Chinese medicine puts the squeeze on Imagethief

Posted on February 14, 2006 by Will Moss

Imagethief is a strapping manly-man, and spends long hours in the gym perfecting his Adonis-like physique. Occasionally, however, his enthusiasm gets the better of him, and he tries to hoist a few kilos too many. This happened to me about a month ago as I was doing plate-rows. At the apex of my set, something in my steely, well-honed trapezoidal wentspang! and pain ricocheted down the length of my left arm.

I called a halt to the day’s strains, thinking that a week or so of recuperation was all that was necessary. Three weeks later, with phantom pains still coursing up and down my left arm and unable to sleep in either of the two positions that I am tolerant of, I finally dragged myself to my regular doctor in Singapore, where I was spending Chinese New Year.

After palpating me in various unsavory ways and making me bend my head into several unnatural positions, he rendered a verdict: a pinched nerve at the sixth cervical vertebrae.  He said I could either pay $500 for an MRI, or, since there was no loss of strength (this, I gather, would have been bad), I could go on anti-inflammatories for a couple of weeks and see how things played out.

I selected the cheap, pharmaceutical option. Going for the MRI at that stage would have been far too large a concession of vulnerability. As an American man, I have a battleship-strong sense of denial when it comes to medical issues. In fact, it was an heroic effort of will (no pun intended) just to make it to the doctor in the first place. Like most American men, I won’t go see a doctor unless a bone or major internal organ is protruding through my skin. And even then it’s a toss-up. Is there a good ball game on?

I did, however, make one extra concession to medical adventure. I agreed to go see my wife’s Chinese doctor.

And this raises another American medical prejudice. Americans are raised to believe that all medicine is Star Trek. If a medical therapy doesn’t involve nitrogen-cooled electromagnets or a particle accelerator and flat-panel video screens, it’s stone-age witch-doctor crap not worth pursuing. This maximal approach to medicine explains why America’s health system is such a dysfunctional wreck. When even stubbed toes require PET scans, something has got to give. When I lived in America, what gave was my bank account, under the onslaught of my insurance premiums. Freelance writers part-timing as radio producers to avoid starvation get to pay their own way, insurance-wise. That leaves little left over for such wastrel’s luxuries as “food” and “rent”.

Thus, going to see the Chinese physician was something of a leap of faith for me. I had been to his clinic with my wife before. It looked like Gandalf’s office: dusty, leather-clad tomes, mysterious charts of the human body covered with meridian lines and Chinese script, and shelf after shelf of cryptically labeled, dark-brown potions in equally dark-brown jars. Not a Star Trek medical device or Physician’s Desk Reference in sight.

Although it was Singapore, the doctor (or, more accurately, daifu) didn’t speak any English. I explained my symptoms in laborious Mandarin, with my wife occasionally helping me through the tricky parts. Accuracy is important in medicine, and doubly so when using a language where a single tonal difference can change the coruscating imprecation “fuck your mother” into the merely perplexing “dry your horse”.

After listening patiently to my explanation, the doctor arrived at a prescription that involved neither a horse nor my mother. Rather, it involved a course of moxibustion, or “cupping”. I grant you that “cupping” sounds like something where a horse might be involved, but I assure you that this is not the case. You are, perhaps, thinking of a “crupper”, which the leather strap that runs beneath a saddled horse’s tail. If so, you are either an equestrian or a bondage freak and, either way, have ventured into territory beyond the scope of this post.

The daifu asked me to remove my shirt, and then rubbed a film of of lubricating lotion on my back. This was the pleasant part of the procedure. The only pleasant part. As soon as I was nicely greased, the daifu took a hollow glass globe the size of a baseball and dropped an alcohol-soaked cotton swab through the thick-lipped mouth. He lit the swab, which flared and burned out rapidly, and then clapped the open mouth of globe onto the skin of my back.

Anyone who has ever performed the collapsing gas-can experiment will be familiar with the principles behind what happened next. In this old, grade-school science experiment you light a little alcohol or other flammable liquid inside a metal container, then screw an airtight top onto it. As the air inside the sealed container cools, the pressure drops and the pitiless math of Boyle’s Law takes over. The sealed container is slowly crushed by outside air pressure. Now, if the container is rigid enough to withstand the pressure, but covered by a flexible membrane, it is the membrane that will distort in response to the decreasing pressure in the sealed vessel. In this case, the membrane was me. A golf-ball sized gobbet of Imagethief was quickly sucked into the glass cup. The suction was surprisingly strong, and I had brief thoughts of my skin rupturing and my left lung exploding into the glass cup. If that had happened, I would have asked for my $15 back.

