Leaking State Secrets泄漏国家机密 (Life of a China Daily English editor)

About China Daily ...

2007-06-13T19:08:00.004+08:00

Thanks to all who have emailed me about working as an English polisher at China Daily. It's been a few years since I was there, and I'm sure it's a whole different kettle of fish now. Besides, there are other people at China Daily who have more up to date blogs - try doing a Google search or look on wikipedia. And any advice I could give is already included in my blog.

I will leave you with a China Daily news meeting:

Behind the scenes at China Daily: an introduction

2006-06-30T21:36:00.001+08:00

In the summer of 2005 I spent a couple of months working at China Daily in Beijing, as a foreign copy editor on the Beijing Weekend supplement. This is the blog I wrote at the time describing my day to day events and thoughts about working for the paper. When I wrote it I did so anonymously and changed everyone's names - and didn't even mention that I was working for China Daily.

I'm now back in Sydney working as a real journalist again. However, I'll leave up the old posts for curiousity value - and to inform anyone else interested in working for the "Window on China".

Back in Australia - Blogging Elsewhere

2006-06-06T10:39:00.000+08:00

I'm no longer working at China Daily, and so this blog is not being updated much, unless something affecting me and the China Daily crops up (like the detention of Hao Wu, for example). I'm now back working for a newspaper in Sydney.
There's an interesting thread at Danwei about recent happenings at the newspaper and its website.

China Daily: foreign editors/polishers lunch

2006-01-20T18:30:00.000+08:00

China Daily: foreign editors/polishers lunch
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here we are on one of the "useful idiots" lunches.

L-R: Christl Dabu [Toronto/Philippines], Brian Publicover [Ottawa], Pan Zhongming [foreign affairs liason], Julia Grindell [UK](obscured), Simon Farnham [London], Ian Morrison [Scotland], Charlie Gidney [UK], Wang Hao [foreign affiars], Ken McManus [US].

Just like I'd never been away

2005-10-16T19:51:00.000+08:00

MO Lunch
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

It's funny experiencing the transition from being a "foreign expert" in Beijing with all the privileges that entails to being unemployed and broke in Australia. I've spent the last couple of weeks taking it easy and spending time with my kids. Playing cricket in the park [real grass! real fresh air!] and of course been down the beach and doing a bit of bushwalking in the Blue Mountains. I've been living off my last wages from China Daily, which not surprisingly have disappeared at an alarming rapid rate: 6000 kuai doesn't go very far in Beijing, let alone Sydney.
I came across my former editor, Zhu Ling, while surfing the net this week, hosting a forum on Sino_Japanese ties.

Zhu Ling, editor-in-chief of China Daily, said the China-Japan ties now face serious challenges, and media organizations could and should do more in promoting good relations between the two nations.

I think he's being a bit hypocritical to say the least, given that China Daily has been banging on so much these last few months about the dastardly Japanese and how China won the war against them single handedly in 1945. I'm all for making Japan make some sincere and concrete steps towards acknowledging their WWII aggression and atrocities, and facing up to their past. But the way China is now drumming up anti Japanese hatred is scary.

Zhu Ling: "Japan should follow China's example and come clean about the past. What? No I haven't read the Tiananmen Papers or Jung Chang's latest book, why?"

Richard of Peking Duck blog visits China Daily

2005-10-05T21:48:00.001+08:00

So you want to work for China Daily?

2005-10-04T22:50:00.000+08:00

crecon, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Despite, or perhaps because of what I have written here, I have had quite a few emails asking me how to get a job at China Daily. Well, let me try spell out the basics here.

What's the work like?
As someone has already pointed out in the comments, the job of a foreign copy editor is undemanding and low paid. You work a five day week, and some of this may be in shifts, working say 6pm until 1am, or more likely 10am to 7pm. It depends where you work. Generally, the work on the supplements such as Beijing Weekend, 21st Century and the business supplement tends to have more regular hours. The work isn't that busy or difficult, so long as you can correct badly written articles. But it can be frustrating, like when you spend two hours re-writing a feature and then find they put it through without any of your changes.

Money?
You can expect to earn 6000-8000 rmb a month, which is a bit less than what you would get as an English teacher. However, you do get a nice new apartment (with dial up internet) and all your bills are paid for you. And three quarters of your pay is in US dollars rather than rmb, so you can save it up and take it home if you wish. Also, the China Daily office don't muck you about or rip you off, and will sort out all your visa stuff for you and even give you a [one way] ticket to China, and a return ticket if you complete your one year contract. Most English polishers are given a one year contract - in rare circumstances this might be renewed, but most have to leave after 12 months.

Qualifications?
Most editors have some basic experience or skill in editing/proofreading, but a qualification or experience in journalism doesn't seem to be essential. You have to pass a writing/editing test that China Daily will email to you, to see if you can manage the basic copy editing skills. You won't be working as a journalist but as an English polisher, so don't expect to be writing features or working as a reporter (though there is talk that this may change). Working at China Daily might be a good introduction to the basics of editing, but is no substitute for experience on a western newspaper.

Nationality?
Most polishers are Brits at the moment, but there are some Canadians, Kiwis and Americans. The China Daily style is British, but this doesn't preclude North Americans.

Holidays?
You are entitled to about 20 days holiday a year, I think, but can't take any in the first six months of your contract. You also get the extended holidays like National Day. As you may have read, China Daily does organise some outings to local sightseeing spots and resorts, all of which are on the company tab.

Location?
China Daily is stuck up in the wilds of north Beijing, not near anywhere in particular. It is half way between the student ghettos of Wudaokou in the north west and the expat/business/bar districts of Sanlitun/Chaoyang in the east. You can get around by taxi for about 20 kuai a pop, but the traffic is terrible. The China Daily office is midway between the third and fourth ring roads, and about half an hour away from the nearest subway line [number 13 at Shaoyuju]. There's no decent coffee or bars nearby, and Carrefour is about 15 minutes by taxi.

Social life?
There are about a dozen foreign editors working at China Daily, most in their twenties and there's usually something happening at the weekends. As you can read from my posts, there's usually plenty of drinking involved.

Do I have to be a Communist/Pro-China?
Nah. There are some card-carrying foreign Party members on staff but it's not compulsory. Likewise they are not expecting you to be Israel Epstein. but I wouldn't apply if you are a practitioner of Faln G0ng.

Language? Do I need to speak Chinese?
No. All the Chinese staff speak English. So much so that it's not a good place to practice your Chinese, and if you want to learn you will have to enrol in lessons outside working hours.

If you are still interested after all that, you can contact the foreign affairs bureau [Waishiban] at waishi@chinadaily.com.cn The guy in charge is Pan Zhongming (panzhongming@chinadaily.com.cn). They have vacancies from time to time, and do all the application procedures via email.

But don't tell them I recommended you. Good luck.

(And in the meantime here are some pics of the place):

China Daily building

2005-10-04T22:12:00.002+08:00

100_0559, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Huixin Dongjie

2005-10-04T22:12:00.001+08:00

beijing 012, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Tang Dynasty bar zone

2005-10-04T22:12:00.000+08:00

100_0654, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Along the canal, near Huixin Dongjie

"Tang Dynasty bar street"

2005-10-04T22:06:00.000+08:00

beijing 013, originally uploaded by jiulong.

The canal near China Daily.

China Daily lobby

2005-10-04T22:05:00.000+08:00

100_0918, originally uploaded by jiulong.

China Daily lobby

2005-10-04T22:00:00.000+08:00

beijing 042, originally uploaded by jiulong.

China Daily compound

2005-10-04T21:52:00.001+08:00

beijing 252, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Taken from the foreign experts' apartments.

Neighbours

2005-10-04T21:52:00.000+08:00

beijing 251, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Foreign Expert's card

2005-10-04T21:50:00.000+08:00

expert1, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Beidaihe - Pan Zhongming takes us to Vassily's bar

2005-10-04T21:47:00.000+08:00

Beidaihe boozers, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Me, Pan Zhongming (acting head of foreign affairs department at China Daily), Ravi Narasimhan (China Daily senior editor and columnist) and Charlie Gidney (foreign copy editor).

Party Committee room

2005-10-04T21:44:00.000+08:00

100_1773, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Red Flag computer

2005-10-04T21:34:00.001+08:00

Red Flag computer, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

The newsroom.

Foreign editor's night out at a North Korean restaurant in Beijing

2005-10-04T21:34:00.000+08:00

Pyongyang restaurant, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Here you can see Charlie, Julia, someone from 21st Century magazine, and Ian Morrisson.

Huixin Dongjie

2005-10-04T21:33:00.001+08:00

Huixin Dongjie, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

China Daily is at number 15.

Huixin Dongjie

2005-10-04T21:33:00.000+08:00

Huixin Dongjie 2, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Or is it Yinghua Lu (Cherry Blossom Street)?

View from China Daily foreign experts' apartment block

2005-10-04T21:32:00.000+08:00

View from China Daily foreign experts' apartment block, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Overlooking the chemical engineering university high school.

China Daily newsroom

2005-10-04T21:31:00.001+08:00

China Daily newsroom, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

The English polishers sit on the left at the far end of the room.

China Daily canteen

2005-10-04T21:31:00.000+08:00

China Daily canteen, originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

"The Noodle"

2005-10-04T21:30:00.000+08:00

"The Noodle", originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

The restaurants opposite the China Daily compound.

Some of the Beijing Weekend staff

2005-10-04T20:16:00.000+08:00

Beijing Weekend staff, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here you can see (L-R): Wu Liping, (designer/sub), Li Shuo (head up), Zhang Tianxing, Xiao Changyan, Tan Rui, unknown, Ye Jun, Clara??, photographer.

From Chai to Bondi

2005-10-03T19:29:00.000+08:00

100_1765
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

I went to see the cardiologist on Friday, here is Sydney. She took one look at my Beijing ecg report and raised her eyebrows. If the machine was correct, I'd had one of the highest rates of cardiac arryhtmia she's ever heard of. But now it's all back to normal. She just couldn't work it out, and wondered whether the machine or technician had recorded things correctly. She also took a look at the pills I'd been prescribed for my heart condition by the internal medicine specialist at the Sino Japanese Friendship Hospital in Beijing.
"Did you take any of these?" she asked.
No, I replied, somewhat guiltily.
"Just as well, they would have made things a lot worse, not better," and she threw them in the bin.
After a thorough exam, she said I'd had apparently had a temporary but potentially serious episode of atrial arrhythmia [a heart murmer to you]. Her prescription was rest, no coffee or chocolate, some beta-blockers just in case, and a decent diet. She couldn't say what had caused it, but it wasn't stress or psychological, she reckoned.
"It must be something in the water over there," she concluded.
Well I guess that's my Beijing adventures over for a while then.
Looking back on it all, I have realised that I was never going to adapt to working in Beijing. I love the city and Beijingers, but as a place to work the city is, well, not for me. Despite all the hype about Beijing being the wave of the future, and China having a "can-do" culture, I found that it is still the same crusty old northern city underneath. The can-do attitude may apply to business, but in the media it is definitely still "foreigners can not do". Just ask Rupert Murdoch, Mark Kitto [founder of That's Beijing] or Scott Savitt [founder of Beijing Scene, also run out of town]. The lesson is that when it comes to the media in China, unless you are a foreign correspondent working for a western company, you are going to get screwed.
Another thing I realised was that most of the Beijingers I met were working like mad to try and attain the things that I already have at home. A car, a decent house in a nice suburb, interesting places to visit, and a little luxury. They all want the VIP lifestyle, but I already have that here: I can drive down to Bronte beach and let my kids play alongside those of Lachlan Murdoch and supermodel Sarah O Hare any weekend I like.
If I want to read some interesting Chinese literature I can find the latest by Ma Jian at Kinokuniya, but not at Xinhua on Wanfujing.
Of course there are some things I will miss. The ridiculously cheap and excellent food. Overhearing the wry humour and civilised talk of everyday Beijingers. Riding my [now stolen] bike down through the hutongs. Stuff like that. Oh, and the chance to see weird and wonderful things like North Korean and Cuban cabaret.
But I can't say I'll miss the weather, the pollution, the traffic, the spitting or the "Let's All Hate Japan and Blame the Foreigners For Everything" national mentality. I also found that a lot of expat life in Beijing revolves around drinking, which I can do without. And the concrete. It's nice to be able to have a bit of grass that you can sit on that doesn't have a fence around it, or need daily sprinkler treatment to keep it green.
I've also realised that my interest in China is really focused on the south west, and I will revert back to my annual treks down into the unexplored parts of the Yalong canyon and the peaks of Muli (see my other blog, In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock.
In the meantime, I will keep one eye on China Daily, on the off chance that they actually start to report something on what happening about bird flu. The WHO and the UN are now saying that a worldwide pandemic of H5N1 flu is a certainty, and guess where it will orginate from? China - and most likely Guangdong. But while every other country in East and SE Asia is reporting an increasing number of suspected cases and deaths, China still has a news blackout on the whole matter. All they are saying is that they are "prepared", and that some wild ducks in Qinghai have died. China is covering up hundreds and possibly thousands of cases of bird flu, and no doubt many human infections and possibly deaths too. For all its moral posturing about being a country of laws and more openness, it is now endangering the whole world with its secretive attitude towards this potentially global disaster.
Well, I hope we get a bit of warning before it hits Australia's shores. I'm off now to buy some Tamiflu. Because I think that when bird flu strikes. it will make the 2008 Olympics, the Taiwan question and even the occupation of Iraq seem insignificant.

As for the future, I will continue to blog about Sydney. The problem is that a comfortable and pleasant life makes for excrutiatingly boring reading. If you're feeling masochistic, or just want to see some nice photos of beaches and happy families, head to Photos of Sydney. See you there.

Home

2005-09-29T11:19:00.000+08:00

100_1795
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

On my first night back in Australia I fell asleep listening to rain pattering on a tin roof. I woke up to sunlight filtering through the blinds, and the sound of the wind blowing in the trees. Outside it was cool and there was a scent of flowers and earth in the air. Blue skies and clouds - how long since I'd seen those?
When I'd arrived back at the airport the day before, the passport control guy had huge mutton-chop sideburns. He looked at my landing card and said: "Beijing ... Have fun?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Welcome back," he said, and waved me through.

And if you want to see what happened next, go to: Photos of Sydney.

On reflection ...

2005-09-28T14:33:00.000+08:00

Azure Cloud temple
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

When I arrived in Hong Kong from Beijing I passed through a branch of WH Smith. There on prominent display were books by the Dalai Lama, Jung Chang's latest screed on Mao and the tell-all memoirs of Mao's personal physician, Li Zhisui. It shouldn't have surprised me but it still does, even now, almost 15 years after my first visit to the PRC, to see the contrast between societies with an open and closed flow of information. In my Herald Tribune on the plane I read about the latest crackdown on internet news sites in China. Maybe that explains why Google News doesn't work any more - I presume that falls under the category of a news distribution site - banned with immediate effect.
This all seems to be the work of the new Hu Jintao-Zeng Qinghong partnership and their hardline approach to information freedom.
Looking back on my China Daily experience - all two months of it, I found it gave me a fascinating insight into just how far China has come in opening up, and just how many barriers remain. Back in 1990 when I first strolled across Tiananmen Square, the tank-track marks from the June 6 massacre were still visible on the roads. And the only English news available in the capital was the dour propaganda and statistics of the China Daily. I don't think there was even a CCTV9 back then - just a summary of news in English on the main CCTV channel.
To find out what was really happening in the world you had to hike over to the Friendship Store and go to the foreigners-only section to buy an expensive copy of yesterday's SCMP.
How things have changed. Despite the cyber-nanny you can now get news on just about anything via the internet in China. There's a lot of roadblocks if you want to find out about Tibet, Fal*n G0ng, or any of the leaders of the CPC, but it's do-able. You expect censorship from the Communist Party authorities, and they are still obsessed with reining in the access to information. And yet, while there may be a few people in China interested in democracy or more liberal causes, I think most people have other priorities. If the Chinese "broad masses" want a more open society, I think they would fight for it themselves. At the moment it doesn't seem to be something they get worked up about, unlike say, hating Japan or getting their kids to an American university. What I find most disappointing is the enthusiastic cooperation being shown by western companies like Yahoo and Google in helping the CPC to suppress information. Go to Beijing and watch what happens if you type in something as incuous as "Zhongnanhai" into Google. You get locked out for about half an hour.
Companies like Google say that this is the price of doing business in China. I would say that price is too high. Leave it to the Baidus, Sohus and the Sinas. Haven't Google got something in their mission statement about "doing good stuff" or some other vaguely benevolent slacker-like intention? Completely meaningless.
Anyway, I return to Australia and find myself glad to live in a society that [so far] treasures freedom of speech.
Having worked briefly at China Daily I find myself seeing it as a bit like the Truman Show. I was one of those workers behind the scenes, trying to keep the 1.3 billion Chinese Trumans living in a fantasy world of sunlight and smiles. Where Chinese leaders are always warmly welcomed on their overseas trips, and visiting speakers always say kind words about the Chinese Communist Party, even in the case of Li Ao, when they don't. If one single thing summed up the absurdity of working at China Daily, it was last Friday when Li Ao gave his speech at Beijing University. As I have already mentioned, the China Daily ran only a brief article noting his comments about life being better under Communist Party rule. At the same time, the staff at China Daily - and presumably even the person who wrote that article - were all avidly hanging on to Li Ao's every word from the limited access cable-TV broadcast. These were the same words that they wouldn't publsh themselves.
But I don't think the Trumans of China are going to have a defining moment when they hit the false horizon and disover there is another world out there. The CPC and its Ministry of Information, my former employers, are all too adept at serving up to Chinese people what they want to hear and see and believe. When the mobs turn up outside CCTV headquarters with bricks and petrol bombs, it will probably be because the station has broadcast a documentary sympathetic to Japan, challenged the myth of Luding bridge crossing or revealed that Da Shan has been lip-synching for the last 20 years.

