Countdown Beijing : Olympic 'Snafus'

About-Face on the Internet (plus tips in case it doesn't last)

Melinda Liu — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:59:08 GMT

There’s a new game in town. The screeching halt, 180 degree Politburo about-face has such a high degree of difficulty that the sport is rarely held – and never rehearsed – except during extremely important, internationally scrutinized public events. Like the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

Which is why Chinese authorities today abruptly allowed access to previously blocked websites such as those of Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. This occured after the eruption of a bruising controversy when foreign media arriving to cover the Games were dismayed to discover they couldn’t reach dozens of sites related to sensitive groups such as the banned Falun Gong religious movement, Free Tibet activists, and other organizations critical of Beijing and its policies. Sites that host thousands of Chinese blogs have also been affected by the Net clampdown. (update: as of Saturday the Falungong and Free Tibet sites remained blocked, though other sensitive sites such as Amnesty's were still accessible in the Olympics media center.)

Chinese citizens have lived with such Web interference for years, of course. But Chinese authorities and high-level IOC officials continually reassured the world in the run-up to the Olympics that IOC-accredited journalists covering the Games would not encounter Internet censorship. Once foreign journalists began squawking about blocked websites earlier this week, the it's-all-going-to-work-out-just-you-wait facade began to crack. IOC Press Commission head Kevan Gosper apologized for the Net hassles and said the IOC had "negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis that they were not considered Games-related." But early Friday morning Beijing time – VERY early, like around 1:00 AM – the IOC faxed around a press release saying that senior IOC figures were holding discussions with Chinese counterparts about the Web problems – and that “the IOC would like to stress that no deal with the Chinese authorities to censor the internet has ever in any way been entered into.” By Friday afternoon, sensitive sites began to open up.

OK, so now we’ve seen an IOC reversal and then Beijing’s backtracking. What other public-relations gymnastics are in store, with the Games opening ceremonies just a week away? At least China got a break on one unrelated front: the weather. Suddenly after weeks of rain and cloud and murk, Beijing's skies suddenly cleared -- to the extent that that my colleague Jon Ansfield thinks Beijing should simply start the Olympics now, early, to take advantage of the glorious weather. Enjoy it while you can – it may not last.

Which brings me back to China's Internet cops. In case you’re wondering if China’s loosening of Net restrictions are the beginning of the end to Web censorship here, my answer is: don’t dump those VPN’s and proxy servers just yet. In case the current relaxation doesn’t expand as hoped, here’s some info on navigating the Internet compiled by the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China. (Full disclosure: I’m a former FCCC president and helped publish its recently released “Reporters’ Guide” with insider tips on how to deal with reporting challenges here on the ground):

Virtual Private Network (VPN). As the name suggests, these are secure, private networks that run through the public Internet. This gives them the benefit of bypassing China’s Internet monitoring and censorship systems. Many corporations use VPN systems to allow employees to access company e-mail remotely; if you work for one of them, you probably will not need other tools for accessing e-mail and blocked websites. For others, there are a number of off-the-shelf technologies that can easily create VPNs. For explanations of what a VPN is see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN or http://www.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm

VPN software and services:

·Paid

http://www.witopia.net/personalmore.html

http://www.hotspotvpn.com/

http://www.publicvpn.com/

·Free / advertising-supported

http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield

Other tools for private/secure Internet access

· Gladder (an add-on for the Firefox browser)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2864

·Tor

http://www.torproject.org/index.html.en

·Psiphon

http://psiphon.civisec.org/

· Anonymizer

http://www.anonymizer.com/

·Proxify

https://proxify.com/

Secure email

·Web e-mail

Gmail. Accessing gmail via https:, rather than the usual http: connection creates a secure connection for e-mail, and should be your default option. The added "s" means secure.

* https://mail.google.com/mail/

Hushmail. A service offering web-based email encrypted with PGP technology (see below).

* https://www.hushmail.com/

·PGP email. The open-source standard Pretty Good Privacy allows for high-level encryption of e-mail sent through standard desktop e-mail software. This prevents anyone intercepting the e-mail from being able to read it.

Explanations

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

* Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html

Software

* http://www.pgpi.org/

* http://www.gnupg.org/

* http://www.winpt.org/

* http://www.cgeep.com/

The Tiananmen Paper

Jonathan Ansfield — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:43:40 GMT

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 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 too risky 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.

