The curse of The Olympics?

Or 'the blessing', as it may be....

I was up in London three times last week. I had been dreading it, because of the turmoil that had been widely anticipated due to additional traffic restrictions and increased tourist numbers while the Olympic Games are on.

In fact, it was a delightful experience. I have never seen the West End so uncrowded. At times, indeed, the city seemed almost deserted. On Tuesday morning, the biggest concentration of tourists I encountered anywhere was in front of Buckingham Palace, and they amounted only to a few dozens, rather than the hundreds that you more usually find there. Passing through Victoria station at around 8.30am - the tail-end of the rush hour, when trains and platforms are usually still packed like sardine tins - I found the Tube about as pleasant as I've ever known it during the working week, the volume of passengers more like what you'd find late in the evening or on a very slow Sunday afternoon.

Now, of course, this was early on in the Games, before the glamorous athletics events had started. And most of the venues are far out in the East End of London. So, I can't really judge what attendance at the Games has been like. And perhaps central London is becoming busier this week.

But... I think the expectation of the return-on-investment for the Olympics is not only that there will be a huge number of additional tourists attending the Games themselves, but that there will be a knock-on effect to boost overall tourism and tourist spending as well. That clearly wasn't happening last week: London was, compared to a regular summer, devoid of tourists. And I suspect much of the rest of the country has been as well (I'm hoping Edinburgh might be a little less frenetic than usual during the festival season there this month!). I've been hearing anecdotal evidence from people in the tourism and hospitality industries that numbers of visitors are massively down this month. It would seem that fears of excessive crowds, transport difficulties, limited availability (and consequent price-gouging) of accommodation, and so on, and perhaps for some people just a distaste for all the hoopla surrounding the Olympics - these are all powerful factors dissuading people from visiting an Olympic host country while the Games are on.

Most of the revenue from the dratted event comes, I imagine, from the major sponsors and the TV companies (ticket sales, I would guess, are not a major contributor). But I wonder how far this revenue can offset not only the massive costs of creating the infrastructure for the Games but the danger of a huge DIP in tourist revenues.

This might be a relatively new phenomenon: as the Games have grown so much bigger over the past couple of decades (with improved TV coverage and the abandonment of amateurism), they have perhaps become progressively more disruptive and offputting to non-Olympic tourists. But not all Olympic cities will have felt this effect so acutely. Sydney may have done to some extent; but it is too remote to attract very large numbers of visitors from Europe or America, so I'd guess that the Olympics were probably a net boost for them in overseas tourism, though perhaps not much of one. Athens almost certainly did suffer from this effect; but other reasons, such as concerns about the city's preparedness, were blamed for poor attendance figures there. Beijing of course suffered very dramatically, but that was a self-inflicted wound: the Chinese government more or less banned foreign tourism during the Games, in the name of 'security' (i.e., heading off any possibility of embarrassing political demonstrations by visiting human rights activists). London might be in a uniquely vulnerable position, since it is such a huge tourist draw without the Olympics. However many people may have come to London from overseas specifically to watch the Games, I'd be willing to bet that there is a significantly larger number who have chosen to stay away.

Again and again we have seen that venues built for the Games are put to little use thereafter. If the argument that the Games boosts tourism is shown to be fallacious, there will be very little reason for any city to seek to host the event any more. I think this could be the beginning of the end for the Olympic Games: they have got TOO DARNED BIG, and are starting to sink under their own weight.

It's a great pity for the UK's national coffers, and potentially a disaster for the tourist industry here - but for ordinary folks like me, it is very, very pleasant to be able to walk around London streets and to ride London trains and buses that seem to have lost 70% of their normal population.

Dubious statistical footnote: I saw on the news this evening (8/8) that tourist spending was allegedly up by 8% in the first week of the Olympics. They weren't very clear on what this was "up" over - average tourist revenues in the last week of July over a spread of recent years, or just last year? Nor were they very clear on the area to which the statistic applied - the whole country, the whole of London, or just the area around the main venues in East London? I suspect it was supposed to be for the whole of London measured against this time last year. If spending at the venues is going really well, I can imagine that raising the total slightly. And theatre ticket sales were mentioned in the report as performing particularly strongly (nighttime, when most of the Olympic events are over). But from what I saw last week, there can't be any doubt that most non-Olympic tourist spending (during the day, in the centre of London) is hugely down on a normal year at the moment.

Haiku for the week

In childhood we cared:

Sport seemed noble, inspiring.

Now, an empty show.

I got quite excited about the Olympics as a kid, and watched avidly in '72 and '76. But the enthusiasm was already waning by the time I got into my teens, and the competition in '80 and '84 was compromised by boycotts (I approved of the Americans' stand over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and was disappointed that Britain hadn't followed suit). I haven't given it much of a thought since then. I made the effort to take more of an interest when the Games were being held in Beijing four years ago, but the atmosphere then was rather subdued by an oppressive government and an almost complete absence of overseas visitors.

And, as I observed after the last Olympics, the event has now become ridiculously bloated, overhyped, over-commercialized, raddled with nationalism - completely divorced from the original ethos of the Games. It's supposed to be about the individual pursuit of excellence; I'm not even too keen on the relay events in running, and certainly wouldn't include any team games. I'd strip the event down to the a few core sports, closer to the original ancient Greek template: basically just the athletics, and maybe swimming; no team games, no adversarial games, nothing that requires apparatus (other than the long-established throwing sports), and nothing that requires subjective scoring (diving and gymnastics, though they are fascinating to watch, are not proper competitive sports). There might be a case for some of the combat sports (the Greeks had boxing and wrestling), though I would resist them on moral grounds (trying to hurt someone shouldn't really be a sport or a form of entertainment). There might be a case for cycling (not a very complex piece of apparatus; and I can imagine the Greeks very easily might have invented it in a slightly different universe); but it is a very boring event. No, athletics and swimming would be it for me. All over in a week. If only...