Thanks and goodbye for now.

A paranoid farewell to China Daily

2005-09-27T14:45:00.000+08:00

room 404
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

I’m writing this on the flight from Beijing to Hong Kong. The strangest thing happened to me as we readied to board the flight. When the boarding call went out, the [predominantly HK and western] passengers got up and spontaneously moved into this strange pre-ordained formation. I was automatically doing my usual Beijing bus and train boarding technique, shuffling up to the front to hang around the edge before wading in with gentle but firm elbows. Yet all around me people were standing in this bizarre conga dance formation, stretching right down the hall. Then I realised what it was – a queue. And it worked – it was moving swiftly and efficiently through the doors, so that within half a minute I was left, mouth agape, near the end of the line, which I joined uneasily. Only two months in Beijing and already I am suspicious of these strange western habits.
My last day in Beijing was a mixture of misplaced fear and farce. Having cancelled my plans for a soothing trip to the mountains of Sichuan, I had sorted out all my gear and left a huge amount of much-loved clothes, books and camping equipment behind. I simply didn’t have the time or money or energy to arrange shipping it back to Sydney. But aon the morning of my departure I got a call from Pan Zhongming, the foreign affairs organiser, who wanted to see me urgently. Why now, just hours before I was due to leave? I made up an excuse about having to sort out my tickets [still half true, actually] and said I’d see him later that afternoon. But then he started behaving oddly – ringing me back with more and more urgent requests to go see him, immediately. And this wasn’t funny Xiao Pan, this was serious Pan Zhongming. This started to get me worried. As a precaution, I moved all my bags to the apartment of a friend down the hall, and left the China Daily compound. As I left, I bumped into one of the foreign editors, who, instead of saying farewell, gave me the cold shoulder. What was going on? Then I remembered back to the night before, when at my “leaving do” down in Sanlitun a few people had remarked about my blog. "Leaking State Secrets" was now being talked about in the office, and I was no longer anonymous. One of the other editors said it was fairly harmless, so long as I hadn't been stupid enough to have actually posted from the office computers.
Err, yes I had actually. “But you used a proxy at least …”
No I hadn’t.
“Oh well you’re leaving tomorrow, if they were going to do anything to you they would have done it by now.” he consoled me.
But with my imminent departure I had even been cocksure enough to have put the real name of China Daily on the top of the blog. Now I was beginning to get paranoid – maybe the authorities had found out about it, and were not happy. I had visions of being jumped on by a mob of Beijing’s finest PSB goons, and a trip to room 404.
I resorted to some rather ridiculous cloak and dagger techniques to get my bags out of the compound – getting some of the other editors to bring out my bags and stick them in a waiting taxi parked down a side street, so I could head straight off to the airport. I arranged all this by SMS and mobile phone. Was it just a coincidence that as we did this, some members of the China Daily foreign affairs bureau came walking down the street, and another drove past [as I hid behind a wall]?
Whatever, I managed to get to the airport and get on my flight with no further trouble.
But that’s what working in China does to you. Paranoia. Always wondering who is taking an interest...and why.

Time to say farewell

2005-09-24T16:55:00.000+08:00

Foreign editors lunch
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Well, that's it - my time's up. I'm no longer with China Daily, although I'll be holed up in their expert's apartment block for a short while, until I had off back to the sunny shores of Sydney.
Last night I made the mistake of going to an all-you-can-drink bar along the smelly canal near the newspaper's office on Huixin Dongjie. For 30 kuai you could have some lukewarm fake beer or some disgusting fake whisky. I picked the latter, and really regretted it this morning. I don't know why I did it because I hate whisky.
There was just me, Brian, and Ravi the cool Indian guy who is a senior editor at China Daily. We had a long, increasingly drunken discussion about the newspaper and what needed to be done to put it right. I heard that the actual editor, Zhu Ling, is something of a livewire, and is really pushing for change.
But despite his enthusiasm, there is a huge amount of resistance both from long established senior editors, as well as from the grey men in smoky offices who control these things.
One thing that came up was that they want to expand the number of foreign editors and even more excitingly, to give them more to do than just "polish" articles. Primarly, they want to get more foreigners working as reporters and writers on the newspaper, because they can see how that will boost their credibility and reporting skills. And a lot of the moans that I've mentioned on this blog were brought up at the recent editorial improvement meeting apparently - the whole indepedence and open-ness thing, plus the iron rice bowl mentality. In other words, they have some great reporters there, but they just aren't making use of their skills.
Well, we'll just have to see how it all works out, but I won't be there to find out. I will keep on with this blog on an occasional basis with any other bits of gossip that I hear about China Daily. But right now I'm about to head off into the wilderness. I will leave you with an article I did about the search for the real Shangri-La. Have fun!

I'm history

2005-09-23T22:18:00.000+08:00

China Daily
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

As we all know, China has a 3000 year history - and now I am part of it. Yes, I'm history as far as the China Daily is concerned. I am a non-person, already airbrushed out of the wholesome daily life of our foreign copy editors. You see today we had a lunch for the "FCEs" as we are known. But I only found out about it by accident when I was ringing around trying to get some white person to turn up for the company-sponsored tournament. Beijing Weekend's acting editor, Yu Wentao, has been nagging me all week to get some token European faces to turn up for this golf trip, just to show the sponsors that we have some real live laowai trophy people. Well of course nobody wanted to play golf, but while ringing around I did discover that all the other China Daily foreign editors had been invited to meet the board of directors of the newspaper. And the picture shows me standing outside the Ying Hua hotel, right next to our office, as everyone else trooped in to hear some words of wisdom from our equivalent of Mr Burns. The distinguished gentleman was Mr Qu Yingpu, who as he reminded the guests on several occasions, has been to Harvard.

Apparently he acknowldeged that China Daily was currently not much more than a government mouthpiece, but things were going to change. At this point the Chinese foreign affairs minders started to look very unsettled.
Mark my words, said the old boy from Harvard, the newspaper must become self supporting. And to do this it must increase its independence, and report more objectively. There will need to be more foreign editors. And there will need to be more independent reporting. As the foreign editors tucked into their Sichuan spicy chicken, our Ivy League speaker spelled out what the core policy of the newspaper would be: if the Party strays from its policies then we sould investigate and report. But we should not criticise the basic Party policies. I wish I'd been there. I would have loved to ask him how any even semi-serious newspaper could ignore the rampant injustices perpetrated against groups like the F#lun G0ng. Or how any paper can even dream about being "independent" when it does not allow itself to question the propriety of the national leadership (Jia Qinglin, you know what I'm talking about ...). I mean, how far do you take that ruling: "we must not question party policy"? Is the party like the Pope? If the "Party" says that Beijing really needs a massive foreign-style Opera house just because Jiang Zemin's mistress wants it, should we say nothing? Really, I thought Harvard could have done better than this. Maybe we should have a director from Yale instead.

Something worth watching on TV at last ...

2005-09-23T12:21:00.000+08:00

Picture 003
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Yesterday I wrote about the don't-push-too far style of editorial "independence" being mooted by one of our directors. Then today I read the caustic comments on independent reporting and criticism of the party from by China's close ally in Taiwan, Li Ao. The New York Times emphasised the comments on "freedom", of course, in terms like this:

During an address at Beijing University on Wednesday evening, broadcast live on a cable television network, Mr. Li chided China's leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration's fear of academic debate and advised students how to fight for freedom against official repression.

"All over the world leaders have machine guns and tanks," Mr. Li told the students and professors in the packed auditorium. "So I'm telling you that in the pursuit of freedom, you have to be smart. You have to use your cunning."

What did the China Daily do on it? It's headline was Li Ao: Life greatly improved under Communist Party Rule

"China had experienced such poor conditions in the past," said Li. "But the situation now is truly much better. I thank the Communist Party of China."

Strangely enough, as I am working here on the afternoon shift, as I write, the large screen TVs are on in the office - the first time this has ever happened. And guess what all the staff are watching? Last night's speech by Li Ao. See the picture.
I hope our board of directors are watching it too.

Let's have a meeting

2005-09-22T17:38:00.000+08:00

1681
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here we are, the last editorial meeting. Wasn't it fun? Well I've had worse, but poor old TR is looking like he's had enough. He's had a bad week since Sting the goldfish departed this earth earlier this week. Maybe I should get him a replacement as a leaving pressie.

Pictured (L-R): Li Shuo, Zhang Tianxing, Xiao Changyan, Tan Rui (head slumped on table), Ye Jun.

Same old, same old

2005-09-22T09:16:00.000+08:00

canteen
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

When I first started here I was very impressed with the works canteen. It was like being back at school and getting free school dinners - and the food was a lot better. The canteen here is open at 8am, 12 noon and 5pm for about forty minutes each time. Being China, there is a big rush to get there first, and there are usually two separate serving lines each serving four different types of Chinese dishes. We pay about three kuai for a meal, which would be two dishes plus rice - that's cheap even by Chinese standards. At first I was impressed by the quality of the food. Typically I might get something like stir fried pork with green peppers, or Ma Po tofu or even beef in black bean sauce.
However, after about three or four weeks, I noticed that the same dishes were being served up again and again - almost every day now it seems to be meatballs, fried chicken wings or fattty pork with carrots.
There is a parallel here to the magazine I work for. When I first started only two months ago I had all these great ideas for articles: a feature on young Chinese film-makers in Beijing, something on women's football, an interview with a leading portrait photographer to see what the impact of digital technology has been ... Then I started to read the back issues.
Looking back through five years of back copies I found that almost all my ideas had been done at least once, and sometimes two or three times. And the journalists are all the same people. So when I enthusiastically tried to sell the idea of an article on Aussie Rules football or Caving to our sports reporter, it's no wonder he gave me a patronising been-there-done-that look. Likewise when I suggested we do something on the Biennale, I got the same give-me-a-break look from Xiao Changyan, the female "culture" writer.
I don't know how they manage to keep up their interest up in what is a fairly limited scene that they have been covering for year after year. Despite all the talk of Beijing being a hip new city with a thriving arts and entetainment scene, it is actually a bit of an overgrown village. I'm sure there is still a lot of stuff they could dig up if they had the motivation and resources, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The reporters here seem content to cruise along and just get by doing the bare minimum. Unlike in Australia there don't seem to be any eager freelancers, interns or wannabee writers ringing up and pestering us with story ideas. The fax machine isn't overflowing with press releases, and the mailbag isn't bulging with invites to media launches or requests to do lunch.
And of course there is not much pressure to keep abreast of the competition. As a state-run magazine there is still something of the iron rice bowl mentality here - a job for life, and little need to prove yourself. That's not to say the journalists are no good, only that they can't or won't stretch themselves. Why bother sticking your neck out when there's no money or glory in it, only the risk of getting your head on the chopping block?
The only area where the staff here do excel is in doing paid advertorial work and sucking up to advertisers. One guy has launched a semi-independent magazine targeting the lucrative expat schools market. We are also running a whole series of ludicrous advertorial articles for cheesy dance shows, law firms and hotels.
So as I am about to leave China I am glad I have learnt something about the reality beyond the "booming Beijing" hype. When you switch on the TV or pick up a western newspaper these days it always seems to be that Beijing is the happening place, and China is the new klondike gold rush. The world's most powerful media tycoons are all itching to get in here - but even Rupert Murdoch can't get what he wants. So it's strange to be on the inside of this bubble and find that it is all very humdrum and mediocre. Our magazine here has a staff of about 20-30, but what they produce is neither efficient nor inspiring. I reckon the same, or even better results, could be achived by one quarter of that number of journalists in Australia. I suppose labour is cheap here. But it's more than that. The very basics of journalism are not there - the journalists don't ask the most fundamental questions, they don't approach the most obvious sources for comment, they can't start an article with an interesting intro ... I could go on. In a way, it's amazing anything gets published at all.
We had a good moan about this over a few beers last weekend, and we [the foreign editors] got on to the same old refrain: they aren't interested and/or don't need to make the publications more readable and relevant. There is simply no desire or motivation to do that. The few experienced western journalists who have worked here and pointed out the mediocrity and tried to push for change have been sidelined and ignored, or even accused of being disruptive and hostile.
"Why is it that in editorial meetings I am the only one making suggestions when I have absolutely no experience?" asked a young British guy who has just graduated from uni. "There are seven or eight Chinese journalists there who have been overseas to study journalism at some of the best schools in the US and the UK, but they just sit there and say nothing ..."
I don't know the answer. But for the time being, the paper will continue to rely on a steady stream of inexperienced amateur "English polishers" who are willing to work for peanuts.
The other significant thing about this paper is the lack of anyone with clear responsibility. There is no identifiable editor or news editor prowling round to keep you on your toes. There is no chief sub to bawl you out when you get some fact or spelling wrong. And there is no publisher swanning round boasting of how many ads he or she has sold. It's still a newspaper run like a state tractor factory where the real bosses are behind the scenes, consulting with the party hacks on how to meet this week's quota. Meanwhile the workers just do the bare minimum until the five o clock whistle, muddling through to produce something that at least "looks" like a newspaper.
And finally, of course, there is the obvious factor of "freedom of the press" and open-ness. You can never have a decent publication if you know that so much of your obvious subject material is off limits. Even an entertainment magazine like ours is neutered because we can't point out the bleeding obvious sometimes. Last week, for example, I edited a short article about the annual book fair, which lamented that "Chinese books" were not that popular overseas. What an absurd claim to make when we all know about the success of books like Wild Swans, etc. But we are unable to talk about authors like Jung Chang because they are "sensitive" - and I wouldn't be surprised if most the reporters here had not heard of her. When you first start working here or first see the magazine you might think how open and "normal" it all appears to be. But after a while you start to really notice the limits and the gaps. Maybe that's when it's time to bail out.
And that is what I'm doing now. I'm just about to go in to my last editorial meeting, for what that's worth. But if anyone tells me in future how much China is developing and "opening up", I will have to tell them that it still has a long way to get near to what we take for granted.

Canteen at 11.55am.

Canteen at 12.05pm

English as she is written

2005-09-20T18:56:00.000+08:00

Interesting little observation: why is that a person's English language speaking ability is no indicator of their writing? One reporter, who speaks languid and eloquent English, can't write for toffee. He always submits his copy at the last moment and I dread editing it. It's usually easier just to write a completely fresh article on the same topic, taking his prose as a rough guide. Our fashion correspondent,on the other hand, speaks as if she is Scottish and has marbles in her mouth, but writes perfect prose, like a native. Discuss.

I'm out of here

2005-09-19T22:32:00.000+08:00

It's with a heavy heart [literally] that I have resigned from China Daily. I have to go back home to get my heart checked out. No disrespect to the good Dr Fu, but I want a bit of peace of mind and to sort out actually what is causing the old ticker to behave in this strange and very scary way. I wouldn't have thought it was stress, because the workload is anything but onerous compared to what I've been used to at magazines and newspapers in western countries. And it can't be culture shock, because I've been coming here for almost 15 years without any such problems. Maybe it's been all the hassle of trying to find a school for my kids, bless 'em. I tried to get the local school to take them, but no way. Unless you're on an expat package here there's only one school in Beijing that will take your little ones, and that's Fangcaodi, miles away in the embassy district. Just too far away for us, and even then, at 16,000 kuai a year, still more than we could afford for two kids.
Ah well, China's loss is Australia's gain, I suppose. I shall take my literary talents back to the convict shores of Botany Bay and resume my former life as a medical journalist on a whopping salary, albeit without a subsidised canteen.
I broke the news to Pan Zhongming today and he seemed quite sympathetic and understanding. And most of all, he didn't demand that I refund the cost of the free ticket they gave me to come here. So long as I clear out of the apartment by the end of the week.
My other Chinese colleagues took the news of my impending departure as if I'd just announced I was stepping out to buy some pens. "Oh? Will you be coming back? No? What a pity ... oh, and by the way there's some listings on page 6 that needs polishing, thank you."
Yu Wentao, the party man and acting editor, just slapped me on the back and breathed the usual gale of garlic on me, as if to say having a cardiac arrhthymia is just a big joke. When I said I would be leaving at the end of the week, he gripped my arm and said: "Staying around that long? Well done!"
Well, I will miss Beijing. I could definitely see myself living down the hutongs of Jiaodaokou, and maybe one day I will, in ten years time when the little runts have grown up and are at university or something.
For now, I am planning the perfect little break for someone with a cardiac complaint: trekking over the 4500 metre high mountain passes of Sichuan in the footsteps of Joseph Rock, to find the old monastery that inspired the whole myth of Shangri La. You can read about it in my other blog In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock.

Now all I need to do is get rid of all the stuff I have accumulated in two months in Beijing, stuff like: an iron, a year's membership to the Bookworm library, six mooncakes and a load of winter clothes. They won't be much use in a Sydney summer.

