Why I empathize with the WSJ’s American expats in Chongqing

Posted on August 4, 2005 by Will Moss

An interesting discussion broke out today on The Peking Duck, in Richard’s post on a Wall Street Journal article on the travails of an American expatriate family living in Chongqing. There was a fair bout of criticism of the family for insulating themselves from Chongqing and China and for moaning about the difficulty of living in Chongqing even as they live all-expenses-paid luxury.

It’s worth reading the article, posted here on Howard French’s “A Glimpse of the World Blog”. You can also go read the extract on Richard’s blog.

It made me think a bit about how I perceive “expats” and the expat lifestyle. I spent nine years in Singapore, where only my first job, which lasted for one year, was on an “expat package”. I was pretty well localized by the end of my stay (married to a Singaporean with more Singaporean than foreign friends). In Singapore I became completely contemptuous of foreigners who isolated themselves. But Singapore is a completely accessible city: wealthy, modern, English-speaking and with all the Western comforts you could ever hope to find. (In fact, Singapore often comes in for the opposite criticism, that it isn’t Asian enough, although I think only people who don’t know where to look make that claim.)

But when I think back to my arrival in Singapore, even it was difficult enough at the time. I remember how thrilled my business partner and I were when we discovered a mass-market Italian restaurant. I remember how akward I felt on public transportation for many weeks. I remember how long it took me to feel like I knew my way around the city. I remember how many dumb mistakes I made managing my staff, and how long it took before I started having good, Singaporean friends.

And that’s the thing about culture shock. It doesn’t really matter what the amenities are, or if the language is the same. There are degrees. You could be an American moving to England and still be culture shocked. You could move from California to New York and be culture shocked. You could damn well move from San Francisco to Iowa and be culture shocked. It might be less severe than coming to Asia, but it would still happen. And different people with different motivations will react differently to the experience.

I came to China because I wanted to engage with it. I wanted to feel what it was like, and talk to Chinese people and “have a cultural experience”. I specifically sought out the feeling of discomfort and displacement that I first had when I got to Singapore because I missed the thrill and challenge of discovering someplace new. It has been tremendously rewarding, but also difficult. I invested two years in learning Mandarin before I arrived. I quit a good job to come here and arrived with no guarantee of work. My long-term future will be in Asia, and I will need to have some experience in China. I had every incentive to get into China.

And yet, even as an Asiaphile with nine years in the region, it was difficult when I arrived. Classroom Mandarin got me almost nowhere on the street. I was scared of the bus, scared of the supermarket, intimidated at the thought of trying to speak to people and generally completely overwhelmed. And I was in a language program surrounded by other Westerners.

Even today I still seek my Western comforts. I live in an international apartment with cable TV. The Internet is my lifeline. I damned well beat a path to the local Jenny Lou’s because I am incapable of giving up Western breakfasts. And I consider myself pretty culturally resilient.

Now, what if I had no experience in Asia and no emotional investment in getting under the skin of China? What if I was here solely for professional reasons and knew I was going to leave in two years? And what if I was in Chongqing, a city far less accessible to foreigners than relatively cosmopolitan Beijing? And what if I was desperate to socialize my young Children as Americans?

I’d probably grow a bunker mentality as well, and concentrate on emerging unscathed. And that’s why I find it hard to criticize the woman in the story.

Sure, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to come to China and not engage with it as deeply as possible. I love it here. But not everyone seeks the same opportunities and experiences as me. And I can’t be too critical of that.

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Why American tech companies betrayed me, not China

Posted on July 4, 2005 by Will Moss

American technology companies are helping China censor the Internet. I am angry and disappointed — probably more than the Chinese people actually affected. Yet, in a world full where corporate amorality is often taken for granted, why does this bother me so much? I’ve been trying to understand the reasons for my anger.

The remaining wisps of my youthful idealism are largely responsible. I started using commercial online services in 1992, and I started building websites in 1994 when I was in grad school. The Internet’s promise as a publicly accessible and democratizing mass medium hypnotized me and dictated the course of my career, into the technology industry, to Singapore and then to China.

The story of the technology industry’s moral collapse before the gleam of Chinese gold is the story of my commercial coming-of-age. The reason why I am so disappointed by the concessions of Microsoft, Cisco, Google and other complicit companies is that these are the companies of my generation. In my naïve heart of hearts, I hoped they would be different. Different from the oil companies that we somehow naturally expect to do business with sordid governments and wallow in environmental depredation. Different from old industrial giants, the car makers and manufacturers that we linked with rust-belt smokestacks, layoffs and economic decline. Different from the defense companies that were happy to sell weapons to our despotic allies. Different from everything that had come before.

It didn’t help that I was deeply immersed in the utopian fit of the technology bubble. I was so steeped in the rhetoric of the unstoppable, transformative power of the Internet that I internalized those beliefs and carried them even after the once bright-eyed startups auctioned the last of their Italian furniture. But technology companies still do their best to keep these fantasies alive. To this day, they market to us in the lexicon of freedom and transformation.

Where do you want to go today? asked Microsoft, suggesting that it could be anywhere you want, and never hinting that they might choose to keep some destinations off limits.Any time, any place, any device, they said, but not any word, they neglected to add.

Do no evil, lectured Google. The first line of their mission statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.Universally accessible. That’s a nice idea. I wonder if it would work, now that we know Dan Gilmore was wrong all those years ago.

Our culture drives us to set high standards for corporate integrity and to give back by using our resources for a positive global impact, says Cisco, in explaining their corporate citizenship. But some parts of the globe are impacted more positively than others.

As a spin-doctor for technology companies I have written words like these myself. I, above all people, should be cynical about them. But I always carried that core of idealism with me. The Internet would be different, I thought to myself, and the people who had founded technology companies, many of them from my cohort, would somehow bring a different set of values than business had previously known. These were the companies of my generation. I had forgotten the core of greed and shallowness that lurked behind the technology industry’s evangelical mask in the terrible years of 1999 and 2000, when we all piously awaited the digital Rapture.

It was foolish, of course. The system is what it is, and it exerts its own terrible, transformative power, even on the most noble of companies. I had ridden one of those companies myself, a once promising venture in Singapore that crumbled from the inside as we succumbed to our own avarice and desperately pushed numbers around to please investment bankers with fast smiles and empty eyes. In the end we were unemployed, poor and bitter, but wiser. Or so we thought.

Technology entrepreneurs told us they would transform the world, and they were right. It has been a miraculous decade, and I wouldn’t change what the Internet brings me, especially here in Beijing, so far from my friends and family. But when we heard “transform the world” we only saw the good implied in that statement. Any technology brings its dark side, and we have spent the last five years discovering the Internet’s teeth. A tool for opening minds can be a weapon for closing them, and the arms merchants can turn out to be people we thought we knew.

So we confront the uncomfortable question of how we expect American companies to represent “our” values. By this, I mean the noble American ideals that we casually throw around in conversation but which are so fiendishly tricky to nail down in practice: freedom, democracy, human rights. The same words that vanished from MSN Spaces in a cloud of dark irony. The depressing reality is that public corporations, as much as they have their place, generally make dismal ambassadors for these ideals. It’s not because they’re evil, or because they are run by bad people. They’re not. It’s simply that the incentives the system creates lead in a direction where idealism is hard pressed to follow. But that doesn’t make the disappointment less bitter.

Meanwhile, the Chinese will manage without our hand-wringing. They can use the proxies if they want, choose to avoid MSN Spaces, cheerfully internationalize despite the best efforts of the CCP. They’ll wrestle with the problems in their own way. They might discover that there are places besides the Internet where interesting ideas can flow more easily. And if the climate in the US was ever to change, we might someday discover the same thing.

And that’s why I am so sad, and why it doesn’t matter whether the Chinese themselves care about this or not. It wasn’t about China’s expectations. It was about my own. In the end I wasn’t angry because technology companies had betrayed China. I was angry because they sold out the promise that I fell in love with twelve years ago. They betrayed me.