Fourth Photo: 'The Wounded'

Word of the shot's publication traveled fast among Chinese politicos and media insiders, primarily over blogs and blocked overseas-based Chinese Web sites that mainlanders can reach by proxy or tunnel. Liu, who makes his home in a hutong of Beijing, was as miffed anyone by the photo. "I did not discuss what happened in 1989 during the entire interview, nor did the published story mention anything about it,” says the photographer and media executive, adding, “I have never received as many calls as [Thursday].”

At The Beijing News, alarm bells sounded first thing that morning. A pair of ranking editors at the paper got a call about the faux pas from a junior colleague, according to another Beijing-based journalist who spoke with them about it that day. Soon cadres from the paper’s co-parent and official sponsor organization, the Communist Party-published Guangming Daily, were ringing them about it as well. The paper made a last-ditch effort to withhold some copies of Thursday’s edition. But the bulk were already in the hands of newsstands and subscribers. It was too late to launch a systematic recall without causing a major stir, say this source and two other veteran journalists with close connections to the paper. The editors did manage to quietly disable the Web link to the story. But the next step was unavoidable: They would have file a report on the incident to Guangming, which would pass it up to the Party’s Central Publicity Department—the dreaded propaganda bureau.

The editors wrapped up their initial investigation into the matter swiftly. It did not take long for them to conclude that this was an unintended gaffe. There had been a missing hole in the layout. A fourth image was needed to fill it. So, the journalist sources were informed, a young layout editor simply scanned the Internet, lifted another image from Liu's book, and slotted it in—neglecting to consider what it was. The downloaded image had to be stretched to line it up with the others, says one of the journalists. Compared with print output of the three shots that he provided, Liu says, “You could notice the difference in the qualities.”

In the minds of the journalist sources, each of whom was independently briefed, there was scant doubt that the blunder was accidental as the paper claimed. Nearly two decades of enforced silence removed from “June 4th”, they explain, even many young people in Beijing have seen and heard next to nothing of the tragedy. The page editor responsible for the story about Liu is about 30 years old, which means he would have been just eleven in 1989, according to one of the journalists. “I myself was old enough to fully experience Tiananmen, but I didn’t notice [the photo] when I first saw it, either,” he says (incidentally, the same could be said for this writer and his family). At the nearby headquarters of Guangming, where the Party newsmen know far more than they are free to publish, most did not hear about the incident all day Thursday, let alone spot the offending photograph.

Propaganda officials appeared to have realized too that the pic, on Page 15 of the Culture section, was not easily identifiable. By Thursday's end, even after filing their mea culpa, The Beijing News editors hadn’t heard a word back from the Central Publicity Department, says the journalist who was in touch with them. The protracted silence was abnormal. They began to sense that with the Olympics just around the corner, perhaps the propaganda bosses might just let the matter be - for the time being, that is. As one of the journalists, informed about with the inner workings of the department, observed on Friday morning: “Right now they just want to stop this from spreading.”

Still, it was a very anxious weekend for the editors, says the journalist who spoke with them. By Friday morning, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao had come out with a report about the foul-up (translated excerpt here from ESWN). According its story, “authorities” ordered all copies of Thursday’s edition recalled from newsstands on learning of it, and a number of editors and reporters at the paper were expected to be disciplined over it. The portrayal of the recall was clearly overstated and that of disciplinary action seemed at very least premature. But it sent The Beijing News editors' stress levels skyward.

Over the weekend they went about firming up their internal investigation. An oblivious young editor’s error did not explain, for example, how the lapse bypassed vetting by the paper’s own chain of command. Less-than-intended Tiananmen references are known to elude the self-censorship process mainland media are obliged to perform. Last June, the Chengdu Evening News inadvertently printed a classified ad from an anonymous buyer that paid tribute to mothers of protesters killed in the crackdown. Three editors were fired as a result, according to reports. That was a mere classified ad in a provincial tabloid. This was The Beijing News.

The paper's top editors were themselves puzzled that their charges had not caught the photo, says one journalist. The page editor Chen Yuan, while young, is the author of well-received histories on the modern Chinese intellectual scene. And the senior editor who ultimately signed off on it was a ranking photojournalist at the paper.

To complicate matters, a few conspiracy theorists cropped up in the blogosphere. They submitted that someone at The Beijing News might have slipped in the image deliberately, in an act somehow motivated by the internal frictions at the paper.