The Olympics have become a colossal bore. And, if you happen to be caught in the host country, the host city, a massive inconvenience.

The spirit of adventure

Just as I was about to leave Beijing a few weeks ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an e-mail about this grand quixotic adventure. Three young Brazilians - journalist Richard Amante and his mates Edgar and Paulo Scherer - plan to drive a beat-up secondhand Santana all the way from Beijing to London.

They set out from the Olympic Green in Beijing 10 days ago, and are aiming to arrive in London on the 27th July - in time for the Opening Ceremony of the 30th Olympic Games. That means they'll be covering more than 20,000km and traversing at least 25 different countries in just 57 days. That doesn't leave an awful lot of time for sightseeing, much less any mechanical mishaps.

They are, of course, completely MAD. And I wish I was going with them.

You can follow their progress on their Olympic Expedition website.

Best of luck to you, Richard, Edgar, and Paulo!!! 

I hope to see you in London next month.

Unhappy update: Damn, I hope I didn't jinx these boys! I'd been worried when they hadn't updated their blog for a few days at the end of their first week... It turns out they ran into problems trying to get their car across the Chinese border - full sorry details here, a prime example of how maddeningly incompetent and obstructive Chinese bureaucracy can be!

They reluctantly left their car behind in Xinjiang, and are now seeking to continue their journey by whatever alternative modes of transport they can contrive... a bit of hitching, a bit of flying....

I am not in the least surprised by this turn of events, but very, very disappointed for the lads. Way to party-poop, China!!


Happier update: Well, I'm glad to see the lads made it to London on schedule. And they seem to have had a lot of fun along the way, despite that unfortunate early setback.

Beijing Taxi

A week or so ago, I went to a screening of Beijing Taxi, a new film by young Beijing documentary-maker Wang Miao.

It's a diverting study of the lives of three taxi drivers in the capital over the two or three years leading up to the 2008 Olympics. In fact, though, it's not much focused on the business of driving taxis at all (I think there's a great documentary still to be made just following what happens in the cars): the film aims for a broader scope by concentrating more on the private lives of its three subjects. Also, interestingly enough, of this central trio, one takes a better-paid job driving tour buses, and another decides to try her hand at running a market stall instead - leaving only one, the oldest, to struggle on with his taxi-driving, despite health problems which threaten to lose him his cab.

I fear most expat Beijing residents will have felt a little disappointed, as I was, that there wasn't more of the city on view here, and that there wasn't more insight into what Beijingers actually think of living here. The only really striking comment in the whole film was the female driver-turned-entrepreneur's complaint that the Olympics were lousy for business in 2008.

This project looks to have been very well-funded, and the technical crew were mostly foreigners. Thus, the production values were much higher than we've come to expect from the majority of Chinese documentaries, which tend to be mostly ultra-low budget 'underground' projects - often shot single-handedly by impassioned 'amateurs' rather than full film crews. The photography here was gorgeous, and the editing very slick indeed.

However, the classic vices of the typical Chinese documentary were all still there - unfortunately.

Chinese documentary-makers seem to hate to editorialize at all. They just like to present an unmediated slice-of-life. This means that a lot of very inconsequential scenes will be included to enhance this conceit of 'realism', and often left to play out in real time - with few if any cuts. I saw a film about the police in a northern border town a few years ago, where a suspect was made to support himself against a wall for ten minutes with his legs slightly bent at the knee (a softening up exercise, prior to interrogation): a Western film-maker would have cut to a clock to show the passage of time, and just shown a few short passages of the prisoner's discomfort to make the point; this Chinese director showed the whole ten minutes (nothing happened - except that the prisoner, predictably, stood up to rest himself every time the officer supervising him left the room). Such longueurs, alas, are inescapable in a Chinese documentary.

It doesn't help that you have no idea how long you're going to have to endure such plodding exposition. I sat through nearly an hour-and-a-half of Beijing Taxi - 90 minutes that felt more like 3 or 4 hours - and it showed no sign of approaching a close. The running time had not been announced by the organisers of the screening. It isn't even listed on the film's IMDB page. Perhaps there's an unwritten pact between Chinese documentary-makers that they should never advertise the length of their films - for fear that potential viewers might be discouraged. I suspect Beijing Taxi, a film that has obviously been made with an overseas audience in mind, probably runs somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. That would make it a relative lightweight in the field of Chinese documentaries, where most run well over 2 hours, and some 3 hours or 4 hours or even more.

And you have little sense of when the end - and your release from your rock-hard chair - might be approaching, because there is no structure. None whatsoever. Well, that would be 'editorializing', wouldn't it? Although there's a similar problem in most Chinese feature films, too: in this country they seem to have never developed the concept of narrative drive, of stories shaped by the developmental character arc of the protagonist(s). A story is just "a bunch of stuff that happens". And then it stops happening. THE END. I fear most of their classic literature is much the same. Aristotle's insights are sorely missed.

