No name for a hero!

I happened to catch a TV documentary the other week about Koxinga, a celebrated Chinese pirate/warlord of the mid-17th century who is most notable for initiating the Chinese 'ownership' of Taiwan by wresting it from the control of a small Dutch colony in 1661.

It's one of those names that I've never heard spoken before, but I'd always assumed that its spelling was derived via pinyin or some similar modern Romanization system. But I really have no idea. It could be a much older spelling. I wouldn't even know what variety of Chinese it is supposed to be (his paternal family were supposedly from the southern coastal province of Fujian; but he himself was born on the island of Kyushu at the southern end of Japan, and had a Japanese mother). And after all, the chap was born nearly 400 years ago; it's impossible to know exactly how various versions of the Chinese languages of the time were pronounced.

Even so, I would have thought that the favoured pronunciation today would follow the pinyin rules, under which x is a sort of sy- sound (not as in psychology, but as in this year), and the o would be a long -or: Korsyinga.

This TV programme's favoured pronunciation, Cock-Singer, just didn't sound right, somehow; it lacked a certain gravitas or dignitas.

[I learn that the name is an honorific title, signifying something like 'Father of the Nation'. In modern Mandarin Chinese, it's 國姓爺, guo xing ye, where the xing part is most definitely a sying, NOT a -ksing! Whether Fujianese or Cantonese (as spoken 400 years ago) would support the more unfortunate innuendo-laden pronunciation, I cannot say.]

Not making it easy

One of my major goals for my last few months in China was to run a marathon again - my fourth, and almost certainly last.

Unfortunately.... the Beijing Marathon, as far as I can discover online, is still in limbo - its traditional mid-October date kicked into touch at the last moment by the government's insane anxieties about the upcoming leadership handover. (I'd been thinking of attempting the half-distance as a warm-up, and to keep a few friends company; but it is a ridiculously overpriced event, hideously overcrowded, and a VERY dull course. Its indefinite postponement - probably now cancellation - is really no great loss.)

The Shanghai Marathon, due to take place on December 2nd this year (by which time I might just about be in shape to give the full distance a go), is likewise a bit up-in-the-air - although organisers are insisting that it will still go ahead on the scheduled date. But a month ago, during the height of the Senkaku Islands hullabaloo, local government officials abruptly intervened - in the middle of one of the organisers' press conferences! - to announce that event could not go ahead this year as the Toray Cup. Toray, the name sponsor of the race for the past 16 years, is a Japanese chemical company, you see. Even if the race does now take place, which must be somewhat in doubt, I trust all right-thinking people will boycott it in protest at the Shanghai government's appalling pettiness over this matter.

Which leaves only the Xiamen Marathon at the beginning of January (a godawful time to hold a race, in the middle of the Western - and, increasingly also Chinese - festivities!). Xiamen is pretty far south, so the weather should be pleasantly mild even in the depths of winter. And it is supposedly a very pleasant route: flat, and almost entirely along the coast roads of this island city in Fujian province. I have been wanting to attempt this race for at least 7 or 8 years; but, until recently, it was impossible to register for it remotely - online, or even by mail; you had to go all the way to Xiamen to sign up for the race!

And, well, here we are barely 11 weeks from race day, and the official website is STILL saying that registrations aren't open yet. Oiveh!

I fear I'm going to be stuck doing 8 laps of my local lake; a self-adminstered marathon the only way to test my aging body's powers of endurance one last time.

'Wartime' privations

Today is the 81st anniversary of the Mukden Incident, the contrived casus belli which led to the Japanese annexation of Manchuria and 14 years of subsequent hostilities with China. Hence it is a day when anti-Japanese sentiments are likely to be at a flashpoint. With the some of the insane sabre-rattling rhetoric we've seen in the media in recent days, things had already got pretty ugly over the weekend - with some of the government-orchestrated mass demonstrations against Japan here spilling over into acts of vandalism and looting.

Most Japanese businesses in China have decided to close down for a little while, in the hopes of avoiding any further such incidents. I hadn't realised, but one of the largest '7/11' convenience store chains here is apparently Japanese-owned (ah, that would explain the sushi), the one that has a branch right next door to my apartment - and is the only place within a mile or so that sells milk. This local outlet - and all others in Beijing, I gather; and probably across the whole country - went dark yesterday, and draped a Chinese flag over the logo above its door. I doubt if most Chinese folks are any more aware than I was that this was a Japanese company, and if they were, the flag ruse isn't much of a disguise. On the contrary, it's likely to draw attention to the place. I suppose the thinking is that patriotic young Chinese wouldn't - couldn't - attack somewhere that was displaying their national flag. I'm not sure that xenophobia-crazed looters would feel so constrained. But there are unlikely to be any such gangs of hotheaded youngsters in my quiet suburban neighbourhood, I think.

