Countdown Beijing

Red Star Athletes: China Trembles

2008-07-01T05:38:10Z

Although the Chinese excel in certain sports, many of the Middle Kingdom’s best athletes are notorious choke artists who disappoint almost as often as they impress. Maybe their inconsistency has something to do with China’s system of athletic development.

Whatever the case, conventional wisdom held that in ’08 a hometown crowd would drive Chinese athletes to overcome their performance anxiety and shine as brightly as the five stars on the country’s national flag. Yet some of China’s most high-profile athletes have delivered underwhelming performances in the last couple of months, revealing cracks in the country’s veneer of invincibility that could prove portentous in August.

The first ill omen came when Guo Jinging stumbled during the women’s 3m springboard preliminary at the FINA Diving World Series in Nanjing on May 30 and failed to advance to the finals. Unsubstantiated pregnancy rumors may have contributed to her subpar performance. Or maybe an explanation can be found at the bottom of a baijiu bottle. I have it on good authority that Guo drank too much, then threw up at a party in mid-May.

In fact, China’s entire diving team has been looking less than stellar as of late. During the sixth leg of this year's FINA Diving Grand Prix, which concluded on June 9 and took place in Rostock, Germany, China won only five out of eight gold medals. Such is China’s diving dominance that anything less than a sweep is considered disappointing.

That was the third time in less than two months that China failed to capture diving titles it once won effortlessly. During the fourth leg in Montreal in May, China failed to walk away with gold in both the men's 10m synchronized platform and the women's 10m platform. A week before Montreal’s frustrating finals, at a World Series in Mexico, China lost three events - the men's 3m springboard, men's 10m synchronized platform and women's 10m platform. The losses by top pair Lin Yue and Huo Liang in the men's 10m synchronized platform at Mexico and then again at Montreal were especially surprising since they hadn’t lost since 2006.

All of which led team manager Zhou Jihong to declare early last month, "I do not think we have an absolute advantage over our opponents anymore." Granted, critics have cast aspersions on the team’s preparedness in the past only to see China reign supreme at the Olympics. But it’s not just China’s divers who are having trouble delivering the goods with less than six weeks remaining before the opening ceremonies kick off on August 8. Another athlete who has seen his unquestioned advantage in a particular event evaporate is hurdler Liu Xiang.

First Liu withdrew from the Reebok Grand Prix on May 31, citing a tight hamstring. Then he was disqualified from the Prefontaine Classic Grand Prix on June 8 when he false started. And then Cuban hurdler Dayron Robles ran a faultless race to clock 12.87 at the IAAF Grand Prix meeting in Ostrava, Czech Republic, shaving one-hundredth of a second off of the previous record set by Liu in July, 2006.

Robles has since been gracious in his praise of Liu, insisting that he believes “at least five guys can win in Beijing, but Liu is the favorite. He is the guy to beat.” Regardless, Chinese sport czars must be understandably concerned that their golden boy could walk away with silver and lose face (horror of horrors) as well as first place.

And any hope that a new generation of Chinese athletes will rise to the top at the Beijing Games seems to be fading fast. Cui Dalin, Deputy Minister of Sport, previously admitted that the country's ambitious Project 119 had failed to yield the bumper crop of young talent that the Chinese government had hoped to cultivate in anticipation of hosting the big O.

If the Chinese soccer team is any indication, there won’t be many surprise upsets for China in August. The national team will not be going to the World Cup in 2010 after finishing last in their group on June 14 with a loss to Iraq. Competing in a relatively easy group – China vied with Iraq, Qatar, and Australia (the only acknowledged powerhouse among the four) for a place on the South African pitch – China failed to win a single game.

The team has only ever qualified for the World Cup once, in 2002, but was quickly eliminated in the first round without scoring a single goal. While soccer is hugely popular in China (I remember crowds of people gathering to watch the World Cup finals in 2006 on TVs that their neighbors had set up outside on the sidewalks at absurd hours of the night because of the time difference), yet the national team remains decidedly unimpressive.

Regardless of whether these recent failings can be attributed to the curse of 2008, Machiavellian machinations meant to lull foreign competitors into a false sense of security, or simply nerves, only time will tell. The only sure thing these days seems to be a sense of uncertainty.

Post-Quake Camp: “Have You Heard of Communism?”

2008-06-29T09:42:53Z

Last week I was in Sichuan, where post-quake reconstruction is just beginning but the sense of utter ruin has faded fast. The down-and-out, albeit, are a relatively small and hard-to-reach minority: I met an ER nurse who couldn't forgive herself for not having saving a soul, for instance, and an eight-year-old boy who'd barely spoken since seeing his teacher consumed in the debris. But the civic spirit I saw in action disinfected some of the cynicism I carried going in. This was particularly the case at the displacement camps I visited, where the mood blended forbearance, levity and melancholy. Imagine an encampment of Deadheads on tour - without the Dead.

The quake leveled not only towns and villages but momentarily, the class consciousness of an increasingly stratified society. It's been many a decade since so many people in China found themselves lumped together in such sorry straits, and perhaps never before have so many across the country genuinely banded together to provide a safety net. Perversely put, Sichuanese can take solace in living out the socialistic ideal of the People's Republic. Not that the damage was egalitarian or equitable. The Big One mostly hit the ill-prepared underclasses up in the mountains, much as Katrina submerged their American counterparts below sea-level. But I'd take life in a Sichuan displacement camp over a FEMA trailer park any day. Here, at least, it signified development.

...

My work didn’t take me to the worst-hit counties like Beichuan and Wenchuan. People I interviewed who did go likened the experience to rediscovering lost cities of antiquity. “Ghosts' towns” became a familiar refrain. In portions of the sticks that have remained habitable, resources are often scare and peasants frustrated and angry. The day before I arrived, members from a small Chengdu-based “house church” piled into a couple SUVs packed with food and other necessities and drove to one outlying village they had been aiding.

But they never made the drop. When they got to the village, their local contacts worried about accepting the offering because it was only enough for about one villager in five, said one church member on-hand. And officials they encountered refused the aid because, according to them, they had things under control. It wasn’t clear whether the bigger hangup was the giver or the gift.

Such problems were not so visible in the official relief camps. Displacement grounds were blocked out in tidy city-like grids of tents, and residents had sunk into the controlled rhythms of ghetto life. The mood was generally constructive and cooperative.

In the heat and intermittent drizzle of the days, people spent a lot of time just lazing around in their tents. Come meal times, they queue up single-file for the communal grub (no ration tickets needed). Late afternoon, the elderly graze under canopies reading or playing mahjong; the young cavort in school or group therapy activities – they sing a lot, and squabble a lot, especially over the odd luxury like a bicycle.

Some days toward sundown, pop bands show up to play a benefit set. Stand after stand sells all variations on those now-ubiquitous “I Love China” T-shirts – some say “Go Sichuan” or “Go China”. Practically every other dweller wears them, many for lack of anything else.

Police and military were constantly on patrol around the perimeter. Rotating in and out were teams of military specialists; telecommunications teams; official media crews; and volunteers from NGOs, academy-based psychotherapy missions, and large companies, who’ve flocked from all over the country. Their ranks probably peaked a few weeks ago, but they continue to assert a big impact on the work in the camps.

The projects that remain have formal arrangements to work with state partners, such the schools or governments, official foundations, or local branches of the All-China Women’s Federation or the Communist Youth League. Kids and relief workers were frequent faces at tents set up to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric fallout. But this scale of "crisis intervention" is entirely new to the everyday masses in China. A lot of adults believed their biggest emotional problem remained, er, what was euphemistically referred to as "economics".

