Beijing - a city out of hope

I've had some curious little jobs in my time here. Just in the last month or two, I've found myself preparing comments on China's economic prospects for the coming year (because, of course, the CEOs of major international companies don't have the time to answer interview questions themselves - at least, not for the likes of China Daily and the Global Times), ghost-writing an editorial for one of south-east Asia's leading newspapers, and tweaking the English version of a major international trade agreement. It's amazing, the kind of responsibility that people will entrust you with just because you can write nicely!

But perhaps the most onerous task I was ever offered - something that I was embarrassed and annoyed at being entrusted with, and eventually turned down - was just over a year ago, when I was asked to write the bid for Beijing to be selected as the next World Design Capital.

Well, I wasn't approached to write the thing from scratch. I wish I had been. I wish somebody competent had been. No, they thought they could get away with a bit of hasty last-minute re-touching. But, since the document was getting on for 20,000 words long and was a complete f***ing shambles, they really couldn't. And since they'd only thought to seek the assistance of a native English-speaking editor 48 hours or so before the final submission deadline, there wasn't even enough time available to 'polish' it thoroughly.

I'd had an early intimation that the project would be an ignominious failure at least a year or two before this, when the Beijing Industrial Design Center (as far as I could gather, this was a quango set up by the Beijing government specifically to coordinate the bid) hired one of my former students. One of my less gifted former students, that is: a pleasant enough chap, but, to be frank, a bit of a plank. He was tasked with conducting preliminary research into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the design industry in Beijing. So, he sent me an e-mail asking, "What do foreigners think of Beijing?" Naturally, I asked him to be a bit more specific; and so it was that I slowly managed to piece together what it was he was up to. I suggested that he compile a mailing list of people involved in design and in the most closely related industries like fashion, art, advertising, architecture and urban planning, etc., and then develop a structured questionnaire that could be sent out to them. I even offered to help draft one, for FREE - but he never got back to me about that.

I've no idea what they did with the next 18 months or so, but they clearly didn't conduct any worthwhile research, or didn't manage to solicit very many responses if they did. My student ruefully confessed to me that they hadn't really received ANY positive comments in response to their enquiries, and had been left over the last few weeks before submission frantically making stuff up. The bid document they finally produced was way too long, chaotically structured, desperately, desperately DULL - and mostly written in the most risible, often just about incomprehensible Chinglish. And they had titled it.... Beijing - A City Out Of Design. I assume they meant By Design, but it never really became apparent. I was tempted to leave this unchanged, because it did seem all too sadly appropriate to the dismal portrait the document painted of a city which had achieved almost nothing worthwhile in urban planning or in the creative industries for the past century: We had some sense of design once, but now it's all gone....

You know, chaps, if you have to mount a bid for something like this in English, you really should hire a native speaker to write it for you. In fact, you should hire an international PR agency to assemble the bid for you. If you want to be seriously considered for the accolade, that is; rather than make yourselves - and your capital city, and China as a whole - into an international laughing-stock.

I have no doubt that the BIDC had originally been quite generously funded for this project. But what had they spent the money on? By the time they had drafted their ludicrous, no-hope-of-winning, not-even-going-to-be-read bid, they were carping about spending even a few thousand renminbi on my final edit.

I was willing to consider doing this work for a low fee; I might even have been willing to do it for NO FEE, because I would like Beijing (and China) to have a chance of winning honours like this, to at least have a chance of having the application taken seriously. Although I bitch about the place a lot, this city is my adopted home and I have a lot of fondness for it - and for China and the Chinese people in general. I don't like to see them made to look ridiculous. And that's what this asinine bid document was doing.

So, regardless of the fee, I was going to take this on, and do my best to re-write the bid to make it at least readable. Since the job was too short-notice to secure payment in advance, I frankly didn't trust this outfit to pay me anyway, whatever agreement we reached on a fee - but I didn't really care. This seemed like an interesting and worthwhile job, it was something that I wanted to do.

But then their go-between, my former student, rang me up again, and told me that he could get the fee bumped up by another couple of thousand, but he'd expect to keep half of the extra for himself. Now, I'm always grateful for an introduction to some work, and I would, of my own volition, have done something to express my gratitude on this occasion - a dinner at the very least, probably 500 RMB or so stuffed in an envelope. But 1,000 RMB seemed a little steep. And... well, I'm afraid I fairly blew my top at him.

It wasn't just my student's gobsmacking effrontery that annoyed me so. It was more that this shameless piece of petty graft brought home to me just why this project had gone so spectacularly down the toilet: the entire budget must have been serially pilfered by the people working there; everyone, right down to the lowliest office boy, had taken his or her own little rake off it, until there was nothing left to spend on fulfilling the project's purpose.

And that, I'm afraid, is China in a nutshell.

This was one of the pivotal moments that persuaded me I had to get out of this country.

How (not) to organise a marathon

In last week's lengthy account of some of the tribulations I'd suffered in participating in an 'Ultra-Marathon' event in south-west China last month, I mentioned that I had a further rant brewing in me about this. And here it is.

I had been assured by the folks in Beijing co-ordinating registration for the event that it was a "very well organized event". Their bullishness was overstated, of course: what they meant was "very good, for China" - which is to say, a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Now, credit where it's due. The organization relating to the actual running of the races did go pretty smoothly: the courses were well marked out, huge numbers of beaming locals were rallied to provide support, and the race-bag pick-up at the finish lines worked well.

The less positive points, though, would be.... well, EVERYTHING else.

Amongst the points you might like to try to address next time, dear organisers....

1)  Provide as much advance information as possible.

This is a perennial vice in China. I'm sure most of the salient details of this event - the dates, the courses, the accommodation arrangements - must have been finalised weeks or even months ahead; but nobody saw fit to pass any of this on to the participants. I hold Beijing's Heyrobics group, who were working as agents to recruit foreign participants for the event, partly culpable here as well. They were pretty hopeless at passing on promptly even what pitifully little information the organisers had deigned to give them. I had, for example, been led to believe that the event was to be centred around Guizhou's provincial capital of Guiyang. I had therefore planned to travel to the prettier and more touristy city of Kaili in the east of the province under my own steam after the event. I only found out the day before I flew down there that in fact the event was centred around Kaili, and thus had to change my hotel bookings to arrange some time in Guiyang instead. Lack of information about the locations and hotels to be used had scuppered the hopes a few friends of mine had had about possibly coming down to support me during the weekend. And none of the participants from Beijing had been told that the final day's race was based in Zhenyuan, another 2 hours or more east of Kaili, and at least 5 hours away from Guiyang airport - a fact which made it severely impractical to try to join the event for the last day only, as many had been encouraged to do. (Several people, in fact, came within an ace of missing their flights home. My pal Ruby only made hers - with minutes to spare - because she had eventually managed to browbeat her minibus driver into taking her straight to the airport rather than making drops in Guiyang city centre first.) And so on.