Some notes:

Several recent events made me want to write this. The first is a tightening of control domestic websites and blogs by the Chinese government, most recently with the MII’s website registration act. This is part of a general trend that has also affected mainstream media. (Both of those links from the invaluable Danwei.org, and see also this good storyfrom the UK’s Guardian via Howard French’s “A Glimpse of the World” blog.)

The second event is the renewed vigor of the Chinese government’s censorship of foreign blogging engines, with Typepad the most recent in a string of victims. The third is the outing of Microsoft’s entirely voluntary attempts to placate China’s censors in advance by preventing the use of the words “freedom”, “democracy” and “human rights” in the titles of posts in the China version of their Spaces blog engine. While the blocking of Typepad has been noticed mostly by bloggers themselves, Microsoft’s move was widely reported and generated scorn and outrage. (Wired; BBC; Financial Times, etc.) Rebecca MacKinnon haswritten a good piece on the overall situation for Yale Global, and it has been picked up by several newspapers. She’s also explored the Cisco situation in some depth.

The entire trend is part of a worrying regression by the Hu Jintao government (here analyzed by Philip Pan of the Washington Post), long suspected of a somewhat less progressive outlook than that of Jiang Zemin (and there’s an alarming statement). The combined effect has been to call scrutiny to the complicity of American technology companies in China’s strengthening censorship apparatus. We should keep that issue alive.

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Sanitized For My Protection: Imagethief’s Self-Censorship Policy Explained

Posted on June 4, 2005 by Will Moss

In a recent comment, an old friend of mine posed a very interesting question:

Do you think much about where the “line in the sand” is for you personally? Just how far can you take criticism of China in your Blog before you potentially attract unwanted attention? While I doubt you would be subject to arrest, being a Caucasian American citizen and thus capable of evoking American political and media attention if such were to happen, you could theoretically be “invited” to leave the country and not return. Do you already impose limits on your rhetoric and subject matter as you write?

Well, first, let’s not over-estimate the amount of righteous fury that would be provoked by the incarceration of one loudmouthed PR flack. Nevertheless, despite recent post topics, I like to think that my criticism of China is leavened by wonder, appreciation and affection as well. No one is forcing me to stay here, and I wouldn’t be in China if I wasn’t enjoying it. But dewy sentimentality won’t jerk any tears from the apparatchiks down at the Ministry of Information. So, the short answer is, yes, I do impose limits on my rhetoric and on the subject matters that I broach, although perhaps less than I should.

I don’t worry about being thrown in jail (when that happens it’ll be because the apocalypse has come and all spin-doctors are being put against the wall). I certainly worry about having my website blocked, which is probably the most likely result of transgression. The worst-case would probably be finding my residency and employment permits cancelled. I have not heard of anyone being expelled for blogging. If anyone is aware of confirmed cases, please comment.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am going to explain my self-censorship policy. There are three reasons why I self-censor:

First, I don’t blog anonymously. Maybe this is a mistake. Many people do blog anonymously, including many of the China bloggers that I follow. And some of them aren’t even in China. (For those who want to know how to blog anonymously, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide here.) But as long as I’ve had a website (twelve years now) my name has been on it. And I’ve always felt I ought to be willing to take responsibility for what I wrote. Perhaps I’ll regret that someday.

Second, China is a good place for a little paranoia. It seems like arrogance to think anyone official would care what I write in this space. But, as I wrote recently, I’ve met journalists here who have been hassled by the authorities. Other bloggers have simply decided that its too dangerous to have an opinion here, and have thrown in the towel. One blogger believes (with some cause) that the Ministry of Information has been lurking about his site. The foreign journalists I know take it as a matter of course that they are under surveillance. And I am a foreigner who deals regularly with both the Chinese and foreign media in the course of my work. That is probably grounds for some caution. On the other hand,searching Technorati for “China” yields 411,780 posts, so what is the chance that I am attracting particular attention? If it is true that China has 30,000 Internet content weasels, I guess the chance is measurable. (The post cited for that widely disputed number is an excellent precis on China’s Internet policies.)

Third, speaking of my work, it is an issue as well. Since I am not blogging anonymously, I have to consider what will happen if someone from my company stumbles across my blog. Sooner or later, it will happen (if it hasn’t already). This is fraught for a variety of reasons, especially considering my line of work. As one of the company experts on blogging and online media, I wouldn’t have much credibility if I wasn’t blogging myself. But I won’t write anything about my company’s clients unless it is in the most general terms. If I puff them, I destroy my own credibility. If I denigrate them, I betray my obligations as their consultant. It also, to an extent, limits what I can say about PR in China in general. This is a shame, because there are some things that beg to be written about. The only  post I have ever written to completion and then decided against publishing was not a China government or policy post. It was a China PR post.

I’ve always self-censored to some degree, usually for purely pragmatic reasons. Back in my angry youth, in 1995/6,  I wrote some inflammatory things in the Report from Singapore, my proto-blog on the rise and fall of Games Online. In tiny Singapore, where everybody in a given business knows everyone else and you bump into the same people throughout your career, this could have really haunted me. You never know when someone you scorch will have the influence to ensure that your permanent residency or employment pass doesn’t get renewed. Or simply be interviewing you for your next job. When I republished Report from Singapore on my website, in 1999, I scrubbed the most incendiary material, removed a few real names and softened some ill-considered rhetoric written in the heat of emotional trauma.

In China, the issue is less one of scorching individuals and more one of irritating the State. So where is my line in the sand? (Or dust, as it is in Beijing.)

Well, like many blogs, most of mine is either my own opinion or my opinion combined with information freely available on websites not blocked in China (since I can see them). I don’t usually re-publish stuff blocked in China, although there have been occasional exceptions, such as Reporters Sans Frontieres’ statement on Ching Cheong.

I don’t spend much time on arch-taboo subjects. I don’t generally talk about Tiananmen Square in the 1989 context both because that is a lightning-rod issue and because there are people much better able to comment on it than I am. I don’t talk about certain quasi-religious movements that China has banned (and, as you can see, I have not even mentioned them by name). Sometimes I wish I could, but that seems like a fast road to exile behind the Great Firewall.

When I first got to China, I published the same assortment of expat-blogger, hayseed abroad “gawrsh!” stories written by every other foreigner who has come to China. (Written, I hope, in my own inimitable style.) That was fine in its time, but the longer I live here, the less of that there is likely to be. Instead I now find myself writing more of the kind of posts you would expect from someone who has been a media professional for nearly fifteen years. I didn’t plan it that way. My interests simply shifted, as did what was happening around me. That has put me pretty squarely on sensitive territory, and I try to respect that. But, as a media pro, how can you ignore the role of propaganda in the recent wave of anti-Japanese nationalism? How can you ignore the arrest of Ching Cheong? How can you ignore the way China represents itself to the world, or to its own people? How can you ignore any of it?

Unless you are in a coma, to live in China is to wonder, why are things this way? What to the Chinese want? Where is it all going? What are the forces driving it? What the hell am I doing here? I don’t know about you, but I process what I see around me every day by talking about and, especially, by writing about it. If I stopped, I would have to wind iron bands around my head or my skull would explode.

So will keep posting. And when I feel paranoid, I will remind myself that there are things being written in un-blocked mainstream media that are far more influential and powerful than anything I will lay before my tiny handful of readers. But I will also be mindful that I and my wife live in a society that doesn’t work the same as the USA does. There is no right to freedom of speech here. There is no right to freely access what much of the rest of the world takes for granted. There are taboos. Like a game of digital hopscotch, I must be mindful of how I step around the lines that have been drawn.

I suspect many of us here do the same.

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The money weasels catch my scent

Posted on May 26, 2005 by Will Moss

This morning I received my first call from an expat “money manager” since moving to Beijing.

