The Harbin water crisis

Posted on November 25, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chemical plant blasts releases no toxic substances [sic]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benzene is a substance harmful to human health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoops. More from Reuters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there is the chronology. Now the fun bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to write a generic China bird flu story

Posted on November 8, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

1) Alarmist headline:

Rural Chinese farms perfect incubators for planet-destroying superbug!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) Raise the specter of government incompetence:

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

6) Gratuitous journalist abuse:

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

7) Alarm bells from the international health bureaucracy:

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

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

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

8) Vox populi:

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

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

9) Tear-jerking rural finale:

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

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

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

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American Internet firms in Chinese peril

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yahoo! Hong Kong Statement
18 October 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Snarky,” he said.

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

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Are PR and MNCs corrupting Chinese media?

Posted on November 1, 2005 by Will Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is also known as the Chewbacca defense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is my position hypocrisy? Or rationalization? Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A truly free media.

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Imagethief and the spectral tiger: A Dongbei travelogue

Posted on October 25, 2005 by Will Moss

It was the same conversation I’ve had a hundred times in China. “Where do you come from? How did you learn to speak Chinese? Do you like China?” But it was the first time I’d had it buck naked in front of five inquisitive and slightly fey Chinese guys and, for good measure, my father. How did I end up in this situation? I get ahead of myself.

***

“Why on earth would you want to go to Harbin?” asked my colleague Christina. ADongbeiren herself, and something of an office dragon-lady-in-training, she had me transfixed in the contemptuous, patrician gaze she reserves for people who have uttered something truly moronic in her presence. “There is nothing there. Nothing. Why don’t you take your father to Shanghai, or Qingdao?”

I had no real answer for this, except that an American friend of mine, an old China hand of some years, had recommended Harbin as a fairly chilled-out town (in the idiomatic sense). Furthermore, my father, on his third visit to Beijing and having spent a week wading through Ministry of Health bureaucracy while consulting for an American NGO, was anxious to get out of the capital for a few days.

Of course, it’s a drastic mistake to ask someone for tourism advice on his or her hometown. Whenever people ask me what they should do when they visit San Francisco I am instantaneously struck dumb. “I dunno”, I’ll mumble. “Get a burrito?” Fortunately another colleague, one of the few other foreigners in our office, dispelled my doubts. “Chinese people have different expectations of tourism,” he said.

This is true. My Chinese colleagues, many of whom are from provincial towns, sacrificed their childhoods to get into elite schools, learn English, earn places at top-flight universities and come to Beijing to work in an international consultancy. Spring festival aside, when family obligations trump all else, the last way they want to spend their vacations is by humping around some provincial burg that represents everything they escaped from. They prefer to go to Shanghai, Hong Kong or Singapore for their fun. I can understand this. I grew up in San Francisco, so how much need is there for me to go to Fremont for my vacation? (The different tourism expectations of Chinese people would become something of a theme on this trip, as you will see.)

I am a transplant to China who is trapped in Beijing most of the time. Singapore is my second home. I go to Shanghai on business all the time and I’ve been to Hong Kong. The dongbei, on the other hand, is the wild frontier to me. So off I went, wife and father in tow.

***

Whenever I fly into a Chinese city I proudly ignore the inevitable car touts and head for the taxi queue. This turned out to be a mistake in Harbin, where the taxi fare per kilometer increases drastically over distance. With a 20 kuai airport road toll and the airport apparently near the Russian border, we ended up forking over 150 kuai to get downtown. For a Chinese taxi fare, that is something like Avogadro’s number. You can deal with it mathematically, but you can’t really grasp the meaning. The opening tout bid had been 120 kuai, negotiable. Bear that in mind next time you fly to Harbin. Or take the train, which puts you in the middle of town.

We were dropped at the Modern Hotel, which is named half-correctly. It’s a hotel. There began our lesson in one the great Harbin truisms: Harbin’s average level of customer-service makes Beijing seem positively obsequious. It wasn’t 1990’s-style refusal to help white people, but more a general indifference that suggests, Ice Lantern Festival aside, the town hasn’t quite come to grips with the concept of tourism. Various people failed to help us book train tickets, make a hotel booking in Qiqihaer, find a bathroom, re-enter a bathroom-less tourist-attraction after leaving to look for a bathroom (related incidents), find some variety of dumpling not sold-out for the night, or avoid a deep-fried bizarre-dessert in favor of the green vegetables we actually wanted (different restaurants). These weren’t language issues, with two of us speaking at least some Mandarin. But if ten years in Asia has taught me nothing else, it’s taught me patience with mediocre service, so this didn’t destroy my enjoyment of Harbin.

Downtown Harbin is exactly what you’d expect of your medium-sized, provincial Chinese city of ten million. It has one boutique-lined tourist drag, Zhongyang Road, and the rest is interchangeable, gray Chinese city. Two things stood out. First, Harbin is a town designed for surviving winter on Pluto. Where Beijing has double-paned windows, Harbin has double double-paned windows with twenty-centimeter gaps in between and hefty double-doors. It is also peppered with European-style building from its days as a Russian entrepot, adding a splash of architectural color to the standard metropolitan Chinese fare of squared-off apartment blocks and dingy shopping malls.

Many of the Russian buildings line touristy Zhongyang Road, but you could see all you needed to see of that strip in twenty minutes. A Meters/Bonwe or KFC in Harbin looks just like one in Beijing. If you’re spending a day or two in Harbin, my advice is to ignore Zhongyang Road completely unless you are looking for a piroshki at the Café Russia 1914, or some other kind of meal. If you’re a veteran of Chinese cities (and who else would go to Harbin?), you’ll find it much more interesting to stroll around the old neighborhood just west of Zongyang Road. Many of the Russian buildings here are just decrepit shells, and gritty Harbin life proceeds unmolested by the Chinese tour groups that ramble up and down Zhongyang Road. Fascinating, grubby little storefronts line the road, and commercial life spills out onto the streets in the form of market and vegetable carts at the intersections.

