imagine that it could become quite the fad. Naturally, pre-boarding security questions should be amended:

  • Did you pack your bags yourself?
  • Has anyone else handled your luggage since you packed it?
  • Did you have a nice, big shit this morning?

With a few simple steps like this we can help China Southern to claw its way into profitability and reduce the global warming threat posed by air transportation. China could establish itself as environmental leader and revolutionize the entire approach to air travel. Dependency upon oil imports would also be reduced. Just think: if every airline in the world was to implement a program like this, we would live on greener, cleaner, more peaceful planet. Considering the benefits, an enema at a Chinese airport seems like a small price to pay.

Note: Thanks to Gordon at The Horse’s Mouth for sending this article to me. Dude, when are you coming back to China? This country needs you.

Related: Shanghai closed flights into and out of Pudong for several hours yesterday due to “air traffic volume”. Foreign flight crews ascribed the delays to military exercises. Anyone who travels in China regularly knows that the all-too-common flight delays and cancellations often get dubious official explanations, and the military’s fiat over Chinese airspace is widely and credibly blamed. In this case it seems likely. No one closes an airport to all traffic because of congestion. You might divert some traffic or delay some flights, but close the airport? The flagship airport at your glamourous international business city? The military explanation sounds a lot more credible in that case. Or some other similarly conspiratorial explanation. At any rate, you coudn’t get much more bush-league, especially considering the government’s usual appalling communication, which extends to what looks to me like a complete absence of any press coverage of the incident.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Fly the feces-free skies of China Southern

Olympics mean a softer touch for foreign correspondents, maybe

Posted on December 2, 2006 by Will Moss

Ed Cody of the Washington Post’s Beijing bureau has written an interesting story on a new decree from the Chinese government that will grant foreign correspondents in China significantly more freedom in the months before and after the games. The article is interesting for a few reasons. First, it suggests that the government might be working out a relatively more sophisticated approach to media management for the games; second it provides a window into some of the media management tactics they are preparing for; and third it explains how the current control regime has been more obnoxious than effective. Cody writes:

A decree from Premier Wen Jiabao’s government said foreign reporters, whether assigned here permanently or visiting for the Olympics, will be allowed to roam most of the country freely and report without interference by local police or propaganda officials from Jan. 1, 2007, until Oct. 17, 2008. The Games are in August 2008.

As explained by Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao, the new rules departed clearly — if temporarily — from long-standing orders. They also marked a significant watershed for China, where information has long been treated as government property to be manipulated and controlled by propaganda officials.

***

If followed by authorities across the country, [the decree would] for more than 21 months eliminate some major barriers to accurate reporting about China: regulations that legally oblige foreign correspondents to work through local propaganda officials when gathering news. Those restrictions, when followed, have limited frank conversation with Chinese people and emphasized the official version of news.

I find this interesting because it suggests that the Chinese authorities are thinking a step beyond their normal control-oriented approach to information management. I don’t think much of how the Chinese government manages information. (I’m sure that statement does not come as a profound shock to regular readers of this site.) All governments want to control information and public perception, and all try to devise systems for doing so that reflect the realities of society, technology and the media environment. I think the Chinese government still drags along too much baggage from before China’s opening and subsequent economic boom, and the attendant explosion in the media and public access to information and communication tools. The CCP model still favors brute control of information over effective communication, and it shows in both domestic and international situations where better communication might be helpful.

This is not just about the Internet. I am not a utopian when it comes to the power of the Internet to free people’s minds. If all Internet censorship in China was lifted tomorrow there would not be any significant change in China. (For some interesting analysis of related topics, see Ann Condi’s recent guest post in Danwei and Howard French’s comparison of the English and Chinese language versions Wikipedia, although the latter has also been fisked by Dave at Peking Duck.) But while the “un-story” approach works OK when there is a relatively small number of centralized media and limited options for personal communication, it works much less well in an era of blogging, instant-messaging, SMS and extensive international contact. At best China’s government would abandon the information control approach in favor of something more progressive. At the very least it needs to be supplemented by more effective communication. I do think the Chinese government is working on this, but they have a ways to go.

I don’t for a moment believe the decree means that the government has abandoned its traditional approach to information management. It still hasn’t had anything meaningful to say about yesterday’s massive service interruption at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, for instance. But giving foreign correspondents more leeway in the run-up to the Olympics would accomplish two things. First, it’s a PR move in and of itself. “See? We’re improving!” But there is a second, deeper side to the move as well, and it has to do with what kind of incident would make the Olympics a PR failure for the Chinese government. And make no mistake: the Olympic Games are the most important external PR endeavor the modern Chinese government has ever embarked upon.

Of course others know this. Because its a global event that attracts the eyes and ears of the world, the Olympic Games –especially the more popular summer games– are a convenient platform for people who have an issue they want to publicize. That’s why the US and Russia used boycotts of each others’ Olympics in 1980 and ’84 to make political points, why the 1976 Olympics were targeted by terrorists, and why any Olympic city is on guard against attempts to hijack the games for other agendas.

China is, as we in the biz say, “issues rich”. And the Beijing Olympics will be the most “issues rich” (i.e. problematic) games since Los Angeles in 1984 (the Soviet boycott). No matter how you slice it, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney and Athens just don’t compare. (When the Olympics were held in Barcelona, not all that long ago, Deng Xiaoping had just made the “southern tour” that marked China’s post-Tian’anmen reopening.) Aboriginal rights are great and all, but my China issues list is longer than the list of people Koko wanted to execute in The Mikado. Where do you want to start? FLG? Tibet? Uighur rights? Pollution? Censorship? Jailed journalists? Corruption? Rural poverty and migration? Activists are already sharpening their press releases and polishing their signs.