No - violence is far more likely to arise from frustrated customers who resent being cut off from their supply of ice cream and fruit salad and pot noodle and other yummy snack foods. I'm already getting quite wound up about it myself, and it's only been just over 24 hours. And I suppose we've got no Yoshinoya either. I know a few people who might be driven to riot over that.

It would be nice to think that all this jingoistic nonsense might soon die down. But Xi Jinping, the heir presumptive to the Chinese leadership, has once more disappeared from sight; there's still no word on the timing of the next National Congress and the announcement of the new Politburo; and Wang Lijun is due to go on trial.... TODAY, funnily enough. (Wang is the former Chongqing police chief whose falling out with Bo Xilai at the start of this year upset everybody's applecart.)

So, I fear the state-run media will be stoking up this anti-Japanese 'distraction' for a few more weeks at least. Ah, China.

Now you see him, now you don't

After two full weeks in limbo, Xi Jinping suddenly showed up in public again this weekend, with a walkabout at a children's science fair at the Agricultural University in Beijing. No, not exactly the most prestigious or high profile event - but a good way to avoid the pesky attentions of the foreign press. After such a mysterious and disturbing absence from public life since the end of last month, there is now inevitably some facetious speculation that the avuncular figure who strolled around the campus on Saturday beaming with good health was a body double. Or an animatronic mannequin. It's been announced that Xi will be representing the Chinese leadership at an ASEAN trade fair in south China at the end of of this week; a full international press corps there will be less easily convinced by a robot or an actor standing in for him.

As Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal, among numerous others, have commented, the episode has been yet another PR disaster for China - precipitating wild speculation about what might be ailing Xi (heart attack, stroke, assassination attempt, slipped disc), along with renewed rumours of political infighting within the Party hierarchy (was Bo Xilai or one of his faction yet attempting to stage a comeback, a 'counter-coup'? was Xi falling out of favour with his peers for some other reason and in danger of being passed over as Hu Jintao's successor - a transfer of power that was to have been affirmed within the next month??). The old school Communist instinct to keep all aspects of the government's inner workings shrouded in secrecy is becoming more and more harmful. In this Information Age, the age of Weibo (China's equivalent of Twitter), attempting to restrict the flow of information about the Party leadership actually threatens to create instability rather than contain it. Xi is already one of the half dozen most powerful men in China, probably de facto the No. 2 by now, and is in the process of assuming the role of paramount leader over the coming year. You can't have someone that important just vanish off the face of the earth for two weeks - without unleashing a shitstorm. 

A few token official engagements aren't going to quickly undo the damage wrought by this disappearing act. After all, Zhou Yongkang, supposedly Bo Xilai's leading ally in the Politburo, has effectively been sidelined since May (at least, according to Jamil Anderlini, the China correspondent for the Financial Times) despite nominally retaining his various roles and titles; going through the motions of official business and making the occasional important-sounding pronouncement is not, in the Through-The-Looking-Glass world of the Chinese government, necessarily any guarantee that you are actually 'in power' any more. Uncertainties about the imminent leadership transition still abound, with the date of the next National Congress - at which the new Politburo line-up would be unveiled - still to be announced. It's usually some time in October, so they're leaving it rather late in the day to finalise the details of the event. And while this dithering continues, much else is up in the air too: major public events in Beijing are postponed or cancelled; the prospects for any large concerts or music festivals around the upcoming National Holiday week at the beginning of October seem grim; even the Beijing Marathon, originally scheduled for the 14th October, has now been put indefinitely on hold. It's a crazy, chaotic situation - something that tarnishes China's international image and gravely undermines the credibility of her leadership.

A Public Relations '101' for the Chinese Communist Party

A plausible lie is better than an implausible one.

But the truth is better than any lie. Even the most awkward truths can be 'spun' to limit the damage they may cause; lies will destroy your credibility if exposed, and may never be fully accepted anyway by an increasingly astute and sceptical populace.

And the worst thing of all is to SAY NOTHING.

Come on, chaps. It's really not that difficult.

Reception committee

I'm supposed to be back in China round about now.

I hope I get a warmer welcome than Jake and Elwood did in the Cook County Assessor's office.

Surreal China

One of my favourite stories to come out of my bizarre former home in many months...

Chengdu Zoo recently ran a 'drill' to practice procedures for dealing with an escape by one of their big cats... by having someone run around the zoo dressed up in a Tigger costume. This might have been particularly bamboozling to Chinese visitors that day, since they don't know what a Tigger is.

The story was covered by, among others, the UK's Daily Mail, and, of course, ChinaSmack. Check out those links for some more great pictures.

You can guess what this final scene reminded me of...

Hong Kong still remembers

While the June 4th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown goes largely unremarked on the Chinese mainland, the people of Hong Kong turn out every year in huge numbers for a candelight vigil in Victoria Park (see a report of this year's event in the South China Morning Post). Far from fading in the memory, the public response seems to have been getting stronger in recent years, with Monday's crowd being the biggest ever - organisers estimate that around 180,000 people took part. [Here's a video report on this year's vigil.]