As a technical scuba diver, Imagethief is well schooled the concept of barotrauma. This is injury resulting from a pressure differential, a common risk in scuba diving. To date, Imagethief has suffered only one serious barotrauma: a ruptured eardrum self-inflicted when I clapped a hand over my ear following the nearby detonation of an explosive by Indonesian dynamite fishermen. More common, and generally less serious, is something called a “squeeze”. This happens when a diver fails to equalize the pressure in some internal airspace, such as a sinus or middle ear, or an external one, such as the airspace in a diving mask. As the water pressure increases during descent, the growing differential forces –or “squeezes”– tissue and fluid into the area of low pressure. Generally you feel this –trust me; you feel it– and stop descending before you are seriously injured.

Never in my life did I think I would pay someone to inflict a painful squeeze upon me, but that’s what I was doing.

Anyone who has lived in China or Singapore will probably have, at one time or another, seen someone with a pattern of round, red welts on their back. These are the marks left by regular moxibustion cupping (I have photos here and here), in which the cups are placed upon specific points on the back, and left there. That kind of moxibustion is for pussies. My wife’s family daifu is renowned in Singapore for his expertise in a technique in which a single cup is slid over the affected area to draw out the “wind” that, from a Chinese medical point of view, is invariably the source of all ailments. My wife swears by this technique, and has had her own sports injuries treated in this way on a few occasions.

Her pain threshold must be higher than mine. I now have a pretty good idea of what an orange feels like as it is peeled. Grease or no grease, it felt like the skin was being torn from my back as the doctor slid the globe up my trapezoidal muscle and left to right along the delicate supraspinatus. It was one of the most painful procedures that I have ever been subjected to, and I’m a veteran of two root canals, eight dental extractions (four under local anesthetic), outpatient neurosurgery on my hand and a hernia operation. After the first course was complete, leaving me breathless and sweaty, the daifu asked my wife something in Mandarin. “He asks if you can stand a stronger treatment,” she translated. Macho posturing immediately suppressed all other instincts, including my instinct to flee screaming from the office. “No problem,” I wheezed, like a teenager who’s voice has just broken.

As the daifu began the second course, I tried to mentally transport myself to another location. Blissful green fields. A rowboat on a calm lake. A spectacular, icy glacier. It didn’t matter. Wherever I visualized myself, I was accompanied by a burly, sweating medieval torturer intent on scourging my back. There was nothing for it but to endure the treatment in the here and now. It was clear that the daifu subscribed to the “after I do this to you, the pain you were complaining about won’t seem so bad any more” school of medicine. “Look,” he said. “You can see where all the old, clotted blood is being drawn out of the injury.” Not surprising.

Centuries later it was all over. I gingerly pulled my shirt on over my abused, stinging back. “Any better?” asked my wife, sweetly.

It wasn’t enough for the daifu to strip all the skin from the upper-left side of my back. He had to send a reminder of my misery home with me, in the form of a jar of noxious, brown liquid medicine decanted from one of the hundreds of mysterious, cryptically labeled bottles in his office. I was instructed to take one good swig, three times daily. It was the nastiest substance I have ever ingested, a potent combination of bitterness and herbal pungency like a combination of slivovitz, crude oil and potpourri. It made me want to cry the way I did when my mother made me take liquid penicillin for strep throat when I was seven. I had to have a water chaser standing by every time I took it. I carried it onto the flight back so I wouldn’t miss a dose, and I’m mystified as to why the security inspectors didn’t catch it, confiscate it and fine me for trying to bring a dangerous liquid onto the airplane.

Now, nearly a week later, I can report some improvement in my symptoms. Of course, given that I have been on a combination of moxibustion, bizarre herbal tonic and old-fashioned, western anti-inflammatories, it’s hard to tell what’s responsible for the progress. Would I dare subject myself to another treatment of moxibustion? The daifu told me that, in an ideal world, I’d be able to come back for another treatment a week hence. Now that I am back in China that will be difficult, unless the daifu can refer me to a trusted colleague here. He did, however, suggest that I come in for a repeat session when I am next in Singapore.

Only time will tell if Imagethief has the nerve to steel himself for another pass. The wind may be bad, but between that and being skinned like a rabbit, I might just stick with wind.

There, now. Doesn't that feel better?

There, now. Doesn’t that feel better?

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BadBranding@Singapore

Posted on February 6, 2006 by Will Moss

I love coming back to my adopted home of Singapore. Always languid and green, Singapore makes an invigorating break from the smoggy bustle of Beijing. Yet whenever I return it doesn’t take long for me to be reminded of some of the niggling, little annoyances that made it so refreshing to get out of Singapore for a few years. Near the top of that list is the local infatuation with the inappropriate use of the “@” symbol in branding.

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I am semiprofessional scornheap. Yet, were I to live for another hundred years (and don’t think I’m not trying), I could never find enough time to heap upon this idea all the scorn that it so richly deserves. As long as I have been here, the branding mavens of Singapore have used the “@” symbol, once a lowly accounting symbol meant to indicate a unit price, to add a whiff of technological glamour to undeserving brands.

