Anniversary

Today is my birthday, a Sunday, and coincidentally, Chinese New Year.

So what am I doing?

Working, of course.

I'm still trudging though the same 2000 words of introduction to a new guide book on Beijing and Shanghai I've been looking at for weeks. It's a long time since I made such heavy going of something. The three local journalists I know best are all equally in a slump, and one of them puts it down to the dismal January weather. But then all three want to get out of journalism.

One gift was Robert Fisk's new book, 'The Great War for Civilisation'. I don't know why I ask for books as gifts, since it will join great towers of others on already overburdened shelves, and remain equally unread for a long time to come, as all I'll have time to read (in brief pre-slumber half hour bursts) will be books related to subjects I'm writing on. Just looking at the piles of unread material depresses me.

But I did quickly read Fisk's introduction, and catch that whiff of saltpetre that's always to be found in his writings, whether because he has spent so much time looking over the edge into the pit of hell or from his own sulphurous anger at what he's seen, isn't clear. Fisk is one of the very few people who represents in reality what we'd like to think foreign correspondents are really like: a man not floating on the surface, not flown in for a five-minute star reporter overview and then off to the next story, not forced by his medium to reduce complicated issues to the news-as-entertainment video clips of shallow and self-indulgent children's television such as CNN, and not someone too busy posing as a star reporter to get any real understanding at all. Probably equally disliked by editors, interview subjects, certainly politicians, and at least half of his readership, for the clarity and forceful expression of strongly held views on matters that may mean life or death to hundreds of thousands of people. His articles change people's minds.

I have no ambition to be any such kind of person, but if there were more like him then I'd become someone who buys and reads newspapers regularly. And if I find time, amidst all the trivia of what I do for a living, to read any books not relevant to what I'm writing, his will be first.

But right now it's back to work. And happy birthday to me.

Oh, and Chinese New Year is really catching on. My wife went out to throw something in the dumpster (skip) behind our apartment building, and some down-and-out rooting through there for items to sell (white Caucasian, of course) said "Gong hei fat choi" to her.


Postscript: In my continuing desperation to avoid work I went over to the EastSouthWestNorth blog, which I really must add to the list of links on the side of this page as it's become regular reading for me, and is a rare, truly worthwhile Chinese blog, offering translations of mainland media and links to the best of other China-related blogging:

EastSouthWestNorth

There was a link to a CounterPunch story about the opposite kind of foreign correspondent, that brainless strutting cockerel Nicholas Kristof, whose articles on China are typical of the worst pabulum produced on the country, and whose China Wakes! might be the most airheaded book on China ever, were there not so much competition; every page an embarrassment. Read on, laugh, and write a letter of complaint to the editor of the New York Times (as I've done in the past):

Nicholas Kristof's Brothel Problem

Accuracy

I've had a copy of Harriet Sargeant's Shanghai for some years without getting round to reading it. Buying it was part of a general policy of picking up most of what comes out on Beijing and Shanghai, but a quick glance at the author's opening remarks made the book seem already dated (it was originally published in 1991), her perceptions rather shallow, and her qualifications for tackling her subject rather limited. It seemed the title would probably be little more than a jobbing author's survey of the plentiful English-language materials of the 1920s and 30s.

I still haven't read enough to decide if that snap judgement was correct, but being in the middle of writing a 2000-word general introduction to Beijing and Shanghai for a forthcoming guide book, I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust, opened it at random, and my eyes lit immediately upon a reference to 'Thomas' sub-machine guns.

I can't claim to know much about machine guns of the first part of the last century, and it's perfectly possible there was a Thomas machine gun of that era, but it seems to me very likely (as it probably will to you) that it was the famous Thompson sub-machine gun that was intended here.

I noted with some interest that I immediately felt disinclined to read any further. I had expectedly quickly to trip Sergeant up over some Sino-technicality, some commonplace of the multiple misunderstandings that creep into most China commentaries of the 'May you live in interesting times' or '5000 years of culture' type, but instead this seemed to be a commonplace of general knowledge. So what chance that the rest of the book would be accurate?

However, I remember once seeing a comment on my Beijing in which I'd gone to the effort to research and set out the addresses of Chinese embassies and consulates in major English-speaking countries and multiple other European ones, saying that I'd made an error in either the postal code or telephone area code (I forget which) of the embassy (as it then was) in Bonn. If I couldn't get such a simple thing right, the comment argued, what chance for the rest of the book?