This is one of the great curses of being an American overseas. In fact, it afflicts all expatriates, but American’s get special treatment due to America’s distinction as the only developed country that taxes its citizens’ global income regardless of where they live.

One of the great joys of living in Asia is that telemarketing and door-to-door marketing are generally much less of a daily curse than they are in the US. Of course, unstable governments and lethal diseases are more of a curse, but on-balance its a good trade-off.  When I lived in San Francisco barely a day when by when I wasn’t shooing some noble cause off of my doorstep. Widows, orphans, whales, trees, politicians and Jesus all got the door slammed in their face more than once. Jesus got it repeatedly, but only because the Jehova’s Witnesses seem to lack basic learning skills.

Similarly, you couldn’t sit down for a meal or a Night Court rerun without the phone ringing and an automated voice that sounded like a sexed up version of the nasal computer from Star Trek explaining why my friends would abandon me and my pets would die if I didn’t get an MBNA Visa card.

This kind of telemarketing didn’t happen in Singapore, where annoying people at home is prohibited by law (as is being nude inside your house while visible to people outside, a law that would have destroyed the very social fabric of my old SF neighborhood, the Castro, where I had a succession of nude-neighbors). In nine years I may have had two people to my front door and one phone call to my home.

What did happen, however, was endless phone calls to my work number from people representing impressively named “financial consultancies” pitching tax-sheltered, offshore investments based in the Isle of Man, Vanuatu, Lesotho, or some such other godforsaken tax haven. They followed a predictable pattern:

“Hello, I’m Rick Ramrod from First Global Financial Counselors AG. Is this a good time to talk?”
“Er, well, I’m just…”
“Mr. Moss. William. Can I call you William? Are you aware that, as an American, Uncle Sam will hunt you down ruthlessly anywhere on this planet and bleed you bone-dry despite your pathetic attempts cling to some meager fraction of your dismal earnings. Is that how you want to live? Is it?”
“Look, Mr. Ramrod, I…”
“Bill –can I call you Bill?”
“I prefer Wi…”
“Smashing. Bill, would you have a half-hour to meet with me to discuss tax-sheltered investments? I’m flying into Singapore from Bangkok next Tuesday. I only do this once every eighteen months, when the moon is full and the weaselbane blooms by night. It’s meet me or suffer a lifetime of privation ground beneath the heel of the tax police.”
“I really don’t…”
“Splendid! How is 4:30?”

And so on. After a while you get good at deflecting them. It’s not that tax-sheltered investments are a bad idea for expatriate Americans. In fact, they’re a pretty good idea. I’m sure if I had some money, I’d use them. But there are less-seedy ways to come by them than at the behest of a salesman from a Bangkok boiler-room.

Since moving to Beijing I had been blessedly free of the overtures of the investment weasels. But it seems I have been discovered. Somehow my name-card has floated into the right pair of oily hands, or I’ve ended up on The List of Beijing expats. So my little pocket of bliss is ended. Because more calls are certainly coming. If there is one thing you can be sure about telemarketers, it’s that they are like roaches. For the one you see, there thousands more hidden in the cupboard, eating your Nilla Wafers and shitting in the Nescafe.

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The abstraction of diplomacy and the reality of rocks through windows

Posted on April 17, 2005 by Will Moss

From my blog reading, some of the widespread conclusions about the ongoing stream of anti-Japanese protests in China are:

  1. The nominal grievances, Japan’s textbooks that gloss over culpability for wartime atrocities and generally insufficient post-war contrition, are, in reality, minor.
  2. The protests were sanctioned by the state, which is tacitly condoning broad, anti-Japanese sentiment.
  3. There is a whiff of hypocrisy about the whole affair.

So, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of grassroots sentiment in response to a profound, historical grievance, the facile textbook row is just theatrically blunt diplomacy rooted in grubby, contemporary issues, such as competition over East China Sea gas deposits and Japan’s bid for permanent representation on the UN Security Council.

Stripping the lingering romance of the heroic Anti Fascist War reduces the protests to messaging, and the protestors to manipulated patsies. The government has decided to send an implicit threat: We have not forgotten and we are still angry. (It’s only implicit at the state level. In published vox populi quotes it’s explicit.) The dismal subtext of the message is that the legacy of the War, six decades later and counting, may still be future retribution.

Pardon my Outraged Masses
To engineer its message, the government is indulging in a timeworn bit of political sleight-of-hand. Stoking nationalist fury at Them (in this case, the Japanese) amplifies the diplomatic message, fills an ideological void and deflects activism that might otherwise be focused inconveniently inward. This old chestnut seems to fare particularly well in places where the state has a functional monopoly on public discourse. The refrain is familiar from other times and places: All your miseries are caused by the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Tutsis, Blacks, Irish, Latin Americans, etc.

The Chinese government has been careful to stress that its complaint is with the Japanese government, not the Japanese people, but news coverage and official statements are loaded with charged language. (Unfortunately, my language limitations mean that I have to use Xinhua and the China Daily, which are for foreign consumption, as proxies for broader press coverage. I would be interested in hearing if the Chinese language press is the same, better or worse.) Some of the language that has caught my eye in the China Daily in just the past three days:

“Japan Told to Face Up to Past” (April 13)

“…whitewashing of its wartime atrocities…”
“…bad practice and attitude…”
“…history of aggression…”

“Japan’s textbook revisions cause for concern” (April 14)

“… all its killings of civilians, exploiting, especially sexually, of women, brutalities…”
“… orgy of atrocity…”
“…the three bloodiest massacres…”

“Schroeder to Japan: Be self critical of history” (April 14)

“…heinous crimes…”
“…wanton slaughtering…”
“…germ wars…”

I’ve deliberately pulled these phrases out of context because that is how they work. It doesn’t matter how measured or balanced the language around them is. These are “villain words” that, repeated often enough (the essence of propaganda) will leave a deep impression regardless of efforts to balance coverage or to mitigate the impact by distinguishing between Japanese “rightists” or the government and the population-at-large. Charged words stick. When passions are sufficiently inflamed, the ultimate result becomes the following: Japanese historical crimes + you are Japanese = your crimes.

Also worth a look are the China Daily editorial cartoons of the past six weeks, several of which invoke Japan. I pulled them together on one web page here [link now dead, see original pages below -WM]. Samurai outfits and Tojo moustaches are caricatures of Japanese militarism (the cartoon featuring Koizumi being notable for its artistic restraint). The depicted attempt to “buy” a Security Council seat reminds me of anti-Semitic propaganda. The thread began on March 9th, well before the demonstrations got going. (The original pages are here: March 9, March 16, March 28, March 30, April 7, April 12.)

Speaking of anti-Semitism, one sadly recurring outcome of this kind of propaganda is a pogrom. Charged language and imagery can be read as state-sanctioned contempt and, thus, as a license to violence. The Chinese should be sensitive to this situation, as their diaspora has been on the receiving end of this very tactic, most recently in the Indonesian riots of 1999. There is a reason why ethnic Chinese across much of Southeast Asia, who are often the backbone of merchant class, take local names and try very hard to assimilate and keep low profiles.

This may all sound a bit hysterical, and I don’t think that an actual anti-Japanese pogrom is going to erupt in China, but threats to people and property are escalating on both sides. Furthermore, the attitudes and prejudices that this kind of propaganda teaches do not go away. They just go out of view, to be expressed later as racism, violence and, if we’re particularly unlucky, future policy as another indoctrinated generation assumes power.

My xenophobes can lick your xenophobes
Of course the long-term consequences of this will be to drive Japan towards the US and further empower the Japanese right, the very element of Japanese society most likely aggravate Chinese fears. Thus the great circle of self-fulfillment might roll on.

