List of the Month - that Opening Ceremony, huh?!

To lighten the mood a little after my last rather morbid post, I give you a List of the Month on.......

10 questions that ran through my mind during the Olympic Opening Ceremony

1) How many ties does Hu Jintao have, and are they all red?

That must have been a pretty tough wardrobe choice for him to make, huh?

2) Is there rationing of Grecian 2000 in Zhongnanhai?

Hu Jintao's hair just gets blacker and blacker with each passing year. You'd never guess he was in his mid-6os, would you? None of the other leaders has quite such brilliantly, glossily, blackly black hair as Hu. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is starting to show a few streaks of grey. Is there some kind of status thing around the hair dye, do you think?

3) Did anyone else think the fly-by shot of the fireworks down the central axis of Beijing looked like CGI?

It was a nice shot and all. Almost too nice. I'm sceptical as to how they co-ordinated the speed of the plane so precisely with the setting off of the rockets. And the pictures did seem uncannily crisp. Beijing was enveloped in a soupy haze that night, and I can't figure out why the lights and so on didn't look more fuzzy.

4) Was that Lang Lang, and has he now given up on the 'serious' career?

I think it was him, but he was pretty much unrecognisable under the heavy layers of make-up and eye-liner. And wow, that cockatoo hairstyle! This was the most cringeworthy segment of the whole show, but mercifully brief. I can't help but wonder if this performance signals that Lang has now given up on his attempt to be taken seriously as a classical pianist and is repositioning himself as China's Liberace. All he was missing on Friday night was the candelabra.

5) Erm, is it really safe to be flying that many people on wires, that high, in the dark?

I think that's probably a NO - but there weren't any accidents, at least as far as we could see. Some pretty weird, baffling imagery there at times: Olympic fairies???

6) Who greenlighted the goosestepping??

I know, I know, it's a common style of ceremonial marching in many countries around the world. But it is particularly associated with the Nazis. And there have been so many disparaging comparisons made between Beijing '08 and Munich '36 that you'd think the organisers would now be doing their best to avoid any further reminders of the Hitler Olympics. Heck, having your national flag brought in by soldiers is sinister enough as it is. Why couldn't it have been carried by laughing schoolchildren? Or hot women in qipaos? Or Olympic fairies??

7) Da Shan - what the fuck?!

Why on earth was Da Shan marching with the Canadian team? God knows, the parade takes long enough anyway, without having all sorts of extraneous hangers-on joining in. It's supposed to be just the athletes. OK, and maybe the coaches and physios. Does it include judges and national Olympic committee members too? I don't think it ought to - but at least they still have some clear connection to the team. What is Da Shan's role with Team Canada? Mascot??

It undermines the credibility of the whole parade when you allow 'celebrities' to take part. You immediately start to question whether those stunningly beautiful women carrying some of the flags weren't just hired in from a model agency for the evening.

Whose idea was this? BOCOG's or the Canadian Olympic committee's, or the pair of them in concert? Shame on whoever it was! A horrible, horrible misjudgement. I think even a lot of Chinese are becoming bored by Da Shan's ubiquity these days, irritated by his smugness. For us expats, he is one of the most reviled men on the planet: one glimpse of his inane rictus-grin gets our bile ducts working overtime.

8) Did anyone else fantasise that Jacques Rogge might stray off message for a moment, and have one or two little "Tourette's" outbursts?

"Shining moment in your nation's history.... [cough, twitch] Free Tibet!....... inspires the admiration of the world..... [blink, head jerk] Falun Gong!....... enjoy a happy and successful Games...... [barely restrains Nazi-salute, Dr Strangelove-style] but Taiwan is not a part of China!"

Ah, if only. I wonder if the thought ever crossed his mind??

9) Do you suppose that flying torch-bearer (and/or his crane operator) had to "make self-criticism" afterwards for briefly getting ahead of the 'unrolling scroll' projection?

I fear it may be so. That is still the way they do things in China.

10) Was that Flame-lighting gimmick SAFE??

That huge fuse thingummy was a mighty big chunk of pyro, and it did seem to flash back quite a way. I noticed they dropped the torch-bearer away from it mighty quickly, but I reckon he still got his eyebrows singed. I wouldn't have gone within 20ft of the thing!

And a last - fun - question for you all: which national team got the biggest cheer where you were watching?

Well, apart from China, of course. Where I was watching (a favourite local bar called Room 101), it was Australia, by some margin. And there weren't that many Australians in our crowd. Closest runner-up was Jamaica. Everybody seems to love Jamaica. It's that Bob Marley thing, I suppose.

Dark thoughts

It hasn't taken long for the opening night optimism of these Olympics to be soured by tragedy. An American tourist was murdered by a (seemingly) crazed assailant with a knife at lunchtime yesterday. His wife and his female Chinese tour guide were both also seriously hurt in the attack. Their daughter, said to have been with them at the time but uninjured, was a member of the US volleyball team at the Athens Olympics, and is married to the current men's volleyball coach. Full story here.

This is particularly shocking to me because it happened in such familiar territory - in the ancient Drum Tower, a famous historic monument in my neighbourhood, less than a mile from where I live, a place I have often visited myself and walk past almost every day.

One of my journalist friends sent me the news at the beginning of Saturday evening, just after the first reports had started to appear on the Internet. It was, inevitably, the only topic of conversation last night.

Almost more disturbing than the appalling crime itself is the 'conspiracy theory' explanation of it, a theory being put forward by a couple of Chinese I spoke to about it last night. They seem convinced that this was not just the action of a lone madman but a paid 'hit' - and that it could be the first in a whole series of such assaults.

I am deeply sceptical of this theory, and suspect that it is merely a knee-jerk rejection of the 'official line' being so vigorously peddled, i.e. that this was just a random incident, that the attacker did not know who his victims were, could scarcely even have known their nationality, much less their connection to the US Olympic team.