There's never any voiceover narration, either. And little or no captioning. You're just left to make your own sense of the pictures and the recorded dialogue presented to you. Up to a point, this can be quite a refreshing change from the heavily structured documentary style we're familiar with in the West. And I can see that this approach might work well with certain kinds of subject. But I think it would have to be allied with more selectivity and self-discipline in the use of footage, and much shorter running times. I would like to charitably suppose that Chinese documentarians opt for this excessively spare, unobtrusive, 'selfless' style out of some kind of ideology; but I suspect, in fact, they're just lazy, naive, or uneducated. If they watched something like Fourteen Days In May or Bloody Ivory or A State Of Mind, they would see how an only slightly more intrusive 'editorial stance' can render a documentary so much more compelling, and sustain audience interest even at full feature-length - rather than creating films that are, whatever the potential appeal of their subject matter, little more than a penance to sit through.

War on Chinglish (16)

sports and games


Sports and games are not the same. A sport is an activity that exercises physical skill and/or strength. A game, however, is a form of competition defined by a complex set of rules, in which two sides contend simultaneously for victory against each other.

Running, swimming, skating, and pole-vaulting, for example, are sports but not games

(they have no aim other than to be the fastest, highest, furthest, etc.; and although several sportsmen may take part at the same time [e.g., in a sprint race] they are essentially competing individually, to try to give the best performance that they can; they are not confronting another competitor, to physically prevent him from attaining victory).

Chess, draughts, poker, backgammon, and go (weiqi) are games but not sports

(because they test purely mental, not physical ability).

Some competitive activities are both games (head-to-head competition within a defined set of rules) and sports (dependent on physical prowess): football, hockey, volleyball, basketball, etc.

A few activities may sometimes be seen as definitional grey areas. Some people object that table tennis is scarcely a sport, since it depends mostly on mental toughness and speed of reaction rather than strength or stamina. Others call darts a sport because it involves throwing something, even though the amount of physical effort involved is minimal.

Martial arts - such as boxing, wrestling, judo and taekwondo - are perhaps something of a special case: even though they are closely defined by rules and involve head-to-head competition, they are traditionally treated as sports not games. This is perhaps because a further element in the concept of a 'game' is that the victory conditions involve the achievement of some artificial object such as scoring a goal or making a basket. In martial arts, though the scoring systems may be quite elaborate, the fundamental aim is far simpler and more direct, less abstract: it is the physical domination of one's opponent - a fairly straightforward objective, more akin to running fastest in a race, or throwing furthest in the discus event.

The combined term sports games exists only in the Universe of Chinglish.


This is another of those occasions where Chinese only seems to have one common verb for use with all forms of physical exertion - and it always gets 'translated' into English as play.

Sorry, folks, that doesn't work. You have to be aware of the distinction between sports and games -

you play games but you do sports.

(Occasionally, we also use go with a few sports - I go swimming, I go running - to indicate that we are leaving the house to take part in them, just as we do with activities like shopping or hiking.)

Similarly, players play games; sportsmen do sports. Usain Bolt is not a player, because his event - sprint racing - is only a sport, not a game; he is a sportsman. David Beckham can be described as either a player or a sportsman, because football is both a game and a sport.

I had hoped that with the splurge of 'sports English' language training initiatives that popped up in the run-up to the Olympics, these stubborn Chinglishisms might at last be displaced - but, if anything, they seem to have been becoming even more entrenched.

It even bleeds through into the way some expats speak English: I've heard friends saying things like, "I'm going to play tai chi on Sunday." No, you're not; you're going to do tai chi. Please, remember the beauty of your mother tongue! Don't let it get tainted by this morass of Chinglish we find ourselves surrounded by.

A venue too far

I was modestly excited to discover that our local football team, Beijing Guo'an, were to be playing a visiting European side in an exhibition game this week. And not a soulless corporate behemoth like Manchester United or Real Madrid, but an actual football team - honest, down-to-earth English mid-table toilers, Birmingham City.

My excitement evaporated when I discovered the game was to be played not at the Workers' Stadium (as I had naturally assumed it would be) but at the dratted Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium (now, apparently, styled the 'National Stadium').

As I griped during the Olympics, the powers-that-be here outstripped their customary stupidity by locating the main Olympic venues in the most inaccessible part of the city.

Now, it ought to be a relative doddle to get to the Olympic Green, because it's in a reasonably central location, just off the 4th Ringroad, only 4 or 5 miles out of the centre of the city. But the public transport links are horrible: taxis and buses can't stop on the Ringroad itself, and there didn't seem to be any obvious taxi ranks or bus stops or whatever beside the main entrances (I think there were extra bus routes laid on during the Olympics, but they weren't well advertised, and have probably long since been discontinued). The subway link was even worse: an entirely separate line (with a laborious, overland interchange) serving just the Olympic Green, and 'connected' only to one other line - Line 10, which is itself scarcely connected to the rest of the network. From where I live, I have to negotiate three interchanges in the space of 8 or 9 stations. And the nearest exit station is still the best part of a mile away from the stadium (and I'm not sure that this rump of a line is still in service anyway; in fact, I'm not even sure if it was fully in use during the Olympics - some of the stations appeared to be closed when I walked by). I could walk all the way in a little over an hour - it's probably quicker.

Quite apart from the galling practicalities of getting there (and back), the area around the Bird's Nest is severely unappealing, a 'cultural desert'. A visit to the Workers' slots neatly into a wider schedule of revelry, since it's in the heart of the city's nightlife zone, with several clubs, bars, and restaurants within the stadium complex itself, and the Sanlitun bar district only a few minutes' walk away.

Moreover, though the atmosphere of the place suffers rather from its excessive size (it's seldom more than a third or a half full, other than for the very biggest games), it is the traditional home of the capital side, and thus inspires fervent emotions in the fans. Even I have some sentiment invested in the place, since it is the scene of the 5 or 6 games I've previously seen here.

The Bird's Nest is a pain-in-the-backside to get to, and will probably be three-quarters empty and severely lacking in atmosphere. And there's nowhere to go for a drink afterwards.

