"China - The Smog Blog" - Catherine Sampson

China's Balancing Act

Fri, 5 Mar 2010 04:01:20 GMT

Today China's annual parliamentary session opened. It lasts two weeks. Yes, that's right, just two weeks. In any other country where the parliament met for only two weeks in a year, the nation would collapse for lack of leadership.Here, of course, the parliament is so utterly without power that it really doesn't make much difference. They could just get it over with in a half hour's voting session over coffee. Which doesn't mean that there aren't important things to be decided, but the parliament won't be doing the deciding, the Communist Party will. For instance, China is much admired for having survived the financial crisis, but property prices have risen into the stratosphere, and there's now talk of a bubble.... So here's a picture of China's 2010 balancing act:

Sweets scattered along the road....

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:10:37 GMT

The Slaughter Pavilion was based on stories that trickle into the Chinese media about missing children. Today, the excellent South China Morning Post, Hong Kong''s English language newspaper, ran this story that I am going to show in full because of all the questions it raises. There are so many echoes here of The Slaughter Pavilion - from the sweets, to the fear of the parents, and even the pools - that it chills my blood.

Children missing for 4 days drowned in pond, police say
February 24, 2010
He Huifeng
Police say five children in Zhejiang who went missing for four days - sparking fears that they had been abducted by child traffickers - drowned in a pond shortly after leaving home last week, Xinhua reported yesterday.
The bodies of the two boys and three girls, aged seven to 13, were retrieved on Monday from a fish pond about 500 metres from their home, four days after they said goodbye to their grandmother and disappeared together on Thursday.
They were the children of two brothers from Xialuwang village in Tiantai county. Four were siblings living in Gansu - where their parents work - who had returned home for the Lunar New Year. The fifth was a cousin.
Jin Xianshun , a spokesman for the county''s Public Security Bureau, said yesterday there were no signs of outside interference with the children''s bodies, the official Zhejiang Online news website reported.
Jin said the children died at about 2.30pm on Thursday, only half an hour after they left home. Police found water in their lungs, and some evidence to show that they had slipped while struggling to get out of the pond.
It was the second case of its kind this month. The bodies of four children who were reported missing on February 4 in Putian , Fujian province, were found under a bridge on February 11. Police identified the cause of death as accidental drowning.
In the Zhejiang case, a flood of reports from worried residents led the children''s parents to fear that child traffickers were behind their disappearance.
A nine-year-old boy told police that he saw a child bundled into a minivan on a country road on Thursday. Two other villagers said they saw the five children on the same road that afternoon. Police found many sweets scattered along the road and took some samples for testing.
Before the authorities found the bodies, Zhejiang Online quoted the parents as saying they had not had any problems with their neighbours, had not received any ransom demands and believed the children had been taken by child traffickers.
At about 2pm on Thursday, the oldest of the five children told their grandmother she would visit classmates with the other children.
The parents reported the children missing at 7pm on Thursday and more than 200 people searched neighbouring villages, hills and rivers until midnight.
A Tiantai police team combed the area for four days and pictures of the children were broadcast on television, published in newspapers and posted on the internet.
A worker draining water from the pond reportedly found the first body at about noon on Monday. The other four were recovered at about 6.30pm.
The pond owner has been detained as police investigate inadequate safety measures around the pond that could be the cause of the deaths.

Spy Cams

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:41:22 GMT

Let''s start with my own paranoia. It used to be the case that as foreign journalists based in Beijing, James and I knew we were being watched. There were cameras at the gate of the diplomatic compound where we were forced to live, and visitors had to sign in. We assumed our phones were bugged, and at times our phones behaved in classic ''bugged'' ways, replaying bits of conversations to us that had been recorded earlier. Every time we went out, we were followed. We used to keep a list of car numberplates - about a dozen of them - that regularly followed us. On occasion we led them up and down and roundabout - you have to remember there were very few cars on the road in those days - and it was clear as day what they were doing. Now we''re all thinking how nice it is that all that''s stopped. But hang on a minute, there are closed circuit TV cameras EVERYWHERE - I know the UK has a reputaiton for being the most watched-over society in the world, but when was the last time China or North Korea published statistics on the number of cameras it has in its streets? I went for a walk in Ritan Park the other day and glanced up at a lampost only to say - oh yes, a camera watching me. Inside the churches - cameras. And anyone with a mobile phone is instantly trackable. I knew all this, but this story from the US, where the local school board issued computers to students then spied on them through the web cams made me even more alarmed - if this is what the school district does in Philadelphia you can bet your bottom dollar they''re not the only ones.

Back to the Dark Ages

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:49:18 GMT

I''ve been sitting here rather listlessly in Beijing for a few months, exhausted by Christmas and the endless grey winter, Only the news that Tan Zuoren is to be imprisoned for five years for subversion has outraged me enough to return to this blog. But now I''m here, I find I''m speechless. All one needs to do is repeat the facts. Tan Zuoren is a literary editor who has campaigned to investigate the collapse of school buildings in Sichuan during the earthquake in 2008. Children died out of all proportion to adults, and in their thousands, because corruption meant that money intended for school construction had found its way into the pockets of local officials. Court documents of course make no mention of this impertinence, only of the fact that Tan has also spoken out against the army''s massacre of civilians in 1989.... Ai Weiwei, however, has found the words here, and they are important because he points out how important it is to people inside China that the rest of the world notices these things, and responds properly.

North Korea comes to Beijing

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:37:17 GMT

Well, we all expected the display of military might. It was the floats that got to me. I''m just going to list them: The Slogan of Scientific Outlook on Development float, the Bless the Motherland float, the Hardworking and Pioneering float, the Mao Zedong Thought float, the Keeping Up With The Times float, the Cross Century float..... It was a parade of abstractions, a parade utterly void of individualism, or individuals, of invention, or creativity, or freedom....I could go on, but I''ll stop there.

A Celebration with Communist Characteristics

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:49:17 GMT

On Monday, I was sitting at my computer when I suddenly heard a sound that I knew didn''t fit here. It wasn''t the lorries on the road outside or the drills and hammering of local construction work. It was.... the screamof fighter jets. In general, we don''t hear any planes here. Nothing is allowed to fly over the city except for the very occasional police or military helicopter or.... as on Monday, the fighter jets practising flying wingtip to wingtip for their role in the vast military parade planned for October 1st, the 60th anniversary of Communist rule of China. Beijing residents may well crane their heads up towards the sky that day, because the aerial display may be all that they see of the parade. So scared is the Communist Party of its own people that they are banned from the route and will be kept away by force.The safe place to watch will be on the sofa, in front of the television set. On the tv, there will be all manner of military hardware, plenty of goose-stepping soldiers, and uplifting commentary. Planes will be banned from landing at the civilian airport for a period of three hours, police are already stationed throughout the city, dissidents are being rounded up. The problem regions of Tibet and Xinjiang will be held in an iron grip of ''harmony and stability,'' and all bad news suppressed. It''s unlikely that anyone will sneeze, let alone die of swine flu until at least October 2nd. Already for weeks internet access has been severely restricted. So.... celebration? Well, let''s just say it''s a day when the Communist Party doesn''t have to pretend and try to be something it''s not. This isn''t the Olympics, for heaven''s sake. On this occasion, it can just be itself.

The Twentieth Anniversary of a Massacre

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 03:27:46 GMT

Tiananmen

It was a very long time ago. Twenty years ago today. I won’t go on at length but it deserves to be remembered. Even more so because here it remains taboo.

We are supposed to think that things have moved on. And of course economically, they have. But how can the present party leadership pretend the massacre had nothing to do with them, if they still hold it so closely to their breast and cradle it, protecting it from the scrutiny of their own citizens?

It upsets me when, on occasion, I hear Chinese talk about the massacre of June 4^th and make excuses for their government. True, the students were naive, true they didn’t entirely know what it was they wanted. Yes, they were blocking traffic. Yes, they were embarrassing their government. But honestly, none of those is an excuse for opening fire and killing hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed demonstrators.

I was writing for The Times in 1989, a twenty-six year old very new to daily journalism. Ever since April I had been covering the student demonstrations. It was exhausting and exhilarating. Because of the time difference, I was often up all night writing for the latest edition of the newspaper. During the day, I would be moving around the town, speaking to demonstrators on Tiananmen Square or in the universities, or on the marches. It was a time when few of those involved were terribly objective. Not the marchers, not foreign journalists, not Chinese journalists, not Chinese police, and most importantly, not Chinese party officials – we later learned of the cavernous split that developed between those who were willing to listen to the students’ calls for more responsive government, and those who were terrified of them.

In all my time covering the demonstrations, I largely encountered huge cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Only once, on the day before the army was sent in, was there evidence that I saw of a fight, and blood drawn, outside the party compound at Zhongnanhai. Were protesters to blame? Were agent provocateurs involved? Outside of Beijing there were riots. But inBeijing itself, there was little violence.

When the party leadership ordered the army in to crush the demonstrations, I was on the balcony of a fourteenth floor room in the Beijing Hotel overlooking Chang’An Avenue. I remember being awed and appalled as an armoured personnel carrier raced down the avenue – I hadn’t realised something that looked like a tank could move so fast. I wouldn’t have believed that this lumbering creature could clamber over buses that had been left blocking the road, leaving them in pieces.

As the night drew on and the shooting began in earnest, I remember seeing red trails jumping into the sky opposite, not realising they were tracer bullets. There were deep explosions – I still don’t know what they were. Later we would learn that people inside apartments in the west of Beijing on the 14^th and 15^th floors had been killed by bullets sent high into the surrounding buildings. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was in any danger, until a bullet hit the balcony. After the authorities turned out the lights on Tiananmen Square I remember sitting curled up on that balcony waiting miserably for morning to come, because I thought it would all seem better then. It didn’t, not immediately. For days there was random shooting all over the city. I was terrified, not at all brave or heroic. I had too vivid an imagination to be a war correspondent. That memory of my own fear always returns to me now when I hear of civilians caught in war zones. I was lucky, it lasted a few days, and I was soon in the relative safety of my own flat. Then, not long afterwards, and entirely surreal, on holiday in Bali. But in Beijing the massacre was the start point of a hellish purge, and a hounding of dissidents, mass round ups and imprisonments that dragged on for months.

To say that things have changed twenty years on is of course an understatement. But perhaps not as much as you’d think. Capitalism has largely eaten up the failing state industries. China’s cities are bursting with entrepreneurial energy and skyscrapers. Dissent as we knew it- university based, fuelled by academics - is largely inactive. And yet... anti-government protest exists in new and equally energetic forms – where once there were student activists, now there are ‘Rights Defender’ lawyers who do most of their work outside the big cities. They use the law to defend clients, often poor and powerless, against corruption and abuse by the powerful. They are as brave as ever the students were, perhaps less naive, more focused. They are involved less in revolution than in evolution.

Where once the state had control of the press, now all manner of opinion populates the blogosphere. But the fist of the state is never far away, as many in jail can attest. They crossed the line.

Meanwhile, the corruption and the cruelty of power unchecked carries on. It wouldn’t matter at this point even if Beijing had enlightened, modern leaders at the top ( in fact there is scant evidence of any enlightenment – in the 21^st century, party leaders are less adventurous and accessible than they were in the days of the early 80s), at the lowest level there is vast human suffering.

If British readers think of the dubious dealings of some of their own politicians, if they think of the ‘flipping’ that earned some MPs thousands of pounds every year, they must then multiply that betrayal by thousands to get any idea of the magnitude of the corruption in a party which has been unchecked by democratic competition or by a free press for sixty years.

Throughout the country, there are thuggish police forces and a brutal justice system that have been formed by sixty years of Communist rule and which the party still relies on. I suspect that this is where the new fractures will start to show.

A Fearful Inheritance

Fri, 8 May 2009 15:50:29 GMT

A few weeks ago, I sat in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the south of Beijing talking to Mao Hengfeng, her husband, Wu Xuewei, and one of their three daughters. A small woman with a pretty face and long black hair, Mao Hengfeng is immensely tough. Sitting there in KFC, she showed me the scars from her latest beating at the hands of the police, and described how they had taunted her.

I was writing a fictional story set in a Chinese jail, and I wanted to hear from her what it was like to be held in a woman’s jail. Mao wasn’t much interested in discussing prison conditions in general. Her own battle with the authorities has been raging for dedecades. That, and the battles of fellow petitioners who Mao supports, are totally absorbing not just for her, but for her family. She speaks rapidly, with few pauses, pouring out information about her own biography, and about the current situations of other dissidents.

Born in 1961, her first confrontation with the authorities came when she became pregnant again after having twins. She was told to have an abortion, and when she wouldn''t, she was detained in a psychiatric hospital. She gave birth to her third daughter in 1989. When she became pregnant again, she was threatened with the loss of her job. Eventually she had an abortion, thinking the decision would save her family from further harrassment. She was fired anyway. From 1990 to 2004 she repeatedly petitioned against dismissal, forced abortion and denial of freedom of expression.

From 2004 to 2005, she was detained in a labour camp under the Re-Education through Labour programme, which is fast track imprisonment requiring no trial.

In early 2006, she was detained in a guest house in a round-up of dissidents. She broke two lamps. In early 2007, she was sentenced for ‘willful destruction of property’ to be detained in Shanghai Women’s Prison until November 2008, when she was released at the end of her sentence. She has given detailed and horrifying accounts of her treatment in jail to human rights organisations. She spent seventy days in solitary confinement because of her refusal to admit her ''crime''.

Refusing to keep quiet, she came to Beijing to protest at her treatment, only to be detained and beaten again. Sent back home, she bounced back to Beijing again, which is when we met in KFC.

Her husband has been beaten and harassed too, but they show no signs of letting up. Their battle is the fire in their bellies.

I turned to their daughter, a quiet-spoken young woman who has been denied many years of schooling because of her mother’s repeated confrontations with the authority. ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I asked her.

‘I am,’ she said slowly, ‘but there are some things you just have to do.’

Her parents told me about how their daughters had been harassed and interrogated when they were younger, and how terrified they had been. But none of this seemed to touch the parents'' determination to continue.

‘She’s like her mother,’ the father said proudly of his daughter. ‘She’s her mother’s successor.’

I glanced at the daughter and the mother, taken aback by the strange nature of his paternal ambition. The daughter looked calmly at the tabletop. If she felt otherwise, she didn''t say so.

A few weeks ago, hundreds of angry protesters gathered at Beijing University after Sun Dong Dong, a law professor, was quoted in the press as saying that 99% of long-term petitioners were mentally ill.

That designation, long term petitioners, includes many people like Mao. What she does – the repeated journeying to Beijing to plead in vain for redress from government departments – is exactly repeat petitioning.

The protesters outside Beijing University were rapidly dispersed, of course. Petitioning the rulers in Beijing for justice is a tradition that extends back to imperial China. These days, the Party pays lip service to the practice, pretending that it is a useful link with the populace. In fact, in all my years in China, I have hardly ever heard of a grievance righted by the authorities as a result of petitioning. Far more often one hears of petitioners dispersed or detained in the kind of detention centre where Mao was last beaten up. Or they may be thrown into mental institutions. At best they are simply ignored while they spend the last of their savings on train tickets and the last of their energies on appeals.

I thought, after I had met Mao Hengfeng, that the choices she was making were not the choices that you or I might imagine that we would make in her situation. Logically, is there not a point where you simply decide to stop fighting? It makes no sense, after all, because you’re never going to win. And your family suffers. Wouldn’t it be better to cut your losses and salvage what normal life you can? After all, for many people in China these days there is a high level of what even those who grew up in the West would recognize as normality – better incomes, freedom to choose your own job, your children’s school, freedom to move around the country and to go abroad. Protesting – when all you’re likely to get for your efforts is a scar or a bruise or worse – doesn’t make sense.

So then does continuing to protest mean that you are mentally ill? It is an Orwellian concept, that persistent protest is proof of madness. And China, with its economic freedoms, sometimes seems to have left Orwell on the shelf. But there are many cases of those who protest being detained in psychiatric institutions.

For Mao Hengfeng’s family, their struggle fuels and defines them, and there are many like them, determined to achieve what they believe is justice even though they know only grief lies ahead. It may not be logical in our eyes, but perhaps if we were in their shoes then we would understand that sometimes there actually is no sensible course to take.

The best discussion of this that I have read is a New Yorker article by a Chinese woman who visits her brother in a Chinese jail and who struggles to understand why her brother has chosen to become a dissident, and to spend years of his life as a prisoner. Both brother and sister seem to conclude, that someone has to be the dissident, and that that to those who risk their freedom to protest, dissent is a vocation. Read the article here.

Maoists Revived

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:53:56 GMT

You may have already read about this in The Economist, but James and I spent a surreal Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago in a Maoist seminar. Yes, Maoist. If people in western democracies are a little querulous now about the superiority of the capitalist system, China's Maoists are emerging, dancing, from the woodwork. The seminar took place in the offices of the Mao Flag website. There is a vast poster of Chairman Mao spread across the front of the room (if you look at the picture below, you can just see him) and a gold bust of Mao on the windowledge. And the bookshelves are stacked with the works of.... well it's not Ben Bernanke. The office is an anonymous hotel room in a fairly grotty hotel in central Beijing, and two hundred people or so packed into it that afternoon. (A handful of police were smoking cigarettes in the lobby downstairs, but it's not clear whether or not they were there to keep an eye on things - another far left meeting on the same day had been cancelled by the authorities.) When James and I arrived, there was a murmur of 'laile', which in this case probably translated as 'the foreigners are here'. But they were the most polite bunch of anti-imperialists I have ever met, insisting that I sat down, and making space for James to perch on a desk. When a very elderly gentleman eventually left, he insisted that James take his chair.

The speaker, a charismatic Mao-lookalike with the glint of obsession in his eyes, raged against western imperialism and capitalism. The audience, which ranged in age from student to the elderly, did not look entirely convinced. But they were interested. The speaker predicted a cataclysmic struggle between pro-democracy rightists and leftists like himself. That's a long way off, but that the meeting happened at all, and that the room was full to sweaty, dizzy bursting point, and that similar meetings have been forbidden, all says to me that the economic crisis means that debate and disagreement are rife.

Evil Germs

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:05:26 GMT

Another poster from my favourite park. This one one how to avoid contracting tuberculosis, and how to cure it if you get it. I love the evil germ, the ghostly tb sufferers, and the cheerful child imprisoned in the X-ray machine.

Oh, and here''s my local park which I pace whilst seeking inspiration:

In Case of Sudden Incidents

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 03:14:26 GMT

Out for a walk in our local park, Si De, I came across this poster.

It''s aimed at educating the public in what to do if there is a ''sudden incident'' - which means anything from a fire to a snowstorm to a riot to a public health emergency. This picture, below, illustrates an instruction to those in charge of media and internet reports to make sure their reports are accurate, objective, and true.

This text urges the rapid and accurate reporting of sudden incidents to higher level authorities, but urges again and again that reports must take account of state secrecy laws and respect them. It also instructs that in cases of important meetings or events, lowever level officials must make daily reports to higher levels.

The text above is attached to a nice illustration labelled ''watermelon festival'', and shows low level officials making their daily report to higher level officials. The official is reporting ''Everything is normal here. What are your instructions?''

Oasis

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 02:44:44 GMT

My son is feeling very glum. We had tickets for an Oasis concert in early April, but it''s been cancelled. The reasons for the cancellation remain unclear. According to Oasis, the Chinese authorities suddenly realised that Noel Gallagher had taken part in a pro-Tibet concert in 1997. But the Chinese organiser says it was cancelled for ''economic reasons''.

I''ve lost count of the number of times we''ve bought tickets for concerts that have been cancelled at the last minute, or that we''ve tried to buy tickets for advertised concerts only to find them cancelled. Around the time of the Olympics a whole bunch of concerts were advertised in official publications. Not only did the concerts not take place, some of them had never been booked, according to the performers'' agents.

The authorities are very nervous about mass gatherings that might get out of hand, very nervous ever since Bjork shouted ''Free Tibet'' from a stage here, very nervous about everything right now. Last year held huge challenges, the year ahead looks even more rocky for the leadership as it treads its fragile tightrope.

Hide and Seek

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:49:56 GMT

Now this is very strange. A man named Li Qiaoming has died of head wounds in police custody. The official cause of his death? He was playing hide and seek, and ran blindfold into a wall.

Yes, your reaction is much the same as that of China''s netizens, who are now sending the phrase ''hide and seek'' zinging around the blogosphere with a great helping of salt. Interesting how it''s not just cynical foreigners who immediately assume police brutality. More on that soon when I tell you about a conversation I had recently with a woman who knows a thing or two about police brutality.

Now China''s Communist Party goes great lengths to censor dissent on the web. But in this case the local propaganda chief is taking a different approach, inviting netizens to get involved in the investigation. Read more here . It''s not clear what the propaganda chief means - are China''s bloggers welcome to do a CSI type forensic analysis inside the jail? I think not. Indeed, he may backtrack rapidly.

Nevertheless, it''s just one more indication that the Communist Party knows it''s got to keep the goodwill of the population, it can''t just rule by fiat.

Wedding Photos

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:44:15 GMT

A couple walks through Chaoyang Park for a chilly morning of taking wedding shots. These photos are not taken on the wedding day itself, and the clothes are usually hired for the occasion from the photographic studio. At the wedding dinner, it is traditional for the bride to wear a red cheongsam.

Undignified Exits

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 13:14:13 GMT

Here is a very interesting piece by the Telegraph''s correspondent in Shanghai, Malcolm Moore, about the undignified exits that some foreign entrepreneurs are making from Shanghai. His evidenceis anecdotal, but that''s how it is at the moment. This morning Ispoke to a taxi driver I have chatted with before. Just a couple of weeks ago he was still very gung-ho about the economy here - now not so much. No one dares to invest in anything he says. Everyone is watching and waiting. Tonight there are fireworks again for the Lantern Festival. Anecdotally - of course - sales of fireworks have dropped this year. They are, after all, the ultimate in discretionary spending.