However, I was unsettled by the passion and confidence with which the idea was advanced, and it did draw me into speculations of my own. How might such a conspiracy work? Well, 50,000RMB is more than your average white-collar worker earns in a year, more than a low-paid worker earns in several years, more than most people can save in half a lifetime. I imagine that quite a few people in this country would consider carrying out a murder for such a figure, perhaps less; it's an amount that would set a poor man's family up quite nicely, and might well be viewed by the desperate as an adequate compensation for the sacrifice of their own life (this attacker jumped from the Tower to his death; but there is no way he could have evaded capture, speedy trial, and execution). 1,000,000RMB will thus buy you a lot of mayhem, a lot of suicide attacks in this country. And 1,000,000RMB is small change for a lot of China's nouveaux riches industrialists.

So, the mechanics of such a plot are all too horribly plausible. But the question remains why anyone would want to do something like this. Well, alas, for many Chinese, the fenqing tendency, misguided nationalism (and the associated hatred of America) might be reason enough. However, you also have to wonder if there might not be just pride but money invested in the outcome of these Olympics: is there some serious sports betting going on about the final medal tally, and whether China can edge America out of the top spot? Now, if there were, perhaps that could provide a motivation for a sequence of such attacks. I don't think you'd have to try to target the likeliest medal winners. The psychological impact of such a campaign would surely undermine the collective performance of America's sportsmen here. Indeed, it might not take very many more such attacks - whether fatal or not - to make Team USA consider withdrawing from competition altogether.

Forgive these miserable ruminations. It's wise to consider all possibilities, and to be a little extra wary after an event like this. But my gut feeling is that the 'conspiracy theory' propounded last night is preposterous. I think the Chinese simply don't understand mental illness very well, aren't so familiar as us with the phenomenon of the random killer, and have become conditioned to suppose that there must be a financial motivation for everything.

There is supposedly a proverb (although I've only ever encountered it in Goldfinger, so I wonder if Ian Fleming didn't invent it himself): "Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; the third time, it's enemy action."

I really want to believe that this incident was just a one-off. But if something like this happens again, I'll be very alarmed. And if there are three such attacks, I'll start to consider staying indoors for the rest of the month.

However, I don't think that's going to happen. Psycho killers crop up all over the world (after all, it's only a week or so since that horrific attack on the Greyhound bus in Canada), and it's just very unfortunate timing for China that this should have happened at the beginning of the Olympics.

Nevertheless, I have three final observations to make:

1) This was arguably a failure of the Olympic security arrangements.

I have long been complaining that the huge numbers of bodies - police, military, neighbourhood volunteers - put out on the streets is largely empty show. Are they actually watchful? Would any of them notice or be concerned by a twitchy-looking guy with the handle of a knife sticking out of his waistband? I fear not.

And while we have had bag checks and X-ray scanners introduced at all the Olympic venues and subway stations, the major tourist sites have been overlooked. Why??

2) China has a worryingly large number of crazies.

The pace of change and constant social upheaval here create huge stress, both for urban and rural dwellers. Yet there is very little support network for people with psychological problems, very little understanding of or sympathy for them even within the medical profession. Not only does China have a huge population, but it has, I think, a far higher proportion of mentally unwell people than almost any other country. In my few years teaching at Universities here, I encountered several dangerously disturbed young people, who were apparently getting no psychiatric help at all.

3) Even crazy people need a 'reason' to do something.

There's a lot of warmth and openness amongst the Chinese people towards foreigners, but it coexists with a lot of suspicion and resentment. State propaganda exploits the notion of the external 'enemy' to bolster national unity; most of the Western powers (and India and Russia and Japan and South Korea and....) are part of that 'enemy' to a greater or lesser extent, but America is pretty consistently Enemy No 1. This knife-wielding maniac may not have known who he was attacking, but I'm pretty sure he chose to vent his anger on them because he thought they were American.

You reap what you sow. The Chinese government has been planting the seeds of this kind of hatred for so many years now, it really shouldn't be surprised when an incident like this happens.

If there are further attacks of this kind, it will be, I think, not because of the machinations of some evil dakuan, but simply because there are a lot of crazed, angry, desperate people here who have been taught since childhood to blame everything on foreigners.

New Picks of the Month

I know it's only a couple of months old, but I feel I have to nominate my June 4th post 'Lest we forget....' as the new 'Pick of the Month' on Froogville. While the Olympics are on in Beijing, I think it is particularly important to remind ourselves of the events that took place here in 1989 - and to hope that a forgetful Chinese nation may begin to remember as well.

From the Barstool, I choose The Adventure Bar, a post from April last year celebrating the characterful little hutong restaurant where I spent most of my first two years in China.

Do please check these out.

Another smoggy day in Beijing town

The weather-control machine boys are still reading the operator's manual, but.... it would seem that last week's three-day window of perfect weather was after all nothing but a FLUKE!

All week, the weather has been humid, hazy, and overcast (with just one or two bright spells in the later afternoon, when the sun has finally managed to burn through); and the Air Pollution Index has been climbing day by day. It was up close to 100 again yesterday, at least according to the official Chinese figures (hint: add a large grain of salt - or simply multiply by 2). This morning, it looks far worse again; but there doesn't seem to be any figure published yet. (I have been referring regularly to the Wall Street Journal's Beijing Olympics web page, which updates the Air Quality report each day.)

Not promising for the competitions ahead.

But gawd, we must be due for some clearing rain soon. There's been not a drop for over a week now - and we hardly ever go without for more than a few days at a time at this time of year, cloud-seeding or no cloud-seeding.

Once again, the BOCOG boys and the city government are in a bit of a bind. They won't want to risk having it rain on the Opening Ceremony; but if it doesn't rain before this evening, the visibility is probably going to be terrible, and that will detract from the effectiveness of the fireworks and light shows. Two hours of rain in the late afternoon would be grand - but can they manage that? We shall see.

Olympic haiku

Seven years' waiting

Can end in only one thing:

Strange anti-climax.

No, not getting any less grouchy and cynical yet......

Give me time. I am expecting to enjoy the event in some senses. I hope other people enjoy it too. I'm not down on the whole event - just on this fucked-up government that's running the show.