Every day I noted positive signs. At a couple of camps outside Deyang, thousands of residents were being moved out of tent cities into newly built yards of prefab housing resembling shipping containers, the temporary kind usually reserved for construction teams building other buildings. From the camps in Mianyang, the Rizhao Iron and Steel Company was in the process of transferring 600 schoolchildren, predominately orphans, to the coastal Shandong city on the other side of the country. There’s the smelter will send them to one of Rizhao’s top school and has been building a new dorms to house them – free of charge (just two per room, the kids had heard). The company has also pledged to support all of them through college or vocational schooling. Total initial donation: $110 million yuan (about US$16 million).

Despite all the counseling, we can only speculate how much emotional baggage has yet to surface under the weight of state propaganda, Olympic pride, and official coercion. Among Sichuanese, underlying complaints and appeals for justice abound: Could they have been warned ahead of time? How well are their leaders going to take of them now? Why did schools come crashing over their only children's heads, and who would pay for that irreplaceable loss?

Though the reality on the ground lay in full flux, there was a numbing beat of routineness to the transition and it pervaded the areas I personally visited. Which is an oblique way of saying that Chinese society functions pretty damn well when it has cause to.

All of the above comes by way of general observations. Since getting there is usually half the battle for us hacks, here’s the meta-journalistic breakdown, by the numbers:

1: number of trips it took me to process credentials to cover the quake zone. A week after the cataclysm, Sichuan’s provincial publicity department began issuing mandatory reporting permits. The new clearance regime helped the government get a grip over coverage after the initial free-for-all, and similar measures were extended to cover volunteers and non-governmental organizations. But the added layer of bureaucracy was not prohibitive in and of itself. Access-wise, I'd still call this story the anti-Tibet.

At the Shiye Hotel in Chengdu, the application process remained a breeze. The sign outside the office said that as a general rule, each news organization would be limited to one to two passes. Newsweek already had two. I should have come with one my colleagues’ existing passes to renew it, one young press flak informed me. It was already too late for that, though. “So what do we do now?” I asked. Without a word with their superiors, they said not to worry – and processed my pass. It was a ten-day pass lasting from June 13 to June 22 - not bad, though the day I arrived was June 19…

2: number of times I was refused an official extension to stay in Deyang. Though the aforementioned provincial credentials cover most of the disaster zone, some cities have taken to requiring their own reporting permits to roam locally. Even the provincial publicity flaks were genuinely fuzzy about this, and I was never asked to present the Deyang pass. But official interviewees are known to ask in places where parents are agitating over in school collapses or where landslides and flooding remain a threat.

When I pulled in to Deyang, the foreign affairs officer at the city government building was nice enough. She issued me a square slip of paper – my permit - in a matter of five minutes. But again there was a catch: It covered the period lasting from June 19 to June 19. No, that’s not a typo.

The next morning, I called the officer to renew. Conveniently, I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the city government offices. But she said she was down in Mianzhu, a hard-hit sub-city of Deyang, and it was not convenient for her to extend my permit.

“There’s some natural disaster out here.”

“What kind of natural disaster?”

“Some flooding, some landslides and so on.”

“But I’m just going to the displacement camps, nowhere dangerous.”

“You’d better stay in the city proper. You won’t need any permit there. You’ll be fine.”

I ignored her, and nothing came of it. I spent the day reporting from a Mianzhu displacement camp, without the slightest inkling of interference. When I called her again next morning, the Deyang foreign affairs officer gave me the same runaround. But again, not having a Deyang pass didn’t make a difference. By the fourth day, I stopped calling her. We haven’t spoken since.

2: number of tries it took to enter Shifang, another city in Deyang. Parents in battered mountain areas like Luoshui township are agonizing over the collapse of schools there. Many have been campaigning outside the township governments for weeks on end pending an investigation into shoddy school construction. Because of that, I was told by my volunteer contacts in Deyang, Shifang had barred journalists and foreigners from entering town. At the same, my volunteer contacts in Shifang had no reservations when I asked to visit, and I’d heard that foreign journalists had been waved in at police checkpoints in recent days. Mianzhu had been no problem the day before. Why should Shifang be?

The next day I got into cab and rode over from downtown Deyang, just a half hour away. At the toll station ahead of the bridge leading into Shifang, a couple of uniformed Shifang policemen stopped our cab. I rolled down the window and showed the officer in charge my journalist’s pass. He made no effort to finesse the reaction.

“Turn around and go back.”

“Why?”

“Traffic control.”

“Then why are all those other cars going past?”

“No journalists are allowed. Period.”

“I’m not going in as a journalist. I’ve got other business.”

“No foreigners are allowed either.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you that. We’re just following are orders.

My cab retreated, and I called my volunteer contacts inside Shifang. To my surprise, they offered to come to pick me up. A half hour later, a pickup truck with a large cab pulled up to where I was waiting, several miles beyond the Shifang toll station. There were four of them, all Sichuanese. Just enough room for me to squeeze in. We stategically seated the two women on the left side of the vehicle, the side closest to the police. The prettier of the two sat in the front. I pretended to be sleeping as we passed the checkpoint unstopped. I opened my eyes soon after we did.

3: number of free lunches I ate at the displacement camps. Favorite dish: the spicy tofu at the Beichuan Middle School displacement camp in Mianyang. I wolfed it down over lunch with several junior high boys in their tent.

Funny thing was, each and every time we passed the food lines, some Chinese volunteer I happened to be with made a point of directing my attention to the scene. (The photo above shows that in Mianzhu.) All those folks queued up with their iron rice bowls -- probably looked as refreshingly retro to them as it did to me. “Excuse me, Reporter An,” an academic from Beijing remarked at one point. “Have you ever heard of Communism?”

5: number of text-pages in the longest of the many cell-phone messages I received from the Sichuan propaganda authorities while in Chengdu. Most concerned basic progress in rebuilding – bridges opened, road work to be completed, classes to resume, special regulations and courts to be established. But the direct marketing of model heroes also reached new and more sophisticated heights. The five-part text went like this:

“Dujiangyan interview notice: At the rescue scene of Xiang’e Township Middle School, the clever ‘folk’ engineer Ren Longfu recognized the need to use effective rescue measures in order to save some of the students. He used only those materials available at the scene...

…for instance a basketball stand and so forth, to build a makeshift crane, and began to rescue students. Around 10 p.m. on March 14, the body of Carpenter Ren’s daughter was pulled out, but the aggrieved Carpenter Ren did not carry…

…off his daughter’s body and leave the rescue scene. He continued to direct [rescue work] until the morning of March 15, when he transported his daughter’s corpse home and carried out the burial. And by that time, he had already worked at the disaster relief scene for about fifty straight…

…hours. In all, according to the township chief Fu Mintao, he rescued five survivors from the rubble. Carpenter Ren’s deeds were invaluable. Contact person: Ai Guangming (Xiang’e Township Deputy Party Secretary. Contact number: 1388193…

…9009. – Provincial Party Publicity Department.”

Inside Sichuan's Volunteer Scene

2008-06-27T09:40:24Z

Everyone's been struck by the continuing altruism and idealism of
young Chinese who flocked to quake-devastated Sichuan province to
help, any which way they can. For some Americans the scene evokes
almost a kind of latter-day Chinese Woodstock. Jennifer Conrad
recently got a taste of life among the volunteers:

I flew to Sichuan a couple days ago, and met a twenty-something girl
from Guangxi province. Smart and witty, she had shaggy bangs and
wore blue pointy-toed snearkers. She told me she'd come from Beijing,
where she now lives and works, to help out with quake relief efforts.