There was no motive or any other evidence to support suspicions of an inside job, the editors concluded. Nonetheless, the paper’s controversial upbringing was relevant to their case.

It’s the product of a pioneering joint venture between an odd couple of partners: stodgy, cash-poor Guangming, which hasn't been considered on the vanguard of reformism since the Deng days; and the Guangzhou-based Southern Media Group, one of the country’s most enterprising and aggressive today. Savvy news and ad pros bred by Southern Metropolis, a cousin paper, have mostly run the show day to day from the start. But Guangming’s the official guardian and wields editorial and administrative veto power.

At the end of 2005, pressured by Party higher-ups over a mounting number of offending investigations and editorials, Guangming’s newly installed Party boss dismissed the top Nanfang editor Yang Bin. This prompted hundreds of infuriated staff to stage an impromptu walkout (most went out on binge of drinking and karaoke). A few of Yang’s lieutenant editors would have been sacked as well, if not for the backlash and talk of an all-out strike. Within weeks Guangming had appointed several of its own men to senior editorial posts, essentially to act as minders. Yang's lieutenants and many other original editors and senior staff ended up resigning. The paper shrank in pages, distribution and advertising suffered, and the renowned editorial and investigative pages slipped into a virtual coma for months. Over the past two years the editorials and daily news coverage have gradually rebounded, but the investigative reports seldom hit as hard as they once had.

Every Monday afternoon, the paper’s senior editors assemble for a weekly editorial meeting. This Monday, hours before the meeting, they got word that Guangming would be dispatching a special representative to brief them. “They thought the whip was coming,” says the journalist. But instead, the rep spent the time transmitting the “spirit” of recent Party pronouncements to study. Of the Tiananmen photo, not a word was uttered.

The paper's official account of the incident has now been circulated to both Party and governmental media authorities, say the journalists. Several editors have already offered their resignations over the snafu, they say. But as of mid-week, the topmost editors was telling them to wait for authorities to weigh in.

Almost certainly, a personnel shakedown is in store for the paper. But journalists with knowledge of the case now think it highly possible that authorities will wait until after the Olympics to take action. It's also possible, though far from certain, that the delay will translate into a lighter punishment from propaganda czars than would have been doled out otherwise, they say. "But they would be stupid to do it now," says one of the journalists.

“They wouldn’t want to give all the foreign journalists in Beijing reason to hype this thing,” another explains. “Especially after what happened there the last time they sacked people.”

Kunming Bus Bombs: Smoke and Mirrors

Mary Hennock — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:08:16 GMT

News of the bombing of two buses in the Chinese city of Kunming made its way swiftly round the world on Monday. Two people died and fourteen were injured as two separate buses exploded within an hour of each other in the morning rush hour, just a few hundred yards apart. By mid-morning, the city's Public Security Bureau had said the blasts were "man-made" and deliberate.

Never mind that Kunming is about as far away from Beijing and its Olympics venues as it's possible for a Chinese city to be - 1,305 miles (21,00 kilometers) off in a province that borders Vietnam and Burma. With intense scrutiny of China's Olympic preparations, the blasts were soon written up in local media from Huddersfield in the north of England to Adelaide in South Australia. Photos of a bus with mangled sides and glass sprayed across the street went up on news sites. There have also been unconfirmed reports in Kunming's local media of a third death in a third explosion in a different location.

Watching this incident blown into a major news story it, it became a little easier to sympathize with China's Olympic security ring of steel, which includes surface to air missiles outside the main Olympic stadium, 100,000 anti-terrorist police to guard the Games, and half a million volunteers watching neighborhoods. Beijing faces the usual Catch-22: security measures are always demanded when they've failed and ridiculed when they don't. Despite the tragedy of any sudden, violent death, this was nonetheless a relatively minor incident. In China's case, it's reputation as a country that blocks free speech, jails internet journalists, and human rights activists has led to a tendency to see any security as over-kill, and much mockery.

Which brings us to the question of who might have set the explosions. Frankly, there's simply no information. Western media were quick to draw a link - albeit cautiously - between the explosions and riots by rubber farmers elsewhere in Yunnan province, in which two farmers were shot dead by police two days earlier. The police came off badly, however; out of the 54 people injured, 41 were police. But there is no proven connection.

The Foreign Ministry has denied any evidence of a link to the Olympics or to terrorism, and Kunming police are offering a US$14,666 reward.