More Olympic ticket hell

As a quick postscript to my last rant, I feel I should mention the ordeal of my friend Leah.

She was pretty pleased to have been allocated some tickets in the first round lottery - for women's volleyball, one of the more popular events, and a sport she is actually interested in.

Alas, when the time came to pick up the tickets from a branch office of the Bank of China, she couldn't prove who she was. The online registration form had only asked for surname and first name, but then a passport was required as proof of ID - and passports, of course, include those confusing middle names (foreign names, in general, are terminally confusing to the Chinese: my bank regularly refuses to accept transfer payments from my various employers because their staff simply don't recognise my name - even if it's been written in exactly the same format it appears on my bank book - and they can't possibly process a payment on the basis of the account number alone, oh no).

This was quite a common problem (the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if it wasn't another element of the 'master plan' to try to prevent any foreigners attending the Games). Allegedly, it was somehow 'fixed' later on - but not in time for Leah. She was getting pissed off with China for a number of reasons, and decided to go back home to the States a couple of months early.

She e-mailed BOCOG to ask if she could get the tickets mailed to her. Eventually they responded in the affirmative, but said she'd have to send them a self-addressed registered mail envelope. She did so. They never acknowledged receipt of it. She sent a number of follow-up e-mails. No reply.

Just last week, she finally heard back from them again. It wasn't clear what had happened to her SAE, but obviously it was now too late to use that anyway. She asked, was it possible to nominate a proxy to collect the tickets for her, could she assign them to me? Er, yes, they reluctantly conceded: that was possible. I gave her my passport details for ID (including my top secret, highly embarrassing middle name). And she already had a ticket allocation reference number, right. What more would I need? Oh, apparently I'd need to present her passport.

Yeah, right.

So, anyway, BOCOG acknowledges that they failed to hand over tickets to someone they had been properly allocated to, and that it was their foul-up. They further failed to deliver the tickets overseas by post, as they had promised to do. And they made it utterly fucking impossible to assign the tickets to anyone else. Would they at least be able to give her a refund? NO.

And what happens to those tickets now? Are they going to sell them again?

If you're in Beijing over the next few weeks - please, please, please, go up to any Olympic official you see (particularly any of the BOCOG or IOC bigwigs) and ask: "Where are Leah's tickets?"

What if they held an Olympics and nobody came? (2)

Of course, the wider world is going to be largely unaware that Beijing is comparatively deserted this month. The streets will seem busy enough anywhere there are TV cameras. And the occasional media story about the financial woes of hotels won't attract very much attention.

But what if the stadiums are half-empty?

The Olympic ticket sales have been one long string of cock-ups. The initial online 'lottery' was so oversubscribed that the website crashed within minutes. A fairly typical Chinese lack of foresight there - "Ooh, we didn't realise we'd need that much capacity on our servers!" When they did finally succeed in running it a few weeks later, there was still horrendous confusion. Many people didn't receive notification of the results. Many people, apparently, may have been awarded tickets, but never knew about it. This was allegedly because the original e-mail notifications somehow aroused the ire of most e-mail system spam filters. The problem was supposedly addressed. But many people I know claim they never heard anything. (Of course, they are mostly foreigners..... Am I being a paranoid conspiracy theorist again?)

The first round had been such a protracted mess that a lot of people didn't think there was any point in bothering with the second round lottery. I never even knew when it was taking place: it seemed to get a lot less publicity than the first round - but then, perhaps I just wasn't paying much attention, because I wasn't really all that interested.

And then for the final round of sales a couple of weeks ago, people were required to make purchases in person at one of a handful of sales booths outside the major venues. Huge crowds (and poor crowd control by an overwhelmed and irritable police force - not a good omen for the weeks ahead) produced some ugly scenes: the worst of it, perhaps, was the sometimes vicious manhandling of press who tried to film or photograph the scenes (Japanese YouTube has some of the best footage of this, here; plenty on regular YouTube too, but it seems to be mostly the same footage edited down, or with poorer picture quality - some interesting stuff here). South China Morning Post photographer Felix Wong accidentally kicked a policeman in the 'nads (as he was he was being jostled and thrown to the ground by 5 or 6 officers!): he was accused of assault, kept in custody for several hours, and was deported (or required to return to Hong Kong) a few days later; and, of course, his camera was temporarily confiscated and all his pictures deleted.

Despite all this, some tickets apparently remain unsold. Countless more are in a kind of limbo, nominally 'sold', but uncollected - it's still unclear what's going to happen to them.

The vast majority have been sold, though, and to local people. That's nice, isn't it? Well, yeah, maybe.....

I'm not convinced that many local people actually want to go. The handful of people you see interviewed on television, of course, all dutifully trot out the expected platitudes about how happy they are to be hosting the Games, and how excited they are to have tickets for something. However, just about everyone I know is massively bored by the whole affair; many, indeed, are irritated by it, or frankly hostile.

Morever, I'm quite sure that a very large number of those who originally bought tickets did so purely in the expectation of being able to sell them on at a fat profit. With the numbers of foreign tourists (and resident expats) in the city this month so low, that is going to be a lot harder than they fondly supposed, and I think they're going to struggle to shift their tickets at all, let alone at the crazy prices that some of them are asking. A couple of weeks ago, I was offered some tickets to the Men's 100m Final - for 5,000RMB each! I believe those tickets are still available. Yesterday, I had a chance to buy a VIP seat for another of the major athletics sessions for 3,000RMB - when they're still unsold in a week or two, I figure we might try to bargain the guy down.

The trouble is, the Chinese often have a rather stubborn streak in their entrepreneurism: sometimes, it seems, they'd rather take a hit financially than 'lose face' by selling something for less than they'd advertised it at (this is a particularly common vice in the property rental market, where some landlords will choose to leave an apartment vacant for months or years at a time rather than accept a lower rent offer).

And then, of course, just recently one of the main ticketing websites was exposed as a scam. Hmm - it's been operating all year, positioned at the top of Google search results, and flaunting official Olympic logos. I think I lay that one at the door of BOCOG and the IOC.