Of course my knowledge of Beijing was rather more extensive than my knowledge of Bonn, and the information I gave was supplied by the Chinese embassy itself, which, if it was just about any other country under discussion, ought to be regarded as about an authoritative source as it would be possible to find. These days double-checking such information is far easier, but then I was scrambling to put the book to bed, and had to take the chance that the Chinese knew their own contact information.

But it's true that even tiny errors almost irrelevant to the main topic can have that deflationary effect on the reader, and this is why it is the least comprehensive and detailed guide books that are often regarded as the most authoritative--remarkably frustrating to those of us who try to dig up as much as possible, and instead of saying, 'Take a bus out of town east to the village of X' (enough, it appears, to support claims of authority) name the right bus station to start from, and give frequencies, journey times, prices, and a description of the route, in the full knowledge that it will only take a small change in price, something over which we have no control, to stimulate accusations of inaccuracy (often disingenuously by competitors incognito in public places such as Amazon reviews).

Undoubtedly I should give Sergeant a second chance.

False melancholia

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

This is Jaques, from Act IV Scene I of As You Like It (which I was watching last night when I should have been getting on with something more important to meet an imminent deadline), and it suddenly struck me that this is something of the attitude of the coffee-house wannabe travel writer, and indeed many a published one.

There's nothing fake about Jaques, who proves his wit and general despair at the state of things in many a comically depressing speech. But it's his manner that appeals so much to the wannabes, so many of whom think that striking the attitude of being a travel writer makes them by definition both thoughtful and interesting, and apparently makes it unnecessary to demonstrate that by writing in an interesting and thoughtful manner. 'I sat in the café and pondered China's long history,' and other dimwitted dross is supposedly interesting simply by virtue of who I am. It's no different from thinking that adopting a tragic manner and wearing a baggy shirt makes you a poet, or from thinking that the belief that there's a great novel inside you makes you a novelist. In all cases you have to deliver the goods to merit the reader's attention.

In times past readers might tolerate your tedious personality and lack of perception for want of being able to have your experiences themselves. But these days it's the non-travellers who are the exception and most travel writing is done for those who might like to have the same experiences, not for those who never will. So you'd better be offering something vivid about the destination, and not some teenage moody diary (or blog) entry.

Not that Jacques is clearly saying (although a later speech seems to suggest he may be, and I quite like to read it that way) that it's his travels that make him melancholy, but that his melancholy, compounded from many simples, is the Elizabethan equivalent of an iPod, and gives him something to think about while he's travelling. I often fall into a brown study on long Chinese bus and train journeys, but in general travel is an irritating process, full of tedious practicalities that tend to get in the way of a decent bit of melancholy, except in anticipation of the trip to the airport and all the rushing around. There's no time for sitting around in cafés pretending to be interesting.

Rosalind's retort offers a more down-to-earth reason for melancholy: A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad; I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then, to have seen much and so have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Rich eyes and poor hands: now that describes travel writing pretty well.

Sadly those who can actually deliver Shakespeare-quality material as opposed to just posing in cafés (or in print) should be looking for employment elsewhere. Rare the editor who has any interest in printing anything thoughtful, and the reduction of all travel writing to simpering directory pieces of the Ten Places to go Dwarf-Tossing kind continues apace.

Collaborators

Link

This morning I came in part-way through a BBC World Service radio interview with someone from Arup, the engineering firm, concerning the development of a new city for 250,000 people (500,000 in other accounts) on an island near Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangzi River. I haven't had time to listen and see if the story came round again, and the BBC World Service Web page has nothing on it, although the Observer has a story on the link given above.

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.

Blind leading the blind

I don't generally quote Oriental-List postings here, but I found the other day that some of my observations, now labelled a 'rant' had appeared on other websites/blogs. (See link on right for Oriental-List details.) This was inspired by a query concerning Xin Tiandi, the tarted-up Shanghai shopping centre, which led me to read the article from The Economist mentioned, and to comment on it in detail. Entertainingly, a Chinese academic has just been quoted making much the same general point as I did about the utter hopelessness of most Western commentary on China. Here's the original posting:

Susan forwarded an article from The Economist, and said:

>I haven't been to Shanghai and I am curious if any list members have
>been to the Xintiandi complex and what their impressions are. I don't
>recall ever even hearing it mentioned, despite it being described
>below as both "a haven for expatriates" and "Shanghai's number one
>tourist attraction for Chinese visitors."

