Imagethief

Tag: Media

  • How to write a generic China bird flu story

    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.

  • Are PR and MNCs corrupting Chinese media?

    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.

  • The abstraction of diplomacy and the reality of rocks through windows

    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.

  • My career in Chinese showbiz is launched

    As a white, suburban American, I enjoy being someplace where I am considered a novelty. Although Beijing has plenty of foreigners, especially in the university district of Haidian, white people are still sometimes greeted with the same shocked amazement also reserved for bearded ladies, elephant men, and other freaks of nature. This is especially true in neighborhoods off the beaten path, and with children, bless their ignorant, rude little hearts.

    Being freaky looking creates odd opportunities. That’s why, this week, I was excited to launch a new career as an actor in Chinese television commercials. It is clearly only a matter of time before I am paired with babe-alicious Karen Mok in the next Hong Kong blockbuster.

    But first, the details on my big break.

    Alright, not that big a break. In payback for all the Chinese people working miserably around the world as nuclear reactor fuel rod polishers, Foreign students in Beijing are often dragooned as cheap labor. China has an entire seedy underworld of young, low-priced English teachers working for meager communist Shekels, kitchen scraps and free lodging in swampy, mosquito ridden apartments. Unusual looks also make foreigners prime targets for recruitment as models and actors, regardless of talent or looks.

    A few days ago, on the way to my gym, I was waylaid by a hyperactive, young Chinese man named Andy who explained to me that he was looking for foreigners to appear in a television commercial for “medical equipment”. He staked out the gym on purpose and had approached me because I was “strong looking”. Now, if this come-on doesn’t ring your alarm bells, you need to check your defense mechanisms and send me your credit cards. Being a sucker for new experiences, I told Andy I was interested. He duly took a snapshot of me and scampered off with a promise to call if I was selected.

    Well, I say modestly, of course I was selected. Everyone was selected. They were hard up for lao wais. For four hours of filming I would receive three hundred yuan (about S$60). Well, of course, normally I don’t get out of bed for less than $30,000 per day, but I had nothing else planned. Still, I was annoyed that the producers rejected my demands for a forty foot trailer, a private all-female massage team, and a nonstop supply of red M&Ms candies imprinted with Mao Zedong’s likeness on one side and the Chinese flag on the other. Nevertheless, I would have the exquisite pleasure of knowing that millions of Beijing residents would be exposed to my inglorious kisser during their late-night television viewing.

    At 7:30AM Saturday morning I arrived at the rendezvous where met my fellow exotics, Stuart (English), Andreas (German), Tony (American), and a Tunisian woman whose name I never got. We were bundled into a van and whisked into the suburban sticks.

    Candidly, my fellow thespians and I were a bit nervous on the drive. We had no idea where we were going or what we were supposed to be pitching, and our van was being driven by a beefy, bullet-headed Chinese man who could easily have been sent from central casting to fill the role of Triad Enforcer no. 4. He also sounded exactly like Wolfman Jack would have if he had spoken Mandarin. I kept waiting for him to introduce the Supremes.

    Two hours of nasty traffic later, we arrived in the suburb of Huairou, at the Joyful Birth Garden Conference Center. I pulled the name from a posted slogan that translated, “The Joyful Birth Garden faces society and all walks of life earnestly”. An alternate translation replaces “earnestly” with “with sobriety”. Take that as you will.

    If you were a recovering alcoholic, prone to DTs, the Joyful Birth Garden would be an unnerving place to spend your time. The main building is a futuristic, angular, concrete megalith with a spooky absence of windows on the second floor. Werner Erhardt would like it. The entrance to the building is reached by a causeway across an artificial lake. The architecture looks crossbred from Logan’s Run, Robocop, and the Road to Wellville.

    Across the lake from the main building are guest residences that are even more surreal. Each set of residential buildings followed a different architectural theme. These were, in order: American Suburban Tract House; Pseudo Gothic Cathedral; Ancient Roman Forum; and Midwestern Industrial White Ghetto. The disturbing atmosphere was amplified by near complete desertion, creating an eerie, last-men-on-earth feel.