     And she's found plenty to do, traveling to the affected areas to
assess needs and then returning to Chengdu each day. She also
helps foreign relief groups handle the logistics of working in China.
She'd seen a town cut in half by a landslide and temporary shelters
built with whatever could be scavenged, including pieces of
old billboards. During one trip, a group of children saluted the
volunteers' car as it drove into town.

      She stays in an apartment that was rented by a guy from Beijing so
that volunteers could have a free place to stay. She took me back to the house
where a bunch of guys were smoking cigarettes and sharing a big meal.
Several of them were shirtless; they sat around in shorts, looking
like they'd been through some hard days of work. A few others were
sacked out on the couch watching TV. About a dozen guys were sharing
the place; three women stayed in a separate bedroom.

     The volunteers--most in their 20s and early 30s--had come from all
over China, taking hard-seat trains to Chengdu to do whatever they
could to help out. One of the leaders I met had spent several days
pulling people out of the rubble. None of them was willing to be
interviewed or photographed. They said they didn't want to be
famous--I'm not sure how much of it was modesty and how much was
nervousness about talking to a foreign journalist. But they were all
excited to have an American girl around. I spent 15 minutes posing
for photos with them--some haven't met many foreigners.

      The apartment had a sort of college-dorm feel, with empty beer bottles
clustered in one corner and minimal furniture. There's been some
drama, too: The woman who took me to the apartment told me she got
into a fight with one of the guys the night before. He'd claimed her
experiences couldn't match his, saving people who were trapped in the rubble.
She brushed it off, though, attributing the oneupmanship to too many beers and
the stress of work.

     On the wall was a giant communist party flag that all the volunteers had signed.
Apparently, this was their second such flag--the first one had already been completely
covered with signatures. A few hours earlier, I met an expat who was
coordinating some relief efforts. He said there's been tremendous support
from the foreign community in Chengdu, but the majority of volunteers are
coming from within China. The young woman who showed me around told me
her experience had been incredible; she wishes she could stay longer.
It's inspiring to see so many young people -- without a plan or a ton of cash --
showing up to do whatever they can.

Beijing's Clampdown on English-Language Glossies

2008-06-26T03:18:41Z

Two of Beijing’s three free English-language entertainment and listings monthlies have just suffered setbacks, and it is unclear when or if they'll return to newsstands. Time Out Beijing (TOB) has been shelved indefinitely due to “improper licensing." The editorial team that once produced That’s Beijing has had to assume a new identity—The Beijinger— after being dumped unexpectedly by the license-holding local publisher.

Publishing in China is anything but straightforward: the license required for periodicals and books, as well as for Internet sites seeking “to engage in information services,” needs approval by the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP). This is the government agency responsible for drafting and enforcing regulations concerning “prior restraint”— the granting of permission and screening prior to publishing.

The stringent monitoring and licensing process is especially difficult for foreign periodicals, which have been known to publish surreptitiously under defunct local titles. When Rolling Stone magazine put out its first Chinese edition in 2006, for example, it was scrapped shortly thereafter for improper licensing, even though its directors had presumed all paperwork was in order.

The reason provided by GAPP for shelving the June issue of TOB is that it lacked a proper license—a fact that has “not changed in the past three and a half years,” said Tom Pattinson, the magazine’s editor. He interpreted the move as another example of heightened restrictions and tighter monitoring in the capital prior to the Olympic Games -- “perhaps a strange time" for a problem to arise over an issue that had not been problematic before.

The problems encountered by That's Beijing were apparently the climax of a long-running feud. According to an email distributed by Mike Wester, General Manager of True Run Media, the organization which previously coordinated publishing for That's Beijing, the publication's former publisher had brokered -- on the sly -- an agreement with another team to produce content for That's Beijing. Wester's e-mail stated the That’s brand has been under dispute for many years and its trademark status is “up in the air.” True Run Media launched The Beijinger website a number of months ago but has yet to arrange a new publisher for the magazine itself.

Along with TOB and That’s Beijing, City Weekend (CW) Beijing -- a bi-weekly for which I write a dining column -- have been read widely by Beijing’s resident expatriates and short-term tourists. Since CW will continue providing “info on what’s on when and where in Beijing,” according to Managing Editor Collin Crowell, it's virtually the only remaining glossy aimed at informing foreigners about local activities.

Not wanting to sound overly cynical, I should mention that guides on Beijing's entertainment venues during the Olympics might not be needed as much as originally expected. New Chinese visa restrictions are adversely affecting the nation's tourism industry, "casting a pall over Beijing," writes David Barboza in the New York Times. Though the names of the Games' fuzzy mascots, the Five Friendlies—"bei," "jing," "huan," "ying," and "ni"—mean "Beijing welcomes you" when strung together, the city isn't exactly opening its arms to visitors from abroad.

Go China! Olympic cheer -- or pain at the pumps

2008-06-25T09:37:58Z

Chinese typically root on heroes and peers alike with the cheer jia you!, the rough equivalent of “Come on!” or “Let’s go!”. In the lead-up to the Olympics, with national pride under assault from all sorts of natural calamity and human rights kerfuffle, people are sporting the pick-me-up on everything from T-shirts to bumper stickers. As in, “Go, Wenchuan,” “Go, Sichuan” - sites of the devastating quake - or “Go, China!” Beijing Games organizers have even begun promoting the "Go, China" chant as part of an officially sanctioned routine for Chinese fans, offset by hand clapping, fist pumping, and a double thumbs-up.

But as you may know by now, jiayou, literally, can mean to “add oil”, or refuel -- i.e., to gas up. And lately the price of the gas in China has gone way, way up.

Despite skyrocketing international oil prices, most analysts didn’t think Beijing would risk another major spike at the pumps, substantially subsidized in China, until just after the Olympics. Instead Chinese leaders sprung a surprise hike on June 20, allowing the costs to loft as much as 18 percent higher – to nearly $3 a gallon.

And so it’s been costing drivers a lot more to jiayou.

Put together the double entendre and you get a corny joke now making the rounds in China by mobile text message, under the guise of ingenious analysis. It came my way recently. In translation:

“The main reason for the current rise in gas prices is:

      Wenchuan jiayou!
        Sichuan jiayou!
        Beijing jiayou!
        Olympics jiayou!
        China jiayou!

Which has resulted in the exorbitant rise in the demand for gasoline, and inadequate supply to meet demand.”

Olympic Mascot Buzz, Lhasa's Lockdown

2008-06-20T12:14:39Z

Chinese Netizens are buzzing about a cheeky interpretation of the five Olympic mascots, known as fuwa. "Five Fuwa, Five Disasters" is the title of one Web commentary making the rounds. The story goes like this: the five mascots are animals or symbols seen as highly auspicious by Chinese. Their simplified nicknames strung together create the phrase "Beijing Welcomes You!" or Beijing Huanying Ni!.

But a string of tragedies during the Olympic year make the mascots seem like harbingers of of bad luck instead, so this argument goes. Mascot Ni Ni, for example has a bird-shaped kite on its head; the Chinese "kite capital" is Weifang in Shandong province, near where two trains collided head-on early this year, killing close to 70 people in one of the country's worst train wrecks in recent history.