When a bus exploded in Shanghai in May, three passengers died and 12 were hurt. The cause? A passenger carrying "flammable materials", according to official reports. This explanation drew skepticism from those who like to see a political subtext to everything, Some conspiracy theorists are already suggesting the Kunming bombings may have been set by police to justify heavy-handed Olympic security.

Less complex explanations are believable, however. I remember watching a bus driver in the western Sichuan hick town of Songpan check engine repairs by sucking petrol through a plastic tube, whilst smoking a cigarette. Guffaws from the driver and male passengers greeted my protests. Two explosions on the same bus route on the same morning seems sure be malicious rather than just dumb, but malice can be dumb too, caused by workplace grudges (both Kunming buses were plying the same route), love triangles, gambling debts, anything really.

Beijing's pre-Olympic clean-up, cracking down on everyone from migrant litter-pickers to expat bar owners, now looks a little more reasonable. Visualize the headlines a fire in a busy nightclub would create. Overall, Beijing's reliance on crackdowns and control-freakery is pulling in the wrong direction though. Of course, the world will always contain a few crazies, but overall the best way to minimize flare-ups, whether by disgruntled individuals, or groups with a cause are more equitable social policies, not least equality before the law - even for party officials.

There is a bright spot in all this, which is that the official Xinhua news agency of the explosions was surprisingly detailed. Given: a crime was committed, and people died, there's nothing controversial and the authorities want to be seen to be doing everything possible. But contrast with the Shanghai explosion, official media reported the names and ages of the victims (a 26-old man and a 30-year old woman) and eye-witness interviews from passengers.

But for some who predicted a return to tight constraints on the media after the temporary openness that followed the Sichuan earth, the picture remains if not clear at least only moderately hazy. A bit like the skies over Beijing, in fact.

Ticket-buying, Round 3: "A bit slow"

Manuela Zoninsein — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:39:42 GMT

Unlike the Olympics’ second round of ticketing -- during which the online sales system was overwhelmed with traffic and ultimately forced to a halt -- Round 3 sales were heralded as a success by China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. Within the first thirty minutes of the 9am opening on Monday, May 5th, the baseball, boxing soccer and wrestling events were sold out. Within the first three hours, 60,000 tickets had been sold online and an additional four events had been bought out. The batch of 1.38 million tickets made available to China-based buyers was purchased in its entirety within two days.

Still, it was anything but smooth surfing when I tried to buy tickets — and it seems I’m not the only one who experienced Internet hiccups, if you see reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal China blog, as well as ESPN and Al Jazeera and the Shanghai Daily. Other than the pair of tickets I managed to purchase precisely at 9:01am, a friend and I spent the rest of the day logged into our Olympic ticketing accounts attempting to buy additional tickets -- to no avail.

We were given a constant run-around. For example, if we clicked into the ticketing page for events that BOCOG had announced still had tickets “Available”, oftentimes the web programming appeared incomplete. We didn't get an announcement that the tickets were now Unavailable” (which was used to indicate that tickets had been sold out). Nor did we get the alternative option to “Add to lot” or “Continue”, which is how I had managed my first set of tickets.

Once we did find a ticketing page that still had tickets “Available” -- and which had either a functional “Add to lot” or “Continue” button -- we tried to click through. We were met by the less than reassuring “We are currently working on your request” response.

     The order-processing, blue ticker tape snailed its way across my screen for over nine hours.

     In addition to these types of delays routing our requests, every one of two attempts met a blank screen or the message “Firefox can’t find the server”. Sometimes it wasn’t Firefox specifically that got blamed: it was any browser I used, at least according to the common message “Bad request: your browser sent a request your server could not understand”.

     When my browser and server were actually cooperating, and when that blue ticker tape paraded me through the order processing system successfully, I became accustomed to the inconclusive “We’re sorry, we’re unable to process your order right now”. I would return to the same event to check on its status; and there were invariably still tickets “Available”. Since this meant my chosen event had not been sold out, I wonder if “unable” simply meant “unwilling.”

    According to Zhu Yan, director of the Beijing ticketing center, the online system received 27 million hits per hour during its peak, and he openly admitted “the website may become a bit slow during peak hours but it's still normal and there's no problem.” Since I’m lucky enough to have tickets for the Women’s Soccer Finals, I guess I should be thankful the system was only “slow” and not dysfunctional like Round 2.

And we still have Round 4 to go.