I think I'll watch the game at home, thanks.

Come on, you Blues!

Haiku for the week

Mercury rises,
Sweating city moves outdoors:
Sidewalks come alive.

For the past two years, with the government's exaggerated anxieties about first the Olympics and then the nation's 60th anniversary celebrations, Beijing's traditional street life has been at least partly suppressed: many bars and restaurants have been sternly discouraged from putting out any furniture on the sidewalks in front of their businesses.

Finally, it seems, we may be seeing a return to normal. Over the past week or so, it has been starting to get really hot here, and occasionally a little humid too. Most folks in the poorer neighbourhoods where I live don't have any air-conditioning (or are too thrifty to use it), so they spend summer evenings loafing around the streets, squatting on their stoop or on a tiny stool outside their favourite local xiaomaibu (a hole-in-the-wall convenience store, of which there are, around here, usually at least three or four in every hundred yards); many of them will even set up camp-beds on the sidewalk and attempt to sleep outside. Even our killjoy government couldn't really suppress these behaviours. But the buzzier atmosphere you get from having almost every restaurant move outside too, from having the sidewalks crowded with people drinking and snacking late into the night - that has been missing this past two years. I was therefore quite shocked - shocked, but very pleased - to discover when heading out to dinner a couple of nights ago that the hutong where I live was thronged with plastic stools and collapsible tables. This is what a Beijing summer is supposed to be like.

Another late "Olympic" story

My good friend The Choirboy was complaining to me the other day that he hasn't made an appearance on my blogs "in over a year".  Ah, the vanity of youth!   In fact, his complaint is somewhat exaggerated; a quick search reveals that he was briefly name-checked over on The Barstool just a few weeks ago, and has had at least three other mentions this year, including the surely rather flattering suggestion in my notorious Cast List post that, in a film version of the blog, he should be played by the gorgeous Irish actor Cillian Murphy.  And he was honoured here on Froogville at the tail-end of last year for his momentous victory in the Grand Final of The Bookworm's Professionals' Quiz.   This, however, is a favourite story from a year ago that I have been meaning to add on here for some time, but have somehow never quite got around to.  (Be careful what you wish for, Choirboy!)     My best friend here in Beijing - a rather sporty and roguishly charming young Irishman that we have come know as The Choirboy - managed to break both his wrists on the eve of his birthday last year. Don't practise capoeira when drunk is the lesson we learn from this.   Although this was a moderately amusing story, he was naturally rather shamefaced about telling it, and his friends all soon grew bored of hearing it. So, for a while, we developed a little competition of suggesting more exotic explanations for his incapacity. Our favourite (since this was just after the Olympics) was that he had been Ireland's surprise hope of a gold medal in the men's table tennis, but that the Chinese team - desperate to protect its domination of the competition - had sent the heavies round to sort him out. "Ma Lin says hello."   [I had first recounted this anecdote here, on Tony's Other Men's Flowers blog, last November.]

Missing the point

One of the most depressing moments in my experience of teaching in universities here came a few years ago, when I was discussing preparations for the Olympics with a group of sophomores.

We got on to the issues of security and policing, and I suggested that extra manpower might be needed.

The first rather naive response was that the entire police force from nearby cities such as Tianjin would be bussed over here. ("What - all of them? Isn't Tianjin hosting some Olympic events as well? And don't you think there's some danger of a crimewave, if there are no police left there at all?" No, actually, I rather liked that idea: I pictured a mass mah jong tournament between the police forces of the two cities.)

Then several people suggested we could just use the army.

Now, there's a place for the armed services in the security arrangements, of course - specialist rapid-response units to deal with bomb disposal or hostage-taking incidents, that kind of thing. But putting the military out on the streets for regular policing duties, maintaining public order? That really doesn't look good. It makes it look as though your government is so unpopular that there is a constant threat of riot or revolt, and that the only way it can control its own people is by the threat of armed force. (They did in fact station quite a number of members of the armed forces along the main routes north from the city centre to the Olympic Green - but at least they were in ceremonial uniform, and only carrying sidearms, not rifles or machine-guns. Even so, I felt it created a slightly creepy, threatening atmosphere.)

The majority of these kids, alas, had grown up in complete ignorance of what happened here in 1989. They didn't know that the murder of civilians by the PLA is still what Beijing and Tiananmen Square is best known for around most of the world. They didn't understand the resonances of deploying soldiers on the streets of your capital city, didn't recognise the signals that it sends to people.

That, for me, is one of the most terrible things about this week's anniversary. The Party's propaganda on the subject has been largely successful. Today, most people in this country probably neither know nor care very much about the 1989 crackdown; even those that know something about it mostly fail to understand why it's so important.

Olympic leftovers (4): "Ma Lin says 'hello'!"

My best friend here in Beijing, a rather sporty and roguishly charming young Irishman, managed to break both his wrists on the eve of his birthday last year. (Don't practise capoeira when drunk is the lesson we learn from this.)

Although this was a moderately amusing story, he was naturally rather shamefaced about telling it; and his friends all soon grew bored of hearing it. So, for a while, we developed a little competition of suggesting more exotic explanations for his incapacity. Our favourite (since this was just after the Olympics last year) was that he had been Ireland's surprise hope of a gold medal in the men's table tennis, but that the Chinese team - desperate to protect its domination of the competition - had sent the heavies round to sort him out. "Ma Lin says hello."

[Yes, I'm recycling again. I originally recounted this anecdote in a comment over on Tony's blog; but it still amuses me.]

Who stopped the rain?