    If we were a bit anxious on the drive, the Joyful Birth Garden had us all but planning escape contingencies. We were escorted into the complex by our Chinese companions, one of whom was ominously cradling an aluminum softball bat. But our anxiety was short-lived. It turned out there was an entire film crew already on site, ready to go. There was a camera, lights, boom mix, sound guy, makeup, the works. We were not, after all, going to be rolled, or turned into cult zombies.

    We were, however, going to flog…Hotpop™.

    It took us a while to figure out what Hotpop was. What was immediately clear from the props was that it was not medical equipment, but medicine. At first we were convinced it was a Viagra-like virility pill. After interrogating the crew we then concluded that it was either a muscle-growth promoter or a stimulant of some kind. I have little doubt that its sale would be prohibited or at least heavily regulated in most developed countries. But it’s over-the-counter in China.

    Our attempts to divine the nature of Hotpop were complicated by the bizarre, out of context lines that we had to deliver. Like the translators working on Monty Python’s “funniest joke in history”, each of us had only a piece of the puzzle. We even received our lines on separate little strips of paper.

    I can think of no better way to capture the strangeness of what we were filming than to walk you through the vignettes and lines. (See the photos in the Hotpop! Gallery.) First, Tony and the nameless Tunisian girl, who had vanished for an hour to be put through hair and makeup, pretend to be a married couple. They push an empty baby stroller (the frame will be cropped) down a shaded path. Tony gazes down at Ms. Tunisia adoringly and says,

    “18 Hotpop a day and my performance has never been better, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

    She gazes up at him serenely and nods knowingly. You can see where the Viagra theory came from. It took a few takes to get this one right.

    I’m next. Wardrobe dresses me in the ghastliest Hawaiian shirt imaginable and makes me wear my sunglasses on my forehead. If Magnum P.I. had a pimp cousin named Lyle, he would have looked just like I did. I am seated at a table with a coffee cup, and I say to the camera, as I positively radiate avuncular, yet pimplike sincerity,

    “Now, almost no Americans don’t know hotpop!”

    When I explained to the director that this sentence was ungrammatical in English, he dismissed my concerns, explaining (I think) that it would all be dubbed into Mandarin anyway.

    Later, I embellish my original line by holding up a Hotpop box and proclaiming to the camera, “Hotpop is great!” (Thrusts box at camera.) “I love Hotpop!” I still have no fucking idea what Hotpop is. But I am sure Lyle Magnum would love it.

    Stuart is next. His wardrobe consists of a fantastically nerdy “Lee Jeans” baseball cap and the softball bat. All of China will soon think that “Lee Jeans” is a Major League team, and start looking for Stuart’s rookie card. Stuart, bat menacingly on shoulder, delivers a vaguely psychotic, “Wow, Hotpop!” for the camera, looking like a high school nerd who has finally been pushed too far.

    The final performer in our group was Andreas. His priceless line, delivered with a deadpan, German lilt, is,

    “Hotpop is great. I can’t live without Hoptpop!”

    Throughout our performances we were patiently coached and cajoled by the director. However, in a true Lost in Translation Moment, all direction was in Mandarin, so we spent a lot of time using our psychic powers to discern exactly how he wanted us to nuance our shillery. At one point, as they attempted to coach the desired incandesce out of Stuart, we were treated to the spectacle of several Chinese crew members delivering an emphatic chorus of, “Wow, Hotpop!” I’ll never need to take drugs again.

    Eventually, it was all in the can. A second crew of foreign actors had shown up to do the afternoon filming of athletic vignettes, and we lounged on the lawn while they worked. I will forever be grateful that I was not tapped for one of the shirtless segments, or the dreaded Speedo appearance. If there is one thing Beijing doesn’t need, it is a broadcast of me, all hairy paleness, dressed in nothing but a postage-stamp sized swimsuit and a bathing cap. Hotpop this, baby!

    At the end of the day the four hour shoot had turned into a twelve-hour full day. I didn’t mind. I was 300 yuan richer; a good payday in a town where a draft Beijing Beer is only 3 yuan. Plus I had been treated to one of the most pricelessly bizarre experiences of my life.

    And, of course, I launched my career in Chinese showbiz. I don’t know when the Hotpop ad will hit the airwaves, but I am already looking forward to my imminent Ringo Starr moment, when I sprint down Sanlitun pursued by legions of lust-maddened Chinese women all dying to sample my staglike, Hotpop-enhanced powers.