Never Mind the Shoe...

Tue, 3 Feb 2009 01:00:40 GMT

...it''s the unemployment statistics that count (and, most importantly, the potential fallout in terms of social unrest). As the FT reports here, there are twenty million rural migrants who are now unemployed after their export-oriented manufacturing jobs vanished in the global crisis.

When he wasn''t dodging shoes, Wen Jiabao visiting London echoed Gordon Brown and others in blaming the international crisis on untramelled greed in the boardrooms of banks in the West. They''re both right, of course. But just as we all know Gordon Brown is also trying to deflect whatever blame he may bear, so Wen Jiabao also has a domestic agenda. There is a small but significant danger that those who are unemployed, or whose businesses go bust, may turn against the Communist leadership. It would make sense for Wen Jiabao to turn that anger outwards towards the western world. And - given the situation - it would be easy and logical. He must, however, be aware that dangers lie in that direction too.

Meanwhile, the government has launched a new scheme to sell electrical goods to the vast, but poor, rural population. It''s a policy that raises questions about joined-up thinking. How will a newly unemployed rural labourer afford the flat-screen tv? Until you realise that this is just another variation of the policy of governments worldwide. Never mind that you no longer have any savings, just spend!

Charter 08 - Still Kicking

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:43:07 GMT

Charter 08, a radical call by 300 intellectuals for an end to one party rule was widely expected to die a quiet death. Instead, it seems to be taking on a life of it''s own. Read this article in the Washington Post about the kinds of people who are adding their names... Eight thousand people is still a drop in the ocean in a country of a billion, but if it is so insignificant, then why does the Communist Party want to ban all mention of it from the internet?

I first wrote about Charter 08 for The Guardian ''s online Comment is Free site here, and received a rather rude response on a state-run website.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the economic crisis for Comment is Free. The economic slowdown is already hitting China, although we don''t yet know how hard. But the leadership will be watching not only how many people lose their jobs, but how those people react. Beijing has kept the population happy with an economic boom and rising living standards. That''s about to falter.

CCTV's Twitchy Fingers

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:28:11 GMT

The excellent Danwei.org links to the China Central Television live coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address...

Just moments after Obama said that the US had stood up to both fascism and communism, the station abruptly broke away from the speech and a rather surprised looking announcer appeared to have to wake an analyst up to comment on an entirely unrelated point.

So, a censor poised, with twitchy fingers at the China Central Television headquarters with a long list of red alert words like 'communism'? It must have been a difficult list to write - 'freedom' and 'democracy' must have been contenders. But then you might as well not have bothered.

But what surprises me is that they were running the speech live at all - it inevitably means that any censorship is a few seconds too late. In this case, for instance, everyone watching knows that Barack Obama said that the US had stood up to communism. And - worse - knows that CCTV then attempted a somewhat awkward censorship of what came next. I would have expected them to run the speech with a slight delay - which is often what is done even in so-called live broadcasting here - so that they cut away before the 'c' word and had time to give the analyst a wake-up call.

New Year Murder Roundup

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:35:55 GMT

People often ask me how I do research. We subscribe to the excellent Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post . Over the festive season we''ve let them pile up. In an effort to clear a path to the sofa, I''ve just had a quick clipping session, paying particular attention to the section that picks up stories from local news around China. Here are some of the grimmer stories I''ve put away in my files for future reference.

In Yunnan, police have arrested a teacher on suspicion of killing and dismembering a thirteen year old student. Eight other female students are thought to be missing.

In Fujian, a 55-year old teacher has been sentenced to death for raping and killing a seventeen year old student.

A man has been arrested for killing two colleagues and stealing money donated for Sichuan earthquake relief. He said he needed the money to help his girlfriend who''d been forced into prostitution.

In Heilongjiang a seventeen year old girl and her boyfriend have been arrested for robbing and killing the girl''s cousin. The girl claimed she was penniless after paying for an abortion.

A 31-year old woman has been sentenced to jail for 11 years for killing her husband''s mistress. The court imposed a light sentence because 128 people had signed a petition pleading for leniency.

A man found wandering the streets of Huadian was found to be carrying his wife''s head after an argument.

A student slit the throat of his professor in front of a class at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. He has said it was an act of revenge after discovering his girlfriend was having an affair with the professor.

Amazing Magic Democratic Underpants

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:37:49 GMT

Well into New Year 2009 Liu Xiaobo is still in detention for his part in Charter 2008, the petition signed late last year by many Chinese intellectuals calling for sweeping democratic change in China. According to this, the Chinese government is trying to suppress all discussion of the charter. I wrote about the charter for The Guardian - you can read that piece here - and was surprised to see a reply on an official Chinese government-run site. I have to say that I'm a little touchy about any reference to my backside, but in the interests of democratic debate I'm prepared, just this once, to turn the other cheek...

Naked Lunch

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 19:50:15 GMT

I was recently interviewed by Sarah Passmore for her Naked Lunch series at RTHK in Hong Kong. We talked about The Slaughter Pavilion, about writing crime fiction, and about China. You can hear the full interview here: http://www.rthk.org.hk/rthk/radio3/naked_lunch/20081107.html

Meanwhile, I'm back in Beijing, fresh - actually the opposite of fresh - off the plane after a family Christmas and New Year in Britain. Beijing is freezing cold, but the rabbit has survived (although in the worst of the weather he apparently refused to leave his nicely insulated hutch). Already I have heard, anecdotally from friends and acquaintances about the way the economic crisis is beginning to hit here too - plunging rental returns on property, and expatriate businessmen and women being recalled by their companies. This new year may turn out to be as challenging for China as last year.

My Christmas Present List

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:15:24 GMT

The Slaughter Pavilion has had some great press reviews - another one from Joan Smith in the Sunday Times last week.

But if anyone has read and enjoyed The Slaughter Pavilion I'd be deeply grateful if you might consider writing a brief reader review for www.Amazon.co.uk .

I've done most of my Christmas shopping online - partly because spending pounds in China is now an immensely expensive business. And partly because most of my time between now and Christmas Day is going to be spent travelling. Anyway, I find, as I shop on Amazon, that I really pay attenting to star ratings, and to reader or user reviews.

One of the problems, with selling hardbacks, is that many bookshops choose not to stock them, and to wait for the paperback. So even as nice reviews appear in the press, buyers don't necessarily see them on the bookshelves in their local Borders or Waterstones. Very frustrating. So Amazon is important. Incidentally, if anyone has news of a bookshop sighting of The Slaughter Pavilion, or has had trouble finding a copy, I'd really like to hear about it. Please do email me to let me know at catherine@catherinesampson.com Thank you!

Charter 08

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:37:08 GMT

Charter 08 was published on the internet this week to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the International Charter of Human Rights. It's an extraordinary document - it calls for an end to one party rule, free elections, an end to Communist Party influence in the military and in the courts. Some 303 Chinese intellectuals, lawyers and officials signed it at great risk to their own freedom. Many of them are now being investigated, and Liu Xiaobo, who is a veteran activist from 1989 is in police custody. You can read the Charter here

Of course I can't, because I live in Beijing, and the website is blocked.

The Strange Case of Yang Jia

Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:29:17 GMT

Earlier this year, Yang Jia murdered six police officers in Shanghai. Last week he was executed by lethal injection. Strangely, before he died, many people in China expressed support for him. I wrote about the case for The Guardian''s online Comment is Free section, and you can find my blog here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/28/china-police

In Case of Dispute - Do Nothing

Wed, 3 Dec 2008 01:03:07 GMT

I’ve decided I’m going to blog more about crime in China. When I talk about my crime novels to groups of people in Beijing or back in England, I often get asked, ‘Do you feel safe if you’re out on your own at night in Beijing?’ and of course the answer, by and large, is yes. Not only yes, but safer than I’d feel in the city centre of most British towns on my own late at night. But there is crime here, plenty of it, and although it may be different from British or American crime and although it’s not much reported, it’s just as interesting, and very revealing about all manner of social and political issues.

Just to pluck a crime pretty much at random. This is a story picked up by the South China Morning Post on December 1^st:

Boss Illegally Imprisons Employee

A man was illegally imprisoned by his employer for eight days in Baoding, but city police refused to help and told his wife to seek help from their home country police, Hinews.cn reports. A Baoding police station chief said they had seen the man in the employer’s home but did not rescue him because they thought it was just a dispute. The employer threatened to torture the woman’s husband if she did not pay him.

It’s that phrase ‘it was just a dispute’, which is interesting to me. It reminds me of the day that our neighbour was besieged in his house for several hours by a gang of builders. He had hired them to renovate his house, and then fired them when he was dissatisfied with their work, but the builders said they were owed cash, and effectively kept him hostage in his own home, bashing on his gate with an iron bar, yelling, and throwing trash into his garden. The police arrived…. and did nothing. When I asked the officers why they weren’t taking action to disperse the angry crowd, they replied: ‘because it’s an economic dispute, and it’s not our job to intervene in an economic dispute.’ The fact that the gang was keeping our neighbour inside his house against his will seemed to be irrelevant, just as it did in the Baoding case. Presumably, if the employer had carried out his threat to torture the woman’s husband, it might then have become a police matter. But by then, of course, it would be too late. Does anyone know whether this police reluctance to get involved in economic disputes has any basis in law? And if it does, then who IS supposed to police economic disputes when they turn into hostage-taking? Because from what I hear, economic disputes do have a tendency to turn into kidnappings…

If You Have a Cockroach in the Family

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:41:46 GMT

I love this poster in the lobby of the block where I have an office. In the lift last week was a notice in English advising residents to call the management 'if you have a cockroach in the family.'

Disappearing Bodyguards

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:06:35 GMT

Some time ago, I blogged about our wealthy Chinese neighbours, whose stretch Mercedes and phalanx of bodyguards fasincated everyone else in the compound where we live. Recently I saw the baby of the house going trick or treating accompanied both by his nanny and by a bodyguard. But there's been a big change. The house is dark, apparently abandoned. No nanny, no child, no Stretch Mercedes sweeping through the compound..Most obviously, no miniature army of bodyguards. Our neighbour - let's call him Mr Huang - along with his brother, another Mr Huang - heads a Chinese retail company with branches all over the country. Both brothers have reportedly been detained by the police and are being questioned about stock manipulation. I miss the bodyguards, who have in the past gone to great lengths to helped us to catch our errant pet rabbit, Dusty, chasing him through the undergrowth of an overgrown abandoned garden.

Here's my original post:

Who's Moving In?

We live in a residential development which was originally built to house expatriates but which has now become home to many wealthy Chinese. We had a famous Chinese pop singer here for a while, and rumours of an actress. Mysteriously, several residents have cars with numberplates belonging to the People’s Armed Police. I say mysteriously, because in China public servants don’t earn the kind of salaries that can pay the mortgage or the rent on a house. So quite what the People’s Armed Police are doing here isn’t entirely clear.

Recently, another mystery has been playing itself out in front of our eyes. Directly opposite our house is a large house that for the past several months has undergone huge renovations. The place has been gutted and rebuilt bigger than ever, windows smashed and replaced, gardens landscaped…still, no sign of a new occupier.

Until this week, that is, when every evening, from about 9 pm onwards, a team of well-dressed young men and women has been busily readying the house for its new occupant, aided by uniformed maids with dusters. Their efforts have taken place in brightly lit rooms with large windows, and we’ve had no option but to observe their labours playing like a film on a big screen. We’re not the only ones who’ve been watching – the compound employs security guards, and several of these have abandoned their patrols to come and stand outside gazing as crystal chandeliers have been polished, remote-control curtains tested, pictures hung and pot plants trimmed.

Two nights ago, at one thirty in the morning, a stretch Mercedes was parked outside the house. A van arrived, and from it were brought box after box. These were delivered to the team in the house, who unpacked items from the boxes and then sent the empty boxes back out to be chucked over the wall of the empty house next door.

Next morning, I looked out the window to see two security guards rummaging among the empty boxes, looking to see whether there was anything worth salvaging. One of them found two silver tiaras decorated with pink fronds. He removed his beret and replaced it with the tiara so that the pink fronds hung coquettishly over his eyes. Both guards fell around laughing for a few moments. Then the guard replaced his beret, and they walked off, tiaras in hand, well-pleased by their find.

Since then we’ve seen the new occupier fleetingly, sitting in a leather armchair at a computer, and surrounded by men who seem to be bodyguards as he gets in and out of his stretch Mercedes. He’s a dapper Chinese man in his forties, I’d say, who wears dark suits with a yellow silk tie, and he has a wife and a young child. I’ve started my enquiries into who our new neighbour might be, but can’t tell you yet. We just hope he continues to live his glamorous life in bright light, and with the curtains wide open.

China's Hawaii

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:44:01 GMT

We've spent the past week in Hainan, an island off the south coast of China, at Yalong Bay in Sanya. It's advertised as China's Hawaii. And as you can see, it's very pretty, with golden beach and blue sea and surf (and even a Chinese tourist in a Hawaiian suit.)

I first went to Sanya nearly twenty years ago, when there was nothing but beach and surf, and not a hotel in sight, but you could see the potential even then. The natural beach is really amazing. Now the whole bay has been developed so it is lined with Marriotts and Sheratons and Ritz Carltons and Crowne Plazas. The Chinese military - not to be outdone - has also developed the area just around the corner with a big naval base, so destroyers can be spotted sailing to and fro across the shining sea. When James and Alistair went kayaking, they were warned to stay well away from the military base, because it was 'very dangerous'.

For some reason that I can't work out, it's a destination very popular with Russian tourists.

In the week that we were there, the taxi drivers went on strike, as they did in two other cities (and have done elsewhere since.) They complained that they had to pay exorbitant fees to the authorities, while the same authorities failed to take action against unlicensed cabs that stole their business. Some of the protesters called for the setting up of an independent taxi drivers' union.

Update: Since my return to Beijing, I've talked to local taxi drivers here, who have similar complaints. They are aware that the protests elsewhere in the country are being met with some concessions, and also with arrests. They also know that the authorities are far more worried about protests in the capital than anywhere else. One of their biggest complaints is the price of petrol - they know perfectly well that the price of oil has dropped. So why haven't prices dropped at the pumps?

Democracy

Wed, 5 Nov 2008 14:12:02 GMT

From my outpost in Hong Kong I’m watching history unfold.

I spent two years living in the States. Today a majority of Americans have voted to reclaim the best of what I saw there – passion, energy, generosity, vision. They’ve voted to do more than correct the vicious extremism of the Bush-Cheney years, they’ve taken a historic step that no one could have predicted, expanding and strengthening their democracy and voting for social inclusion and justice. Given the reality of American power, this is an event which spells hope for all of us. But – and this is the history - black people, men and women, have been leaving the polls in tears. Obama has given a voice to the millions who felt that they were disenfranchised.

Which of course brings me to China. When China has, for years, been the biggest economic success story in the world, and when the standards of living for many Chinese are improving, when polling suggests that a vast majority of people are optimistic, why do people like me harp on about political reform? What’s wrong with a dictatorship, as long as it responds – as this one increasingly does – to popular grievance?

Well, step back a bit and you see that China is going through its own extremist swing towards a ruthless capitalism that could be termed devil take the hindmost. Certainly the central government is trying to address issues like healthcare because they understand that it is potentially explosive, but the statistics are absolutely dire. One article in a state-run newspaper last week suggested that only 10% of cases of childhood leukaemia can be treated, because the vast majority of parents cannot afford to pay even to attempt to save their child. This in a country which owns much of America’s debt, which has an active space programme, and which is on paper committed social justice. America’s record on healthcare is atrocious, but there’s no Medicare here.

Step back a bit further, and you see that China’s history since 1949 has been a series of swings – some of which, like the extreme leftist Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, have left millions dead. The present swing to a corrupt right will leave its own death toll. From a purely pragmatic point of view, democracy, with the constant challenge of an active opposition, the pressure to find consensus, along with the necessary accompaniment of a free press and independent courts seems to me to represent the best (but never perfect) corrective to extremism.

Beyond this, I believe that political impotence is potentially toxic. Today what we are frequently seeing in China is that the disenfranchised are driven to extreme measures. Often these are self-destructive – the suicide rate is high. Sometimes they are vengeful. Recently, a man called Yang Jia murdered six police officers in Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, he has been sentenced to death. What has been astounding has been the outpouring of displeasure on the internet about the sentence. It seems that he was beaten up by the police and, unable to get anyone to listen to his complaint, he turned to murder. The revenge of course was totally out of all proportion to the grievance suffered. Nevertheless, people on the internet said they wanted to know the whole story and questioned whether Yang Jia should be held entirely accountable when the system offered him no outlet for his grievance. This is not an isolated incident. Democracy – and by this I mean the press, the courts as well as the polling booth - even when it is flawed, as it is everywhere it exists – provides an absolutely necessary outlet for potentially explosive buildups of grievance.

Beyond even that, I believe there is a profound but unmeasurable effect on the individual who feels she or he has a voice. The Chinese I meet are under no illusion that they have any impact on the future governance of their country. But many of them seek a voice. The internet is the clearest indication of that – it is full of debate, much of which is silenced, some of which is not. At the moment, China has side-stepped the ballot box and is practicing the populism of the internet forum. An economic boom is one thing, a healthy country is quite another.

The Transformational Internet

Tue, 4 Nov 2008 09:11:00 GMT

The internet has already played a role in what may later today - bated breath - be a transformation of US politics. Here''s what the internet is doing in China:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5077899.ece

All a Writer Wants to Hear

Tue, 4 Nov 2008 08:24:59 GMT

I''m in Hong Kong for a few days. Here is the view from my window. It''s what''s known as a partial harbour view.

A British man who works in the Macmillan office here told me a nice story this morning. He has a domestic helper working in his home (this being Hong Kong she is likely an English-speaking Filipina, although I didn''t confirm this). He discovered that she had removed my first book, Falling Off Air, from his bookshelf. A few days later it returned, and the next book, Out of Mind, had gone. That''s all a writer wants to hear.

Our little piece of history

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:53:19 GMT

The air, over the past few days, has been vile. Back to pre-Olympic smog, despite regulations to keep twenty per cent of the cars off the road Monday to Friday (we can''t use our car on Friday, and the inconvenience is already stretching my committment to the environment). You can smell the dirt in the air. I had been toying with the idea of buying an extra air purifier for the house, and looking out of the window convinced me that the time was right. I made the call to Mike, the genius who realised a couple of years ago that there might be quite a market here for IQAir units - the gold standard of the air purifier industry. I asked what discount he might give me as an old customer (just about any purchasing conversation goes like this in China), and he offered me a little piece of history. Instead of an entirely new machine, I could have - at 15% off full price - a machine used for just five weeks by the Olympic delegation. And now here it sits, humming in our sitting room, gently blowing nice clear air over us, just as it might well have blown nice clean air all over Michael Phelps! Or at least over a junior coach.

Kidnapped Children, Religious Music, and other matters

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:38:40 GMT

For anyone reading The Slaughter Pavilion and interested in the story of the vanishing children, you might be interested in this from the very excellent Global Voices Online. http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/10/08/china-40-missing-children-parents-journey-in-beijing/ Sadly, the fiction in The Slaughter Pavilion is not without some basis.

This week, I wrote a blog for the Guardian''s Comment is Free section on the banning of Western religious music from concert halls. The ban has not been made public but is, as far as I understand, common knowledge in the concert halls of the capital. No one knows why exactly the authorities have done this, but in my view it''s part of a general trend towards the left, that is, towards a more inward-looking China and increased paranoia about exchanges with the West, and fear of Christianity. You can link to my blog here (why the link mentions tibet, I do not know.) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/08/china.tibet

Also, I''ve had two lovely reviews for The Slaughter Pavilion in the last few days. One, by Matthew Lewin writing in The Guardian, can be read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/crime.roundupreviews2

And from Susanna Yager writing in The Sunday Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/05/bocrime105.xml

Reasons To Frown

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:51:16 GMT

I've written a blog on the Guardian's Comment is Free site about the stresses on the Communist Party leadership post- OIympics. As the concern surrounding the melamine-tainted milk powder spreads, and all domestically-produced dairy products are removed from shelves, the Communist Party now faces a major food safety scandal. The World Health Organisation is now asking what the central leadership knew and when. They want to know whether the delay in taking timely action was because of a cover-up or simply because of a failure of systems. Among people I've spoken to here, no one is surprised that the Central government knew that children were getting sick way back in July but did not issue a recall for the tainted milk powder until September, and people assume that the centre covered-up because of the Olympics. Anyway, here's the link to the piece I wrote for Comment is Free, complete with comments from several people who seem to believe that no one should raise questions about anything going on in China. Try telling that to the World Health Organisation. Try also telling that to the many Chinese who are desperate for a more responsible and responsive government:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/17/china.olympics2008

Who Knew What and When?

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:58:25 GMT

The Paralympics ends tomorrow, and already the Olympic decorations are being dismantled.

The facade of perfection also begins to crumble.

Over the past two days, news has begun to emerge of more than a thousand babies sickened by infant formula tainted by melamine. Two babies have died. What is not yet clear is who knew what and when, but it seems that the New Zealand partner to China''s Sanlu manufacturer was pushing for a recall of the product even before the Olympics, but that Chinese officials refused. When New Zealand representatives brought the matter up in Beijing with Chinese officials, a recall was eventually made, too late for many babies who had developed kidney stones.

So, did Beijing know about the tainted milk product and allow it to continue to be sold in order not to disrupt the image of the games? We know that news organisations were ordered not to report on food safety problems during the Olympics. Or did over-zealous local officials hide the scandal not only from the public, but from their bosses in Beijing?