So, for a variety of reasons, a lot of us who'd quite like to have some tickets have not been able to get any. It is still impossible to obtain tickets at any kind of reasonable price. And yet a significant number of those who do have tickets are not that fussed about using them. There are going to be a lot of empty seats, I think - even in the Bird's Nest.

I'm still hopeful I'll be able to pick something up at the last minute. I figure that's going to be down to luck and 'the grapevine', though - chance encounters in bars and restaurants. I rather doubt if the piao fanzi (street touts, or 'scalpers', as the Americans say) will be allowed to operate in their usual way (although a couple of journo friends of mine were suggesting the other day that they think perhaps they will; they might just have to be a little more discreet, and hang out a little further away from the venues). Oh well, we shall see.

What if they held an Olympics and nobody came? (1)

It does seem a very real possibility. The streets of Beijing - streets, bars, restaurants - are uncannily underpopulated at the moment.

The city always empties out somewhat at this time of year. Almost all types of business suffer a bit of a summer slump, and schools and universities, of course, are on their long vacation. It's a good time for foreigners to go back home for a bit, or to go travelling elsewhere around China. And more and more Chinese are now being given some discretionary leave days (rather than just the nationally mandated 'golden weeks' for May Day, National Day, and Spring Festival), especially if they work for foreign companies. This is a good time to go on holiday, because the weather is always unpleasantly hot and humid throughout July and August. But all the Olympic brouhaha seems to have induced a lot more people than usual - both Chinese and foreigners - to quit the city at the moment.

Then, of course, there were all the visa problems. Most foreigners (even many of those with 'proper' jobs, working for foreign companies) are unable to obtain visas easily through normal channels - because the bureaucracy is so damn fucked up and opaque. So, almost all of us, to make life simpler, obtain our visas by some petty subterfuge: usually we pay a professional 'visa arranger' to fake up the necessary supporting documentation (and perhaps grease a few palms along the way as well). Except that, earlier this year, they started to change the 'regulations' every few months or weeks: first it became absurdly difficult to obtain the standard F (Business) Visa that most people use; then it became impossible, at least here in Beijing; eventually, the powers-that-be closed the Hong Kong loophole too (the Visa Office down there is famously much more forgiving in handling applications, and the annual or semi-annual 'Hong Kong visa run' has become routine for many of my expat friends). Then it became much more difficult, if not nigh on impossible, to obtain the more classy Z (Working) Visa that I have (partly, I gather, because the numbers issued are restricted on some sort of quota, and when the Fs were no longer available, suddenly everyone was trying to get a Z). If you were determined enough, you could find ways to stay (Student Visas continued to be surprisingly easy to obtain, for a while at least; it would seem that there are quite a few "Mandarin schools" here that are little more than fronts for visa fixers; and even the 'genuine' schools usually have few qualms about assisting a visa application for someone who hasn't actually signed up for a full course, so long as an appropriate 'arrangement fee' is paid). However, it was becoming hellishly expensive, as the fixers responded to the more competitive market by ramping up their rates: I've heard of people paying - or, at any rate, being asked to pay - as much as 18,000RMB for a visa that would ordinarily only "cost" about 5,000. All in all, it was just way too much hassle. I know a lot of people who got thoroughly pissed off with it, and decided to leave for the whole summer (there was a lot of talk amongst my younger American friends of starting a kind of party commune just over the border in Cambodia or Laos; in places like that, you can live like a king for three months on a lot less than 18,000RMB). I know quite a few who have left China for good. I know a lot of people (myself included) who are still considering quitting China for good, because we're so incensed by the stupidity of all this, and so alienated by the sense of ingratitude (a lot of us have devoted years of effort, often fairly low-paid or even unpaid effort, to trying to help this country in its development; there are lot of people who've been here far longer than me and made a far greater contribution to the country who've been, in effect, 'kicked out' this year).

It's been pretty damned hard to get even tourist visas. My old teaching colleague, Big Frank, wanted to come over to visit me from Korea this month. He applied for a visa over there a month or so ago, but was told by the Chinese consulate in Seoul that they were "only processing Olympic visit applications". Well, Frank was talking about coming for a month, at the end of July and the beginning of August. He'd be here when the Games started. So, it could be an "Olympic visit application", right? Well, he'd need proof of a confirmed hotel reservation, in at least a 3-Star hotel. And some Olympic event tickets. And they wouldn't be able to give him an answer until August 1st!! So, they wanted him to shell out a whole stack of money to qualify as eligible for an Olympic tourist visa, but he still couldn't come when he wanted to, and they weren't able to guarantee that they would give him a visa at all. I had thought perhaps there was something especially fucked up about Korea (perhaps the Chinese don't like the South Koreans, and don't want any of them at the Games??); but I've heard similar stories from England and the States. Heck, I met a guy recently who's working as a technician with the drug-monitoring programme here: he told me that even his visa application was initially turned down - despite having heaps of supporting paperwork establishing that his was an "essential Olympic job" - and he needed a direct intervention from BOCOG to speed through his reapplication.

And then, of course, for a variety of reasons, it's been next-to-impossible to get any tickets. Damn, that's worth a whole post all on its own.

I met a banker a little while ago, who was lamenting that her company wasn't able to give its tickets away: her corporate clients just weren't that bothered about coming out here. I doubt if expense was an issue for people of that ilk (ethical codes would require them to cover their own accommodation and airfares in order to take up the hospitality offer). Beijing, I fear, is just too darned far away from North America or Western Europe to be a very enticing destination. And then, of course, many people will have been discouraged by the political troubles here, and by the smog, and perhaps even by the earthquake (Americans were shocked to discover that China is earthquake-prone!). I used to work in corporate hospitality back in England, and a few of my contacts from that time tell me that this is going to be the weakest Olympics ever for their industry: it was too difficult to arrange events over here, the flights and hotels were too expensive, it was nearly impossible to get visas, and no-one was that fussed about coming anyway.