This area has many large and unlovely local apartment blocks well worth exploring. Unlike the slabs and towers of Beijing, Harbin’s blocks are designed around courtyards, and each courtyard tells the story of the prosperity of its block. Some were gleaming and tidy, with exercise machines for the aunties and uncles and nicely groomed gardens. Many were shabby, decrepit and lined with the detritus of urban Chinese life. Real personality shows through the back of a house, not the front, and I am fan of this kind of urban voyeurism. I peeked into many of the courtyards as we walked, looking for the slice-of-life dramas that tell the real story of a city: families doting on children, old people praying in solitude, middle aged men with shirts hiked to their nipples gathered around chess games on overturned oil drums, tiny shops and midden-heaps. It is far more interesting than anything you’ll find on the shopping strips.

We did devote a little time to tourist sites, including St. Sophia’s, a century-old Russian Orthodox church, which could be lovely if the interior paintwork was tidied up. Plus it wouldn’t kill the city fathers to add some English to the captions on the otherwise interesting display of historic Harbin photographs inside.

I had broken one of my own travel rules the night before and eaten a very spicy meal prior to traveling. The north end of my gastrointestinal tract loves spicy food, but the south end is somewhat less resilient. My enjoyment of the fading architectural grandeur of St. Sophia’s was diluted by the sudden liquefaction of my colon and resulting immediate need to find a bathroom. 25 kuai to get into St. Sophia’s church does not get you into St. Sophia’s toilet, it turns out. Furthermore, the spotty youth guarding the door told me that I wouldn’t be allowed back in if I left. That left me with two options: a possibly sacrilegious and definitely illegal unloading in the church rotunda, or cutting short my visit and going in search of a Harbin public toilet.

Decorum won, but Harbin service gap loomed again. “You can’t shit here,” growled the lao taitai minding the public squats when I asked to buy a packet of tissue. Jeez, it’s a toilet. If not here, where? At that moment I realized how much Beijing’s abundance of fully functional public toilets has spoiled me. I promptly broke the record for a foot-transit from St. Sophia’s to the Modern Hotel, and my room’s semi-modern toilet.

Refreshed, we strolled down to the bank of Harbin’s kilometer-wide Songhua (pine blossom) River to see the unfortunately named Stalin Park. The park, a long, riverfront promenade, is home to the famous flood control monument commemorating the heroic efforts of the men who held the banks of the Songhua against the raging waters of 1958.

It was a hot, July Saturday and approximately the entire population of the city was piling into the river. Thousands of people were splayed along the concrete steps that line the downtown side of the river, treating the strip like a beach. Whole families had stripped off to their underwear and were splashing in the unwholesome but cool river water. Children careened around with water guns and cotton-candy, a volatile and sticky combination. Balloon and pinwheel vendors worked their hypnotic charms on toddlers, and aunties sold two-kuai tickets for the boats that ply the river between the promenade and the far-bank’s Taiyang Park. Smoke from roasting chuan drifted through the trees. It was a tremendously congenial example of the Chinese ability to turn any public park into a block-party.

Judging from the enormous crowd, the flood control monument was a renowned local attraction. While bronze flood controllers gazed forth resolutely from the plinth with socialist fervor, hundreds of people watched a fountain squirt and pulse in time with tinny, martial music blaring from loudspeakers mounted on a surrounding ring of Romanesque columns. Perhaps during Harbin’s legendary winter it becomes the glacier-control monument.

As we watched the plaza near the flood control monument, we noticed a slow infiltration of lao taitais and lao gonggongs in matching, white T-shirts. It looked like a geriatric street-gang was casing the area. In my head I could hear the Jets theme from West Site Story. This was appropriate, because suddenly they reached critical mass, a squawky drum/cymbal/pipe trio burst into life, and we were treated to Saturday Night Fever Harbin-style with a display of Chinese fan-dancing. An ornately-coiffed queen-bee in a black, sequined pantsuit, and her consort, resplendent in green, dominated the event with conspicuously smoother moves than their arthritic colleagues. All this took place before a surreal, bronze statue of a Sino-Greco-Roman Adonis in conspicuously modest, bronze shorts slaying a Chinese dragon. Another monument to either flood control or sensible underwear. In Harbin, both are important.

***

When in Harbin, it is mandatory to visit the Dongbei Siberian Tiger Forest, a kind of tiger theme-park where you can ride a bus through tiger-infested enclosures and gaze in wonder at the majestic beasts. To get to the Siberian Tiger Forest we took one of the two-kuai boats across the river to Taiyang Park, from which it is a fifteen-minute taxi ride to the tigers. The boats are steel rustbuckets that tie up at the riverbanks in droves and shove-off when full. Most of them look as though they’ve sunk and been salvaged repeatedly. They are clearly designed to bang off of each other when mooring and casting off. I am sure if the Songhua River ever dries up, the bottom will prove to be littered with the corpses of these boats. (The entire scene at the jetties would be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever been to Singapore’s Changi Point to catch a bumboat to Pulau Ubin.)

Taiyang Park is a kind of sterile, Russia-land amusement park that seems to cater either to Chinese who want a taste of “motherland-lite” or to homesick Russians tourists who have no better alternative. There is a lot of Russian on the signs. The most authentically Russian thing we witnessed was provided by a Chinese woman who was drunk beyond all sensibility and sprawled on the grass in full, keening sob with her skirts indelicately hiked up to her waist and a husband or boyfriend frozen in embarrassed inaction beside her.

The official propaganda for the Tiger Forest claims that it is breeding tigers and training them for reintroduction to the wild. This is utter balls. It is breeding tigers and training them to entertain tourists. At the Tiger Forest you can arrange in advance for various live animals to be hurled to the tigers for your entertainment. The price list begins with chickens (40 yuan) and escalates through ducks, goats and live cattle (a bit rich at1600 yuan). We were too cheap to arrange any livestock-hurling of our own, so we counted on the other tourists on our bus to do the right thing by subsidizing our entertainment.