Insecurity Checks II: Leave it Home or Lose it

Jonathan Ansfield — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:25:38 GMT

March 15 was the day many foreign media scrambled to try to reach Tibetan communities in Western China in the wake of Lhasa's ferment. It also happened to be the day that stricter no-liquids-allowed airport security checks came into force. The pileup of people waiting to go through security at Beijing's Capital International Airport was so long that one Beijing-based foreign correspondent missed his plane.

On my own quest for fresh news from Tibetans, I flew out to Lanzhou, in the western province of Gansu, first thing the next morning, March 16. Anyone who hadn’t seen news of the regulations ahead of time was in trouble. For one, Chinese are not the most patient or trusting travelers; they seem particularly averse to checking in bags. Add to that the fact that at many check-in counters (like mine), the airline staff neglected to make note of the new rules.

The first I heard of it came over the P.A. in the hall near the security checkpoint, by which time it was too late. Hordes of people had amassed behind me, and many many more in front. The announcement played on and on in a repeating loop, a death knell to the liquid-toting masses.

I waited in line for about 50 minutes. During that span, I stood behind two Chinese businessmen wearing sweaters under suits. They seemed clear enough about the reasons for the added hassle. “It’s all because of Uighurs making trouble,” one quipped to the other - a stereotypical remark. This couldn’t be good for race relations, I thought. Now Tibetans were ‘making trouble’ too, I told the men. That they didn’t yet know. Together we joked that if officials didn’t get the lines at security under control, they’d be dealing with a popular uprising of their own.

Things did devolve quickly. The crush of bodies might have suited a Chinese train station before a national holiday, or a supermarket with promotional giveaways on cooking oil, but not the expanded Beijing Capital International Airport with its Sir Norman Foster-designed terminal.

In the former main terminal, Chinese jetsetters jostled for position. Spats broke out. Young children shrieked in frustration. In the scramble, a bespectacled woman lost the stub of her boarding pass, and was almost trampled after she dropped to her knees to retrieve it. A man in a silk tie retreated on tiptoe along tables moved in to partition the lines, in order to check in his male clutch purse full of toiletries.

Most passengers simply elected to surrender theirs. It was either that, they figured, or risk missing their flights. At the front of the line, female attendants from the Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) were collecting discarded bottles. There was green tea, nail remover polish, cologne and hand lotion. The haul of confiscated cosmetics and other personal grooming items was enough to open a hotel kiosk.

Would the CAA officers divy up the take? “No,” said one. “We probably just throw it all away.” She didn’t sound convincing. The next day, I imagined, her husband could be shaving with a half can of lime-scented shaving cream. My shaving cream.

I was forced to hand over a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of contact lens solution, along with the aforementioned shaving cream. I put up a fight for the lens solution, since some containers smaller than 100 milliliters were still allowed provided they passed screening -- and I only had a few days’ worth of drops left. But my objections were futile. All that mattered was the size of bottle, I was told. There was no period of leniency, no room to negotiate.

One of the attendants was apologetic for the “inconvenience”. Most were stone-cold. “Sorry this is the policy. It’s for your security. We’re just doing our best to execute it,” uttered one woman. At the checkpoint, a male officer inspecting bags one by one rejected any suggestion that CAA was caught unprepared. I began to argue with him. But another businessman in front of me had had enough of my quibbling. “Okay, Okay. Enough already. You should just be happy you got to this point!”

On the Web, some Chinese Netizens have vented frustrations and criticism toward news of the ban. From the thread of comments appended to one report carried on Sina.com in early April, I found the following:

“1. Chinese people always go to the extreme in handling matters. Thus it’s come to the point where you can’t bring anything.
2. Say that for checked luggage, the compensation for every kilo lost became US$50. Then everyone would definitely be willing to check their luggage. With checked bags right now, first, it’s very dirty; second, it wastes a lot of time; third, it’s too easy to lose something!”

“I wish the makers of hair products and cosmetics would produce smaller containers.”

“It’s appropriate to be strict. But it should be more human.”

And my personal favorite:

“…No liquids are allowed, not even baby’s milk. If the kid’s hungry, find a stewardess.”

Since September 11, goes the wry expression in liberal America, “security is the new freedom”; whereas in China, security has always taken precedence. Few Chinese have any illusions over that approach, and in many cases the masses tends to agree with it.