Ah, hotel price-gouging. That was another good one. I've heard that most hotels, even down to the little backpacker hostels around my neighbourhood, were - despite government pronouncements intended to curb this - quoting rates for this month at 6 or 8 times higher than normal over much of the last couple of years. Now, most of them are discounting well below their normal summer rates. Heck, some of them are literally giving rooms away (I was told of one major hotel that had some corporate bookings, and allowed one such customer to add 2 or 3 extra people to its party at no charge - because it was so embarrassed by the fact that it had charged them so much above their current rate for the original booking). A friend of mine passing through on the way to Shanghai a week or so ago was staying in a swank new hotel out near the airport: he was getting a rate comparable to what you'd normally pay in a hostel; he was at that time the only foreign guest in the place, and one of only a very few guests at all. Occupancy rates all over town (well, except in a handful of the big name hotels that are handling the major corporate sponsors) are way down, I hear.

And what of my own little Olympic gouge? Of course, that came to nothing. I advertised my apartment for sub-let on here, and via viral e-mailing through all my friends. Never a sniff of interest (although a couple of people passed on anecdotes of the suggestion being greeted by people they'd mentioned it to with snorting laughter - does anyone want to go to these Olympics?). Most of the people I knew who were thinking of doing likewise, gave up on the idea when they met with a similar lack of interest - or because they couldn't face the hassle of trying to keep their landlords onside, coping with the temporary residence registrations with the police, etc. Of the three people I did hear of that had managed to set up something of this sort, two of them unwound; and the third was agreed at a fairly modest rent, let to a competitor's family. A guy I know who'd spent quite a bit of time and money setting up a website to broker such apartment sub-lets this summer confessed to me a while ago that of a couple of hundred people who'd advertised with him, only TWO had actually got a deal.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that the government might be a little embarrassed by the fact that there are so few foreign visitors at this great national showpiece? Well, perhaps not so much.

A Chinese guy I met a little while ago ventured the opinion that the government had initiated a conscious policy of "discouraging" foreign visitors (or visitors from Europe and North America, anyway) after the Tibetan troubles in March. I'm not so sure: I haven't noticed anything getting worse in the last few months; with the possible exception of the protocols for obtaining tourist visas from overseas, everything else I've mentioned above has been going on for most of the last year, or more.

I don't think the Chinese government ever wanted any foreigners at these Games. Well not too many, anway: just enough for show (expect champion arse-licker Da Shan to be making appearances at every single Olympic venue!). We just mess the place up with our slack morals and our loud opinions and our namby-pamby democracy fetish.

No, they never wanted us here for this. And they have, for the most part, achieved that wish. I've got a feeling, though, that they will be regretting this policy before long (if they're not already). Be careful what you wish for.

The chai Olympics

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but, alas, I no longer have a functional version of Photoshop on either of my computers (hence the dearth of photographs on my blogs of late).

This character - chai - means 'demolish', and it is daubed on the walls of buildings shortly before the bulldozers arrive. Sometimes, you wonder if this isn't about the only warning the soon-to-be-displaced residents get. Sometimes, indeed, the demolition seems to follow so swiftly that I speculate there may be dozens of opportunistic wrecking crews roaming the city, authorised to raze any chai'd building they find and claim a bounty for their good work. (I'm kidding about that, of course. I don't think even the Chinese would try taking market economics to that extreme. Would they???)

The wholesale destruction of great swathes of Beijing - often in a rather chaotic and unplanned way - has been one of the sorriest consequences of awarding the Olympics to China. Many of the most charming and characterful old neighbourhoods have been ruthlessly flattened to facilitate the city's misconceived plans for modernisation. The dreaded chai symbol has swept through the hutongs like a plague.

We've heard a number of unflattering slogans for these Games now, of course: the Genocide Olympics (thank you, Mia - you take the prize for hysterical overstatement), the "1936 All Over Again" Olympics (makes a similar point, but more broadly and more humorously), the "No Fun" Olympics, the Fenqing Olympics (fenqing are the objectionable, hysterical young nationalists who are the Chinese government's unfortunate 'blowback' from years of unremitting propaganda), and (another favourite of mine) the Mafan Olympics (mafan= 'hassle').

But I decided some time ago that people really ought to remember these Games as

the Chai Olympics

because the brutal eradication of so many close-knit communities, the obliteration of so much architecture and history, the foolhardy ripping out of so much of the city's heart & soul, that's what will be, I'm afraid, the one really lasting legacy of the 2008 Olympics.

(Many thanks to my friend The Artist for realising this design.)

The Weather Machine got broken?

Already??

After three peachy-perfect days over the weekend, yesterday and today have been sultry, hazy, smoggy once again.

Maybe they're still fine-tuning the secret weather-control machine? Or maybe it's run by the same species of half-wit that twiddles the Internet censorship knobs down at Kafka Central?

Of course, I'm not really surprised. It does seem to be an impossible juggling act the authorities are trying to pull off here.

If it gets too humid, pollution inevitably gets trapped in the air. Yet this is naturally the most humid month of the entire year. And how can they stop it getting humid, unless they drain all the water out of the countryside for hundreds of miles to the west of here (oops, they might actually have done that), and stop it raining in the city too (well, they've been trying that for the past few days; and guess what, the earth is already bone-dry and starting to fill the air with dust!)?

The BOCOG boys and the city government need a lot of rain - to stop the grass and trees from dying, to freshen the air, to lower the temperature, to "rinse" some of the crap out of the sky. But nobody likes too much rain - it becomes impossible to get a cab, the streets flood, the sewers overflow, and it gets insufferably humid straight afterwards.

No, I feel sure it must be an impossible balance to strike. And however magical the secret weather-control machine is, and however much experimental knob-twiddling its dedicated operators indulge in, we are certainly going to get a fair proportion of crappy days this month. (Hmmm, I wonder if I could get Anson Williams to sing that, and post it on YouTube? Another Crazy 'Art' Idea!!).

Reclaim the square!

What's wrong with me? Suddenly I'm feeling all warm'n'fuzzy about the dratted Olympics.