2) Provide maps and diagrams of the courses

The only maps we were given were squiggly lines on a blank white background. The few features marked were in Chinese only (no English or even symbols for drinks stations and so on), and far too small for anyone to read anyway. No place names or geographical features were indicated. And no larger scale map was provided to let us know which part of the province we were in, where we were in relation to the major cities of Guiyang (where we'd flown in) or Kaili (where we'd stayed prior to the opening race). In such mountainous terrain, a diagrammatic representation of the hills to be covered is pretty useful, too. A few of the other runners claimed to have seen such a thing, but perhaps, as independent competitors, they'd been able to request additional information directly from the organisers. There was nothing of the sort in the official information pack for the race. And the Heyrobics gang had refused to provide any contact information for the event organisers. On the first day, a German runner told me (perhaps on the basis of what he remembered from running the event in a previous year; apparently, there had been numerous changes to the courses this time) that the first race ended in a very severe hill-climb. I reined myself in over the last several kilometres, trying to save my strength for this cruel finish; but it turned out that the last few kilometres weren't too hilly at all. On the second day, however, the rumour had been that the course was almost completely flat - but we discovered that it ended in a brutally steep 3km hill. This sort of thing matters to runners! Provide a goddamned diagram of the elevations, please.

3) Provide clear information about the race arrangements

The runner's information pack was clear as mud. In fact, much of what little information it did contain was WRONG, so I pretty soon disregarded it altogether. In particular, NOTHING was done to publicise where the race bag drop-off or the assembly point for each race was. There had been diagrams in the runner's guidebook, but these were - again - completely unlabelled, and bore no obvious relationship to features we could actually see on the ground. The assembly points were all fairly nearby the hotels where we were staying; but not so nearby as to be easy to see or easy to find. On Day 2, several people missed the race altogether because the assembly point was quite a long way away, and was not visible from the hotel; and because many of the volunteer helpers were mistakenly directing people that they had to get on a bus - which was in fact supposed to be taking injured runners directly to the finish, twenty miles away. On Day 3, many people ran without being officially 'logged in' to the race start, because they had gathered at what appeared to be the obvious assembly point on a plaza next to the starting line - unaware that on this day, the official assembly point was actually half a mile away inside the hotel.

4) Don't spring a 'health check' requirement on participants at the last minute (though doing nothing to publicize it, or enforce it... and making vague statements to the effect that it can be ignored at the individual runner's discretion)

I refer, of course, to the ludicrous blood pressure checks about which I moaned at length last week - and which I spectacularly failed, though I went ahead and took part in the races anyway.

5) Sort out a better system for transferring bags between hotels

We had to stay in a different hotel for each of the three stages of the event. This is, of course, severely non-ideal: you really don't want to be dealing with the hassle of packing your luggage and clearing your room and checking out of a hotel in the last few minutes before you're due to run a marathon (it's not good for the blood pressure!); nor do you want to be cooped up on a bus for two or three hours heading to a new location immediately after you've finished running. But, if this is unavoidable, at the very least, the organisers need to make the transfers run as smoothly as possible. Now, in fact, we kept the same coaches throughout the event; and the coaches all travelled together in convoy between locations, so everyone left at the same time (which was a bit rough on the faster runners, who had to wait around for hours while we slowcoaches huffed and puffed our way to the finish). There was therefore no reason why we could not each have been assigned a numbered place on a numbered bus, to be used throughout the event; and why we could not then have put our luggage ourselves in the luggage bays on our personal bus; and why we could not have put more valuable or fragile items (computers, cameras, wallets, etc.) in bags on our seats, trusting our driver to ensure that the bus would remain locked until our return at the end of the day's race. No reason, except that this is China, and nobody will ever go for a simple and sensible option if they can do something half-assed, unnecessary and inadequate instead - like throw everybody's bags on to the backs of flat-bed trucks, and then have an unseemly scramble to recover them each day on arrival at the new hotel. (My inability to find anyone who was willing to undertake the safe-keeping of my laptop for me almost prevented me from taking part in the races altogether.)

6)  Make yourselves known to the participants

Only one member of the organising committee made a public announcement during the whole five days I was down there. He didn't introduce himself by name. And he disappeared immediately afterwards, never to be seen again. Few of the senior organisers were visible at all; none of them made any attempt to communicate - formally or informally - with the race participants. No public notices were displayed or announcements made, in Chinese or English, during the event. Hence, nobody had any idea what was going on - ever. Business as usual, in China.

7) Brief your volunteers about what's going on

There were large numbers of volunteers, and they were very nice - oh so cheerful and eager to please. There were rather too many of them, really. I think they quite comfortably outnumbered the competitors - the old 'Infinite Number of Monkeys' approach so beloved in China: why bother to plan a solution to something, when you can just keep throwing more bodies at the problem? This meant, of course, that it was almost impossible to find someone you'd spoken to about a problem previously; your would-be saviour would just merge into the crowd again, and, as like as not, never been seen again. And not many of the volunteers had sufficient initiative even to offer an empty promise to try to solve your problem; most of them just frankly admitted that they didn't have a clue. I felt sorry for them. They wanted to do their best to be helpful, but no-one had told them anything. They each seemed to have a very limited scope of responsibility - such that, for example, at the end of a race, the girls handing out towels could not tell you where to get water, and the girls handing out water could not tell you where to get a towel, and neither group had any idea where there was a toilet. Most of the volunteers based in the hotels seemed to have been charged with trying to help with accommodation problems only, and had been told NOTHING about the race arrangements; so, they were generally unable to answer even the most elementary questions asked of them - like "Where is the race bag collection point?" or "What time do the buses leave?" or "Where does today's race start?"