Fang Zheng, one of the most famous victims of the Beijing crackdown (his legs were torn off when he was run down by a tank on Chang'an Avenue, not far from the Party leaders' residences at Zhongnanhai - an incident that Deng Xiaoping always sought to deny), was among those in attendance this year.

There was also an excellent article in The Washington Post yesterday - by He Xiaoqing, a Chinese history lecturer at Harvard who specialises in studies of the Tiananmen crackdown and its aftermath - about the work of Ding Zilin's Tiananmen Mothers group (here's a link to their Chinese website; or you can register your support for their efforts here), which concludes with the observation:

The moment a government orders its army to fire on its own people, it loses its legitimacy; when a regime tells its people that human lives and human rights, human dignity and human decency can be “sacrificed” for the sake of higher goals such as national pride and economic development, it sends the message that any principle can be compromised for the ideals of “get rich” and “rising.” Such mentality has become the root of major social and political problems in the post-Tiananmen China.

[I also just turned up this fine essay from the Tiananmen Mothers, first published a couple of years ago, and still available on the Human Rights in China website. This year's message from the group, also on that site, laments the sorry lack of progress towards acknowledgement and redress of the crimes of June 4th over the last decade, but notes rumours that Wen Jiabao - the only member of the current leadership who seems to be sincerely an advocate of reform - has in the past year again been arguing behind closed doors for such an initiative. In the current climate of insecurity, I can't see him making any progress to that end. Indeed, my gut feeling is that it will probably take another decade or two - if it happens at all. But we must all keep lobbying for it. For me, the issue is not so much about showing respect for the victims and their families, but about whether you can found the future progress of the nation on LIES. The continuing cover-up on Tiananmen is shackling China's development - it has got to STOP one day.]

Spooky!

Reuters reported the other day that the Shanghai Composite Index suffered a drop of 64.89 points on Monday, an uncanny reminiscence of 6.4.89 - the style in which the Chinese usually render the date of their government's brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

That this should happen on the 23rd anniversary of the murderous crackdown is an eerily improbable coincidence, although no other explanation seems likely.

Even Fate is seeking to remind the Chinese Communist Party of its crimes, it would seem...

Six Sigma in the toilet

Beijing is having another of its intermittent pushes to improve its image by beefing up hygiene standards in its public toilets.

Amongst a raft of new policies announced last week, the detail that caught every journalist's attention was the bizarre 'two fly' rule: no public toilet may have more than two flies in it. [Presumably this means houseflies rather than trouser flies... ho, ho. If flies on underpants were intended as the subject of this regulation, it would in fact be a covert addition to the current anti-foreigner campaign being waged in the capital. Chinese underpants do not have a fly; this is a Western aberration.]

One of the shrewdest and funniest commentaries on this measure came from Leo Lewis of The Times. Unfortunately his piece from last Thursday cowers behind a paywall (or a register-your-details-for-our-endless-e-marketing-assaults-wall, or something), but I don't think he'll mind me reprinting a brief highlight.

Issued yesterday to the bafflement of veteran toilet cleaners around the capital, the Working Standard of Beijing Major Industries’ Public Toilet Management is designed to bring draconian improvements to public hygiene and the 12,000 public toilets in the city.  

Key to that, according to one troubling paragraph, is ensuring that the number of flies “resident” in each facility is never allowed to exceed two. To widespread consternation, the rules offer no suggestions of how to achieve that exacting standard or even how to measure the fly population in the first place.  

As with all censuses, there are profound complexities. The two fly rule does not specify, for example, whether the quota refers to living or dead specimens, and whether or not to count a fly that had entered through a door or window but shown no sign of wishing to prolong the visit.  

One toilet cleaner, who gave her name as Wang, said that the rules were also frustratingly vague on what to do if the resident fly population was precisely two: “are we obliged to destroy the surviving two, or leave them be?” she said. 

Despite the apparently no-nonsense demands of the two fly rule, officials at the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment (BMCCAE) admitted that the rules were primarily designed to “lead public toilets in a better direction” and indicated that enforcement of the two fly rule would not be as rigorous as many toilet cleaners might fear.  

“We will not actually count fly numbers,” said Xie Guomin, an official at the BMCCAE, “the regulation is specific and quantified, but the inspection methodology will be flexible.”  [My emphasis]

Toilet cleaning professionals in several facilities near to The Times office in Beijing pointed out that the two fly rule has not been accompanied with any budgetary changes that would allow them to procure, for example, a fly swat.

So, as with most Chinese laws and regulations, it's really more of a guideline.

Does Yang Rui still have a job?

Apparently, YES.

For anyone who may have missed last week's uproar, you can revisit my post here and/or take a look at this video summary of the affair from Taiwanese humorous news site NMA TV.

CCTV's inaction is hardly surprising, but it is depressing. Their 'star' English-language presenter has revealed himself to be a vile xenophobe (not to mention a moron and a borderline psychopath). It is completely unacceptable that he should remain in the employment of the national TV station.