Imagethief is not immune to the seductive charms of the “@”. Along with my old friend and former business partner, Joe Pantuso, I once co-authored a book on online games called, to my eternal shame, Online G@mes. In my defense, however, that book was written in 1994 before the “@” rose to depressing ubiquity. The book and its title were both obsolete the moment it hit the shelves, which was just about the same moment the Internet began to kill off the proprietary online services such as GEnie, Prodigy, AOL (in its dialup incarnation) and Compuserve that hosted the games we had written about. Such is life as a technology writer.

I keep thinking that the brand developers of Singapore will outgrow “@”, and they keep disappointing me. I was scandalized five years ago when the glamorous, new office tower at Dhoby Ghaut was named “Atrium@Orchard”. In 2006 using “@” in a brand is beyond unforgivable. It’s the branding equivalent of a fifty-year old man with a pot-belly and severe male-pattern baldness growing a pony tail and getting his ears pierced in a futile attempt to stay youthfully hip. It reveals a failure to grasp contemporary style that is so final and absolute that it obliterates by definition the very sensibility that it was meant to create.

You would think that the manifestations of “@” that I run into these days would the last of a dying breed; fading survivors of the dot-com boom days, when anything that evoked the Internet was sexy by definition. But, alas, it is not so. Many of them are freshly minted. In 2006 that is a crime against style that makes one consider the fact that there are some offenses for which caning is a justifiable punishment.

“@Orchard” –meaning at Orchard Road, Singapore’s main shopping drag– is a particularly common abuse. In fact, one of the things that reminded me of this issue was discovering that Harry’s Bar, a longtime fixture of the Boat Quay restaurant strip, has opened an Orchard Towers branch called Harry’s@Orchard. This is shameful retread of the government’s time worn “Library@Orchard” and the “Atrium@Orchard” mentioned above. I can understand when government bureaucrats, like the National Library Board, make these transgressions. I expect government to be ten years behind, and they are serial “@” offenders as a quick scan of the ww.gov.sg website rapidly shows (not counting use in e-mail addresses). But a bar impresario? Criminal.

A quick flip through the online Singapore yellow pages reveals at least four other offenders including “The Dentist@Orchard” and, to my surprise, “Apple@Orchard” for the Apple Computer store in Wheelock Place. The brand-conscious Apple people should know better, and I, writing this on my PowerBook, feel tainted by association. (And upon writing that, I also note that the Apple people have fallen victim to the equally loathsome branding cliche of intercapping –as in PowerBook–, a longtime Singapore branding crutch.)

But by far the worst example of “@” abuse I stumbled across this year was the naming of Singapore’s annual Chinese New Year “Chingay” parade. According to the official Chingay website, the word Chingay comes from a corruption of a Chinese dialect word for a small, decorated stage or float carried by performers, and was first used during ethnic Chinese celebrations in the storied Malaysian Chinese trading port of Penang. With such a colorful history, it seems a shame to drag the word down into vulgar techno-cliche, but there it was: Street Party @ Chingay. Ooh, taste the coolness.

I realize I shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the country that felt compelled to rechristen its perfectly sensibly named National Science and Technology Board as the precious “A*Star“, complete with asterisk (and don’t even ask what happened to the oldProductivity and Standards Board). But the line must be drawn somewhere. Otherwise, why not simply rename Changi Airport Airport@Singapore and have done with it?

Think I’m p@ranoid? As you can see, it’s not entirely far-fetched.

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Congress to grill US net firms on China

Posted on January 14, 2006 by Will Moss

The US government has begun to take note of what American Internet firms are doing in China. A report in CNET’s News.com from technology policy journalist Declan McCullagh (also now picked up by Rebecca MacKinnon, Asiapundit, etc.) says that two congressional committees are planning to hold hearings into American Internet firms’ compliance with Chinese regulations and norms concerning censorship and media management. French advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is helping to drive the agenda:

After hearing reports that American tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo are abiding by Chinese law mandating Internet censorship, some irritated U.S. politicians are threatening to pass laws restricting such cooperation.

Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said Thursday that the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Rights, which he heads, will hold a hearing in early to mid- February. Smith has invited representatives from the U.S. State Department, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Google, and the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders to speak.

The effort is designed to determine what can be done, either by legislative mandate or on a voluntary basis, to “dissociate a company from working hand-in-glove with a dictatorship,” Smith said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com.

A similar hearing is planned for Feb. 1 in the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said Ryan Keating, communications director for Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat leading the parallel effort. The caucus, unlike the human rights subcommittee, is an “informal” committee that is overseen by about 30 House members and includes a few hundred others, Smith among them, as supporting members.

Both Ryan and Smith are in the process of concocting new laws, which will likely take cues from recommendations issued by Reporters Without Borders and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a 12-member, congressionally-selected governmental panel.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this week backed a law banning an American company from hosting an e-mail server in any “repressive” country. It’s also suggested that American corporations come up with a joint plan for how to handle censorship requests from foreign governments, including refusal to censor terms like “democracy” and “human rights.”

The companies have defended their decisions by saying that, as multinational corporations, they had no choice but to comply with Chinese mandates.