8)  Make the most of your English speakers

This is an event that aspires to an international profile, and is so desperate to attract more foreign competitors that it actually pays weekend fun runners like me to take part! And yet it does bugger-all to look after its foreign competitors. Only one of the main organisers and very few of the volunteer helpers spoke any English at all. Since just about all of the foreigners taking part - a few Germans, Russians, and Kenyans, as well as the expected Yanks and Brits - spoke some English, but, in most cases, little or no Chinese (and even those who could speak some were struggling; the local accent/dialect down there is pretty weird), it is kind of a high priority to find at least a few people who speak decent English (just a few; until all the fun runners arrived for the last day, there were only a couple of dozen or so foreign participants; it wouldn't have been that hard to find one dedicated minder for every 5 or 6 of us). The situation was better - not great, but not hopeless - at the first location in Kaili, quite a big city with a lot of university students; the subsequent two locations out in the sticks could barely muster any English speakers at all. Given the importance of communication in English, would it be so hard to bus some of those university students from Kaili out to the other venues as well? And why can't you give your best English speakers a little more responsibility, and brief them clearly about what's going on? I found a guy at the final location who spoke excellent English. He was actually part of the media liaison team, but he offered to try and help me find a way to get a late-arriving friend all the way from Guiyang to Zhenyyuan. Alas, he had been told that the airport pick-up service from Guiyang had only been operated for those participating in all three days of the event, and had thus been discontinued on Wednesday. This would have been most unwelcome news to my friend arriving on Saturday evening - but, luckily, it turned out to be complete bollocks.

9)  Don't change the parameters of the race at the last-minute

The second day's race had been advertised in the runner's guidebook as being 35km. We were told at the 'technical briefing' on the evening of Day 0 (which comparatively few people attended, because nothing had been done to advertise it) that this had been reduced to 32km. In fact, it had been increased to 38km. 38-and-a-bit km. However, the time allowed was reduced - without any announcement having been made to this effect - from 4'30" to a niggardly 4 hrs. Many people who narrowly missed the new, less generous cutoff point were denied an official classification for the entire event (something which didn't bother me, but rankled with the more serious competitors in the field quite a bit). I think the time allowed for the first day's full marathon might have been reduced as well: the cutoff had been advertised as 5'30", but the race clock already seemed to have been dismantled when I finished just on the 5-hour mark.

10)  Do measure the goddamned courses - and mark the distances - accurately

I believe the organisers may have calculated the distances using a flat map, not taking into account the effects of hills. As I recounted a week or so ago, I was pretty damned sure - having walked that part of the route on the previous day - that the first "5km" of the first race was perhaps as much as 30% long. People with GPS height and distance tracking gizmos on their smartphones reckoned the course overall was certainly between 1.5 and 2km longer than the regular marathon distance it was supposed to be. The last day's race was supposed to be a half-marathon, 21km. At the last minute, it was extended to "22km"; the guys with the smartphones said it was closer to 24km. There were a few eccentricities with the distance marker boards as well: there were a few stretches where there were no markers for 2 or 3km (this tends to cause the poor runner a lot of unnecessary anxiety, when he's got used to seeing a reminder of his progress consistently every kilometre along the way); and there was one point in the later stages of the short last race where a "1km" interval between boards was in fact very nearly 2km.

11)  Don't f*** with people in the finishing stretch

A regular marathon is only supposed to be 195m more than 42km. On the first day's race, the finishing line was at least 450 or 500m beyond the 42km marker (which was, in any event, something over 43km from the start!), and the course was so twisty that you couldn't see where it was until you were almost on top of it. There was a similar deal on the final day, only worse: the course just went on and on and on, after the final kilometre marker. And then one of those big red inflatable arches that they use to mark the finish of a race finally hove into view. But it was a dummy - not the finish at all. WHY??  People yelled at us to keep running for a few hundred more metres. Another red arch came in sight and I sprinted for it - but guess what, it was a SECOND dummy. The real finishing line was yet another 200 or 300m further on; but, of course, by this point, we no longer had complete confidence that this really was the finish. I had had enough by that point: I refused to 'finish' the race, walking in along the sidewalk behind the crowds. Misleading course markings and false finishes are a big no-no.

12)  If you're going to have souvenirs of the event, let them not be crappy and worthless

We were given free race shorts and shirts. Disgusting design, poor quality manufacture - and ridiculously small (the largest size they had was ostensibly XXXXL; usually a Chinese XXXL is fine for me, equating to an XL back home - but this "XXXXL" was surely no more than an M, I couldn't get it on over my head!). Large numbers of them were abandoned in waste baskets in the hotels. That's not good for spreading awareness of your event and boosting participation in future years.

A Baker's Dozen Postscript: Don't steal your star attraction's passport. One of the professional athletes from Kenya who'd been brought in to give the appearance of this being a serious international competition had had his passport confiscated by the organisers for the whole time he was in the country. No clear reason had been given for this; I heard his minder spinning him some bullshit story about how they'd needed it to buy an air ticket home for him. He had been promised that it would be returned to him when we left Zhenyuan the day after the final race. It wasn't. And it seemed that nobody knew quite where it was. The minder made some anguished phone calls, and eventually announced that someone in Guiyang had it, and would come to the airport to return it to the athlete - an hour or so before his flight was due to leave. He was a lovely guy, very sweet-natured and laidback; but he was starting to get a mite pissed off about this unfolding clusterfuck. I suspect even his super-athlete's blood pressure was getting a little elevated. I was staying in Guiyang for a few days rather than flying straight back out myself, so I don't know if he was able to make his flight that day. I do hope so.

Advice to would-be writers - a final word

In two long posts last week, here and here, I summarised the lessons I've drawn from some three decades of experience of writing groups, writing classes, and trying to scratch a living as a writer.

I suspect many of these observations go rather against the general orthodoxy, especially in North America, where the teaching of "creative writing" has become a significant industry and writers' groups are now enormously popular. In particular, I imagine my extreme scepticism of writers' groups, and even of one-to-one mentoring, may arouse a fair amount of animosity.

I've already gone into the reasons for my scepticism in some detail in the second of my posts on this topic. In essence, I believe very strongly that writers should cultivate their autonomy and learn to rely on their own judgement; I don't think depending on anyone else's support or advice is ultimately conducive to that goal. With mentoring in particular, it is the status inequality between the two parties that most bothers me: I don't think it is good to "look up to someone". You should be looking up to yourself; or trying to become someone that you can look up to. For every positive story I've heard about mentoring, I must have heard four or five that were much less so. And I suspect most of the positive experiences were more to do with the strength of the friendship and the emotional support given than with the mentee's development as a writer. I tend to think that if you've got it in you, it's going to find its way out sooner or later; if you're lucky enough to find a mentor with whom you enjoy a very positive relationship, you may feel that's helping you to develop as a writer, but it's probably not really making very much of a difference either way.