But before we were treated to the action we had to wait for our tiger-bus to be ready. The waiting room was also a museum and, naturally, a gift shop where you could purchase any of a staggering assortment of tiger paintings, stuffed tigers, tiger tchatchkes and ice cream bars. But the centerpiece of the souvenir-emporium cum educational display was an enormous, tiger skeleton pickling in a glass vat of formaldehyde. Ragged bits of flesh still clung to the spectral tiger remains, which gazed through a brown haze of preservative. It was surreal in a way that only threadbare, Asian tourist attractions can be. If you’ve ever been to the Zoo in Ho Chi Minh City, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’m still not sure if it was simply a poorly preserved biological specimen, or a tremendous example of slyly provocative modern art.

It was time to safari. We bundled in with eight or ten Chinese tourists and I had visions of Jurassic Park as our bus made its way through large, electric double gates into the enclosure. Fortunately gambling on the blood-lust of our fellow tourists paid off.

The safari park where you pay to see live animals fed to other live animals seems to be a peculiarity of Chinese tourism. The show is definitely not for PETA members or sensitive bunny-hugging types. The whole time we were driving through the tiger enclosures we were shadowed by an armored Land Rover filled with plastic containers of live chickens and ducks. Whenever someone was ready to stump up for a feeding, he would fork over the bills to the driver, who would radio the Land Rover and specify which animal was to be hurled to its doom. (I’m not sure what they did if you ordered a cow. You might want to phone ahead if you want that.)

We were treated to two spectacles. The first was scarcely ten meters into the enclosure, when we stopped in the midst of four or five lazy looking beasts. The Land Rover drove up beside us, and the tigers reacted exactly the way my cats do any time I move towards the kitchen. The driver fished a live chicken out of one of the plastic bins in the back and unceremoniously tossed it up through the window on top of the car. The chicken barely had time to register its predicament before the largest of the beasts was on top of the Land Rover with a mouthful of live bird. You can see why chickens are cheap. They don’t last long.

We got another burst of excitement when one of the other tourists decided to front up another 100 kuai for a duck (an outrageous price for a live duck in Harbin considering 50 kuai will get you a whole roast duck in Beijing). We pulled up by an artificial pond surrounded by several somnolent tigers and the Land Rover stopped on the opposite side. The driver stepped out, duck in hand, and lofted the unfortunate bird down into the water. The tigers were completely indifferent. Only after the bus driver leaned on the horn and threatened to run over several of the slovenly cats did they rouse themselves into grumpy hunting action. Now we got suspense. Unlike the chicken, the flightless domestic duck had plenty of time to see what was coming. It went around the pond in increasingly frantic circles looking for a tiger-free stretch of bank as the stripey noose slowly closed around it. Finally one tiger took to the water, only to be robbed of its prize as it pinned the duck against the bank where another, more strategically positioned tiger jumped it. I wavered between guilt and fascination the entire time. It was actually a pretty good show.

And that was pretty much the end of the excitement at the tiger park. No one felt like stumping up 600 for a goat, to my disappointment. We did stroll through a series of elevated catwalks (no pun intended) with our fellow tourist, from which we could watch tigers frolicking. The most interesting thing was watching a few tigers roughhousing in their small, concrete swimming pool. The pool was absolutely infested with frogs. Damn, I remember thinking, what a shitty place to be a frog.

***

The next morning we set out for Qiqihaer to visit the Zhalong nature reserve, home of the giant, migratory red spot cranes. The two-hour train ride offered a splendid view of the desolate, industrial plain of Daqing. It was covered with decrepit oil wells dipping moodily for the remains of China’s vanishing oil, enormous coal-fired power plants, and the swamp itself, which we traversed for over an hour. Apparently the Zhalong swamp is the second largest wetland in the world, after Russia’s legendary Pripet Marshes. Much of the train ride was occupied by a lengthy debate among our fellow, Chinese passengers about how we should get from town to the nature reserve. The consensus was that we should catch an indeterminate bus from behind an indeterminate supermarket near the station.

Qiqihaer’s old train station is a true masterpiece. It’s a gorgeous, brick, Art Deco building dominated by a clock tower and two enormous sets of red, Chinese characters mounted on the roof: “Long live the communist party” on one side, and “Long live Mao Zedong thought” on the other. The new train station, next door, is ghastly, 1970s neo-Stalinist monstrosity with far less personality. Having looked up the CITS travel office, we took a taxi ride across Qiqihaer to the nearly glorious Hubin Hotel, next to Qiqihaer’s Longsha Park. Qiqihaer is an ammunition-manufacturing center for the PLA. It is broad and flat, and has little scenery to recommend it. It is, however, littered with Army surplus stores all featuring marquees with pictures of sexy women in military garb. If you like this sort of thing, by all means, visit.

After lunch at the hotel, the man who ran the travel office was thrilled to help us book transportation out to the Zhalong Nature Reserve and a night’s lodging at the Zhalong Guesthouse, thus sparing us from the alleged bus and uncertainty over where we would spend the night. He warned us that the guesthouse would be rough accommodation.

A one-hour taxi ride took us to nature reserve, which occupies a spit of land that projects into the swamp. To call the Zhalong Nature Reserve surreal is to stretch the definition of the word “surreal” to its outermost limits. A series of decrepit, squared-off office buildings surrounded a car park dominated by a space-age, Soviet era, stainless-steel statue of cranes in flight. The guesthouse itself was a charmless cinderblock construction featuring exactly no other guests, which really should have served as a warning. We were given two rooms featuring no fans, no air conditioning and windows that could not open.

Or rather, in each room one window could open and one window could not. But the window that could not open was the only one with a screen. More on this later.

Ten minutes walk away from the guesthouse and office complex was the “nature reserve” proper, which consisted of rows and rows of cages featuring captive red-spot cranes. While we wandered around gazing at the miserable looking caged birds we were treated to the brief spectacle of the one and only flight of wild cranes we would see while we were there. They didn’t linger.