After a series of scandals, food safety is an immensely sensitive issue here, and not only as it relates to the Olympics (there were worries that athletes might become ill). This morning I was chatting with a taxi driver, who told me that he meets up for lunch with other drivers every day, but that he avoids small restaurants because of the poor quality of their ingredients. ''Eat there and you get a tummy ache,'' he told me, and then suggested that tummy ache was the least of the problems - many people, he said, were suffering from cancer and leukaemia in Beijing, and he put this down to tainted foods. True or not, food safety is a potential minefield for the Communist Party as it tries to retain the trust of the population.

Like many expatriates here, we buy a lot of imported food, from New Zealand milk to German fruit juice and US honey. Increasingly, those Chinese who can afford to, do the same.

When is the Paralympics not the Paralympics?

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:22:26 GMT

Ask many people in the West what the para in Paralympics stands for, and they may hesitate, wondering whether it is something to do with paralysis, or whether it means parallel, as in games that run alongside the Olympics. It is the second, para as in paramedics. These are the Parallel Olympics.

However, in China the Games have been translated erroneously as the "Can Aoyun", or the Disabled Olympics. It's an easy mistake, of course, but it does nonetheless reflect the fact that China's level of awareness when it comes to disability is not as sensitive as it might be.

We're hearing a lot about China's efforts to help people with disabilities, but in fact they've suffered terrible discrimination for years. I know one excellent linguist who is entirely self taught, but was not allowed to attend university because of her hunch back. I know a teenage girl who is a member of the national troupe of disabled entertainers. She's become something of a star, singing sweet songs from her wheelchair, but she's been treated heartlessly as her condition deteriorates by the very officials charged with helping those with disability.

Still, we went to the Opening Ceremony in the Bird's Nest, and joined a crowd of about ninety thousand people there to witness another brilliantly choreographed spectacle. When the Chinese team emerged into the arena, the crowd went wild.

History moves in mysterious ways, and perhaps nationalism will do as much for disability awareness in China as anything else. I don't know who first dreamed up the Paralympics, but it is an entirely brilliant concept to stage something so challenging on the back of the Olympics. Crowds are already enthused, stadiums built, and a whole new world of achievement is presented seamlessly after the main event.

We have seen big crowds at events, tickets seem to have sold well. Security is less oppressive than for the Olympics, and the sky is still blue - there are many Paralympic pleasures to be had.

I've been interested to watch the reactions of my children, who are as enthused about the Paralympics as about the Olympics. It occurs to me that children are much closer to the idea of games, and understand that all games are constructed from fairly arbitrary rules designed to handicap the players. What, after all, is the difference between a three-legged race, in which competitors have to race despite a handicap, and the 50km walk, in which competitors have to race whilst never taking both feet from the ground at the same time, and basketball played in wheelchairs or blindfold?

Over The Top

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 01:03:06 GMT

We watched the closing ceremony last night on television - a huge North Korean style extravaganza. I couldn''t make head or tail of it, although the plethora of aliens in bicycle helmets and glowing green men suggested some kind of space race theme. (This is entirely speculative, but it would vaguely make sense, since the opening ceremony depicted China''s history and thus the closing ceremony might depict the future, and China certainly has space travel ambitions. If anyone has any better ideas, let me know.) If you think I''m trying to read too much into it, rest assured that there is no state-sponsored cultural event in China that does not carry a message, and we now know that from leaks to the press that the opening and closing ceremonies were subject to massive political intervention.

The best, I thought, that could be said of London''s uninspiring display was that at least it didn''t involve thousands of soldiers who''d been rehearsed to the limits of their endurance in order to please the politburo''s endless tweaking of the show. But what political vision did Beijing''s ceremony portray? I can''t even begin to think. If all this sounds sour, the comparison to North Korea comes from Zhang Yimou himself, who directed both shows.

Interesting, I thought, that Jacques Rogge''s speech referred not to a wonderful or fantastic Olympics, but to a diplomatically and neutrally worded ''exceptional'' Olympics. For the IOC, dealing with Beijing has been like nothing they''ve ever had to do before. He thanked the thousands of volunteers - who were unfailingly cheerful - before he thanked BOCOG, the Beijing Olympic organising committee.

And yet, despite the almost tragic politics of the thing, I am a convert to the Olympics. I am not a sports fan, and thought I would be left cold. But I was wowed by the athletic prowess I saw, and moved by the teamwork, and by the extraordinary effort. On Friday, we went to the Bird''s Nest and watched the end of the 50km men''s walk. It''s a strange sport, to my mind, with the athletes surely having to struggle not to run. But one couldn''t help but be full of admiration when these men, who''d walked through 50km in the roasting heat, collapsing when they got to the finishing line.

Some of the most impressive athletes have been the Chinese, who won more gold medals than any other country. Every athlete from every country is of course under pressure to perform. But it has been very evident that the Chinese athletes are under exponentially greater pressure to perform in order to fulfil the leadership''s gold medal ambitions. After the match in which the Chinese women''s volleyball team won bronze, their coach was interviewed on Chinese television. The interviewer asked whether there had been too much pressure, and the coach burst into tears. Athletes had been told - although he didn''t say this - that a gold medal was the only medal that counted.

The Bird''s Nest is a beautiful stadium, stunning from outside and intimate inside. Although whoever chose the lights made a mistake.

At the moment, the media seems to be portraying the Bird''s Nest and the surrounding Olympic Green, as the new heart of Beijing, replacing the politically problematic Tiananmen Square. But at the moment it''s a vast concrete slab, unrelentingly free of shade, and it''s a vast tranche of real estate. The end of the Olympics leaves China''s leadership facing many challenges. The Olympic Green is only one of them.

Meanwhile, to put all this in perspective, on Saturday afternoon we went to the Crab Island water park, thinking that it would be empty because everyone would be gathered around their televisions watching the Olympics. We were wrong, everyone was at the beach.

Beijing's New Forbidden City

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:46:49 GMT

Discouraged from visiting the Olympics, the city's inhabitants watch them on TV - or rather, they watch an edited version. To read the whole of this blog, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/15/olympics2008.china/print

Lying directly north of the Forbidden City, Beijing's Olympic Green slots symbolically into the capital's symmetry of great historical sites. In imperial times, ordinary citizens were forbidden access to the vast palace complex of the Forbidden City. Now they are similarly banned from Zhongnanhai, a palace adjoining the Forbidden City that has been adopted by the Communist party as its leadership compound.

Beijingers are used to being banned from sections of their city. So it comes as no great surprise to them that access to the Olympic Green – which dwarfs the Forbidden City – has been severely restricted with road blocks and fences cutting off access to all those without a ticket. CCTV cameras and guards reinforce the barriers to entry. At other Olympics, the Olympic Green has been a place for the general public to gather. It is an important place for sponsors, because it is where they spend money to advertise. They have complained that only about 40,000 people a day are passing through Beijing's Olympic Green, as opposed to the 200,000 they would expect....

...

Yesterday I watched China Central Television highlights from the women's weightlifting. Over and again they replayed the failed attempts by weightlifters from other countries. When the foreign athletes stumbled or fell, the clip was played not once or twice, but several times. Eventually, China's gold medal winner was shown doing what no one else had managed to do. To China's leaders, it counts as a double success to have cleared the streets of security risks and to have people watching television at home. On television, error and success is not fleeting. The editing process can hone the message and send it again and again, and the message for the domestic audience is clear: China is a success, and the Olympics have shown the world that China is a success.

The Big Screen

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:50:35 GMT

It being Sunday, we did what many families traditionally do on a Sunday afternoon, which was to go for a walk in the park. We''d been told there was all sorts of excitement going on at Ditan, so off we went eagerly, especially interested in the big screen, which relays Olympic action from the television.

Yesterday, the Beijing organisers of the games struck back at those who said there was no Olympic excitement for ordinary people, issuing this statement: "The live sites are parts of Olympic culture building in Beijing for citizens in Beijing, and friends and journalists and tourists from China and abroad, for the athletes and officials and other visitors. The live sites provide the best opportunity for them to take direct participation in the festive activities and the ambience of the Olympic Games.
Since the 13th of July, the opening of all the live sites, at every live sites, a colorful and rich variety of activities has been staged including performance troupes from other provinces and other countries. Dance troupes and choirs and non professional amateur performers at the community level, they are consisted of a large format screens and cultural showcases, the exchange of emblems and souvenirs."

Well, in Ditan, on what should be a busy weekend afternoon, this is what we found:

AND we had to go through a security check to get to the screen. Throughout Ditan park there were vast numbers of police and plainclothes police. Vendors at a craft fair complained that there were very few customers. And this is what one drinks concession looked like:

A Clear Olympic Sky and Flyweight Watching

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:03:21 GMT

Today, we had lunch in the picturesque Ritan Park, which is one of the three designated protest areas. There was, of course, not a protester in sight. Not much visible security, either. Presumably the authorities already know full well that there won't be any protesters.

In the evening we went to the Worker's Gymnasium to watch the boxing. After Thursday's torrential rain, the sky was utterly clear, with scudding white clouds and views of the mountains in the distance. This was the view in the early evening - not a whiff of pollution.

This is so different from the pall of smog that usually covers the sky.

After half an hour sitting there not knowing what was going on, we had to Google the rules of boxing, after which things became a little clearer. The crowd was interested if not excited....until Zou Shiming appeared. Suddenly, the stadium developed powerful lungs, yelling 'Jia you, jia you!' I wouldn't have liked to be Zou's opponent who, as if to rub salt in the wound, was French (the most hated nation if you are a Chinese nationalist.) But then I wouldn't have much liked to be Zou either - the weight of expectation on these athletes is palpable. Several who have not done as well as expected have collapsed in tears. They are told that the only thing worth having is a gold. Anyway, the crowd loved Zou.

Especially when he beat (literally) his French opponent.

Soaked Again

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:42:47 GMT

I took all the children and one of their friends miles out of town to the water sports centre to watch the rowing yesterday, and it was such a hellish experience it's taken me 24 hours to be able to write about it.

We arrived at 2, as instructed, decked out in sunhats and sunscreen. In fact it was already raining but we were still hopeful. We took our seats in the stand, wrapped ourselves in the plastic capes the volunteers give out, and gritted our teeth.

Then the rain got heavier, thunder began to roar, lightning flashed, black clouds rolled overhead.... the rowing was postponed for an hour, and we all sat in utter misery without any shelter assuming that the organisers knew that this bad weather was about to blow over. At this point it was too wet even to get my camera out - my mobile phone got so wet that it stopped working. Then, after we'd sat there for an hour and a half, the weather getting worse rather than better.... the rowing was cancelled.

And several thousand people all flooded out of the stadium at the same time. There were crowds a dozen deep all along the roadside. I worried about losing a child, and insisted we all hang onto each other. By clambering across a muddy ditch and climbing up the other side, we managed to talk our way onto a bus and even get seats. But still it took us two and a half hours to get home....By which time we had been soaked to the skin for four hours.

I was told I could use my tickets again today, but by the time we got home I simply couldn't face the idea of starting all over again, so I gave my tickets away. Today, of course, in blue skies and gorgeous sunshine, I have been regretting that. Still, it would have taken a lot to get me to trek all the way out there again.

A friend who went to a different event yesterday said she felt the security checks had got stricter - she had a biro confiscaated because it was 'too sharp', and her husband was told he couldn't take his Toblerone into the venue, so he ate it on the spot. I was told I couldn't take in a packet of mint imperials. But when I blanched at the thought of eating them all up, and said I'd throw them away, they softened and allowed me in. The security checks remain good natured, but the security obsession seems to be deepening. Armoured personnel carriers have appeared on the Olympic Green, and sponsors have complained that too few ordinary people are being allowed into the open spaces around the venues.

James took Alistair and Kirsty to hockey this morning, and they got sunburned not soaked. I have been trying to track down some other tickets - there's an online market in unwanted tickets. But there's almost nothing left. The only option was boxing tomorrow night. It's a brutal sport, of course, and we shouldn't encourage it. But most importanly it takes place indoors, so we'll all have seats ringside tomorrow night.

Volleyball is fun...Hockey Leaves Me Cold... and Concerts are Cancelled

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:01:04 GMT

On Saturday, an evening of volleyball converted me to the Olympics - I hadn't realised sports could be so much fun. I resolved to try to get tickets to more events. The women in black and white are cheerleaders, by the way, not players. And the characters in the inflatable plastic suits are the fuwa mascots, not players either.

On Sunday the girls and I sat under umbrellas and swathed in plastic capes in a rainstorm waiting for a hockey game. After an hour waiting, watching the teams warm up in pouring rain, every swipe at the ball sending up gallons of water from the pitch, and soaked to the skin, our good spirits flagged. Shortly after the game started with thunder roaring overhead, we gave up. How the teams played on, I have no idea. We went to the information kiosk (below) for directions home. About a dozen friendly volunteers scratched their heads and consulted maps and frowned and took photos of the girls. I gave up and headed for a bus.... any bus. But to give them credit, one of the volunteers raced after us and followed us onto the bus. Panting, he told us he'd worked out a route for us. It took us two hours to get home by crowded, steaming, bus, then underground, then taxi. but it was a good route, and home we got.

Today I tried booking us tickets for performances advertised in the official Olympics publications - how great, I thought, that we can live in Beijing and see modern dance from New York, and megastar violinists from Italy, and Hairspray in the Great Hall of the People, and Cuban ballet.... But of course we can't. Every performance I wanted to see had been cancelled. I assume it's the Bjork effect - she shouted out 'Free Tibet' after a concert in Shanghai last year. Now it seems the authorities have decided they can't trust foreign performers on their stages.

Day One

Fri, 8 Aug 2008 17:57:07 GMT

The morning dawned hazy. I went to a talk by Norman Foster - who designed Beijing’s new aiport - and Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist who has recorded the building of the new aiport in photographs. Last week Ai Weiwei accused China’s leadership of turning China into a police state in advance of the Olympics. Before the talk began, we were warned we must limit our questioning to the subject of the airport and to keep off politics and The Olympics. We were all very obedient, but Ai Weiwei seemed to chafe at the bit. Sarcastically, he said he hoped we’d all enjoy the blue sky days we were about to enjoy.

The roads around the city were already becoming difficult to navigate because the police kept closing them for official delegations. I guess it’s like this all over the world, and wherever the Olympics takes place. I saw people taking each other''s picture in front of an Olympics countdown clock as it ticked down the last minutes and hours. I saw a lot of police. I saw very few Western tourists, and the taxi drivers I spoke to agreed that there were very few.

This evening we attempted to find a big screen outside to watch the opening ceremony. We had heard that Chinese were being urged to stay at home rather than gathering on the street. Sure enough, when we got to our nearest open air venue, Chaoyang Park, the screen was declared out of order. We were suspicious. We got back in a taxi and set off in the direction of another open air screen, but found ourselves gridlocked in traffic. In the end, rather than sit in traffic all evening, we did a U-turn and headed back to the Lido Holiday Inn, where we’d earlier spotted a screen outdoors. But there was no room at the Holiday Inn - Samsung, one of the Olympic sponsors, was hosting a private party there. Local bars with tv screens were full.

So, with no place to go but home, we visited the local grocery store for supplies of popcorn and fizzy drinks, and found it full of local Chinese stocking up for the evening’s tv watching. The tv was on in the grocery store, and everyone was watching the countdown to the opening ceremony while they queued.

Back at home, on our comfy sofas and with a mountain of food to eat, we watched as the ceremony began with fireworks that burst above the packed Bird’s Nest stadium and the near-deserted city. Then thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers from the Cultural corps, in a spectacle of awesome discipline, began to bang their drums to the glory of China...

Return to Beijing - the Deserted Beer Garden

Thu, 7 Aug 2008 16:38:20 GMT

I got back to Beijing yesterday morning at an unspeakable hour (5.45 in the morning), so 36 hours later I’m still finding my jet-lagged feet in pre-Olympic Beijing. These are my first impressions:

The air is as bad as it has been for months. The air is grey, so thick you could eat it. The sun hangs like a red golf ball in the sky, not shining, just glowing distantly through the smog. I can see no improvement in air quality, and an investigation on the BBC website at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7506925.stm shows that there is a strong correlation between visibility and pollution.

There seem to be very few Western tourists. I’ve been walking up and down along a street which boasts the Lido Holiday Inn, the Rosedale Hotel and the Yanxiang Hotel. I saw no more Westerners than usual, perhaps fewer. At about eight this evening, the Rosedale Hotel’s Beer Garden was empty. The Lido’s, complete with big screen sports coverage, was decidedly sleepy. This is not a scientific survey. Maybe all the tourists are hiding in the Olympic village.

Among the population of Beijing, opinion is polarized. Some people think the Olympics are the best thing since sliced bread and are genuinely excited.

Many taxi drivers have decorated their cars with Chinese flags. On our street, identically-sized Chinese flags hang above the storefronts (which have recently been renovated so that they too are identical.) All this flag-waving does not look like a spontaneous act of patriotic fervour – these bright new flags are not heirlooms dragged out of the attic for a special occasion.

Perhaps the flags have been issued, complete with instructions for flying them. One man described how tomorrow’s opening ceremony was going to be as happy an event as Chinese lunar new year, with families gathering around the TV set.

Other people are offended and angry because of what they describe as excessively heavy-handed security operations. ‘This should be a happy occasion,’ one man said to me. ‘Why do they have to be so anxious?’

There are staff at every bus stop who check bags of passengers for bombs. If you carry a bottle of water, you’re ordered to take a sip to prove it’s not toxic or explosive. If you refuse, you’re not allowed on the bus.

It goes beyond that. Around the city, posters have gone up asking people to inform on each other if they overhear subversives plotting against the government. ‘It’s just like the Cultural Revolution,’ said one man, referring to the bleakest years of Communist history, forty years ago, when people were encouraged to turn on one another. It is said now that if people make remarks criticizing the Olympics in public, they should expect to be taken away and detained until the Olympics are over.

I have spoken to no one who has direct knowledge of anyone being taken away, but the fact that people believe this is so is indicative of people’s state of mind. They feel their leaders don’t trust them (or why would they keep checking their bags?), they suspect that the security measures are as much about political dissent as about terrorism. In return, they are willing to believe the worst of the very leadership which seems to think the worst of them.

I have heard a few people mention an explosion on a bus in central Beijing last week, in which two people were allegedly injured. Again, it is not clear to me whether such an explosion actually happened, or whether people are observing the heavy-handed security measures that are disrupting their lives and are speculating that something specific must have triggered it.

Top Ten Beijing Fiction

Sun, 3 Aug 2008 21:23:33 GMT

Catherine Sampson''s top 10 books on Beijing

guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday July 23 2008
Article history

The newly built Herzog de Meuron Olympic stadium in Beijing. Photograph: Iwan Baan

Catherine Sampson has lived in China for more than 15 years. Her fourth crime novel, The Slaughter Pavilion, is set in Beijing and features private detective Song Ren. It will be published in hardback by Macmillan on September 5. Her third novel, The Pool of Unease, in which private detective Song Ren was introduced, is now available in paperback. She has also contributed a short story to the book Beijing Portrait of a City, a collection of fiction, poetry and essays published by Odyssey which you can buy online here.

"Beijing is about to become host to what will be one of the most fascinating Olympics ever. I first came to Beijing in 1981, more than a quarter of a century ago. It was a sleepy place, where you couldn''t get a taxi and the streets were full of bicycles. Restaurants were staffed by snapping waitresses and closed at eight o''clock. Because of astounding economic growth and because of the Olympics, the city has been transformed - but with restrictions on visas, traffic and public gatherings, Beijing could look like the world''s most over-built ghost town come August. Great swathes of old alleyway housing and street markets have been demolished to make way for some of the world''s most audacious skyscrapers and stunning sports facilities. But the history of this city is one of sometimes murderous political struggles. These ten novels and collections of short stories are rich in satire, and in metaphors for political oppression. Most of the books below are written by Chinese writers who have chosen to live abroad in order to write freely about their country."

1. Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

Published this year, Ma Jian describes the events that led up to the 1989 massacre in Beijing. He has found the perfect metaphor. Dai Wei, a student activist, lies paralysed years after being wounded during the army action of June 4. Those around him believe Dai Wei to be unconscious, but he can see and hear and, most importantly, remember. He is locked in - just as China is locked in - unable to speak or communicate freely, but silently remembering, unable to forget. The novel is rich in contemporary detail – doctors who gouge families for cash for treatment; bulldozers that threaten demolition of homes. Like much of the book, the intricate description of factional rivalries among students is rooted in fact. Ma Jian lives in London.

2. Please Don''t Call Me Human by Wang Shuo

As a teenager, Wang Shuo ran wild in Beijing, and he writes in the slang of the capital. In Please Don''t Call Me Human he''s at his most scathingly satirical. In a thinly veiled reference to the Olympics, his Beijing taxi driver anti-hero competes in an international competition to find the nation most able to humiliate itself, with gory and gloriously symbolic results. Wang Shuo lives in Los Angeles.

3. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

In this short story collection, Yiyun Li writes beautifully about the lives of ordinary people to tell the greater story of contemporary China. In Extra, the first story of the collection, she follows a middle-aged woman who has just been laid off from the bankrupt Beijing Red Star garment factory. The unemployed woman navigates the grim realities of modern China, first in a marriage of convenience, then as a cleaner for rich kids. Each ends tragically, but the woman catches a glimpse of love. Yiyun Li lives in the US.

4. The Uninvited by Yan Geling

This is a comic novel that gently lays bare all manner of social issues. Dan is an unemployed factory worker who discovers by accident that if he pretends to be a journalist he can attend press conferences. That means eating like a king at banquets laid on for the press, and receiving "red packets" of cash which amount to payment for writing adulatory stories. In fact he can make a comfortable living from his assumed identity. Things get more complicated as he is approached to write the stories of several people with grievances. He tries to help, with disastrous consequences. Yan Geling lives in the US.