I feel the need to repeat my call to action from the end of last Monday's post:

Get active on this, people. Tell your friends, tell your workmates - Chinese and foreign. Use Twitter, use Weibo, use Facebook, use anything. Lobby cable networks. Lobby advertisers. 

Bombard CCTV with e-mails (try the programme's feedback address: dialogue@cctv.com). Bombard them with phone calls or faxes (Tel. +86 [0]10 6850 9230 or 8824 4002, Fax +86 [0]10 6858 1282). 

Yang Rui Updates

Yang has torn in to Charlie Custer of the ChinaGeeks blog, who led the calls for a boycott of his Dialogue TV show - blustering at first about suing him for libel, and then resorting to bullying remarks about using his influence with the PSB to try to get Custer kicked out of the country.

Elsewhere (as reported by my mate Josh Chin for the WSJ, amongst others), he was making a half-assed attempt to backtrack slightly. He claims that his "foreign trash" slur was only intended to refer to criminal elements and not to the expat population in general. He also tries to make light of his abuse of expelled American Chinese journalist Melissa Chan by asserting that the term he used of her - 泼妇 - is more correctly translated as 'shrew'. (As if that's any kind of defence! In any case, I've talked with foreign translators and Chinese friends about this, and they are united in the view that it is an extremely disparaging and offensive term, and that 'bitch' is a more appropriate equivalent in contemporary English. The fact that it is an extremely harsh - and sexist - term of derogation is more important than the ostensible limitation of the basis of that derogation to being a scold/nag/troublesome woman. It is unwise to use gutter invective when addressing a serious and important issue, Mr Yang. It is even more unwise to yolk such terms to the adjective 'foreign', thereby implying some kind of essential connection or equivalence between the two and so constituting a slur upon all foreigners.)

I've also been told that Yang tried to head off the likely boycott of his TV show by foreign guests by jeering that anyone who declined to appear with him was "a coward" - an impressively mature and conciliatory attitude! [Unfortunately, this is the only source I've been able to find for this remark so far.]

Meanwhile, expat news blog The Shanghaiist has turned up more offensive nonsense from Yang's past musings on his Weibo microblog, indicating that he is also an anti-Semite.

And finally (well, not quite), a young English Sinologist has provided this amusing account of what an incompetent buffoon (and a swaggering bully) Yang Rui is, even when hosting a show in Chinese.

A few defences of Yang Rui have begun to appear, but - like this one, ostensibly by a Japanese journalist who's been a frequent guest on Yang's Dialogue show - they do little to help his cause, for the most part coming across as even more lame-brained and racist than Yang's original diatribe.

CCTV has apparently only commented to the extent of stressing that Yang's xenophobic remarks were his personal views rather than those of the station. They have not addressed the issue of how a man who expresses such contempt for foreigners can continue in a role where he is expected to act as a public relations bridge between China and the rest of the world. Keep sending the e-mails (letters and faxes even better - bury them in paper!).

When is a gunboat not a gunboat?

When it's Chinese, of course.

According to Shen Dingli, an "expert" on international security quoted in an article in the Chicago Tribune the other day, China's actions in (so far) sending only small patrol ships rather than major warships to assert its claim over the Scarborough Shoal display great "restraint", are an effective projection of its "soft power", and demonstrate that China is not engaging in "gunboat diplomacy".

Restraint, soft power, gunboat diplomacy - I think Mr Shen needs to consult a better English dictionary.

As so often with me, a Punch cartoon from the 1970s came to mind; but, alas, I have been unable to locate it online. 

One of Queen Victoria's gunboats is chugging up a river somewhere in the heart of Africa. The riverbank is lined with hundreds of angry tribesmen brandishing spears. The captain on the bridge remarks to his first officer, "I suppose Lord Palmerston knows what he's doing."

I never have that sort of confidence in our political leaders.

Forced departures

China's mounting reluctance to issue visas to anyone is starting to bite: the cull of IELTS examiners I anticipated a couple of months back has just started getting under way; and I myself will have to leave next week. But China will not be much compromised by our loss, either in its internal functionality or in its external perception by the world at large.

When, on the other hand, the government chooses to expel one of the smartest and most respected foreign journalists working here, it does enormous harm to its international reputation.

For the past couple of years there have been intimations of a clamping down on foreign reporting here: many journalists, freelancers in particular, have found themselves facing longer and longer delays in getting their journalist's accreditations and visas processed, and sometimes being granted only short-term rather than full-year visas amid intimidatory rumblings about the record of their past coverage of China, or their employer's record, possibly having a bearing on the approval of their applications.

But no-one had had their journalist's status revoked... until last week, when Melissa Chan, an American Chinese reporter who has for nearly 5 years been the English-language correspondent for Al Jazeera in China, found her accreditation cancelled, making it impossible for her to get a new visa and thus obliging her to leave the country at short notice.