The age-old Chinese faith in order and fear of chaos kicks in, hammered home for many by lingering memories of the Tiananmen crackdown, and the Cultural Revolution. By now, most people are well-acclimated the drill of everyday life under the whims of an insecure policing regime, which in reality functions in extreme spells of laxness and stringency. While levels of enforcement are highly irregular, at least the timing of a crackdown is much more predictable. New ground rules tend put everyone on alert, and to numb many people's instincts to question the need for them. After all, the official argument goes, the Olympics are at stake. In response to which the people understand that this, too, shall pass.

A few weeks later, I was back at Capital International for another trip out west, this time bound for Xinjiang, to investigate a protest in the Muslim Uighur outpost of Khotan. This time I checked my rucksack. I found that the wait at the security checkpoints had subsided considerably. At front of some of the lines, sample bottles of liquids were arrayed as a reminder of what not to bring. Passengers had learned the drill, and were more patient and compliant. On the plane, for once, there was some extra room in the overhead bins.

I caught my connecting flight to Khotan in Urumqi, where Uighur assailants reportedly boarded the flight that was targeted in March. Every check-in counter at the airport there displayed a full-size photo of restricted combustible, inflammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, compressed, radioactive, infectious, oxidizing or otherwise “dangerous goods”. These signs weren’t all new; CAA last instituted caps on liquid containers in 2002, after a fire tore threw the cabin of a plane and it plunged into the sea off of Dalian, killing all 111 people aboard. (A suicidal passenger is believed to have set the blaze).

The still-life shots showed tanks of gasoline and camp-stove propane, tins of paint and paint thinner, bullets and flares. Passengers were prohibited from carrying on any of the above, the placard said, or from failing to declare any “dangerous” items as such in checked luggage. There was a disturbing gloss, however. Some of the signs were printed solely in Chinese, often with English translation but no Uighur script.

The uniformed guards performing the body searches, on the other hand, did not discriminate. They were attentive to the point of being clinical, and there was no attempt to separate men from women, Uighur from Han Chinese. In a first for me in China, my shoes were ordered off. I felt a pinch on both ankles, a series of potches on the bum, an abrupt tug on the belt…and finally, I was done.

“We’re stricter than before, so much stricter,” mused a chatty young CAA officer posted at the gate to my plane. That much I can tell, I said, readjusting my jeans. The officer was adamant that reported attack on March 7 was true. As proof - again, by some backward twist of logic - he explained the new security measures were a direct response to it. So, I questioned, that meant that the Uighur assailants had walked down one of these very gangways with soda cans of gasoline, right? He didn’t say much more.

In Beijing, you can still buy a bottled or canned beverage once beyond the securty checks. Not so in Urumqi. At the sit-down cafe areas, the cheapest drink was a four-dollar glass mug of Lipton tea.

It’s worth noting that the service aboard flights to Xinjiang and other far-western provinces, home to the majority of China’s Muslims, caters to them in some ways but not others. The meals they hand out are generally Halal, as on my plane into Khotan. A Uighur man sitting across from me asked for one extra snack pack to take for his teenage son, who he said “really likes the airplane food”; the Chinese stewardess gave him two. He did not expect that the boxes she brought would contain ham sandwiches. Catching a whiff of the ham, the man rolled his eyes and groaned in his stilted Mandarin, “I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

Another taboo moment came a few days later, on the plane back from Khotan to Urumqi. I was seated at a diagonal from an observant older gentleman dressed in simple two-piece outfit with a skullcap and a mid-length beard. The whole trip he sat calmly in his seat, his feet crossed, his arms folded, and his eyes transfixed by one of the racier in-flight video programs I’ve ever come across in this country. First came Taiwanese pop music videos pulsing with noir love scenes, followed by a slo-mo montage of South American models. They pulled rubber cocktail dresses tight across their bodies as water bounced off their bodies, a signature move.

The airport in Khotan, expanded for civilian service in 2002, is still a tiny facility with a single waiting hall. On the drive into town, you pass nearby police, paramilitary and army installations that brood over the city. Uighurs still make up over 90 percent of the population of the prefecture as a whole, but the Uighur proportion of passenger traffic is significantly smaller at the airport. You see a mix of local entrepreneurs, employees of government companies and agencies, and the odd foreign tourist or trader. Here, unlike most other airports around China, you cannot even step foot inside without a plane ticket.