Apparently, it rained pretty heavily almost everywhere in China over the weekend. Everywhere.... except in Beijing, where we had only a couple of light showers overnight. Beijing is still pretty damned parched. At least the laying of the dust across much of north China has restored our blue skies (the air in Beijing is still fairly poisonous, especially anywhere near the huge construction sites around Sanlitun; but at least it's transparent again, which it wasn't for much of the preceding fortnight).

Quite a few times recently, it's looked like it might rain here in the capital, it's felt like rain.... but it hasn't rained. This is quite remarkable, since ordinarily any and every cloud that approaches the city is promptly shot full of silver iodide by artillery batteries stationed to the south and west - and, sure enough, rain comes. A sour-tasting, chemical-rich rain that tints the sky green.

But I don't think we've seen any of that since the Olympics last year.

There are two (non-exclusive) 'conspiracy theories' to explain this curious circumstance. Or three, if you believe in karma or divine retribution or....

1) OK, so, the Hand-of-God, reap-what-you-sow, don't-mess-with-Dame-Nature explanation is simply that the powers-that-be here in Beijing are being punished for all the meddling they did with the weather last year to try and ensure a reasonably well-watered and non-polluted Olympics. There doesn't have to be any mechanism; it's simply right and just that we are now suffering month after month of rain-free, cloud-free drought and inexorably turning into a desert.

But me, I like to try and find a mechanism always.

2) The drought currently afflicting north central China is at least partly caused by the massive re-routing of water supplies to the capital last summer. Beijing demanded so much water from the provinces to the west that their water-tables were dangerously depleted, and still haven't recovered. Beijing's not getting any rain because there's now very little groundwater to evaporate from the areas immediately upwind.

3) Even when clouds do appear over the capital, we don't seem to be trying the silver iodide trick any more. Did we use up all our stocks last year? No, I think it's more possible, more likely that we're having to observe some kind of quota system. I noted last year that Beijing's rampant cloud-seeding must effectively be robbing areas further east - notably the sprawling municipality of Tianjin - of rainfall, and that this probably couldn't continue completely unregulated. I suspect that Beijing used up all of its cloud-seeding allowance and then some last summer, and is now being forced to refrain from the practice for a while.

Just idle speculation, of course. But I think these ideas merit some investigation.

Olympic leftovers (3)

During the Olympic summer last year I commented a number of times on the "x-ray" scanners that had been introduced at all the subway stations (commenting mostly on what a complete waste of time they were!).

I had expected that they would be de-commissioned, sold off within a few weeks of the end of the Paralympics (well, in a sensible world, they would have been hired rather than bought; but I'm sure several people received generous hong bao [the little red envelopes in which the Chinese traditionally hand over gifts of cash] in return for authorising this massive purchasing programme). And, for a little while, it did appear as if this were going to happen. Most of the extra security staff who'd been filling the subway ticket halls during the Olympics disappeared; without the throngs of 'guards' hustling people towards them, the scanners were effectively falling into disuse; sometimes the scanners themselves were now left unmanned; several were mothballed, draped in foil-covered blankets; in a few places, I think, they'd actually been removed.

But then.... the blankets came off, the machines were put back into use, more security staff appeared again (not as many as last summer, but many more than last autumn) to operate them, and to bring them to passengers' attention (many of them are sited in really stupid positions, not on a convenient path through the station, and sometimes not even readily visible).

Is there some new terrorist threat the authorities are seeking to respond to here?

No, I think not. It's just another phoney job creation scheme, another sign of 'meltdown' desperation.

Olympic leftovers (2)

I caught a little of a CCTV profile of China's star gymnast He Kexin over the recent New Year holiday.

The young lady appears to have filled out quite considerably. Maybe it's just a little layer of winter insulation. Maybe she'd been eating a lot over the holiday period. Maybe she's been taking a rest from training for a while.

But she did appear to be becoming a little bit of a porker. Taller and fuller figured, too. Perhaps she's finally hit puberty. There is, of course, always speculation that these young female gymnasts are given drugs to delay puberty and keep them small and light, although the rigorous training regime alone is apt to do that. When these girls do finally 'grow up', they grow up fast.

He Kexin, I would say, is growing up. She's now starting to look like the 16-year-old China claimed she was a year ago. Almost. Well.... starting to look like the just-turned-15-year-old she actually is.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote on the age-faking scandal at the time, here and here.

The IOC was eventually shamed into launching an "investigation", but I never heard the outcome of that. Has the story really been forgotten, hushed up, "disappeared"?

I just tried to find out, and.... guess what? A search on Google News produces only ONE return for He Kexin. And that one probably only slipped through the filter because it's in Polish.

A regular Web search produces considerably more returns; but, seemingly, none of them are dated later than 23rd August last year. Has Ms He really done nothing of note since then? Has there been no further public discussion of the "age controversy"? I find that hard to believe. No, I fear that we are still seeing blanket censorship of this topic within China. (I need to find myself a better proxy; FoxyProxy no longer seems to be cutting it.)

I would be grateful to anyone who could send me some more up-to-date news on this.

By the way, I put "controversy" in quotation marks because I don't think there's any controversy about it at all. Check out the excellent Stryde Hax for overwhelming proof that He Kexin was underage when she competed in the Olympics last year, that her documents were altered to make her appear older, and that Chinese government officials have repeatedly lied about it ever since. Oh yes, and tried to pull every incriminating document from the Internet as soon as it was exposed. And tried to suppress domestic discussion - or even awareness - of the issue by censoring the Net.