The highlight in the above quote is added by me because I think that’s the money paragraph. This is attempt to pressure Internet companies into dissociating themselves with China’s regime, and its policies. In fact, that statement is broad enough to encompass any kind of company that does business with the Chinese government, which is to say almost any foreign company in China. The article is substantial, and worth a read.

I am going to put on my PR black hat, distance myself emotionally from this situation, and look at it from a professional point of view. From where I observe, this issue is gaining momentum, and will become increasingly important for US Internet firms doing business in China. If they handle it poorly they will either find themselves legislated out of the country or, more likely, on receiving end of a growing tide of public opprobrium. Either could cause business problems and damage brand and shareholder vale.

Back in September, when the Yahoo/Shi Tao affair was emerging, I wrote the following:

[I] wonder if it will start impacting technology firms internationally. I think back to noisy, well-organized public campaigns against companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa, or in Myanmar. So far, the calls against tech firms complicit in censorship (and now arrests) in China have been pretty scattered, and confined primarily to the digerati rather than to the great mass of customers. That might change.

So far, most of the firms confronted have given variations on the “we comply with the laws of our host country” explanation. This is accurate and understandable, but as a PR holding statement it doesn’t do much to diffuse the perception that western tech firms are knuckling under to a repressive government in search of massive bucks. Just the thing to put college students in a righteous snit. Yahoo! hasn’t issued a statement on this situation that I can find, which is also not a great idea because NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders are busy filling the silence.

I can see the dilemma for big, listed Internet companies. Their shareholders will punish them ruthlessly if they aren’t aggressively pursuing the Chinese market. But to do business in China, they have to submit to the Chinese government, in all it’s capriciousness. These are really media companies – the only foreign media companies allowed to do business here – with real influence over Chinese people and a commensurate level of scrutiny from the authorities. But none of them will dare forsake the market on principles, and that leaves them vulnerable to [PR problems].

In retrospect, I should have said, “put college students and congressmen in a righteous snit”. The comparison with Apartheid-era regulations and public pressure is what has stuck in my mind since this issue started boiling, and I see more and more of that in the growing outcry. The spread of awareness of this situation beyond the digerati and into congressional human-rights committees will drive it further into the mainstream agenda, following already widespread mainstream coverage of the recent MSN/Anti affair. RSF is a well organized and media-savvy pressure group (as one would expect), and will certainly do its utmost to ensure that remains the case. (It’s also worth reading MacKinnon’s critique of RSF’s current, problematic petition on this issue. RSF’s site is, ahem, blocked in China, but the text of their proposal is also on Declan McCullagh’s blog.)

Just over a week ago, I wrote a post analyzing Microsoft’s motivations for keeping the Chinese government on-side. Its situation is not unique, and most American Internet companies are negotiating a similarly complex web of issues in a staggeringly complex regulatory and governmental environment. In that post, I reiterated that I would like to see US Internet companies taking a much more open approach to communicating around how and why they do business in China, and what policies they follow and will enforce. In response to that, a good friend of mine who works at Cisco (and who’s name will soon appear again in a forthcoming post on crappy automobiles) wrote a rational and thoughtful comment on why most companies, ever conscious of their legal exposure and share price, would be horrified at such an approach. It’s worth reading [note: the comment originally linked to here is no longer online -WM].

But I think the CNET article above illustrates the countervailing risks of following a strategy of opacity. When you leave space, forces opposed to your interests will likely fill it. And the more this issue penetrates into the mainstream, the more of those forces there will be. I think it’s unlikely –at least in the near future– that the US government will legislate in a way that prevents US Internet companies from doing business in China. Regardless of the outcome of congressional testimony, too many dollars are at stake, and the lobbyists will already be sharpening their policy papers and booking tables at lavish restaurants. But it is possible that legislation could be passed, and that would significantly damage or destroy the China business prospects for US Internet companies by making a huge, potential audience either inaccessible, or far less accessible (since the Chinese will simply block access to the US versions of services they don’t care for). Even if legislation is not passed, consumer pressure, in the form of boycotts or other activism, could damage the reputation and sales of US Internet companies. Third party nations more easily swayed by NGO arguments might apply their own sanctions against US Internet firms, especially if goaded by domestic competition. None of this might come to pass, but these are the risksthat should be considered.

Three things give this situation legs it might not otherwise have. First, while many US companies do business in many dodgy regimes, none of those regimes is positioned as a major strategic rival to the US. Anti-China sentiment runs high these days. If you need to be refreshed on that, review some articles about CNOOC’s attempted takeover of Unocal last year, the valuation of the yuan or Pentagon appraisals of Chinese military capabilities. As a result, China is visible in the US in a way that very few foreign countries are. Second, running a polluting refinery or setting up sweatshops in third world countries, to pick just a couple of examples, are reprehensible. However neither cuts against the grain of afundamental American value. If you ask random Americans on the street to name a freedom guaranteed by the US Constitution, chances are that “freedom of speech” will be at or near the to of list. Freedom of speech is a pillar of American national self-image, and when American companies are seen to be betraying that pillar you move into very charged and dangerous territory. Combine that with all the baggage around China and you can see where the risk comes from. (This is not, of course, solely an American issue, as VOiP operator Skype is now discovering.)