The keepers explained the system to us. Every day at 10 AM, the captive cranes are released. They fly one or two laps around the nature reserve, and then return and wander around freely for a while so people can photograph them. While we were there, a chubby Chinese tourist was having a loud and abusive argument with the keepers because they (remarkably) would not accept his bribe to have a private flying for him then and there. He and his two friends were the only other visible tourists.

With no crane-flying to watch until the next morning, we walked further along a little raised path leading into the swamp, toward a distant hut inhabited, one must presume, by some kind of swamp man. (There was smoke from the chimney.) Swamp-man’s special powers immediately became obvious. He is invulnerable to mosquitoes. This is clear because by the time we were fifty yards down the path, my father and I were covered with mosquitoes.  This is not an exaggeration. Despite a dusting of repellent, every inch of exposed skin, and every inch of clothing had mosquitoes on it. And it wasn’t even dusk. My wife, who is gifted with something called “intelligence” (I’ve read about this; it sounds useful), had seen this coming and turned back. My father and I literally sprinted back toward the cages, swatting madly. Both of us were speckled with little splotches of blood where we had smacked feeding mosquitoes.

So an exploration of the swamp was out. We decided on an afternoon stroll to the local village instead. That also required a two-kilometer walk through the swamp, but along a much wider, elevated dirt road. Nevertheless, on the way out of the nature reserve grounds several people asked us the same ominous question: “Aren’t you afraid of the mosquitoes?”

On the way out of the nature reserve grounds we saw one lone, un-caged crane standing amidst the tall grass behind the security office. A real wild crane sighting! We were elated! “No,” said the cheery evening security guard, an aging, former fisherman who earned 300RMB a month manning the guard post at night, “He’s not wild. He can’t fly. So I take care of him.” Yes, we had spotted a pet crane. David Attenborough would be proud.

The walk out toward the village was surprisingly beautiful. The sun was getting low and orange, and the light was turning warm. Away from the trees and nature reserve buildings you could appreciate what a genuinely enormous, flat, uninterrupted space the swamp was. It stretched off toward the horizon in three of four directions, an endless sea of soggy sawgrass interrupted only by the very occasional structure or stand of trees.

A bus happened by and took us the rest of the way to the surprisingly tidy and prosperous looking village. Many of the residents must either fish or work at the nature reserve or some of the nearby hotels and restaurants that serve it. People were surprised to see us, and many, suspecting that we had taken leave of our senses, asked us the now common question about whether we had the good sense to be afraid of the mosquitoes. One mother wrestled her children into a row so I could take a group photo. Another pair of mothers was charmed when I showed them the digital photo I had taken of one of their young sons on a tricycle. “Can you take it out of the camera?” one asked. I had to admit that, at that moment, I couldn’t. But I made a mental note that a small battery-powered printer or Polaroid camera might be a nice icebreaker in some of China’s remoter locations.

The sun was getting seriously low and those questions about the mosquitoes were weighing on our mind. It was going to be a long and itchy walk back through the swamp. Fortunately, a family of peasants offered us rides back to the nature reserve in a xiao beng beng, rural China’s ubiquitous, two-stroke, three-wheeled utility vehicle. We all clambered into the back and had the least comfortable motor-vehicle ride of our lives. Xiao beng bengs (I think they are named for the noise the engine makes) have no suspension. I crouched painfully in the rear with my knees bent to absorb the otherwise spine-shattering jolts. The family was hauling a load of live fish to market and every bump splattered me in icy fish water. Worse, we were moving only incrementally faster than the mosquitoes, and I still picked up a fair few bites on the way.

Back at the nature reserve we stopped for a chat with guard and his defective pet crane. He was a friendly soul, and shared his last three cigarettes with us. In my travels in Asia poor people have often offered me cigarettes in lieu of any other available gesture of hospitality. I seldom smoke, but in those situations I usually accept, as an icebreaker and show of collegiality. Plus, it kept the mosquitoes away. I couldn’t help but think about 300 RMB a month, though, and what share of his monthly income a pack of cigarettes must have represented. After dinner at the nature reserve’s small but cheerful restaurant (the only cheerful thing at the reserve), I bought a pack of Chunghwas for the usurious price of 60 RMB and took them back to the guard. Of all the presents I have ever given in my life, this one the elicited the most spontaneous and genuine expression of joy that I have ever received. And people say that cigarettes are bad.

That night I was in danger of sweating to death. My wife and I were in a threadbare room with three beds. Although it was a dry night, a slow leak somewhere in roof above was dripping down onto the middle bed. It obviously hadn’t been used in a while, since the bedding and mattress were thoroughly discolored by the leak. We desperately wanted to open the window and get some air, but we were dissuaded by the constant drumbeat of insects against the closed windows. The sheer volume of insect life trying to break into our room sounded like rain against the glass. A fair number of insects were already in the room, and my attempts to read were constantly interrupted by small, wriggly flying things bouncing off the reading light and landing in my hair, on my sheets and on my book. Having spotted a few sinister looking millipedes on the wall, I had already shifted my bed away from all surfaces. I would have levitated it if I could.

The handle had broken off the one window with a screen. Finally, in danger of heatstroke, we asked the help (and I use word loosely) if there was any way to open the screened window. They produced the snapped-off end of the handle. After some fiddling and swearing I actually managed to get the window open, admitting a welcome breeze but also making the rain of insects sound ominously closer. The window in my father’s room was beyond saving and he had to roast. Finally, unable to read any longer for the constant stream of bugglies landing on my head, I turned off the light.

The next morning, in anticipation of the flying of the captive cranes, we were out at the cages at 9:00 AM. At 9:30 AM we were joined by busload after busload of Chinese tourists. At 10:00 AM the doors of the cages were opened and the cranes burst forth in a mighty flock. Captive or not, they are awesome to watch in flight. With their two-meter wingspans and the primordial swamp as backdrop it was like watching an orbiting flock of albino pterodactyls.

After two slow laps, the cranes landed in front of the cages and began pecking for frogs at the grass at the edge of the path. And the tourists waded in. These are some of the most tolerant birds I have ever seen. People scrambled among them, arranged themselves for family photos in front of them, herded them into position for pictures, and were generally louder and squawkier than the birds were. With one or two alarming, flappy exceptions, the cranes were completely indifferent.