Other female gymnasts in the Chinese team last year were also underage. It would appear that conspiring to fake the age of female gymnasts has been a standard government policy here for some time. The only new wrinkle in the He Kexin story is the massive attempt to cover the tracks of the deception online. Yang Yun, a medal winner on the assymetric bars at the Sydney Games in 2000, has publicly admitted to being only 14 at the time. She doesn't seem to be ashamed at this revelation, and no action has been taken against her. On the contrary, the mayor of her home town seems to consider it a matter of greater pride that she could win a medal at such a young age, blithely ignoring the fact that it was against the rules.

I have spoken before about the apparent lack of any moral qualm in the Chinese about cheating. It is one of the things I find most depressing about this country.

Olympic leftovers (1)

I know, I know, I wrote quite enough about the darned Olympics last year, but..... after a long pause, I feel I can now return to the subject occasionally.

And I really don't know how I came to omit mentioning this at the time last summer.

I learned from a cab driver that many Beijingers spoke of the official Olympic logo as being a picture "of a man shot in the back.... by the police.... while trying to run away...."

Yes, the red hole in the chest is somewhat unfortunate, and one can readily see where this gory interpretation springs from.... but the elaboration of that image.... ouch! It speaks volumes about the psyche of this nation, I fear, and about its brutal recent history.

Reclaim the Square! (2)

No, not that Square. What do you take me for?

Just before the Olympics, I commented on how nice it was to have my local square, the rectangular space between the historic Drum and Bell Towers (just under a mile from my apartment), suddenly denuded of tourists and returned to the sole possession of local residents. It's a great spot for people watching, a wonderfully friendly, happy place - when it's left open for the folks in the 'hood to just wander about doing their thing in it.

Sadly, this freedom-to-hang-out is often interrupted, either by the incessant convoys of tourist coaches, or - on major holidays - by the closing of the square while viewing platforms, stages, and sound and light equipment are installed for special shows (to which, of course, only party cadres and other 'VIPs' can get tickets). In the last few years, the western New Year's Eve has regularly been blighted by such 'festivities'. And last year, Chinese New Year's Eve was as well. I had feared a repeat this year, but.... well, perhaps last year's event was part of the pre-Olympic build-up. This year, they did something similar on December 31st, but not last night. Hooray!

The square thus became a major centre for revellers to set off fireworks. For an hour or so either side of midnight, it was just crazy - perhaps even bigger than the last couple of years (although I think 2006, the first year of the lifting of the firework ban in the capital, is unlikely ever to be surpassed - that was just a continuous, all-day barrage).

And there were no accidents, fortunately - although there were some close calls with a few rockets fizzing horizontally across the width of the square and crashing into crowds of onlookers on the other side.

And there were a couple of Chinese guys who conducted an experiment I've long been eager to see. After waiting patiently for several minutes for there to be enough of a lull in the firework lighting around them for them to have a chance to fully unravel the enormous wagon-wheel coil of firecrackers they'd brought along..... well, they discovered that although this string of crackers was very, VERY long, the firecrackers themselves weren't all that big - and were not making themselves very well heard above all the other ordnance being let off in the square. Moreover, the string was burning down awfully slowly. So, they picked up their 10-metre string of firecrackers, looped it up again, and flung the coils on top of the bit that was already lit. Result? HUGE F***ING EXPLOSION!!!!! And seared eyebrows. Who'd have thought it?!

Last night was so noisy that I think it may have damaged my hearing. Really - it was worse than a rock concert.

And it's just starting to get going again tonight.

Where are those earplugs??

Signs & portents (The End of Days?)

People sometimes ask me, "So, how is the global meltdown affecting China?"

Well, it's difficult to say.

One of the first things I notice is that people seem to favour the 'tsunami' metaphor rather than 'meltdown'. Does that have any wider currency, or is it just a regional linguistic preference? A couple of the Chinese "academics" I edit for have used it already, and I noticed Hong Kong supremo Donald Tsang say it on TV the other day. I suppose, as a metaphor it has the advantage of suggesting transience - whereas a 'meltdown' can just go on and on (hmmm, perhaps not a good time to mention 'the China syndrome'?!), and even when it's over leaves an irremediable mess.

Then, the air has been uncannily clear over the past few months. I mean, even cleaner than it was during the Olympics. It started getting all crappy again pretty much the instant the Paralympics was done, but then it suddenly brightened up again at the beginning of October and we've been almost entirely smog-free ever since (we've had just a few bad days, but I'm sure it's been almost entirely domestic coal-burning and the occasional blitz of ancestor-worship bonfires, not industrial haze). Admittedly, the weather is usually pretty good through much of the autumn and early winter: it's an especially windy season, which helps; also, the government's statistics-wranglers are usually working desperately to hit their promised quota of 'blue sky days' for the year, and so ordering sporadic factory shutdowns to achieve that. However, we do also get a lot of really shitty air quality days through October to December every year, and this year there have been NONE. Chinese friends will insist that factory closures have thus far been limited to a few highly-publicised incidents in Guangdong, but..... I really think there isn't much manufacturing industry going on in the entire country at the moment.

There is a lot of forced jollity in the media about how pro-active the government is being in trying to stimulate the domestic economy (to bail out the rest of the world - thank you, China!). However, China Daily last week also mentioned a survey which suggested that the typical response of Chinese citizens - 3 out of every 4 respondents! - to the economic crisis was to "save more" (and, given the continuing crapness of China's banks - much improved since I've been here, but still pretty terrible - much of that saving is going to be, like my own, under the mattress). China is seeking to maintain its nominal GDP growth - and restrict unemployment - by pouring money into state-funded infrastructure projects. Stimulating domestic consumer-spending is a bit of a pipe-dream, I fear. And when you've become used to a decade or more of continuous double-digit growth, 7.5% counts as a recession.