Mascot Ying Ying represents the endangered Tibetan antelope, a favorite target of poachers during the 90's because of the luxuriant, costly shahtoosh shawls made from its precous fur. These days the protected Tibetan animal is also seen as a symbol of the Lhasa riots which erupted on March 14, triggering a security clampdown and waves of unrest in many Tibetan communities.

Then there's Huan Huan, symbol of the Olympic torch. It represents the emotional protests -- by critics of China and the Tibet crackdown -- which erupted when the Olympic torch relay passed through London, Paris, San Francisco and other cities shortly after the Lhasa riots.

The pro-Tibet demonstrations triggered a virulently nationalist Chinese backlash against the West -- and especially the Western media -- that began to subside around the time of the May 12 Sichuan earthquake. This particularly horrific tragedy is represented by Olympic mascot Jing Jing, the giant panda, whose natural habitat is mostly in Sichuan province. There the Wolong Giant Panda preserve was badly damaged during the quake. (Newsweek.com was the first Western media to report on and show the destruction in exclusive photos.)

Finally the fish mascot Bei Bei is seen as an icon of water, which Netizens say symbolizes the extensive flooding experienced in southern China recently. (An alternative interpretation, according to at least one Netizen, is that "Bei" stands for Beijing -- and therefore this mascot portends a disaster yet to come.)

Even if you don't believe in such superstitions, you've got to admit 2008 has been full of catastrophes for China. Their reverberations continue to be felt. Tomorrow the Olympic torch passes through the Tibetan capital. Sadly, Lhasa remains in lockdown.

It's extremely difficult to talk candidly with Tibetans in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas to assess the true situation on the ground. Foreign media and diplomats have not been allowed to enter Tibet on independent trips since March 14. (Several extremely brief, tightly orchestrated group trips have been organized by authorities.) Internet communications -- and even some mobile-phone conversations -- have been monitored heavily, according to Lhasa residents who've managed to get messages out. More than three months after the riots, the extent and timeline of the Tibetan unrest remains shrouded in opacity, which is yet another tragedy for this Olympic year.

"A Normal Life": U.S. gymnast Shawn Johnson

2008-06-18T10:04:19Z

During the Olympics media summit in Chicago in mid-April, Newsweek's Karen
Springen talked with U.S. gymnast Shawn Johnson, 16, about her Olympics
aspirations and her emphasis on having "a normal life" -- including going to the prom.
Excerpts:

Shawn Johnson suggested she was an accidental Olympian. "I never
started gymnastics thinking I wanted to be an Olympian," she says.
"It was just always something I enjoyed."

At age 3, she started tumbling. "My parents put me in gymnastics
because I had way too much energy around the house." She declines to
talk about competitors in Beijing. "I never really try to focus on
anyone else," she says. "I was always just trying to beat myself."

She likes living 15 minutes from her gym, and living in Iowa, which she
calls "the best place ever." Her mom and dad are "the most normal
parents there are," she says. "They never pushed me. They just wanted
me to follow my heart." Because of them, she says, "I've stayed pretty
normal." She attends public school from 8 to noon. She works out from
2:30 to 6:30 p.m. during the week and from noon until 6 p.m. on
Saturdays. Sunday is her day off.

Her role model: Mary Lou Retton. "Mary Lou Retton has always inspired
me," she says. "She's the nicest lady I've ever met." But she doesn't
want to be just like her. "I'm in the sport to become the next Shawn
Johnson," she says. "I want to be a person that little girls and athletes
can look up to and admire."

She says she doesn't suffer from injuries (though she later says, "you
learn every ache and pain possible-it's the most physically demanding
sport there is"). When she's not at the gym, she goes to school
football games. Last summer she was a ball girl for the football team.
"My parents think it's mandatory I have a normal life," she says. So
does her coach, who she's been with since she was 6. "He's completely
understanding I need a normal life," she says.

In fact, the number of hours she spends in the gym is on the "low end"
to "avoid burnout," she says, "[But] there is definitely a lot of demand for my
time." She is considering a career in the "medical field
because gymnastics teaches you so much about your body," she says.
"I'm going to be in gymnastics for life."

After the VISA national championships last year, a little girl on the
street said she wanted to be like her. "It was such an honor," Johnson says.
"It was the greatest, rewarding feeling to have." She is excited for her Chinese
coach, who hasn't been back to his country in 13 years. She is happy
with the new gymnastics code, though she knows some people have
criticized the loss of some of the artistic side of the sport. "I
think the new code is great," she says. "I am a powerful athlete."

More on Media: A 'Hallmark Moment' Indeed

2008-06-15T11:40:07Z

When a snow disaster cracks the land,
When Tibet splittists disrupt the torch relay,
When an earthquake shakes every single person’s soul...

No matter what hardships hit,
[We’ll] never leave any countryman stranded.

Go China! Stand up straight!

Inspiring words from the Chinese Web portal Sohu.com, in a banner ad for its news channel. The plug on the home page, which has been running off and on for a couple of weeks now (between luxury car ads), sums up a troika of blows China has taken this year in one restorative pitch. It also suits the prescription of Community Party propagandists, who've ordered that coverage of the quake be unifying, positive, and conducive to national stability. Sohu, the operator of the official site of the Beijing Games, is simply playing to its market of course, albeit one confined by Web police. It might as well be parroting Communist Party leaders themselves.

The biggie in Sichuan has served to unify the country, brought it more positive press than not, and thereby benefited national stability. First impressions have become critical to Beijing's record in responding to such crises. And Beijing made a good one after the earthquake, pulling together a massive relief operation, ushering in an official media blitz, and tolerating, if not engaging, most of the rest of the state and foreign press corps. It also embraced, on a massive and unprecedented scale, the Good Samaritan giving of public volunteers, private companies and foreign donors. After the highly contentious prelude to the Olympics, the flood of sympathy was a cleansing political catharsis.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But there were darker undercurrents. Private charity, having barely just become an option in China, practically became an obligation. Aid from places such as Taiwan and Japan got knotted up in politics. And dissent over the handling of the quake has been mostly relegated to the blogosphere; for elite spheres like closed-door intellectual forums and the pages or Web pages of liberal media; and to those vexed Sichuanese who lost children in toppled schools or failed to get adequate relief, and have been repeatedly hushed up.

Without sufficient breathing space for independent critique, coping and aid, repressed tensions could still boil over in disaster zone. And the progress that might come out of the quake might be much less than originally hoped.

For all the hustle and bustle in the immediate aftermath of the quake, one could argue that the Party always controlled the message - the “main melody" (or "theme"), as its known in official parlance. More than a month on, it’s easier to reflect on the developments. On all the key fronts - publicity, charity, relief work, and even emergent field of psychiatric counseling - Beijing has come to circumscribe a circus of activity under the state's own tent.

Did anyone expect any different? No. Nonetheless, state unity, when egregiously enforced, engenders the underlying strains of isolationism and divisiveness in China’s political DNA. It’s a family-oriented style of politics. Ancient philosophers and conquerors helped implant the notion, colonialist foreign powers exacerbated it, and the Party -- together with many (often rightfully) proud Chinese -- are feeding off it to the present day. If you’re not with China, you risk being branded “anti-China”.

The evolution of the domestic media, post-quake, indicates how authorities have encircled the forces of pluralism and served to polarize public debate. (This I’ve touched on this in previous posts here, here, here and here.) Initially, thousands of journalists scurried to the disaster zone. No one stopped them, but no one invited them either.