Shanghai is a kind of theme park maintained by the government especially to mislead stupid foreigners, and particularly lazy journalists and legions of lemming-like investors, and distract them from reality. And it works very well.

Nearly all the programmes and articles on China come from Shanghai these days, and fall into the 'Oooh!', 'Aaaah!' category, but few of the commentators, and none of those parachuted in for five minute visits (such as many involved in the BBC series of programmes on China last week) seem to have their eyes open. It's all, 'amazing', 'fast-growing', 'unstoppable', and then a repeat of some version of the usual canard that it's inevitable that China will be the world's dominant superpower or the largest economy by next Tuesday or 2020 or whenever. No one seems able to see just how many of the shiny towers are incomplete or complete but unoccupied, nor to venture, oh, 1km away from The Bund to see what a ramshackle mess the overwhelming majority of the city is, let alone to venture into the countryside for a dose of reality.

Really Shanghai is not the place to look for much hope of sensitivity towards architectural heritage, and Xin Tiandi is as much a sham as the rest. The Economist's article is shallow and at times fatuous.

The Economist said:

>THESE days, the Chinese like to joke, their national bird is the crane.

Oh, definitely haven't read this one in several other places recently. Has anyone in China actually ever heard this said by a Chinese? Given that the Chinese for crane (the bird) and crane (the construction machine) are completely different it doesn't seem too likely. Or does it fall into the 'May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese say' category, when in fact there seems to be no evidence that they've ever said anything of the kind (Chris Patten, who used this on a radio programme broadcast from Shanghai last week, please note).

>The results have been largely disastrous, reckons Benjamin Wood, of
>Wood + Zapata, a Boston-based architectural firm, who has worked in
>China since 1998 and blames foreign architects for much of what has
>transpired.

All those tens of thousands of square miles of shoddy, white-tiled, gimcrack buildings? Obviously foreigners' fault. Nothing to do with Chinese urban planning, bubble economy building, greed, lack of aesthetics, making do, or plain corruption on the part of the Chinese. I happened to sit next to a man on an airplane a while ago who was part of Shenzhen's town planning department, and who claimed that Shenzhen was now more beautiful than Paris or Rome. I assumed they must have
pulled it down completely and started again, but no, when I woke up then next morning and looked out of the window it was as hideous and tawdry as ever. He wasn't handing out any credit to foreigners, luckily.

>China's commercial capital is starting to take on the chic of Paris,
>the sophistication of New York and the futuristic vibes of Tokyo.

If there was any sentence likely to reinforce my view that The Economist is essentially the economic and political equivalent of a fashion magazine, this might be it. Apparently written entirely for its rhythm, this sentence contains barely a speck of truth.

> It already boasts the world's fastest train (the Maglev that takes
>eight minutes to run the 30 km from Pudong airport into the city),

It doesn't run into the city. It stops on the edge, and is a white elephant which will never recoup its costs.

>the longest underwater pedestrian tunnel (under the Huangpu river)

Unless something new has recently been built, it's not pedestrian. Passengers are carried across in little computer-controlled cars past a laser and neon light show which makes the average fairground haunted house look like something of Star Wars sophistication.

>and the world's tallest hotel-the 88-storey Grand Hyatt, complete with
>the world's highest swimming pool and longest laundry chute.

It's the world's highest hotel, not the tallest, not least since the hotel only occupies the upper floors.

But who cares about accuracy. There's much else to complain about (or laugh at) in the article, but let's get back to Xin Tiandi and the saving of architectural heritage:

>Most interesting, it has Xintiandi, a two-hectare (nine-acre) complex
>of hip restaurants, bars and shops in an open, elegant, low-rise style
>that cost $170m to develop and is one of the first examples of China
>preserving its own architecture.

Anyone else care to start the long list of all the 'preservation' projects in China which have preceded this?

Wandering around there reviewing restaurants in October last year, I wondered if there was a single original brick. Xin Tiandi is 'preserved' in the sense of taking everything down and putting it up again. It's less 'preserved' than even the Old Railway Station building in Beijing, which has become a shopping mall. The perfectly mortared exteriors carry signs for familiar brands such as Starbucks, and the interiors entirely remodeled with the removal of most internal walls in order to make spaces large enough to function as shops as restaurants, and there are other structural adjustments wherever it's convenient to make them. It doesn't cost the quote $170 million just to tidy up some old buildings. It costs that to more-or-less rebuild them from scratch. Little of it is now the housing it originally was, but if you want a sophisticated foreign meal at New York prices, it's the place to go. It's Disneyfied China, with the stress on souvenirs and sake-based cocktails (or whatever the latest fad is). It's a pleasant, safe, and utterly sanitized. And in a move which ought to make anyone cackle, in what is effectively a vast temple to consumerism affordably only by a tiny percentage of China's population, there's a museum to the founding
of the Communist Party of China, the soi-disant party of the people, which took place here.