The one exception I might allow - which is the substance of this final post in my mini-series on writing - is the 'writing buddy'.

You don't want to be sharing your early attempts at writing with a much more experienced writer, whose opinions you may feel obliged to defer to even if you are inclined to disagree with them, and measured against whom you may always feel yourself somewhat inadequate. You want to find a peer: someone who's in a similar position to yourself, in terms of their experience, their motivation, and - if possible - their level of ability.

And you don't want to have to be struggling to form a personal relationship with a mentor (or members of a writing group) at the same time as you are entering into this quasi-professional,skills development relationship with them. It's much better to find someone, if you can, with whom you already have a fairly close relationship, and share your work with, solicit feedback from them. They don't even have to be a writer; spouses and siblings have often proved to be a writer's best sounding board. However, I think their criticism is likely to be more astute if they are also writers; and it makes the relationship more balanced and reciprocal if you are each critiquing and encouraging the other's work.

If you already have such a close rapport with someone, hopefully that will mean that you are aware enough of each other's particular sensitivities and insecurities to express negative opinions as tactfully as possible; but also it should mean that there is sufficient trust between you that you can be fairly uninhibited in your critique, secure in the knowledge that, although such negative opinions may often cause irritation or distress, your relationship should be strong enough to survive any such strains. It's much, much harder to attain that sort of intimacy with strangers.

I've never done this myself, but it occurs to me that, if you can't find a suitable 'buddy' within your circle of family or friends, you might possibly try to find one online. I can see this might be fraught with the same kinds of difficulties one encounters in making friends or dating online, but similar caution can be exercised in the early stages of seeking out and establishing such a relationship. And there is something nicely insulating about non-face-to-face interactions, a distancing that allows us to be more forthright with each other. 

I'd far rather have a real-world social dimension to a 'writing buddy' relationship; but an e-buddy could also work. Ultimately, the most important thing is how much in common you have, how much sympathy or connection you feel in discussing your writing, and how that builds into a solid rapport between you - whether you are lifelong friends or you've only just met each other in a chatroom.

It's difficult to find a really well-matched 'writing buddy'; if you do, you are blessed. But don't worry if you can't; just forge ahead on your own. That's what most of the world's great writers did.

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.

Advice to would-be writers (2)

Following on from Saturday's post about what I see as the four basics of turning yourself into a better writer (reading as much as possible, getting writing practice on a daily basis, tying your reading and writing together and cultivating an awareness of the mechanics of writing through regular analysis and critique, and experimenting with a broad range of different genres), here's the concluding part of my accumulated wisdom on the subject. [Well, not quite the concluding part; I came up with a final afterthought as well.]

These pieces of advice are rather more specific, and aphoristic in form; although I fear they will require a fair amount of elaboration to justify them. I suspect some of them, at least, will prove a bit controversial as well - particularly for readers from North America, where the formal teaching and mentoring of 'creative writing' and the communal support mechanism of writers' groups have become something of a cult phenomenon in recent decades.

More Froogly Advice: 8 tips for aspiring writers

Be self-aware, but not self-conscious; be self-confident, but not complacent

This is a restatement or elaboration of something I touched on in my first post. A writer needs to cultivate the ability to view his own work with a detached eye, to be alert to its flaws and foibles, and to be ruthless in attempting to eliminate them. However, there is a danger that such extreme self-criticism may undermine the writer's confidence in his work, and make him unduly afraid of the possible criticism of others, more hesitant to present his work to a wider audience. This is a fear that must be faced and conquered. A writer must try to be as acutely sensitive as possible to all the possible shortcomings of his own work, without allowing himself to become afraid of his readers' reactions. He should never allow himself to believe that his work is flawless, or nearly so (if he does, the quality of his writing will start to deteriorate rather than continue to improve); but he should always believe - by the time he comes to seek publication - that he has produced something worth reading.

Remember - you are not your audience

I think this is perhaps the No. 1 vice I have encountered in writers whose passion for writing exceeds their talent (which is the majority, by far). There is a common prejudice among writers - borrowed, inappropriately, from other areas of artistic endeavour - that one should not "pander to the market", that one should remain "true to one's inner vision" and not "compromise" that to seek a wider audience. Oh yes, all well and good up to a point. I don't favour trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, lowering my standards to reach a wider readership. I'd like to write literary fiction (or literary non-fiction) for a narrow, discerning audience. But there is always an audience; writing is fundamentally a public and commercial act - you have to write something that someone else is going to want to read. 

By all means, writers should enjoy the process of writing. And the content of what they write will naturally be things that they themselves find entertaining. But writers must guard against a solipsistic experience of their work, where they are writing primarily or solely to entertain themselves, with no consideration of how their target audience might respond to it. Unbridled indulgence in private quirks - arcane vocabulary, elaborately contrived wordplay, intricate descriptive passages, comprehensive back-story - is likely to produce something that is hugely entertaining for the writer... and unreadable for almost anyone else.

Make it a job

I noted in my first post on this topic that many of the great writers served long and tedious apprenticeships writing journalism or promotional copy. I therefore always urge people to find ways of getting paid for their writing, or at least of making their writing useful and getting it out before the public (if you can't get work as a freelance magazine writer, you can almost certainly find some local business or charity group that you can offer your services to cheap or free - helping to produce event programmes, catalogues, flyers, and so on). 

This is valuable in several different ways. It helps you to overcome any artsy preciousness about your writing, and leads you to consider it more as a practical - and useful - craft. It opens up more contact with the outside world, preventing you from lapsing into the writer's stereotype of the self-obsessed and anti-social hermit. It relieves you of the burden of self-motivation (having to force yourself to keep putting in the hours on a private writing project that may never see the light of day becomes emotionally exhausting; having other people depend on you to produce some writing, having external deadlines to meet, can be such a refreshing change from that). It helps to wear down that damaging self-consciousness about your writing, getting you used to the idea of your work going before the public (albeit work that is fairly short and utterly unimportant to you). And, above all, it helps to cultivate the daily writing practice habit that I recommended last time; people often find it difficult to maintain such a regime if their writing is to be purely self-motivated and self-consumed; creating responsibilities to produce writing for others is great for improving the regularity of your output (and for getting you to diversify in genres).

