"China - The Smog Blog" - Catherine Sampson

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 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 1978, 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

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.

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.