5. The Crazed by Ha Jin

Here is another metaphor for the censorship of free expression in China, and again it is set during the student demonstrations of 1989. At a provincial university, Prof Yang suffers a stroke. His subsequent outbursts draw parallels between the cultural revolution and pre-Olympic China. This unsettles his student Jian Wan, who eventually leaves to go to Beijing to take part in the demonstrations. Ha Jin lives in the US. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award.

6. The Last Empress by Anchee Min

This is fictionalised history. Anchee Min has taken one of the most notorious women in Chinese history, the empress Dowager Cixi, and has turned her into a surprisingly accessible heroine. Drawn in by the first person narrative, the reader is taken into the heart of imperial life and witnesses first hand the life and death struggles between those who would open to the west and those who would turn China in on itself. It is a struggle that continues today in Zhongnanhai, the Communist party compound which occupies part of the old imperial palace. Anchee Min lives in California.

7. Servet the People by Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke lives in Beijing, and has said that this means he sometimes tones down what he writes. Nevertheless, Serve the People is an unashamed satire on the Communist party''s instruction to "serve the people". A lowly cook working in the provinces takes the instruction too literally when his boss, a local party leader, leaves for Beijing, and the cook finds himself seduced by the official''s wife.

8. I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen

Zhu Wen is another writer who chooses to live in Beijing. I Love Dollars is a collection of short stories that are often absurd and have a strong undercurrent of nihilism. Zhu, tongue firmly in cheek, debates the relative values of sex, political idealism and money.

9. The Dragon''s Tail by Adam Williams

Williams'' latest historical novel, The Dragon''s Tail, follows British spy Harry Airton through the Japanese invasion, the cultural revolution, and up to the Beijing massacre of 1989. Williams'' passion for China''s modern history is rooted in his own family''s experiences as expatriates in China during the same period, and in his own experience as a long-time Beijing resident. The result is engaging, enthusiastic storytelling.

10. Beijing Doll by Chun Sue

This is all teenage angst and boredom. Chun Sue is the name both of the author and the protagonist, and this is thinly veiled autobiography. Chun is pessimistic, rebellious and more interested in sex than in school. The book can feel as tedious as the narrator''s life, but it is an interesting insight into a generation whose lives are as far from the Communist Youth League as from the moon. Don''t be taken in. Beijing Doll tells only part of the story. Back in the late 80s, middle-aged people rolled their eyes about young people''s shallow materialism. In 1989, millions of young people took to the streets nationwide calling for political change.

Which China?

Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:28:56 GMT

Which China?

Don't confuse China's leadership with its people. There's a greater difference between them now than at any time since 1989

- Catherine Sampson
- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday July 28 2008

"What is not clear," Simon Jenkins wrote last Friday of the Beijing Olympics, "is who will win, China or its critics".

We all know what Simon Jenkins means: that China's Communist party leadership is winning the short-term race to host the Olympics on its own terms, but it may face trouble running the marathon – the longer-term struggle. I broadly agree with this analysis.

But when we use the word "China" to refer to the small group of party leaders who wield power, then we play the Communist party's game.

Saying "China" when what we mean is actually the tiny group of men who run the country is a shorthand that we've all used, myself included. Before you roll your eyes and accuse me of being picky, I would argue that it is extremely important now, in 2008, to make this distinction.

It is the Communist party which has, very cleverly, for decades, worked to conflate the greater good, patriotism, nationalism and one-party rule. That is why western media coverage is judged both inside and outside China to be either "pro-" or "anti-" China, when in many cases the western media is simply telling it how it is, or telling it as well as it can, given the limits on access. Is Simon Jenkins in fact using the Communist party's own vocabulary when he describes recent western press coverage of China as "hostile"?

More importantly, this use of an all-inclusive "China" is the most potent method of control that the leadership has over its own people. To raise questions about one-party rule – indeed to raise questions about pretty much anything – is to be "anti-China", a dissident.

This year, China's Communist party has faced a perfect storm of stresses. Natural disasters have stretched relief capabilities to their limits, first in the snowstorms at lunar new year, and then in the devastating earthquake. Rioting by Tibetans against Han Chinese has laid bare one of the most sensitive areas of policymaking, both internally and in relations with the west. The Olympic games, which were intended to be China's moment of glory, are threatening to go sour. Grievances about price rises and official corruption have fed protests and, in some cases, riots in the provinces.

Journalists cannot report, because they do not know, what effect this has had on the Communist party leadership, which shows a publicly united front. But it would be naive to think that everything is as harmonious in private. For those skilled in the science of China-watching there are tiny hints that might be cracks in the party response to these crises. China's modern political history shows periods of apparent stability disrupted by violent political rows at the top.

I have lived in China for about 15 years on and off since I first went there in 1981. I was in Beijing until the end of June this year (and will return there in August). My sense, as I spoke to people about the things that were happening, was that there were far greater differences of opinion than at any time since the demonstrations and massacre of 1989.

I encountered angry anti-western sentiment, complaints that the west had not given enough aid to earthquake victims, complaints that western leaders who might boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics were maliciously spoiling China's moment in the sun.

I also encountered ordinary people – not people who would describe themselves as dissidents – who were furious with their leadership, who described as "stupid" their paranoia about Olympic security. (In Beijing, a security threat might include someone wearing a "Free Tibet" T-shirt). I have heard people say, "Tibet has nothing to do with me, why should I care?". I have heard people rail against propaganda. I have met taxi drivers who get their news from the internet and who can discuss intelligently the differences between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In the past, the party exerted control through state-run work units which dispensed healthcare and education as well as birth control and wages. People's lives were absorbed into the sphere of party control. That has largely vanished. The carrot and the stick have gone, people's economic lives are basically their own, and party rule is now largely exerted through a combination of propaganda and damage limitation.

My point is simply that we should be mindful now, more than ever, how we think and write about China. We must distinguish China the nation from the Communist party leadership which dictates policy. We must remember at all times that the Communist party is rarely united and that stability is often an illusion. And most of all we should remember that the vast variation in opinion among the ordinary people who make up China does not make up a monolithic will. The struggle, as it emerges, will not be between "China" and "its critics" – it will be the debate inside China itself.

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday July 28 2008.

Before the Sky Turned Blue

Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:20:46 GMT

I wrote this for The Guardian before blue skies swept across Beijing!

Little escape from Beijing''s smog

Many Chinese people are beginning to grumble about air quality, but unlike the expatriates they have little choice but to live with it.

- Catherine Sampson
- guardian.co.uk,
- Thursday July 10 2008
- Article history

To those of us who live in Beijing, it''s not news that the Olympic host city is horribly polluted. We live in a pall of smog that can press down on us for days on end. It is a fine day when I open the curtains in the morning and can see the sky. The city is transformed. But there are days when I open the curtains and the skyscraper that I know is there, just a few hundred yards away, is so shrouded in smog that I cannot see it. Then my spirits sink.

Beijing''s cityscape, with its mirrored tower blocks, and its steel and glass, is a city designed to reflect a blue sky and puffs of white cloud. Smog reflected is smog amplified, and some of the most stunning architectural designs in the world appear as little more than murky shapes. When Ethiopian world record holder Haile Gebrselassie said he would not take part in the marathon in Beijing because he feared the pollution would aggravate his asthma, he raised the question: what about the people who live there?

Expatriates who live in Beijing are there largely out of choice. For the most part, they don''t plan to settle for a lifetime in Beijing. They hope that they can get out before the air does their lungs any lasting damage. Those whose lungs protest get out quickly. A couple of years ago, one very clever American entrepreneur spotted what he called "the perfect storm" and has since built a roaring business importing Swiss air purifiers. They cost about £700 each, but many expatriates have several humming constantly in their homes.

But the Chinese population of Beijing has little choice. They are unlikely to be able to leave town – their jobs and families tie them there. Even if they were to move out of Beijing, many of China''s other cities offer little better in terms of air quality. Water quality and food quality are equal concerns. For much of the time, we are – expatriates and Chinese alike – in denial. Who can survive, day to day, if they are thinking that every breath they take is toxic? Worse, that every breath their child takes is toxic?

China''s astounding growth means that, so far, everyone has turned a blind eye to the appalling quality of the air. For the expatriate, China is the engine of the world economy, and an immensely rewarding place to live and work in many ways. Similarly, many Chinese residents see their own living standards rise with every puff of smoke from a factory chimney.

The lack of a free press has helped to foster a mass delusion. Until recently, most Chinese I met simply referred to smog as "fog" until the newspapers announced there would be a new word – "mai" or "haze". There are now warnings in the press on particularly bad days that children, the elderly and those with heart conditions, should not go outside. These are rare instances of transparency in a system that is generally as opaque as the sky.

The authorities are adept at being economical with the truth. There is no real-time monitoring. So, apart from the truly atrocious days when the government itself issues warnings, it is impossible for schools to know whether it is safe or not to let children out to play. Some western experts have caught the authorities moving the monitoring stations away from more polluted areas. Satellite photography has shown Beijing completely hidden in smog even at times when Chinese officials have said the air quality is acceptable.

Of course, this is pollution that we in the west have exported to China – if the goods that we buy in the shops were all manufactured in Britain, our air would be foul. China''s communist government has welcomed the polluting industries because it needs continuously to raise living standards in order to retain its own hold on power. China''s population has put up with it so far, partly out of economic necessity, partly out of ignorance fostered by the press, and partly because any act of protest is met with instant retribution.

I will be in Beijing for the Olympics, and I am fascinated to see whether the emergency measures will have the desired effect. I''m not quite sure how I''m going to get my children to school because our car (which has an odd-numbered licence plate) will only be allowed out on odd-numbered days. The measures will be in place from July 20 to September 20 (the end of the Paralympics). For two months, the city will grind almost to a halt, as any enterprise that is judged to be polluting will be temporarily closed down. It''s true that the air is generally better at Chinese New Year, when the whole country is on holiday. If the air is clear in August, it will show that where there is a will there is a way. But no government could expect as a permanent measure to close down industry and take half the cars off the road.

Many Chinese people are beginning to grumble about air quality, and to worry about their children. Those with internet access may have seen alarming statistics from the WHO about the numbers of pollution-related cancer deaths. Sometimes, pollution scandals leak onto the internet and embarrass the authorities. Under pressure from the west, China is beginning to take notice of the need to foster greener technologies. There are many ways in which China has leapfrogged the west. It is possible that China''s leaders may surprise us all.

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday July 10 2008.

The Tiananmen Taboo

Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:07:42 GMT

To assume the 1989 massacre has been forgotten by China is to assume the Communist party line

- Catherine Sampson
- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday June 30 2008
- Article history

Beijing is reported to have forbidden live Olympics coverage from Tiananmen Square. This will be a bitter disappointment to international broadcasters, who would have cherished the exoticism of live pictures from China''s most iconic site.

Tiananmen Square, and the massacrethat took place there in 1989 after six weeks of anti-government demonstrations, is one of China''s great taboos. Some western commentators say that after nearly 20 years, people in China have forgotten the massacre of June 4, citing the fact that no one talks about it. That is true, no one talks about it. But I would contend that this does not mean it has been forgotten.

Nineteen years on, the Communist party is prepared to offend the western businesses it has spent so much time wooing for fear that some incident – a banner raised, a pot of paint thrown at the portrait of Chairman Mao – will echo the Tiananmen demonstrations, and will be captured on film and broadcast around the world. Nineteen years on, anyone in China typing "June 4" or "Tiananmen massacre" into Google will find their use of the search engine temporarily disabled by China''s firewall. It is the party censors who have turned Tiananmen into a taboo, and precisely because they know it has not been forgotten.

Nineteen years ago, I watched from a 14th floor balcony of the Beijing Hotel as an armoured personnel carrier sped down Chang''An Avenue towards Tiananmen Square. I had expected these tank-like vehicles to be slow, lumbering things, but given a good straight urban road they were fast. I was a young foreign correspondent with no experience of war zones. I''d never seen a tracer bullet before, and I was horrified to learn that a tank could crush a bus pulled across the avenue as a roadblock and keep right on going. If June 4 was a nasty shock to me, that night was a tragedy for many families.

Nineteen years on, the house of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist party general secretary who supported the students, is still sealed off, although he is dead. His secretary, Bao Tong, is still under 24-hour surveillance, as is Ding Zilin, the mother of one of those who died.

The massacre was followed by mass arrests and a vicious purge. Those who had protested were forced to lie about their involvement or recant, face disgrace and worse. Of those who took part, hundreds were jailed, and between 50 and 200 are thought to still be imprisoned. Many others fled the country. Some of those have now returned, with foreign passports in their pockets and high-paying jobs in business. But millions came out to demonstrate – every day on the street I probably pass several people who took part.

And yet, in Beijing you almost never hear the words "June 4" uttered. Such is the party''s alarm at the words "Six Four" (as the massacre is known) that I am always uncomfortably conscious of the fact that the digits six and four form part of my phone number. To the party, June 4 is a taboo because it fears that open discussion of the massacre would erode party authority. To the man and woman in the street, June 4 is taboo simply because to talk about it remains extremely dangerous.

One result of the taboo is that many young people simply do not know what happened in 1989, and that in itself is a propaganda coup. I have heard of Chinese students first learning about the massacre from foreign students. I am told that most families don''t discuss June 4 in front of their children. It''s a depressing topic, after all. There was no happy ending. Besides, there is no imminent prospect for change, so what''s the point? Parents have seen what can happen to children if they rebel. Better to pretend it never happened, and get on with life.

Getting on with life is subtly different from the "Get a Life" school of thought, which says that June 4 is not a taboo, it''s just irrelevant. This line of argument, advanced by some westerners and Chinese, runs thus: "China''s moved on. It''s not the same place that it was. Get a life." A sub-set of the "Get a Life" approach adds: "No country''s perfect, every country commits human rights abuses. Get a life."

For those who want to believe the best of the Communist party – and this includes many people both Chinese and expatriate – there is a third option: "The Communist party really wants to admit that the massacre was wrong but it can''t do so until the former leaders who were involved have died."

Traditionally, the Chinese are past masters at putting unpleasant truths behind them temporarily while they do the only thing they can do, which is to get on with life. For the past 19 years, that has meant elbowing for survival and in some cases even for prosperity in a chaotic, booming economy. That''s certainly distracting. But getting on with life does not mean forgetting. Every year in Hong Kong, where there is more freedom and where there are many distractions, thousands gather to commemorate the June 4 massacre. When I do broach the topic with Chinese acquaintances, I become convinced that at some point in the not very distant future, June 4 will re-emerge as a political rallying point. Although people almost never bring it up in conversation, it only takes a little gentle encouragement in private to provoke a flood of anguished memory. One woman I know started to talk about a neighbour who had set fire to a petrol can in an effort to slow the advance of the army. "He was executed," she said, still clearly horrified all these years late, "just for that. He wasn''t even allowed to see his family at the end." Another woman described how her husband had gone to the square and had seen doctors shot dead even while they were trying to collect the injured.

To assume Tiananmen is forgotten is to assume the party line. There are many people who would like to forget, but that is a different thing. I doubt the silence will go on forever.

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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday June 30 2008. It was last updated at 10:21 on June 30 2008.

The Lone Biker

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:49:12 GMT

This is the man I saw in Beijing a few weeks ago, outside the Olympics stadium, who had bicycled all the way across China to support the Olympic games. He sleeps rough. His family thought he was mad when he told them what he intended to do, but he went anyway. He says he''ll spend his whole life publicising the Olympics. He is parked, here, next to another man who set off from another province with the same single thought in his head.

Doping Poster

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 08:01:39 GMT

This is the poster that has appeared outside our local pharmacy.

The wording:

No illegal sales of Protein Assimilation Preparations and Peptide Hormones. Athletes should be cautious with drugs containing banned substances.

The Olympic Dragon

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 09:17:57 GMT

This is the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, and in the distance Panggu Plaza, which is built to represent a dragon. To the rear of this tall block - you can just see the edge of a roof here - are a series of lower buildings that represent the dragon's back. The screens on the side of the buildings will transmit Olympic programming. Below, there's a close up. You can see a small sphere in the dragon's mouth, intended to represent a pearl. The building houses, as I understand it, a seven star (!?) hotel, as well as luxury office space. When I was there, a week or so ago, it looked as though it had a way to go before it was fully functioning. However, this is Beijing, and there are a whole four weeks before the opening ceremony, so there's plenty of time. The pictures give an idea of the smog which has blanketed the capital recently. The photograph of the Bird's Nest was taken from outside the perimeter fence, which is manned by guards.

Riots

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 15:51:07 GMT

Riots have broken out in Guizhou after the death of a 17-year old girl, Li Shufen. As far as I understand, Li’s body was found in a river. Police said it was a case of drowning, but her family believes she was raped and killed by relatives of local officials. When police insisted that a preliminary investigation had found no evidence of murder, riots broke out involving up to thirty thousand people. Police cleared the crowds with tear gas, and are now patrolling the streets.

State-run media has started broadcasting news identifying rioters as hooligans, which has only enraged people further. Claims and counter-claims have been posted on the internet, many of them taking their arguments beyond the specifics of this case, and complaining of official corruption in general. The authorities are deleting these posts as fast as they appear. Some netizens are posting via sites which re-format their posts so that the lines run vertically rather than horizontally. This is the classic style for writing Chinese, so it''s a very elegant way of getting around censors.

This is one of the largest incidents of mass unrest in recent years, and will unsettle the already unsettled Communist Party before the Olympics, likely making them clamp down further on anyone they see as a ‘trouble-maker’.

Every time I ask anyone Chinese why the Communist Party is so obsessed by security at the Olympics they reply, ‘Because they are afraid.’ Incidents like this - and according to official figures there are thousands of smaller riots or demonstrations every year - explain why.

I have written, for the Comment is Free section of the Guardian Online, about the massacre of 1989, and the fact that in my opinion, it is not forgotten. If you are interested, you can read my post here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/30/china

An Awfully Patriotic Morning

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:25:13 GMT

This happened a few weeks ago, and before the Sichuan earthquake. For one reason and another, I didn’t post this blog then. Now, however, I am in Scotland on holiday, and so this can serve as archive material to fill the gaping void. It gives a small taste of how patriotism and culture intersect in Beijing at the moment.

One morning this spring, far too early to be properly awake, I headed to the Beijing Youth Palace for a gathering of local choirs. Each choir was to give a brief performance, and I’d signed up to sing as part of a small international group.

The Youth Palace is a former aristocratic residence that is part of the Forbidden City complex. The site was taken over decades ago by the Communist Party and transformed into a maze of practice rooms to nurture children who were identified as particularly musically talented. The traditional courtyards are home to peeling red walls, golden roofs and mythical animals rendered in bronze. At night, one can almost see the ghosts of imperial concubines scurrying through the shadows. A Space Race themed playground, all stars and rockets, hints at another ghost: the Soviet roots of China’s communism.

This morning’s multi-choir extravaganza, the Sounds of Spring, has taken place for the past few years. What I had forgotten is that this is 2008, and therefore what might have been a straightforward celebration of choral music had of course turned into an Olympics-fest.

There were choirs of children, choirs of adults, choirs from kindergartens, choirs from far-flung corners of the city. But all of them, without exception (except us…) were dressed in T shirts in the colours of the Olympic rings. The event was kicked off with a speech about the glories China was about to enjoy as the Olympic host. And almost every song was either Olympic-themed or politically themed, and often both (because, after all, that’s the point).

Some of the inspiring lyrics: “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.” The only western song I identified among the swelling chords and electronic backing tracks was “O Sole Mio”. Except for our programme, that is… still, the gospel song, ‘We Shall Overcome,’ was introduced diplomatically as ‘A traditional English song.’ And the African spiritual that we sang was incomprehensible, so no one will have known that it meant, ‘We March in the Light of God.’ Left to me, we would have translated every word. Not as a political or religious statement, but simply in honour of honesty and so that a different voice was heard. But then that’s why I’m not a diplomat.

It was a good natured event. Outside, the sky grew dark, thunder roared and rain poured down. Inside, under extravagantly painted imperial ceilings, the children waved tinsel pom-poms, sang in perfect harmony and applauded their country’s coming glory. I have never seen such a mass of well-behaved children. The patriotic songs are intended to keep them that way.

Tardis

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:56:29 GMT

A couple of hundred yards from our home is the Rosedale Hotel. Suddenly, a couple of days ago, a kiosk landed, like the tardis, on the pavement outside. We have all inspected the kiosk, which so far remains locked and - apparently - unoccupied. On the outside there are pictures of a few foreigners asking directions outside the Olympic stadiums, and a sign saying 'Volunteer.'

But increasingly it looks as though there won't be many foreigners asking directions. Reports are coming in thick and fast of people turned down for visas, even if they have Olympic tickets. One American woman told me her sister had been in a queue in a consulate in the States, in which every single person in the queue was turned away because they had inadequate paperwork. Some of them may sort their papers out - they need hotel vouchers, tickets, flight bookings, etc etc - but some never will, or will still be turned down. China's government is in an alarmingly paranoid mood.

Today I had an alarmingly paranoid taxi driver, who spoke angrily about European leaders who had decided not to attend the Olympic ceremonies. 'Suppose you have a neighbour you don't like, ' he said, 'if his son is getting married, you don't cause trouble on the day.' He told me it didn't matter if foreigners didn't come, Beijing wasn't holding the Games to make money, unlike other countries. He said the most important thing was safety, there had never been an assassination in Beijing since the beginning of the People's Republic, and there wouldn't be at the Games. He happened to liver near the Olympic stadium, and told me that the security guards in his building would all have to leave town because they were migrant workers who would be banished. Because of the building's proximity to the stadia, these doormen would be replaced with People's Armed Police.