Propaganda organs, as in case of many crises and cover-ups in recent years, were initially disarmed. State media editors knowingly disregarded protocol on disaster coverage and an explicit ban on non-official reporting, knowing the demand for the story was huge and the risks (hence the openings) many. Premier Wen Jiabao, on the ground in Sichuan within just a few hours, was already out ahead of them. All the easier for them to chase.

Suppose central and local officials had managed to shut all or most them out, or tried much harder. The backlash would have been bad and looked worse – something on the order of another SARS debacle. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Chinese masses along with the international community promptly rallied behind the rescue and relief efforts. The propaganda department quickly retreated one step, drawing the line at bad publicity.

And the vast majority of domestic media stuck within the newly established boundaries. In turn, the official broadcasters – especially China Central Television (CCTV) and Sichuan TV – dominated the story. The cascade of real, live, rolling coverage, official and non- alike, trained on the official response and reinforced the impression that under the leadership’s command, the government was doing about the best it could given the circumstances. In most cases, it probably was. But if it wasn’t, few dared say so.

Within a week, media were being ordered to play down a growing list of salacious subjects. When some of the country’s most assertive media began needling away at the most sensitive point of all - the thousands of schoolchildren crushed to death under badly built schools - censors began ratcheting up warnings and punishments.

It wasn’t a blanket crackdown, but a series of targeted strikes, just enough to send a message. Web czars planted key word blocks on search engines, warning of possibly illegal contents. Party propaganda bosses busted papers like the 21^stCentral Business Herald, for spreading “harmful information” in a couple of features. The official newswire Xinhua, presumably at their behest, took aim at the trailblazing Guangdong newspaper Southern Weekly for its investigations into the school construction controversy. Finally, according to insiders, they and other leaders exerted pressure on Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang, seen as a relative moderate, to call home watchdog reporters from that newspaper group.

Where Party authorities didn’t directly discourage dissent, nationalistically-charged readers did. A rash of Web debates entangled online commentators in sticky standards of political correctness. A pair of young bloggers were detained by police after their critiques offended the sensibilities of Netizens. A Chinese property tycoon, and a bunch of big foreign brands, were pilloried for not donating enough at first.

The pressure to empathize with quake victims hit absurd heights. When Chinese media discredited a news-making text message purportedly written by a dying mother to her daughter, the China Media Project reported, Netizens seemed less upset with the sham artist than the media itself - for being too cynical. The respected Shanghai writer Yu Qiuyu urged orphaned parents to set aside their festering grievances against officials and contractors, reasoning it would only bring China bad press.

Many Netizens turned on Yu, though he did expose a core truth behind the manipulation of public opinion. There's always the risk free expression can always be used against China. Thus it's forever prone to charges of subversion.

Even the most "democratic" countries fall into this trap at times. Un-Chinese? How about un-American? Is the stiflingly patriotic climate of political correctness here much different than what we found in the United States following 9/11? We all know how since then, in the eyes of most Americans today, the U.S. paid for the surge of nationalism.

But China, by comparison, was never so blatantly divided to begin with. A single-party political system, the homogeneous Han majority, and the Olympic fever have kept political and socioeconomic divisions submerged beneath the surface all year. The snow disaster that crippled the nation's railroads and coal pipelines and left millions of people returning home for New Year’s out in the cold - now that was a temporary P.R. disaster for the government, both domestically and abroad.

But the Tibet conflagration completely split the sides, and kindled the worldwide face-off over the torch relay between pro and anti-China protesters. The Communist Party leadership, whose chief concerns lie on home front, came out of it feeling pretty good. Within the Standing Committee of the Politburo, says one Party media editor in Beijing, the internal appraisal of the ordeal was: “’We won. Not because the torch relay was successful but that Chinese young people showed their disappointment with the West. This means that West’s ‘peaceful evolution’ policy is not a success with the youth. It’s failing.”

Peaceful evolution to a Western-style democracy, he explains, is "their biggest fear of all,” He explains: “It was a result that Communist Party leaders themselves did not expect. They spent all these years with all this patriotic education, but none of it had the impact of this single event. People could view the West with their own eyes and realize, ‘Hey, it’s not always so friendly.’”

The quake response displayed a flash of the civic spirit of reform behind China’s rise - the thing Beijing Olympics were ideally meant to reward and further encourage. This spring, the prevailing icon in China has been the heart, as in “I (heart) China”. But at first it was a hard heart, not to be broken by anti-government protesters. Folks started boasting the heart on My Space sites and on T-shirts during the international torch relay.

Now the heart has softened somewhat, since being adopted by Beijing in the latest mass publicity campaign for quake relief. Propaganda posters show a red heart beating with the slogan: “Shaking the hearts of China”. It’s paired with images signifying the recovery or reconstruction, and related couplets rooting on the effort. Here's a translation of one:

The heavens and earth have been overturned/
But hope has broken through.

Here's another (pictured above):

Hot tears have been shed/
But strength has been gathered.

Still, the question is, "hope" and "strength" for whom?

Last week in Beijing, I sat in on a forum for Chinese media marking the one-month anniversary of the quake. The hosts were the SOHO group, the preeminent developer on the capital’s corporate East Side, and the Shanghai-based China Business News. CBN’s well-travelled chief editor He Li moderated and celeb SOHO founders Pan Shiyi and his wife Zhang Xin joined a panel of prominent scholars.

For a few hours, they meditated on the quake and how they might build on its aftermath toward a civil society. Xu Jilin, an intellectual historian from Huadong Normal University in Shanghai, helped frame the discussion in his introductory remarks. China is again a great economic power, he held, but not a “great political power”, nor a “great civilization”. Xu questioned whether the public outpouring in response to the quake would come to signify a revival of Chinese civilization, or rather its “hui guang fan zhao”. He was referring to a Chinese phenomenon similar to the Lazarus premonition, that last burst of vitality before death.

It was hard to be optimistic in the case of the media expression, observed Zhan Jiang, the straight-talking journalism dean at China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing. Comparing official openness at the scene of the quake to unrest in Tibetan regions, he stressed that every case of media coverage still had to be weighed separately. Increasingly, Professor Zhan pointed out, "certain elements" within the central government had been putting the clamps on quake reporting. He predicted that one day soon, all of the sudden, the August Olympics would take its place as the official media's lead story.

Indeed even as I write, the leadership is tweaking the “main melody” - or melodies - of state publicity. This from Xinhua on Sunday (italics mine):

BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- China's top publicity official Liu Yunshan said here on Sunday that more publicity should be given to post-quake reconstruction and the Beijing 0lympic Games.

"People's efforts in rebuilding their hometown after the massive quake and patriotism as well as great spirits involved should be highly praised," Liu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, told a national conference of publicity officials.

Liu said models and heroes in quake relief should be publicized by the media, and literatures relating to the quake relief should be created to encourage the nation to weather the storm.

He said more publicity should also be given to Beijing's preparation for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Sichuan Pandas Premiered in Beijing

2008-06-12T08:23:54Z

After spending eight days in quarantine, eight visiting pandas from the Wolong Panda Reserve in Sichuan Province were presented to the public at Beijing Zoo last Saturday, June 7. Though their tenure had been planned for months in advance of the Beijing Olympics—and not, as some believe, because the Sichuan reserve was rendered unfit for the pandas by the recent quake—their arrival could not have been better timed to ride on sympathy for the people, and animals, that suffered from the May 12th natural disaster.