None of this exonerates the Japanese government, which regularly seems to find ways to irritate neighbors who still remember the war. The Koreans, fellow victims of the Co-Prosperity Sphere and no slouches at nationalism themselves, are also fond of good anti-Japanese demonstration. In the years I lived in Singapore, I encountered many bad memories of the Japanese occupation and much lingering ill will. But no one is guilty of their father’s crime, even if they don’t apologize sufficiently for it, and a regional cycle of nationalism and escalating tension won’t do anyone any good.

I like to think of myself as an optimist, and I don’t expect a full-scale crisis. But it’s sad that the Japanese foreign ministry has to advise Japanese citizens against travel to China, and it’s worse that the abstraction of diplomacy has already become the reality of rocks through windows. My neighbors are Japanese. They have a three-year-old daughter who is infatuated with my cats and giggles so loudly that I can hear her through the walls. I wonder how they are feeling right now.

One final China Daily quote, from an editorial published on March 28:

“It is the young, after all, who urgently need to learn about the falseness of promises offered by nationalism and its romanticization of national glory.

The truth is, the past never disappears. In fact, it often returns to haunt one.

It is an unforgivable sin to turn one’s face away from past atrocities while many of the victims are still suffering from the abuse they endured.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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The strange medical odyssey of Tiny Cat

Posted on March 19, 2005 by Will Moss

As regular readers know, I had to pay USD$600 in shady cat-graft to get my two, dime-a-dozen Singapore drain cats, Tiny and Xiao Xiong, out of Chinese kitty Stalag when they first arrived in China. (How’s that for your Foreign Corrupt Practices? I appear to be some kind of recidivist.)  My reward for this demonstration of heartwarming, “pets are for life” commitment was four months of complaints about the lack of wildlife available for murdering. Then Tiny got sick, and my wife and I spent every day of the Spring Festival, China’s biggest holiday, at the vet.

The first symptom was the complete evaporation of his appetite. To know Tiny is to know how alarming this was. He’s not so much a cat as a fuzzy, ironically named jet engine that ingests all loose objects in his path, and, perforce, emits a noxious stream of pollutants and gas from the rear. This cat can hear the workmen at Goldfields open their tins of luncheon meat seventeen floors below us. He never met a meal he didn’t like.

Appetite loss turned into vomiting. Finally, we awoke one morning just before the Spring holiday to find cat puke meticulously arranged on every fabric surface in the house (couch, living room rug and hallway runner), and thought it might, perhaps, be time to go to the vet.

We hoisted Tiny off to the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital, in the vet and pet shop ghetto on Gongtibeilu, west of the Worker’s Gymnasium. It didn’t take long for Dr. Xiang to make a diagnosis: liver failure.

My cat has liver failure? From what? His late night Maotai benders?

Brought on by obesity, you see. She pointed to a simple silhouette chart on her office wall, apparently designed for dullards like me, which showed a thin cat shape, normal cat shape, and obese cat shape. “He is like this,” she said, pointing at “obese cat”. A highly scientific assessment of his prognosis followed. “Maybe he’ll live, maybe he’ll die in the next week.” All hope lay in an aggressive program of intravenous medication to be administered every day until he recovered or expired.

Well, that’s settled then. We’ll just leave him here. Phone us up when he’s better or dead.

Not so fast. The Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital does not board animals. We would have to bring him in every day. My fantasies of a well deserved, indolent Spring Festival crumbled. I don’t want to seem callous, but it kills your vacation to go to the vet every day. It’s the immovable scheduling object that everything else must be scheduled around. Shall we go to Longqingxia to look at the ice sculptures? Sure, after the vet. Shall we have a long, indulgent breakfast at Steak and Eggs? You bet, but remember, we have to go the vet. Shall we go to Chaoyang Park and have a snowball fight? Absolutely. Right after we go to the goddamned vet!

We began a daily schlep of dragging Tiny out from under the couch, cramming him into his cat carrier, wrapping it in a jacket to insulate him from the wintry, Siberian blast ripping through Beijing, and taxiing up to the vet for his fix.

Under the People’s Olympic Beautification Plan, line item 857, Beijing is upgrading its fleet of disintegrating, rattletrap Xiali taxis to swish, new Hyundai Sonatas. This has three consequences. First, it is increasing the bottom-end taxi-fare from 1.2 yuan (14 cents) a kilometer to 1.6 yuan (19 cents) a kilometer. A scandalous outrage.

Second, it is killing off a singular Beijing experience. Xialis (and many of the equally dire Citroens) are grungy and cramped beyond compare. Your average adult American has to break his own legs to sit behind the driver’s cage of a Xiali. During the sweaty summer, when I was going for job interviews, Xiali seatbelts often left broad, diagonal black stripes on my white business shirts. I learned to forgo the belts even though there are few experiences as nakedly terrifying as bombing through Beijing traffic at high speed in a car with the build and ride of a Radio Flyer wagon.

The third consequence of the upgrade is that it has made taxi drivers choosy about what they will carry in their elegant, new cars. A Xiali driver will take your camel, if you can find a way to squeeze it in. (Hint: break its legs.) But Hyundais? No cats, please. One Hyundai taxi driver, after refusing to take us, kindly warned the driver of the next taxi in line (also a Hyundai) not to take us, as we were carrying a cat. Another Hyundai driver thoughtfully offered to put Tiny in the boot (trunk, Bob).

I think this is all part of the great, Beijing double standard. As I have noted before, this is a dog town. My apartment building is infested with little dogs, and at least two large enough to be officially illegal inside the fourth ring road. Every evening the courtyard is a riot of minuscule dogs in precious winter outfits: checked coats, little dog sweaters, and such. I bet dogs get to ride in the swish taxis. But cat people are viewed with suspicion:

What? You don’t have a dog? Didn’t you get the memo?

(Of course, they also eat dog in Beijing, but there is clearly a mental separation between eatin’ dogs and huggin’ dogs. However, a few days ago we had lunch in one of our favorite cheap and cheerful jia chang cai joints, just across from the vet, and we noticed both a dog-meat special on the menu and an assortment of conspicuously doggy noises drifting out of the kitchen. Maybe the chef was feeding scraps to his pet…)

Through cajolery, charm and luck we managed to taxi to the vet every day. And every day we would go through the same routine. We would take Tiny into the examination room and decant him from his box. Dr. Xiang would ask us if he was eating (yeah, some). She would gravely inspect the color of his skin and eyes (still yellow). Her eyes would narrow; did he poop? Then she would tsk a bit, write a daily prescription and send us to the treatment room. There we would pay 100 yuan, the nurses would greet Tiny with the usual exclamations of “Aiyohhh, so fat!” and he would be wired up for his cocktail of meds.

The IV drip is Beijing’s catchall approach to veterinary medication. Whatever your pet, whatever its problem, the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital has an IV for it. Cat, dog, parakeet, hamster, goldfish, whatever, they’ll needle it up for you. And every animal gets the same thing: a straw-colored concoction that looks like piss.

From the crowd in the treatment room, winter was scything through the little pets of Beijing. Large, bullet-headed Chinese men, who would have owned ridgebacks or rottweilers in any other city, fussed over comically tiny, bug-eyed puppies wheezing and hacking their way through various ailments. One man tried to control three diarrhea-ridden husky puppies. Another miserable, palm-sized pup vomited onto its owner’s lap with mechanical regularity. Every animal was getting a drip. There was a sense of solidarity at the Beijing KPK Veterinary World, all of us spending the biggest holiday of the year cradling our pets, surrounded by the bunting of the IV lines.

After a few days, Tiny began to recover. The vet commented on his rude glow. We started having to wrap him in a towel to restrain him during his drip. The bottle runs slowly when your re-invigorated cat is struggling to escape. Over three weeks we graduated from IVs to daily shots, to home treatment, to the ol’ jet engine. Tiny has had his second narrow escape in Beijing. I am out another 1500 kuai, grudging taxi rides included. And I am reminded, once again, of the folly of carrying cats to Beijing.