Avoid (like the plague) writers' groups

I know a few people who swear by them. And perhaps I have had unduly disappointing experiences - finding groups where no-one really had much talent, and the meetings became primarily social get-togethers. Perhaps also I am temperamentally unsuited - too much the rugged individualist - for a culture of mutual support. But I am wary of the very idea of the writers' group; very, very wary.

I think a group is unlikely to be of much use to you unless you can find people who are: a) similarly talented (you're not going to learn much from people who can't write their way out of a paper bag; but equally you might be intimidated by people who are clearly at a much higher level than you are); b) similarly motivated (many naturally gifted writers just aren't that fussed about writing something, and many more are just enthusiastic amateurs, hobbyists with no clear goal of publication; if you've actually made a commitment to producing a book about a particular topic or story and you are determined to bring it to completion within a given timeframe... you are a one-in-a-million aspiring writer, and you will struggle to find group of truly like-minded people in your locale); and c) capable of giving astute, unbiased, and uninhibited feedback.

I think there's a particular danger that writers' groups may often just provide band-aids for the fragile ego, that they may help a writer to feel better about himself, but they won't do much if anything to help him make his writing better. If most of the feedback he's hearing is undiscriminatingly positive, it's likely to make his writing worse. This has been the situation with just about all the writers' groups I've ever experienced or heard or read about it; they became big love-ins where nobody offered any meaningful criticism at all. 

On the other hand, you may also occasionally run into criticism that is unhelpful because it is excessively harsh, spitefully motivated, poorly expressed, or just misdirected or inaccurate. Being a really good critic is perhaps an even rarer talent than being a good writer, and I don't think I've ever encountered one in a writing group.

And even if you are fortunate to have found an appropriately matched group of writers which does include some astute critics, all kinds of problems can emerge with the social dynamics of such a gathering: admiration, jealousy, irritation and a range of other factors interact with personal friendships to strain relationships between the group members and distort their perceptions of each other's work. 99 times out of 100, you're better off keeping well away from all of that.

Writing is an essentially solitary pursuit. If you can't learn to do it on your own, then you're probably not going to be able to learn it.

Be your own mentor

Most of the same problems I identified above with writers' groups also apply to mentorship. Most people, I think, join a writers' group largely in the hope of finding one or more mentors through it, or viewing the group itself as a kind of collective mentor.

I know a few people who feel they've had a very positive experience with a mentor. But I know rather more who started off enthusiastic about the notion, but found over time that all sorts of tensions arose within that relationship, often ending in a complete meltdown. 

My major concern is that there is too much of a status gap between the two parties: it is almost inevitable that the mentee will feel - at least at first - overawed and inadequate before the mentor; and it is likewise almost inevitable that excessive adulation from the mentee will make the mentor unduly self-satisfied, lead him to put on airs and graces, and perhaps even become too domineering in the relationship, or start seeking to extend his own career vicariously. None of those are healthy attitudes for either party.

As I just said above, writing is a solitary pursuit: learn how to do it on your own.

A writer needs to be robustly self-reliant, and confident in his own judgement. I don't believe that relying on the guidance of someone else is an appropriate way to develop those qualities; rather, it is likely to stunt them.


Edit rather than redraft
Of course, there will be a need to redraft something from time to time. But too many writers become obsessed with endless redrafting. It becomes an instrument of procrastination. And it is a prime means for allowing 'perfect' to become the enemy of good. Compulsive redrafters may never finish their work at all. And the manic need to keep on making changes somewhere leads them to start making changes that are unnecessary, even deleterious: their book starts becoming worse the more they fret at it. You have to learn to accept something as 'finished', to be able to walk away when it is good enough.

Worst of all, the redrafting impulse betrays a lack of confidence in your writing; and confidence, as I said above, is vital for the writer. More particularly, it suggests a lack of confidence in your subconscious. At least 90% of the writing process occurs in the subconscious mind. And your subconscious is much more able than you think. Your subconscious also learns and gets better very quickly. Learn to trust your subconscious creativity: your 'first thoughts' will be best most of the time - and subsequent more conscious tinkering with them will more often than not weaken your writing.

You should go over your writing carefully to weed out errors in spelling and syntax. You should remove any repetitions or inelegancies. You can tweak a phrase here or there. You should excise any of your trademark tics that you now notice - those features of your writing that may seem natural, and even perhaps attractive, to you but which are likely to be obtrusive and irritating to other readers. And you should edit for length, trimming out any superfluous material - however good it is, however much you enjoyed writing it - to improve readability.

But this is all editing. Wholesale rewriting, recasting great chunks of your 'first draft' is to be resisted as far as possible; it can too easily become a destructive addiction.

Focus on structure

A lot of writers like to "go with the flow", just start writing and "see where it takes them". There's more to be said for this with fiction, where strongly realised characters can "take on a life of their own" and suggest new plot developments during the course of the writing. However, you still need those strongly realised characters, and a strong basic story idea, before you start writing. And, in my experience, I would say that it is only very experienced, or uncommonly naturally gifted, writers who can excel in such an improvisational approach. For the other 95% of us, it is essential to prepare thoroughly and make an outline for the work with as much detail as possible (particularly for non-fiction, but also for fiction). This process can take several weeks, or even months for an ambitious book - don't rush it. Don't let it become procrastination, but don't rush it. Don't start writing in earnest until you've got a very clear idea of what you're going to write about, and how it's all going to hang together.

Make a connection with other aspects of your creativity

Everyone - almost everyone - has some special interest which excites their passion, and through which their creative imagination most readily finds expression. And for most people it's not writing; they come to that later in life, often because there's a particular book project they'd like to realise.

I believe that if someone's writing is going to be compelling, exciting, distinctive, if it's going to suggest an individual "voice", it has to tap into that person's primary passion(s).

I'm not thinking so much about subject matter; although, if your passion is cooking, obviously it might be a good idea to make food a central focus of your projected south-east Asian travelogue. My more important point here is that creative individuals - and we're all creative to some extent - have already developed their own ways of viewing the world, of interacting with it, of expressing their responses to it. If you're a musician, what is it about music that especially appeals to you - performance or composition, solitary playing or the buzz of communal creativity with a band, highly structured pieces or free-form improvisation? How can you bring elements of your musical experience - those preferences, those insights, that passion - into your writing? Similarly, if you're a photographer or a sculptor, or a carpenter or a mechanic - what is special about the way that you look at the world? How can you incorporate that into your writing?