Eight two-year-old pandas settled into their newly-constructed home. They'll live there not just for three months as originally planned, but for a longer (as yet undetermined) period to allow the quake-damaged Wolong Reserve to be renovated. Wolong is located 30 kilometers from the epicenter of the powerful quake and damage to the facility was extensive; five staffers at the Wolong base died. Two pandas were injured and six initially went missing -- of which four subsequently wandered back to the ruins of their enclosures.

Notice that there are six in the far back...

Huge crowds visited the pandas in Beijing on June 7, opening day. Parents and grandparents with children, in particular, were present enmasse. Compare the pandas’ opening day crowds with the number of visitors just a week earlier at the zoo's front entrance.

Beijing Zoo was the first in the world to display Giant Pandas, beginning in 1955. The Panda Hall consists of both indoor and outdoor areas, with animals displayed in either outdoor or indoor individual cages. During summer and winter, when temperatures become extreme, they’ll all live indoors.

All the pandas appear to be pre-occupied with eating bamboo—of which Giant Pandas eat 20 to 40 pounds (9 to 18 kg) per day. No wonder they seem busy

Eating more bamboo....

The new panda cage has been in the works since as early as 2005. And of course, the zoo exhibition wouldn't be complete without an array of panda plush toys.

Vendors selling panda-themed items

A tree bound up with notes from well-wishers...

Chinese Pride: What the T-Shirts Are Saying

2008-06-10T08:58:05Z

In China as elsewhere, a grassroots movement hasn't arrived until it can claim a t-shirt or two. The explosion of volunteerism and pride after the tragic Sichuan earthquake has triggered a wave of t-shirts. Jennifer Conrad, who works in Beijing, explains:

There's been quite a bit of coverage of Chinese nationalism lately, with the counter-protests against pro-Tibetan protesters, calls for boycotts of the French supermarket Carrefour, and the latest, angry words lobbed at actress Sharon Stone, who said—and then apologized for saying—that the Sichuan earthquake was the result of bad karma.

National pride—which, by the way, runs deep in almost every Chinese person I've met—is being expressed in a lot of ways, such as Chinese-flag bumper stickers and instant-messaging icons. But I think it's most interesting to look at the T-shirts that young people are wearing.

In early May, I went to Xi'an over a holiday weekend to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors. As I elbowed my way toward one of the pits, I spotted a guy—probably a teenager—wearing a shirt that read "Tibet in China, Torch in Heart." (According to the media blog Danwei, T-shirts with this message were given out in Beijing's university district Wudaokou and mailed to overseas Chinese students a couple of weeks prior.

            At that point, the Chinese people that I know -- friends, coworkers, teachers at my Chinese school -- did seem truly hurt and surprised by the level of criticism China was facing during its big moment in the global spotlight.

            And then, on May 12, the Sichuan earthquake struck with such force you could feel it in Beijing. Since then, the T-shirts have taken on a softer tone as everyone rallies around the quake victims and follows news of the relief effort. At work the week after the quake, two of my Chinese coworkers came back from lunch proudly sporting matching white tees with green hearts on the front. The shirts, they explained, were for earthquake relief: when you bought a magazine
and made a donation, you received the shirt.

            I went to a benefit at the rock club D22 about a week and a half after the quake. (D22 is sometimes called the CBGB of Beijing and, for those of you who are wondering, they do play the New York Dolls and the Stooges, but the bathrooms are far too clean to match the legendary—and now shuttered—New York City club.) A few feet in front of me, a guy wore a T-shirt with 14:28 on the back, the time that the earthquake struck.

            I see shirts reading "I [Heart] China", with the Chinese flag in the form of a heart, all over town—I must've spotted a dozen when I walked around Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City yesterday.

            In China, T-shirts aren't quite the teenager and college student uniform that they are in the U.S. You don't see as many young people wearing shirts for their universities and favorite bands. (If anything, you'll see shirts with Western logos or questionable English. My American coworkers and I got a kick out of it when one of our Chinese coworkers showed up to work in a tee with bottles of the notoriously cheap beer Olde English on it.) But T-shirts are catching on here, and they're providing a fast and cheap way for young people to broadcast their politics and national pride.

The Tiananmen Generation: Ma Jian on his new novel

2008-06-06T08:03:04Z

Ma Jian, one of the most influential modern Chinese writers, has published a new novel that starts with the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. After beginning his career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, Ma quit that job, travelled across China for three years - a journey he later described in his book ‘Red Dust’ – and wrote a novel ‘Stick Out Your Tongue,’ set in Tibet, which was severely criticized and banned by the government. In 1987 he moved to Hong Kong; after its handover to China ten years later he moved first to Germany and then to London. His new novel ‘Beijing Coma’ tells of a student shot in the government crackdown on the Tiananmen student movement of 1989, who remains in a coma for the next decade – but who gradually becomes aware of what’s going on around him in China’s post-Tiananmen society. It’s partly a fond memoir of the 1980s as a time of idealism and youthful romance. But it’s also a savage critique of contemporary society – and an attempt to secure a place for the events of 1989 in the Chinese collective memory. Newsweek's Duncan Hewitt spoke to Ma Jian about the book and his views on China:

Hewitt: Why did you publish a book about 1989 so many years later?

Ma: I’ve had the idea for this kind of story in my head for many years… You may know that a few days before June 4^th 1989 my brother had a fall and became a ‘vegetable’ - went into a coma. It was an accident; someone had hung a rope between two trees to dry their clothes, he was running past, and the rope caught him by the neck and pulled him up – he flew into the air and fell back onto the ground – this was on 28^th May [1989]. After his fall I rushed from Beijing to Qingdao to see him.

So in a sense he brought me back to Qingdao and therefore I wasn’t in Beijing at the time of the massacre, it’s very strange - as though one life was exchanged for another. Because if I’d been in Beijing I might well have lost my life, I was on Tiananmen Square every day observing what was going on. And as I sat beside my brother’s body in the hospital I was always thinking about this subject: a person in a vegetative state is a body which is dead, but its memory is still alive; I really wanted to describe this kind of life. In fact someone in this state can’t live for so long, and won’t wake up – but in the book I wanted to use this as a kind of symbol.

My point is that when he wakes up ten years later he discovers that he’s the only one who’s retained his memory – because people living in real life, whether those who are in the Communist Party or those who are under their control, are all collectively forgetting this period of history. Parents won’t tell their children about it – some clever kids ask their parents, but they tell them you’d better not know – don’t ask about this. So they’re all trying together to find way to forget this history. And he [the character Dai Wei in the book] is the only one whose memory hasn’t been taken away by others, the only living person who still has a memory…. So reality is the world of the comatose person, and his memory becomes alive - my aim is to say that we can live in our memories, or we live in our memory

Q: Did you feel that the events of 1989 needed someone to write about them in a literary way?

A: I originally didn’t intend that this book would be representative of June 4^that all. I was always asking my friends, why didn’t any of you who were in the square at the time write anything about it? I’ve read a few stories but none had real literary strength, and I thought this is really weird, so this [duty] fell on my shoulders… [First] I wanted to write about someone in a coma, I’d already got into this subject – because it was such a coincidence that my brother became a vegetable just at the time. As I watched him at the time I was thinking of what had happened in the square, the killings… so all these things entered my mind together. My brother died, but he was alive too: and then everyone started lying, only he didn’t… He was the only one they couldn’t arrest - already dead, but his mind was alive.

I felt I just had to write this… So in the end, by chance really, I combined the crackdown and a person in a coma with my own experience into a single whole. I wanted to combine the absurd life of someone in a coma with his real experiences… So you have a person who’s been living in a coma for ten years – and the things happening around him in real life are absurd – for example in the book his urine is turned into a medicinal drink to cure illness. I wanted to satirize not just commercialization but people’s loss of faith and beliefs.