I have mixed feelings about this situation. I have used the Internet since 1993 and run my own website or blog for much of that time. My master’s thesis (in a broadcasting program) was written about the Internet in 1995, with a focus on its mass media potential and censorship and popular media issues. I spent several years working as an Internet and e-commerce consultant before moving into technology PR. I am attracted to the Internet for its media aspects far more than its ability to, say, improve supply chains or procurement. I believe that the strongest societies encourage free and open exchanges of ideas. I’m a blogger. Therefore I tend to react with visceral loathing to censorship and media controls. Hence my description of the deleting of Michael Anti’s blog in a previous post as “abhorrent”. In general, I still stand by that assessment.

Stepping back from that, however, and divorcing my natural inclination to project my Yanqui values onto China from my analysis, I come to the following conclusions:

1) American Internet firms should not quit or be drummed out of China
That is pointless for everyone involved. At worst, American Internet firms here operate subject to the same requirements as Chinese ones. At best, they offer a valuable alternative that still functions as a gateway to a wider world, even if parts of it are missing. Drive American Internet firms out and everyone goes to Baidu and Bokee, or their brethren, and you slam the door on the one area of Chinese media that is open to foreigners to any degree at this point. I am not sure how that helps to carry the standard of liberty to Chinese Internet users (assuming this is neccessary – see below), although it does deny business opportunities to American companies. Furthermore, every foreign company that operates in China is somehow in hock to the regime, if even indirectly. Are you prepared to tell Boeing, GM, IBM, Intel, GE and all the other pillars of American industry to get out of China as well? All of these companies engage the Chinese government, seek its custom and pay taxes in China. Were I one of these firms, I would be extremely worried about the precedent that pressure on US Internet companies might set.

China isn’t Myanmar, North Korea, 1980s South Africa or some other politically inconvenient backwater that can be isolated and forgotten about. It is an emerging great power and an immense US trading partner increasingly bound with America’s economy on a number of fronts. The implications of isolating it, were that even possible, run beyond inconveniencing a few American corporations and extend deep into the realms of foreign policy, economics and Asian security.

2) There are shades of gray in this situation
We see the Internet companies as different because we see freedom of speech as different — as a universal human right. But, as an intellectual exercise, let me pose the following: even in the US has limitations on freedom of speech. No libel; no obscenity; no yelling fire in a crowded theater. All of these limitations are predicated on mitigating harm (libel, false advertising) or respecting established social boundaries (obscenity). One might, then, concede that different countries and societies might set the boundaries of permissible free speech in different places based on those same criteria. Now, if you are China, and obsessed with maintaining social harmony in a fractious country of 1.3 billion, the vast majority of whom are shockingly poor, you might interpret the role of free speech in society somewhat different than developed, Western countries. Now, this doesn’t excuse locking up journalists or arbitrary censorship of politically inconvenient opinions. And it certainly doesn’t excuse cloaking regime-preservation in the trappings of respect for social boundaries. But it does serve as a warning to beware of letting ethnocentric value-creep color your arguments. China is not the US or Western Europe and it never will be.

There are also shades of gray in the prosecution of restrictions on speech. Removing blogs and filtering websites and keywords is a shame, but I will entertain a defense of it (note that this is different than agreeing with it) in the interest of keeping your business in China. Thought it might be antithetical to our values, it’s hard, without verging into philosophy, to argue that anyone is being directly harmed. However, supporting arbitrary prosecutions and application of the notoriously malleable “state secrets” law and jailing of inconvenient journalists and activists for long periods is hard to defend. Where, then, is the line of complicity that American Internet firms should not cross? When is it OK to surrender information to the authorities? Dare an American firm question when a Chinese prosecution is justified and when it is not? Probably not. As ESWN has pointed out in a post worth reading, if a foreign company operating in China is served with a legal warrant by the authorities, it probably has no choice but to comply. The PR risk in this situation –beyond the obvious– is that companies desperate to protect their interests in China may take a liberal interpretation of what represents due process in China. An informal “request” from the Chinese government may not have legal force, but in a country where government patronage is crucial to many businesses, that may not matter. The Gods of PR (dark and terrible gods that they are) help any American company found to have been surrendering information on Chinese users via extra-legal processes. That’s why it is important to articulate under what circumstances records will be turned over.

3) The debate will be framed in an oversimplified view of China
Those who argue that US Internet firms should either get out of China or reject government demands to filter content (which equals getting out of China) will likely frame the debate in very stark terms rooted in fiery rhetoric about the evils of the CCP, China’s sinister national ambitions and the need to protect universal values (a malleable concept) and to pressure China to improve its human rights. Many of the people making those arguments won’t know much about China, or will ignore nuanced reality in the pursuit of powerful headlines that can advance agendas. (Example: here are the digerati of Boing Boing with a satirical image that aptly demonstrates how even US cultural sophisticates view China.)