Of a weekend, the little square between the Bell and Drum Towers (the iconic pair of old Imperial watchtowers, just a short walk from where I live) is usually clogged with coach tours and hordes of tri-shaw drivers hungry for potential fares. But this weekend - NO. Either because the coaches have been temporarily banned from parking on the square (I know not), or simply because there are hardly any tourists at the moment (very likely), the square was for once free of this unsightly congestion - and could revert to what it should truly be, a leisure space for the local community: kids playing football, a young martial arts student practising his nunchuk routines, old codgers playing chess or cards or just generally chewing the fat. It is a delightful place to while away an hour or two in people-watching at dusk on a Sunday.

But then the brutally fierce spotlights they have erected to illuminate the Bell Tower by night for the next two months rather spoiled the idyll......

Traffic Report - the blog stats for July

There were 54 posts and around 16,500 words on Froogville last month.

There were 41 posts and just over 9,000 words on the Barstool.

I discern no particular variation (much less increase) in the traffic figures, and commenting has been disappointingly scarce (all of my one-time 'regulars' - with the exception of the ever-faithful British Cowboy - seem to have deserted me, or at least to have reverted to 'lurking'). However, there was a HUGE - inexplicable! - spike in visits to both blogs on Friday the 11th of July. I wonder what that was all about.

We also welcomed new readers from Sweden, Finland, Malaysia, and the Philippines. And I now have a fan in Kosovo.

Thanks for reading. I hope I'll find something entertaining to say during the upcoming craziness of the Olympics.

This week's bon mot (or talking point?)

"Women are the cause of far more misery in the world than drugs or alcohol, yet no-one has tried to ban them."

My Olympic Fantasy Girlfriend - Emma Green

I had been thinking that I ought to nominate a sportswoman as my 'dream date' this month, what with it being the Olympics and all.

Of course, they let the tennis pros take part these days, so there are many likely prospects there, including last month's 'girlfriend' Danka Hantuchova, Ana Ivanovic, Venus Williams, and, of course, Maria Sharapova.

However, I happened to be watching a bit of women's high-jumping on TV the other night, and I discovered that there are several very striking women in this sport at the moment - well, tall & skinny always has been my preferred 'type'! And gosh, they have tight stomachs! And legs that go on forever.....

One, however, really stood out from the crowd: a dazzlingly pretty Swede, with the rather un-Swedish name of Emma Green. I don't think she's a serious medal contender, but I'll be rooting for her anyway.

Reclaim the streets, reclaim the lakes!

A couple of hours ago, I got back from a jog around the nearby Houhai lakes area. That's three days in a row I've managed it - feeling stiff-legged but virtuous.

One of the best things about it is that the road around the perimeter of the three lakes that I run on is almost deserted. Usually it's clogged with weekend drivers showing off their SUVs, and with gazillions of tourists. This weekend: no cars. A few taxis and mini-buses, and few official cars parked outside one of the swanky houses up on the northeast shore - but not an SUV in sight. I don't know if the area's been sealed off to motorised traffic (something I - and numerous others - have been demanding for years), or if this is just a knock-on effect of the Olympic traffic restrictions (and the fact that an awful lot of people are just leaving town); but whatever it is, it's marvellous.

There are very, very few tourists. Yesterday, I tried counting the number of foreigners I passed on my double lap of the lower two lakes, and, until I passed a convoy of tri-shaws near the end of my run, I hadn't made it into double figures. Truly remarkable. Even the relatively few Chinese still milling about look as though they might be local residents enjoying their neighbourhood, rather than the usual hordes of shrilly babbling tourists. I'd like to think so anyway. The tri-shaw drivers are seriously underemployed, but they seem to be taking it in good part, kicking back and enjoying the sunshine.

I was beginning to doubt that anything good would come out of these darned Olympics for Beijingers, but here at last is something: the weather is delightful, the traffic is light, and the streets are semi-deserted. (It is, in fact, spookily reminiscent of the SARS summer.)

Dogs and Mad Englishmen

I have been taking advantage of the last three days of improbably perfect weather to try to get back into a daily running habit. Trouble is, well, I haven't been rousing myself to hit the streets until the early afternoon when the sun it at its height, and, damn, it's draining to run in this kind of heat - especially when you're as woefully out of shape as I am at the moment. Oh well, at least I'm making the effort.

And it is kind of purging to sweat that much......

Cue for a song, I think.

Blue Sky!! (Or Vanilla Sky???)

OK, I take it all back - Beijing looks as if it might actually be able to produce a "blue sky" Olympics after all. After a dull and hazy start to the day, yesterday - 1st August, one week before the official opening of the Games - turned into an absolutely peachy day, just gorgeous, one of the best I've ever seen in Beijing (although it did turn soupily humid for a while in mid-evening); a day, indeed, quite unlike any I've ever seen here in August before.

In fact, it was a day quite unlike any I have ever seen before in this city at any time of the year. The sky was elaborately streaked with thin, high, wispy clouds, and was a deeper, crisper blue than I've ever known before.

No haze of pollution at all, for the first time in decades?? Well, hardly any. From the rooftop terrace of The Bookworm (the monthly social for the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China) we marvelled at the view: all the buildings along Jianwai and the East Third Ringroad were visible in full detail, their illuminated names readily legible. 2 or 3 miles of crystal-clear visibility might not seem so amazing in many other countries, but here in Beijing it is A FIRST.

Well, the last of the migrant workers who staff the city's major construction sites have now been banished, so all these sites are finally at a complete standstill (it was eerie to walk past the huge Sanlitun SOHO project and find it mothballed, completely silent - when only a week or so ago I had watched it teeming with ant-colony activity), and that's probably given a huge boost to the air quality. I gather that the radius of factory closures has been extended to take in the edge of the neighbouring provinces as well as the whole of the enormous Beijing Municipality. And, yes, there were healthy doses of rain on Wednesday and Thursday evenings that have done a lot to freshen things up.