I walked around the perimeter fence of the Bird's Nest today. It has become quite a tourist pull, and there were groups of people taking photographs or having their photograph's taken against the backdrop of the building. There were also two men there who had cycled carts to Beijing from in one case Zhejiang and in the other case Yunnan. They sleep in their red and yellow decorated carts, or sleep rough. They had decorated their carts with pro-Olympic slogans. Once I've worked out how to post photos, I'll post some. One had his head shaved in a kind of Olympic sculpture. He said that even once the Olympics were over, he would devote his life to the Olympics. Neither of them had any tickets to attend sports events. They were both, I suspect, pretty close to crazy.

These eccentrics were the one colourful and human splash in what was otherwise a grey, over-sized and bleak landscape. You've all seen photos of the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. But it was another building that freaked me out. Pangu Plaza is vast - I can't begin to describe it's huge arrogance - and shaped like a dragon, the iconic representation of China. It will house a seven star (seven??) hotel, and an apartment complex offering homes that cost millions of dollars.

Ted

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:31:51 GMT

This blog entry has nothing to do with China or with smog. I''ve stumbled across the most amazing website, and it has lit the light of obsession in my eye. I think everyone should know about it. It is called www.ted.com - the acronym has something to do with technology and design. Apparently - who knew? - there are TED conferences every year at which artists and designers and scientists are invited to speak. Their lectures are posted online on this website. This morning I watched neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describe her own brain haemorrage. That was after Isabel Allende got stuck buffering, but in general these talks play smoothly and seamlessly. Perhaps if you''re living in Britain with the BBC and Channel Four, or in the US with NPR, then this wouldn''t be such a big deal. And of course it may be that to everyone living in Britain or the US, Ted itself is old hat. (What? You mean no one''s heard of Ted in Beijing?) But if you live on a diet of pirated DVDs (which we don''t, of course) then Ted is a breath of fresh air. Which brings us back to the subject of smog....

The Official Cheer - with thanks to www.danwei.org

Thu, 5 Jun 2008 06:10:47 GMT

This just in from the great website www.danwei.org

The official Olympic cheer

Posted by Joel Martinsen, June 5, 2008 11:42 AM

This segment from CCTV''s Network News introduces an authoritative, four-part Olympic Cheer. Go Olympics! Go Beijing! See below for detailed instructions.

The cheer is a joint product of the Party Office of Spiritual Civilization Development and Guidance (GODPP), the Ministry of Education, BOCOG, and CCTV. Here''s an illustrated guide, which will appear on television and promotional posters in the near future:

Step 1: Clap two times (while chanting 奥运, "Olympics")
Step 2: Hands in fists with thumbs up, arms extended upward (while chanting, 加油, "Let''s go!")
Step 3: Clap two time (while chanting 中国, "China")
Step 4: Hands in fists, arms extended outward and upward (while chanting 加油, "Let''s go!")

Li Ning, president of the Beijing Etiquette Institute, described how the cheer can be adapted to different contexts (from The Beijing News):

At yesterday''s ceremony, Li Ning explained that the uniformity of the cheer contained a multitude of variations. It could be "Go Olympics! Go China!" as well as "Go China! Go Yao Ming!" or "Go Brazil! Go Ronaldino!" It will work to give encouragement to every country and athlete in competition.

She said that the civilized cheer "Go Olympics! Go China!" expresses the "Citius, Altius, Fortius" Olympic spirit and is in line with general international principles for cheering, while at the same time possessing characteristics of Chinese culture. Overall, the cheer unites both gestures and words into a smooth, flowing whole.

The Beijing News also reports that students across the country will be trained in the cheer, particularly the 800,000 students who will watch the games on-site. In addition, 448 volunteers will lead spectators in the cheer at both the Olympics and Paralympics.

Links and Sources

The Beijing News (Chinese): Four steps to the Olympic cheer
GODPP (Chinese): Illustrated guide to the Olympic Cheer
Video from Sina

A Tale of Two Taxi Drivers

Mon, 26 May 2008 14:19:06 GMT

I'm in a Dickens mood. My son, Alistair, is taking part in a performance of Oliver! later this week (Thursday to Saturday evenings, plus Saturday matinee - purchase your tickets soon to avoid disappointment) at the People's Liberation Army Opera House way across the other side of town. This means a lot of time spent with taxi drivers.

'Your Gordon Brown, he's very different from Tony Blair,' was the opening conversational gambit of yesterday's driver. He waxed lyrical, and fairly accurate, on the subject of British politics. I asked about his interest in foreign news, and he said, 'I pay a lot of attention to what's going on in developed countries.' It soon became clear that he not only paid attention, he also compared and contrasted. He talked about the rescue effort in Sichuan, worried that the rebuilding was going to be a long term challenge, and criticised government disaster preparedness, citing the shortage of tents. Then he said, 'That's the problem with a one party system. There are no other parties to scrutinise policy as there are in democracies.'

Today's taxi driver came at the whole thing from an entirely different angle. 'Have you see how everyone's been donating money all over China? he asked me. Yes, I said, I had. And I told him how my children were also involved in money-raising activities at their school for the earthquake. 'Hmm' he grunted, unconvinced. 'I get the feeling,' he said, 'that western governments haven't donated very much money for the earthquake victims. All these developed countries in Europe, and America, they can afford much more than they've given...' I told him that government donations were one thing, and that individual donations would be made through non-government channels to the many charities involved in disaster relief throughout the world. But still he wasn't willing to be won over. I suggested that the rescue and rebuilding of Sichuan would be a long-term challenge. 'No,' he said, 'There's no problem. China can do it. There are so many Chinese. We can do anything.' He was a living embodiment of the kind of nationalism that has been growing here ever since the Tibetan riots in Lhasa, and the official condemnation of the western press that followed.

The days when we can say 'the Chinese think this or that' are over, and that is heartening, no matter whether one agrees or disagrees. It proves, for one thing, that whatever the censors try to do, information from outside does make its way in. But when there are two such distinct points of view in the general public, you can bet there are two distinct points of view in the leadership too. I know I hark on about splits in the leadership, and the strain of this year's events on the unity of the party, but in the past such internal party struggles have sometimes taken us by surprise.

''Jia You'' demonstrations

Fri, 23 May 2008 16:11:26 GMT

James has returned from the earthquake zone. He is impressed by the survivors'' stoicism, by the efficiency of the relief effort, and by the openness to press coverage. I hear this from many people. Everyone here is an expert. After all, for three days there was quite literally nothing on the television except earthquake stories. People in grocery stores, and on buses, and in offices, have all been glued to the screen.

Today I spoke to a Chinese friend who was almost in tears when she spoke of the way the leadership had responded to the crisis. ''It wasn''t anyone''s fault,'' she kept saying, ''it was a natural disaster.'' So many Chinese disasters have been manmade, but this time no one was to blame, and the leaders were only to be praised.

In Chengdu, James saw another ''Jia You'' demonstration such as the one I describe below in Tiananmen Square. Demonstrators chant ''Come on China, Come on Sichuan,'' in what at least on the surface appears to be a message of support. Similar demonstrations - apparently spontaneous - have been reported in Beijing. In each case, the police shadow them warily. The only demonstrations the government allows are those the government approves of - in this case, the message seems to be what they would deem ''patriotic''.

Still, this earthquake is going to have a profound affect on China. For the moment it has created a bond of sympathy which will be a uniting force, and unlikely a dissident force. But in the longer run, if demonstrators are allowed to wander the streets, and if the ties of sympathy turn into new allegiances, all bets are off.

Siren Wails of Grief - then crowds gather....

Mon, 19 May 2008 08:28:56 GMT

Sirens have just wailed eerily across Beijing for three minutes, and car horns sounded as people fell silent and only birds continued to sing. Exactly a week after the earthquake, China is officially entering three days of mourning. Flags are at half mast, cinemas, nightclubs and bars have been ordered to close down (and police are patrolling to make sure that they do). Even the controversial Olympic torch relay has been suspended.

My visiting brother, Steve, who was in Tiananmen Square during the 3-minute silence, said that thousands of people poured into the square, presumably to show their solidarity with the mourning of the victims.

And this just in, video here of what happened next in Tiananmen Square. http://video.sina.com.cn/news/c/bn/2008-05-19/145415957.shtml

This is perhaps the biggest chanting crowd to have gathered in Tiananmen Square since 1989 (perhaps with exception of happy crowds celebrating the Olympics hosting decision). So - what are we seeing? What they're chanting is, 'Jia You!' which is what you shout at a football match when you want your team to make extra effort to win. So, at least on the surface, they're chanting for China to make that extra effort to overcome the hardship of the earthquake. This is intriguing. I might have expected a silent gathering, heads bowed. So: are they making a noisy show of support for the world? Or is this an expression of the nationalism we saw gathering after Tibet and before the earthquake? Or do they want something else?

This year, with its combination of the biggest riots in Tibet since 1989, the biggest natural disaster since 1976, and the biggest international event to be hosted since 1949, is becoming a huge test for the Communist Party, and gatherings in Tiananmen Square are immensely politically significant.

The earthquake has now been upgraded to 8.0 on the Richter scale. 'They didn't dare tell the truth about how big it was,' was the analysis of one Beijing man, used to lies about everything from temperature to pollution.

There is little hope left now for those still buried under the rubble. There has been a huge outpouring of sympathy, both from inside China and outside. There are international rescue teams working in Sichuan, and aid delivered even from a US military plane.

Beyond the awful human tragedy, there is also, of course, political spin. I watched the English-language staterun station CCTV-9 this morning, and earthquake coverage was being heavily tilted to reflect adulation of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who have both visited the earthquake zone. They have been shown on TV cuddling distressed children, lecturing rescue teams on how to rescue people, and reassuring victims (their minders hushing the victims' sobs so that the words of wisdom from the leaders can be better heard.)

On this morning's television shows, the leaders were described as 'popular heroes,' even as 'counsellor in chief'. Of course, they are fulfilling the role that leaders always fill when they visit disaster zones, whether they are George Bush or Tony Blair. They carry the message with them that the thoughts of the nation are with the afflicted area.

The CCTV-9 anchor praised Wen and Hu because they had shown a very different attitude to the 'Gang of Four' during the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976. To be honest, it's pretty faint praise to compare them to extreme leftist leaders of more than thirty years ago. But the point is actually well made. This is the same regime, the same Communist Party, that has led China through disasters natural and party-made.

James will go to Sichuan tomorrow. It's the first time that foreign journalists have been allowed fairly free access to a disaster zone in China. Meanwhile, a huge amount of information is emerging on the internet, and for anyone who wants to access some of that, I wholeheartedly recommend this link to global voices online.

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/05/16/china-time-to-pray/

Earthquake

Tue, 13 May 2008 02:31:20 GMT

I was sitting on a particularly wobbly stool yesterday afternoon when things got even wobblier. I looked out of the window, but couldn't see buildings swaying, and after a minute the strange sensation passed. I thought nothing more of it until, a few minutes later, James texted me to say, Did you feel it?

'We had an earthquake!' Rachel declared when she got back home. She and Alistair described sitting in their classrooms and the children noticing that the lights were swaying to and fro, and pointing it out to teachers. A few moments later, messengers came to the classrooms to say they were to be evacuated. Rachel, whose class had just sat down to start on a practice science SAT, were only too pleased to be able to abandon it.

People working in high rise buildings in Beijing report swaying that was truly alarming. Nevertheless, today we realise that we felt just the flutter of a hugely powerful earthquake nearly a thousand miles away. Already, the death toll is climbing to ten thousand, and there is as yet no news of Wenchuan, at the epicentre.

The television has wall to wall coverage of the rescue effort - the authorities are acting fast, and have released news fast. They know they have to get this right. First for practical reasons: This is Yangtze country, and the dams along the river are notoriously vulnerable to earthquakes, landslides, and then to tidal waves. Second, because many people are dissatisfied with the government on a whole range of issues, rising prices high on the list. The Communist Party doesn't retain power through a popular vote, but popular revolt could destroy them. Third, because whatever the Communist Party's mistakes, they will be magnified in Olympics Year. Fourth, because earthquakes are hugely symbolic in China. In 1976, the Tangshan Earthquake killed nearly a quarter of a million people. It is tied inexorably in the minds of the Chinese with the end of the rule of Chairman Mao and the dawn of the reform period.

Thermal Tickets

Mon, 12 May 2008 05:43:46 GMT

An Olympic ticket postscript. Having booked and paid for all my lovely women''s hockey tickets online, I went to the Bank of China this morning to pick them up. I handed over my passport and it was duly photocopied and ...well... filed, I suppose. Where DO all the photocopies of passports go in China, there must be warehouses stacked full of them. (This morning I had to provide another one to get an ID card to walk in and out of the compound where I live.) Anyway, I was handed the tickets, and asked to sign for them. I had to copy out the script word for word, and the script was:

"The thermal tickets marked with the date of printed have been picked up."

I pointed out that this wasn''t actually English, and the bank clerk told me that many other people had said the same thing, but ''it''s come from above, we can''t change it.'' And of course she couldn''t, so there was no point in complaining, I just buckled under and copied it out.

The Third Phase

Mon, 5 May 2008 15:04:48 GMT

Today was the scarily-named 'third phase', the day Olympic event tickets went on sale to the public. The first two phases were lotteries in which we failed to win a single ticket even though we thought we'd chosen two utterly unpopular sports, to whit synchronised swimming and trampoline gymnastics. It turns out they have fans. Lots of fans.

I woke up this morning with a sinking heart. None of us are big sports fans in our household. We can't really see the point in getting off the sofa to run around a track or catch a ball. Because we live in Beijing, however, we've decided that our children need to attend at least one Olympic event so that they can tell their grandchildren about it. But that's easier said than done. In the last phase of applications for tickets, the computer system crashed. Sure enough, when I went online this morning, the system just took me around and around in circles. Want to order tickets? Sure. Which event? OK. Want to order tickets? Sure. Which event? Ok. Want to order tickets?.Sure. Which event? ...

I hurled the computer out of the window and reluctantly, every part of me protesting that this was madness, I went to join the queue at the awful Bank of China, which has been draped for the past week in a red banner proclaiming that it is a venue for Olympic ticket sales starting today. The queue snaked outside the bank. There were eighty people in front of me. Three hours after the bank opened, only ten of them had been served. Some of them had been queuing since three in the morning. They'd brought stools and snacks, and eventually bank staff handed around cups of water. The mood was one of resigned, even amused, tolerance for this latest display of Olympic ineptitude.

'There's a problem with the computer system,' a member of the bank staff explained sheepishly. 'It's taking forty minutes to process each customer's request...'

Now I'm no good at maths, but even I could work out that at that rate the bank was scarcely going to make it to number 30 by the close of play, let alone number 80 in the queue...

So I walked back home, turned on two computers, set up two accounts, one in my name and one in James's, and went online on each, scouring the Olympic schedules for tickets that were still available and leaping for my Visa card every time the screen barked at me to 'Fill in this form in two minutes.'

Two hours later I had discovered the sport which is less popular than any other sport in the entire world. Even worse than synchronised swimming. We now have tickets for women's hockey coming out of our ears.

Who Cares?

Fri, 2 May 2008 15:43:16 GMT

Yesterday, May 1st, there were demonstrations outside the French supermarket chain Carrefour in several Chinese cities. I''m not sure whether anyone can quite remember what crime Carrefour committed, but in general terms the chain seems to be paying the price for comments made by the French president that were critical of China''s human rights record in Tibet. "Well!" Carrefour might protest loudly, "he was hardly the only one." But instead of arguing their corner, Carrefour has tried placating their nationalist critics, only to find their desperate efforts to dress in Olympic-logo uniforms slammed as illegal (a huffy China having decided the uniforms infringed Olympic copyright).

Still, shoppers went on shopping. And this is in keeping with my poll of ... oh... well under a dozen Beijingers. Who tell me that they simply don''t care about all this nationalist ranting, that it has nothing to do with them. The days when the Communist Party could mobilise the masses are over, they say wearily. The Communist Party no longer puts rice on their table, or pays their hospital bills, or educates their children. They look at their newspapers, and they cast a large helping of salt over every word uttered by the leadership, and they watch the demonstrations and know that the only demonstrations in China are state-approved. Amazingly - and I''m pretty surprised by this myself - I''ve been told by several people that they don''t even give a damn about Tibet and its splittists (I thought EVERYONE, no matter how sensible, hated a splittist). Granted, the people I''ve talked to are by and large middle-aged. They''ve seen campaigns come and go, and they''ve witnessed first hand the nastiness of the regime when it becomes defensive and hits out.

Still, there are demonstrators out there outside Carrefour, and there are people who get extremely hot under the collar about Tibet, and about ''the western media'' . My own analysis is that, as is the case everywhere and always, the young are the most eager to be mobilised. I am told that many young people who demonstrate outside Carrefour are just wowed that they are allowed to demonstrate at all. (One reason the Communist Party gets nervous is that they fear nationalist protests could turn into something else - perhaps anti-party protests.) In China, many young people are not aware of how bad things can get when politics turns against you - the massacre of 1989 is taboo in many households, as it is in public discourse. When nationalist activism flips from being a positive force to being a liability, then the political tide will turn in a minute.

No Fun At All, But Friendly Traffic Police

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:30:18 GMT

Beijing feels like a city bracing itself for a season of utterly cheerless celebration and paranoid control freakery. Police are going door to door in housing compounds checking that foreign residents have registered their address with the police. This is because the authorities are terrified of foreigners disrupting the Games with - God forbid - a Free Tibet T shirt, or a banner. They aren't trying to catch the long-term residents, but the short-term visitors who they suspect might have come here to dig in for a few months before the Olympics.

These checks give the authorities a sense that they know where everyone is, and indeed they do. Every registration in modest neighbourhood police stations, is entered into a city-level database which is accessible (and frighteningly accurate) from any other police station.

Usually the Olympics are the occasion for a bit of spontaneous good cheer. But things aren't looking good for Beijing. The city has cancelled the hugely popular Midi rock festival, which was due to take part in a park next week. It has cancelled another culture fair in another park which was to promote the countries of the European Union. Nationalist protests may take place next week outside Carrefour, the hapless target of much anti-French protest. It's increasingly difficult to get visas even to set foot on Chinese soil.

This morning, I went to get my driving licence renewed. First I had to go to a clinic a stamp put on a form to confirm that my eyes, ears and general skeletal shape were satisfactory. Then I headed off to the offices of the Traffic Police. There, in the car park, a smashed up car was displayed on a raised dais. On one side of the dais was a banner warning that this was what happened if you drove badly. On the other, pragmatically, was the telephone number of a scrap yard - presumably it was they who'd paid for the display.

At the doorway to the Foreigner's Section, was a big poster declaring that the slogan for the Olympics was "Harmonious Traffic for the Olympic Games, Friendly Traffic Police." Inside, an electronic countdown board showed that there were only 105 days left until the Olympic Games, and a screen showed a continuous loop of traffic accident footage, complete with mutilated bodies. I filled in endless forms, and while I was waiting made use of the free shoe-polishing machine that graces the waiting room. The police wanted more pieces of paper than usual, including that precious piece of paper showing I'd registered with the neighbourhood police. The forms had to be filled in in blank ink, and the slightest mistake meant starting all over again.

After all that, they got my date of birth wrong on my licence, making it a year later than it really was. Did it matter? I asked. The officer screwed up his face. He was a career bureaucrat in one of the world's greatest bureaucracies, but it was lunchtime. I could foresee another tedious wait while they corrected my date of birth. He could see himself going hungry and having to put up with a bored foreigner endlessly polishing her shoes in his waiting room. Still, he had to admit that the wrong date of birth on the licence would cause difficulties for me when I turned sixty, because at that stage I'd have to start having health checks every year. It would mean bureaucratic confusion, and a great deal of time spent correcting it. He looked greatly relieved when I said I'd worry about that when I turned sixty. We both headed off to our respective lunches, and I was pleased to realise that I was a whole year younger than when I'd entered the building. Very harmonious, very friendly.

The Flame behind Closed Doors

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:17:42 GMT

Each night for the past few days, as I’ve made my way up the stairs to bed, I’ve had the strange urge to picture China’s leaders as they prepare for the hours ahead. They live just a few miles away from me, of course, another strange thought because they seem to belong to another world.

I imagine restless, wakeful nights interrupted by hissed disagreements on internal phone lines in the early hours of the morning. I imagine black Mercedes sweeping through the gloomy streets, emergency meetings held in secret, BBC and CNN footage shown in darkened rooms, flickering torchlight and tussling bodies casting shadows across silent faces.

I have no way of knowing, of course, whether any of this is happening. China’s government is one of the world’s most secretive. We do not know what goes on behind the closed doors of the leadership compound. There is no push and shove between political parties, no public dissection of policy by newspapers, no statement and counter-statement.

What we do know is that China's leadership have called in western diplomats at all hours of the day and night - one ambassador was called in at two am - to be shown footage of the damage caused by Tibetan rioting, and in particular the injuries suffered by Han Chinese.

In my view, the attacks on the torch rally as it makes its way around the world will have provoked profound anguish with the Communist Party and will be of significance far beyond the front pages of a day or a week. Wherever there is distress within the Communist Party, wherever splits develop, there is the potential for explosive political change.

Those inside the system who have struggled during the past few years genuinely to promote gradual change inside China, and who had hoped to push China towards more openness and perhaps even more responsive government will now be burying their heads in their hands. But those hands – to mix a metaphor – will be tied.

Government spokesmen have described the protests against the Olympic torch as ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’. Their choice of words – and such words are carefully scripted here - indicates a leadership which, for the moment at least, is digging in defensively. China has suffered long periods of isolation in the past, it can afford no more – many people inside the government know that.