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A scholarly analysis of the economics of PR in China

Posted on March 6, 2005 by Will Moss

It occurs to me that, despite having been a Beijing PR professional for six months, I have yet to write anything about working in Beijing, as opposed to just living here.

So let me tackle that by talking about one of the most striking differences between public relations in China, and public relations anywhere else. We pay journalists to come to press conferences.

I can now hear the collective, outraged gasp from my peers around the world. But, as adventurers throughout history have discovered, it is asking for a short trip to the dog-headed guillotine to judge China by your imperialist standards. Unless you have gunboats.

I have no gunboats, so I try to stay open-minded.

When we do a press conference in Beijing, we give every journalist who shows up a 200 yuan “transportation reimbursement”. I use quotation marks because you have to labor mightily to roll up even a 50 yuan taxi fare in Beijing, and the average ride probably sets you back 20. Clearly, it ain’t all going to transportation.

Before you let your imagination run wild, we do not keep a bucket full of cash behind the media reception desk. It’s all very discreet, with the money distributed in plain, white envelopes along with the press release and the naff corporate gift du jour. This is completely standard practice across China, so save your indignation.

200 yuan, or roughly $40 Singapore/$25 US, is a lot of money in Beijing. I can get through a weekend on 200 yuan if I am not crawling the decadent, five-star hotel bars like Centro or Red Moon.

But exchange rates don’t tell the real story. Having learned a lesson from that most scholarly of news magazines, The Economist, I believe international monetary comparisons are best expressed in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), rather than straight exchange rates. So, for the benefit of my friends in Singapore (Americans, bear with me), I will make a PPP comparison using the commodity that flacks and hacks best understand: beer.

In Beijing, rock bottom for a beer out on the town (say, a pint of Yanjing at the Electric Cactus Garden in Wudaokou) is about 3 yuan. In Singapore, rock bottom for a beer out on the town (a tall Tiger at the Maxwell Road hawker center) is about $5 Sing, or 25 yuan, more or less.

So the 200 yuan we pay a journalist, after we deduct a legitimate 50 yuan for round-trip taxis, will buy about 50 beers. (150 yuan remaining divided by 3 yuan a pint. Are you following me? If not, you need to come over to my house for poker night.)

OK, Singaporean journalists, hold onto your hat. To achieve similar benefits from attending a press conference in Singapore, you’d have to receive an ang pao containing, wait for it, $270 Sing. That’s two $10 cab fares (ignoring the fact that you will claim them), and $250 to pay for your 50 tall Tigers at $5 a snort. (Other countries, insert your own math. Bloomberg exchange rate calculator here, and I know you don’t need me to tell you the price of a cheap beer.)

So, journalists, next time my peers from whatever PR firm in Singapore phone you up and ask if you will be attending their client’s unveiling of the latest in electronic toilet brushes, or whatever, I suggest you demand just compensation. If it’s good enough for the Chinese press corps, by god, it’s good enough for you.

Note: Some economically literate readers may wish to point out that PPP should be calculated using a basket of commodities rather than just one. In defense of my analysis, a beer represents a basket of agricultural and industrial commodities: hops, malt, water, packaging, the energy required for manufacturing and distribution, etc. If you still want to take issue with my analysis, get a girlfriend or a hobby for god’s sake.

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In praise of Google in China

Posted on January 26, 2005 by Will Moss

The BBC’s website is blocked but many international apartment buildings get BBC World. My colleague was watching the BBC in her Beijing apartment this morning when a report on Google’s agreement to censor key words and sites via its upcoming google.com.cn service aired. Needless to say, they were only moments into explaining how Google had agreed to meet Chinese content control restrictions when Nanny dropped the hammer on the Beeb, leaving legions of bewildered expats to wonder exactly what it was Google was doing with the Chinese authorities. Censoring of censorship news seems like one of those things that might cause the universe to collapse in on itself.

For the record, Imagethief thinks that Google is doing the right thing, and taking a reasonable approach to the conundrum of operating in China. I have to confess some disagreement with RSF’s take-no-prisoners approach to complicity with the Chinese government censorship regime, despite my respect for them as an organization. I believe that American Internet firms should remain in China, but should take as many reasonable steps as they can to avoid putting themselves in untenable situations, such as turning over e-mail communications belonging to Chinese dissidents or journalists. As I wrote previously [note: this link now dead – WM], I think there are shades of grey in this situation, where the benefit of offering Chinese people more choice can be balanced against compliance with some of the Chinese government’s less onerous restrictions. Filtering keywords is bad, but it is not in same league as becoming an unwitting tool in the imprisoning of dissidents.

As reported yesterday, Google’s approach is to post notifications that some content has been removed when search returns are filtered. It will also refrain from offering its “Blogger” blogging service and Gmail service in China, so as to avoid placing itself in a situation similar to Yahoo’s recently, when it was required by the Chinese authorities to turn over journalist Shi Tao’s e-mails. Those are reasonable steps, and, as someone who has been party to a few boardroom discussions (PR people get to be flies on lots of walls), I am willing to believe that there was substantial debate within Google as to the merits of proceeding down this path before they made a final decision.

That being said, for any company with interests in China there will be no perfect defense. Once Google has an established business in China that they have a stake in protecting, the Chinese government will gain a degree of leverage over them regardless of whether google.com.cn in separately incorporated or where the mail or blog servers live. If the authorities wish to receive information on a Gmail user, they’ll still effectively be able to hold Google’s Chinese business hostage. What would be an interesting –and traumatic– test for Google would be how they would react in such a situation, where they have no obvious legal obligation (as Yahoo apparently did), but a clear interest in protecting their China business. That is a situation carrying substantial PR risk because the widely-used “legal obligation” PR shield, thin as it is, would no longer be available as a defense.

As to why I support US Internet firms being in China, it’s a matter of providing choice for Chinese users, even if that choice isn’t as rich as what users in other countries would get. This is essentially what Google has offered up as an explanation, and I accept it. We need to be clear with ourselves what group we’re trying to serve by pressuring US (and European) Internet firms to withdraw from China. It certainly isn’t average Chinese users. Perhaps I see this issue through too much of a personal filter. (Perhaps all of us bloggers working and living in China do; we seem to have similar opinions on this issue.) I work with seventy Chinese colleagues, almost all of whom use Google to run searches as part of their work and 100% of whom use MSN messenger to chat with friends, colleagues etc. (Don’t ask me why; that’s what they like. I’m an AIM user myself.) I certainly wouldn’t want to be the person wandering around the office explaining that the MSN Messenger servers were no longer accessible to them because Americans felt it was inappropriate for Microsoft to offer it as a service to them as long as it meant following Chinese content restrictions. And I certainly don’t see how restricting them to Chinese Internet services only serves their interests, even though it may salve our national conscience.

But, as I also wrote previously, US Internet firms need to be clear on where they draw the compliance line, without having to wait to be pressured into it or forced into it by a crisis. There does come a point at which the tradeoff is no longer worthwhile. Personally, I think it’s worth making concessions to content filtering to offer wider –if crippled– choice. But is it worth being complicit in the detention of journalists and dissidents? Answering at a personal level again, no. Google’s decision not to offer certain services in China is recognition of this division, even if it is imperfect and a bit risky. Other companies need to be clear where the line is for them, and explain it to their stakeholders at home. Otherwise we won’t have seen the last of this issue.

Finally, some will be tempted to say, “they’re just doing it for the money!” Yes. That’s what listed, joint-stock corporations do, and what they should do, pursuant to sensible regulation. I’m not aware of there being any mystery or hidden agenda about that. From a business point of view it’s totally understandable that companies should want to pursue the China market. The fact that many do is directly responsible for Imagethief having a job right now (just so you are clear on my personal interest in this issue). But, at the same time, companies need to be consider what costs and risks beyond the obvious financial ones they are willing to endure to pursue the market here. And exactly what compromises they are prepared to make.