An hour later, the birds were herded into their cages, the Chinese tourists left, and we were alone with mosquitoes again.

And here, then, is the great difference between Chinese tourists and western ones. We are obsessed with “getting back to nature” and seeing things that are unspoiled, or at least appear unspoiled (there is often a difference). We want the “authentic” and the “un-touristy”. We want to wander the local village, taste native life, and observe great creatures roaming their natural habitats. We want to scowl dangerously at other westerners who dilute our sense of cultural isolation.

The Chinese want a predictable spectacle, and then they want lunch.

I offer no criticism. Given that I am all for keeping animals in humane circumstances, the Chinese know what they want, and they go for it. We should get over our hypocrisies about it. We western tourists are as picky and spoiled, in our own way. We are as demanding of spectacle, but we camouflage it better behind our obsession with luxury eco-tourism and our treating of impoverished locations as adrenaline thrill rides. As an amateur photographer, I intrude as a matter of course. I just intrude on people instead of animals.

Having had our fill of Zhalong, we took a bus back Qiqihaer and caught the train back to Harbin.

***

In Harbin we had a couple of hours before our sleeper back to Beijing. My wife desperately wanted a shower before the train, and it didn’t sound like a bad idea to me either. During our travels she had noticed several buildings called 洗浴馆 (xiyuguan). After a little research, she determined that this was someplace where a shower could be had. As luck would have it, there was a large one in the building across the plaza from the Harbin train station.

It was, of course, a large Chinese bathhouse, of the kind that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the Chinese film Shower. I had never been into a Chinese bathhouse before. I hadn’t even seen Shower at this point, so I really had no idea what to expect. We paid our fees and my wife headed for ladies’ side my while father and I headed for the gents.

The whole place had an over-wrought and slightly chintzy Greco-Roman décor, and a whiff of KTV lounge and prostitution. That put me well on edge from the start, and my unfamiliarity with the system made me feel even more vulnerable and awkward. The moment we were inside the locker room we were surrounded by squads of young, Chinese men dressed only in terry-cloth shorts and sandals. They tried gamely to nurse us through the process. With their cajoling I undressed, halting at my underwear. I don’t normally have a nudity taboo, but there were far more people involved and far less privacy than I had envisioned. “You have to take everything off”, said one of the boys. “Everything?”
”Yes, everything.”

Gulp.

So I took off everything except for plastic slippers and a bracelet that had my locker key and a token good for a massage attached. Being buck naked in an unfamiliar building in Harbin with all my possessions in a flimsy locker and a squad of nearly naked, teenage looking boys around me was making me a little squirrelly. But I put on my game face and flapped my way into the shower room desperately clutching a small, complementary bag full of single-use toiletries, with which I tried to obscure every sensitive part of my body. The shower room had the same pseudo-classical décor, three large, heated pools in the center, and rows of open shower cubicles and dressing-room style vanity counters around the edges. A few other men were in the pools or showering or grooming in front of the mirrors.

So I took a shower. I gather foreigners aren’t regular customers of this bathhouse. As I was toweling off, still naked, I gathered a crowd of customers and attendants who asked me many of the usual questions about where I learned to speak Chinese and how I liked China. I learned that my Chinese skills atrophy a bit in this situation. As do a couple of other things. As I headed toward the locker room the attendants anxiously explained that I hadn’t had my massage yet. In my vulnerable state, that was a bit more than I was prepared to take, so I demurred with the excuse of a train to catch. A wiry man, who had for some reason been allowed to keep his underwear, immediately asked me, “Can I have your massage token?” I was only too happy to make his day.

But, really, there was no reason to be anxious. It was a bathhouse. Nothing more. After I thought about it, I realized that my discomfort was mostly the result of unfamiliarity. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, or what to expect. Next time I’ll be better prepared. And were I to find myself in the same situation again, on the road and in need of a scrub, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at the local bathhouse.

Of course, if the attendant offers me a hand-job after the massage, I’m outta there.

And so, freshly scrubbed and relaxed, we caught the night sleeper back to Beijing. It was a good trip. But, then, they usually are.

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How to survive a Chinese drinking party

Posted on October 12, 2005 by Will Moss

Imagethief is in Shenzhen, supporting a Japanese client company at the Seventh Annual China High Technology Exposition, currently occupying a huge amount of space at one of Shenzhen’s two convention halls (our first taxi driver took us to the wrong convention center this morning). We’re also staying at one of two hotels with nearly identical names, which caused us some problems yesterday. Shenzhen is a confusing town.

It’s extra confusing when you’re drunk. After a hard day’s teeing up interviews for our client with the Chinese media, they invited us to a lavish dinner at the Beihai Fishing Village Restaurant. Like all Asian dinner parties, it was really an excuse to drink ruinously and publicly shame friends and colleagues. A free flow of lethal Chinese brandy and beer was arranged. Thankfully, delicate Japanese sensibilities (I presume) kept baijiu, China’s liver-and brain-dissolving white spirit, off the list.

Despite their often-reported political and cultural schisms, the Japanese and Chinese share one thing in common: they love social drinking. It’s the time when protocol hits the road and everyone becomes loudly friendly, until they pass out. This shared interest notwithstanding, I was interested to see a clear segregation of Japanese executives at one table (with one Japanese speaking Chinese manager) and Chinese and Imagethief at a second table (with two Japanese executives). Given that one Japanese executive at my table spoke both English and Chinese, it may have been simple linguistic segregation rather than some kind of spooky, racial arrangement.

The national table arrangements didn’t stop much cordial toasting back and forth. Yours truly was seated next to a young Chinese executive who spoke passable English and was both friendly and, apparently, interested in seeing exactly how much alcohol would go down an American’s throat before his head exploded.