It's not clear why Melissa has been singled out for this treatment. The authorities mutter darkly about her having failed to "respect China's laws", without - of course - mentioning which particular laws she might have infringed. It's possible that their wrath is directed more against Al Jazeera than against her personally, since they have also declined to accredit a replacement for her, thereby forcing the news channel to close down its English-language bureau in Beijing for now. It's possible that it's part of the tense diplomatic manouevring between China and the US over the Chen Guangcheng case. Or perhaps it's just a brutally random gesture of intimidation, a pour encourager les autres warning to the rest of the foreign press corps to back off from 'negative' stories in this sensitive period of the leadership transition. Melissa herself declines to speculate openly on the reasons, and - in her inspiringly upbeat farewell piece a few days ago - she refuses to feel bitter or sorry for herself. [Do go and check out that article, and the archive of the rest of her reporting from China, to see what a fine writer we're losing.]

Many of my journalist friends are shocked and disgusted by this news, and depressed at what it seems to signal about the way China is heading this year. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, mostly a fairly optimistic commentator on this country, has written bitterly that the expulsion of Melissa Chan by the Chinese government "revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future."

Quite so. I am glad to be getting out of the place this month. And increasingly doubtful whether I shall ever be coming back.

Haiku for the week

Sunshine and coughing -

The city's late April gifts -

Play on the memory.

The approach of summer always seems to bring with it one of the worst of the 'Beijing colds'. I have been very ill since last Sunday. I was similarly afflicted at the end of April or early in May in my first year here - just as news of the SARS outbreak had finally been released here (it had already been in progress for well over a month, but the government had been trying to keep it a secret). I wonder if it's the wheezy cough and the rasping headache (yes, I'm sure all of us here thought we might have SARS for at least a day or so during that jittery time) as much as the similarly blue skies that's been dredging up the memories of that first summer here this past week. Or perhaps it's the prospect of my imminent departure that's prompting me to reflect on my memories of nearly 10 years living in this city... and I'm wistfully focusing on what were, paradoxically, some of the best of those memories.

Another incisive suggestion from the think tank

I was editing an article about the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation last week. This was inaugurated in 2000, and the fifth of its triennial ministerial conferences between the member states is slated to take place in Beijing this July. [Another good reason to be out of the country this summer. Another reason, indeed, why it may be impossible to stay in the country!]

My author was terribly excited about the special resonance of this 12th anniversary of the organization, taking time out in his first footnote to try to explain how significant the number 12 is in Chinese culture - through the system of the dizhi (地支), or Twelve Earthly Branches, which define the twelve-year cycles of the Chinese zodiac.

So besotted was he with this notion that one of the few concrete suggestions he had to offer on possible improvements to the functioning of the organization in the future was that perhaps a full summit meeting of the participating countries' heads of state might also become one of its regular events... to take place - yes! - every 12 years. 

There's only been one such summit so far, in Beijing in 2006, when a big shindig for African heads of state was held alongside the regular ministerial conference. The organization - and China's increasing focus on Africa - began to gain a lot more international attention as a result; but that might not be something China is really all that happy about. And it was, on the whole, a pretty vapid PR exercise. The ministers seem to be taking care of business quite well enough on their own; I doubt if having all the big cheeses along for the ride is going to be all that helpful. 

But... if there were some point to this, wouldn't you think it might be a good idea to do it slightly more often than once every 12 years? You know, try to make it fit in with electoral cycles, leadership terms, and medium-term economic programmes? Never mind the poor bloody Africans; I don't think the Chinese leadership is going to be too happy about such a big diplomatic event - with all of its repercussions for trade and energy security and so on - recurring at irregular stages of its domestic Five-Year Plans. Or about the prospect of missing out on one of these media-friendly, 'face'-building events altogether, if the timing was unkind to them (if the China-Africa Forum had kicked off with such a full-scale summit in 2001, and then the next one wasn't due until 2013, the Hu/Wen leadership team would have been bypassed, and thus denied a chance to develop lots of lucrative guanxi in Africa!).

Hm, really - you'd advocate something that cockeyed just because feudal superstition held that 12 was a 'magic' number? You didn't consider that certain contemporary factors might indicate that a 5- or 10-year timeframe might be a more sensible choice for a regular heads-of-state summit?

Footnote 1:  My author also tried to tell us that the Chinese zodiac has "twelve animals for each year" (rather than one animal for each of the twelve years in the zodiac cycle; it's lucky I knew better!). That would make for rather a crowded zodiac zoo. I very much doubt if China has 144 different animals (animals, rather than birds, insects, etc.). Well, in fact, Wikipedia says there are about 500; that's far more than I would have guessed - but I suspect most of them are minor variations of small rodent species.