Q: How long did it take you to write?

A: It took me ten years, partly because it was really difficult to write: one aspect is the historical difficulty – I wanted to know everything [about what happened in 89], about all the people who took part, their roles, what they said, what they felt at the time, what they feel about their history. So I did a lot of work, I talked to a lot of people… and I read almost everything on the internet, as well as records and eyewitness accounts published at the time. I also used my own memories from the Square.

Q: What were you doing at the time?

A: I was there for around a month – I didn’t join any of the [activist] groups, I didn’t want to… I wanted to be there as an observer. I was living in Hong Kong then and went back to Beijing specially – I took my camera, went to a lot of universities and read the posters, helped them write some... My main feeling was that Chinese democracy had hope. At the time almost everyone - not only opponents of the party but lots of officials also - came out [to join the demonstrations], so the movement included the entire population, apart from the army – it was maybe the only time when all the Chinese people were so united, a rare moment.

This background is very important to my book – that if you compare before and after June 4^th 1989 the Chinese people totally changed. I was really surprised by this. For example just 20 days later [after the crackdown] the same Beijing citizens who had been giving water, steamed buns and popsickles to the students were suddenly denouncing the students, helping the police to arrest them, wearing their red armbands again.

Q: Not all the Beijing people turned against the protestors like that.

A: Not all. But it shows how fear of political power can make people change at any moment. So this had a big impact on me at the time… Also you found that overnight the government had already changed history: a democratic movement had turned into a counter-revolutionary riot within a few hours. It was frightening.

Q: Are you writing about real people in the book?

A: No – after I’d collected all the material I combined some real characters to create composite characters. But all the main characters in the book were not real people… I feel that we can respect history without describing history. I respect history greatly, but from a literary point of view you don’t need to describe history all over again. I’m not interested in that.

Q: But you go into a lot of detail.

A: Right: even people who were in the square after reading my book have to acknowledge that that’s how it was. I wanted to combine the most realistic things and most absurd things - for me this was my challenge.

Q: Why don’t you think other Chinese fiction writers have written much about the events of 1989? Is it just because they’re not allowed to write about this subject?

A: No, that’s not the reason: In China they don’t control what you write, they only care about whether you publish it or not. But I feel in China’s current reality people have become fragile. So people who went through June 4^th don’t have the energy to face up to what happened. I even feel that now in China the faster you forget something, the greater a writer you are, the more advanced you are - it proves that you’re writing literature, that you have nothing to do with politics…This is a particular situation in China. I think it’s a kind of weakness.

Q: You also write a lot about what happened in the decade after 89:

A: Of course I’m always interested in Chinese society and how it’s changing, and I want to describe these changes…

Q: You make it sound like a pretty terrifying society – there are lots of shocking or grotesque things in the book…

A: In real society there’s one thing I find scary – that people don’t want to reflect, don’t want to face history. They want to live in a vacuum. This vacuum can make you very happy for a while, but you can’t dare to connect with your experience, your memory. And it’s not just the party which doesn’t want to make this kind of connection, I think ordinary people don’t want to do it either. It’s like the way the French have amnesia about what was done by the Vichy government in the Second World War: they killed Jews, helped the Nazis - but then after the war everyone pretended they didn’t know anything about this period of history.

A: You also write about a lot about earlier political movements –including those which protagonist Dai Wei’s parents experienced in the 1950s and 60s. Was it important to you to include this?

Q: It’s very important: I feel that in any nation - whether German, French, Chinese, Japanese - if you forget history then I don’t think you can be a great nation… You become very weak, I feel. Whether or not a nation really has a soul is connected to whether or not you can face your entire history, not just the parts of your history that you choose to remember. A nation which runs away from history is always a weak nation…

Q: But lots of people in China would say ‘we know this history, we know what happened, but we feel that there are more important things to worry about at the moment, we have to look forward…’

A: Yes – for Chinese people the ideal state is to forget history and look ahead, earn money - but I actually feel that all the nation’s problems are now being revealed, [such as] low morality. Our nation doesn’t have a concept of values, so the way we decide between right and wrong, our standards of behavior are all random, bizarre.

Q: The government has talked a lot about moral standards recently. Isn’t it aware of this problem?

A: Yes but the problem is that these standards are the bare minimum – just about enough to qualify you to be a person! Which means that our standards have really fallen low. One main reason is that we have never gone back to the point in our history where we fell down, and tried to stand up again at the same place...From the point of view of psychology, someone who doesn’t dare to admit that they’ve been hurt will always be sick, can never be healthy.

Q: Some will say you’ve been abroad for a long time, you don’t know everything about Chinese society anymore. There are lots of problems, but many intellectuals would say there are new NGOs and grassroots activism, and people are very sincere about these things. Yet in your novel China seems to be a totally corrupt society.

A: I think that if we’re outside China we can see it more clearly – I can only see the shape of a mountain if I’m not on it – the people who live in the mountains can’t see it. Plus with the internet, I think I know more about Beijing than lots of people who live there. They may only know one part, and I go back every year: the prices, which houses have been demolished, where they’ve dug a ditch, I may be more aware than people who live in Beijing, because they may only stay in one area. I go all around. I don’t feel I don’t understand this society. And people will also say 'You don’t live in this society so you don’t have the right to criticize it'. I feel this is complete rubbish. It’s as though if you’re not Chinese you’re not allowed to talk about China’s problems – that’s completely ridiculous.

Q: Do you think people in China would be interested in this novel if they had the chance to read it?

A: I don’t think they would be interested. To them, this period of history has not affected China’s development – they mean China’s economic development. They think the economy is so good now why should we go back and remember that period of history? But I feel that when the economy gets strong and people have the ability, they should go back to history and slowly reassess it… to give a fair judgment to the people you’ve abandoned and forgotten. If you still trample these people under your feet and say ‘you lost’, then I think you’re a bad person.

Q: You mean the victims [of 1989]?

A: There are too many victims in Chinese history… But if you ask one of the Chinese students in London they’ll think you’re strange, they’ll say, ‘No there aren’t any. My parents are all fine, my grandparents too, they haven’t suffered’. I often hear this.

Q: So did you write this book because you felt the young generation has lost this memory?

A: Of course. If young people do have any memory of what happened, then they’ve already consciously or subconsciously closed their minds to it… I find a lot of young Chinese people are like this. It’s very hard to tell them that history is important; they say, oh that’s my parents’ problem, now we’re fine…

Q: Is this [attitude] because of patriotic education…?

A: It’s connected to the party’s patriotic education.

Q: Is it only because of education or because this generation is just different anyway?

A: Both factors are relevant. The values we got rid of during the period of socialism - such as materialism - have now become the most trendy things, the very values people admire most in Chinese society, such as money. So as our values are overturned, you find that young people are not aware of their own problems… Since they were young, their parents, and society have given them patriotic education, which in fact is education in how to love the Party – dyeing them red! …

Also because the nation has no faith, and because since 1989 you’re not able to critique morality: people don’t dare to discuss moral questions. The party doesn’t dare either, because they’re the ones most lacking in morals. So they turn morality into something very naïve and childish, a question society can’t face up to. So in these circumstances young people chase after money – the party has opened up this route for them and said ‘do what you like’. So it’s become very absurd and lopsided - as though you have two hands and one of them can grow as much as it wants, but the other hand… sorry, you’re not allowed to move it.