I learned a valuable lesson tonight. These kinds of ganbei toast-o-ramas are not tests of your drinking abilities. They are tests of your wits. The contest is not who can drink the most or hold their liquor the best. The test is who can slyly cajole his friends and colleagues into drinking more than he does. It’s all about duplicity, challenges, evasions, filling the glasses of people in the bathrooms, and gentle belittlement to encourage people to risk alcohol poisoning.

Imagethief is a quick study. I rapidly sent my brandy glass away, as just having it in front of me was going to result in my painful and premature death. I also never let the waitress fill my beer glass more than halfway, and often stopped her at a third. That way I was never far from a gan bei (dry glass). I went over and toasted the other table as a group to pre-empt them coming over and toasting me one by one (the lone white boy is always a toast-magnet). Finally, I drank 1.5 liters of water during the evening, in addition to my liquor, as good hydration helps to mitigate both drunkenness and, especially, hangovers.

While I was employing these tactics I observed various other forms of duplicity, including toasting beer against brandy; diluting beer with water; toast deflection (finding someone more worthy of a toast than you  – this often victimized the women) and, the coup de grace, one Japanese executive actually pretending to be passed out at the table. He somehow managed a miraculous recovery when it was time to walk to the bus.

I figure I earned a B- for my performance. I was called out for sending my brandy glass back after three shots, but managed to go toast-for-toast with my beers and sacrificed only a moderate amount of face. One Chinese executive who upbraided me for quaffing water was doing the same thing ten minutes later. I was never caught dumping or cutting liquor, and I never shied from a toast that was offered me. I am still sober enough to write this, and should be borderline functional tomorrow. Which, in PR, is par for the course.

But I’ll probably be sleeping in the bathroom tonight as I get rid of that liter and a half of water. Nothing in this world comes free.

Coda: It is now the next morning. There is nothing sadder than a bunch of hung-over executives slinking around an incredibly noisy and hot convention floor. That might be the definition of hell.

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The strange lunacy of translators in airliner cockpits

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Will Moss

Singapore is now completely infatuated with China, and the average Straits Times has about seventy-six pages of news from China. I am really good friends with two of the ST correspondents in Beijing, so I will mention that much of this coverage is of the highest standard. Now that I am done sucking up to journalists for the day, I was interested to see an article in today’s (unlinkable) ST on China’s shortage of pilots.

Anyone who has flown domestically in China will have experienced the fallout (no pun intended) from this problem, as it’s quite clear from the vertical takeoffs and spleen-rupturing landings that many of China’s pilots are actually professional longshoremen or swineherds who are simply moonlighting as pilots for extra cash, or to make time with stewardesses.

Like many nations with shortages of pilots, and in order to minimize the number of swineherds in the cockpit, China has looked overseas for qualified personnel. The article notes:

There are now more than 50 foreign pilots from the United States, Canada, Switzerland and Hungary flying for Chinese airlines today. But they do not speak Mandarin, which makes it difficult for them to communicate with air traffic control.

…and with their co-pilots and with traffic control and with their passengers, it scarcely needs be added. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but in this era of congested airports and skylanes, and considering Beijing’s shroud of visibility-reducing pollution and southeast China’s constant supply of typhoons, the ability to communicate smoothly with air traffic controllers would seem to be…well, “friggin’ mandatory” is the phrase that springs to my mind.

But fear not. The rocket scientists at the CAAC, China’s civil aviation authority, are on the job:

In July the CAAC issued regulations governing the employment of foreign pilots by Chinese airlines, which included a rule stipulating that a qualified English-Mandarin speaking interpreter must be on board an airplane flown by a foreign pilot.

I am overcome by a warm sensation of security and bliss. But that is because I am still feeling the effects of the Valium I took before my flight on Singapore Airlines this morning. If that had worn off I would now be running in circles and gibbering in terror at the thought of having to rely on translators in airliner cockpits.

Look, when you’re barrelling along at 300 knots in zero visibility, let’s say during your typical browned-out summer approach to Beijing Capital Airport, and the shit suddenly hits the fan (or turbine blades) for some reason, I should think that every second counts. Do you really want to wait for your air-traffic control instructions to be filtered through a translator on their way to the pilot?

Furthermore, in my industry we handle a lot of translation, both of written materials and for live speeches and interviews. There is a huge amount of what we in the industry technically refer to as “shit translation”. Now, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, that’s no big deal. We edit or clarify, and no harm is done. But, with rare exception, we in the PR industry are not landing 747s (although we do deal with the aftermath when someone else fails to land one). If I was asked to pick the one time out of that one hundred when it is a big deal to have instantaneous, one-hundred percent accuracy with no exceptions, it would be in commercial airliner cockpits. Or, possibly, nuclear reactor control rooms. It’s a toss-up.

It really doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to envision how the scenario of cockpit translators could go wrong, especially in a moment of extreme stress:

Pilot: “Air China 138 heavy on approach.”
Translator (to tower): “Air China 138 heavy on approach.”
Tower: “138 heavy turn two seven zero and descend to 2000.”
Translator (to pilot): “Turn to two seven zero and descend to 2000.”
Bang!
Pilot: “Air China 138 heavy declaring an emergency. Port engine has ingested a goose, is on fire and has lost power. Clear the runway!”
Translator (to tower): “Air China 138 Heavy is anxiously requesting roast goose! Our sexual prowess is dimished! Please empty the promenade!”
Tower: “138 Heavy, how much goose do you want?”
Translator (to pilot): “Why do you want goose at a time like this? We are doomed!”
Pilot: “Motherfucker!”
Translator (to tower): “138 Heavy extends warm greetings to your parents!”

Perhaps I’ll take the train.

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The Great Donkey Meat – Tiger Piss – Media Whore Axis

Posted on September 8, 2005 by Will Moss

Trust me, it all connects.

Americans just don’t understand the reality of Chinese food. Mu shu pork, general’s chicken, all that Chinese restaurant crap you get in the US, has almost no relation to anything you can get in China. The defining highlights of Chinese cuisine, with the possible exception of dim sum, which followed the Cantonese diaspora, are conspicuously absent from American menus.