Footnote 2:  This risible obsession with seeking to extol the glories of traditional Chinese culture at every opportunity is a facet of China's recent focus on 'soft power'. This very same article included a passage which boasted of the number of Confucius Institutes now operating in Africa and of the increase in the study of Mandarin by Africans, citing this as heartwarming evidence of growing Sino-African friendship. This is yet another reason - one of the main ones, really - why I am reluctant to put much effort into learning Mandarin: I don't want to become another statistic for the CCP to crow about, as they gleefully delude themselves that they have the best damn culture in the world and that therefore, of course, everybody loves them.

The genie won't go back in the bottle

The meteoric rise of the Sina Weibo microblogging platform over the past 18 months or so is the most important phenomenon unfolding in contemporary China. It was a little slow to take off at first, taking some 18 months to reach a total of 60 million users; but just one year later, by the end of February 2012, it could announce that it had surpassed 300 million. Its only significant rival, Tencent Weibo, claims a similar or greater number of users, but some industry analysts estimate it has only around 10% of total microblogging usage. It is Sina that is clearly now the big cheese. If these figures are anything like accurate, its market share and market penetration are nearing their maximum potential, and far surpassing the reach that its original inspiration, Twitter, enjoys in America. 

Well, of course, all such figures are to be taken with a large grain of salt. 300 million users would be more than half of all the people who have any kind of Internet access in China, and four or five times the number that have a 3G smartphone. That figure is actually the number of ‘user accounts’, and there’s a great deal of redundancy there, with many people setting up multiple aliases but then soon allowing the accounts to fall into disuse. The number of daily active users is reckoned to be only around 10% of that eye-catching headline figure; but that’s still an awful lot of people, and they are generating around 3 billion messages each month. Moreover, these users are predominantly drawn from the moderately affluent urban middle class, in the 20-40 age range; in this highly influential demographic segment, Sina Weibo has attained an extraordinarily high level of uptake in a very short time. 

Sina’s shrewd CEO Charles Chao hurried to launch Weibo in August 2009, in anticipation of the imminent unveiling of the country’s first 3G phone services. He had the good fortune to find the new platform emerging into a market vacuum, as the government had just suppressed all existing microblogging and social networking sites – both foreign giants like Twitter and Facebook and the early Chinese players in the field – in a panicky response to the Urumqi riots the month before. Sina Weibo probably benefited to some extent from the absence of competition from Twitter in its early days, but it has now achieved such an overwhelmingly dominant position that there seems to be little prospect for Twitter ever being able to re-enter the China market, even if the government were to lift its ban on the site. Many of my expat friends, initially turning to Weibo reluctantly, tentatively, only because they tired of having to use a VPN all the time to access Twitter, now laud the service as vastly superior to Twitter. They tell me it is impressively user-friendly and offers a variety of features – such as the easy embedding of photos and videos rather than just links – that are not available on the American microblog. Indeed, it seems to be more a full-service social networking site, a kind of hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. And it looks set to evolve into a comprehensive mobile portal as it expands into gaming and e-commerce and encourages the addition of third-party applications. 

The roll-out of a full English version of the service at the end of last year was initially aimed at increasing uptake among the expat community (who are thought to account for about 10% of the active users) and, even more so, at facilitating the access of overseas companies to the Chinese user base. Sina executives have so far been downplaying suggestions that they might have designs on overseas markets, but Weibo surely has the potential to become an international player, and might even cause Facebook and Twitter some anxieties, particularly in territories where they have not yet established a dominant share. 

So, Sina Weibo is one of the great shining success stories of the Chinese Internet boom, beloved by its tens of millions of regular users, attracting admiring media commentary around the world, and stirring envy and fear in the corporate corridors of Silicon Valley. And they’ve got their own plane as well, with Tianjin Airlines last year unveiling a new Embraer E-190 twin-jet airliner in the Weibo livery. This was the first ever such high-profile sponsorship deal from a Chinese website, and I bet Jack Ma is kicking himself that he didn’t think of doing something like this for Taobao or Alibaba. 

Some would say it’s hypocritical of the Chinese government, and contrary to the spirit of its WTO undertakings, to continue to block foreign web services like Facebook and Twitter while Sina Weibo and other domestic enterprises – like the Facebook and FourSquare ‘clones’ Renren and Jiepang – are flourishing unchecked. The government’s concern, of course, is for the potential of such platforms to become a forum of political dissent and even to co-ordinate mass protests – as was vividly demonstrated in the spate of popular uprisings across the Arab world at the beginning of last year. Domestic Internet companies mitigate that risk by undertaking to self-censor, and often they will remove potentially undesirable content on their own initiative to avoid any possibility of incurring official displeasure. However, their actions are often not prompt or thorough enough. Again and again over the past year Weibo users have embarrassed the government with mass outpourings of critical comment: castigating attempts to hush up the causes of last summer’s high-speed train crash near Wenzhou, flocking to the support of dissident artist Ai Weiwei with donations to help pay the punitive $2.3 million tax demand that had been slapped on him, and speculating on possible political in-fighting within the walls of Zhongnanhai last month. 