Q: Are you mainly talking about the decade after 1989? Now authorities are talking a lot about morality?

A: My point is that when they start talking about morality it shows there isn’t any morality.

Q: But do you feel the 90s was a key period in this change?

A: My point is that when they fired their guns on June 4^th they didn’t just kill the bodies of a few people or a few thousand people; I feel those guns killed the soul of the Chinese people… Since then Chinese people have changed – they’re not so genuine – whether in business, all these fake products, I feel it’s because people’s souls are fake. And this is directly linked to 1989.

Q: Since June 1989 have you always felt that those events cast a shadow over you?

A: It’s very hard to get away from it – I feel that every Chinese person, however wealthy, cannot get this out of their mind. We can pretend we’ve forgotten – but you can’t forget what’s really inside.

Q: Do you depict the students as naïve, or idealistic, or as heroes?

A: These students all had a similar education – under the red flag – but all had slightly different backgrounds. The more someone’s family suffered [in the past] the more they might be able to reflect on things, be more aware of dictatorship, more likely to call for democracy...But at the time many didn’t really understand the meaning of democracy, because they were too young, and because of their education – some of them just went then to the library to check what the US constitution was… Still they had an instinctive sense that people need freedom and democracy – though many just blindly followed the student leaders. Previously they weren’t interested in politics. They spent their time playing mahjong, chasing women, trying to go abroad, very few seemed concerned about fate of China.

Q: People who went through 1989, particularly as students at the time, often say their generation understands politics – because they saw for themselves what it can do. Do you think some of them might still have some ideals, might still want to create something in society?

A: I think to simplify you can call them the Tiananmen generation. This generation, wherever they are in the world, they are still a generation with ideals – because this historical incident was forcibly etched in their mind. Wherever they work....if they have a chance they will try to move this society towards democracy or in a positive direction - that’s certain.

Q: Their ideals haven’t been destroyed? They’re not just interested in earning money?

A: I’ve met some in China who are millionaires but they’re still idealistic. They keep it well-hidden. They say they’re not interested in politics, but I think if they have a chance...any [future] changes in Chinese society will still have to rely on this group of people… So some people are still really nice, still striving – but others have been destroyed. There are two kinds.

Q: There’s a lot about the ‘80s in the book: do you feel that was a very important time for modern China? Because there certainly seems to be a lot of nostalgia for that period in China now…

A: If there’s a chance for people to be nostalgic about the 80s then maybe if you go a bit deeper this [feeling] will include June fourth: because that was the high point of the 80s. So maybe this nostalgia for a time when people were idealistic, though poor, might lead to something like this, that’s a good thing… I feel that the 80s were a time of opening up, despite the various political campaigns of the time. It was a time when we emerged from Mao’s dictatorship to a time when the party no longer regarded Mao as a good – the era of abandoning Mao Zedong thought. So dictatorship ended and we moved towards authoritarianism – which was relatively much more relaxed! (Laughs) So in our memory the ‘80s gave us a lot - at least now we knew who Ginsberg, Marquez, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner [and] Freud were.

Q: Recently we’ve seen young people expressing their anger at the West. What’s the difference between students now and those of the 1980s?

A: There’s certainly a difference... ‘80s students were idealistic: OK, before the student movement they were playing mahjong, chasing women, going to America, but as soon as this movement came along they all got so involved: so this apparent lack of ideals was false – they had had no choice, because the party didn’t give you the opportunity.

But now young people really do have the opportunity to choose idealism – but I think they intentionally don’t want to, they look down on it. They feel that in this system we can live comfortably, so there’s no need to challenge the government. The ‘80s’ students were attracted to democracy and to the US; today’s students are the opposite: they look down on democracy and the US, their values are completely different. They can study in Europe, go to school in the US, but they don’t like the US – they think that authoritarianism (zhuanzhi) is actually good: it keeps some people under tight control, and the others have the chance to earn money…. So they’re not interested in politics

Q: Are there exceptions?

A: There are too few [exceptions]. Most of them still read the Chinese news websites – they think that the foreign media write too much about the negative side of China. So they don’t read it. I often forward them information about foreign websites that [Chinese] intellectuals often read, and then I ask them if they’ve looked at them – but they don’t look at them; it’s bizarre.

Q: Is that because they’re scared?

A: It’s not fear – they despise these things.

Q: Has government turned their ideas of youthful rebellion around so that they're targeted against the West?

A: They’ve turned the party, the nation and the individual into one thing – this is what the party wanted, these are the kind of people the party wanted to produce. But that’s not so strange. What is strange is that when they go abroad they don’t have the ability to choose different views of their own.

Q: You’ve said that you think the recent protests against Western individuals and media [over the Tibet unrest and so on] are very significant…

A: It’s extremely important. All these demands for people to apologize to China – this has become a problem which contemporary people must face up to. I say to people [abroad], if you don’t pay attention to this, the next person who’ll have to apologise will be you... This culture of apologies is similar to Islam – but in China it’s for political reasons. I think it’s terrible... As soon as someone speaks you say ‘you’ve attacked me’. Have you seen Western people asking China to apologize for anything? This [expression of different views] is normal life in western countries… We can’t allow that in the early 21^st century we should become so narrow [in our thinking] – this is tragic.

So my point is that these young people all look same as everyone else on the outside, and they’re very nice and polite. But their whole political system, their soul, has been created by the communist party. So for example when there are problems with the Olympic torch relay they’ll come out of every corner of your Western society… Normally they’re all separate, but as soon as the [Chinese] embassy calls them out they come together.

Q: But maybe the western media does sometimes present a simplistic picture of China, or sometimes it may reflect some prejudices?

A: That doesn’t matter. Only China has this wenziyu – that if you write something wrong you have to confess to a crime. In the west, whatever I’ve written I haven’t killed anyone, this isn’t a crime…

Q: You’ve described this clash of values in terms of a new Cold War…

A: People felt that the so-called socialist camp -- the Soviet Union or China -- had already collapsed, and that commercialization and middle-class development meant it would slowly vanish. But I think western people are too optimistic: ideology doesn’t just arise in a day. The party spent years making it part of everyone’s spirit, you can’t just get rid of this immediately. And so once [Chinese] society gets wealthy, a new cold war may begin. Of course it’s no longer so overt – not promoting Marxism or Maoism in the same way – but I think in the future this [kind of thing] will continue to happen…

Q: But since the Sichuan earthquake we’ve seen some openness in Chinese media, greater access for the western media, and ordinary people making sacrifices, giving donations. Hasn’t this shown another, positive side of China?

A: I feel the earthquake awoke the Chinese people’s conscience – and in this time of suffering people have shown sympathy for others. This is good, it shows their hearts are alive… It’s a good start - but I don’t know how long it will last… And in our pain can we not weep just for the [quake] victims, but also for those who died in 89? You can lower your flags to half mast for these victims [of the earthquake] – but do you dare to lower them for all those who have suffered in China?

Q: Your book was published first in English. Will there be a Chinese edition – not in the mainland obviously?

A: The book will be published in Chinese for the 20^th anniversary of 1989 next year. I feel there should be something like this to commemorate what happened.

Q: People might say that publishing at this time you’re trying to cash in on a commercial opportunity?

A: No, it’s just to commemorate what happened. And I don’t think there is any commercial opportunity. I don’t think too many people will be interested in the anniversary! But I want to put this out there. And I welcome people to make pirate copies to sell in China – I don’t want any money – I just hope people will read it…