Disclosure: Imagethief does not represent any company currently affected by Chinese Internet censorship issues. But he is damn happy Google is available in China. He is also awaiting the inevitable flames for taking the position stated above, and is aware that some bloggers he likes and respects feel otherwise.

As always, personally I think censorship is abhorrent. But I lay it at the feet of the Chinese government, not Google, and I’d still rather have Google here than not.

Other (blog) reading (various points of view):
Peking Duck 1: His original post on this issue. Conflicted.
Peking Duck 2: On Google fighting a US government subpoena. A double standard?
Roger Simon (Via the Duck): Boycott Google.
Rebecca MacKinnon: “Don’t be too evil.”
Danwei: Keep cool…still.
Fons: Yi koutou! Er koutou! San koutou!
Life After Jiangxi: Agonizing…

Added Jan 27th:
Asiapundit: Dumb move by smart guys.
Billsdue: Ka-CHING…Not.

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Tiny and Xiao Xiong’s bogus journey

Posted on January 16, 2005 by Will Moss

Or: The Headlong Collision of Two Kitty Cats with the Chinese Bureaucracy

In the run up to our move to Beijing, one issue loomed large: what to do with our two house cats, Tiny and Xiao Xiong.

Now, I can hear you thinking, cats is cats. No doubt they can be had a buck a bushel on any Beijing street corner. And you’d be right, although, to split things finely, the Beijingoise are more partial to little, yappy dogs than to cats.

Furthermore, you will be thinking, Chinese chefs are notorious for being able to conjure delicacies from the carcass of almost any animal. After all, kitchen-bound civit cats (not actually cats) were widely blamed for SARS and a stroll through any Chinese wet market will reveal that, with creativity, almost any creature can be stir-fried, braised or pickled in its own gastric juices. As the (possibly apocryphal) saying goes, if it walks with its back to the sun, the Chinese will eat it.

However, I believe that refers to the southern Chinese, who seem to be more gastronomically adventurous than the northerners who populate Beijing. Although dog is an expensive delicacy in Beijing, most local restaurants offer little more exotic than mutton and eel. Considering I’ve had fruit bat and squirrel in Singapore, that is hardly anything to get worked up about.

So I wasn’t really worried about my cats ending up in the stewpot. I was much more worried about animal import bureaucracy. After all, along with gunpowder, moveable type, paper money, neurosurgery, arbitrage, lip balm and the weather vane, the Chinese invented bureaucracy, and they’ve had four millennia to perfect it. When you consider that the national symbol of China, the Great Wall, is the world’s first government boondoggle, and it was an active project for 2000 years, it’s clear that bureaucracy here is world-class.

My company had thoughtfully recommended a local real-estate outfit to help me find an apartment. I asked them if they could provide information on pet importation into China. “Not recommended” was their official advice. I had the receptionist at our office do a little more research, and her results were more encouraging. With the appropriate documentation and inoculations, and a small fee for veterinary examinations, it should be possible to import the cats.

Meanwhile, my wife, Olivia, was busy researching the problem on her end. Singapore, it seems, has created a cottage industry to help expatriates get their fuzzy friends into and out of the country. After soliciting bids from a few such companies, she selected an outfit called Mitchville that claimed to be able to handle preparation of all necessary paperwork and inoculations and arrangement of shipping.  Mitchville also assured us that, with appropriate documentation, it would not be necessary to quarantine the cats in Beijing, but that they would have to be restricted to our apartment for thirty days.

That was important to us. The idea of our cats in Chinese institutional care for a month was too horrible to contemplate. With our confidence thus bolstered, we decided to ship the cats to China to live with us.

Naturally, it did not go well.

First, Tiny sensed something was up and ran away the night Olivia left for China, forcing her to search the neighborhood to find him.

Then, after an uneventful flight, the real trouble began. As I waited in the international arrival area with our driver, I got a call from a distraught Olivia. The Chinese authorities were going to impound the cats for thirty days. Mitchville had been wrong. According to the customs official that Olivia was speaking to, the regulations had changed just two months previously, and thirty days quarantine was now mandatory.

While I waited helplessly outside, Olivia had it out with the customs authorities in Mandarin for an hour. She pleaded, cajoled, bargained, and made oblique references to “working things out” on the spot. It was all to no effect, and a morose and tearful Olivia emerged into the waiting area while an equally miserable Tiny and Xiong were packed off to Chinese kitty hoosegow.

Well, what do you do in this situation? Call the embassy?

“Consular services, how may I help you?”

“Uh, yeah, the Chinese authorities are detaining, well, um, my cats.”

“I see, sir. The ambassador has the gravest concern for your situation, and he will be in touch with the Chinese authorities immediately.”

“Really?”

“No, moron. Buy a  freakin’ clue.” Click!

“Hello?”

Maybe not. In fact, you do what we did, and call Mitchfield and read them the riot act and tell them to get their Chinese contact burning up the phone lines to find out what alternatives exist. We were pretty sure that thirty days in the Chinese hole would leave our cats dead or irreparably damaged, and Xiong, having been hit by a taxi in his younger days, was neurotic and spooky enough already.

After twenty-four hours, Mitchfield came back with the goods. As always in China, everything was, in the end, negotiable. The cats could be returned to us immediately. There was just one obstacle: six hundred US bucks in cash, if you please.

Once again, I can hear what you’re thinking. Six hundred bucks? Dude, it’s cats! They are practically free. Heck, ours are Singapore drain cats. They were free! That is, if you don’t count the thousands of dollars worth of lifetime vet bills, inoculations and the recent air-freight charges. But, then, why throw good money after bad?

Because, ultimately, they were our cats. And, god help me, I love the obnoxious, smelly, little beasts. And I was moving my wife to Beijing and she was going to be studying full time in the house, and I knew the cats could make the difference between her feeling like she was at home, and her feeling lonely and isolated.

So I barged my way into the Bank of China after closing time and wrestled the US dollars out of my account (no mean feat at the best of times). The next day Olivia handed it to a representative of the local moving company working with Mitchfield, and later that day two dirty, stressed-out but otherwise unharmed cats were delivered to our apartment. Net total detention: two days.

Ultimately, I’m glad we brought the cats to China. Although we were rewarded for our efforts and expense with month of ungrateful complaints (we can’t go outside; there are no lizards to kill; this place smells funny; I hate you; etc.), they do make our apartment feel like home. And my clothes wouldn’t be my clothes if they weren’t perpetually dusted with cat hair.

But if you are considering moving to China, and you ask my advice on bringing your pets, I have two words:

Not recommended.

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So you want to study Chinese in Beijing

Posted on October 2, 2004 by Will Moss

The pros and cons of Worldlink Education

Last spring, for selfish personal reasons, I quit my perfectly good job in Singapore and abandoned my wife for three months to come to Beijing and study Mandarin. I am now living and working in Beijing, along with my wife, so I guess the whole crazy stunt can be considered a success.

Before I came to Beijing I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how I was going to study here. I had two years of Mandarin instruction in Singapore, so I wasn’t starting from scratch, but my skills were elementary. I had no idea which language programs or schools in Beijing were reputable or what would be a fair price to pay. I spent a lot of time on the web and wrote to acquaintances living in Beijing.

I got a lot of different opinions. Some people told me to come to Beijing, hire a tutor and work one-on-one. Some people told me to attend classes. I heard BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture University) was great. I heard BLCU sucked. It didn’t add up to a really coherent picture. One problem was a shortage of useful information on the web. It was easy to find websites for Wordlink Education, BLCU, the Taipei Language Institute and other programs with registration information, classes, fees and so forth. What I couldn’t find was third-party reviews, real testimonials from students or critiques by people who had been through the programs.