Several foreign correspondents in Beijing have been removed from China by their news organizations after being deluged with death threats and after detailed personal information has been published on the internet. One web site - a masthead shows the CNN logo riddled with bullet holes - invites people to add their names to an anti-CNN petition. ‘Every name is a bullet,’ it states.

The government is fanning the flames of anti-foreign nationalism even as it prepares to host the biggest ever one-time influx of international visitors, including thousands of journalists. If there is to be any hope of a saving the Beijing Olympics from disgrace, it will only come with the leadership’s courage to act in a flexible and enlightened way. The flames of nationalism – now symbolically linked with the Olympic flame - are dangerous and unpredictable. China is at this moment poised on a knife edge, and yet the leadership seems paralysed.

I suppose history is always messy. The pro-Tibet demonstrations around the world have actually been provoked by vicious ethnic rioting by Tibetans. These were not monk-led peaceful protests, although there had been such protests in the days leading up to the rioting, and the anger that exploded had been fed by decades of oppression under Chinese rule. In fact, little has changed since Beijing was awarded the Olympics. Tibet has been kept in a stranglehold since 1959, dissidents nationwide – in many cases whistleblowers on official abuses of power – have always been thrown into jail. It is as though the riots, violent as they were, simply reminded the world of the nature of Beijing.

China’s leadership can perhaps be forgiven for feeling aggrieved. It has been courted by presidents, prime ministers and CEOs for the past decade. Protests about human rights have become fainter as memories of the 1989 massacre fade. When violent riots broke out in Lhasa, Beijing made the decision not to send in the army with guns blazing. This was not 1989. The riots were riots, not peaceful protests. The suppression was not a massacre, although Tibetans say many have died.

I suspect China’s leaders felt they should be congratulated on their restraint. Western activists have seen the protests, however, as a clarion call to make the Olympics a time of reckoning. In response, China’s panicked leaders focus on the specifics – on cropped news pictures, on mislabeled photographs in newspapers – because they cannot address the fundamental fact that that there is no democracy in China, and that for the Tibetans this has meant particularly egregious abuses.

I find it hard to talk to Chinese acquaintances about these issues. There are some Chinese, of course, who understand the Tibetan situation, and others who I think must have their suspicions but who keep quiet (and who can blame them?) But many of those who will talk at length about abuse they themselves have experienced at the hands of the Communist Party are not sympathetic to the Tibetans. They do not see a continuum, they do not see that the Tibetans are simply at the most extreme end of what many Chinese nationwide have suffered. Instead, many Chinese think in terms of “splittism” because China’s leaders have nurtured nationalism (it is the refuge of many undemocratic regimes because it affords them the validation they otherwise lack). Propaganda is not always a river of pseudo-Marxist sloganeering, it can also take the form of tabloid jingoism. Decades of such jingoism, with no counter argument, no voice of reason, no opposition… try to imagine what that might create in your own country…

But the problems of Tibet mirror many of the problems in China at large. One of the triggers for the riots in Lhasa seems to have been rampant inflation, which is also the cause of angry complaint throughout the rest of the country. Many in Tibet say that their lives are not improving, even as the central authorities say otherwise. Just as in 1989, protests break out when people, whether Chinese or Tibetan, become frustrated by the fact that Beijing does not listen to them and does not respond to their concerns. China’s leaders have no need to listen, because they are not democratically elected. Just as China’s leaders surround the Olympic flame with a security detail, so they deal with protest throughout China, containing with force where necessary.

Pre-Olympic muscle-flexing

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 08:50:48 GMT

Another example (and they are multiplying) of pre-Olympic nerves on the part of the authorities. They want a squeaky clean city (although the numerous brothels around town show no sign of being closed down). Last Friday night, the police here launched a sudden raid on Sanlitun bar street, the most popular hangout for a cosmopolitain mix of expatriate youth (some very young kids from the international schools) and backpackers, and a number of drug dealers. A young man who was there described exiting a pub only to find himself in the middle of a police cordon, manned by a SWAT team (they had jackets saying so) with fierce dogs and what appeared to be guns. This young man described the police detaining African young men, who have a reputation as drug dealers in the area, and removing them in vans. Also removed were some Chinese managers of pubs which are suspected of hosting drug dealing operations. Other young expatriates were forced onto the ground, and guns were waved around (although it''s not clear that anyone had a gun pointed directly at them). Those who protested and tried to get away were beaten back to the ground by crowds of police. One young expatriate who tried to get away was shoved into a van, into which police then climbed and ''the van rocked to and fro''. The Telegraph''s Richard Spencer has spoken to the parents of some of the expatriate youths involved, and reports that several of them were taken away by police with their heads covered in plastic bags, and were made to take urine tests. The police have confirmed that several expatriates were detained, and that drugs of various descriptions were discovered during their raid. Sanlitun may indeed be a little more respectable after this raid, but the authorities should surely, at a time when China''s reputation hangs so vulnerably in the balance, be putting just as much effort into winning hearts and minds internationally.

The Flame Arrives

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:01:10 GMT

We went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday (along with much of the population of Beijing), where an electronic countdown board alerted us to the fact that there were only 131 days left until the Olympics. In fact there was no danger of us forgetting. This morning there was traffic chaos because the Olympic flame arrived at the airport. It''s route into town was kept secret, presumably because of security concerns (controversial things, these flames...). In fact, it must, surely have been driven down the airport expressway - there''s no other way of getting into town, unless they helicoptered it in, and perhaps they did. Anyway, apparently the whole area around Tiananmen Square was closed off to real people. A great foretaste of what''s to come. I can''t say Beijing''s population is waiting with breathless anticipation. I asked a taxi driver the other day whether he was expecting to make a lot of money during the Olympics, and he grumbled that no one would make money except the government. All the people who visited Beijing would be in tour groups, and would travel around on big buses, he predicted. I suspect that may well be right. I don''t think this Olympics is going to be a celebration of the individual. On our way back from the Botanical Gardens, we drove past the Bird''s Nest, the main Olympic stadium, and the Water Cube, where the swimming events will be held. There''s a lot of building still going on, including a tall block built, apparently, to look like an Olympic flame. You could almost see a Tibet-shaped cloud hanging over the stadium. The riots and protests in Lhasa and throughout what used to be Greater Tibet, are confronting the authorities here with a nerve-wracking Olympics. Now they must walk a diplomatic tightrope at the same time as cracking down on protesters - but if they set a toe out of line, the whole thing will come tumbling down around their ears. At a time when they''re about to welcome the greatest number of journalists ever to China, they are busy attacking the western media in their newspapers, accusing them of misreporting what happened inTibet. The only journalist the state-run media has praised is James! This because he was the only foreign correspondent to witness the violence, and of course he reported it as he saw it. The government here has seized on this to bolster their claims of evil Tibetan plots. But like state-run media the world over, they pick and choose. They choose not to report much of what James says - like the fact that the riots were an explosion of rage against years of Han oppression, and that the crackdown on those rioters will be brutal.

Aftermath

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:10:47 GMT

James is back. He asked the authorities for permission to stay longer in Tibet but was (of course) refused. He is now decompressing... he describes the week as the most surreal experience of his life. Coming a week after a trip to North Korea, he''s overdosing on surreal. So now there is very little in the way of eye witness reporting coming out of Lhasa and other Tibetan areas - many journalists are trying to get close to the areas concerned, but they are usually stopped miles away. And of course, when no one has facts to work with, their imaginations work overtime. What are the Chinese authorities up to, which they don''t want the outside world to see? Well, we have seen before what they are capable of. Even where they don''t go in with guns blazing, there can be terrible cruelty. From the point of view of the western world, it is complicated, of course, by the fact that what happened in Tibet really was an ethnic riot, with a lot of violence directed at Han businesses, and indeed at Hans themselves. This wasn''t the usual monk-led peaceful protest that the west has come to expect. This was a vicious outburst of pent-up frustration, and one which the Chinese authorities allowed to let rip for hours.

When is a Soldier not a Soldier?

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:56:58 GMT

James had a visit today from the foreign affairs bureau of Lhasa and the police, and they insisted he move out of his hotel in the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa. The riots are over, the streets are filled with troops, and the Chinese government says it hasn't used any lethal force to suppress the violence. Officially, the army hasn't taken part in the crackdown. But what's the difference between a member of the Armed Police holding an AK47 and a soldier holding an AK47? It's almost impossible to know what the truth is. James has been the only foreign journalist in Lhasa for the last week, and although he's ranged far and wide both during the riots and after the security forces took over, he can have seen only a fraction of all that's taken place. He has heard sporadic gunfire. He says that some of the Armed Police forces are wearing what he thinks are army belts, and that they are driving around with their number plates covered - you can tell by looking at a number plate whether the vehicle belongs to the People's Armed Police, or to the Army. His reports, and some of his photographs, are on www.Economist.com . He's busy penning a three-page section on Lhasa for this week's edition of the magazine. But back to Lhasa - last night was the deadline for rioters to hand themselves in if they wanted 'leniency' (one can't help but wonder what that might consist of). And I guess that today they start mass arrests of anyone who took part - that, I speculate, is why they want James out of the way. It is to the authorities' credit that they have not come in with guns blazing as they did in 1989 - but I predict that life is now going to get extremely grim for Tibetans, and those who took part in riots will face ruthless retribution. The government has been self-controlled enough not to massacre people in the streets. It must have been very tempting, not only to restore control, but to restore the fear the Party needs to nourish in order to stay in power. They know, however, that there are other ways of imposing fear. Unless the authorities allow Chinese and foreign journalists in to Tibet now to observe what happens in the next few weeks and months, the world will imagine the worst.

Days and Nights on the Phone to Lhasa

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:49:33 GMT

At last - and perhaps only temporarily - I've emerged from deadline fever. At the same time as staggering towards deadline day, I've been travelling and speaking at book festivals first in Beijing, where I live, then in Hong Kong, and then in Shanghai. Of course, because of the censorship of China's writers, these festivals are basically run by expatriates and attended by expatriates. That was what I was going to blog about, and about the delight of meeting two writers I greatly admire, Qiu Xiaolong and Yan Gelin, and about the people I bumped into along the way.

But then, on Tuesday, my husband James went into Lhasa on an officially-sanctioned trip. He flew as far as Qinghai, and then travelled for about 24 hours on the train, watching antelope and (he insists) a wolf, out of the train window. He said the landscape was breathtaking. Even before he left Beijing, he was intrigued by the fact that the authorities were allowing him to go into Tibet at a point when news reports were beginning to leak out of protests at Tibetan monasteries.

On his first evening he was banqueted by his Chinese hosts, and ethnic dances were staged for his benefit. By the next day, much of Lhasa was in flames. He is staying in a small hotel in the heart of the Tibetan area, and he has spend the past 24 hours out in the maze of streets observing the riots and the response of the security forces. This morning, when I took my daughters for a walk in the park, I spoke to him on my mobile, only to discover that he was trapped near the Jokhang, his way out blocked by rioters and an armoured personnel carrier. Later, when I spoke to him, he had managed to return to his hotel.

We have tried to keep in touch, but frequently there is no mobile signal, or the hotel loses electricity and he can't recharge his phone. He told me today there is no longer any internet access. Luckily, supplies of food are still available, although the yak cheese omelette is no longer on offer in the hotel coffee shop. At one point his interpreter, who is in another hotel in a different part of the city, asked me to pass on the message to James that he should not drink the tap water because it was poisoned - I suggested to her that this was probably a rumour, but she felt she didn't want to test it out. She is Han Chinese, and would like to leave as soon as possible, but is not being allowed to leave her hotel, and has been told that the airport is also closed for fear that rioters will flee by air. How much of this is true is impossible to know. When I spoke to James earlier this evening, he said the armed police had moved into the city and there is the sound of sporadic shooting.

Of course, as everyone has pointed out, these riots come at a terrible time for the Chinese authorities (that of course will have been the point). Not only is the parliament meeting being held in Beijing, an event which the leadership goes to great lengths to stage free of expressions of dissent. But the Olympics are just months away, and an overly aggressive response will lead inevitably to calls for a boycott.

Nevertheless, Tibetan calls for independence bring out a fierce response in many of China's leaders. They have oppressed and cracked down hard in the region for decades, resisting international pressure to allow more freedom. I suspect there has been a heated argument in the leadership between those desperate to preserve the Olympics, and those who may be prepared to sacrifice the Olympics if necessary in order to quell what might grow into a Tibetan rebellion. We will see, in the next few hours and days who has won.

The Big Bang

Wed, 6 Feb 2008 15:05:20 GMT

It's new year's eve, and it feels as though we're in a war zone. The whole city is erupting with fireworks and firecrackers as big as bombs intended to scare bad spirits away before the new year. The smoke from the fireworks is hanging over the city already, wafting over the ringroads and hanging among the highrise buildings. I have discovered a whole new use for glass-clad skyscrapers - they do a glorious job of reflecting fireworks. I had to walk about a hundred yards down the street after dark, and it was hard to know which way to go to avoid being disfigured forever by firecrackers being set off on the pavement. But in fact you don't find crowds of people out on the street - it's way too cold, and people are far too sensible for that. It's the bad boys out letting the firecrackers off, and everyone else tucked up inside, filling dumplings for the late night meal, and watching TV.... Meanwhile, my hero of the day is world-record holder marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie, who on a visit to China left his hosts tearing their hair out. He said that he will attend the Olympics but that on the day, if he decides it is too polluted, he'll walk away. Best of all, he said it wasn't enough for Beijing to promise to cut down on traffic and close down industry for the two weeks of the Games. 'What about the health of the Chinese people who have to live here all the time, not just for the Olympics?' he asked.

The Beijing Bubble

Sun, 3 Feb 2008 14:34:01 GMT

I meant to revitalize my blog at New Year, but I’m afraid that came and passed in a flurry of activity, and now I find myself suddenly arrived at Chinese New Year. The year of the rat will arrive, noisily, at midnight on Wednesday. This should be the one time in the year when China as a whole kicks off its shoes for a well-deserved rest. Even migrant workers, the hard-working low-paid engine of China’s economic growth, try to go home at Chinese New Year, to see their families. Often they have left wives or husbands and children behind, and they are desperate to see them. Ideally, they go back as conquering heroes, with wads of cash from their work in the big city. The compound where we live is ablaze with celebratory fairy lights, but it’s an illusion - Beijing is a bubble of normality at the moment while much of the country is in real crisis. Unexpected snow blizzards have stranded hundreds of thousands of people at railway stations and thousands on the roads, and have cut off power to thousands of homes. The freezing weather comes as a particularly disastrous shock to the south of the country, which is used to balmy weather, and installs little in the way of heating in homes. Such awful weather conditions mean that the authorities are having trouble moving coal around the country, and with more bad weather forecast there are serious concerns that power outages may spread. The government is embarrassed – could they have predicted this? Probably not. But they have kept saying that all will be well, and it patently is not. Of course, with China’s propagandistic approach to news, it’s hard to know just how bad things are in distant parts of the country, and what the death toll actually is. This all feels rather surreal in Beijing, where today the sky was an unusual blue. But, the fairy lights not withstanding, we did today take the precaution of buying lighters, in case we need to light candles....

Back Dorm note

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:48:02 GMT

For anyone who got the version of the link that doesn''t work, this one should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBlCtqsat-w

I was alerted to the Back Dorm Boys by Rebecca Mackinnon, who lectures in journalism at Hong Kong University, and who uses the Back Dorm Boys to illustrate the fact that the internet is being used primarily for fun in China as everywhere else. Youtube was recently blocked here, but has been unblocked.

Tony Blair and the Back Dorm Boys

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:19:16 GMT

First a bit of a rant:

Tony Blair gave a speech at Dongguan in southern China last week. He charged 237,000 pounds. I haven’t seen the full text of his speech, and therefore I apologise if I do him a disservice. From the reports of the speech, it appears that his speech broadly praised the changes that have taken place in China over the past decade and more. I have seen no report of any questioning, any challenging of an audience that will have been made up exclusively of the powerful and the rich.

I am deeply disappointed that a man who has made himself a moral arbiter, putting thousands of lives in harm’s way in defence, he would claim, of democracy – should choose when in China to take the money and run, churning out platitudes without challenging his audience to think about the many very worrying and challenging consequences of changes implemented by an unelected political party. Serving politicians and diplomats are always circumscribed, on international visits, by the foreign policy of their government. Blair was only circumscribed by the money. He could have seized the opportunity to say something worthwhile, but it might well have offended his hosts.

Interestingly, from what I understand, the local press was very rude about the lackluster tone of Blair’s speech That’s pretty rich in a country where speeches by the leadership are without fail stilted, scripted, clichéd, sloganeering and instantly forgettable. So is their criticism simply an anti-foreign outburst – they didn’t get value for money? Did Blair do something to offend someone? Or is their outburst a reflection of real disappointment – no matter what rubbish they expect from their own leadership, they expect more challenging fare from a former leader of one of the world’s great democracies?

Now - and possibly of far greater importance - to bring a smile to your face, click this link to view the Back dorm boys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBlCtqsat-w

Petitioners

Fri, 2 Nov 2007 07:34:54 GMT

A few years ago, James and I went down to the streets surrounding the petitions office in Beijing. We found dozens of desperate people who had come on long gruelling journeys to the capital to plead with the authorities to listen to their tales of injustice. They could get noone to listen to them in their home towns - very often those who had abused them were local officials - and they believed that in Beijing they might find the ear of a sympathetic leader. They soon became disillusioned - I cannot remember ever hearing of someone who had a wrong righted on the basis of a petition - and on the morning that we were there, we had papers pressed upon us by petitioners, page after page of handwritten documentation relating instances of corruption and abuse and violence, in the hope that we might be able to help them through our reporting. We wrote about our experiences then. More recently, Channel 4 came and reported on the petitions office today, specifically on the cases of those who''ve had their property destroyed by developers. Here''s the link:

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1357069DKZqmaty

(Broadcasted by TV Program by Channel 4, UK on Oct.19, 2007)

Click here to see the TV program

Thank you for calling...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:16:59 GMT

My parents were booked to fly back to the UK today, but when I opened the curtains this morning I knew it was going to be one of those Beijing days which are a smoggy hell (blazing furnaces sound warm and jolly compared to the bleak desolation of a day wrapped in dirty bleached air.)

'I wouldn't want to be on a plane on a day like this,' my six-year old daughter muttered, when she saw the sky outside. We could see the houses on the other side of the street, but the newly-built tower blocks a couple of hundred metres away were simply invisible, swathed in opaque fog, and beyond that the mirrored office building about a mile away might as well have been on the moon for all we could see of it (of course we can hardly see the moon, but that's another story). Later in the day, the pollution was graded at 3B - in Beijing this counts as 'light pollution' - although those with cardiac problems are advised not to undertake any energetic activity, and even those who are symptom-free are warned they may feel less than sprightly.

My parents had bought tickets through Trailfinders with KLM, who having taken their money then fobbed them off on China Southern, 'a partner airline' and refused to have any more to do with them. Queries about seats and delays were batted away merrily by KLM's Beijing office (KLM's answering machine chimes charmingly, 'Thank you for calling Air France'). Having informed my parents that China Southern were the only airline who could possibly answer any queries (although there was a KLM flight number on my parents' tickets) KLM claimed they couldn't even given them China Southern's telephone number..... Well, I ask myself, with partners like that, who needs enemies?

Finally reaching China Southern by top-secret for-our-eyes-only phone number, we were assured that the flight would take off at 2.40. We turned up, to find that no flight had taken off since dawn, and no flight had landed. My parents checked in, and then we went home for lunch and a cup of tea. We rang, and were promised a 3.40 lift-off, so off we set back to the airport only to find that China Southern had omitted to tell us one tiny thing - the plane hadn't even arrived from Guangzhou. We went away....were recalled by an excited Miss Wang to the airport at 5.40 and.... eventually my parents, who hadn't eaten since 1.00, were airborne somewhere around 8 o'clock at night.

IN the evening, I turned on CNN in the evening and discovering that the Olympic Committee had been in Beijing this very day. A sour-faced committee president repeated his warning that if the air quality was bad, they would have to delay endurance activities. A Chinese official tried to reinterpret this as meaning that - and I paraphrase, but only slightly - 'if the wind doesn't blow, we may have to postpone the sailing events.'

Beating the Bank of China

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:49:02 GMT

Every time I go to the bank of China, I have to take a ticket and wait for up to 2 hours until I get to speak to a bank clerk. This drives me up the wall. It also makes me think some very dark thoughts about the institutions behind theworld's fastest growing economy.

Sometimes I nip out to do some grocery shopping, but an hour is more groceries than I need, so as a time management technique it is unsatisfactory. This morning, however,inspiration struck! I would both effect my transaction, AND leave the bank healthy, svelte and clean!

I went to the bank, took my ticket -at 9.45 - number 42 - inspected thedigital readouts above the clerks' windows, discovered they were up to number 22, did a rapid calculation - ata conservative 2 minutes per customer, I had40 minutes.

I raced to the health club next door, flung myself into the gym, watched exactly 13 minutes of Grey's anatomy while I ran on the machine (some might call this ridiculously brief, but I call ita power workout). I took a dizzyingly quick shower, pulled my clothes back on, raced back to the bank, flinging myself through the door at 10.20...only to find they had already reached customer number 55. My mistake? I had failed to allow for the large proportion of customers who just plain give up, decide they can live without cash, and just walk out the door...

Despondently I prepared to take another number and commence the wait all over again.... only to find that one of the kind souls who'd given up had left their ticket - no 62 - on the machine. So I adopted it, and waited about ten minutes and.... hurrah! It was my turn. In the parallel universe of the Bank of China this counts as a victory.