China’s government is pretty awful in a lot of obvious ways, but it is not some cackling, cartoon vulture perched atop the nation. It is not a caricature dictatorship or a Kim Jong-il-style one-man fiefdom (at least, not anymore). For all its problems, the government here has genuine ambitions for improving the country. But it governs 1.3 billion people –that’s four USAs–, two thirds of whom are desperately poor and many of whom speak different dialects, and who are beset by a range of tensions and deeply structural problems. Furthermore, the Chinese government cannot rapidly escape the legacy of its origins. It is factional and divided and there is often a pronounced lack of common cause between the central government and provincial and local governments. Progress will not be smooth or even.

But there is progress. Consider where this country was thirty years ago, when it was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. In the space of one generation it has gone from complete isolation and destitution to a fair state of development and engagement with the world. The target audiences that US Internet firms are trying to reach are the children of people who lived through Cultural Revolution as youths. To make this example more accessible to Americans, basketball player Yao Ming’s mother was a Red Guard. Think about the progress this represents. Where once there was uniform poverty there is now growing prosperity. Where once there was isolation there are deepening international connections. Where once there was only state controlled  propaganda there is now a lively and growing commercial media, and a fair amount of access to international media. This doesn’t excuse the bad things that the government does, but it highlights that we are not talking about a Myanmar-style irredeemable military dictatorship or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy busy reducing its people to ever greater penury.

4) Chinese Internet users may not need or want to be rescued by us
When MSN killed off Michael Anti’s blog he didn’t need help from an NGO to move to Blog City (blocked in China, I note with some irony). Chinese people aren’t idiots or naifs wandering in the wilderness, waiting to be lead to civilization by foreigners. Certainly in my office they discuss government control and management of information matter-of-factly (of course, they are all also media experts).

We westerners seem to be conflicted in how we feel about China. We have an idealistic conviction that the simple flow of our ideas and culture and the relentless march of technology will somehow precipitate change, yet we can’t resist an interventionist desire to actively impose our values. At the same time we mythologize China into something unknowable and impenetrable. The result is that no matter what we do we risk patronizing the Chinese Internet users we want to help, and driving them further away.

Imposing foreign activism on China has a pretty dismal record of failure. In a country where nationalist sentiment runs high and is easily provoked, it is liable to backfire. Imagine for a moment that American Internet firms are drummed out of China by legislation or activism. My guess is that Chinese youth would not swell with admiration for courageous, highly-principled foreign companies. Rather, they would likely seethe with nationalist contempt for companies that don’t “get” China and for foreign governments that are trying to dictate what is good for China. That won’t do wonders for dialogue. I can tell you who would be happy though: Bokee (who launched a devastatingly self-interested attack on MSN prior to Anti’s removal, as reported here by ESWN) and other Chinese blogging engines who would be pleased to see off foreign competition.

Not that they need to at the moment. Most Western Internet companies in China are not doing very well. In the grand scheme of forces affecting China, the inclination of American (as opposed to Chinese) Internet companies to toe the censorship line is so far down the list as to be nearly beneath concern. The free operation of China’s domestic mainstream media ranks substantially higher. Although the two issues are tangentially connected via the Shi Tao case, US Internet companies and American interventionism are probably not the key to freeing Chinese media. (Howard French’s recent International Herald Tribuneopinion piece on China’s information control efforts is worth reading.)

What does all this mean for communication?
I have said many times that the “just obeying local laws” excuse, widely used by American Internet firms when they explain their compliance with Chinese censorship requirements, is inadequate. It is inadequate because it ignores the visceral reaction that their American stakeholders have to issues of censorship and free speech and the emotionally and politically-charged complexities of all issues China, especially in the United States.  American Internet companies need to start communicating better now how they see this situation, why they feel it is justified to do business in China, why they will conform to local regulations, why this is not selling out American values, and under what circumstances they will reveal customer information or communications to governments. They need to do it before they are on the defensive in congressional hearings, when everything they say will be greeted with skepticism reserved for the proclamations of those already convicted in the press.

While they are communicating, US Internet companies need to be mindful that their audiences include the US government, their US customers, the Chinese government and Chinese customers and that public messages must be considered in that context. US Internet companies need to be prepared to act as rational advocates for China, aware of its problems while resisting attempts to demonize the country or oversimplify its situation. They need to understand China well enough to be able to explain its complexities to foreigners who might otherwise take a simplistic, emotionally charged view. They must be able to provide context for their decisions without condescending to their Chinese customers or to western stakeholders who have legitimate concerns about what their national business champions get up to abroad.

Most important, they need to remember that this is a situation driven by social values, and values have to figure in the communication, if even in explaining why they have to be applied differently in different times and places. The terse “obeying local regulations” reply is insufficient because it leaves the values part of the equation unaddressed. As long as that “values” hole in the communication is not filled by Internet companies, others, such as RSF or anti-China agitators in the US, will start filling it themselves.