This is probably because the Chinese eat, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of nasty shit. (Civit cat?) Don’t get me wrong, the Chinese have some fabulous food as well. But this is country of extremes, and as lofty as the culinary highs are, the lows are scraped straight from the floor of Hell’s own takeaway lunch counter. I’m fairly well inured to Asian and third world diets, having prowled much of the Indonesian archipelago and Indochina (not to mention China proper). But I do have my limits. And I reckon this dish –actually a scam– tests those limits:

Chinese Eatery Sold Donkey in Tiger Urine

SHANGHAI, China (AP) – A restaurant in northeastern China that advertised illegal tiger meat dishes was found instead to be selling donkey flesh – marinated in tiger urine, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The Hufulou restaurant, located beside the Heidaohezi tiger reserve near the city of Hailin, had advertised stir-fried tiger meat with chilies for $98 as well as liquor flavored with tiger bone for $74 a bottle, the China Dailyreported.

Damn, that’s nasty. On two levels. First, that people though they were eating tiger meat. Yes, I know that tiger meat is supposed to confer sexual prowess, etc. But tigers are still cats, and I own cats, and I can tell you with complete authority that cats are nasty creatures better looked at than eaten. Anyone who has seen what comes out of a cat on a daily basis will understand this. Tigers are pretty and regal, but, when carved into deli slices, they’re still cat meat. By the way, it’s worth reading the China Daily coverage as well, if only for this statement:

After inspection, the owner, Ma Shikun, confessed that the so-called tiger meat was actually donkey meat that had been dressed with tiger urine, to give the dish a “special” flavour.

It’s special alright.

Donkey I have no real issue with. Somehow the idea of eating donkey just seems somehow more savoury (in the metaphorical sense of the word) than eating tiger, and not just because donkeys are neither photogenic nor endangered. But donkey marinated in tiger urine? Check yourself in for therapy if that concept doesn’t automatically make your skin turn green and crawl like a carpet of millipedes. Only one thing on the face of planet should ever be marinated in tiger urine: Paris Hilton. In all circumstances, any form of cat urine should be treated like radioactive waste and interred in abandoned mines in Nevada under a “plain of thorns” sufficiently pointy and tall to dissuade future civilizations from excavating the site. Come to think of it, might not be a bad idea to put Paris Hilton down there too. And Da Shan while they’re at it. Of course if the two of them are put down there together with an unlimited supply of virility-inducing tiger urine, future civilizations stupid enough unearth the site may be confronted with a lost, buried society of hyper-white, inbred, bilingual media whores. I shudder at the prospect.

There is, of course, more, in this case from the AP story:

Raw meat was priced at $864 per kilogram.

The sale of tiger parts is illegal in China and officers shut down the restaurant, only to be told by owner, Ma Shikun, that the meat was actually that of donkeys, flavored with tiger urine to give the dish a “special” tang, the newspaper said.

The report didn’t say how the urine was obtained.

Authorities confiscated the restaurant’s profits and fined Ma $296 it said. It wasn’t clear what Ma was fined for. Selling donkey meat is not illegal in China and it is widely consumed in the northeast.

$864 a kilo is a lot to pay for piss-marinated donkey meat, under any circumstances. I am clearly in the wong business. I have to toil for days to earn $864, and that’s before Chinese government taxes and health contributions. Now many people may suggest that piss-marinated donkey meat and press releases really aren’t all that different, but I don’t write by the kilo no matter how much it may seem that way to journalists.

As to how they collected the urine, I suppose that’s the hidden cost of earning $864 on capital costs of roughly zero, assuming that donkeys are dirt cheap and the cost of rasing and keeping the tigers wasn’t born by the restaurateur. It occurs to me that $864 might be actually be a justified price for piss-marinated donkey meat considering the health implications of collecting (and working with) the ingredients. I mean, how does one collect enough tiger urine to marinate a donkey?

Nice kitty! Hold still…

Thanks to Hose-B for the article.

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Do you, uh, Yahoo? You’re busted!

Posted on September 8, 2005 by Will Moss

Do you, uh, Yahoo? Not, one would hope, if you’re a Chinese dissident or journalist on the wrong side of the authorities.

It seems that American technology companies can’t stay out of trouble in China. The last two days has seen widespread coverage of Yahoo!’s alleged implication in the arrest of a Chinese journalist wanted for “releasing state secrets”, which is a euphemism for embarrassing the government, among other things. The BBC has one of the more interesting articles, because it covers the bigger picture without dwelling on the usual shopping list of scare figures, like the 40,000 lurking net monitors (cited in theTelegraph’s coverage – does anyone else notice that number inflating?):

Yaman Akdeniz is the director of cyber-rights.net, a web-based e-mail service set up in the wake of tighter laws in the UK about the traceability of e-mail communications.

He advises activists using the web in oppressive regimes around the world to make sure they did not set up accounts with firms which have offices in the country in question.

“Providers with offices in China have to obey specific rules. We operate in the UK so I don’t have to reply to any requests for information made by the Chinese government,” he said.

While cyber-rights.net collects no information about its users it is not a completely untraceable way of sending communications.

If asked by the UK government to supply information in a fraud or terrorist investigation it is likely its parent company Hushmail would comply, even though it is based in Canada and not bound by UK law, said Mr Akdeniz.

“But if the request was for information about the account of a journalist it is likely it would be more reluctant to comply,” he said.

I don’t know if Yahoo! is guilty or not, but, as a PR pro, and in the wake of recent scandals concerning the conduct of fellow tech firms Cisco, Google and Microsoft in China, something is clear: there should be a whole category of crisis public relations for tech firms named as complicit in Chinese government censorship or detainments.

It doesn’t make much difference to those firms’ business in China, of course. For one thing, not many people are likely to hear about it here. But 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 Wach 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 foresake the market on principles, and that leaves them vulnerable to PR problems whether petty, as in the case of Microsoft’s banning of general words from it’s MSN China Spaces blogging site, or sinister, as in Yahoo!’s possible complicity in an arrest. It doesn’t seem that many of them have thought in advance about how to deal with these problems.