Self-censorship may not be enough: that is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Pre-emptive filtering may not be enough: Chinese Netizens are endlessly inventive in finding ways to circumvent blocks on particular words or phrases. You cannot expect to be able to effectively moderate an online conversation when there are this many people taking part in it, and when it is happening in real time. The government began getting anxious about Weibo during the Arab Spring. It is even more anxious now, as the year of the leadership transition is coinciding with a worrying slowdown in the economy. Many senior cadres would like to find a way to emasculate Weibo, or to suppress it altogether, a desire manifested in recent ham-fisted attempts to restrict the provision of wi-fi in public places (a campaign which rapidly fizzled and died) and to require ‘real name’ registration of Weibo user accounts (an initiative to which Sina lent conspicuously half-hearted cooperation), and in a complete suspension of the commenting facility for three days at the end of last month (which provoked a vehement outcry from Weibo users). Clearly such efforts to clamp down on Weibo users are not going to work. Weibo has become too big, too successful, too popular to be suppressed or restricted now. The Chinese people have acquired a convenient means of communicating with each other instantly, and they are relishing this newfound freedom. They are not going to give it up. 

The genie is out of the bottle for good. The CCP is going to have to learn to live with that.

This is the second of a series of articles I prepared at the start of this month for a China-based English-language business magazine. Unfortunately, that anticipated cooperation went up in smoke, and... well, there aren't too many other outlets I could shop this around to. And I couldn't be bothered to make the effort. I thought I'd just share these observations via my blog.

My major frustration with the violent implosion of this job prospect, though, is that I had very much enjoyed the challenge of writing some pieces that were rather longer, more focused, more serious, and more researched than my usual output on here. I would like to find a magazine that might give me an outlet for such writing... so long as they don't seek to impose a ludicrous slave-labour contract on me, demand to keep all rights to my work in perpetuity, and pay only peanuts. [Yes, Business Tianjin, that's you, that is.]

My Fantasy Girlfriend - 'Roxette'

I should, of course, more properly say Marie Fredriksson - since I have absolutely no interest in threesomes, nor in men, however hunky and rock-starry they may be (sorry to disappoint you, Per). Marie, however, the statuesque blonde singer with the Swedish pop duo who were so big in the late '80s and early '90s, has always had quite a hold over me.

The severely short hairstyle was a key part of the appeal. Though I like long hair too, a woman's neck is an area of particular fascination for me, so I do, on the whole, prefer short haircuts which show this off. She wore a lot of leather, too; that always helps! And, of course, there's something about Scandinavians (I am rather more often smitten with Norwegians and Danes, but it's hard to say no to a Swede).

Moreover, Ms Fredriksson is closely associated in my mind with my first trip to China (which was 18 years ago this month). Near the end of that three-month adventure, I found myself playing host to a motley crew of English teachers from various schools and colleges I'd visited out in the sticks, who were treating themselves to a rare weekend of 'excitement' in the big city of Wuhan, where I'd been based. On the Saturday evening they dragged me off to a nightclub - quite possibly the city's only one at that point - where we were just about the only people present and the drink was unaffordable. We stayed about an hour or so; a torture made bearable, I think, by the mellowing effect of one of my mate Toby's 'special cigarettes'. I kept myself entertained by watching the continuous loop of Roxette videos being shown on the TV screens. They were evidently very big in China at the time (I think they'd been one of the first foreign acts allowed to perform in the country, just a year or two earlier). I hadn't known they'd released so many songs and videos: there seemed to be at least 7 or 8 in the loop, most of which I'd never heard before. It was in these rather odd circumstances that I developed a slight fixation on the lovely Marie.

She's an inspiringly tough and brave lady too, returning to performance after a very serious run-in with cancer a decade ago. And she's still looking very striking in her fifties. The band played in Beijing a week or two ago... but I'm not quite enough of a fan to pay top dollar for a show like that. My music-mad buddy Badr went to see them and had a good time, although he noted that the attendance was a little disappointing (the gig didn't seem to be that well promoted, and it was on a Monday, for heaven's sake - NOBODY goes out on a Monday! - but the Wukesong Arena is a HUGE venue, so even a 60% turnout is a lot of people).

Here's one of their biggest hits, The Look.

Hmm, I find it's not nearly so arresting when I'm not spliffed up in a dreary Chinese nightclub....

When I started searching YouTube just now, I was reminded that the great English blues-rock band Dr Feelgood did a song called Roxette back in the '70s (I wonder if that's where our Swedes got the idea for the band name?). I think I'll throw that in for good measure.

Ah yes, that's much better!!

Unfair competition

Beijing institution The Bookworm - bar, restaurant, lending library, bookshop, live music and speaker meeting venue, favoured hangout for many of the city's foreign journalists and all-around 'cultural salon' - is launching its fortnight-long International Literary Festival today (well, actually, last night).