But that’s expected. There will always be some kind of scandal. Atlanta even had a bombing. The games can survive a scandal, a protest, or even a bomb. What they can’t survive is a bad police reaction to such an event. Let’s put it this way: If a bunch of people assemble in Tian’anmen Square with pro-FLG banners, it’ll be annoying for the Chinese government, but not a disaster for the games. Even if a sweet-faced teenage girl douses herself in gasoline and sets herself on fire it will be tragic and sad, but not necessarily a catastrophe for the games. It is the government’s own actions during the games that will speak loudest, especially overreaction. If the Chinese cops bust up the demonstration, roust the TV crews and photographers and impound tapes and films it will then become a disaster, not least because every person in the vicinity with a modern mobile phone, Chinese or foreign, will have pictures and probably video anyway. (And if you want to start another revolution in China,  the best way to do it would be to try confiscating people’s mobile phones.) A harsh reaction means the story stops being about the protestors or even the originating issue and starts being about the what a bunch of thugs the Chinese government is and why did we give them the Olympics again? That’s a discussion the government will find hard to control once it gains momentum.

I’m pretty sure the Chinese government and BOCOG know this, and if they don’t, their PR company –one of the major internationals and a competitor of my firm– is probably telling them (unless they’ve been told to keep their mitts off of strategy and are just grinding out press releases about the Fuwa). So telling authorities around the country to go easy on foreign correspondents is not only good PR now, but its a defensive move to guard against scandal escalation.

There is however, a potential problem: provincial authorities have a flexible approach toward implementing central government decrees. Imagethief is willing to put real money down on the square that says, when push comes to shove, that provincial authorities will still detain and roust foreign correspondents that poke their noses into sensitive areas during the games, threats to call the Foreign Ministry notwithstanding. And hanging over this is the wide latitude for interpretation of what kind of reportage contravenes Chinese law. Also, the government probably knows that attempts to control the moves of something like ten thousand foreign correspondents will be like herding notepad and tape-recorder carrying cats. Indeed, Cody adds:

In practice, foreign reporters in recent years frequently have managed to report on their own, speaking directly with Chinese people while using subterfuge and stealth to avoid getting caught by local police. Those who have been spotted, however, often have been detained, lectured and forced to write confessions that they broke the law. In many cases, their notes and camera equipment have been confiscated. At times, they have been shoved around by police.

I believe the Washington Post has been on the receiving end of some of that shoving around, and I perhaps detect a bit of personal annoyance creeping through that paragraph. But maybe it’s just my conspiratorial nature. Since they don’t do much business coverage I don’t know any of the WaPo journalists personally, although I do like their China reporting.

The  Chinese government is also, of course, making sure that the police are up to snuff on English and prepared with talking points (well, “dialogues” actually) in case they do run into any nosey foreign correspondents:

A manual published by the Public Security Ministry and handed out to Beijing police, who are studying English in preparation for the Olympics, contained a dialogue making clear how ministry officials believe reporting should be approached. It described a hypothetical situation in which a policeman comes upon a foreign reporter inquiring about Falun Gong:

“But Falun Gong has nothing to do with the games,” the policeman says.

“What does that matter?” the reporter replies.

“It’s beyond the permit.”

“What permit?”

“You’re a sports reporter. You should only cover the games.”

“But I’m interested in Falun Gong.”

“It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal. As a foreign reporter in China, you should obey China law and do nothing against your status.”

“Oh, I see. May I go now?”

“No. Come with us.”

Oh dear. Better work on that last part.

A few hints for the Chinese authorities before the games. First, nothing is “beyond the permit”. Journalists are coming with their own agendas and they are going to write stories about anything and everything. When an emerging, baggage-laden country like China not only hosts the games, but intentionally makes them into a global coming-out party, every single issue in the country is automatically connected with the games. Like it or not. Covering the Olympics, which the Chinese government itself would probably admit are much more than a “sporting event”, is not just sports reporting. If the cops run in every journalist they find asking questions about topics the government finds uncomfortable, they’ll either build some new jails or have a fleet of 747s standing by to deport journalists who have their credentials revoked. I’d say start drafting the self-criticisms now and have them waiting in a stack ready to sign. That will save time.

In the interest of making a contribution to the success of the games, Imagethief humbly suggests the following, improved approach to media management. It not only presents a better solution, it also more accurately reflects how an overworked foreign correspondent –especially one unused to working in China– might react to the situation:

Cop: “But Falun Gong has nothing to do with the games.”

Reporter: “Everything has to do with the games, Sherlock. That’s how it works.”

Cop: “It’s beyond the permit.”

Reporter: “Permit? What kind of happy horseshit is that?”

Cop: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your snappy English vernacular. You’re a sports reporter. You should only cover the games.”

Reporter: “Say, Kojak, why don’t call up the Foreign Ministry? Tell them I’m going to publish a story on how local cops are harassing accredited journalists doing their jobs.”

Cop: “It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal. As a foreign reporter in China, you should obey China law and do nothing against your status.”

Reporter: “My status? My status is pissed off, buddy. I gotta deadline here.”

Cop: “Look! Over there! It’s Zhang Ziyi! And she’s naked!

Problem solved. The Foreign Ministry can send payment to me care of this website.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Olympics mean a softer touch for foreign correspondents, maybe