Sooner or later, these companies are going to have to come up with a better explanation than “just following the law of the land”, or they will end up on the wrong side of a really aggressive, negative PR campaign that will hurt a lot. For the life of me, I can’t think of what that explanation might be; give me some time to work on it. But public statements of principle on matters of free speech and protection of the rights of journalists might be a good start. These are media companies, after all. Manufacturing companies have been down this road with China sweatshops and sketchy contract manufacturers. They’ve had to submit to independent monitoring and create codes of conduct for their contractors. And they’ve been held to account, although not often enough. Could a similar situation arise for the media companies doing business here?

In the meantime, there is some good advice in the BBC article above. If you’re a Chinese journalist or dissident, perhaps you shouldn’t host your e-mail with a company doing business in China. Perhaps the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for online privacy and anonymity, would care to make some of its very good privacy information available in Chinese.

Of course, it would probably be blocked…

Update, Sept 9: And sure enough, Yahoo!’s defence is just as predicted above. From Reuters, via the Australian:

“Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based,” Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement emailed to Reuters by the company’s Hong Kong arm.

This is meeting the predicable response from Reporters Without Borders, who ask:

“Does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?” it asked.

“It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese Government’s abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate.”

People who read this site know my opinions on the Chinese government’s treatment of journalists and the media. But looking at this strictly from a PR point of view, I think Yahoo! and the other firms will find their “just following the law of the land” defence progressively less tenable. That is because the NGOs and activists targeting them are attacking the morality of the laws that these companies are claiming to comply with. Go back to the apartheid comparison, above. If a company had cited compliance with the law of South Africa in submitting to apartheid, how do you think activists of the era would have responded?

The explanation still needs to evolve. Expect more trouble ahead.

Update 2: Other interesting links (both via Peking Duck)
Angry Chinese Blogger translates the document that got Shi Tao busted. (Proxy link.)
ESWN dissents on condemnation of Yahoo, although I suspect he will be a voice in the wilderness.

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Dark table tennis match of the soul

Posted on August 22, 2005 by Will Moss

The Western stereotype of Chinese people, and Asians in general, is that they are inscrutable.

This is balls. They are as scrutable as anyone else. Thick face, black heart; Art of War; it all feeds the mythology. As one of my colleagues, an experienced China hand, has pointed out, the Chinese themselves and the consultants who make zillions brokering deals for foreigners in China are happy when Westerners see the Chinese as indomitable super-businessmen who cannot be beaten at the negotiating table.

But it turns out that what many people took for amazing business prowess was simple cultural ignorance, poor preparation and a shaky legal framework that could be exploited by those who knew the ropes. Anyone who thinks the Chinese aren’t emotive has never walked down a street in Beijing. And it turns out that there are plenty of situations in which Chinese people will reveal their inner character.

One of these situations is during a ping-pong match. This was demonstrated to me during our Autumn company outing yesterday, during which I was challenged to a game by Wendy (not her real name), one of the more recent arrivals to our company.

Wendy is one of those tiny, irrepressibly cheerful, twenty-something Chinese girls who chirps around the office like a pony-tailed swallow leaving a trail of sparkly effervescence and gossip in her wake. She radiates the kind of relentlessly happy mood that I had previously thought was limited to the hosts of Children’s television shows. But she revealed her inner character to me across that ping-pong table. In reality, Wendy is the The Merciless Serpent Lady.

The transformation began the moment I stood at the opposite end of the table to receive her first serve. Wendy’s smile remained, but her eyes narrowed dangerously and took on a steely glint as she evaluated me: 85 flat-footed kilos and clutching my paddle the way a three year old might clutch a large lollipop. I was dismissed as unworthy before the match had begun. Wendy, forty kilos dipped in concrete and rolled in chocolate sprinkles, went onto the balls of her feet, folded her paddle oddly behind her wrist, with the face parallel to the ground as though she was hiding it and planning to prestidigitate it mid-swing, turned from the hips so her left shoulder was facing me, and bounced the ball off the table.

From the moment the ball hit the table, things happened very fast but with stunning clarity, like they do in a car wreck, which is pretty much what I had. The ball floated up from the table. Wendy’s left hand extended out from her body, palm towards me like awuxia master. Her front shoulder dipped and she uncoiled from the hips. Halfway through the turn, the paddle flicked into being from behind her wrist, turning flat towards the ball. When she hit the ball, it ceased to be round and stretched out into an orange blur with a crack that sounded like the noise a housefly might make if it broke the sound barrier on the way from the window to your half-eaten Danish.

Newton’s second law of motion settled over my body like one of those lead aprons the dentist drapes you in just before he goes and stands behind a concrete wall in the next county while shooting your head full of X-rays so he can justify why he’s going to charge you $500 to drill into your skull. By a coincidence, a lead apron would have been useful to me as the ball drilled into my sternum and dropped to the floor. Wendy’s point.

And so it went. Wendy, flinty eyed and nimble, slid and shifted like an oiled cobra while I flailed like the Michelin Man on an Army obstacle course. The ball went past me. The ball went through me. The ball ricocheted off my paddle and went into the squash court, onto the foosball table, onto the pool table and into the sink on the far side of the cocktail bar. Final score: some astronomical number to one. I think it was a “face” point so I wouldn’t have to resign from the company. Doubtless that point was thrown to me to prevent inconveniencing the team rather than out of sympathy. During the process, Wendy’s outer personality of “bubbly office girl” was stripped away and I was treated to a glimpse of her real self. The resolve, the pitiless calculation, and the iron will to dominate at all costs. She still had the sparklies, though.

So I learned a valuable lesson. I’ll never go head-to-head with Wendy across a negotiating table. There is no mercy in her soul. And, when I want to appraise Chinese business partners in the future, I’ll skip the karaoke lounges, godawful banquets and all-night baijiubenders — the usual arsenal of Chinese character tests — and head for the ping-pong table.

Ping-pong doesn’t lie.

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