I have found these maxims useful in developing my writing abilities and my confidence in my writing. I hope they might prove useful to others too.

Advice to would-be writers (1)

Although I am profoundly sceptical of the notion of teaching creative writing, it is something that I've had some experience of attempting myself: in my first career as a high school teacher and more recently in Beijing with Chinese university students. A few years ago, I was asked to deliver such a course for a bunch of American college kids studying in China for a year. That fell through, vanishing mysteriously into the ether as so many job opportunities in China tend to do; but I had spent some time sketching out what 'wisdom' I might try to impart to these students and what kind of exercises I would ask them to undertake; and I've just discovered that I still have some of those notes.

My thoughts on this area were stimulated again just the other day when an old friend told me she was interested in trying to write a book and was wondering how to go about it. This was one of those coincidences that struck me as somehow timely or significant; it goaded me into codifying the various (hopefully useful) prejudices on this topic that I have accumulated through a lifetime of writing, and teaching, and teaching writing. And now I am ready to share them with you. 

[This will probably end up being at least a two-parter. In fact, a three-parter: further instalments here and here.]

Froog's Thoughts On Becoming A Better Writer

Read more

Many writers, I know, don't like to read too much, if at all, while they're actually writing a book. That is a hangup I can sympathise with, particularly if you are prone to reading gluts of books in a single genre or by a single writer - that can imprint itself too strongly on your consciousness and skew your own writing style. When I was a boy I went through 'phases' in my reading: devouring T.H. White's Once and Future King tretralogy in a matter of weeks, reading the collected short stories of Saki one after the other, polishing off nearly all of Evelyn Waugh's novels in the space of just a few months. After one of these reading splurges I found I could mimic or parody the content and style of those works quite well - but I couldn't do much else, I couldn't stop myself thinking and writing in that admired writer's manner. So, yes, you have to be careful.

However, in general, I think the best way to improve your writing abilities is to read as much as possible: read every book you can get your hands on, every kind of genre, every kind of style, scores of different writers. I am deeply suspicious of attempts to teach the essence of 'good writing' in a systematic fashion. It seems to me that such a mechanistic approach must invariably focus on a handful of features, to the exclusion of many others, and tends to engender formulaic and homogenized styles (I feel I can always tell when someone has attended a 'creative writing class' - and it's not usually a good thing!). Most great writers, even most reasonably competent and confident writers, have an innate sense of how to write - without ever having formally studied 'the craft'. You absorb the elements of 'good writing' by osmosis - through reading a lot of good writing. There really is no other way. 

People who've been avid readers for much of their lives are thus usually well prepared to embark on a career in writing. However, many people who take up writing later in life have been only intermittent readers, have perhaps not read very much at all since their school days. Folks like this need to do some catching up, they need to start reading A LOT.

I'd even say that it is useful to do a lot of reading in your own chosen genre/subject area. Many people fear that this may stymie their originality, that if they immerse themselves in other similar writing, they won't be able to help themselves picking up certain quirks of style or adapting another writer's ideas (whether being tempted into deliberate emulation or doing so merely subconsciously). I believe it should be possible to guard against this danger, if you do this reading some way ahead of commencing your own writing, in the early stages of your preparation - rather than immediately before or during the writing itself. Perhaps in non-fiction even more than fiction (and particularly if you are thinking of entering such an overworked field as, e.g., 'the China book') it is useful to know what other writers have done in a certain area, and how they've done it; to know what to avoid, to understand how to make your contribution more distinctive (let's not get hung up on unique - hardly anyone ever manages to achieve that!), and hence more saleable.

Write more

There is no substitute for practice. Most good writers honed their skills through years of drudge-work in journalism or advertising. If you've never written much besides your school and college essay assignments and the occasional diary, then you've got a lot of catching up to do. Make writing a regular habit, a ritual in your life; try to write something every day. A diary or a blog is a good place to start; but try to vary the length, content, and style of the pieces you write; and take care to write 'properly', rather than in a chatty or notey style.

Furthermore, if you haven't done much or any extended writing before, don't be in too much of a hurry to get started on 'the book'. Take the time to build up your writing skills with daily exercises for at least 3-6 months first. You can't run a marathon without training for it first; writing a book is much the same (if you're not already a well-practised writer).

Cultivate awareness about what you read and write

Of course, doing huge amounts of reading and writing won't do you a lot of good unless you are alert enough to learn from it. When we read, we do so for education or entertainment; we focus mainly on the content, and on the feelings and impressions that content produces in us. We don't pay much conscious attention to how a writer has achieved these effects. We probably have an intuitive sense of when a writer has been particularly effective in conveying something, and we feel an additional pleasure in reading such writing, but we don't pause to consider the nuts-and-bolts of how it is done. An aspiring writer needs to start doing that on a regular basis, needs to become almost compulsive about it. Any time you find a piece of writing particularly striking, go back and read it again - and again - more carefully; analyse why it had such an effect on you; consider what might have been done differently, and what the effect of such changes would have been. Study pieces of writing at different scales: a whole article or chapter, a single page or paragraph, and individual sentences. Sometimes you can try to write a formal critical essay on such a study, as a writing exercise; or, try to rewrite a piece yourself, to see if it can be 'improved' upon (probably not; but there's no harm in trying).

Similarly with writing, most of us don't bother to think about how we write. Most of us believe that we are competent in our writing, at least at the basic level of spelling and syntax; and we are all deluded in this - the English language is so monstrously complex that nobody manages to get everything right all of the time.

Unfortunately, the era of instant communications has had a very deleterious impact on our writing habits: even e-mail encourages us to write more briskly and to mimic the unconsidered sloppiness of casual speech, with its slang, its fragmented grammar, its unconventional punctuation, and so on; even more immediate and condensed forms of communication like IM and Twitter promote the abandonment of upper-case letters and the rampant use of abbreviations. Most people - though they seldom fully realise it - make frequent and often quite horrendous errors in their spelling and syntax; instant communication tools like Twitter are making this worse.