The roads are oddly deserted. Really, the traffic is much better now than it was during the Olympics. OK, there has been a new restriction brought in to cut down car use (registration plates with a certain last digit are banned from operating on a particular day: I'm not sure if that works out to a 1-in-10 or a 1-in-5 reduction - though it seems to me like a pretty difficult system to publicise or enforce effectively); but during the Olympics, there were similar measures intended to cut down car use by half, and, in addition, most government-owned vehicles (nearly half of the total on the roads in the capital!) were pulled out of service, and a huge number of people quit town for a fortnight to avoid the whole circus. I would say that the number of cars on the roads now is significantly lower than it was during the Olympics, and down by maybe as much as 50% on what it was 6 months ago. Yes, maybe some people just learned to do without their cars during the period of Olympic restrictions - but I rather think that at least some of this lull on the roads is the result of reduced business activity (or of belt-tightening, loss of economic confidence, converting that second-car-for-the-Mrs into something-more-portable-like-gold). I am thus far something of a lone conspiracy theorist in making this observation, but I'm confident that in time more and more people will realise the truth of this. When the cars disappear from the roads in these sorts of numbers, it's a sign of something pretty dramatic - and not good.

Oh yes, and this may not be so much of a 'meltdown' thing as a 'China's economic miracle is built on straw' thing, but..... a couple of weeks ago I learned that almost all of China's domestic airlines have been losing money hand over fist for the past year or more. This being China, their response has been to start omitting to pay their landing fees to the airports. Since the state has to prop up this industry (and is probably still the major investor even in nominally privatised airlines), we can be sure that there will be some kind of surreptitious bail-out. But we had reached the awkward, ugly, risible stage of having the chairman of the Airports Association going on TV to threaten the airlines with being refused landing rights if they didn't make good on their arrears. What larks.

Ah, and then I mentioned the other week the curious phenomenon of how massive road and sidewalk mending operations around the city of Beijing appeared to have been abandoned half-finished for two months. Something odd going on with that too......

My basic Jeremiah message (or perhaps Cassandra?) for you is this: if you're waiting for China to dig the rest of the world out of a hole, think again. China is built over a hole of its own, and this global crisis might just cause it to topple in. Interesting times.....

Impassable

I have commented before on the frequency (and protractedness) of sidewalk renovations in this city - but just lately, things have been getting ridiculous.

The sidewalks on both sides of Jiugulou Dajie, the main southbound street near my apartment (which I walk along nearly every day), have been completely impassable for a couple of months: although much wider than in most parts of town, these would-be pedestrian thoroughfares are riddled with holes and trenches, piles of sand and stacks of paving slabs every few yards. It's particularly difficult to traverse these obstacles at night, since street lights are few and far between, of rather low brightness (the government no doubt claim this as a sign of their Green consciousness, but it's probably more to do with the shortfall in generating capacity), and largely obscured by the ubiquitous bloody trees anyway. Lately, I have fallen into the habit of cutting through the hutong back-alleys when I go out at night - because it really is just too darned hazardous to try to negotiate these sidewalks in this half-dug up condition (and there are no warning signs or tape cordons, of course!).

And it was not just this street. Almost all the major streets in the centre of the city seem to have been reduced to this condition. The shots above were in fact taken a couple of weeks ago on Zhang Zizhonglu - one of the city's main east-west thoroughfares!

We always get big seasonal splurges of this kind of repair work, but this year it seems to have been more thoroughgoing, more widespread than ever before. And it started in September, within days of the Paralympics concluding. I wonder if perhaps the deterioration of the sidewalks (another trees problem - the shallow root systems often chew up the paving within the space of 6 months or so, requiring continual re-levelling) has been more chronic this year because the spring/early summer repairs were done earlier than usual (and perhaps in a more rushed, slipshod manner - if such a thing is possible!) because of the panic about prettying the city up in time for the Olympics. It seems quite likely.

The most alarming thing about this phenomenon is not the inconvenience and health & safety risk it constitutes, nor its startling ubiquity - but the fact that it has gone on such a long time. The work was begun in late September or early October, but proceeded very slowly - and then seemed to be abandoned altogether for several weeks. I began to worry that it might be another indication of the impact of the 'global meltdown': if the Chinese government is running out of money to complete routine public works...... then we are all in big trouble.

PS Just in the last couple of weeks, the sidewalk re-laying finally seems to have been completed. The workforce was diverted elsewhere for a month or two, I suppose. Perhaps the 'global meltdown' effect here is that China is channelling its spend-it's-way-out-of-recession efforts into more conspicuous public projects like new roads and bridges and subways, and mundane pothole-filling is occasionally getting sidelined.

Ice, ice, baby

When staggering home through Arctic conditions last Thursday night (well, OK, the wee smalls of Friday morn), I was alarmed and perplexed to note that - although temperatures had been continuously below freezing for over 24 hours at that point, and had been getting down towards -15°Centigrade for the past several hours - there was not a trace of ice on the old city moat which lies alongside the North 2nd Ringroad, just a few hundred yards from my apartment. I have remarked on this rather perplexing - downright scary - phenomenon before. One wonders if they're still dumping superheated sewage into it (they supposedly stopped unloading raw sewage into the city's open waterways for the Olympics, but they've probably resumed the practice now; all of that modern city/"Green" Olympics bullshit was the most temporary of window-dressing).

It is therefore with considerable relief that I note today that - despite the temperature having been much milder for the past few days, and well above freezing during the middle of the day today - the moat is at last well and truly frozen.