Subversive Cubans at the Elephant

2005-09-18T21:01:00.000+08:00

Red Detachment of Women
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Last night I saw one of the most brilliant, audacious and in-your-face pieces of political satire imaginable in China. And it was performed by a troupe of Cuban lap dancers at a sleazy cabaret club in the Beijing Russian ghetto of Yabaolu. A few of the editors from work went to the Elephant Club, down a dark side street among all the hole-in-the-wall shops selling fur coats, and which is full of dodgy-looking Russian businessmen and women. The Elephant is decorated in a florid Muscovite style and has old Russian movies and Russia's answer to CNN playing on big screens. They do a great all-you-can-eat [and drink] buffet for 58 kuai, which we tucked into with gusto. We'd just finished our mixture of east and west food when the buffet area was cleared away and turned into a stage. On came some go-go girls wearing skimpy purple tinsel bikinis, to do a bit of pole-dancing. Because they looked vaguely European we thought they were from Uzbekistan or some other down-on-its-luck part of the Russian empire. But then they returned to do turns from different parts of the world. They did cowgirls [just like that scene in Apocalypse Now], some cheesy rhumba, Riverdance and even a bit of belly dancing with a black guy playing the role a hareem overseer. But they save the best for last. Suddenly the stage was lit up pink and on strode the same girls in Mao uniforms, complete with red armbands and red stars, brandishing fake rifles. To the accompaniment of the earnest revolutionary music from Red Detachment of Women, they did a suggestive sado-masochistic piss-take of the whole thing, bumping and grinding and using those rifles in very suggestive ways. To cap it off the brought out the "bad landlord", who was played, in a stroke of brilliance, by the same black guy, dressed in a confucian gown and topped of with a Fu Manchu cap and pigtail. They chastised and criticised him and he responded with a "What? Why me? What have I done?" bemused and pained look on his face that could have been straight out of a Mel Brooks movie.
He was "executed" and then all the dancers returned on stage holding up a huge picture of Mao. But at this point the music switched from revolutionary chorus to a techno blast version of "Fight the Power". It was awesome. I don't think the Russians got it, but the Chinese present certainly did, and had looks of shocked bewilderment and mischievous grins on their faces. Us western Europeans were just cacking ourselves.
Being a twerpy reporter at heart, I went backstage to find a troupe of Cubans hurriedly packing their bags to go to another engagement at the Tropicana Club. Only one of them, Cesar the black guy, could speak English. He said sorry they couldn't stay and chat, but spoke long enough to say that they'd been in Beijing a year and had come up with the Red Detachment finale themselves as they knew it well from their own Cuban education. Cesar translated my words of thanks and appreciation into Spanish for the girls stuffing themselves hastily and quite revealingly into ordinary clothes. They all said gracias and disappeared into the Beijing night. Delicious.

Not a heart attack

2005-09-17T17:19:00.000+08:00

1560
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

The picture is of Dr Fu, the internal medicine specialist who checked my Holter monitor ECG reading this morning. In the early hours I woke up with all the symptoms of a heart attack (well except dropping down dead). So at 8am I got China Daily's foreign affairs assistant Ma Jun (aka Helen) to take me down to the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital (I hope the clinical standards don't bear any relation to the degree of friendlieness at any particular time). We were ushered into the clinic for big shots [or gao ganbu 高干部　as they say here]. You see, the plebs, the workers, peasants soldiers and other laobaixing all have to go into a scrum on the ground floor to register,while big ganbus like me can go straight up to the fourth floor and get service with a smile from a pretty nurse with a squeaky voice. Who said Chinese hospitals don't have a fourth floor because it sounds like death? They have a fourth floor, but only the big Party members can go there - maybe that's a Chinese joke.
Anyway, I sat around in air conditioned luxury, to wait for Dr Fu. Once I got in to see him I found that Chinese hospitals - even ones for big ganbus - are just like all other aspects of Chinese life. People push in and jump the queue. As I was sat in the consulting room having some suckers painfully removed from around my nipples people kept coming in and asking if he could just spare a moment to look at their uncle or their boils. Excuse me - take a number and sit down!
Once he'd dealt with the various queue jumpers he was able to tell me that I'd had - wait for it - 237 supraventricular ectopic beats since yesterday. "A slight problem," he told me. Tell me about it. I remember every one and they weren't nice. I've never had a great sense of rhythm and now my heart has confirmed this by adding a few extra contractions on the offbeat whenever I get stressed out.
Dr Fu told me I'd better get checked out for rheumatic heart disease, coronary heart disease and a few other things he couldn't translate. So there will be more investigations ahead and I may not be sticking around in Beijing to to do them.
Oh, and after that good news, and a 1200 kuai bill for it all, I came out to find that some bastard had stolen my bike that had been chained to the hospital fence.
Not my best day in China.

Get your tits out for the lads

2005-09-16T22:49:00.000+08:00

1544
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here I am modelling the new Ipod Holter monitor. 24 hours of your favourite lub dub sounds on one set of Duracell copy batteries. All your favourite ST segments that you remembered from the 1970s. If I am still alive tomorrow I will let you know what I think of it. Courtesy of the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital, who are very good value for money if you have chest pain. Mr Koizumi all is forgiven. Sayonara, pengyoumen.

Feeling better now, thanks

2005-09-15T20:02:00.000+08:00

My persecution mania seems to have passed. Nothing like a cup of tea and a bit of ironing to set you right. Oh, and a few laughs at work. Now, do you want the good news or the bad news?
The good news is that they wanted almost a thousand kuai to fix my Powerbook keyboard because the num lock key was stuffed. I said "no thanks", took it home and found it's working again! It must have just been a breadcrumb stuck under there. I feel a thousand yuan better off already.
The other bit of good news is that I was called into the office to get ... a huge box of mooncakes and a bottle of Cab Sav [local unfortunately] for the Zhongqiujie. What nice people these communists are when you are in their good books.
The bad news is that Sting the office fish is on his last legs, or should I say his last fins. He is lying sideways and flapping a bit pathetically. The general consensus is that this is because his tank is refilled from the office water cooler. I know nothing about fish, but I'm sure that distilled water is probably not their natural medium. They all asked me what to do, as if Laowai are fish breeding experts. I suggested setting him free in the algae ridden canal nearby.
The other funny thing was meeting the Serious American in the dining room tonight. A few days ago we were asked for our suggestions on how the paper might be improved [I had to resist facetious comments like "tell the truth"]. It seems that the senior editors and the Laowai trusties have been in conference all day debating what direction the paper should take. I half jokingly said we should go tabloid and start putting pictures of models on page 3. Believe it or not this is what they are planning to do. They must be noticing what Xinhua are doing. The official word is that we are going to be less "avant garde" and to reach out for the "youth market". So fewer articles on Tang Dynasty pottery and more beauty contests! And watch out for more features on bodypainting, which the Chinese seem to have an unhealthy obsession with.
Well if you'll excuse me I have some more ironing to do.

PS They are also planning a "talkback" section in which they will print some of the comments they get by email and on the website. So get writing: "Dear Editor, Please do more style features on that fashion-conscious young Mark Anthony Jones. Where does he get his ties from?"

Just because you're paranoid ...

2005-09-15T12:43:00.000+08:00

The weather has turned cooler in Beijing today and I woke up this morning shivering. But I don't think it was the air conditioning. I think that unconsciously, I'm frightened. I know it sounds crazy but I have this creeping feeling of falling foul of the law. For the last couple of days I've had a weird lethargic feeling, combined with a sense that I am extremely wound up and fit to burst. At first I thought it was because I'd been pushing myself too hard at work, combined with some late nights out. But now I'm not sure what it is.
Over the last few days there have been a few things that have set me on edge. Reading about the case of Shi Tao and his betrayal by Yahoo has made me wonder what I would have to do to get an eight year jail sentence. All he did was what I've been doing on this blog - revealing what a Chinese newspaper has been telling its employees to do and what not to do. I have our "style book" here in front of me that tells us how to edit articles on Taiwan or Tibet, the names we should use and so on. Is that a state secret too? OK, Shi Tao is a Chinese citizen and I'm a foreigner, but I have just read a book recently about a British guy who spent five years in a Shanghai prison for possessing cannabis that he'd bought in Xinjiang. So having a foreign passport doesn't make you immune when "breaking the law".
My paranoia was increased when I heard an offhand remark from one of the other foreign editors here recently, about how our emails are monitored. Last Christmas one of the foreign staff emailed his parents in the UK to say he was cold and wished he'd brought his favourite scarf. A few days later he was presented with a silk scarf by his fellow workers who said they'd heard he was suffering.
And yesterday I got a fright when two security guards marched into our office and came up to me. It was a false alarm - they were just looking for some boxes they had been told to move.
Finally, today I read an article by a Uygher woman who went from national hero to traitor [and an eight year jail sentence] after sending some newspaper clippings to her husband.
It may all be paranoia, but I've now started thinking about what I might need to do if the goon squad turns up to lead me away for a little chat about the website, or other comments I have been making online. I've even contemplated getting an "emergency bag" ready for such an occasion, and leaving contact details of my family and journalist colleagues on the Australian papers.
Am I being paranoid? Or is this what happens to anyone who tries to write more openly in modern day China? Whatever, it certainly shows how successful the party has been in making all of us here think twice before speaking out.

Testing times

2005-09-14T11:35:00.000+08:00

I've been very poorly, as they say in the north, these last few days. I feel like I've got ME or chronic fatigue or whatever they call it. Yesterday I could hardly get out of bed, but had to drag myself into work to get the issue out a day early. My listlessness wasn't helped by having to turn stuff like this into readable English:

Nowadays, caving is a much a breakaway from the plain-looking nature to be a recreational sport of exploring caves as it is often undertaken solely for the enjoyment or for the physical exercise thought the original exploration or biological science still viewed as important goals for many cavers.

The writing test never prepared me for crap like that. If you want to work for our newspaper you have to take a writing test, in which you have to polish a few sample stories - a couple of features and some two paragraph fillers. When I first did mine it was returned as unsatisfactory and I was told to try again. I don't know what that was all about, given that at the time I was the news editor on a major Australian publication and this kind of editing was just what I had been doing for the last ten years. Maybe it was just a psychological ploy to make new editors feel insignificant. Anyway, I "passed" the test second time round, and here I am.

Yesterday I had to edit [ie rewrite] and polish 20 pages of gobbledegook like that. By the end of the day I was shattered both mentally and physically, and went home to collapse into bed and stay there for 12 hours. Not a word of thanks or praise form any of the Chinese staff.

I think this is a big difference between how editorial offices work here and in Australia. Here, people just come to work, do what they need to do and go home. You don't get any credit for doing a better than average job or for making a special effort. In Sydney, if I'd have put in a day like yesterday we would have got a pat on the back from the editor and probably an invitation out for dinner after the rush was over.

The editorial meetings are the same. In Sydney these would often start off with a discussion of what we'd seen on telly the night before, or the editor's new shoes. And while discussing what was on the agenda we would often go off at a tangent to bitch about someone in particular or to tell a joke. Here it is all very plodding and lacklustre and by-the-book. And surprisingly, there seem to be quite a bit of pettiness and argument over things that in Australia we would settle with flattery and humour. Just now we were discussing whether to do a story on tennis. After the journalist in question mentioned it, the editor just said something like" "No, that's not interesting, our readers won't like that." They then had a five minute bickering session about why an article on the Tennis Open would be worth doing. It all ended on a kind of abrupt , sour note and I got the feeling there was loss of face and resentment all round. I couldn't help thinking of how the same situation would have been handled in Australia. Someone would suggest doing the article with a "How about this .. . wouldn't this be interesting,?" then the editor and other writers would jump in and say: "Well, this angle might be good but we don't want to do this or that ..." - constructive, face-saving criticism, in other words. And even if the idea was rejected, the journalist would be given a pat on the back for coming up with the idea in the first place.

Maybe it's a case of the "grass being greener", or maybe it's just a case of sour grapes. When I suggested we do a feature on radio personalities in the capital I was told this was "not very interesting". Instead, they are going to do a feature on Dental Health week.

When I look at some of the past issues of this mag I see that they used to be lively and full of variety. I don't know what it is about the present set-up that makes a feature on dental health a priority. I get the feeling that I'm reaching a crossroads where I can choose either to "Try Make a Difference" on this publication or just to go with the flow. GIven our pitiful wages and our one year use-by date, I get the feeling I may just opt for the latter.

On yer bike

2005-09-12T09:06:00.000+08:00

mine was black
.

I have invested in a Flying Pigeon "Fei Ge" bike, and it has really changed my impression of Beijing. Until now the city seemed like a huge, impenetrable sprawl with streets constantly in gridlock. Now with my "two wheels good" mode of transport, the city has suddenly shrunk and become much more accessible. It feels like I can reach almost anywhere in the centre within half an hour. It's like living in Palmers Green [as I once did] and being able to reach the West End or Walthamstow in 30 minutes. The fact that Beijing is as flat as a pancake and the streets are laid out in grids make it really easy to get around. I am slowly filling in the gaps of my local knowledge built from having surfaced from subway stations, so that now I am joining up all the bits like a jigsaw puzzle. I can see how Chaoyangmen leads to Wangfujing, and how Sanlitun connects with Guomao.
There's something almost mesmeric about riding along in the bike lane for what seems like hour after hour, watching the street life unfold around you. One minute you can be on a street corner where they are having an impromptu bird market, then you are passing old men sat out at tables playing chess, and round the corner there will be a whole street of traders with Cyrillic nameplates selling swathes of fur coats to podgy Russian blondes. And you notice the other riders more - especially the parents chatting with their kids on the back seat, or the girlfriends riding side saddle with their boyfriends.
Riding a bike in Beijing is not as hazardous as everyone has made out - I haven't had any collisions or near misses yet, and I get the feeling that as long as you take it easy and don't try to speed around, then you'll probably be OK. The key is to keep pace with everyone else and use them as buffers. Whenever I cross a major intersection I always try ensure that I have someone alongside me, so that if a car does fly out from nowhere, it'll take someone else out first.
The other thing about having a bike is that you can duck off down all the little hutongs at a moment's notice and use them as shortcuts, or just to get away from the noisy traffic for a while. People say the hutongs are disappearing, but there still seem to be plenty left when I bike around. I guess the only real problem with biking anywhere in the hot dusty climate is that when you arrive anywhere your eyes are full of grit and your hair has taken on the texture of a brillo pad.
Yesterday I took a bike ride down to Chaoyangmen, to try get my laptop keyboard fixed. One of the other foreign editors, Simon, tagged along. Simon is from London, and as we sailed down Andingmen Lu he was talking on his mobile to his Chinese girlfriend in cockney-accented Mandarin. Very surreal. Simon has tattoos and looks like a pirate with his shoulder-length hair and ear rings. Wearing a leopardskin top also makes him stand out a bit on the average Beijing street.
As we biked along together I learnt a few things about him:
1. He thinks Beijing women are really fit ["which isn't that difficult when you've been living in Preston"]
2. He used to be a London fireman but didn't approve of them looting stuff from burned-down houses and premises.
3. Has strong left wing/pro-China views.
4. He really misses his toolbox, which took him ten years to build up and is now in storage in England. ["I feel naked without a screwdriver"]
5. Like most expats here, he loves Ikea ["Especially the cafe']
6. He reckons you should only ask women directions in Beijing as they are more likely than men to admit if they don't know the way.

When we eventually reached the computer centre at Bainaohui we parted ways, as I tried to get the Apple dealers to fix my Powerbook. Instead of fixing it, the guy there actually made it worse, but that's another story.

The Mysterious Mr Song

2005-09-11T15:09:00.000+08:00

One of my favourite movies is The Third Man, and I like the scene where Holly Martins is abducted in a fast car by what he thinks are Russian gangsters in Vienna, only to find that he is actually being taken to give a lecture at the British Council on the modern novel. I had a similar experience last night when we went to the North Korean restaurant.
In our office we sometimes see an older guy about the place called Mr Song. No one knows who he actually is or quite what he does. He sometimes edits articles and will come over and ask advice on a complicated bit of syntax. He inevitably knows more than you do about English and it usage. He's a very gentlemanly, scholarly type and speaks flawless English with a clipped British accent and a world-weary air. If you closed your eyes you might think you were talking to an Oxford don. Some of the foreign editors think he writes the main leader articles for the paper, while others say he is some relation to the founder of the paper and is just allowed to hang around to keep him busy.
Well yesterday I had my first real chance to speak to him.
Last night when we went to the North Korean restaurant in Liangmaqiao we had to split taxis. There were four of us, and it ended up three in one taxi [because only one could speak Chinese] and I was left looking for another. Standing at the gates of the office compound trying to flag down a taxi, who should pull up but Mr Song, sitting in the back of a posh black Audi complete with driver. He asked where I was going and when I told him he ushered me to get in.
As we cruised along in air-conditioned comfort he started off the conversation with: "You speak good Chinese ...", making this sound like a statement of fact rather than a compliment. Then he continued: "... but you are Australian?" {As if this were a contradiction]
When I explained that I was British born, he seemed to relax, and put his head back, as if that explained everything.
We then had a bizarre conversation about which nationalities made the best editors.
"We have had some Australian editors before," said Mr Song. "They like to drink a lot. We had one who drank all the time. So we sent him to Hong Kong!"
I didn't quite get the logic of this, but Mr Song seemed to think it was funny.
"Now we have many British editors, and this is better, I think." he said. "The editors from Britain are more stable and they do not complain so much. And they get along well with the Chinese staff. We used to have more Americans but there is often some trouble with them. Americans are...." he thought for a minute, "...They are too arrogant. For them there is always right and wrong, and the American way is always right. They cannot accept that there may be other ways of doing things. And after a while this causes problems with the Chinese staff."
He finished off by pronouncing: "I think in the future we will mostly have British editors. This is an inevitable trend."
We rode in silence for a while and then as we passed the Kempinski Hotel, he suddenly started up again:
"You were a journalist before. What do you think of our newspaper?"
I made a few neutral comments about it being different to those in Australia, and how it was now "more open" than five years ago.
He then surprised me by saying: "It is not good enough. Some of the articles are very low quality. We should publish more different opinions ..."
By now we had arrived at the restaurant. As the car stopped he started saying my name over and over:
"I have seen some of your articles. They are very good. You should write some articles like that for our newspaper. Our Chinese writers are not able to write in this way!"
And with that the door was opened for me and Mr Song gestured goodbye. I was left standing on the kerb as he drove off, wondering what it all meant.
Is Mr Song the local PSB guy or just a harmless old man who thinks the paper needs to loosen up a bit? If he has access to an Audi he must be fairly high in the pecking order at the publishers. And I wondered what he meant by having seen my articles - everyone knows I've been doing some freelance stuff for Australian papers, which has also appeared on the net. Or was he referring to this blog? All very cryptic.