Ultimately I chose Worldlink Education’s Beijing language program, and instruction at their in-house school, the Beijing Chinese Language Academy. Worldlink seemed reputable and well organized and their office in Australia, through which I did registration, was responsive and quick. I chose their in-house classes rather than BLCU instruction (which they also offer) because of the smaller class sizes.

On the whole, the experience was pretty good, but not perfect. I posted this article so that people who are considering Worldlink for study in Beijing know exactly what they will and won’t get from the program, and what kind of an experience they can expect.

I am also including a little bit about Beijing itself. I am not going to write about the city in detail. Others have done that, including me in my China Diary blog (www.imagethief.com/china). Also, I am not an old China hand by any stretch. My total time in Beijing is now a year. But I’ve been in Asia for nearly ten years, so I have some perspective.

All of this is based on my own experiences. Other people will have different opinions, and your mileage may vary. Shop around, and don’t make your decision based just on what I have to say. I invite other Worldlink Beijing alums to add their own comments, good or bad, using the form at the bottom of this page.

Beijing
“Motherfuckers,” muttered the American in line behind me, “I fucking hate the Chinese.” I was in Bangkok, boarding my most recent flight to Beijing on a transit from Singapore. The passengers were mostly Chinese and the queue to board the airplane was random disorganized at best. The angry American was coming to China on business for what I am sure were six long, miserable weeks. Clearly not all of this guy’s baggage was suitcases, if you know what I mean, but I think he was a pretty good example of how you can end up if you don’t learn to roll with the cultural punches.

If you haven’t spent time in Asia, be prepared. Very little English is spoken away from the central business district. Although it’s modernizing fast, Beijing still has a lot of third-world grime, dust and odors. Much of the food is shockingly oily. Public transportation is crowded and, often, uncomfortable. Queuing (lining up for things) is an inexact science. People might seem rude and brusque at first glance. Service may sometimes seem appalling (although it can be surprisingly good at times). You’re a foreigner, so sometimes you’ll pay more for stuff.

Relax. Things just don’t work the same here, and you have to have patience, tolerance and open-mindedness. Chinese social idiosyncrasies are as valid as American ones. Treat discovery of those idiosyncrasies as a cross-cultural adventure and you’ll have a good time. If you expect things to work like they do at home or are quick to get frustrated or angry, you’ll end up culture-shocked and miserable like my fellow traveler in Bangkok. Beijing is fascinating, generally inexpensive and great fun. Western comforts are easy to find once you know where to look. It is much more accessible and easy to get around than I thought it would be. In general I have found Chinese people to be friendly, enthusiastic about speaking Mandarin, and engaging and curious about me and my country.

Some of this stuff seems obvious, but my own Wordlink roommate wrestled with a lot of these issues while he was in China. He was a great guy with good Mandarin skills from university, but this was his first time outside the US and I think a lot what he experienced here took him by surprise. There is no real way to know if you’ll like it or not before you arrive. Buy a good guidebook and read it thoroughly before you get on the plane. Track down people who have spent time in China and talk to them.

Classes
This is what you are coming for, so I’ll spend the most time on it.

Worldlink classes consist of three sessions: Speaking, comprehension and listening. Normally these are taught by different instructors, and each session uses a different BLCU text provided by Worldlink. You have two of the three sessions each day, varying over the week. Speaking and comprehension provide the backbone of vocabulary and grammar while the listening course uses cassettes to get you used to hearing and understanding native speakers. I strongly advise going to the BLCU bookstore, near Worldlink, and buying your own set of the cassettes for your listening session. The entire set for one textbook costs about 80 yuan (US$10). If you take the “intensive” course there is an additional afternoon session which is mostly extra reading and vocabulary.

The professors are mostly retired BLCU instructors and the instruction is Asian in style, which means a lot of working through the book by rote and not too much creativity. Homework consists of book exercises and memorizing vocabulary and characters. Different instructors encourage different amounts of discussion in class, but, generally, there is a serious lack of useful conversation time.

You are expected to use language exchange partners or tuition for conversation, but there was a chronic shortage of tutors at Worldlink while I was there. Language exchange partners are local students who swap their Mandarin coaching for your English. If you’re lucky, as I was, you can get a great one who will become a good local friend. If you are unlucky, you’ll get someone who was roped in by being invited to a party where “there will be foreigners” and who has no real idea what he or she is getting into. Several of my friends’ language partners were recruited in this way. There is no shortage of energetic local students advertising to be tutors and language exchange partners, so if Worldlink isn’t providing what you need, don’t be afraid to swallow the modest cost and strike out on your own. If you want to progress, there is no substitute for speaking Chinese to locals.

If you already have some Mandarin, Worldlink will give you a placement test when you arrive. It’s one-page, and no one actually speaks to you. One page is no basis for assessing someone’s language skills. If you’re having a bad day with your characters, or if there is some key vocabulary in the reading passage that trips you up, you get downgraded. If you’ve encountered the parable in the reading passage before and can explain it, you get placed high. To Worldlink’s credit, you can shift classes. They say you can do this during the first week, but they are fairly flexible about it throughout. If you feel uncomfortable with the level of the class you are in at any time, don’t be afraid to ask to change up or down.

Worldlink does not offer all course levels all the time, and they shoehorn a lot of students into the next-best class level. A good friend of mine was not willing to settle for next-best, and browbeat Worldlink into opening a new class at his level. That was fortunate for me since I ended up joining him after spending one weeks in a course that was too easy and then another week in one that was too hard.

But we learned another lesson: Worldlink’s quality of instructors varies wildly. Some are truly fantastic. Some are complete no-hopers. One friend of mine had his Mandarin skills ridiculed in class by his teacher. Not a constructive approach to instruction. Our new instructor was friendly and well meaning, but he had a complete inability to explain vocabulary and grammar in Mandarin, which some of the instructors are very good at. He also had not been trained for the listening class and had apparently never operated a cassette player before. There were some tragicomic moments as my friend and I used our bad Mandarin skills to explain to him how he was supposed to teach us.

Again to Worldlink’s credit, they eventually replaced him with a significantly better instructor with whom I enjoyed studying. But it took a second round of furious lobbying and threats by my energetic classmate. All in, the first three weeks of my twelve week program were something of a write-off. Bear this in mind if you are coming for a month-long program.

Students come to Worldlink for varying lengths of time, and the people in a class can change with time. In the nine weeks after I finalized my class our group ranged from two students to nine. I spent the final three weeks as the sole student in the class, which was at once useful and trying. Four to six people is very comfortable. Much above six and no one person gets to participate much in class. If there are more than ten people in your class at Beijing Chinese Language Academy, complain loud and hard. You are paying extra to avoid BLCU’s large classes.

Often the students have substantially different skill levels. That is not necessarily bad, but it can be frustrating for everyone involved at times. More frustrating, motivation levels can vary dramatically from people who are driven to learn to complete tourists who cut most of their classes and only manage to slow class down at the odd times they show up. We had a one student who was in our class for one month during which he attended six times and contributed nothing but carbon dioxide and surplus body heat.

I spoke to a lot of my friends and classmates about their experiences in Worldlink classes. Opinions ranged from those who felt it was tremendous experience to those who felt it was a total waste of time. On average my friends thought their classes were OK, but were disappointed because they felt that the classes could be significantly better. Better instructors, more conversation and less rote book-work were what many of them wanted.

There is no doubt that you can learn from the Beijing Chinese Language Academy classes taught at Worldlink. I did. But use the classes a springboard to get vocabulary and grammar. You’ll gain much more actual speaking and listening ability from talking to locals, whether they are language exchange partners, tutors, taxi drivers or shopkeepers, than you will from the classes.

Accommodation
My experience was great. I had asked for a three-person apartment, but demand was high with the rush of students returning to Beijing after SARS and I was “upgraded” to a two person apartment. The apartment complex, Huaqing Jiayuan (Leisure Garden), was in a neighborhood called Wudaokou. At first I was alarmed by how far the apartment was from the school, nearly four kilometers. But I rapidly got over that.