>Shui On, the Hong Kong developer behind the project, and Mr Wood,
>hired as its architect, have spent the past seven years painstakingly
>preserving original materials like Shanghai's unique grey bricks and
>art deco features such as 1920s lintels and columns.

I have to wonder what makes Shanghai's 'unique' grey bricks different from all the grey bricks one sees in old buildings across the country. I also have to wonder what 'art deco features' are doing in 'one of the first examples of China preserving its own architecture' unless art deco was another one of those things that the Chinese actually invented when we thought it was us. There may be 1920s material in Xin Tiandi, but that doesn't make it art deco, of course.

>The group also hunted down the original drawings to replicate
>structures that had decayed beyond repair. Nothing like it had been
>attempted before.

Pure nonsense. The Chinese regularly rebuild ancient buildings from scratch and have been doing so for a long time, sometimes claiming to be working from original plans, sometimes just making it up. I think the writer has merely read the press release and taken his research no further than a comfy chair, possibly in a different country.

>Xintiandi, originally a haven for expatriates, is now Shanghai's
>number one tourist attraction for Chinese visitors, says Vincent Lo,
>chairman of Shui On.

It's still a haven for expatriates and a number of sufficiently wealthy Chinese. As at foreigner hang-outs elsewhere in China, everyone else is coming to gawp at foreign behaviour and the gentrification and airbrushing of their own heritage in pursuit of the tourist dollar. But it's look, don't touch.

>While the preservation costs mean Xintiandi itself is not making
>money, it has had a halo effect, pushing property prices in the
>surrounding area to the highest in Shanghai-and hence mainland China.

And, of course, much of the surrounding property has been developed by Shui On or its partners. Hong Kong development companies are not noted for their philanthropy.

>"Xintiandi shows that Chinese architecture can be fashionable. It
>shows old buildings can have both economic and social value," says Mr
>Lo.

But apparently you must kick out the residents, and transform their homes almost out of all recognition into trendy shops. Presumably they had an 'economic and social value' to their residents before probably (as happens all the time in China) an unholy alliance of bribed local government officials and property developers likely kicked them out against their will for compensation completely inadequate either to the costs of finding somewhere else or the vast profits to be made from
redevelopment, directly or indirectly. No mention of this aspect of redevelopment in the generally joy joy luck luck happy happy article.

>Indeed Xintiandi is being replicated in cities throughout China, both
>by Shui On, which has a similar project in Hangzhou, south-west of
>Shanghai, and by copycats, who have been caught photographing the
>original's features, down to the carvings above the lintels.

I'll admit to having missed the carvings. Perhaps these were art deco after all, and borrowed from the West, or added in the 'preservation'. I've also visited the Shui On development in Hangzhou. It's on a much smaller scale and about as authentic as Xin Tiandi.

>Chinese architecture has rarely been this confident.

Um... So if we're really talking about 'preservation' what's that got to do with how Chinese architecture feels about itself now?

Pleasant as Xin Tiandi is, in an air-con, air-brushed kind of way, there's only one word for all of this:

Humbug.

The 'glimmer of hope' is someone striking a match to blow architectural heritage sky high.

[One final thought in the defence of the author. Stories have their own momentum, that momentum is currently of seeing Shanghai as representing China's shining future however blind this may be, that's the story that editors who've never been there want to see, and there's little market for anything else.]

End quote.

It was a pleasure therefore to come across a translation of a Southern Weekend report by one Zhang Jiehai (Shanghai Academy of Science, Social Sciences Academy), making much the similar point about Western research and reporting, and ridiculing Western conclusions about China's economic power and massive progress based solely on two-day visits to major cities. The whole article is available in translation on the EastSouthWestNorth blog:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060107_1.htm

and the Chinese version at

http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/southnews/zmzg/200601050853.asp

but here are Zhang's conclusions:

'Here, I wish to solemnly tell everybody -- for any research done by a foreigner on China, you can put up a question mark first. Especially, those foreigners who come to make some short trips in several major cities in China and are greeted and shown around by Chinese people. You might as well as not listen to what they say. That is not because they are stupid, but because the situation of our nation is too special.'