OK yah, xiexie

2005-09-11T14:18:00.000+08:00

db
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

One of the funniest things about working for a Chinese Communist newspaper is discovering how many upper middle class English girls work here. It's like a finishing school for debs. Roedean, Cambridge, Kitzbuhel ... Chaoyang? I don't know if it is the official hiring policy but there are now a serious number of well spoken English gels among the foreign editors. I was talking with a couple of them at Kai the other night and found them to be charming, witty, very attractive - but they make you wonder about what they teach 'em at public schools these days.
One of them was complaining about an article she'd had to edit on Taiwan and the DPP.
"It was so unfair. It was saying the DPP were cold blooded and lots of other nasty things. I knew this newspaper was government run but I didn't expect it to be be so, well, communist ..."
A few cosmopolitans later I think I discovered what really brought them to China. Breaking into TV.
They were all bitching about Laura Kyle, the other well-spoken English woman in Beijing who reads the CCTV9 news. They all wanted her job.
"I mean, what has she got? And did you see what she was wearing last night ...?"
I was just beginning to enjoy their company when they were whisked away by some French guys who were having a private party somewhere. OK, ciao ...

Nice headline for the PRC

2005-09-10T18:10:00.000+08:00

100_1485
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

For all of you who wanted to see the headline, here it is. Next week I will try push the boundaries a bit further with a headline like Free Tibet or Hu Jintao - How corrupt is he? I shall return to some serious blogging tomorrow when I get my keyboard fixed. Now I'm off out to a North Korean restaurant with the other foreign editors.

Update: The Pyongyang restaurant was great. Bacon wrapped in lettuce and dipped in a kind of satay sauce ... plus waitresses who burst into song to praise their Dear Leader. All this and beers too, for less than ten bucks.

Spot the badge:

[My in depth interview: "Do you you like Beijing?" Yes. "Do you miss Pyongyang?" Not much.]

You know you're getting old when ...

2005-09-08T14:13:00.000+08:00

proc
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

... your workmates have never heard of the Proclaimers. Or the Sisters of Mercy. I came up with what I thought was a very smart headline this week about the transfer of Shanghai Shenhua footy player Du Wei to Celtic. "I'm On My Way", as in the Proclaimers song. OK, they were from Leith, but it's the same country, right?
At our foreign editors meeting this lunchtime I passed around my handiwork. Nobody got it. Not one. They're all in their twenties. Not even Rob Nutbrown, the bass payer in our favourite expats band "The Party". Come to think of it, he'd never heard of the Sisters of Mercy, either. Which is OK with me, as I hated goth right from the start, even though I knew someone who was in the Sisters [Ben if you must know, and he's now a tax accountant!]
Well after that my only contribution to the foreign editors meeting was to suggest where we should go for the next works outing - to the PLA firing range where you can fire a real AK47. And guess what, everyone else thought it was a great idea. Kids, eh?

On deadline

2005-09-07T22:10:00.000+08:00

100_1443
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Our sports reporter sums up how we all feel at 4pm on a Wednesday. Don't ask what the detergent is for.

Wednesday woes

2005-09-07T14:43:00.000+08:00

It was many years ago when I worked in Hong Kong that I first encountered that species of gweilo known as FILTH: Failed in London, Try Hongkong. These are the talent-challenged westerners who get jobs in Asia based simply on the fact that they speak English. Good on them, you might say. But not when they start acting all high and mighty, and carrying on pompously as if they had actually some modicum of ability, which they invariably don't.
The editor of a magazine I worked on in Hong Kong was a bit like that. He managed to parlay his experience as a hospital porter in London, into becoming editor of a health and science magazine in Honkers. He knew nothing about either health or journalism, but that didn't stop him correcting and sometimes even rejecting almost every article I wrote for the magazine - just to show he was the boss. (He was also that kind of gweilo who would never eat rice and was proud of the fact that he had never visited China, some 40 minutes away on the KCR tube trains.)
Well, I thought I was all over that, but there is a northern cousin of FILTH here in Beijing. I'm talking about the party hacks who are in charge of stuff here, but who have absolutely no clue about how to do anything right. I call them HICCUPS (Hopeless In China Cos Under Party Supervision). The acting editor here, Lao Yu, is proving to be something of a major HICCUP. It started off with small stuff, "correcting" the odd bit of grammar here and there, just to show he was reading the pages. But now he's extending his scope to re-writing the stuff that I have already re-written. In other words, I convert Chinglish into English, and he is "improving" it back into Chinglish again. Sometimes it's just a case of striking out my corrections - changing "young people" back to "youth", for example. At other times he's adding in whole new paragraphs of superfluous and badly written prose, as if to prove that he can actually write in English. I then have to polish his polishing of my polishing. It's all very trying, especially when we are supposed to be on deadline.

He's also been nagging me to write lots of new slogans and headings for Beijing Weekend. We have one page that is just a kind of "bits and pieces" collection of snippets of local news and quirky stories. I suggested a few new names like "Beijing Bites" and "Only in Beijing", but he rejected them all in favour of ... wait for it ... "Events". I tried to explain that a title like this would make readers think it was a listings page for what was happening in the following week, but he shook his head. "These are events that have happened in Beijing, so we should call it that," he explained, helpfully.
He also rejected all my snappy suggestions for a more general slogan for the paper, on the grounds that they didn't have enough words in them. I suppose he wants a slogan like that of the Beijing Subway, which goes something like "For your convenience, please get on the subway".
OK, if that is what he wants I will give him it. Maybe I can "do as the Romans do" and plagiarise a bit of the former Olympic slogan: "For a more convenient time in a more open Beijing."
He'll love that.

Do you Yahoo? I don't, any more

2005-09-06T23:52:00.000+08:00

Internet giant Yahoo supplied information to the Chinese government that led to the jailing of journalist Shi Tao for 10 years, international watchdog Reporters Without Borders said on Wednesday.

The California-based company's Hong Kong subsidiary gave details to China's state security, which helped to identify and convict Shi (37) the group said. Shi was sentenced in April for "leaking state secrets".

Thanks to the Inquirer

Pushing the envelope - or sealing it?

2005-09-06T11:45:00.000+08:00

li
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Oh I do like being at the forefront of China's opening up to the world. We're doing a feature article this week on the wildly popular Super Voice Girls - typically a week after it has all finished. My front cover headline, to go with a pic of winner Li Yuchun is Voice of the people. The editor, Lao Yu, wants to change it to Voice of youth. He thought my headline was "too political". I said his suggestion was more political and made up a story about it being a popular political phrase used by western students who wanted more human rights. Whereas mine was "jokey". Let's see who wins out.
If I can get Voice of the people in big letters on the front cover of a Chinese government-run newspaper I will be quite chuffed.

Update: It's there! Gone to the printers ... watch this space.

Reese Witherspoon in my shower?

2005-09-05T12:59:00.000+08:00

My predecessor in this creaky seat was a Scottish guy called Hector, who seems to have done a very good job with the magazine. Looking through the back issues, I'm very impressed by the lively approach he brought to the paper, and how he kept it topical useful and informative. Hector is now presumably back in Scotland, and he has another claim to fame: he features in a book called Around the World in 80 Dates, which describes how a British female journalist travelled around the world trying to find Mr Right. Hector was a friend of Jennifer Cox, and she stayed with him and his wife here at their Beijing apartment [which is now mine] during the Chinese leg of her global find-a-man journey. Hector used an article in the paper here to publicise her quest for a man in China. Before coming here I read the China bits of the book in Collins booskshop in Sydney [oh come on, I wasn't going to buy it], in an attempt to find out a bit more about my new job and living conditions. All I really learnt was that the newspaper provided its foreign editors with small apartments that had no separate shower. Ms Cox described her embarrasment at sharing the apartment with Hector and his wife, and having to cringe behind the opaque shower door as the others brushed their teeth.
Anyway, I think Ms Cox didn't have much dating success here in Beijing, but went on to find her beau in the Nevada desert. The book has been a modest success, and it is now being turned into a movie by none other than Reese Witherspoon.
So I would just like to say to Ms Witherspoon that she is welcome to come and use the original location [my apartment] for the Beijing scenes of her movie. I also do a good Scottish accent, would be ideal as Hector, and I am available for movie work and as a technical consultant, except on Wednesdays.

Useful idiots

2005-09-04T18:51:00.000+08:00

You'll have to excuse me today, I am feeling very delicate after a big night out with one of our newly arrived editors, Julia. I remember drinking a lot of sake, ending up at Bar Blu in Sanlitun, arguing about the use of "which" and "that" and "whilst" in articles, and claiming to have been good friends with Echo and the Bunnymen [well .. they once came to our student party]. I have no idea how I got home. And I can't believe how much money I spent.
Julia, our beautiful new member of staff seemed very impressed, and will probably get the impression that we go out getting blind drunk all the time. Which is true for some of the editors here. But I just can't go on like this, I need to give the drinking a miss for a while.

I don't really remember what kind of people I expected to be working with here at the government run newspaper. I suppose I thought they would be mostly people with maybe a little bit of experience in journalism - local papers, or trade press, like myself. So when we had our first little get together lunch, I was a bit surprised to say the least, when I found myself sharing a table with an odd collection of what appeared to be backpackers, unrecovered alcoholics and the kind of people you see reading newspapers all day in public libraries. Our Chinese minders seemed to be treating us as useful idiots - a bunch of people to be humoured and cosseted, but only because we were an unfortunate necessity for the running of an English language paper. Having just come from a fairly busy and professional newsroom, I was surprised to find the other foreign editors swan in wearing the Khao San road uniform of cargo pants and singlets, looking unshaven and lighting up as soon as they sat down.
Well, I have since found that first appearances can be deceptive - some of the "backpackers" are bloody good editors - but also that the old hands among the foreign editors have every right to look cynical.
Imagining myself a bit more of a professional than my new colleagues, I had been bragging a bit about some of the articles I've written and some of the places I have worked at. One young Canadian woman, another newcomer seemingly fresh out of university, was always asking my advice on journalism. So there I was, the old hand, passing on a few gems of wisdom. And this young lass, a rather devout Christian I might add, seemed to lack the most basic knowledge of the wider world, very naive. Obviously doesn't get out much, I thought. But I later discovered that she has written feature articles for some of America's most serious papers. And good articles, too, better than I could have done. Our little friend is either very modest or something of a prodigy.

I've also found out why many of the editors seem to have a "why bother, nothing ever changes" attitude. We had a really good set of articles this week, on foreign artists living in China. They made up the bulk of the magazine and I assumed that they would of course feature on the cover. But instead, I found this week's cover plastered with a propaganda shot of some smiling "minorities" playing their musical instruments to celebrate the 56th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, or something. Completely unrelated to anything within. What a complete turn off - nobody's going to pick up a magazine or open it with that on the cover. It's all Yu Wentao's idea - the editor from the Party School. Nice guy, but no clue as to what makes a good cover.
He also comes over from time to time and corrects some really niggling point about grammar that I've "missed". And yet he [and the others] leave huge layout gaffs uncorrected - like having a heading at the bottom of a column and the article starting at the top of the next column.
It's even worse on some other sections of the paper. Brian, who works on the business section, was fuming yesterday because he spent two hours completely re-writing some gibberish story, only to find it went on the page in its original form, with just a few minor changes.
Last night I was talking to an Aussie guy who used to work on the paper. I told him it was amazing that the paper had not done anything on the Chinese angle to the New Orleans disaster - like what was happening to Chinese people and Chinese businesses in the region.
He just laughed.
"You've made the mistake of thinking you're working on a newspaper," he said.
"It's just the official noticeboard of the Communist Party of China. It's not designed to be read, just to spell out what they want. You can always tell the important articles because they come in already well written and no changes are allowed. Everything else is just fillers. They claim it's got a circulation of one million, but there's only really about 25 people who actually read it. And they are the foreign correspondents and China watchers who want to get the official line. It doesn't make any money, it's not meant to, and therefore it doesn't need to attract readers."
Andrew was bitter because he wanted to stay in Beijing but had just been "let go" by the paper after his one year contract was up. He had wanted to stay on, but the paper was still enforcing its "one year only" rule.
"They like to have a regular turnover of foreigners, so nobody gets settled in and becomes too familar with the system," he said. Only a select few senior foreign staff were allowed to stay on for two or maybe three years. His parting advice was: "Don't take it too seriously. They don't take you seriously. They just want your English skills for a year. Then it's thank you and goodbye, next please."
And with that, I think I will also say farewell. Early night for me.

Summer special

2005-09-03T16:36:00.000+08:00

bei5
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Lovely weather here in Beijing, wish you were here. After a month of hazy, hot and polluted air, the sun has come out and the capital feels like a different place. I keep thinking I should go off to Bronte or Clontarf, but then I remember I'm not in Sydney anymore.
Despite all the bad news on the international front, I'm in a good mood because so far I have managed to get the better of Beijing this weekend.
1. I managed to get a seat on the 104 trolley bus so I could sit all the way to Wanfujing and read the very same newspaper pages I edited yesterday.
2. I managed to score the entire set of Monty Python shows on DVD and the women in the shop undercharged me by 10 kuai.
3. Breakfast [xiaolongbao] cost me 3 kuai.
4. I found a decent bookshop/library/cafe at last, at the Bookworm, even if it is in the middle of a demolition site. Got two great books to read. [Including the Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly].
5. The girl in the cafe said my Chinese was zhen bang and I don't think she was just being polite.
6. Found Carrefour and scored a) A fine selection of Belgian Trappist beers for about 15 kuai each, b) Freshly baked French bread! c) Muesli for 15 kuai d) Some decent coffee.
7. Err, that's it for now.

I suppose I should also mention that we came across an all you can eat and drink pizza place just down the road last night for 39 kuai. And the pizza was great. The manager kept urging us to eat more and drink more draft beer. I think he's going to regret that in future.

And with that, I'm going to wash my hair and use my newly acquired Body Building Protein Conditioner [on special]

Oh, and before anyone asks: "why bother being in China if you only want to eat French bread ..." I would just point out that I've been living on an exclusive diet of Chinese food and CCTV for the last five weeks. And if you know hard it is to find decent bbc [bread, books and coffee] here, you would understand.

I will leave you in the very capable [and extremely strong] hands of Nadya from Blagovechensk:

I need your help with a slogan

2005-09-02T10:58:00.000+08:00

The editor, Lao Yu, has just asked me to come up with five ideas for a new slogan for the section, by close of business today. The current one is somthing like: "XXXX Daily - for your convenience". Yes. The boss wants something with "more energy".

So this is your chance to get your words on the masthead of the nation's top newspaper.

Here's a few to start you off:

You read it here first - because we closed down all the other papers

Capital life need not be capital punishment

What to do in Beijing - apart from getting shit-faced every night

I have been promised payment for this - and I will of course share my reward with anyone who can come up with something "appropriate".

A bit sensitive

2005-09-02T10:09:00.000+08:00

I'm feeling a bit sensitive this morning - one too many Yanjing pijiu [probably fake ones at that] and about 120 dB of sound blasted into my ears by The Party, a band which includes Rob Nutbrown, one of our editors, at Sky studios last night.

Sensitive seems to be the word of the week. Yesterday at our editorial meeting I was surprised when Zhang Tianxing, one of the reporters, suddenly suggested we do an article on Taiwanese living in Beijing. We've done some articles on the lifestyles of Hong Kongers, Singaporeans and Koreans living in Beijing, so it seemed a good idea to do one on the Taiwanese, was his argument.
Our nice-but-orthodox section editor, Yu Wentao, sucked in through clenched teeth and give him a sideways don't-give-me-any-grief look. For my benefit he said: "Yes we should consider all the different communities in Beijing, but why not concentrate on the foreign communities first?"
Switching to Chinese, which he knows I understand, he continued:
"It would be difficult to do the Taiwanese. You would have to be really careful to avoid any politics. And you would have to make their status very clear. It's all a bit sensitive [youdian mingang]. The two Chinese groups you have to be careful with are Taiwanese and Muslims."
This seemed to leave the door open for Zhang to do his article, but when it came to the final summing up, Lao Yu just said "Page 9, Taiwanese in Beijing? No, too sensitive, do that other one ..."
The mischievous Ye Jun piped up: "What about Tibetans? This area has lots of Tibetans living here!" The others just giggled, uncomfortably and the matter was dropped.