Don't kid yourself that you can 'code switch', i.e., maintain awareness of different language situations and shift seamlessly between different levels of formality and correctness in your writing. If 90% of what you write most days makes minimal requirements on formal grammar or punctuation, the other 10% is going to be negatively impacted by that. If you want to get 'serious' about your writing, you have to shift the proportion between formal/correct and informal/incorrect writing in your daily output; use Twitter and IM less, use e-mail more - and try to approach e-mailing as you would writing a formal letter on paper. 

Eliminating 'basic' errors of spelling and syntax, errors of the kind that will make your writing difficult to read and unimpressive to a prospective agent or editor (no matter how wonderful your content may be), is a huge task for most people. Indeed, it may often require several months of hard effort just to reach an adequate (not perfect) standard in this regard. However, this bootcamp work on the basics of writing doesn't have to be done in isolation; it can be undertaken alongside your more targeted preparation for your major writing project and the more general self-cultivation of the creative or artistic dimension to your writing.

At that higher level of writing we also, alas, tend to be complacent about our competence, blind to our faults and blemishes. It is natural to like our own writing, or at least to believe that it is reasonably 'fit for purpose'; and it can be hard for us to accept that in fact it may not be objectively very good; or that, whether it is 'good' or not, not many other people are likely to enjoy reading it. The aspiring writer has to cultivate the habit of carefully re-reading everything he or she has written, and reading it, as far as possible, from the detached perspective of an imagined reader, reading with a ruthlessly critical eye. That ruthlessness is the key that very few people achieve. If you can read your own writing and say "This sucks", you will continuously improve; if you read it and say "This isn't bad", you will stagnate or deteriorate.

Practise in as many genres as possible

Consider it cross-training. In my experience, people who focus exclusively on one genre may become adept in handling the conventions of that genre, but they rarely become truly impressive writers. To do that requires an all-around writing education. 

You can often learn more by moving outside your comfort zone, by attempting to write something in a format that is quite unfamiliar and even unappealing to you. Try your hand at writing everything; fiction and non-fiction; long pieces and short ones; news items, travelogues, advice columns, opinion pieces, restaurant or theatre reviews; novellas, short stories, micro-fiction. 

I particularly recommend having a go at poetry. You almost certainly won't be any good at it; poetry is HARD, and 90% of published poets aren't worth a damn. It doesn't matter whether you're any good; you'll learn a lot from trying and failing. Poetry teaches you about rhythm and structure, conciseness of expression, allusion, and phrase-making in a way that no other kind of writing can; and yet every kind of writing can benefit from these lessons.

That's enough - more than enough - for one session. There will be some more to follow, next week some time.

I hope I may actually provoke some comments for once with this post!

Here endeth the lesson

I finally managed - with a further follow-up e-mail - to goad the senior guy at that law firm I was griping about a few weeks ago into giving me an answer as to whether he'd even received my last e-mail about the training/editing position we'd been discussing.

His reply was in flawless English, but decidedly snooty in tone. He claimed that he had been "too busy" to reply (for the whole of the past 5 or 6 weeks, much of which was a holiday in China?), and that he felt that my original e-mail (admittedly quite a detailed discussion of the topic, but with bold-labelled bullet points to facilitate skimming, and a nifty one-paragraph 'executive summary' at the beginning which obviated the need even to do that) would have required a long response which he just didn't have time for.

So, I'm not quite sure what his defence/excuse is here:  bad e-mail management (I meant to reply to you, but I omitted to do so promptly, and then forgot about it), bad time management (I really wanted to reply to you, but I just couldn't find the necessary 5 minutes in my schedule), arrogance (I'm TOO IMPORTANT to bother with little people like you - an unfortunately common mindset in China, particularly amongst 'Red Guard generation' types like this guy), or - most likely - the inveterate Chinese vice of being incapable of delivering 'bad news' (It's just SO embarrassing; I can't bear to be communicating with somebody who might become unhappy with me!).

Well, guess what, shithead - you did make me UNHAPPY with you. And I'm not the sort of person to let something like this lie.

And I'm not so unusual in this. Many Westerners, if you fail to reply to an important e-mail of theirs with even a token acknowledgement (which will only take a minute or two, perhaps just 30 seconds, for heaven's sake!), will send a follow-up e-mail querying the omission; and perhaps a follow-up to that follow-up; and a follow-up to the follow-up to the follow-up. It can go on for a very long time, choking your Inbox, and "embarrassing" you afresh every day. How's that for saving your time? You may eventually feel hounded into giving a response; if so, you haven't even managed to avoid the dreaded "unfortunate confrontation"; and, in fact, it's much worse now, because your correspondent has become pissed off with your cowardly evasiveness.

I continue my Quixotic battle against this most frustrating and self-harming of Chinese business traits. This was the reply I sent to my annoying lawyer:

Dear Mr Wang,

Thank you for getting back to me at last.

It would have taken you no time at all to acknowledge my e-mail, and to tell me briefly that you did not wish to pursue further discussion with me (even if you didn't have time to explain why).

A discussion is not terminated until one party notifies the other that it is terminated.

Of course, it is very difficult to deal with the high volume of e-mail we all receive these days; but it is conspicuous that Chinese people tend to be much worse than most other nationalities at dealing with e-mail promptly and appropriately. In particular, it is an unfortunately common problem that the Chinese seem to prefer to terminate a conversation unilaterally, without letting the other side know, especially if they feel embarrassed about having to give a response that the other side may find disappointing.

As you should know, around most of the rest of the world, and certainly in Western business usage, this is seen as unprofessional, childish, and rude. It makes an enormously bad impression on any foreigners you have contact with. It is probably the No. 1 problem in inter-cultural communication between China and the West. It seriously harms your ability to grow your foreign clientele.

Even if you do not want to make use of my abilities to deal with your English editing needs at present, it is possible that my help in this area might be of value to you at some time in the future - even if only for one-off emergency cover, for example. There are also a number of other ways in which I might be of assistance to you, such as recommending suitable editors/polishers or editing agencies for you, or introducing potential new clients. If you treat someone rudely, they will be unlikely to offer you such help; if you ignore someone's e-mails, they may ignore yours in the future.

Failing to respond to e-mail is a very bad and damaging habit, and I hope that you will succeed in eliminating it at your firm.

Regards,

Froog - Champion of Good E-Mail Etiquette

Beware of the music fans

There's a cool little CD shop I like to drop into every once in a while. The owner there has eclectic tastes, and is often playing something interesting - rare or familiar, Chinese or foreign - when I wander past. And he's very amenable to putting on a disc or discs that you request, even if you're quite obviously not in a buying mood that day.

