20 January 2006
Collaborators
But the point of this is not the construction of the so-called eco-city, but what the Arup interviewee had to say. He may have been company director Peter Head, widely quoted elsewhere as the genius of the plan, and whose company has just been 'given the go ahead' on the project, according to The Observer.
Whoever he was, he was determined put across a picture of an improving ecological situation in China, and indeed claimed to have seen improvement over 30 years of visits, to the point where Beijing's sky was now blue.
The willingness of foreign businessmen to roll over to please the Chinese government is a constant source of nausea not to mention incredulity not only at their cupidity but their naivety. But this is only technically short of as blatent a lie as any you will find in China Daily itself.
The interviewer was rightly sceptical, pointing out the constant reports of major pollution issues, and the chump from Arup remarked that he was happy to bring good news.
People like this, who parrot completely false views of the government's 'progress', are collaborators in the suppression of ordinary people in China and contributors to the pollution that is shortening the lives of so many. Stating that things are fine and improving in a way that gets broadcast worldwide simply allows this truly appalling state of affairs to continue for longer.
And by an entertaining coincidence even China Daily published an article today throwing the lie back into the Arup's teeth, and part of the lesson Arup needs to learn that collaborating with the Chinese government is guaranteed to leave you with egg on face.
Full story here, but the salient bits are:
The skies in Beijing yesterday may have been blue, but still the air quality was the second-worst out of 84 major cities across China.
Beijing's air pollution index (API) was 139, with only Lanzhou, capital of Northwest China's Gansu Province, worse, at 142. On the list, which is released daily, 15 major cities including Shanghai had APIs higher than 100, which means the air is "slightly polluted."
Experts said that in such an environment, patients with heart and respiratory diseases should reduce outdoor activities.
...
According to Zhang Lijun, vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), about one-fifth of urban citizens are living in seriously polluted environments.
If the API can be kept under 100, about 178,000 Chinese lives could be saved every year, he said, during the Forum of Strategic Approaches to Regional Air Quality Management in China, held yesterday in Beijing.
Although China has made some progress in air pollution control and the air quality has improved, the country still has tough tasks ahead, especially in the control of sulphur dioxide discharge.
It is expected that in 2020, the country's release of sulphur dioxide will reach 280 million tons, 160 million tons more than the environment can handle, according to SEPA statistics.
In fact these cities frequently have great rolling banks of grey air, reducing visibility and making the eyes smart and the nose run. I'd like to take the smug Arup man's British passport, burn it, and make him take a People's Republic of China one, and let him have to live in the cesspool he's helping to create.
Note that the island being singled out for mass redevelopment is currently agricultural land and also a sanctuary for wildfowl, as The Observer mentions, so it's no much of an eco-project to cover it in concrete. It's also one of the locations that people forcibly relocated from land flooded by the Three Gorges Dam were dumped. For them it's out of the frying pan into the fire.
In a recent editorial the Washington Post was discussing Cisco Systems' supply of Internet censorship software to the Chinese goverment, Microsoft's censoring of blog pages and withdrawal of Michael Anti's blog page (although no one seems to have remarked that either that's up again or someone's hijacked it), and Yahoo!'s handing over of the name of a blogger who is now spending ten years in prison. It labelled businessmen who suck up to the Chinese government 'moral dunces'.
In what initially looked this week as though it might be a bright spot in the darkness of general collaboration and caving in, Reuters was reported as standing up to the Chinese Ambassador in London's attempt to have them deny two reporters entry to an event at Reuters' London headquarters at which he was going to speak. The story I initially read in The Independent contained the following statement from the news agency: "Reuters has never kept any diplomats or journalists from attending one of these events."
The story mentioned a claim from Reuters to have been in China since the 1800s, which helped to make it look even more heroic to stand up to the ambassador's demands and risk so much, at least compared to the general spinelessness of other businesses, although surely in a normal world we ought to regard standing up for press freedom against the threats of a bully as a sine qua non of the very existence of a news agency. But these are not normal times, and a Dow Jones report, while using the same quote, anyway comes out rather differently:
Dow Jones report
One of the journalists from The Epoch Times, John Smithies, told Dow Jones Newswires that Reuters had told him on Monday afternoon of the Chinese embassy's threat to cancel the ambassador's speech. He said that he had been put "under a lot of pressure" by Reuters not to attend the event, but had decided that it was "a question of press freedom."
A spokeswoman for Reuters said that the company had contacted The Epoch Times journalists on Monday afternoon, but had simply reiterated the concerns expressed by the Chinese embassy. The spokeswoman said Reuters had made it clear to the journalists that they wouldn't be turned away if they still wanted to attend the event.
Dow Jones is a competitor of Reuters, so a little schadenfreude might reasonably be expected. But if the Epoch Times reporter is speaking the truth, then so much for the bright spot, as apparently Reuters was craven and only put on a brave face when left with no option.
To call anyone working for The Epoch Times a 'reporter' is to stretch the meaning of the word, it might be added. The paper is presumably Falun Gong owned or funded, and is about as dispassionate about the movement as China Daily is, but in the opposite direction. The ambassador would be right in assuming that he would be asked embarrassing questions, and right to assume that his of necessity evasive answers or refusals to answer (perhaps on the matter of torture of Falun Gong members) would be reported negatively in The Epoch Times.
The paper's print edition, which makes the incident a front page story, does not use the word 'pressure' with reference to Reuters but the ambassador, and has one of the journalists saying 'Reuters offered for a similar event with the same guest list to be organized which The Epoch Times could attend at a later date, but without the Ambassador. The two journalists decided not to succumb to the embassy's pressure and to go ahead with their plan to cover the talk.'
The Epoch Times piece gives credit to Reuters for not cancelling the event, raising the question of whether Dow Jones misquoted the 'journalist', the same person who says in that paper's piece, '"Reuter's decision upheld press freedom in this country," said Smithies [one of the 'journalists' in question]. "I fell grateful to them for this; it took great strength on their part [to cancel the event]."
With typical Chinese government disregard for anyone's welfare but its own, the cancellation was only confirmed 1.5 hours before the event itself, which left those who had travelled long distances and the Epoch Times journalists having a drink instead.
And there's the rub. The Epoch Times can't afford to criticise Reuters in its own pages (although it's true Reuters did cancel the event, if it did bring pressure it is shameful to have done so) because it wants to go on in the rest of the story to bang the drum about the importance of its own role as a speaker of truth about the Chinese government and thorn in Beijing's flesh, now given credibility by the ambassador's cancellation of his speech.
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