Earlier in the week I had the good fortune to bump into my predecessor as foreign editor of Beijing Weekend. I saw him at "The Noodle", a tatty restaurant opposite the office where the laowai editors gather most evenings to knock back a zhapi [draft beer] after their shift. It's the alternative editorial office. Bill dropped in while he was cleaning out his apartment, ready to take the Trans Siberian home.
I asked him what the story was with the orthodox editor and my exclusion from the real editorial meeting. He rolled his eyes and said: "Oh, they haven't started that again, have they?"

He then gave me a ten minute rundown of the office politics over the last two years. First there was a section editor who was good. He was moved to the political section because his talents were thought to be wasted on theatre and restaurant reviews. Then they had "The Bitch", a woman who was OK to start with but who was then supplemented by Yu Wentao as co-editor. To try show how much better she was, she would push everybody much harder than was needed, just for the sake of showing she was really in charge. She was pointlessly nasty, making requests that she knew could not be carried out, just so she could give herself ammunition to critcise people. This coincided with the tenure of an earlier laowai editor who was a complete basket case and who would have screaming matches with the Chinese staff ["Yoyo Ma is a woman, I tell you - you Chinese know nothing!"]. The Bitch moved on, and Yu Wentao became editor, and the publication really started to slide. The staff who had once put out a reasonably good publication now just did writing-by-numbers on boring topics and plagiarised a lot of articles from local foreign-produced magazines. The authorities finally recognised this and packed Yu Wentao off to Party School to get him out of the way. The section was then run by the staff themselves, with female chief reporter Li Shuo being de facto editor, and the quality picked up again.
And so things continued to my arrival, which has coincided with the return of Mo Bin.
"But I wouldn't worry too much about it all," said Bill. "I hear they're going to close down the whole section and absorb all the staff into the rest of the paper. Or maybe launch a weekend magazine."
Right.

The good, the bad and the ugly

2005-09-01T11:38:00.000+08:00

Highlights and lowlights of the latest issue, and a sinister event that
trapped another Beijing journalist:

Fly killer
A Beijinger named Huang Baolin has killed a total of 549,424 flies in the last ten years. According to him, killing flies is a good form of physical exercise, and he spends about eight hours killing flies every summer day.What impresses other city dwellers most is the fact that Huang can easily tell male flies from female ones whenever he catches sight of them. Hu Xilin, another fly killer living in South China dropped in on Huang last year. What they did at that time was to exchange viewpoints on how to kill more flies quickly. Huang hopes that more and more ordinary people will support his campaign of annihilating harmful insects in the future.

fArt alert:

As a modern theory based on the research of pan-African culture and immigration-based communities in Europe, the scattered dwellers of Asia are hardly to be theorized and represented to remain their cultural marks. The exhibition will tackle this theme with a display of works by noted artists from the two countries, in attempt to reveal the connections behind them.

And from the New York Times:

Mr. Zhao is jailed at a Ministry of Public Security detention center in southern Beijing.
Mr. Zhao's arrest followed an unlikely sequence of events. Infuriated after finding a cockroach in his salad at the Pizza Hut, he complained in vain to the manager and then turned on his cellphone to ask a local reporter to come to the scene. Days earlier he had switched the phone off as a precaution. He often told friends that state security agents tracked his movements through surveillance of his phone. His fit of temper apparently proved it. Shortly after he activated the phone, three agents arrived and took him away.

.

A visit from the Peking Duck himself

2005-09-01T00:36:00.000+08:00

Had a special visitor here yesterday at Truth Towers, in the form of Richard, the blogger who does the Peking Duck website. I should say here that my views are quite at variance with Richard's, and I often disagree with what he says in his posts.
However, I think Richard's site is tops and he certainly respects and encourages a wide variety of views - to his own detriment, I might add.
Anyway, there was a rich irony in having Richard stepping through the door here and having a squizz around the headquarters of the People's Publishing empire. As many of you will probably know, the online version of China Daily has published an article attacking Richard for being anti-Chinese and it included some defamatory accusations. The author is a laowai who is entitled to his point of view, but should respect other people's right to privacy.
Well I hope it was some compensation for Richard to be given a guided tour round our not-very-exciting office. It's really like any other Chinese office - a cross betwen a three star hotel and a run-down 1960s high school. Marble lobby and a creosote wall canteen. Richard was quite surprised to find that we didn't have armed guards on the gate, like they do at CCTV. Nope. We had a quick peep into the newsroom, where there was nobody about because the main shift don't come on until 1pm [Is that a state secret? Not any more ...], and I took a quick snap of Peking Duck against the marked up copy of yesterday's edition, where the editors write on what they think of how each story was laid out and treated.
I hope he doesn't mind me using his pic.

Then we moved on to my own section, where we inadvertently bumped into the boss, aka Yu Wentao, the nice-but-dull politically orthodox acting editor. I introduced Richard as my Meiguo pengyou and Mo started asking Richard where he was from, trying to show off that he himself had just come back from the States [see ... I'm an important potato here, I get to go on overseas trips]. He even showed Richard the little magnet-sticker souvenir he got from Ceduna, Arizona, stuck on his locker, and told him a bit of history about how Ceduna was founded. Richard looked really interested, I can tell you.
And we topped off our surreptitious studio tour with lunch in the crowded, 300-seat office canteen, where we had something that looked like chicken and celery with rice, which I might be competely wrong about.
We were chatting about this and that, and I noticed a few of our fellow diners giving us funny looks as we mentioned topics like Fulun Gnog, censorship, Tiananmxn and Taiwxn. I suppose it would be a bit like Michael Moore sneaking in for a low key lunch at the Fox News staff canteen.
And that was it really. I saw Richard out of the front gate, under the noses of the guards. I wonder what they would have done if they knew who he was? Well they won't find out, I hope. Promise you won't tell.

The Office Gentleman, C'est Moi

2005-08-30T21:22:00.000+08:00

I turned up for work at the office on Monday morning to find all the girls casting strange wistful smiles at me. And a few of the blokes giving me leering grins. What's going on? Then I remembered. After all the hectic activity of going away to Beidaihe for the weekend - and then attending Richard of Peking Duck's blogger dinner on Sunday when I got back, I had almost forgotten my rash gesture on Friday. I sent a bunch of flowers to an Australian actress, Nina Liu, who is playing the lead role in a play (The Power) here in the capital. I don't know why I did it. Maybe I was starstruck. I don't know her other than having interviewed her for an article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. But she was sweet and I admired her courage in coming to Beijing and taking the risk of working on a completely new type of play that a few people [and bloggers] have really laid into. I went to see the first night, and at the end there was a bit of confused clapping from the predominantly Chinese audience. And then, as tradition dictates, someone came on stage with a bunch of flowers, for the leading lady, I presumed. But instead, the flowers were given to the Chinese male actor playing the Emperor. To make things worse, the actors were then sidelined as some nondescript bigwig came on stage - the Culture Minster perhaps - and took all the credit for the remaining applause as he did a boring speech to a TV camera crew.

Maybe it was just me, but I thought this was really unfair on the actress - she deserved better. Or maybe it's just me sticking up for a fellow Aussie [OK, it's my adopted homeland, I wasn't born there but it's been good to me].
Anyway, the next morning I left a note on my colleague Ye Jun's desk, asking if he could try arrange to send a bunch of flowers to her dressing room [do they have Interflora in China?] with a note of support for her performance. I left him with what I thought would be enough money to cover it, and more. And with all the beery shenanigans in Beidaihe, I forgot all about it until Monday morning, when I learned from Ye Jun that he had really maxed out and blown every last fen of my hard earned on the biggest bunch of flowers in the shop. I don't know what the actress's reaction to them was, but I hope she was impressed. I was. And so were the girls in the office.
"Oh Zhuanjia, you are such a gentleman! Chinese men would not do something like that! It was very ... noble of you." They all looked at me expectantly as if I was going to announce something. I just said, "Oh no, do it all the time back home."
I think Ye Jun felt that the Chinese side had lost face, because he piped in:
"It is not the Chinese tradition to give flowers like this, that's why she did not receive any."
I don't care. All the women in the office think I'm the bee's knees now.

Nina Liu

Beidaihe: enjoying some Party perks by the seaside

2005-08-29T13:35:00.000+08:00

Foreign Experts 2
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

I was completely wrong about Pan Zhongming, our foreign affairs liaison person here at the newspaper. In charge of dealing with the foreign experts, after my brief dealings with him so far I had him down for a rather weasly man who would say anything to please, but never deliver. I have since found out otherwise. On our office trip to Beidaihe "Xiao Pan" (as he is known) proved to be the life and soul of the party, to use a dreadful cliche. His English is not that great, but he uses it - mistakes and all - with great gusto and a terrible sense of humour that grows on you, Richard Whiteley style. [Overseas readers: Richard Whiteley was a so-bad-he's-good presenter of a children's quiz show]
On Friday we took the train to Beidaihe, the seaside resort about four hours away from Beijing that has been the traditional summer retreat for the Communist Party leadership. We didn't see many of the villas where they are supposed to gather in smoke-filled rooms to hammer out the next five year plan. These were, of course, hidden behind high walls and screened by trees and lots of guards. Instead, we got to stay at our own "Resort for Foreign Experts", a villa that we were told was also for medium-level cadres and party officials.

Xiao Pan had our schedule for the whole weekend worked out to the minute, including one hour periods of free time between trips to the beach, meals, and visits to the Great Wall at Shanhaiguan.
For the whole of the weekend he shadowed and chivvied us constantly, but not in an overbearing way. Instead, he kept up a constant stream of commentary and bad jokes, that you couldn't help admire.
Sitting down for dinner, he would joke: "Me, I am born in the Year of the Cat. I love to eat fish!" And arranging the rooms at the villa, he announced: "To save money we will share rooms, ladies with gentlemen!" And he would burst into laughter. The best thing was his un-Chinese habit of laughing at his own jokes. Taking the mickey out of one of the older subeditors, he struggled to translate a Chinese proverb:
"You are like a cow - just put in weeds and squeeze out the cream!" He thought about this for a second, then found some double entendre in it and doubled up in laughter, slapping his thigh.
The other amusing thing about Xiao Pan was his way of dealing with the hotel staff, treating them all like old friends. The villa had a bevvy of very attractive fuwuyuan, who dressed very smartly and seemed to carry out their roles in some tradition of serving the party leadership. The head waitress, however, was a little bit prim and proper. Xiao Pan kept up a constant stream of Chinese ribbing of her. "Hey - sargeant major, how long were you in the army for?" he said, saluting her, and the next time she appeared: "Please comrade, come sit here and explain the Three Represents to us!"

After an hour of this the head waitress cracked and came over to sit with us and make conversation. She warmed up even more when she found out we were not Russian. That's because Beidaihe was full of Russians, most of whom had come down on a two-day train ride from towns like Blagovechensk near the Manchurian border, to soak up a bit of sun before the Siberian winter set in. The shops all had signs in Russian and the staff would greet us with "spaceba" and quote prices in Russian. When we went down to the beach, we discovered a weird mix of Chinese and blonde Russian women and pot-bellied men mingling on the thin strip of sand. Xiao Pan was changed in a jiffy into his too-tight Chinese bathers, which along with his smooth skin and the bathing cap over his comb-over hairstyle made him look, well, not exactly Bondi lifeguardish. The rest of us westerners peered a bit suspiciously at the water and decided to have a wander about first. Walking up the beach, I found the Chinese behaved just like anyone else at the beach - their kids made sand castles, they splashed, showed off, and the blokes got buried in their sand by the girlfriends or kids. It wasn't as tacky or as naff as I'd expected, and we didn't have to pay to go on the beach - although there were sections where you could only sit if you hired a beach umbrella.

I took a walk uphill, inland and found Beidaihe to be an extremely surreal place. China by the seaside. A laid back atmosphere of European villas set amid neat, empty, tree-lined streets. The few Chinese you would see ambled along or rode bikes with an almost Mediterranean nonchalence. The only thing that jarred this atmosphere were the police stationed at the gateways of some compounds and at the end of some streets. Like the Sanlitun Embassy district.
Walking in a circuit, I passed several old European cottages, one built by a French merchant, with beautiful landscaped gardens, complete with cypress trees and freshly mowed lawns. Opposite it was the Friendship Hotel, built by the Russians in the 1950s in St Petersburg wedding cake style, and now again emblazoned with signs in Cyrillic.
After a huge seafood dinner [Xiao Pan: "Eating a crab is like a newspaper article - first the headline, crack, then the intro, crack, then you get to the main body inside!"] we were taken to a special "beer garden" built on the headland, the centrepiece of which was a huge viewing tower built in the shape of a conch shell. We got in for free, as Xiao Pan had already set up some deal after schmoozing with the manager. And I'm glad we didn't pay because it was awful. The idea was that you walked around different areas of the small park, drinking at each of the themed bars. But in practice half the bars were off limits, reserved for tour groups, and service at the other areas was slow - and served lukewarm beer. The only place where you could get decent service was in the main section, in front of a stage where a woman screeched out some Chinese karaoke classics. It was hideous. We tried sitting near the waterfront, but the arc lights attracted so many locusts and other bugs to make it unpleasant. It was a beer garden designed by people who don't drink beer. In the end, we had a mass mutiny and told Xiao Pan we were off elsewhere. He didn't mind.
We decamped to sit in the elegant terrace of Vassily's restaurant, up the road. It was pleasant and quiet, but most of the Russian guests departed quite early in the evening. Xiao Pan challenged the manager to a drinking contest, and downed almost a litre of Yanjing Pijiu in one go. The we learned that there was another Vassily's bar, down on the waterfront, and set off to find it.
Following the sound of thumping music, we found a scrappy bar that was little more than a load of plastic chairs and tables under some plastic sheeting, just up from the beach. Russian techno music was playing, and a handful of blonde, tannned Russian women were dancing away on the concrete. As we took a table, our multinational group of Indians, Filipinos, Brits and Chinese got quite a few stares, including some sullen looks from mean-looking Russian guys. Xiao Pan was oblivious to all this, and he kept on ordering more beers.

Peter, Xiao Pan (Pan Zhongming), Ravi, Charlie

We sat around, soaking up this atmosphere of Mosow-on-the-Bohai-Sea, and let's be honest, ogling at a few of the women. Around 11pm, Xiao Pan rose up unsteadily to his feet. "Now I must go," he announced, swaying slightly. And looking around at the tans and blonde highlights, he wagged his finger at us: "Don't be tricked!"
After he left, it was as if the Russians had suddenly been given permission to speak with us. Several tables of women beckoned us over. I sat with one couple, Oksana and Natasha, blonde and brunette, who were from Blagovechnsk and Sakhalin, and who spoke in perfect 007-villain style Russian accents. "Vair are you froom?" the enquired, sidling up close. That was about as far as the conversation went, as they knew hardly any more English. We managed to get across that we were working in Beijing, and that they had come straight through on a train from Russia. And we were the first westerners they had ever spoken to. Oksana spoke a bit of German, and I was just getting into a more cosy chat, when my arm was gripped as if by an iron wrench. I looked around, expecting to see a Spetsnaz-trained Russian pimp, but instead found myself looking at a big, 40-something but not unattractive woman. She said something in lively Russian, and despite my complaints in English, I was whisked out of my chair and onto the dance floor in seconds. For the next fifteen minutes I was the star of the show, as she danced with me, occasionally exorting me to jazz up my weedy western-style disco shuffling to match her more energetic, arms-in-the-air style. Half the bar seemed to be watching me, and a crowd of Chinese gathered outside to gawp as well. I don't know what they were expecting, but they all seemed highly amused.
When Peter our Filipino graphic designer came up to take some pictures, I grabbed him and volunteered him as the new dancing partner.
Returning to our table I found that Natasha and Oksana had been replaced by a burly Russian man with a red face and about five gold teeth. He grinned at me, and the others informed me that this was my dancing partner's husband. Expecting the worst again, I was relieved but a bit confused when he gave me the thumbs up and a bear hug. What could it all mean? He told me in broken English and German that he was originally from Armenia and he thought the English were very good and Chinese not so good. He beckoned over a young girl of sixteen, their daughter, who could speak a bit of English. For the next hour we were toasted, invited to "Come Russia, very good" and had our pictures taken by the Russians with cheap 1970-s style instamatic cameras.

Some time after midnight it all quietened down, and our new Russian friends departed after making us promise we would play them at volleyball the next morning. As I made to go, the blonde Natasha appeared out of nowhere and presed a piece of paper into my hand, saying "Emil, Emil ..". It was her email address in Russia. "You teach me English by Emil, OK?"

I was well pissed by this time, but managed to stagger home up the hill to the Tiananmen Thousand Funs Guesthouse for Government Workers and get to bed safe and sound. The only mystery about the evening was that I lost my socks. I never found out when or where I took them off. Perhaps I had some kind of Russian foot massage that my memory has blanked out.