He doesn't really have any functional ability to carry on a conversation in English, but he has memorised many of his favourite English lyrics pretty near perfectly.

A couple of months back, I found him one Saturday afternoon blaring out Radiohead's OK Computer, singing along with every word.

When he got to this part, at the beginning of No Surprises, his delivery became strikingly lustier:

You look so tired and unhappy

Bring down the government

They don't, they don't speak for us

I do hope the poor chap doesn't get himself arrested.

War on Weibo??

As I mentioned a couple of days ago (flippantly, in passing - but that doesn't make it not true), I really think the Chinese government needs to stamp all over the micro-blogging fad as soon as possible. I speak from their point of view here, not my own.

They have, very wisely, suppressed Facebook and Twitter for the past couple of years. (I facetiously argued in that earlier post that this might be misguided, because these services actually had little potential to foment revolutionary idealism, but, on the contrary, provided an addictive distraction that might serve to defuse rising social discontent. Events in North Africa earlier this year might be said to have proved me wrong on that. And anyway, there are plenty of mass media 'opiates' with which the CCP can stupefy its population. Foreign social networking sites are of little interest to anyone here, but the government would mess with World of Warcraft at its peril.)

However, by some strange (ahem, probably 'commercially motivated' - did anyone say bribe? OK, now I did) oversight, they have allowed a Chinese micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, to become enormously popular.

Enormously. It was only launched just over two years ago, and only seems to have really been gaining major traction during the last year. But it now has over 60,000 registered users (hmm, query Wikipedia on that - I suspect it might well be 60 million!), and  between 100 million and 150 million regular readers, and is starting to eclipse rival domestic services, with a survey earlier this year showing  it had more than 50% of active users and more than 86% of browsing time in the micro-blogging market. Very nearly all urban middle-class Chinese now have at least occasional access to the Internet; and perhaps 35-40% of them are fairly regular users. Sina Weibo is well on its way to achieving 100% penetration of that powerful demographic wedge.

It has now announced plans to launch an English version of its service before the end of this year - initially, one supposes, with a view to wooing the expat population in China who may be growing weary of having to 'tweet' via a VPN all the time; but before long, one suspects, they aspire to try to go toe-to-toe with Twitter and Facebook and the rest in overseas markets. And, oh yes, Tianjin Airlines last month launched a passenger jet in the Sina Weibo livery; it's the first Chinese website to sponsor a plane in this way (though I bet Jack Ma of Alibaba is kicking himself that he didn't think of it).

Well, good luck to them!

The thing is, since the rash of Jasmine Revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East at the start of this year, the CCP is crapping its pants at the now dramatically confirmed potential of these social networking tools to coordinate mass protests. And it would really, really, really like to squelch poor old Sina Weibo. Sometimes, filtering isn't enough. With that many people taking part in the conversation, you can't expect to effectively moderate the conversation - you've just got to put a STOP to it.

But it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Sina Weibo has just got way too big, too successful, too famous, too popular. They've got their own airplane, for heaven's sake. And they're getting ready to fight for the pride of the nation against the most powerful brands in the worldwide Internet. You can't shut down an operation like that.

All you can do is make it less and less easy to use, especially from mobile devices - by outlawing the provision of free wi-fi in public places.

A 'pilot scheme' of this sort seems to have been launched in the past few days. Cafés, bars, and restaurants in several parts of central Beijing - such as the trendy shopping streets of Nanluoguxiang and Wudaoying Hutong, near where I live - have been receiving visits from the police, gruffly warning them that they face stiff fines if they continue to offer wi-fi services without installing a 'security package'. According to this item in yesterday's New York Times, this package is a piece of software which purports to 'identify' users who log on to the Internet through a wi-fi network. God knows how that's supposed to work, since the idea of introducing 'real name registration' for China's Internet users has been mooted a number of times in the past, but has, predictably, never got off the ground.

The software's developers claim they charged $310,000 to create the program. The PSB are attempting to extort around one percent of that from every café owner who wants to continue to attract patrons by offering a wi-fi connection. Major franchises like Starbucks and McDonald's will presumably shell out, just to keep on the right side of the government. But the fee being asked is so outrageous that it seems inconceivable that any small independent business will agree to pay it. If the amount had been a painful-but-affordable 5,000 or 10,000 rmb rather than 20,000, we might have supposed that this was just another little scam - another way of soliciting "contributions" to the Policemen's Benevolent Fund or whatever. At this price level, however, it is plainly an attempt to outlaw wi-fi altogether.

Will it work? Well, probably not. People, after all, can log on to Weibo using their work or home computers. And there are lots of unsecured wi-fi signals bleeding out of offices and apartments (there are at least three neighbours in my xiaoqu that I piggyback off occasionally when my own connection's gone on the blink). Maybe you can access it via the cellular phone network as well - I don't know.

And I doubt if there'll be any real follow-through on enforcement. It would take a HUGE commitment of manpower to try to monitor every bar and café (and restaurant and shop and hotel and gymnasium and...) offering a wi-fi service in Beijing.

As so often with this sort of initiative, the implementation is going to be completely half-arsed (remember the census-that-wasn't-a-census last year?); the guys on the ground don't really give a damn about it anyway, and the high-ups will eventually realise how hopelessly impractical it is and quietly forget about the whole idea. And the majority of venue owners will probably ignore the crackdown as well, perhaps making a show of compliance for the next few weeks, but then putting their wi-fi beacons back into service, and only discreetly turning them off again for 10 minutes or so when a neighbourhood copper is seen ambling down the street with an i-Phone in his hand.

Let's hope so, anyway.

Not that it bothers me. I never use wi-fi. And I loathe Twitter and all of its ilk (even if they might occasionally be useful for starting a revolution). But I feel sorry for friends who do rely on wi-fi for their work (and their 'tweeting', if they must; some of them assure me that a lot of it is 'work related'). And I feel sorry for bar and café owners whose business might be seriously impacted by this measure.

So, Communist overlords, you must think again. You have to find a way of killing - or emasculating - Sina Weibo, before it does the same to you. But you have to do it by such gradual increments that nobody notices enough to make a big fuss about it (think Gramsci's Frog). I'd have a look at that 'real name registration' idea again - not for wi-fi Internet surfers, but for Sina Weibo account-holders.