Oh No, Suzhou!

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:11:20 GMT

When I wrote airily that I was off for a series of publicity events in Shanghai, you may have imagined me sitting for days on end at a table busily signing copies of The Pool of Unease while a queue of people snaked around the block awaiting their turn.

Well, I’d just like to state for the record that on Day Two, at the fantastically fabulous venue, The Glamour Bar, on The Bund, plenty of people turned up, and quite a lot of them queued to have me sign their books.

But let me tell you about Day One… It was the kind of excruciating experience that writers usually keep quiet about until they are very, very famous.

I arrived, as instructed, at Garden Books in the French Quarter of Shanghai, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Mr Chen, the owner of the shop, greeted me warmly but with some anxiety - it was raining outside, and it was No Car Day, Shanghai’s attempt to reduce its carbon footprint by occasionally banning cars from main thoroughfares in the city.

By 1.30, only four people had turned up. We decided that instead of me standing and delivering my half-hour speech to a near-empty bookshop, we would huddle around a table in the coffee shop, and have a discussion about the book. Very kindly, some of the bookshop staff came to sit with us too. It was friendly and relaxed, and 25% of my audience bought a book. One book, that is.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mr Chen, ‘there will be more people in Suzhou.’

Mr Chen has a double life as an official in Shanghai’s publications bureaucracy and therefore (in China, this is entirely logical) he has just about the only license in the whole of Shanghai to import foreign books and sell them. He is a charming man, and a careful driver, as I discovered on the two-hour journey to Suzhou, where he has another bookshop. He also has a charming friend, called Echo, who runs her own printing business, and who came with us.

Mr Chen had, he reassured me, dragooned one of the teachers at the international school in Suzhou to bring along some fellow teachers to meet me. I was pleased to hear this because I was beginning to understand, from what my audience of four at Garden Books had said, that there had been next to no publicity before my arrival.

The last time I went to Suzhou was more than a decade ago, and I remember peaceful canals and old wood-beamed houses, and bicycling around parks, and grottoes full of ancient Buddhist statuary. But now….the road from Shanghai to Suzhou looks like a gigantic industrial park. The boulevards leading into Suzhou are broad and tree-lined, and behind the trees are low-lying factories and tall residential apartment buildings. The exhibition centre looks as though it is made of wire mesh, and at night a rainbow of lights ripples across it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

We reached the bookshop, which is called Skoob (Books spelled backwards, Mr Chen explained, delighted at his own invention) and located in a characterless mall. It was 5.30, and it was ominously empty. The event was due to begin at 6.00, but as the hour struck, the only customers were an elderly Australian couple who had dropped in for ice cream.

At 6.30, with an air of forced cheer, Mr Chen and Echo and I decided we too should have a snack to build ourselves up for the rush that would soon come. I opted, ambitiously, for a roasted vegetable and goat’s cheese pie (who’d have thought it!) and it wasn’t bad at all, and Mr Chen and Echo had ice cream. When we had finished, and were eying each other uneasily, the shop assistant approached and told us she had two pieces of bad news. First, the city government had invited the entire expatriate community to a Mid-Autumn Festival party at the lake. Second, the international school teachers were at a riotous birthday party and would be delayed. Still, she said, they would come eventually. Meanwhile, would we like something more to eat? We shook our heads and waited for an hour or so in the horribly quiet shop, each of us imagining the teachers eating and drinking and laughing…

I heard all about Mr Chen’s enthusiasm for publishing ‘how-to’ books for living in China. One of his best sellers is a how-to book on training your ayi, or maid. Echo had rather more literary tastes, and told me about her passion for the books of Eileen Chang, who wrote the spy story “Lust, Caution” set in 1930s Shanghai which has just been filmed by Ang Lee.

The teachers never came, of course – who can blame them? - and in the end Mr Chen and Echo and I got back in the car and drove the two hours back to Shanghai.

Shanghai

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:51:32 GMT

I've just arrived in Shanghai to give a series of talks to publicise The Pool of Unease. I came on the sleeper from Beijing The timing is nice - I left just before 8 in the evening, and arrived in Shanghai at 7.30 in the morning. There are trains leaving Beijing for Shanghai just about every half hour in the evening, so great is the traffic between China's first and second cities. Whereas trains used to be made largely of hard class carriages, the express Beijing-Shanghai trains seem to be made up almost exclusively of soft class carriages, and they are booked solid by China's newly affluent middle class. It costs about 30 pounds each way for a soft class sleeper, with clean bedding, a decent dining car, and endless boiling water for making tea.

So here I am, all checked in before 9 in the morning. I'm staying in the Salvo Hotel, near the Bund, and I'm on (gulp) the 28^th floor, from where I can see the boats on the Huangpu River, and the Oriental Pearl tower that stands like a fat-bellied daddy-long-legs over Pudong. If I look down, I can see a maze of old red-tiled roofs, and waves of bicycles and cars in the narrow streets, and then the skyscrapers jutting out and up. It's rather like the view Tom Cruise had while he was swinging between Shanghai's high-rises in Mission Impossible 3.

I cast an eye over the hotel literature. 'Please' I find myself urged, 'deposit your valuables and huge sum of cash in the front desk safe.' Well, I would oblige if I had a huge sum of cash. But how can I possibly choose between the 'fad beverage' on offer in the lobby bar, and the Full Bar on the 31^st floor where, 'In the still of the night, when you cling to French window, you will immerse in the fascinating shades within enthralling and florid picture in the Bund.'

I've allowed myself a day either side of the publicity events, to try to get some writing done. I've written the beginning of the next book, but not much more. In theory, a couple of days of intense staring at the screen will create a breakthrough. Next to my bed, there is a switch labeled General Illumination. If you see me clinging to the French window on the 31^st floor you'll know it didn't work.

Literary Review

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:58:36 GMT

I''m sorry, but it''s so lovely to get nice reviews (and so horrid to get bad ones) that I just can''t help myself. So here goes, from the Literary Review, an extremely fine publication:

''Taken as crime fiction, Sampson’s third novel is original, fast paced and clever: taken as a beginner’s guide to the enigma that is modern China, this is an outstandingly interesting description of life in Beijing from two utterly different angles. We see the busy, baffling society from the viewpoint of a Marlowe-style Chinese private eye, an honest, cussed altruist who deals equally with paupers and millionaires. He is of the generation that remembers what it was to vanish into police custody. In alternate chapters we follow a British woman journalist from ''the corporation'' who endangers others through her naivety about what can and can''t be done in a police state. Like the native Chinese born after the relaxation of the 1980s, she is ''taken by surprise when the system snapped its jaws around them and took them down into its belly''. The author lives in Beijing and was The Times correspondent there, so her own experience lends authority to a gripping mystery.''

Latest review for The Pool of Unease

Sat, 1 Sep 2007 11:07:54 GMT

An ice hot thriller to devour with your chow mein...

From www.reviewedonline.co.uk

The Pool Of Unease
Catherine Sampson
Macmillan

review by: Paul W Smith

Beijing. A private detective, Song Ren stakes out a brothel for a client seeking evidence of infidelity, but after rescuing a young boy from a fire, he finds himself a murder suspect. Meanwhile, in Britain, TV journalist Robin Ballantyne is preparing an investigative report on the possible sell-off of a steel work to a Chinese businessman, a task which needs her to fly to Beijing. But as each continue their own investigations, the separate pieces fall together into one blood-stained puzzle that involves wealthy Nelson Li, a ragged child, and a struggling steel plant back in the UK. In Catherine Sampson's carefully controlled hands, the actions of her two characters snowball into the double intrigue of a serial killer and underhand-dealings, which effect two continents and hundreds of lives.

The Pool Of Unease bubbles with pace and clarity, whilst beneath the surface darker currents stir deadlier deeds. Splitting the story between two protagonists - Robin and Song - Catherine Sampson manages to sustain the mystery and intrigue, with Robin's account told in the first person whilst Song's experiences remain in the third person. It becomes a juggling act of narratives, each strand containing its own unravelling mystery, but both destined to cross. Both characters are sketched in with carefully selected detail, and yet they give human depth to the intricacies of the plot. One is the estranged husband of a corrupt police chief's daughter and the other a hard-working mother, each trying to manage a career and some semblance of family life. It grounds them in a reality we all identify with, whilst also taking them both into unknown territories.

A yin and yang of adventure, East meeting West, wealth meeting poverty, where the two strands of story counterbalance each other, simultaneously solving their own internal intrigue whilst crisply joining the story into a full circle. Sampson's own experience as a Beijing-based journalist has ensured that The Pool Of Unease has a tang of gritty authenticity to the crime recipe. She allows the plot to breathe and gather momentum, creating a story that swims with imagination whilst also providing an intriguing window on a city and its people that are being forced to adjust rapidly to change. An ice-hot thriller to devour with your chow mein.

Return to Beijing

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:30:48 GMT

I just got back to Beijing after two months away, and I feel as though I''ve entered a parallel universe. I''m totally jet-lagged, after a night up with three jet-lagged children who awoke for three hours each in turn. So my observations are not profound.

I want to tell you about the baggage handlers at Beijing airport. My summer in the UK involved three Heathrow experiences, once on arrival and twice going to meet arrivals. Each time it took passengers close to two hours from landing to emergence into the arrivals hall - that''s brutal after a ten hour flight. Here, the luggage was pirouetting elegantly around the carousel by the time we made our way through immigration. Beijing airport will be preening grandly in time for the Olympics, but Heathrow seems to be staggering towards an Olympic humiliation.

Anyway, we stood there, gaping wearily at all this glorious luggage circulating hypnotically in front of us, until it slowly dawned on us that we were the only ones still waiting, and the carousel was bare. It wasn''t Beijing airport''s fault - either BA or Heathrow handlers had failed to put our luggage on the flight, and it was stuck in London.... Beijing airport efficiently noted down the problem and delivered our errant luggage the next day.

But - and there always has to be a but - Beijing airport is somewhat soulless. And the intimidating mural of the Great Wall in the immigration hall probably should go before the Olympics, since this fortification was built with the express aim of keeping foreigners out.

Finally, I should record on the Smog Blog that today has been a genuinely blue sky day in Beijing, complete with bright white wispy clouds. Suddenly it''s as though the city''s been repainted in colour.

Jenny Eclair

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:13:06 GMT

From the sublime to the deliciously ridiculous – having spoken on the weighty subject of press freedom at the Frontline Club just a couple of days ago, this morning I was interviewed on the Jenny Éclair show on LBC. Jenny Éclair is a Perrier-winning stand-up comedienne, and she was brilliant, incredibly quick on her feet, moving me along from whether I’ve ever had a crush on a teacher (if you weren’t listening, you’ll never know), to the Beijing massacre of 1989, to the strangest foods I’ve eaten in China (you can have this one: a worm in gelatine, dipped in mustard), to the Olympics. A little alarm seemed to go off in her head every time I was in danger of saying something tedious, and she would leap in and ask a question that led me rapidly in the opposite direction. I wish I had her sitting on my shoulder constantly, telling me when to shut up.

The Never Ending Story

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:50:00 GMT

This is one for people who like to have fun writing - www.theneverendingstory.co.uk is a site where members post the first page of a story and other members add pages one by one so that the story is a collaborative, ever-envolving phenomenon! I''ve posted the first page of a story called Murderous Intent. If you like to write, you''ll enjoy visiting the site, and maybe you''ll take the mystery one step further...

Live Webcast!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:12:23 GMT

I''m taking part in a panel discussion at the Frontline Club on 23rd August at 7.30pm. The topic is the foreign media''s coverage of China. Tickets are 7 pounds, and you can book online at www.thefrontlineclub.com. If you can''t come, there is a live webcast (!) at the same web address, and even a podcast after the event. My fellow panellists are Rob Gifford, authof of "China Road", Duncan Hewitt, author of "Getting Rich First", and Lifen Zhang, of FT.com. The event will be chaired by Carrie Gracie.

The Independent - China Trembles at the Power of the Blog

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:56:23 GMT

In Beijing, a pregnant woman, Zeng Jinyan, blogs almost daily about her married life. This, however, is no tale of cosy domesticity. She posts photographs of the cars used by the state security officers who follow her and her husband every time they leave their house.

Last week, she described going for a walk in the park and chatting with her husband about their unborn child. Then, in frustration, "I looked back at the state security officers whose keys were rattling at their waists, and I said to them, ''Aren''t you ashamed? Keep further away from us!''"

Zeng has blogged about how, on 18 May this year, she and her husband, Hu Jia, were followed by plainclothes police to a routine 16-week pregnancy check-up at the hospital. Then, on their way to the airport to fly to Europe, they were detained by eight police officers and questioned for four hours. Since then, they have been under constant state surveillance and banned from travel. Zeng has blogged bitterly about her confinement and the nature of a government that chooses to treat her and her unborn child in this way.

Zeng and Hu are campaigners for the rights of people with HIV/Aids. They are just two of a small but growing group of activists in China who are beginning to use the power of the blog to reach a huge readership.

Xiao Qiang, editor of the US-based China Digital Times, an online monitor of Chinese news and internet developments, points out that "censorship''s most direct impact on blogging is that there is a lack of ''political bloggers'' in the Chinese blogosphere". Pure politics is simply too dangerous. The small number of campaigning bloggers are not dissidents; they do not call for the overthrow of the Communist Party. But they are at the forefront of debate on specific social issues.

The country''s Communist leaders fear their power, but for all the government''s cyber-policing, the bloggers are proving almost impossible to control. Last year, the official People''s Daily reported that there were more than 30 million bloggers in China, and that their numbers were set to grow by a further 60 million in the next year.

Of course, many blogs fall by the wayside and, like bloggers everywhere, many Chinese bloggers are more interested in film stars and sex than in social activism. Portals use celebrity blogs to attract traffic, but the lines between a politically sensitive blog and a useful revenue-generator in a fiercely competitive portal market in China are being blurred. What is clear is that in China, where free speech is suppressed so vigorously, blogging has become a cyber civil society.

The phenomenon of activist blogging is "unstoppable", says John Kennedy, the Chinese language editor at Global Voices Online. "In the absence of a normally functioning legal system, the internet is where the engaged public is coming to consensus on what the future of China is going to look like."

The mainstream media remain under the control of the Propaganda Department, the country''s media police, which issues secret diktats concerning what may and may not be covered. Most recently, The Washington Post reported, food safety scandals, murder and riots have been declared off limits.

Among many Chinese there is a thirst for debate, and for access to information that has not been through the wringer of the Propaganda Department. In several cases journalists themselves are embracing the blog, and some newspapers are lifting articles and columns directly from blogs to print in their pages.

In May, the journalist Lian Yue, in the tropical city of Xiamen, blogged about the horrors he thought would be wreaked on his peaceful beachfront city by a petrochemical plant the government was desperate to see built. A few days later, someone sent an anonymous text message saying the construction of the plant would be like dropping an atom bomb on Xiamen, and SMS messages started to fly around the town. This launched the biggest middle-class protests in China''s modern history.

A media blackout was imposed on the demonstrations, but to the dismay of the Propaganda Department the issue developed into a perfect storm of blogs, SMS messages and internet bulletin-board postings. Several bloggers from the independent collective Bullog attended the demonstration and sent live SMS updates direct to a colleague who had stayed at home at his computer, and he posted their updates minute by minute. They soon attracted so many readers that Bullog''s host server was unable to keep up. Several people have been arrested for spreading the word – the internet police have technological and administrative methods to demolish a blogger''s anonymity.

Xiao Qiang writes: "Facing these independent voices, the old ideological machine starts to crumble. Within society, bloggers like Lian Yue are seen as more credible voices than propaganda officials."

In June this year, the internet once again deeply embarrassed the Communist Party and set the agenda for national news. The parents of kidnapped children in Henan posted a letter to an internet site begging for help in finding their offspring, and it was instantly transmitted in the form of blogs and SMS messages across China. Soon, the mainstream media had no choice but to investigate the issue.

When the first television pictures were shown of battered and beaten teenage boys being used as slave labour in brick kilns and mines, the government itself launched an investigation. It was found that local police and local officials were profiting from the trade in kidnapped children. It was the sort of story that the mainstream media might well have been ordered to hush up, but the firestorm of blogger reports forced them to respond.

After the Xiamen protests, the government tried to ban anonymous postings and to insist on real-name registration. Ever since the dawn of the blog, the Propaganda Department has tried closing them, blocking entire domains and imposing keyword filters that ban several hundred sensitive words, only a small number of which are obscenities. The keywords include the names of many of China''s leaders, as well as references to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and words relating to Falun Gong, the religion that Beijing has branded a cult.

Posts containing these words are removed by censors employed by the host site. Sometimes the blog itself is eliminated. But some filtering systems are more efficient than others. Character splitting is one way to evade the censors; because Chinese characters are made up of several parts, these can be split apart on the page. This strategy fools an automatic keyword filter, which sees only nonsense words, but is easily digested by a reader who knows what is going on. Bloggers are also working on systems that convert sensitive words into images, thereby subverting the filters.

Last year Hao Wu, a well-known blogger, was arrested and detained for 140 days. His blog, Beijing or Bust, was mildly critical of the Chinese government. He blogged about his plans to make a documentary about Chinese Christians, and the obstacles he was encountering from religious officials in Beijing.

After his release, he blogged about inviting his friends for a drink to celebrate his freedom. "I''m not one of those who fight to break the shackles," he wrote. "But I can dance. Dance with my shackles. Dance with my bondage after the shackles."

Catherine Sampson''s novel, The Pool of Unease, set in Beijing, is out now (Macmillan, £12.99). She blogs about her work and life in Beijing at http://www.catherinesampson.com/pages/blog/index.asp

The Guardian - Top Ten Asian Crime

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:54:09 GMT

Catherine Sampson''s top 10 Asian crime fiction

Catherine Sampson''s latest novel, The Pool of Unease, is set in Beijing, where the author has lived for many years. Her earlier books, Falling Off Air, and Out of Mind, both featured journalist and single mother Robin Ballantyne. In The Pool of Unease, Robin Ballantyne investigates the murder of a British businessman in Beijing. The book also introduces private detective Song Ren, who is miserably staking out a brothel when he hears a blood-curdling scream, and goes to investigate...an inquiry which rapidly becomes entangled with Robin''s.
Buy The Pool of Unease at the Guardian bookshop

"If you only looked at size of population, you''d expect China and India to dominate any list like this, but in fact it is Japan which has taken crime fiction to its bosom. In China, politics adds a thick layer of complication. To write about crime in China - however fictional - is to advertise the fact that Chinese society is not an entirely harmonious and benign thing. Of course, China''s leaders are a lot more tolerant than they once were when it comes to literature, but it''s still sensitive, and crime fiction is a small but growing genre. The Beijing that I see around me, with its speed-of-light economic growth, its social dislocation, its constantly migrating population and its quagmire of corruption, is a verdant pasture for crime fiction. And its political claustrophobia is the perfect environment for a private eye who is an honourable man struggling against a system that threatens to overwhelm him."

1. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu is a Chinese writer now living in America. His Detective Chen is an inspector in the Shanghai police force. When a female model worker is found dead, Detective Chen investigates, and the trail leads him onto dangerous political ground. The book has a gentle feel to it which makes the violence of murder even more shocking. It is a vivid description of present day Shanghai, and the satisfying ending is utterly believable.
Buy it at the Guardian bookshop

2. Playing For Thrills by Wang Shuo
Wang Shuo was one of the inventors of so-called hooligan literature. It tore into Chinese conventions by romanticising the lives of young people who had no interest in politics. Wang Shuo writes Chinese literature''s version of punk, often described as gritty and sarcastic, and his work is frequently banned. Playing for Thrills has narrator Fang Yan trying to clear himself of a murder he may - or may not, he''s not quite sure - have committed a decade earlier.

3. Crime De Sang by He Jiahong
This should be available soon in English as Blood Crime. He Jiahong is a lawyer who teaches at one of China''s most respected universities, and he has also spent time in the United States. His protagonist, Hong Jun, is a lawyer, too, and He''s books are most notable for their beautifully observed descriptions of daily life.

4. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Bombay underworld is brought to grimy life in this bestselling novel in which police detective Sartaj Singh investigates the suicide of crime boss Gaitonde. When it first appeared, Indian readers were excited that it had broken many taboos. The murky complexities of politics, religion and caste soak the bloody plot, and the Bombay described here rivals any Mafia-ridden Italian city.
Buy it at the Guardian bookshop

5. Jack the Ladykiller by HRF Keating
Keating is a British writer who has adopted India as his territory and is best-known for his Inspector Ghote mysteries. This unusual novel is written entirely in verse and is set in the British community in the Punjab in 1935. When a woman is murdered, Jack Steele, a young colonial police officer fresh out of school, must investigate and confront his own preconceptions. The novel, like most of the books on this list, uses the form of the criminal investigation to dissect social relations, in this case the nature of the colonial population and its relationship with the local population. I love novels in verse, and having tried my hand at writing verse, I find it always takes me in interesting directions.

6. Out by Natsuo Kirino
As in Britain and the USA, the Japanese crime genre has female stars. Natsuo Kirino''s dark and bloody Out is not a pleasant read, but it is a powerful one. A young mother who works a night shift making boxed lunches in the suburbs of Tokyo brutally strangles her deadbeat husband and then seeks the help of her co-workers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime.

7. All She Was Worth by Miyake Miyabe
Another prizewinning Japanese woman writer paints another searing picture of Japanese society at its darkest. When a young woman applies for a credit card and it is denied because of a bankruptcy many years before, she and her fiance are shocked. Soon the woman has vanished, leaving her fiance to investigate a mystery which involves stolen identity and consumerism run wild.

8. Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto
Perhaps this is a little out of date - it is a police procedural that was published in the 60s - but it is a classic. It is a very different Japanese crime novel from the previous two, but more familiar, perhaps, to the reader of traditional British crime novel. Inspector Imanishi is a more conventional figure, middle-aged and middle class, who calmly attempts to bring order to a muddled world. His traditional domestic life forms much of the landscape of the book. When I read this book many years ago, I was delighted by the way in which it made the complexity of Japanese society accessible to a reader who had never set foot in Japan. It is the book that first made me think that the crime novel can travel, as a genre, so that a British reader can settle happily into an entirely foreign environment.

9. Murder At Mount Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki
Japan''s bestselling mystery writer, and another woman. This is a thoughtful and intelligent mystery, set in snow-covered Mount Fuji at new year. A visiting American student and a Japanese police detective attempt to unravel an intricate web of intrigue to uncover the truth concerning a family murder.

10. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
When I visited Saigon several years ago, this book was photocopied and sold on stalls throughout the city. A mystery and so much more - this is a classic tale of a romantic triangle, violent politics and murder. Many of the books on this list have been written by Asians who have left Asia, at least for a while. Several of the books by non-Asian''s, like this one and HRF Keating''s take an expatriate community as their focus. As a writer who is not Asian but dares to write about Asia, I think it can be done. But there are few non-Asian writers who manage to make Asia, and one searing point in history, so utterly alive as Graham Greene.

Floods and the Frontline Club

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:25:53 GMT

What a summer. The Pool of Unease comes out on Friday, and I’ve been doing a flurry of local radio interviews and writing about all manner of things for publicity purposes. I’ve been in England for nearly a month with all three children, and things have been a tad chaotic with me yo-yoing up and down to London, and the children in the tender care of my brave parents, who have no water because of the floods. This doesn’t sound right, of course – how can there be floods and no water? But the pumps have been deluged, and so not a drop has made it to the taps now for 11 days. We are promised a trickle ‘in the next few days’, although it won’t be clean enough to drink. It's a measure of our desperation that we're all excited by the prospect of doing laundry. Meanwhile, no one’s had a bath for longer than we care to think about and the kitchen is piled to the ceiling with bottled water. Even the dog is drinking Evian.

Domestic matters aside, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion at the Frontline Club in London at 7.30 on 23^rd August, along with my friends and fellow writers Rob Gifford and Duncan Hewitt. Details can be found here: http://www.frontlineclub.com/club_events.php?event=871 We’ll be chaired by our friend Carrie Gracie of the BBC. The topic will be whether the international press adequately covers China. I will have had a bath by then.

The Siege

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:48:21 GMT

27th June 2007

Well, I was wondering what to blog….and then, this being China, an incident occurred quite literally on my doorstep. It took place on Friday, and it was a siege that lasted six hours until the authorities realized it was about to escalate into a diplomatic incident, at which point, everyone left to have dinner. I should explain that we live in a walled compound, or what in some countries is called a gated community, and that some of the buildings are occupied by embassies and diplomats.

This is what I wrote on Friday:

As I write, there are about 30 people gathered outside my house. Not because of anything to do with me - although several of the men involved are taking a rest on our garden wall - but because of a dispute between a neighbour and the builders who renovated his house. I don’t know much about the dispute. But we hear of such confrontations, big and small, occurring all over China, and what is interesting about what’s happening outside my front door is this insight into how such rows are – or are not – resolved in China.

These people – 20 builders, 4 representatives of the compound’s management office, and 3 police officers - have been gathered there since late this morning. A while ago some of the construction workers started bashing on my neighbour’s gates with hammers, yelling at him to come out.

I went out to find out what was going on, and to point out that there was no way my neighbour was going to come out to negotiate with twenty people waiting for him, some armed with hammers, and that perhaps the thing to do was to discuss the issue one on one. The two police officers were arguing the same thing. They seemed to be bending over backwards to avoid confrontation. I didn’t see them attempt to disarm the man with the hammers, although they did try to calm him down.

A few of us stood in a circle and discussed the problem. A furious woman from the renovation company insisted that there was no other way to get money she said was owed to her. There was talk of lawyers, but the angry woman said they were no use. The police officer shook his head and said the police had no power to intervene in economic disputes.

‘But this isn’t an economic dispute any more,’ someone pointed out. It was true. It was surely a crime to hold a man hostage inside his house, and the police officer looked uncomfortable. Still he had clearly been ordered not to escalate potentially violent situations, but rather to try to persuade protesters of the error of their ways.

‘Look, if we do anything, we’ll have to protect the man inside there,’ the police officer said to the angry woman, ‘so you’ll be worse off than before.’

I said that my children were going to come home from school soon, and it wasn’t acceptable to have demonstrators armed with hammers blocking the street outside our house.

‘Well, you can’t do anything about it,’ said the angry woman.

‘What about the police?’ I asked the police officer.

‘They can’t control us,’ the angry woman said dismissively, ‘we’re going to stay until we get our money.’

‘Is it true that you can’t control them?’ I asked the police officer.

‘Well,’ he said sheepishly, ‘we’ll do our best.’

We seemed to have reached an impasse. The police officers retreated to their car, lit up cigarettes, talked on their mobile phones and fiddled with video cameras that they pointed half-heartedly in the direction of the construction workers. Eventually a second police car arrived. The angry woman took to her mobile phone. The managers of the compound where we live took to their mobile phones. The construction workers picked up bottles of water from a crate their boss had thoughtfully provided and sat back down on the kerb. After a while, one of the feistier of them started lobbing the empty bottles and lunch boxes over my neighbour’s gate, and the man with the hammers started bashing on my neighbour’s gate again…

A quickie

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 12:13:44 GMT

Sunday 24^th June

I just felt I had to share the first two paragraphs of this story in the Beijing Today, which came complete with a photograph of a scrawny dog next to an armoured personnel carrier.

It read thus:

A top leader of a Tangshan-based criminal syndicated alleged to have driven around in an armoured personnel carrier, was expelled from his post in the city’s Political Consultative Conference last week after Hebei police arrested him for extortion and weapons offenses.

Yang Shukuan, the 39-year old chair of the Huayun Group, was found to be in illegal possession of firearms and other military equipment, including one armoured car, two military transport vehicles, a Jeep, 38 firearms, 12 police tear gas canisters and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Yang also owned several luxury cars including a Rolls-Royce and two Ferraris, all with military license plates...

A big fat smoggy lie

Fri, 8 Jun 2007 02:32:28 GMT

This is a piece of research done by James:

Look at the following NASA satellite photos and accompanying text, noting the date the photograph was taken.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17591

Then look at the following story, noting the statement by the Beijing weather bureau official in the 5th paragraph:

http://english.gov.cn/2007-04/16/content_584448.htm

Of Chandeliers and Dusty Corners

Sun, 27 May 2007 05:42:46 GMT

27th May 2007

My third book, The Pool of Unease, which comes out in August, has as its backdrop some of the less savoury aspects of modern China – rampant corruption, poverty and beggar gangs, a sense that criminal activity is on the rise as society changes fast and often chaotically.

Several years ago, when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I was scolded by a Chinese foreign ministry official for ‘looking at the dust in the corner of the room and ignoring the chandelier hanging in the centre of the room,’ so I know that this is sensitive ground.

Of course, I write thrillers, and it is a genre that requires the writer to look at the dark underbelly of society. A thriller devoid of dirty, dusty corners is not a thriller.

The Chinese press is controlled by the Ministry of Propaganda (this is another theme in The Pool of Unease), and the Ministry of Propaganda would like nothing better than a media full of chandeliers. But Communist Party control of the media, as of everything, is increasingly patchy and undermined by the market. The state has reduced its subsidies to many newspapers, which means they are more dependent on advertising revenue and therefore on circulation, which means providing readers with journalism that they want to read. Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean accurate journalism, or worthwhile journalism, and indeed it is common practice these days for Chinese journalists to be paid by corporations to write glowing reports of these products.

One of the things I like to read is a page titled ‘China Scene’ in the China Daily (this is in English, the lazy way to read the Chinese press, an easy way to start the day). It is a largely chirpy collection of humorous and uplifting tidbits from the Chinese press. On Friday we had, ‘Group Effort Returns Fallen Bird to Nest’ from the China Business Review, ‘Pet Dog Earns Its Keep by Snatching Purse Thief,’ from the Henan Commercial Daily – you get the picture.

But scattered among these brief reports are always one or two that make me stop and frown in disbelief. On Friday, there was ‘Suspected Ghost Wife Murderer in Detention’ from Beijing News. Which read, in its entirety, as follows:

Police in Linzhang County, Hebei, have detained a suspect in the murders of six women, most of them mentally retarded, for the purpose of selling their corpses as ghost wives for dead men.

Starting last year, Song Tiantang, a 53-year old farmer, has allegedly been killing women and then selling their corpses to people seeking spouses for their dead family members, mostly unmarried men. The practice of marrying the dead is an old one, and is still followed in a few remote rural villages. Police appealed to villagers to drop the custom because it is illegal and could lead to murder.

Granted, China is a vast country with a vast population, so even the most appalling story is, in effect, diluted. Granted, the original article may have been longer and more prominent. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that a dark story like this makes its way into the English language press only as a 100-word brief, and buried among the funnies. The distortion of news values here (and of course they’re distorted in other ways in England, I’m not saying they’re not) is, of course, an indication of just how powerful China’s propaganda machine remains, despite so many changes. And it’s also a reminder to those who see the modern skyscrapers of Beijing and its glittering malls and restaurants, that all is not as entirely rosy as it seems.

Holiday Reading

Wed, 16 May 2007 07:35:51 GMT

May 16^th

I’ve been on holiday – a week in Langkawi, where dolphins frolicked in the bay, monkeys sat in the trees around the swimming pool, and a yard-long monitor lizard strolled casually across a path in front of me. The children were in heaven – actually they were mostly hurtling down a water slide – and I was hoping that inspiration for my next book would strike as I lazed. I don’t like the word inspiration. But there are points where certain ideas or images come together in the brain, and a little light bulb flashes to say that something has been achieved. Anyway, inspiration – an idea – can’t be forced, all one can do is to provide the conditions. This, I have found, often means thinking about something else, or thinking about nothing at all, and letting one’s sub-conscious do all the work. So I dutifully thought about nothing at all, fully expecting an idea to strike me by day three or four, but it seems the sub-conscious refuses to be tricked like this. My sub-conscious must have been aware that I was waiting….

Never mind, the week was not entirely unproductive. I did manage to read a book my friend Lucy Cavender had recommended to me. The Uninvited, by Yan Geling, is a novel written in English by a Chinese woman, a writer who worked as a journalist in the 1970s but who now lives in the USA. The protagonist is an unemployed man in Beijing who discovers he can make a living by pretending to be a journalist because journalists are invited to banquets by companies and government departments and are not only fed but given packets of cash. These packets are, of course, basically bribes to write positive stories. Her protagonist discovers, however, that he is soon surrounded on all sides by people who are desperate for him to write about their situations, and that these stories are in many cases damning for the powerful politicians and entrepreneurs who run China. It is a wonderful concept for a book, and Yan Geling treats the very serious themes – abuses of human rights, abuse of the powerless by the powerful, the manipulation of the press – with a wonderfully light, comic touch. Read The Uninvited (The Banquet Bug in the USA), and you’ll learn a lot about modern China at the same time as enjoying a comic novel as good as anything I’ve read recently.

Singing in a Palace

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:20:18 GMT

15^th April 2007

Last night I sang as part of the International Festival Chorus in the Forbidden City Concert Hall. For me, this is a huge privilege. I love to sing, but I’m not in the same class as many of the chorus members who are brilliant amateurs and professionals - practically the entire alto section seems to be made up of music teachers from the international schools.

We sang Off, Off, Offenbach, a wild and whacky arrangement by Gerard Lecointe of tunes by Jaques Offenbach (including the Can-Can) with a fantastic percussion ensemble, Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon, who are four rather gorgeous French men and a woman.

The choir is a treat from all sorts of points of view. It works like a well-oiled machine: practice parts and translation files are distributed in MP3 format; committee members coordinate funding, sponsorship, publicity, rehearsal rooms and guest musicians – Emma Kirkby will be singing in the Bach B Minor Mass in October. But without one man, Nick Smith, none of it would happen. Nick Smith studied music at Cambridge but he has lived in Beijing since 1995, and has devoted all his considerable energy and passion to working as a conductor with musicians from China and all over the world, and to introducing western music to Chinese audiences. The IFC is truly international, and many of its most active and talented members are Chinese. Its concerts always almost fill the 1400-plus seats of the concert hall.

But one of the things I love best about singing with the choir has nothing whatsoever to do with music. It has to do with places. For the past few days, we’ve been rehearsing at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, which means driving in the early evening around the huge red walls of the former imperial palace alongside the moat. In the evening, with few tourists around, the gigantic red gates of the palace and the open square in front of them are as imposing as they have been for centuries.

Yesterday morning a friend and I arrived early for the dress rehearsal. The Forbidden City Concert Hall is set in Zhongshan Park, right next to the Forbidden City, and we walked among the willows, lilac and tulips in brilliant sunshine for half an hour before the rehearsal.

Earlier rehearsals had taken place in the Beijing Youth Palace, a former imperial household behind Coal Hill. In the fifties the communist authorities designated it as a centre for talented children to come and practice music, which means that its ornate rooms and roofs have been left largely untouched, and it has a wonderfully shabby feel to it. There is no better thing in Beijing than to wander around its courtyards in the evening, when almost everyone else has gone home and these magnificent buildings are just sitting brooding over all they’ve seen in the dark. As a final surreal touch, there is a children’s playground that must have been built in the fifties because it has such a Russian look to it. Its theme is pure space race, and in the evening its vertiginous slides and constructions in the shape of rockets and stars stand out against the night sky.

Who''s Moving In?

Sun, 1 Apr 2007 13:00:28 GMT

The Spray Painted Mountain

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:09:43 GMT

20th March 2007

A ‘garish green’ paint job on a mountain in Yunnan Province has become an issue of nationwide interest and some controversy. Was this a misguided attempt at environmental greening by the Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry, or a local businessman’s attempt to improve the view from his window?

According to Beijing Today, Laoshou mountain was quarried for decades, and was eventually closed down after villagers complained about constant noise and dust. Then, last August, the barren mountainside was spray-painted green, a project that took 7 people 45 days.

The local Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry has denied that it spend up to 470,000 yuan (US$60645) of public money on painting the mountain in an effort to satisfy government pressure for greenification projects.

The China Daily, meanwhile, has reported that a local painter and decorator called Du Mucheng spent just 10,000 yuan (US$1280) of his own money on painting the mountain in order to improve the fengshui of his home. He told the newspaper he considered the silence of the local government as tacit consent for his project.

Skeptics suggest that Du may be taking the heat for the local government. Quite whose bright idea it was to paint the mountain may remain a matter for local speculation for some time.

Smokestacks and Crows

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:21:45 GMT

March 13th 2007

Yesterday I went with the photographer, Lucy Cavender, out to the area around Shougang, Beijing’s vast Capital Iron and Steel Works. Part of my next book, The Pool of Unease, is set out there, and I wanted to go and take another look at the area I’d explored more than a year ago. We had to drive – by which I mean Lucy had to drive – due west out of the city. Which sounds – and looks on the map – simpler than it actually is, given Beijing’s ever-evolving and badly signposted road system. Soon we reached the huge smokestacks and blast furnaces which make up Shougang and the adjacent electrical power plant. Around here, all the residential housing has a thick grey grime on the windows, because this is where much of Beijing’s smog is born. Shougang is being downsized. Over the next few years it will be removed entirely from Beijing, because the city government knows they can’t solve the city’s air quality problem while it sits there, puffing out smoke rings, on the edge of the city.

There was one particular place I wanted to get to - all I could remember was that we had to follow the periphery of the wall of the power plant. Eventually we found it – a dirt track that rose along the wasteland at the back of the power plant, the industrial landscape on one side, and an unused quarry on the other, much of which has been turned into a dump. It is home to a vast multi-coloured collection of plastic bags tangled around skeletal trees, tumbling down the side of the quarry, floating on the top of pools of wastewater. The area is populated by crows, mangy dogs, and a community of scavengers.

We saw a group of people using metal detectors, and went to speak to them. They came from rural Henan, one man told me, where he said there were too many people to live off the land. I asked how, once they got to Beijing, they knew where to go to find work. He said that there was a network of Henan people already in Beijing, who had directed him to the area around Shougang. He had come to the capital with his wife, and their entire income came from the scraps of metal they scavenged. Two of the scavengers spent some time bashing with a mallet at a concrete bollard they suspected harboured metal. The concrete splintered and flew away in all directions to reveal a six-inch iron rod at the centre. It was worth about 1 yuan, they said, just a few pence. They said they made ‘a few tens of yuan’ a day. Ten yuan is just over one US dollar, or about seventy pence. One man told me that he and his wife paid 200 yuan a month for housing, and 800 yuan a term for their child to go to school. Even with their expenses, their income in Beijing is far higher than what they would earn in the countryside. But it''s not an easy life.

Two Sisters

Tue, 6 Mar 2007 02:01:52 GMT

March 6th 2007

Last week I spoke to two little girls begging in the evening outside a cafe which is frequented by foreigners. Six and seven years old, dressed in thick grubby clothes, they told me they were sisters. They had come to Beijing from rural Henan Province with their grandfather, they said, clinging to the top of a train for 12 hours overnight because they couldn't afford tickets. ‘It was very cold,’ one of them said with stoic understatement. When they arrived in Beijing at the end of their awful journey, they said, they were discovered by the police and threatened with jail as stowaways, but the younger one had cried, and they had been let go.

The six year old was the more talkative of the two – indeed, her story poured out of her in a torrent. She said it was her own birth that had precipitated the family’s descent into poverty when local officials came to demand cash in fines for the birth of a second child (although the birth of a second child is, in many cases, legal in the countryside). When the family couldn’t pay the three thousand yuan demanded by local officials in fines, the mother was thrown into jail. After her release, their mother had been injured, and was now earning 5 yuan (about 40p or less than US$1) a day working as a cook for another family. The two girls clung sleepily to each other as they told their story. They would spend the night, they said, in a hut their grandfather had found for them. Their grandfather, they said, was about half a mile away, begging outside a hotel.

Their story raised all sorts of questions – how had their grandfather known how to find the lucrative expatriate watering hole as soon as he arrived in the capital city? Why were the police not intervening? Would the money the children received really go towards the tuition fees they said they had come to Beijing to raise, or would 90% of it go into a middleman’s pocket? There are gang leaders who collect children from their families and bring them to the city, either to beg, or to wash cars, or sell flowers. The children have to hand over whatever cash they receive, and their parents are promised a small per diem payment from the gang leader. Sometimes that materializes, often it does not.

Smog by any other name

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 08:16:47 GMT

25th February

This truly is one for the smog blog. Smog has a new name in Beijing. Everyone used to call it wu, which means fog, and that used to send me a little crazy, because fog is a natural phenomenon, and it seemed to me that there was a government-sponsored brain-washing initiative at work here, pretending that pollution didn’t exist. Fog moves with the air and it comes in waves. There are places where it is gossamer light, and places where it is so heavy it feels solid. Beijing smog is not like that, it’s a uniform haze that hangs, unmoving, above the city. It’s a combination of encroaching desert, and construction dirt, and car exhaust, and industrial emissions. As you come into land, pilots often comment on the limited visibility. It’s not there every day, of course, or a lot of us would have fled town by now. Beijing is in a hollow at the centre of mountains, and so whatever gunk goes into the air stays there until the wind comes and blows it away. One day earlier this week was vile, with air you could taste. Then the wind blew it away (I wonder where) and the sky became a gorgeous blue. Anyway, on another vile day a couple of weeks ago, I was informed by a Chinese friend that what was once called wu is now to be called mai, which Isuppose translates as haze, or smog. My friend explained that mai is different from wu, because it contains no moisture. (Indeed, it has neither snowed nor rained since I returned to Beijing in January.) Apparently the word mai emerged in the newspapers and on television in the form of promises to issue haze warnings. That day three Chinese Beijing residents, quite independently of each other, told me about mai. Whether it was intentional or not, the new word seems to have stimulated new interest in the cloud of pollution that hangs above the city.

Smog Blog - First Entry

Fri, 5 Jan 2007 11:50:59 GMT

picture credit: Stephen Sampson

One day, after I had written my first two Robin Ballantyne books, I found myself walking along a Beijing street and trying to decide where to set my third book. It had to be somewhere gritty, I thought. It had to be somewhere chaotic and full of energy, where corruption and power hold sway over the law, and where darkness and hardship lurk underneath glamour. I racked my brain.

I've spent sixteen years of my adult life in China and Hong Kong. I've lived in Beijing longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life.

There's a lot to be said for living in Beijing, and pollution and traffic to be said against it. Sometimes I think wistfully about living in Britain. In South London we would not have all-night construction happening just outside our bedroom window, a spotlight shining around the edges of our curtains, cranes groaning, dangling lumps of concrete, and construction teams hanging clinging precariously to scaffolding. In South London we would not wake up once in a while to find, when we pulled the curtains back, that the world had been turned yellow overnight by a sandstorm that had dumped desert over everything. Or to find that we could not see beyond the house opposite because of the smog. But then, in South London, we would not have what we have here in Beijing, which is the sense that history is rapidly unfolding in front of our eyes.

The third Robin Ballantyne book, The Pool of Unease, is set in Beijing. It will be published in 2007 and it introduces a new character, a private detective called Song (the 'o' is pronounced like the 'u' in pudding), a disaffected former police officer. The Pool of Unease is a thriller set against pollution, corruption, the gap between rich and poor, the lack of a free press, the power of the economy, the hunger for growth, the breakneck speed of change...