The next morning, I am ashamed to say, I ducked out of the promised volleyball match. I was in no fit state to walk, let alone play an energetic game in the 30 degree humid haze. Xiao Pan was up bright and early, however, rousing us for breakfast, apparently no worse for the many beers he'd had the night before. He was teasing the waitress again, "Come back with us to Beijing, you can be the boss of the office canteen! The food there is rubbish, you will shake them up!"
The other fuwuyuan lined up by the wall, pandering to our every culinary whim. It was the first time I have ever eaten french fries for breakfast - with chopsticks. The waitresses seemed dainty and neat after the big Russian women of the night before. Then they disappeared into a side room where a lot of good-natured shouting and screamimg was going on. Some women were egging someone on in a drinking contest, Xiao Pan explained. I thought the waitresses had gone in to restore order. But then Xiao Pan said "It is the fuwuyuan who are daring the leaders to drink ..." One red-faced man tried to escape but was physically manhandled back into the room by these petite butter-wouldn't-melt-in-ther-mouths girls. Then after a crescendo of squealing and chanting, three men emerged looking bedraggled and reeking of baijiu.
"These fuwuyuan are very naughty," said Xiao Pan, grinning. "They use very rude words to make the men drink, saying they are not men and can't make their wife happy ..."
As we got up and left the dining room, we passed the side room and saw one man passed out on the floor. The waitresses were just giggling.
"He is one of the Beijing city party leaders," said Xiao Pan. "He won the contest."
I said goodbye in Chinese to the fuwuyuan, who were by now standing in front of the air conditioner unit, lifting the front of their blouses and wafting the cool air down there quite provocatively. When they heard my Chinese, two of them jumped forward and quickly grabbed my hands. They locked their little fingers around mine and pulled our fingers together so the thumbs touched. "Mingnian zai lai!" they blurted out. "Come back next year - now you've made a promise!"

"Don't get tricked ..."

2005-08-28T23:53:00.000+08:00

Foreign Experts
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

Those were the last words uttered to me on Friday night by a very drunk Pan Zhongming, our "foreign expert" liaison man, as he left us in a seafront bar full of blonde Russian women at Beidaihe. It was the annual works outing for the foreign editors from our newspaper, and we were taken to this seaside resort favoured by the Party hierarchy, to stay in a nice villa usually reserved for party members. If you want to know what happened next, and about my adventures with Oksana from Благовещенск [Blagovechensk?], tune in tomorrow.

Foreigners must not interfere in our internal affairs ...

2005-08-25T16:41:00.000+08:00

I still haven't found out what the "small problem" is, but there has been one big change since the boss got back from his holiday: he came over this morning and told me that my presence would not be required at the editorial meeting. At least, not the informal one where all the real work gets done. I have been lumped in with the minions, who only attend the rubber stamp main meeting, where everyone is told what they will be doing for the next week.
It was put to me like this: "First we will discuss our internal affairs. This will not be of interest to you, and we will be speaking in Chinese. You may come to the proper meeting, when some of us can speak in English."
And that was that. I was summoned to the main meeting, where this week everyone's demeanour was very different, like at those formal party meetings you see on TV, with everyone sat around the table with their jars of tea, looking stiff and dutiful. What a change from the usual meeting.
Afterwards, we all went for a formal lunch, where after a few glasses of baijiu, the boss lightened up and started ranting about how many Falun Gong people he had seen while in America.
"They are everywhere! Even at the airport! Too much!"
Then he asked me a question:
"Zhuan Jia, do you think religion is superstition?"
I just gave him a straight no.
Instead of following this up, he just went off on a tangent about the finer points of Buddhist teaching. Then he got up, went to the door of our private dining suite and bawled out the waitress for being late with the fish. She scurried away, and he turned round, looking at all of us with his red, slightly drunken face and gave a big grin, as if to say:"That's the way to treat them ..."

Look busy, the boss is here

2005-08-24T17:50:00.000+08:00

Until now I've been pleasantly surprised by the relatively laid back working atmosphere in the office here in Beijing. But today, something was different. Everyone was looking over their shoulder all the time and there was none of the usual chattering. Just after 10am I discovered why - the boss, Lao Yu, was back from his "study" trip to the States.
The rest of the office welcomed him back in gushing tones, referring to him, interestingly, as "teacher". Then after he had plonked down his California grapes on the meeting room table, he came over to me and asked me how things were going. When I replied that they seemed OK, he nodded and just said:
"Fine. We have one or two small problems we should discuss some time. Talk to you later ..."
Erk??? What's that supposed to mean? Maybe I've been found out. You never know what a "yidian xiao wenti"　［一点小问题］ is in China.

We're just making it up

2005-08-23T21:29:00.000+08:00

I'm sure I won't be shattering anyone's illusions by saying this, but not everything you read in the papers is true. In fact a lot of the time it's just made up. Take it from me, I've worked as a journalist in a few countries, and I've seen it in all of them - including today, when I was involved in concocting some fictitious quotes. Just as the Sun and other UK tabloids simply invent quotes to put in the mouths of celebs, so do the papers here. And whereas we in the west pay homage to the world of celebrities, here in China, there is also the altar of "Chinese civilisation" to be respected.
What I'm getting to is an "interview" with an American businessman that I edited today. He was allegedly making comments about his impressions of China and some of the cultural things he had encountered. I can't remember the exact words that were in the original article, but this is something like what "Brad Mason" was purported to have said:

"Since I was in China I experienced the intoxicating and mysterious wonder of China's long cultural history, although I am only a greenhorn I came to have a clear appreciation of the great depths of an illustrious civilisation ..." [blah blah for another two paragraphs of the same]

There are two possibilities here. Either a) the journalist interviewed an American businessman who really did say something like this, but it got changed a bit in the transcribing; or b) the writer just made it up.

Well given my brief experience of what American - or any other nationality - business men have to say about China, I think our journalist must have looked long and hard to find one as expansive as that on the subject of Chinese culture. In fact, I am 99% sure there was no American businessman - certainly not one who uses words like greenhorn. No, the writer just made up the quote because it was just what was needed to back up the words of a Chinese professor of history who happened to be quoted just before this in the article, saying how foreigners were now gaining much more respect for Chinese culture.
So what did I do in this situation? I could have left the quote as it was, and then anyone who read the article would immediately have known it was all a crock of shit. What I actually did was polish up the English and tone down the gushing praise a few notches, so the final quote read like a China savvy businessman giving grudging praise for an ancient culture. Much more credible, but still fiction. And it happens all the time. In the few weeks that I've been here I've come to realise that a lot of the words purportedly spoken by foreigners are just made up to suit Chinese cultural expectations. From vox pop interviews on the streets, to the reader's letters and emails, even the words of some supposed experts, they're all pure invention. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Should I interview myself?

2005-08-21T12:46:00.000+08:00

news
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

I am really chuffed today because I have just had my first freelance article accepted by one of the Australian dailies. [Look out on Tuesday if you're in Aus].
Does this mean I am a real "foreign correspondent" now? It felt great when I signed off the standfirst with "XXXXX in Beijing reports ..." - feels a lot more glamorous than having a Sydney or Canberra byline!
At the same time I found myself on Friday in the unusual position of having a hand in defining China's policy on outbreaks of animal-borne infectious diseases like bird flu, anthrax and those fatal streptococcal infections that have occurred in Sichuan. At the end of the week I'm supposed to edit the sports pages, but because almost everyone else was away on the office trip to the seaside, I was handed the Op-Ed pages to edit as well. A rather fusty editorial came through about China's response to outbreaks of disease - nothing really exciting, just saying that the law should be enforced more thoroughly. So I jazzed it up a bit and added a few clarifications here and there, based on my own knowledge of public health [I was a health writer in a former life]. I thought this article was going to be placed on some obscure legal page, but when I opened the paper yesterday it was the leading article on the opinion page. Shit! If I'd known that I would have just corrected the grammar and left it at that. Well, I've done a quick search of the internet today and thankfully haven't yet found any Reuters or CNN reports running headlines like "China signals change of course on bird flu". So maybe the changes I made weren't that significant after all. But it makes you wonder just how much the foreign news agencies read into these editorial pieces published by the Chinese news media. There was a huge stockmarket panic a few weeks ago after a badly translated item on China's revaluation of the Yuan came appeared in some obscure business journal. Maybe I could have triggered worldwide panic if I'd made it appear that China was acting recklessly in relation to these outbreaks. Who knows.
As a Beijing-based foreign correspondent, perhaps I should do my next article on China's response to oubreaks of fatal infectious diseases. Then I could go straight to the source of the opinion articles being published here - myself.

Beijing nightlife report #3

2005-08-21T09:12:00.000+08:00

After a hard week slaving over a hot keyboard I decided on Friday evening to have a third crack at exploring Beijing's nightlife. The weather has cooled down a bit since my disastrous attempt to find a place called The Den last week. The only reason I went there was to meet up with some fellow journos, who'd gone there to watch the cricket. If you asked me to imagine what I'd least like to do on a Friday night I think watching the cricket on a pub TV would rank just below being forced to watch Big Brother or Australian Idol in a sports bar. But this is a foreign city and you have to make concessions. Ah, I should have followed my instinct. Having already learnt the hard way that you should always have the address written down for wherever you're going in Beijing, I knew I had to go to number 4 Gongti Beilu. So off I went in a sweaty, slow taxi [this was last week remember]. Got to Gongti Beilu and guess what, number 4 [in fact the whole top half of the street] was just a big construction site. I traipsed up and down that street twice in the humid 35 degree heat without finding the place, and eventually gave up to flag down the only taxi in Beijing that has no air conditioning. The driver made up for this by smoking like a chimney all the way back, adding a nice odour of stale Yunnan tobacco to the sweat soaked shirt that was by then clinging to my back.
I later found out that the bar in question was actually on a perpendicular road, and the address given was its "official" address rather than its real one. Right then.

Never one to be put off by such a slight setback, I tried another couple of places this Friday. After reading a rave review about the "real" beer at the Paulaner Brewhouse [Beijing's only brewpub, apparently], I set off in high hopes, taking a taxi around the third ring road. Well I can report that the beer there is indeed excellent, but the bar is one of those awful expat places full of squeaky clean middle-aged businessmen in "smart casual" clothes talking shop to off duty Japanese PAs who have developed funny fake-American accents. The Chinese waitresses were all wearing Bavarian-style dirndl dresses, a surreal sight that made me smile until they brought me the bill for my one small, albeit very nice beer. Nearly 60 kuai. That's $10 in Australian money. Ten bucks for a beer that I had to drink in the company of people I would normally run a mile from. Cheers!
I made a hasty exit, past the overpriced gift shops of the Kempinski Hotel foyer, where you can buy Mao-chic t-shirts for $200 a pop. It's ironic that the only place in China where you can now see such revolutionary socialist icons is in the rarified muzak-filled corridors of a swish capitalist hotel.
I took a stroll down to Sanlitun, passing a lot of local ladies hanging around outside the hotel who smiled at me a lot and seemed to want to make my aquaintance.
And so to the Sanlitun expat "bar street", which always seems to me to be a rather nasty artificial drinking ghetto, as if the Chinese authorities have reluctantly deigned it the place where the foreign devils can go partake of their filthy drinking habits. I tried The Tree, which wasn't bad [especially at 15 kuai for a nice big beer thank you] but again seemed to be filled with westerners on the make. Maybe it's just the company I attract, but I got sat opposite some rowdy British merchant banker types - the only people in Beijing I have ever seen wearing ties - who seemed to be having a contest to see who could be the most bullish about business. And to my right were a couple of Americans whose conversation was peppered with words like opportunities, vision, maximising and challenging.
Having blown most of my evening's budget on that one beer at the Paulaner, I walked to the subway station rather than get a taxi back. On the way I passed a makeshift outdoor bar down a dark alley, entirely populated by Africans. And across the road outside the Workers Sports Stadium I saw two men doing what looked like an odd kind of vertical wrestling. When I got closer I realised they were part of a larger crowd of Chinese couples practising their ballroom dancing moves in the shadow of some trees. These guys didn't have female partners so they were doing it man to man.
Next week I am going to try the bar at the Beijing Film School, where appparently they show independent movies and stuff. And there I am sure I will meet some arty people who can engage in intelligent conversation about the influence of Powell and Pressburger rather than profit margins on towels and hamburgers. Stay tuned.

There may be trouble ahead ...

2005-08-19T10:04:00.000+08:00

renmin
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

So let's face the music and dance. Well I could use some of Astaire's fancy footwork to negotiate the complex office politics going on here right now. While the sun shines outside our office, there are storm clouds looming over the weekly editorial meetings, where I seem to have the role of both performing monkey and editor in chief.
Yesterday all went well in the "little" meeting, where I threw in some ideas for features on non-controversial subjects [or heshi - suitable - as they like to say here] like what new students think of Beijing.
My off-the-cuff remarks were jotted down by five eager Chinese journalists and the acting editor turned them from half digested thoughts into a news list with deadlines and photo requests within 10 minutes.
Then came the "big" meeting. All was going well until about half way through, when the acting editor suddenly threw a surprise on me. "Now Zhuan Jia will go through the last issue and give a critique of each article rating them for writing skills and treatment of the subject," he announced.
What??? So this is what he'd meant by "making a few comments" at the meeting. But I knew that public criticism is the biggest no-no in face conscious Chinese society.
Well, I started off with the lead stories and made some dutiful comments about how we needed to have snappy intros and draw readers into the main body of the story. Unfortunately the lead story was by the sports writer and as I found out, not one to take criticism lightly. He started asking what was wrong with his intro, and when I gave an example of how I might tighten it up a little he asked how could he be expected to use western metaphors, switching into Chinese and triggering a sympathetic muttering of support from the other reporters. "Too unreasonable!" was one comment I understood.
It all went downhill from there. As I ploughed on through each article, I tried using Mao's "70% good, 30% bad" formula for some of the real shockers. Giving lots of praise and then slipping in a "by-the-way" comment at the end. "Like I wouldn't have used this word oblate, I would have tried to find a simpler word," I said of an article on the folk customs of Jiangsu. "And westerners don't sing ditties they sing songs," I said, trying to be helpful.
Nope. Didn't work. As I reviewed each article, the journalist in question sat there as if I was accusing them of gross incompetence, sleeping around and embezzling funds from the charity for AIDS orphans.
The acting editor seemed oblivious to all this, especially as I had passed over his article with no particular comment except that it was "interesting".
[What I should have said was: "How can you write an article mentioning the theft of China's cultural relics by western museums without also pointing out that they would probably all have been smashed to bits during the Cultural Revolution? Or at least mentioned that most of your national treasures are stored in an underground vault in Taipei rather than in the British Museum?"]
They obviously thought this was favouritism on my part.
Well the meeting ploughed on, and then when my suggestions for articles were brought up, they inevitably went down like a cup of cold sick. The reporters took them on reluctantly and asked all kinds of awkward, truculent questions. "How can I contact so and so before next Monday? Why doesn't Wang do this, he's has all the contacts in this area ... or why are we doing this when we already covered it last year?"
Seemingly unaware of this, the acting editor then wound up the meeting by exhorting the reporters to show more enthusiasm for their work. "We have noticed that when reporters have more interest in their work they write much better articles!" he beamed.

Is he just an insensitive, clueless loon, or is this some cunning strategem to deflect attention from his own shortcomings by making me condemn myself with my own actions?
Well, which ever it is, now he has made me the scapegoat for all the reporter's grumbles. I think I shall go out tonight and get very very drunk.

In the bubble

2005-08-17T23:01:00.000+08:00

The sun came out this afternoon in Beijing and I could actually see the sky. The temperature has come down to pleasant levels and the city seems like a different place. After three days of rain, and all the hot weather before that, I finally ventured out from the company compound, and suddenly realised that I hadn't been out "into the world" for a while. After moving in to my company provided apartment, I found that you could live here and seldom have to interact with the rest of the city. The apartment is great - wooden floors, nice furniture and all the things you could need to live a nice life here - especially gallons of air con. Like a lot of things in Beijing, on the outside it looks like a dump, but inside it is almost palatial.
So with the company canteen, the company gymnasium and the company house, an employee here could live quite cut off from the rest of the world. They even have company outings [Beidaihe beware next weekend ...]. It's all very cosy and you feel almost drawn in to the company as a family. Dare I draw a parallel here to China as a whole? I get the feeling [and correct me if I'm being too simplistic here] that many Chinese settle into a similar routine with their hometown, company, their friends and culture. There's something very reassuring about having all those conventions and all that 3000 years of history in the background. You know where you are all the time, and anything nasty and uncertain can be put in the "strange outside stuff that we shouldn't worry about too much about" box. Even while I've only been here a few weeks the outside world seems to be receding, and world events that seemed so urgent and important last month, now just seem like distant murmurs. Iraq? London bombs? Global warming? They all just seem like someone else's problems. Even with the internet and CCTV, these events all appear as if viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. Yes I know it's all happening, but meanwhile in my little cocoon there are more immediate concerns. And I think the fact that knowing there isn't anything you can do to change things here also plays a role in this cocoon mentality. Don't worry your little head, the "relevant authorities" are taking care of everything.
How easy it is to slip into this floating life, where the only concerns seem to be celebrating the victory of China in the Anti-Japanese War, and pondering the merits of rebuilding the Summer Palace that was destroyed by the Brits and the French. Oh, and the sacking of Beijing Guo'an's manager.

Let me through, I'm an expert

2005-08-16T19:11:00.000+08:00

3
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

I've always wanted to be an expert at something, and now I have it in writing. I'm an expert in foreign things. Yes, today I took posession of my foreign expert's card, which looks very much like a Chinese passport. It has my photo stuck inside, along with my name helpfully transliterated into Chinese characters. It doesn't really say much else - like what I do or anything, only where I work and my date of birth. And that I work as an "expert in the fields of culture and education". Makes me sound like Rudolph Nuryev or Albert Schweitzer. It cost me 20 yuan, and I'm not exactly sure what I am supposed to do with it. I already have a work visa in my passport, so when would I need to use this thing? I doubt very much whether it will get me cheap tickets or preferential treatment anywhere. Maybe I can jump the queue to get in to see Mao's waxwork or something.
Like most things you see on official documents these days, it means the opposite of what it says. The Democratic Republics were anything but democratic. Freedom of Information Acts are usually all about keeping secrets away from journalists. And a foreign expert is just someone who is well, foreign, and not particularly good at anything. If they were they wouldn't be here.