This approach won’t stave off confrontation or debate about this issue, and nor should it. Part of believing in free speech is believing in the value of the debate. But it will put Internet companies in a better position to answer the accusations that will inevitably be flung their way as the rhetoric grows hotter.

Update: At the risk of creating a circular link, it’s worth reading Roland’s post on this issue at ESWN. His capsule intro: “If the subject is about Chinese Internet censorship, then this had better not be a decision made by the US Congress, Reporters Without Borders, Cisco, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  It would seem that you better ask the Chinese Internet users themselves.  I assert that they couldn’t care less about Yahoo but the loss of MSN Spaces would be a blow.”  Go check it out.

Also, Danwei’s metaphorical take.

Also, for balance, Daai Tou Laam Diary’s different take on this issue, including his deconstruction of my own arguments. Apparently I’ve made it to “arrogant China hand”, thus fulfilling one of my childhood ambitions. Not bad for only a year-and-half in China. Also in trackbacks, below.

Disclosure: Imagethief is a strong believer in freedom of speech and feels that censorship generally does far more harm than good in a society. I believe that China would benefit greatly from a more open and unfettered discourse, that the arbitrary jailing of journalists and activists is appalling and that universal human rights carry the label “universal” with some justification. My point behind writing this is not to disavow my own strong affinity for free speech or my anxieties about the complicity of American firms in practices I personally finds reprehensible, nor is it to be an apologist for the brutalities Chinese regime or for censorship. My point is to explain why I feel this is a much more complex and nuanced issue than it is generally made out to be and, thus, to illuminate some of the communication challenges and explain why current communication efforts are inadequate.

Imagethief does not represent any companies currently caught up in this issue. He does, however, represent other companies that do business with the Chinese government.

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Haircut

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Will Moss

I decided to try out a new hair place in my building this weekend. Back when I was in my glorious, long-haired hippy phase (’89 – ’99 roughly), I only had to worry about getting a haircut once every year and a half or so. Now that I’m 38 and keep my hair business-consultant short, I need to hit the barber every four or five weeks. My hair doesn’t grow out elegantly, and the transition to doofus-looking is shockingly fast. (The doofus phase lasted nearly two years when I grew my hair out. Some say it lasted the entire decade.) At this age, I’ve also reached the point in my life where advertisers and marketers have started to write me off. As I move into middle-age, I’ve developed what they call “brand loyalty”. When I find something I like, I tend to stick with it relentlessly. Unto death. The products I use today will, it seems, be the ones I take with me to the grave, decades hence. (When I am laid to rest, put a stick of “Gilette Cool Wave” deodorant on each eye so I won’t stink up the afterlife.) Thus, having found a decent hair place near my apartment in Beijing, I had some resistance to trying a switch. But in this situation, laziness trumped loyalty. The prospect of finding a good cut literally right below my apartment was too compelling to ignore.

When I first arrived in Beijing, and was living up in the Northwest, I used to get a 10 kuai cut from the barber at the BLCU gymnasium. It wasn’t elegant, but with hair as short as mine that’s not really a concern. Your worst cut grows out in about three weeks. Since moving downtown, I’ve gone to a flashier, unisex stylist at Soho/New Town, where I now pay 80 kuai a shot, recently raised from the 60 they used to charge for their entry-level, Chinese styliststs. Such is the price for moving into the fashionable area of town. Of  course, all neighborhoods in Beijing have their supply of cheap’n’cheerful, local haircut parlors. But I am always a touch wary of the low-end because brothels notoriously masquerade as hair joints in many parts of Beijing. Frankly, I think blow-jobs and scissors mix badly. But maybe that’s just me; people looking for no-anaesthetic vasectomies may have a different take. Of course you can usually spot the hair brothels because they are visibly overstaffed with Rubenesque, provincial young women in far too much makeup who sit conspicuously close to the window or door and gaze at male passers-by with expressions that do not, in all honesty, suggest haircuts. Nevertheless, discretion is the better part of keeping your balls attached, so I normally select the more upmarket joints.

My long-haired phase aside, I’m a fan of simplicity when it comes to haircuts. Until moving to Beijing, it had almost always been a race to rock-bottom for me. Back when I was in college, but before I started growing my hair out, I used to get my trims for $6 from a guy called Capers who had a place down in the Seabright neighborhood of Santa Cruz. Capers had been cutting hair since being in the Navy in WWII or Korea, or one of those grand-adventure wars they used to have before the Aquarians ruined that idea for everybody with Vietnam. Apparently he’d had both ears blown off –must have been a combat barber– as he wore a pair of conspicuously prosthetic ears on a metal headband. Or perhaps he cut them off shaving, but that was too terrifying a prospect to contemplate. Capers gave one of the world’s great, power-assisted scalp massages with a device I’ve never seen anywhere else, but wouldn’t be surprised to stumble upon in a Beijing hair brothel. Twenty years later I still get tingly thinking about it. He lasted until my long-hair decade, during which I only had five or six trims, and so didn’t have any particular loyalty to hair joints, although I developed rigid tastes in conditioners and hair mousses. Those were dark times.