I imagine, then, that the nearby Houhai lakes are too, although I haven't had the chance to go and take a look yet. The ice is probably still a little too delicate to bear much weight, but give it a few more days. The two-month 'Frost Fair' down on the lakes is one of the highlights of the Beijing winter: a Bruegelian (the Elder, that is - not the mad visions of Hell one) pageant of skating, sledging, hot chestnuts and candied fruit.

The Nanny giveth, and The Nanny taketh away....

We were without Blogspot this morning.

Perhaps this was just a glitch - or the dreaded "routine maintenance" (hmm, yet another possible band name) - with the Blogspot servers; but I couldn't help thinking that it was a China-specific problem, a reimposition of the Net censorship regime we have suffered here for most of the last few years, which was only grudgingly relaxed over the summer in deference to the promptings of the IOC.

It's always swings-and-roundabouts with this cockeyed government: it's just becoming possible to get visas without too much hassle once again, but..... no, you can't read fatuous weblogs any more.

I wasn't even able to get access via FoxyProxy, which I have been relying on for some time now. I was anxiously contemplating having to experiment with new proxies (with all of the tiresome online research, the downloading and installing of widgets, the resetting of browser configurations, etc. that this can entail). However, this afternoon, we seem to be in business again.

I suspect it was just one of the lads down at Kafka Central playing with the switches again. It's easy to see how they might get bored and restive on the lonely weekend shift.

Fate makes mock of me once more

One of the more attractive features of my apartment is the small park right outside my living-room window.

One of the more curious features of the said park is the large oblong concrete structure pictured above. As you can see, although it has a plain flat roof (its featurelessness broken only by that one cluster of skylights), its four walls are all thickly clad with great slabs of natural stone, giving it the appearance of a man-made mountain. It is some years since I actually went into the park, but I really think there's not even any obvious entrance into this building; the stone facing seems to cover it all. I suppose it is just about the right size for a swimming pool or a gymnasium, but it is not advertised to be such, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen anyone entering or leaving it, or even standing around forlornly outside after being frustrated in the attempt to find a means of admission.

No, the purpose of this structure is a complete mystery. I have often speculated that it is the discreet surface emanation of a government nuclear shelter, the iceberg-tip of an unimaginably vast underground fortress. This quaint fantasy of mine was rather disturbingly reinforced one night two or three years ago when a deafeningly loud klaxon went off in or near the "bunker" in the middle of the night; it shook my windows, and made it quite impossible to sleep; and it went on for some hours.

Anyhow - whether this strange building is Blofeld's headquarters, a disused swimming pool, or an extravagantly large groundsman's hut - it is currently undergoing an extensive makeover. For the past week or so, scores of builders have been teeming all over it. It is not clear to me what the results of these labours have been: it appears that a few small sections of the roof have been torn up - and perhaps replaced? - but I can't see that this would keep 40 men occupied day and night for a whole week, even here in China where working practices are notoriously inefficient. Other, more mysterious renovations are afoot, I fancy; perhaps even inside the building.

There are supposed to be laws prohibiting the carrying on of noisy work in residential areas between the hours of 11pm and 7am, but it is dashed difficult to obtain any enforcement of these. I have mostly been going to bed too late and too exhausted over the past week to notice how late or how noisy the work is at night; but there have certainly been at least a couple of nights when substantial noise has been produced all night, with delivery lorries and plant moving about, the shouting of orders, the occasional chime of pick-axes and the lusty singing of songs like 'Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go' (or maybe I just dreamed that bit?). At least the rattling of the two or three pneumatic drills that are in use around the back of the building seems to have been stilled at night. It has, however, been going from early in the morning and with very little respite during the day. How I have come to delight in the little oases of silence that come at noon and 6pm when the workers take their meal breaks!

The reason why I am finding this so especially difficult to bear just at the moment is that, having no work currently, I am usually home all day; and moreover, since I have suffered a string of extremely late nights (a self-inflicted harm, I know), I am often desperately trying to sleep during the day. I am having very little success in that endeavour.

I am rather afraid that I shall not be able to sleep during the night either, if the noisiness persists at its recent levels. My choices would appear to be as follows: 1) to check into a cheap hotel in a quieter part of town for a week or two until this hell is over; 2) to use this as an excuse to go and pay a long overdue visit to some friends down in Shanghai (given the notorious pretentiousness of "the Other Place", though, this would likely be a far more expensive option than No. 1, even if I were lucky enough to have my friends put me up for free); or 3) to enlist the help of a Chinese-speaking friend to try to persuade my local police to uphold the law and insist that the building site closes down overnight (I did once succeed in such an attempt, but it was many years ago; and that was a much smaller piece of construction; and it was in the middle of a university campus, which perhaps gave us afflicted residents a little more leverage over our landlord - the university itself - and over the police).

I am very, very, very, very, very tired and annoyed. An explosion of psychopathic rage may well be imminent. Ah, China.

(By the way, the reason why I've seldom been into this park is that access is ostensibly restricted to people who've purchased monthly season tickets for it. You have to present proof of ID [in my case, a UK passport] and proof of residence nearby in order to be eligible for one of these. And you can only renew your ticket over a period of a few days at the beginning of each month. This last requirement is an absolute classic example of how creatively obstructive the Chinese can be. Until fairly recently, the same used to be true of the monthly passes on the subway network - with the result that there would always be horrendous queues at the ticket windows on the 1st of every month. At least we are now spared that rigmarole: the monthly passes were phased out some time ago in anticipation of the new system of smartcards and automated barriers that was introduced just before the Olympics. Such useful reforms have not yet reached my 'private park', I think.)