To mark the occasion, I dug out My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors, by the great Torontonian comedy group Moxy Früvous. These boys were BIG when I was living in Canada in the late '90s, and I got to see them once - but, alas, they disbanded shortly afterwards (nothing to do with me, I assure you).

Safe sex, the Lei Feng way

I don't know how I missed this at the time, but I was grateful to the author* of the most recent academic article I've had to edit for drawing my attention to a news story that was briefly a cause célèbre here in China back in 2006.

A trading company called Taotao, from the port city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province, won itself notoriety for marketing condoms (a three-pack for 18 kuai; definitely the budget end of the market) using the image of Comrade Lei Feng, an iconic do-gooder heavily promoted as a model citizen in numerous propaganda campaigns from the early 1960s onwards.

Lei Feng's public image was austerely virginal, but he liked to think of himself as a "good screw" in the Communist machine, a screw that would "never come loose" and "never rust".

Moreover, as Zhang Zhiwen, a "spokesman" for (and, in all probability, sole proprietor of) Taotao aptly pointed out:

"Lei Feng would have supported safe sexual conduct and responsible family planning, I believe."

Drawing on one of the most enduring images of Lei Feng as a tireless darner of socks, both his own and other peoples' - with 'socks', of course, being a more or less universal metaphor for condoms, but another potentially rather negative association for this advertising campaign - Zhang slyly added: "Our condoms are stronger than his socks. He would not need to repair them."

Sadly, Mr Zhang's irreverent little enterprise was promptly squelched - but not overtly in the name of protecting Lei's saintly image; no, he was deemed to have obscurely contravened local regulations on "erotic content" by including in the packaging certificates proclaiming the lucky bearer to be an 'Official Horndog' or a 'Male Virgin' - a marketing ruse designed to appeal to teenagers. This was evidently rather too successful, as Taotao was brought down by the complaints of an irate parent. There is no IP protection for the image of a dead person in China, but Zhang had laid himself open to regulatory reproof by rashly using UN and Public Security Bureau logos on his 'certificates'. One report alleged that he didn't have a valid business licence either. However that may be, it would appear that he got closed down pretty damned quickly. That's what you get if you mess with a national hero here.

This was round about the same time that an online Lei Feng game was launched (if you darned enough socks, you could win a personal audience with Chairman Mao!), but that was an altogether more earnestly respectful venture. It does not appear to have been very much more long-lived than Mr Zhang's ill-fated condoms, though. Lei Feng doesn't really inspire very much reverence any more; in fact, for the younger generation he has become simply a joke.

However, the would-be uplifting Learn from Comrade Lei Feng! campaign still continues. Today, in fact, is Lei Feng Day - the 50th since Mao inaugurated the movement in 1963, six months after the young hero's tragic death. For this one day, at least, we should all get out there and try to be the best screw we can be.

* I don't owe this author gratitude for anything else. His article was the usual mish-mash of mangled irrelevancies; most of it, in fact, extended misquotations from Stefan Landsberger's excellent book on Chinese Propaganda Posters.

Ford Prefect's verdict on Mao

Another of my occasional visual puns - verbum sapienti sat est, and all that.

This picture is by Chinese photographer Kuang Huimin, part of a photo-essay on images of The Great Helmsman in China today, for which he won one of the prizes in World Press Photo's recent annual awards. 

[Brought to you via the excellent China news blog Ministry of Tofu, a relative newcomer on the scene, having only launched a bit over a year ago.]

Update:
The slogan I had in mind was:   Mostly Armless.
(Nobody seemed to get it.  See Comments below.)

The final onslaught looms

I think - New Year's Eve aside, perhaps - this has been the quietest Spring Festival I can remember (not excluding my first three or four here, when fireworks were nominally banned within the Beijing city limits). The soaring cost of fireworks has been significantly inhibiting the pyrotechnic celebrations this year.

But I'm sure people have been saving much of their arsenal - and will be raiding their piggy-banks for a rush of additional last-minute firework purchases - for one last HUGE blowout tonight, the Lantern Festival, the mid-point of the first lunar month in the new Chinese calendar, and traditionally the end of the main phase of New Year celebrations. I am dreading it.

My American friends, however, just can't seem to get enough of it. A delirious enthusiasm for "blowing shit up" seems to be hardwired into them, no doubt somehow related to their cherished constitutional right to roll up their shirtsleeves. And the Canadians, always inclined to ape their rambunctious southern cousins, seem to be just as bad - if not worse. Last week, I happened upon this, surely the world's most tasteless giant firework concept (Burning Schoolhouse?!), from AirMagic, a Toronto events company specialising in 'special effects'.
[I actually find it a bit disappointing: not that much pyro at all, just some smoke and sparks belching out of the chimney. But then, at the end, the whole structure is suddenly engulfed in flames. That is quite startling.]

I don't suppose anybody has managed to get hold of one of these over here. I hope not! You can get your fix of pyromania by watching the video below.