I was living in Singapore when heat, boredom, advancing age and the visible signs of a receding hairline made me realize the long hair had to go. I went to a place in Great World City called “Jantzen Hair Design” and told them to get rid of it all. All those years of long hair had made me surprisingly tolerant of places billing themselves as “hair design” or “stylists”. Like I said, those were dark times. Jantzen whacked the lot off and I spent the next day wandering around, feeling my scrubby scalp in delight like a dorm-rat on X. Out of inertia I took my shorn head back to Jantzen for several months until I realized the Malay barber in Holland Village, walking distance from my house, would give me the exact same haircut for one quarter the price. I stuck with those guys until I left Singapore.

The place downstairs in my apartment building is clearly “hair design”. At the low end they charge 98 kuai for a cut from a Korean stylist, 68 for a Chinese stylist. This graded pricing is a peculiarity of Beijing hair salons, where the operating assumption is that maximum style can never be achieved through the services of a Beijing native. Having walked many of Beijing’s malls, it is possible that there is a grain of truth in this assumption. But I think it’s mostly about playing to people’s infatuation with exotic imports. My previous hair place charged more for stylists from Hong Kong, while the Toni & Guy up the road at Sunshine 100 charges big bucks for the sophisticated caresses of a Canadian stylist (no doubt of Hongkie extraction).

The place had only been opened for a few days and customers were still in short supply, so I was descended upon by a well-coiffed mob the moment I entered and gently ushered upstairs into serene, white-paneled bliss. There the attendants locked my coat in a cabinet (for my protection), seated me on a luxuriously soft couch, and placed The Book on the coffee table before me. The Book was opened to reveal photograph after photograph of gorgeous, high-cheekboned, effeminate looking Asian men with spiky, frosted hair. Which gay, Korean popstar would I most like to resemble?

I have nothing against gay, Korean popstars (or straight but devastatingly androgynous ones, for that matter). But as a thirty-eight year old white man with broad shoulders, a generous nose and prominent brow line, no amount of hair engineering on earth is going to make me look like one. But they were game for a try. Everybody seemed a bit crestfallen when I said that I simply wanted my hair cut short, and a little longer on top was OK. I was seated in a spanking, new salon chair with not a strand of previously cut hair upon it, and a gorgeous, high-cheekboned, effeminate looking Chinese man (remember, I didn’t stump for a Korean) with spiky, frosted hair went to work on me. Meanwhile, two attendants hovered over the chair ready to do…anything that might be necessary. Or, almost anything. This was not, after all, a hair brothel. The only contribution that they made during the actual haircut was when one held a transparent shield over my face for thirty seconds while my bangs were being cut. If I hadn’t lowballed on the stylist, I’d have assumed they were sitting at the feet of the master. As it was, they were sitting at the feet of the discount.

At the end of the process was where we ran into communication difficulties. I have hair best described as “unruly”. As usual, there were two or three little sprigs on the top of my head that refused to lie flat. I said to the stylist, “I always have some that stand up. Use a little gel.” (Actually I used the English word for gel, I have to confess to not knowing the Chinese.) Naturally, this was perceived as “use some gel to make my hair stand up”. I had just issued an invitation to spike up my hair to a man who saw all unspiked hair as falling far short of its full, glorious potential. I realized what was happening when, after rubbing in some gel, Mr. Frosty started using his thumb and forefingers to roll tufts of my hair into spikes. I did a quick inventory of my Chinese vocabulary and realized rapidly that I did not have the words to politely say, “I’m sorry. You have misapprehended me. I do not wish to have my hair spiked. Just use gel to make it lie flat.” So, in the best Beijing fashion, I decided to roll with it. After all, it wasn’t like he was trying to give me a dye job. I’d have drawn the line at that.

Five minutes later I was looking smooth. Youthful and trendy. I went down to the counter to pay. There was an opening week 30% discount, so I only owed 47 kuai. Six bucks. Same as I paid Capers 20 years ago. And Capers worked without help (or ears). I love Beijing.

I took my stylish self back up to my apartment where my wife said, “You paid 50 kuai for bed hair?”

I went into the bathroom and brushed it flat.

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Decadent Beijing suburbanites give me da bomb

Posted on December 26, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Beijing needs a giant monster attack

Posted on December 18, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chinese restaurant calculation made easy

Posted on December 17, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Underweighted dishes:

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

Standard weighted dishes:

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

Overweighted dishes:

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

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

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

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

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

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I am Beijing’s decadent man bitch

Posted on December 13, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that about sums it up.

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

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Harbin aftermath: Government vows to thoroughly scape all goats

Posted on December 7, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

What I see in this article:

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

What I do not see in this article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Van Nguyen died for your sins: Executions as public communication

Posted on December 1, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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