This morning’s attack, which killed 16 police in the far western region of Xinjiang, did not exactly surprise me, but it may have startled at least one senior official from the area, Kerexi Maihesuti. Just last Friday in a Beijing press conference for foreign media the vice chairman of the Xinjiang region described the threat of ethnic Uighur separatists there as a disorderly band of wanna-be’s “with limited power” who are “not competent make the attacks which some hostile forces wish".

It’s bad news for a mainland newspaper to let something slip about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Really bad news. The news only tends to get worse when the slip-up occurs at a time as delicate as now, with the Olympics days away and Beijing on tenterhooks about, among lots of other things, foreign TV broadcasts and tourists at Tiananmen Square. But one week after its well-publicized infraction, the propaganda-meisters remain eerily silent in the case of The Beijing News. Persons informed on the matter say it may very well stay that way until after the Games.

Last Thursday the paper, one of the country’s elite commercial dailies, ran an interview with Pulitzer Prize-decorated photographer Liu Heung Shing. Liu is the editor of a new coffee-table volume of photos that spans the tumultuous history of the People’s Republic (Newsweek’s Alexandra Seno profiled him about it last week). Much of the subject matter is politically tinged, including images of the Tiananmen demonstrations, the Cultural Revolution and previously unreleased shots by Chinese photojournalists. As a result the book is unlikely to be sold on the mainland, and some copies shipped in have been impounded by customs officials.

To accompany the interview in The Beijing News, Liu says, he e-emailed the paper three photos of his in the book, though he was cautious not to select any that would be to o risque to publish. When the interview appeared, however, the spread of images featured a fourth he never sent, at the bottom corner of the page:

The Beijing News, July 24, 2008, Page C15

The corner photo, entitled “The Wounded”, was one Liu captured during the June 3-4, 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen. Its shows civilians pierced by bullets being wheeled away on tricycle carts.

By Jeremy Kahn

Indian police were ready for protesters

By the way, my friends in the know say many Beijing establishments -- at least in the expat-rich area of Chaoyang where I live, and where the 2008 Games will take place -- have run out of Guinness. While this isn't as serious a crisis as, say, running out of flu vaccine, it's causing  consternation and angst.

Rumor has it the Guinness imports are held up due to newly stringent government requirements for product-safety testing, using sophisticated gas chromatography which costs importers something in the neighborhood of five figures (in greenbacks, that is) and can take weeks or even months to complete. My last blog described the highly coincidental timing in which last week's important international food-safety conference in Beijing was preceded by a high-profile media visit -- pulled together by the city's Olympics organizers -- to a number of quality-control sites.

Included was a quality inspection site in Chaoyang with a display room showing various imported goods that've been tested for elements such as heavy metals. I saw some well-known labels there, including Revlon hair coloring, Del Monte ketchup, Ballantine's and Perrier.  Is the sudden dearth of Guinness related to Beijing's recent surge of interest in product safety inspections? If so, it means China and the EU are beginning to hit where it hurts in their tiff over quality control.

What do the Beijing Games have to do with this week’s diplomatic hissy-fit between Chinese and European Union senior officials over product safety? Following months of export scandals and Western recalls of flawed Chinese goods, the Beijing Olympics media center laid on a Nov. 12 press visit to a string of chicken-processing, pig-butchering and product-inspection facilities to emphasize the city’s commitment to food safety.

Among other things we saw neat assembly lines of pig carcasses being sawed, sliced and cut into bits. While graphic, the scenes bore little resemblance to how we imagine most meat gets processed in China, evoking the Chicago abattoirs of Upton Sinclair’s time. Chinese factory officials bent over backwards to assure us their high standards guaranteed food safety for ALL Beijing citizens, not just visiting Olympians. That was to deflate rumors that secret pig-raising centers had been established to guaranteed hormone-free “pampered” pork for Olympic athletes – gossip which blogger Andrew Lih dubbed “the Olympic pig conspiracy.”

The timing of that media event seemed quite the coincidence when, this past week, Beijing opened a big international food-safety conference. That’s when the high-level catfight erupted. First EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson tore into Chinese authorities for their record of unsafe exports and “tidal wave” of counterfeits. “During the summer some Chinese officials pointed out that less than 1 percent of China’s exports to Europe had alleged health risks,” he declared, “But Europe imports half a billion euros worth of goods from China daily, so even 1 percent is not acceptable.”

Mandelson’s rant was “unfair” and “inappropriate for today’s occasion”, maintained Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (one of the organizations that featured during our little press trip, by the way). Chinese vice premier Wu Yi-- Beijing’s top trade official, nicknamed the “Iron Lady” -- was even more miffed. She declared herself “extremely unhappy” with Mandelson’s remarks and defended China’s efforts to improve quality control and crack down on pirated goods.

Later that same day, Mandelson riposted that Wu should not have taken exception to his statement that four-fifths of the counterfeit items pouring over Europe’s borders originate in China. “We must seek truth from facts,” he said, citing a phrase identified with Beijing’s late strongman Deng Xiaoping.

What exactly are the facts surrounding China’s food-safety record, and why are Western officials so concerned? Here’s an interview my colleague Han Songmei conducted with Dr Roger Skinner, who’s investigated China’s food safety system as a consultant for the World Health Organization. The London-based specialist is lead author of a report on suggested reforms that was sponsored by China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the World Health Organization and the Asian Development Bank. Skinner was remarkably candid; check out these excerpts:

The recent meltdown of Beijing's online ticket-sales system for the 2008 Games came as a surprise to many -- and as a huge frustration to millions of unsuccessful ticket purchasers. Beijing after all has been so forward-leaning in erecting Olympics venues that at one point China's leaders -- all nine of the top guys were trained as engineers -- were politely advised to slow down construction to avoid completing some buildings too soon. So well you might ask how organizers could have fumbled the ball so badly on Oct. 30, when 1.85 million tickets went on sale -- and the official sales website crashed after attracting more than 8 million hits from eager buyers? Manuela Zonensein in Beijing explains:

It seems Chinese authorities weren’t quite ready to serve the people. Tuesday Wei Jizhong, a consultant to the Beijing Games organizing committee, was quoted by the state-run Beijing News as saying the vast potential size of the local audience means "first-come, first-served doesn't fit China". When sales resume Dec. 10, organizers will revert to a lottery system – similar to that used in the first phase of sales last April--to determine who’ll be allowed to purchase tickets. The organizing committee says this approach will adhere more closely to “principles of fairness, impartiality, and convenience to the public." And that’s about the only explanation the public has received regarding last week's disastrous launch.

It’s still unclear how authorities could have underestimated – by eight times – local demand for Olympics tickets. They hinted that demand was inflated due to ticket hoarding and speculators; indeed shortly after the first phase of ticket sales kicked off, Chinese websites featured scalped tickets selling for as high as RMB 150,000 (more than USD 20,000).

Part of authorities’ explanation was that, with 1.3 billion people, China has more aspiring buyers than Sydney or Athens, but around the same number of tickets will be sold. Therefore the ticket-selling mechanisms that served those two cities’ Olympics proved inadequate for the task in China. Haven’t we learned by now that size matters? “What was driving their expectations?” wondered David Wolf, President and CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a technology communications firm, “That you're not going to have more people [wanting tickets] than Sydney, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Los Angeles?"