But the transformation achieved yesterday was just uncanny; and you have to start suspecting that the Chinese really do have a secret weather-control machine. I just can't work out how a few more anti-pollution measures and a bit of timely cloud-seeding can affect the cloud patterns and the humidity (and the temperature!) so dramatically as well.

The journos (and we hangers-on) on The Bookworm roof were boggling in wonderment and disbelief at yesterday evening's sky. We were scarcely less amazed than Arnold Schwarzenneger at the end of Total Recall [SPOILER] when ancient atmosphere-generating machinery below the Martian surface is triggered into operation and he suddenly sees a blue sky on Mars!

Indeed, it was so improbably, unbelievably wonderful that I couldn't help but find it also a little bit sinister. I was uncomfortably reminded that the appearance of vivid skies over Manhattan every day in Vanilla Sky [SPOILER] really should have tipped Tom Cruise off to the fact that he'd died and gone to heaven (or, at any rate, to a 'virtual reality' depiction of how he would have liked his life to be).

Hmmm, today has dawned even more perfect. Damn it, I don't care how they're doing it. I'm going for a run!

Recap

It's been quite a busy week of posting, but in amongst all the usual frippery (and the mounting pre-Olympic angst) I did throw in a triplet of semi-serious posts on the issue of the Olympic security arrangements - here and here and here.

I hope these don't get completely lost amid the floodtide of my other outpourings. I felt I had some quite important points to make with these posts, and I would welcome some discussion.

On a lighter - but scarcely less important - note (indeed, this could become an idea of world-changing significance!), I began the week over on the Barstool with this summary of the theory developed by a doctor friend of mine about the ultimate key to human attractiveness. Another one that you really should not overlook, my readers.

A double dose of Daily Llamas

Because we haven't had any for a while......

This goofy little guy is actually a llama-guanaco hybrid. There is some fancy name for that, but I forget what it is. Llamaco, perhaps? Or guanalla? Depending on who the father is.......

Should it be allowed????

(This, apparently, is a genuine Peruvian road sign.)

This week's highlight from the recording studio

A new acme in the category of bizarre Chinese name choices. Something so gobsmackingly bizarre that DD and I were at a loss as to how to correct it, and left it as it was - for future generations of soundproof-booth slaves to enjoy and boggle over.

I was required to say, to my female friend: "Hey, nice to see you, S.H.E.!"

Somewhere in China, there is probably already a student who has chosen that as their 'English name'. Now, there could be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more. I feel so responsible.

Weekly haiku

Drab sky, toxic air;
Police and soldiers everywhere;
Beijing Olympics.

No, still not having very much "fun".......

Ennui

One of the white-uniformed flunkies who has to try to wrangle passengers through the subway "security check" at one of the stations I've been using most regularly of late was wearing such an extravagantly long face when I passed her this afternoon (I was exiting, and there had evidently been no incoming travellers for a while) that I couldn't help teasing her a little, to try to coax a smile out of her.

"Cheer up," I said. "It's only one more month."

"TWO months," she corrected me, miserably.

Ah, yes, I'd momentarily forgotten about the sodding Paralympics. Life won't be getting back to 'normal' for us here in The Jing until October. Sigh.

A 'blue sky' Olympics?? (Hollow laughter)

The Olympic Village officially opened last weekend, but I gather that some competitors were checking in even earlier. The Australian delegation, for some reason, moved in the weekend before. I imagine the majority of competitors will be arriving over the next few days.

I understand the need to allow some time for overcoming jet-lag and getting acclimatised to the local environment, but...... I really can't see any point in coming to Beijing any earlier than is absolutely necessary.

The air quality is still dismal. (A friend told me today that attempts to clean up the air here have concentrated on the heavier particles and vehicle emissions, and completely overlooked certain potent carcinogens that we have billowing around us. I think he said this was a WSJ story, but I couldn't find it when I just checked. Anyone have a link for it?)

The closing down of factories and restrictions on road traffic have had some effect, but the bulk of the crap in the air is demolition debris (and I dread to think what kind of nasties there are in that; I've seen workmen out at the '50s factory complex at Dashanzi removing huge pieces of asbestos-clad piping without any safety gear at all), sand, and dust. It hangs in the air because the city tends to be relatively windless and appallingly humid during the second half of the summer (and the humidity has been made even worse by the manic over-watering of all the specially planted Olympic 'greenery').

Frankly, I just wouldn't trust any official API figures coming out of Beijing at the moment, however closely they're supposedly being monitored by foreign agencies. It's claimed that the API has been down around 100 recently - but, as this article points out, that's still terrible. Anything over 50 is a very significant health risk. If they got it down to 25 or so, that would still be like mid-town Manhattan in the rush hour - hardly ideal for athletic competition, but tolerable. There isn't a chance in hell of that happening.

But my impression is that the API here has often been well over 100 recently. I trust my eyes: I can tell when the visibility is lousy. I trust my throat, my lungs: I can tell that this cough, this sore throat isn't natural.

It's only rained twice in the last fortnight. The grass is turning brown. Every tree is surrounded by its own little dustbowl. Although the frantic hutong renovation work of the past two months is now over, many of the piles of sand dumped in the street to supply this still remain - uncovered, slowly blowing away. The major building sites were all supposed to be suspending work well before the Olympics (there was talk a year or two ago of a 6-month moratorium! Perhaps that was only ever a rumour?) - but I think the deadline for the shutdown was extended until today, and certainly many of them seem to have been still fully active until very recently. Despite the ejection of most of the city's population of casual labourers, small-scale building operations appear to be continuing all over town.

The humidity is high. And the dust in the air is just appalling.

Don't expect any track & field records to be broken at this Games. Don't expect the Marathon to take place at all.

Supplement: After last night's (chemically engineered) torrential downpour, the air was - to some extent - 'washed clean': today was one of the best days we've had in quite a while. Unfortunately, the clammy humidity that inevitably follows a heavy rainfall in the summer meant that dust and smog were pretty soon building up again. And even in the early morning, when things were about as tickety-boo as they're ever likely to get here....... well, I don't believe for one moment that the API was down to the low 40s level that was being officially claimed all day long. When I went out after lunch, the air was starting to get pretty caustic again. In addition to being a "No Fun" Olympics and a "Mafan" Olympics, this is, of course, going to be a "Lying Their Arses Off" Olympics.