100 strange things

2005-08-16T13:32:00.000+08:00

I don't want to fall into that isn't-China-weird syndrome, but I'm going to do it anyway, because it is occasionally. I am making a list of all the odd things I am seeing here in Beijing, without implying that these things are a sign of a backward or wrong-headed society. Like the man asleep in the underpass near Bainaohui computer centre, surrounded by sheets covered with drying rice. From it's brownish colour I suspect it was stuff he had recycled from bins. And the street called Guloudajie near Houhai, which is entirely devoted to public toilets. What's that for?
But my winner so far this week has been the sight of two men fixing the air conditioning unit on top of our office building yesterday afternoon. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, but they were doing it during in the middle of one of the worst thunderstorms I have ever seen. The rain was pelting down and bolts of lightning were loosing off left right and centre. Our office isn't the highest building in the district, but it's up there with them. And along come these two blokes shimmying up a ladder to perch on top of this huge green conical metal ventilator, so high they were almost touching the low-scudding clouds. Not content with that, one of them then put up an umbrella when he got to the top! I couldn't bear to watch, but somehow they escaped getting zapped.

To show that I am no stranger to odd behaviour myself, I must relate my saga with the stamps. On Wednesday I went down to the Air China cargo centre near the Renaissance Hotel, to pick up two pieces of unaccompanied baggage that I had sent through. At the Sydney end this had involved an 8am visit to the offices of WorldBaggage.com at some industrial estate behind the airport. A nice Armenian Australian woman called Mandy even let me into the office early when she saw me sat outside in my car. I filled in the form, plonked the bags on the scales and paid by credit card. And I would have been at work by 9am had I not taken the wrong turning on the M5 and gone half way to Wollongong.

Picking up the bags here was a more interesting experience. I had taken half a day off work and had specially safeguarded myself against bureaucratic hassles by forgetting to bring my air waybill form, my passport and having only 90 yuan in cash on me.
I found the office without much difficulty and the nice Air China lady took pity on me and despite not having my waybill number she went through about 20 forms until she found mine. In the good old days that would have been a guaranteed instant "Meiyou" situation. She then gave me the first of what were to be about 10 stamps that I would need before she sent me off to get my paperwork OK'd by customs, health, quarantine and despatch departments, all located at various different offices around the warehouse. They were all really nice to me.

But before arriving at Air China I'd tried to find somewhere nearby to change money, and learnt for the umpteenth time the Number One Lesson about Beijing - never try explore for something on foot. I scoured a 1km area around the Air China warehouse but found nothing more than a Bank of Agriculture, who didn't want to know about Australian dollars, and the Renaissance Hotel, who gave me a rain cover for my brolly but wouldn't change any RMB for me.
I went back to Air China in the certain knowledge that my stamp collecting was about to come to an abrupt halt once they realised I couldn't pay the local luggage handling and release fees. And yet to my surprise I arrived at the cashier to be presented with a bill for .... 20 yuan.
So my worst fears never came true. Reclaiming my baggage was a bit bureaucratic but everyone involved was quite pleasant in that civilised Beijing way. Even the warehouse man insisted on calling me a taxi inside to pick up my heavy bags from the dispatch bay.
And when I got home and opened up this precious cargo, I found that it contained nothing more than a load of old shoes, trousers and shirts and some books that I hadn't wanted to leave at home. I had just spent $300 and the best part of two days schlepping a load of old rags across the Pacific. Well, at least I've got all my winter clothing now, just in time for the stinkingly hot and humid weather.

A sensitive topic

2005-08-15T12:50:00.000+08:00

As a believer in Truth, Justice and Being Nice, I find I sometimes have a very difficult job when editing articles for this Chinese government publication. I really have to wrestle with the content of some articles and often lay awake into the early hours, worrying about whether I was justified in altering or letting through a particular article. As you may have already guessed, I'm talking about the Arts page.

That's right. Not the China's Taiwan stuff or the Tibetan question. I can insert those inverted commas around Taiwan's "premier" faster than you can say Frank Hsieh. And I have no problem rewriting those captions for Tibetans with fixed grins who are being "warmly welcomed to the bosom of the motherland" ... but Art. Oh dear.

Art is the stuff that gives me the most headaches. Or Fart, as John Lennon so rightly called it - and he should have known, having been married to one of the most celebrated exponents of Fart in recent years. Whenever I get an article that has to be edited for the Arts page I get a creeping sense of dread, and break out into a feverish sweat as I open it. I don't know who writes this stuff, but they are certainly creative with their grammar. Here's a recent example, prior to being "polished":

Using the theme of samples from the transition as a way for the artist to continuously examine and contemplete various aspects of contemporary society on a microcosmic level in their eyes, the careful obscuration of borderlines is between existing order and disorder, logical and the incredible, highlighting the confusion, disharmony, complication, the out of place and the absurd in his projection of the reality from various perspectives that he has made his own work. He uses the approach to reveal the thinking and mockery of modern life, which like the river begins in a narrow and shallow place and quietens mingling with the seas.

After reading something like that I have to go for a walk and inhale some fresh air-conditioned air to bring me back to reality and clear my headache. I should get paid danger money for reading prose as bad as that. Who writes this stuff? Do they really believe anyone understands it? Or is it that old chestnut, that the value of artistic narrative is proportional to the number of long words and level of pretentiousness involved?

I have adopted a standard operating procedure for stuff like this: a zero tolerance policy. So the above article after polishing looked something like this:

An installation art work by La Ji will be exhibited at the Wanko Contemporary Space until September 10.

I'm sure Damien Hirst would approve.

Urinating on national monuments

2005-08-13T18:03:00.000+08:00

beijing 236
Originally uploaded by Zhuan Jia.

It's funny seeing all the fuss being kicked up about some laowai pissing on the Great Wall at a rave. It was even funnier when the paper's editorial piece on this very subject came onto my desk for editing yesterday. I flicked it over to Charlie, who was nominally in charge of the Op-Ed section and is senior to me by about a week. The original article by one of the anonymous Chinese editorial writers [who write under witty pen-names like Li Shi ("History") or "Wen Zi ("Word"), was an indignant diatribe full of flowery Chinese expressions that sounded prissy and faintly ridiculous when translated directly into English. Therefore we spent an interesting afternoon toning it down a bit [changing "pissing up sacred wall" to "urinating on a national monument"] and trying to think of parallels in Britain
"What would you say is Britain's greatest monument that represents the nation?" Charlie asked me.
"The Queen?" I replied.
"Yes, you wouldn't like Chinese people to piss on her, would you?"

We did our best and then hit the return button to fire off the polished leader article to wherever these things go in the system.

Then it was back to more mundane things, like subbing the sports pages. For me, this is rather like being Betty on Fat Friends, when she gets her fish&chip shop owning husband to tell her about the fish fryer's convention to get her to go to sleep. When I start reading the listings of Eastern European tennis players in the US Open my eyelids get heavy and I start to pass out. I was almost unconscious when I was suddenly jerked back to the here and now by a summons from Teabag. This woman is the features editor - I will explain her name later - and she strikes fear into me. Not because she is nasty, but because she is so nice, at least when she speaks English. Speaking Chinese, she has a voice that could scour paint off the hull of a ship. But as soon as she switches into English she is all sweetness and light. I find this deeply disturbing.
Well I was summoned to her cubicle in the big room next door, and I could see all the Chinese subs' heads peeping over their partitions to see what kind of a bollocking I would get. Teabag was very polite to me, and asked why I'd seen fit to make so many changes to the page she was holding up. I thought it was the Pissing Up the Great Wall editorial, but I quickly recognised it as the travel page that I had subbed first thing that morning.
"Why you change so much? Agency copy - no need to change it. All OK already," she purred at me. Ah yes, the agency copy. She seemed to have overlooked the fact that it came from a Turkish news agency who must have got Kurds to translate their copy at gunpoint or something, given the standard of the writing. Anyway, I was relieved to find that she didn't mind us changing the Great Wall editorial. And today when I sat in Starbucks and read the paper I found my headlines on the subterranean world of Kapodokya - or wherever it was - had been left intact.

For the remainder of my shift I kept a low profile, sneaking off to the canteen to try one of their congyoubing [pancakes]. As I ate the dripping thing back at my desk, Charlie just sat grinning at me, and for good reason. For the rest of the evening I had a fit of burping, and the disgusting taste of that oily, garlicky creation kept coming back to haunt me.

Just before I went off my shift the nice waishiban guy, Lao Wang, came over and dropped a load of bumf on my desk for me to take to my new apartment. As well as an inventory of everything in the flat [bed, 1, Y1000], it also included a copy of my contract that they'd made me sign almost as soon as I'd stepped into the Arrivals Hall. I took it home and over a Yanjing dark beer I had another look, to see if this blog might get me cast into Beijing Prison Number 4. Well, after reading it, I was none the wiser. As Party B, I am obliged to follow the laws of China, not interfere in China's internal affairs or undertake religious activities incompatible with my status as a foreign expert. But it doesn't say anything about keeping an online diary. Maybe that comes under "prejudicing the morals of the Chinese people". But I doubt it. There again, it doesn't say anything in the contract about urinating on national monuments, either.

By the way, if you were wondering, the picture is of Sting, (as in stingray) the wettest member of our editorial team, who hot-desks with sports writer Tan Rui.

All hot and bothered

2005-08-12T11:09:00.000+08:00

The temperature has gone up a few notches, and so did tempers in our office yesterday. The weather has been almost balmy since I arrived in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, but now the wilting heat that I feared seems to have arrived. On the TV weather forecast [with a Pee Wee Herman-like American guy doing it] they should use fans as a marker of just how stuffy it is going to be. Yesterday I would have given it four out of five fans - and the old nainai's and yeye's certainly had their fans out as I traipsed round the back streets of Chaoyang last night.

Earlier, in the relative cool of the office, we had an eye opening editorial meeting. When we broke off half way to try sort out the missing "fl" debacle [see yesterday's post], the junior reporters sidled up to me and urged me to intervene on their behalf. "Zhuan Jia, when they get back, tell them you have some other ideas for the arts page - this stuff is crap!"

The problem, it seems, is that these reporters have already covered a forthcoming arts festival in great detail. And their other scheduled article on modern art they thought was just a big yawn. I don't think I was really much help - I suggested doing something on pop bands for kids [this being a 'back to school' theme issue] and tried to explain the Wiggles to them. All I got was blank looks and a kind of you're-as-bad-as-they-are vibe from the junior reporters.

I went back to my desk to try brainstorm some more ideas, but another kind of storm erupted. The printer man turned up and he wasn't going to accept responsibility for stuffing up the missing "fl's". Oh no. For the next couple of hours the editorial meeting room was like the scene of a kerbside minor traffic accident dispute, as all sides postured and shouted, trying to get the other to admit they were zeren. There was blustering, banging on the table and rapid-fire Beijinghua curses, all of which was quite entertaining for me, because I wasn't involved. One of the junior reporters, Xiao Changyan, came over, looking a bit sheepish and said "Ohmygod" in American acented English. She tried to explain what was going on in diplomatic terms, but I could understand quite clearly without any translation.

It was the first time I'd seen such a row in the workplace - I've seen them often enough on the streets. And it made me grateful that I've not yet had to go head to head with any Beijing big shot in a confrontation like this. After a couple of hours some sort of face saving compromise was worked out and things calmed down, but the printer guy kept defending himself, right until he was ushered out of the door.

After that, the rest of the day was a bit of an anticlimax. I fiddled with my work computer trying to "tune it up" but just ended up stuffing it up. Is there a moral to this story? If it ain't broke ... don't fix it. If it is broke, deny all responsibility for it.

Good news from Beijing

2005-08-11T12:37:00.000+08:00

The good news is that I'm finally moving in to my apartment tomorrow. Just heard that I will be shifting my stuff over tomorrow morning. Yippee! I have been getting mighty fed up with the Ni Hao hotel. And I think the xiaojie's have been getting fed with giving me the mandatory Ni hao greeting 20 times every day.

The bad news is that we just got the magazine back from the printers and it is riddled with typos. All the "fl's" have been missed out. In other words, flower looks like ower. Not my fault, fortunately, but something to do with the printer's software. But there were squeals of disappointment as each of the journos picked through their articles during the news meeting this morning and discovered more of the dreaded missing fl's. It looks like it is too late to reprint, as it has been done overnight, in house.

I discovered the printing presses the other day when I was mooching round this labyrinthine building. They look quite modern presses, and it makes you feel like you are really working in a publishing house when you have the presses right there. So far I have only explored the floor I'm working on, but I have already discovered a library that I didn't know about. I must take a closer look, because it contains a comprehensive collection of Chinese newspapers and periodicals, as well as a few English language ones like Time, US News and World Report and some travel mags.

The funny thing about my wandering is that I've never been stopped, challenged or even given a second look. I'd imagined that something as sensitive as a government newspaper office would be very security conscious, but far from it. I plan to go a bit further afield when I have more time - perhaps even up to the fifth floor, where the bigwigs hang out.

The other thing I'd like to suss out about this place is who all the bloody foreigners are. I thought I'd met them all at our "Useful Idiots" welcoming lunch banquet [more about that later]. But I still keep seeing the occasional laowai about the place, and they never say hello or even acknowledge my presence. Very peculiar. At the moment I'm guessing they might be non-English speaking laowais working on the Spanish or Bulgarian editions of our publications. Who knows?

More pics of the China Daily foreign experts' apartments:

At the coalface

2005-08-10T08:10:00.000+08:00

The front pages of this morning's newspapers are all splashed with the the lastest coalmine disaster. 102 miners trapped and probably already dead in a Guangdong coal mine. These coal mine fatalities are China's national disgrace, and show how far removed China has become from a communist country. If this was any other country the miners would be on strike for better working conditions. Britain had Arthur Scargill as a miners' leader, who was vilified for being a communist and who became the government's enemy number one after he lead the coal miner's strike of 1984 to protest against wholesale pit closures. Well, he was defeated but he was right. The coal industry in the UK was privatised and soon went out of business - I don't think there are any coal mines left in Britain now.

So where is China's Arthur Scargill? The obvious answer is there isn't one. And if there was he'd be in prison faster than you can say Hu Jintao. And meanwhile, the steady drip drip of coal mining accident fatalities continues. The death toll seems to be almost as bad as the US army's in the Iraq insurgency. When you read the article about the latest disaster, it's the same old story. An old state run coal mine was reopened under private ownership, and presumably corners were cut in the new "more efficient" mine.

But in the China Daily today there is no editorial condemning unsafe mines, or even calling for better standards. Instead, all we have a is a statement about Li Yizong, "director of the National Bureau of Production Safety, Supervision and Administration" who went to the disaster site to supervise rescue work.

If China had a half decent newspaper it would be sending reporters to Li Yizhong's office to ask a lot of hard questions. And it would have reporters at his house to see what series BMW or Merc he is driving. For make no mistake, as a senior bureaucrat, Li Yizhong will have a very imposing office and a very nice car, among other perks. In any other country his head would have rolled long ago, but in China there is no accountability.

The next time anyone says how advanced China is, ask them about Li Yizong. Ask them why he still has a job, and why he doesn't close down all unsafe mines today.

Update: China Daily did do a strong editorial on this a few days/weeks later, and the government later announced that all unsafe coal mines were to be closed down in some provinces. Whether this ruling is actually enforced is another question.

A typical article

2005-08-09T13:41:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I had to sub a short article that summed up the kind of editorial approach taken here. It was about the Beijing concert of fortysomething Taiwanese singer-songwriter Luo Dayou. Only it didn't mention that he was from Taiwan [which is part of China, of course]. And it was all plagiarised from a website article about a similar concert a couple of years ago. I re-wrote it enough to make it just about original, but didn't add anything in about him being from Taiwan. We don't have an editorial policy that forbids mentioning Taiwan, but I haven't been here long enough to know how much leeway we have in describing someone as Taiwanese. There is a style book that tells us how to refer to Taiwan, but it isn't much help in how to deal with whether to brace the subject at all.

Streetwatch Beijing

2005-08-08T13:03:00.000+08:00

What exactly would you see if you walked down our street this lovely hot lunchtime?

[View from China Daily window]

Here's my Top Ten:

1. Man with trailer-trike [hereafter known as TT] selling peaches.
2. Lady with TT selling paperback books - including the latest Harry Potter and Dan Brown titles in English.
3. Tibetan lady with cloth spread on pavement selling Tibetan necklaces and some horns and thigh bones.
4. Old man with small stall selling tiny birds and crickets in small round bamboo cages.
5. Workmen backing up a huge truck into the building site next door.
6. Traffic brownshirt waving his red flag and blowing his whistle a lot.
7. Security guard in grey bus-conductor-style uniform standing under his umbrella guarding the gate to this compaound.
8. Two Chinese girls dressed in Korean maternity-smock-like costumes standing either side of the glass doors of the restaurant bowing and saying "Huanyin Guanlin" to all and sundry.
9. A country girl about four feet ten high giving out business cards for a ticketing agency.
10. Dodgy geezer squatting on pavement and selling a small selection of shrink wrapped DVDs, including Mr and Mrs Smith.