Zhang is being kind here. Undoubtedly some of the reports are simply stupid, some gullible, and some at best lazy. You can make our own minds up as to in which box the Economist piece on Xin Tiandi belongs.

'Generally speaking, their error was this -- they only paid attention to the development and prosperity of Beijing and Shanghai and they don't know about the poverty and under-development of the rural villages in the central and western parts; they only pay attention to the styles of the hotel lobbies in China and they do not know how many elementary school students did not even have desks; they only pay attention to the super-purchasing power of Chinese tourists, and they do not know that Chinese tourists seldom get to go out of the country and when they do, all the relatives will ask them to buy things -- thus, they are not only spending their savings of many years but they are also spending the savings of many years of other people; they only note the trade imbalance between China and the United States, but they do not know that if we ship a planeload of clothing, we will not get an airplane back; they notice that they see stuff everywhere that is made in China, but they not know that there isn't much that is invented in China.

'I am saying all this because while looking at the mainstream of rapid development in our country, it is also necessary the grim side of the problem too. As for the comments by foreigners on China, we do not have to feel humbled and we do not have to be complacent. After all, we are the ones who understand Chinese matters best and we must rely on ourselves to solve China's problems.'

The last sentence shows interesting doublethink. There are no more unreliable sources than Chinese ones, and Zhang began by admitting that the least reliable reports came from people 'greeted and shown around by Chinese people'. The Chinese will not only mislead foreigners wherever possible, but almost their entire media output, and their education system, is entirely dedicated to misleading themselves.

Accurate information about China is almost impossible to come by, but since this is known to be the case, it only seems reasonable to expect Western media to be a little more sceptical and investigative, and not to feed us bland reproductions of Xinhua production-is-up, the-minorities-are-happy media reports, or indeed equally bland reproductions of Hong Kong property developer press releases.

On misreporting also see this earlier post:

Misrepresentation

And this:

Luckily someone else said it first

Best of 2005

As we relaxed over a coffee and began to feel the pangs resulting from our first game of squash in five months, I was talking about 2005 to my partner, who was grumbling that he'd got fat while going nowhere, and at least I'd got fat (although I'm not in his league) while travelling the world, and began to think about the highlights of last year's travelling.


Antarctica

For many on my cruise (and even a little for me) visiting Antarctica had a certain trival 'complete the set' quality--the last continent remaining unvisited. I generally prefer destinations with some cultural content and some human resonance, and I'm interested in the interaction between people and their environments and the impact those environments have on their culture. Orderly farms speak to me in a way wildernesses generally don't. But the white silences of Antarctica, even if unavoidably shared with a hundred other people, and the experience of weaving over partly-frozen seas inches above waters at death-dealingly low temperatures to land on beaches occupied by thousands of penguins was memorable even to my overloaded brain, and I would happily go again. A photograph I took of abandoned water boats in heavy sleet has a memorably gloomy appeal. Anyone wanting to see for themselves should get aboard The M/S Explorer:

http://www.gapadventures.com

Something's already appeared in Canada, and there's a major in-flight feature with Rob Stimpson's photography appearing later this year. (Note, in passing, that the income for this won't actually arrive until about two years after the trip was taken.)


Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires lacks inspiring monuments or wonders of the world, but I took to this huddle of villages, to the variety of its European architecture, to its articulate and cosmopolitan people, to the huge variety of its restaurants, and to shopping for locally designed and made clothing and shoes for ridiculously cheap prices. I've something to do on this for a Canadian paper this week.


Australian sheep dog trials

Actually walking the course at the Royal Adelaide Show with the judge as he gave scores to dogs and their handlers was definitely a highlight. The competitors were clearly very pleased that someone was taking an interest in their sport, whose importance at the show has rather decreased over the years in the face of competition from the human cannon, monster trucks, and so on. I would rather have attended a small country meeting but the charm of the traditions overcame the artificiality of the environment, and the sheep dog people couldn't have been more friendly and helpful. This was also true of the owners and staff of the sheep station north of Adelaide I subsequently visited to see real sheep dogs do real work, and particularly 'backing', where the dog actually runs across the backs of the closely penned sheep, helping to separate out one at a time for shearing. Peter Fisher was good company and his photography was also brilliant, and I look forward to seeing this story run as a six or eight page feature in an airline magazine later this year.