The Olympics loom....

While the city empties out its regular inhabitants - both Chinese and foreign - it is starting to fill (well, no, not 'fill' - the numbers are probably only significant, only visible because the streets are otherwise so relatively deserted) with Olympic visitors.

Two new regulars in my favourite bar this week are a pair of engineers who install and maintain some of the high-tech equipment used in the dope-testing.

Now and then you see people walking around the city with their Olympic Village passes still hung ostentatiously around their necks (is it mere inadvertence, or conscious showing off, I wonder). This is something that should be discouraged or prohibited by the security regime (if there were any security!), since they are a mighty tempting target for theft - for souvenir hunters and would-be event-crashers as much as for terrorists.

And last night I briefly got tempted to tag along with a bloke I met over dinner who had scored an invitation to an Opening Ceremony rehearsal.

Oh, yes, barely a week to go now. We're definitely gearing up......

It's that girl again

So, having given up on ever hearing again from that dratted publishing flunkie for whom I'd done several hours of work 10 days ago......

Out of the blue, she calls me on Monday evening. Yes, that's Monday evening. I am in a bar, about to go and have dinner with my buddy, The Chairman. This is not a good time. But what have we come to expect from her?

We have a long discussion. I tell her pretty much what I think of her - but in restrained terms, without being rude.

She wants me to meet with her author, some eccentric prof from Tsinghua. He really liked my work, wants to discuss his project with me, might have some more work to throw my way. I really don't want to work with this woman ever again. I don't want any more work from this guy, if it's the computer-generated garbage I had to wade through last time. I am merely manouevring to try to make sure I get paid for the work I've already done.

OK, when could we meet? "Tomorrow!" I'm not really free on Tuesday, but it seems she and the prof are jetting off to a conference in Indonesia on Wednesday and really need to discuss the editing with me before that. So, why are they only getting in touch with me 36 hours in advance of their departure?? On a Monday evening?? How many times have I bewailed the absurd last-minutism of the Chinese??

Reluctantly, I agree. But I point out that I want to be paid in cash at the outset of the meeting, before I discuss anything. And I also emphasise that this is highly inconvenient for me, and that I can spare them no more than one hour. Fine. All sorted.

We've had a long discussion, and we've got everything clear. Right?

No. An hour later, she sends me a text message. She needs me to edit the second half of the manuscript. By tomorrow. (A text message! Why can't she bloody well phone? This is major!!) I have already explained that I am out to dinner for the rest of the evening, and will be busy with something else all day on Tuesday. I reply by text message, remind her of this...... telling her that she is a crazy woman, and that what she asks is completely fucking impossible.

She doesn't reply. Worrying that I may have blown my chances of collecting the promised fee for the first half of the manuscript, I relent slightly - and suggest that I will skim the second half as best I can, if she will promise me an additional fee for doing so. To work through it thoroughly would, I guess, take a good 5 or 6 hours; but I can get up early the next day and do a superficial run-through in an hour or two, for an extra 500 kuai. She agrees.

At last, I can get back to enjoying my evening out with my friend.

Well, no, not quite. A little while later, I get yet another text message from her. (I'm in quite a bit of a fume with her again by now; not least because I have earlier asked her to text me her e-mail address, so that I have a more reliable method of keeping in touch with her...... and can attempt to verify that she does indeed work for the publishing house she claims to. 2 hours on, she has still omitted to do this.) This time she is fretting about the rendezvous I have specified: do I know the name of the coffee shop? No, I don't - and how the fuck would that help, anyway? I have given very clear and precise directions to it, practically the goddamn GPS co-ordinates. It is the only coffee shop anywhere nearby. It is really well-known, really conspicuous, really easy to find. Shut up and leave me alone, you wretched girl.

Tuesday dawns a miserable day. Having to get up at 6am to have another go at this manuscript-from-hell doesn't help my mood. As it happens, I get it finished quite quickly, and can move on to my other work.

At 10.40 - 20 minutes before my rendezvous, and rather before I need to leave my apartment - the dratted girl starts pestering me by SMS again about the name and location of the coffee shop. I reiterate what I told her the night before.

As I set out, it starts to rain heavily.

Now she phones me. She couldn't find the coffee shop. She doesn't believe that it exists. She has gone to another one, about half a mile further away. Would I like to go there? NO, I FUCKING WOULDN'T! I can't afford to take time out of my day for you like this. I am not prepared to walk twice as far, in the rain, and try to find you in some place I've never heard of.

The Chinese in general are pretty hopeless about giving or receiving directions to places, but this girl is just taking it to a whole other level: she is being so staggeringly dim and irritating that she completely exceeds my ordinarily saintly patience. "Come to the meeting place we agreed, or let's forget about the whole thing."

She got her prof to call me back. He was very nearly as bad as her. Could I come and find them and guide them to the rendezvous? No. I am now sitting in my favourite coffee shop, with a frozen mango smoothie, looking out at the rain. I am not going anywhere. This place is on the square between the Drum and Bell Towers, one of the most famous and most conspicuous historic sites in the city. If you can't find that, you must be completely fucking braindead.

I hand my phone over to the counter girl in the shop so that she can explain where we are in Chinese. This was possibly a mistake. She gets very flustered. It takes her 5 minutes. He's really not getting this Drum Tower concept. He is completely fucking braindead.

Anyway.... they were, it seems, all of about 5 minutes' walk away, but it somehow took them a further 15 minutes to find their way to me - making them twenty minutes late.

Imagine my FUME. Amazingly, I didn't throttle them both then and there - although those images danced enticingly through my mind. I was, I confess, pretty damned arsey with them. I don't think I have ever met two people so spectacularly dense and incompetent. And I really don't want to work with them ever again. But they have offered me rather a lot of money to do one last job........