The apartment was clean, modern and spacious, if not overly stylish. Despite a very odd smell from the drains in the shower, it was a long way from the roach-infested pit I had mentally prepared myself for. Wudaokou was a great neighborhood to live in, with dozens of bars, restaurants, outdoor beer gardens, coffee houses and shops. A subway station right across from the apartment provided easy access to downtown. School was a ten minute bus ride away, but for most of the summer I walked the forty minutes to and from school. It was hot and dusty, but not unpleasant.

There were a few issues in the apartment that you should prepare for. Although there was a fine fridge and microwave, total cookware consisted of a frying pan, a cleaver and a cutting board. Dishes were four bowls and eight chopsticks. Fortunately, the supermarket downstairs had a fine assortment of ridiculously cheap kitchenware. Also, in Beijing you often prepay for your power, which I didn’t know at the time. Although that was supposed to be taken care of for us, our power went out a couple of times, requiring frantic calls to the landlady, Worldlink etc.

Worldlink’s website also made a few unsupported claims about the apartments. For instance, it says that “all apartments have Internet access”. It would better read, “Internet access can be arranged in all apartments.” It’s not hard to do, but you do have to pay for it yourself (80 yuan a month for broadband). Also, the website says that all rooms have desks and chairs. Well, I got to the apartment first, so I claimed the master bedroom, which did have a desk and a chair. My roommate was in the microscopic second bedroom, which fate he accepted with good cheer. But he had no desk or chair. The apartment also didn’t include the promised DVD player, but my roommate wasted no time prying one out of Worldlink. Ultimately, I was very comfortable there.

Some of my friends who had opted for the dormitories were not so lucky. The dorms are rudimentary but serviceable, but they were also full. The overflow was placed in the Chengfu Hotel, right off of Beijing’s fourth ring road, about two kilometers from campus. The Chengfu was, not to put too fine a point on it, popular with the local whores. It was an adventure for male and female students alike. It didn’t have either the convenience of the dormitories or the charm of Wudaokou.

Some students opt to stay at the Xijiao Hotel, also in Wudaokou. I put my father up there when he was visiting Beijing, and I have nothing bad to report.

Home stays with Chinese families are another option, and I can’t really comment on them much since I didn’t do one myself. I will tell you that my friends who did home stays had mixed experiences. Some thought it was great, some thought it was weird and uncomfortable. Based on what I have heard, I will tell you this: The language benefits of a home stay are real (see “Immersion” below). But be prepared to gamble a bit on the quality of your family, and be ready to surrender some privacy and independence regardless. If your situation is uncomfortable, ask Worldlink to move you.

Fellow Students
My fellow students were the best part of my Worldlink experience. In three months in the program there I made many very good friends, some of whom I hope to stay in touch with. The ready-made social group is hard to beat when you come to a new city, especially one where there can be difficult to make local friends quickly. People were friendly, supportive and fun.

They were, on average, younger than me. I was the rare mid-career professional, at the creaky age of 36. Many of my classmates were college students or grad students, with the occasional 30 something and one or two older people. But we were all strangers in Beijing, and I found it very natural to form friendships with people.

Having a group made it that much easier to navigate restaurants, explore the city, be tourists, share experiences, and generally survive three months in a strange place without feeling stranded. Having moved back to Beijing to work just two weeks ago, I miss that ready-made group of friends, and I feel much more isolated.

Immersion
The trade-off of the social group is that Worldlink is not “immersion” in Chinese. I was constantly surrounded by English speakers, and hung out with English speakers in my spare time. For a while, I worried about this. “Don’t take anyone to Beijing who will speak English with you,” said my tutor in Singapore (who is from Beijing). Well, I didn’t need to take anyone with me. I found them all there. But I think the trade off of immersion for the support and fun of great was worth it.

You can immerse yourself a bit more with a home stay, if you like. But unless you are relentlessly dedicated to speaking Mandarin all the time, you’ll end up speaking English to your classmates anyway, especially if you want any kind of social life.

There are some non-Worldlink programs that pledge students to speaking nothing but Mandarin. Whatever works for you. Immersion is great, but there is plenty you can accomplish by simply making the most of opportunities to speak the language. My fellow-students and I had a series of “speak Mandarin” dinners where we spoke in Chinese to each other. But it seems a shame to limit all of your discourse to the lowest, linguistic common denominator for three months. If you want to immerse yourself, go backpacking on your own for a month through rural China or get yourself an English teaching job in the sticks for six months (not hard). Worldlink won’t do it.

Extras
Worldlink promotes a few bells and whistles to flesh out their package, including the weekend excursions and social outings, elective classes and the student-lounge with Internet access. As with everything else about Worldlink, it’s a grab-bag of good and bad.

I never did any of the weekend trips, although they were very popular. They seemed quite expensive to me for what they were (often 1500 yuan or more for two days by train to Xian or Inner Mongolia, which is deceptively close to Beijing). Often fifty, sixty or more students went on the trips, and they were basically package tourism. Here is your schedule. On the bus, off the bus, eat here, sleep there. If you don’t mind that, go for it. A lot of people had good fun.

For places like the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace I suggest skipping the Worldlink trips and doing it on your own, or with a small group of friends. It’s easy to hire a driver and get to those places and more fun to chart your own course when you’re there.

I only did one elective, a course on Chinese character writing. It covered stroke order and radicals. It was OK. I think the electives are very hit-and-miss, and I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing anything by only taking up one of my allotted four.

As for the student lounge, the computers are full of spyware and tend to run badly, but they do generally work. Think twice before accessing your Internet banking. Demand is very high at peak hours (right before class and right after). If you have a laptop, it’s a better bet to bring it and plug it into the Worldlink network. The lounge is often a disaster area of pizza boxes and beer bottles. It’s not so good for lounging, but reasonably tolerable for checking your webmail and meeting your friends before lunch.

Management and Organization
Worldlink is bang-up at processing your application and getting you enrolled in the program. They will meet you at the airport, just like they say they will. They will have someplace tolerable for you to stay. The fundamentals work fine.

The devil is in the details, however. As an academic program, Worldlink seems fairly haphazard. It all comes together in the end, but with rough edges. As we learned, if you don’t end up with the right class or the right instructor, you need to be prepared to make things happen. (Or, if you’re like me, find a friend who is prepared to make things happe). Things like tests and attendance are all fairly random, and depend a great deal on the individual instructor.

Be prepared to be taken by surprise here and there, and to have to ask to office to help you with things that you might feel they ought to automatically take care of, like buying electricity for your apartment. The upside is that the staff were generally very helpful when I did have to ask for them to take care of things.

Was it worth it?
Unquestionably. If you want to come to study Chinese in Beijing, Worldlink makes it easy. The courses, the accommodation, the visa paperwork and the ready-made gang of friends are all taken care of. It’s the easiest way to get there, and it takes the burden of organization out of your hands.

But you can expect some compromises in the classes and the quality of service. That’s the deal you make. I had a good experience, but I worked hard to speak Mandarin with regular Chinese people on a daily basis, and I had a head-start on the language. I also knew exactly what I wanted to get out of being in Beijing for three months, and I achieved that. Even though that didn’t all have to do with Worldlink, they served the purpose I needed and so I feel good about the experience. Not everyone felt the same. My roommate thought the whole thing was a poor second to his Duke University language program of the year before.

It would be easy to come to Worldlink and piss the time away and not learn much, or to be scandalized by a poor experience and give up on it (which some people do). You’re paying a lot considering the local costs, so be willing to go to the mat with Worldlink to get your money’s worth if you feel jerked around. Be clear about what you want to get out of the experience and do what you need to in order to achieve that. Come into it with your eyes open and can be worth your while.

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