Saint-Pierre et Miquelon

It's always a pleasure working with photographer Rob Stimpson, and although this tiny French archipelago, a mere 15km from Canada's Newfoundland, has little in the way of spectacular attractions, its sheer unlikeliness and the friendliness of its people, made it an excellent long weekend (although we spent more on food and drink than really made the visit viable in economic terms). And let's be clear, this isn't an offshoot of Francophone Canada. It's a French department, with its government appointed by Paris, using the euro, and whose residents beautiful Parisian French (and precious little English). A story about this is in Cathay Pacific's in-flight magazine this month, I believe.

Misrepresentation

Link

A few years ago I spent a brief period as Editor-in-Chief (at least, that's what my contract said, but my business cards were only allowed to say 'Chief Editor') of the English language free magazine City Weekend. This was formerly City Edition, a Beijing 'what's on' magazine, and a relatively early arrival at the time when the only other English expat-run magazine was the scurrilous (but entertaining) Beijing Scene, shortly to be closed down. It had built up a decent distribution and advertising base, and secured itself a national publishing licence, and its incompetent management was under the impression it had found itself a generous buyer in the form of the Hong Kong-based tom.com empire. In anticipation of large injections of cash, it acquired swanky new offices, state-of-the-art furniture, and several new members of staff, including me.

The ink was barely dry on my contract when the plug was pulled on the investment, which the idiots had failed to secure formally before contracting to spend vast sums themselves, suddenly throwing the whole organisation into a frantic scrabble for alternative funding. Meanwhile I put together the first edition of the nationally distributed title under its new name, it's distribution now limited to Beijing and Shanghai--plans for a Guangzhou office rapidly suspended.

What brought all this back to mind was a posting on Danwei, a blog discussing Chinese media.

The big hoo-hah about blogging tires me immensely, and the proportion of truly useful blogs to the total is no different from the proportion of reliable and interesting material to background noise in any other area of the Internet. Some people have decided to put their diaries on publicly readable pages. The diaries are only as good as the expressive ability of the people who write them and the material they have to work with. Those by someone living in Baghdad while it's being attacked and bombed and when there are no other sources are likely to be of value even if not poignantly expressed (although accuracy will always be an issue). Those by people with some extra insight to offer on a particular topic are also valuable (and Danwei's translations of Chinese media might be included in this category).

But the overwhelming majority of blogs are, unsurprisingly, not of this kind, and reflect the rather sorry and trivial little lives that most of us lead (my own half-witted and intermittent blog included). There's nothing here to base a career on (the infinitely tedious and obviously desperate Rebecca Mackinnon please note. But after a career at CNN inevitably even the most trivial matters will look stimulating, no doubt.) Even half-decent blogs with Chinese content are far too fond of quoting and cross-referencing each other, Danwei included, and in congratulating themselves on being mentioned in each other's pages. Add increasingly lazy and sycophantic mainstream media, and their ever greater tendency to add artificial blogs to their own pages, and we're no further on. In fact if anything we're going backwards towards ever more self-analysis, ever less recording of real events, even more to seeing the media itself as an essential topic of discussion for the media, and even more to witless pieces on supposed trends entirely concocted by looking at other media, which now includes blogs. Vanity, thy name is journalism.

But I digress.

Danwei says of itself: 'we publish fresh information about China that you won't find anywhere else.'

But on Dec 27 the site published a piece called 'People: Jo Lusby of the Penguin Group', contributed by one Jenny Niven.

This jolly little introduction to someone who worked at City Weekend when I was there contained some surprising information:

'She arrived in China in Nanjing in 1997, where she spent her first year teaching English to ‘surprisingly well-informed’ PLA students in the southern capital. A stint as an editor on a Financial Times-backed economic database followed, opening doors to the prospects of publishing in China. Unwilling to do things by halves, Jo set up her own English language magazine in Nanjing, which although had a relatively short print run, suffered no financial losses and alerted Beijing magazine City Edition to what Jo was up to. A few weeks later, she found herself being introduced to the Beijing staff as their new editor.

'Jo stayed at the magazine for five years, overseeing its transition from City Edition to City Weekend, watching as the city’s English language publications gradually transformed from local village rags to major city listings and entertainment magazines.'

