People in the rest of the world have probably seen plenty of pictures like this already. Here in China, they are rather harder to come by. I think there's some filtering of Google Image searches going on, since most of the search terms I just used produced returns like this either not at all or not on the first page.Though I learned about this as it was happening (on Monday night, during the Lantern Festival firework frenzy) from Chinese friends, and I gather there were some live reports about it as breaking news on radio and TV, I'm not sure that any live footage of it was shown. There was no reference to it at all on the local 'international' channel, CCTV9, until the following evening, and then only a 10-second mention and an almost subliminal still shot of the burning Mandarin Hotel. The Peking Duck reports that the state news service Xinhua promptly sent out instructions to Chinese websites to downplay online coverage of the story, and we've seen a similar near-blackout in all the other media here. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly politically sensitive about this story. It's just that there is no bad news in China.
I note that one of the early Xinhua stories on the fire - before the powers-that-be fine-tuned the censorship dial - suggests that this not-quite-finished hotel building is 200m away from the distinctive metallic doughnut of the new CCTV Tower (headquarters of the national TV station). Hmmm. I haven't been over that way for a while, but I think it is a bit closer than that. It is part of the same complex (and, like the Tower, also designed by Ole Scheeren as part of a unified concept). And that fire was plenty big enough that it might have spread to the Tower as well. A few panicky rumours flying around on the night suggested that it had done so.
Of course, we're all terribly relieved that it didn't, and that the Tower is intact...... although the ungenerous spirit of schadenfreude in me would have been eager to see how the Chinese media would make light of an even more conspicuous and shaming disaster like this. Also, I confess, I am slightly regretful at the lost opportunity for a really great headline. Beijingers, you see, have nicknamed the CCTV Tower 大裤子 (da kuzi, or 'big pants' - 'pants', apparently, in both the British and American senses!).
Can't you just picture it? PANTS ON FIRE!
I'm afraid I just can't help thinking that that would be a particularly appropriate headline for a story about CCTV, given its notoriously creative interpretation of 'truth'.
(One of my translator friends assures me that an alternate and possibly better rendition of ku would be 'crotch', but..... CROTCH ON FIRE!? Where's the humour in that??)
2 comments:
that's crazy. every administration that has done this kind of things has... turned out crazy.
but. what to say.
Well, it's perhaps overstating things to say that there's been a "news blackout" on this. It has been reported on a lot. It's just that the reporting has mostly been very brief and low-key (and that approach has been dictated by the powers on high).
It's a very striking contrast to what we're used to in the West - where the media would regard this as the MAJOR story of the week and go overboard on it for a few days.
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