Wanky business cards

2005-08-08T10:40:00.000+08:00

Today I had a lucky escape. I went to the Foreign Affairs Office [Waishiban] to arrange for some business cards to be printed up for me with the newspaper's masthead. I got all the English details sorted out, and helpfully included my name spelt in Chinese characters. Helen, the foreign affairs assistant took my scribbled notes and made a dummy copy based on someone else's card. As she wrote out the Chinese I heard her muttering "Wanker, wanker ..." I asked her if it was all OK.
"Yes, no problem, you can pick them up tomorrow. But why do you choose this Chinese name, Wan Ke?"
I looked at the Chinese characters I had written down for her. I had a made a mistake. The character for Mai 迈　is similar to that for Wan万, except it has a "boat" radical underneath. I had forgotten to include this. So instead of saying Mai Ke迈克, my card gave my name as Wan Ke万克.

For the next year I would have been introducing myself as Wanker the Journalist.

My first editorial meeting

2005-08-08T07:52:00.000+08:00

Once we had the week's issue out of the way, we had the weekly editorial meeting. Held in a cramped side office strewn with bundles of back copies, this was a strange experience because it involved an informal preparatory meeting and then the official meeting. The strange thing was that the two meetings involved almost the same people saying the same things.

In my first week here at the magazine I have yet to find out who the actual editor is and to meet him or her. So far, the magazine seems to run on a concensus basis, with no one person responsible for decisions. I did briefly meet the deputy editor, Yu Wentao, but he disappeared off to Los Angeles on my second day.

For the editorial meeting, one of the reporters adopted the mantle of de facto editor. He briefed me beforehand, telling me they would expect me to introduce myself and to give a few comments about the newspaper.

So first we went into the pre-meeting meeting. This consisted of about six of the Chinese journlaists sat around the table, discussing the latest issue, in English. It was very odd to hear the critiquing their own magaizne in a foreign language. "This picture is OK, where did it come from? Couldn't we get the other one?' etc etc.

The acting editor then started the meeting off by suggesting some topics for next week's magazine. What about the issue ofthe many new taxi drivers not knowing their way around town? - he said, recounting how most of the cabs he took these days didn't have a clue. This was immediately put down by Li Shuo, an outspoken female sub editor. "No, that's not worth a whole article to itself. Anyway, I don't find that," she said derisively. So much for the concept of saving face! The others chipped in with equally biting comments. Another then suggested doing something on the moves by the subway to ban newspaper sellers from setting up their stalls in stations, and only allowing vendors to sell papers on the move. Again this was rubbished by the other journalists present, and they briefly lapsed into Chinese to discuss it.

The acting editor then went on to list the upcoming topics for the next few theme issues. One would be on a vaguely "back to school" theme as we approached the new September school term. Another would be on what sounded like "Rent Collection", but actually turned out to be Red Collection, meaning collectors of revolutionary memorabilia like Chairman Mao badges. And the next issue would be on the theme of the anniversary of the end of WW2. Or as they called it, the "Victory of the Anti-Japanese War of 1937-45".

As they banded around ideas, they offhandedly described things as "too sensitive" or "too political" for the magazine, in a pragmatic way that made it sound like it was something they had to deal with every day. The acting editor sensed my confusion and explained that the Red Collection theme was not really political. "Red in China doesn't just mean political, red has a cultural meaning," he said, leaving me even more confused than ever. They'd asked for my contributions, so I asked whether it was worth doing a vox pop on what some old Beijing people remembered doing on VJ day, or whatever they called the day the war ended. There were some polite nods, but Ye Jun said this was "too political", and quickly moved on. Instead, Li Shuo mentioned that the Military Museum was holding a re-enactment of the major air battles of WW2. "With radioactive planes," she said. Radioactive? I asked. "You know, small planes, like models." Ah radio-controlled planes.

On the subject of "Red Collections" I made no suggestions, wondering how it was possible to avoid being "political" on this one. Ye Jun just said they would speak to a collector who had donated most of his stuff to a museum, and see how much it was worth now. Ask him what are the most valuable items and how much they have gone up in recent years. In other words, turn the emphasis from the political to the financial. I wondered what kind of approach we would have suggested if we'd been doing an article on this topic in Australia. Why do people collect this stuff? Doesn't it seem like sacrilege to turn political material into financial commodities? What does this say about the cult of personality? Are there many fakes? Do people feel a nostalgia for the revolutionary era? And surely for some people these must bring back terrible memories?

Needless to say, none of these sorts of questions were raised at the meeting. We quickly moved on to the Back to School issue, for which I suggested doing something on mobile phones for kids. At what age should they be allowed to have them? Do kids use them too much, at the expense of studying or doing other more healthy pursuits? Do parents ever get nasty surprses with their phone bills?

These suggestions were greeted with a few puzzled looks. What could be wrong with owning a mobile phone? asked the sports writer. Then a female reporter said in Chinese "The Laowai means when people get addiction to mobile phones, like addiction to the internet ..."
Oh yes, said the sports reporter, and he struggled to think of an English phrase for " spiritual pollution". "There are some kids who use their mobile phones to get pornograph from western ..." he said.

The acting editor took up my idea as if it had come from the editor in chief, and briskly assigned two reporters to follow it up. One would look at the phenomonon of mobile phone addiction among school kids, while the other would look at the benefits of having a mobile phone, such as parents feeling reassured that they could contact their kids.

As the meeting went on in this fashion, it became clear that the magazine was very much evens driven, and did not seek to cover issues simply for their interest value alone. An article on opera would only be done if there was a famous tenor coming to town. And likewise the coverage of the anniversary of WW2 was all based around events that were taking place at museums, and patriotic concerts that week.

Then it was the turn of Xiao, reporter for the shopping page, to come up with some suggestions. "Ah, I hate this page," she laughed candidly. "I have done every topic you can think of! Nothing new to write!" After a brief discussion, it was decided that she would do something on "Mores", and they mentioned an international conference on Mores that was taking place the following week.

"What are Mores?" I asked. "You know, like the big supermarkets, where people go to do their shopping." Ah. Shopping Malls. Yes, Beijing has plenty of them, I thought.

Soon, the unofficial meeting came to an end and we had a five minute break before the "real" editorial meeting began. Yao Zhang took me to one said and asked if I was prepared to say a few words, outlining exactly what questions he would ask. He sounded almost nervous, but I said it would be no problem. From his manner it sounded like the big boss, the editor in chief would be coming along for the real meeting. But to my surprise, we alll trooped back into the small side room and reconvened - with almost exactly the same group of people! There were a couple of extra faces, but they were the young female intern and a couple of the sub editors.

The acting editor officially opened the meeting with a few formal words and then asked me to say my bit. I introduced myself, mentioning my twelve years experience in journlalism, which raised a few eyebrows. Then when I mentioned that I had lived and worked in New Zealand and Australia, as well as the UK, they quickly asked if I had dual citizenship. They could hardly believe it when I said I had three passports. "So which country do you belong to?" asked Miss S. When I casually said that I didn't really know, or care, anymore ["England - Australia, half-half"], I sensed a bit of discomfort from them.

Then I ummed and ahhed some flattering comments about the magazine. It was good, showed an in-depth coverage compared to expat-run magazines and had a lot more local insight, I said. It also had just a lot more information and facts than other magazines, I added. And the photographs and layout were really good, too I threw in. I hoped that covered all the bases.

I don't know what they were expecting, but the acting editor seemed taken aback. "Oh, err well, thank for your kind words ..." he said. And with that he started to run through what would be coming up in the next few issues, which was really just confirming all the things we had already discussed. Next week, Back to School, the week after Red Collections ... and after twenty minutes, the by now restless staff were relieved when it was officially wound up, and they could scrape their chairs and get back to their computers.

Such was my first editorial meeting in China.

Breaking into the park

2005-08-07T19:01:00.000+08:00

It was dark on the number 13 bus as I headed back from my abortive attempt to check out the non-existent "Beijing scene" at the Waiting for Godot bar. I was standing up, hanging on to one of the straps on the rattly old bus as it laboured up Heping Dajie [Peace Street] past the Lama Temple. It was one of those old, Russian-style buses that hinged in the middle, and the evening was hot. Earlier in the evening I had changed into some smarter clothes while listening to the old seventies favourites on my Powerbook Itunes. Well, now I was feeling sorry for myself, wondering what the hell I was doing in Beijing, riding home 60 kuai worse off after sitting all on my lonesome in a pretentious bar.
Ah, well, tomorrow is another day, I consoled myself.

But as I sauntered back towards the Cherry Hotel [Yinghua Bingguan] I bumped into some of the other foreign editors. Brian the Canadian, Rob from Shrewsbury (school) and Simon, from London. They asked if I wanted to join them for something to eat, and we were soon in the next door Korean restaurant piling strips of raw red meat onto the grill and siping Hapi Harbin beer.

I got the usual "Wow-You-Speak-Good-Chinese" from the waiter, and I talked with these guys about my trekking trips to Sichuan and Yunnan. Simon seemed to have strong left wing views, or at least pro-Chinese views, saying they had been right to get rid of the Dalai Lama as he'd overseen a serf society. Brian talked about his days studying journalism in Melbourne, and then they invited me on to a party "on a concrete boat" at some park down in Chaoyang, near the embassies.

We had another beer at a noodle restaurant around the corner which was pretty busy, then took a taxi down the ring road to Ritan [Sun Temple] Park. When we arrived I saw street kids begging other foreigners for money. Simon filled up one of the boy's mugs with fen, and then they went off into the trees to have a leak. I kept some distance from them, because there were security guards outside the Vietnamese embassy just opposite and I didn't want to get arrested for insulting Chinese soil or some such.

We had to break into the park because the gates had been chained up. We did this by climbing over a small fence at the back of some German restaurant that backed on to the park. There were a few other laowai-friendly restaurants around the park - quite different the northeast where our office is.

We followed the strains of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart wafting through the heavy black air until we found the party, which was indeed being held on an ornamental boat on the lake. There were about twenty people there, nearly all laowais, and this was my introduction to the hard drinking/partying culture of expats in Beijing.

It was surreal to be stood out in the hot evening, watching what I thought was a firefly dipping on the lake surface [which seemed to be some sort of radio controlled gadget actually], and chatting to all these exotic women [well, OK, some were from Reading and Liverpool]. The expat life in Beijing ... well this is OK, I thought.

I spent a lot of the eveing talking with Brian about learning Chinese. And about patriotism in Canada, Australia and China. I also ended up chatting to two local women in Chinese, which surprised them even more than it surprised me. It was weird to be talking to Chinese people on a social level, but interestingly they didn't have any of that insularity or chip-on-the-shoulder surliness that I'd encountered when trying to talk to the locals in Hong Kong. They were quite at ease among westerners, even though they didn't speak great English. Likewise the bar staff were friendly and helpful without being subservient.

It seemed to be a pretty hectic party and I got pretty blathered. Brian kept talking about going on to some place called Maggie's, which he said was full of Mongolian prostitutes. I wasn't really on for that, and as the night drew on I got "lost"and took a cab back north, and amazed myself by being able to find my hotel and get back in to the room without falling over.

This morning I was really paying the price for all the booze. That must be the most pissed I've been for ages. Woke up at nine and felt like a fridge had crashed on top of my head. I was really dizzy and feeling sick. Ah well.

The afternoon shift

2005-08-07T13:32:00.000+08:00

I did my first full shift on the paper yesterday afternoon. I arrived early to find a room containing a whole row of PCs, with their flat screens flickering away. There was only one other person there, a local journalist who spoke excellent English and like a lot of the local staff, seemed surprised and even taken aback when I spoke to her in Chinese. It doesn't seem to be the norm for the foreign experts here.

MIss X told me the others would be in after 10am, and settled down to continue her work. I later overheard her telling another newcomer that she's studied at a provincial university in the UK, and in the long term was hoping to become a lawyer in Beijing.
I was assigned to "polish" the sports and features pages. When the copy came through, I realised I didn't have a clue about sports. One of the articles on basketball, was complete mystery to me, talking about "free agents" and"play offs". What?? I subbed it as best I could, and had to make some drastic changes to the quotes obtained by a local journo at a press conference with some black player from the US. I wonder if he will read it and think "I never said that?" Well I'm sure he didn't say what the journalist quoted him as saying - it was almost random gobbledegook.

The other stories weren't too bad because they were agency copy, and I got them out of the way fairly quickly. Which was just as well, because after lunch I came back to find the frantic "foreign expert supervisor", Pan Zhongming, looking for me on the stairwell. All my stories had apparently been filed to someone else, so there was now a backlog of nine stories to edit. I managed to clear this fairly rapidly, and he seemed relieved and a bit surprised when he came back an hour later to check. "So quick" was his only comment.
During one of the quiet periods later on, I went downstairs to "Starbucks" - the terrible coffee counter in the lobby with "Ed" - my fellow foreign editor on the shift. Mark was from the UK, and like most of the foreign staff has adopted a uniform of unpressed shirt and shorts. As I sat sipping my ammonia-flavoured coffee, he gave me the rundown on some of the other staff, past and present.

One of the former journos had been Pete, a typical Fleet Street [tabloid] journo, who had an energetic, no-nonsense approach to reporting. He had fallen foul of the Chinese management because of his habit of speaking his mind at editorial meetings. If he didn't like a story he would say so outright. "No that's rubbish, we're not putting that in. Next .."
Another recent departure was "Helen," who had been keen to revamp the paper and make it more relevant. But she became bitter and frustrated when the management ignored all her ideas and suggestions.

Mark just laughed, and said it was useles to try change anything at the paper. There was no one person responsible, and any suggestions got lost in about seven layers of management.

"They will pat you on the back and seem very interested and appreciative, but nothing ever happens," he said.

As we sat there, he hailed a Buddha-like bald Chinese journalist over from the lift lobby. You Nuo came and sat down and they discussed what was happening around the office. Was the Shanghai supplement going to fold into the paper? What was happening with the new high rise apartment block being built in the Beijing compund? Was John still around? Did he still go right across town to buy his favourite salami from Jenny Lou's supermarket?

You Nuo laughed at this, and told how this popular and succesful "supermarket for expats" had been set up by two simple cousins from rural Henan. The woman who ran it now still rode around on her bike and didn't even have air con installed in her office, he laughed. "Simple people with a simple idea," he said.

After he left, Mark told me that You Nuo had been banished to Xinjiang province in 1989 because he had written editorials supporting the democracy activists and calling for more freedom. After a lean time there - literally - he had been partly rehabilitated and had retrned to the editorial department after a stint in Hong Kong.
Mark told me to watch out for one vetern foreign member of staff who was a real toady to the politically correct line. All the Chinese staff thought he was pathetic, said Mark. "None of them swallow all those editorials about Japan and Taiwan," he said. "They think it's all a joke. Good on them!"
And so, back to work. I proofed a couple of pages and twiddled my thumbs for a while until 7pm, when my shift finished. I was surprised that there were hardly any people about - I'd expected a busy newsroom, but it felt like a skeleton staff. The Chinese journalists all spoke reasonably good English and went about their work briskly, and barely interacting with us foreigners, except when they had to. They were matter of fact, and not very chatty. I overheard one or two talking among themselves, but it was all mundane stuff - where to get a certain peiece of furniture, what theywere doing for the weekend.
And so, such is life on a Chinese government newspaper.
After work I went to my first expat party, which entailed us breaking into Ritan Park after dark. But more of that later.

Something for the weekend

2005-08-07T13:19:00.000+08:00

I opened the paper on Friday night and saw "my pages" for the first time, which actually made up the whole back half of the paper. I must admit I was proud, even if it was just the sports news and a silly feature on the alleged rise of the Malaysian fashion industry. They were "my pages"! And now people all over China - and maybe even overseas would be reading my beautifully crafted headlines and captions.

I was sat in a cafe which got a good write up in another local listings magazine, That's Beijing - a competitor of ours, no less. The cafe was bohemian in theme and called Waiting for Godot, and it had been billed as something unusual, where intellectuals might go to meet. Well, I'm an intellectual aren't I? Anyway, after my disappointing experiences so far with expat bars - most of which seem to be full of arrogant/whining/boring middle aged men, I thought I would give it a whirl. Well the cafe itself was OK - they had some good Belgian beers and I settled for a less pricy German dark beer.
As I got settled in to the wobbly sofa, another customer arrived - a laowai woman, to boot. In this city of 10 million or whatever, it's still unusual to run in to another whitey, so I said hello and tried to make polite conversation. But as I am finding in Beijing, a lot of the foreigners here seem to have a problem talking to or even acknowledging their fellow big noses. It wasn't like I was trying to chat this women up, but she gave me this look as if to say "Why are you talking to me?" And she turned away to read her Proust, or whatever it was.
So I went back to reading "my" paper, feeling slightly absurd as one of two laowais sitting in this cafe, studiously ignoring each other. What a strange town this is.

Some background

2005-08-05T12:45:00.000+08:00

I am a journalist and "foreign expert" at an English language Chinese newspaper, based in Beijing. Let's not name names [Alright then, it's China Daily ...], but anyone with half a brain could guess what it is. This will be an anonymous blog for obvious reasons. And all names have been changed. While I'm not a Chinese citizen, it's not unknown for foreigners to end up in Chinese prisons. And if journalists can be jailed for "leaking" the president's speech, you can't be too careful.

I'm supposed to be here for a year, but we'll wait and see about that.

My first issue editing Beijing Weekend

2005-07-20T18:34:00.000+08:00

beijing 422
Originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here I am after my first attempt at copy editing the events mag Beijing Weekend, part of the government-run China Daily group.