As far as I recall from descriptions at the time, the Nanjing magazine only ran to two or three editions and was completely unviable. Be that as it may, Lusby did indeed join City Weekend a short time before I did, but as a junior member of the editorial staff under an editor who had been there for quite some time. He stayed on the editorial staff when I took over (which was at times a little uncomfortable, and not a situation I handled well), but I was in charge for the first issue under the new name, and thus responsible for 'overseeing its transition from City Edition to City Weekend', not Lusby.

This first Beijing and Shanghai edition carried a cover story I wrote on the return of three bronze heads of animals, originally looted from the 'Old' Summer Palace in 1860, in which I attempted to fill out some of the history of the heads which was being ignored in the nationalistic rantings the government was causing to be printed in the Chinese press, and to mock the supine repetition of some of that nonsense in the Western press which should have known better.

The then CEO and founder of the magazine was delighted with the story, and declared that the magazine was now far and away the best written of anything published in Beijing (not exactly a highly competitive field, however, so no particular credit here).

Unfortunately, a Chinese 'journalist' (lickspittle) picked up on the story, and decided to further his career with it. To cut a long one short, the Beijing Youth Daily, a popular Beijing newspaper, published a personal attack on me, beginning on its front cover. Four further stories in a similar tone were published, and things became rather hot for City Weekend, which utterly failed to support the story it had approved, and instead volunteered to publish one of these attack pieces in translation. So I found myself going up to Yuanming Yuan to direct the photography for a cover story in which the magazine attacked its own editor. Even before this blew up I'd decided that City Weekend was not something I wanted to continue with, and not to renew my initial short-term contract, although a newly-appointed CEO, a remarkably untrustworthy individual, swore he'd 'make me an offer I couldn't refuse', whose Godfather-like overtones seemed lost on him. But after all this the offer was quietly dropped, and so was I.

The previous editor returned to the helm and behaved rather tactlessly. Following him I believe there was yet another editor still. So, to return to the Danwei story, which seems to have Lusby sliding seamlessly from obscurity in Nanjing to supervising the transition from City Edition to City Weekend 'a few weeks later', she did nothing of the kind. In fact it was months later, when she already well-known to staff, that she even became editor, when the weak and vacillating CEO, unable to keep his word or make his mind up on anything, chose someone he no doubt perceived as weaker and less threatening than himself, and who would be unable to prevent him from interfering with editorial content (in a way he'd promised not to do, of course).

Scanning notes and copies of email from the period I'm forcefully reminded of how weak Lusby's performance at City Weekend was, and although my own failings at leadership may have contributed to that, she would slide out of any task she could, was unable to meet deadlines, had no journalistic nous whatsoever, and was completely disorganised. Had I remained at the magazine, disciplinary action would not have been far in the future.

I wrote to Danwei off the record to point out the errors in the report, and expressed surprise that such an inaccurate puff piece was being posted on the site. And now we begin to see the difference between blogs and serious media, since the reply from the person who appears to be the site's main organiser was the brush-off "Perhaps that is so. I didn't write piece." I was however invited to contribute something to site on this topic, but I declined. I suppose I thought that the site editors might themselves want to ask some questions of their contributor, and more generally:

1. Did Jenny Niven actually do any research for the piece?

2. Is the relationship between Niven and Lusby as distant as it should be?

3. Did Niven report Lusby's biography accurately from information she was given, and if so what exactly was the source?

4. Is there evidence here that Lusby in fact distorted her biography in presenting herself to Penguin?

My reply to Danwei's offer of space to comment was:

"I don't have any particular interest in sabotaging Lusby, but I'm
disappointed to see this kind of thing in print, even if only on a
blog/website. Isn't the point (or at least one off the points) of
Danwei to bring a little clarity to the muddy world of Chinese
'journalism'? But this is just more of the same, and hardly 'fresh
information about China that you won't find anywhere else'. And
that's a shame."

A subsequent quick search of Google shows that Niven was a contributor to City Weekend's pages during Lusby's time there, and so certainly someone who should not have been writing such a laudatory piece, as Danwei should surely have checked and questioned. This is like the worst of Chinese media, and Danwei should be ashamed of itself.

I forwarded the Danwei piece to someone who had been a City Weekend insider while Lusby was editor, and received the following reply:

'I haven't believed in a just God since I was 10.'

It's sometimes joked of the Chinese media that there's nothing true except the date. In fact all commentary on China, however trivial, needs to be read with great caution. Laziness and self-interest frequently cause the contagion to spread. When it comes to China misrepresention is the norm.