At the check-in counter, passengers have to wait for checked bags to pass X-ray inspection before they’re permitted to move on to the security check themselves. On my way out of Khotan, an officer spotted something that looked suspicious in my backpack, and asked me to come around behind the counter to open it. The item in question was just a flash disk. “If anything or anyone looks irregular, we check,” he stated. I asked if I looked suspicious. “We are dui wu bu dui ren,” he said in an officious tone, meaning, “We look at the goods, not the individual.” There would be no racial profiling here.

At its most hectic, only two commercial flights depart Khotan airport a day. Still, there was a backup at security. The Han officer checking ID's was meticulous. He deals with fewer passengers a day than almost anyone in his position in China, he told me, yet he’s as busy as any of them. He contended that airport security in Khotan, scene of a rash of Uighur separatist violence in the late 1990’s, had been this tough for years. Other reporters were told that lately it had gotten tougher .

The shortfall of Uighur-language signage was still bugging me. If authorities were convinced that Uighur splittists were plotting destruction, why not put them on watch in their own language?

In Khotan - where despite rising pressures to use official dialect in schools and official affairs, most Uighurs still don’t speak much Chinese - I asked the Han woman at the check-in counter why some security provisions weren’t posted in Uighur script. “Because we don’t have that here,” she said blankly. The reflexive answer is, to this day, one of Chinese officialdom’s more annoying habits. Switching flights in Urumqi, I put the question once more to a another Han staffer at check-in. “You’re right. There should be more Uighur,” said she said, to my surprise. “I’ll pass on your recommendation.” I doubt she did, but still.

I returned from Urumqi to Beijing on China Southern Airlines flight. It was the evening equivalent of the morning trip that, exactly one month earlier, was forced to make emergency landing in Lanzhou. We were served a Halal Chinese meal of cold duck, rolls, and a salad of carrots, celery and boiled peanuts, which actually wasn’t half-bad. It also made me very thirsty. Later, I made for the bathroom at the back of the plane. I took my digital pocket camera with me, not thinking that anyone would really notice.

Inside, on the door, I found the big ubiquitous airlines sticker noting in both Chinese and English: “No smoking in lavatory.” A smaller notice had been tacked on above it: “SMOKE DETECTOR INSTALLED IN LAVATORY.” And above that, slapped up last with scotch tape, was a third notice: “STRICTLY PROHIBITED TO MANGLE THE SMOKE DETECTOR.” I started snapping pictures, but there was turbulence, and I'm no photographer, so it took a minute or two to take a clear shot.

A stewardness was in my face when I opened the door, just about to knock. She’d been seated directly across from the lavatory, keeping stern watch over the customers using the facilities. After a little small talk, though, she let down her guard a bit.

What exactly had occurred on the morning of March 7? The stewardess, whose surname was Wu, repeated the official line. The young Uighur woman had carried a can or cans filled with gasoline to the bathroom. “She tried to light it but just couldn’t get it lit,” said Ms. Wu.

In the weeks following the March 7 incident, Xinhua said the Uighur girl confessed to a "terrorist" attempt. The talk around Beijing, which remains unconfirmed, is that she was carrying a Pakistani passport.

Ms. Wu knew nothing of this. She claimed not to know anything more outside of what she’d read in state media. To me this seemed strange, considering that colleagues of hers on the same route had supposedly overpowered the plotters. The female flight attendant who sniffed the gasoline received a reward of $17,000, the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily had reported in late March. The flight crew was a awared $57,000 in all.

Before returning to my seat, I asked Ms. Wu whether she thought the blanket ban on liquids was excessive. “This period of time is the most risky we’ve ever faced, because of the Olympics. So we have to take whatever safety measures are necessary,” she said, summing up with a typically Chinese phrase: “This is the way when there is no other way.”

India passes the Olympic torch

Newsweek — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:38:42 GMT

By Jeremy Kahn

Indian police were ready for protesters

As the day drew near for the Olympic torch to be carried through the heart of India's capital, New Delhi, Indian government officials had grown apprehensive. India is home to the world’s largest number of Tibetan exiles, including Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered figure, the Dalai Lama, and it has also sought to avoid antagonizing its big neighbor to the north. Indian officials feared the worst--including the prospect that Tibetan monks might immolate themselves in protest on the city’s streets. In the end, however, the torch relay here went off without disruption, thanks to the extraordinary security measures the Indian government laid on for the event.

Officials left nothing to chance. The run was shortened to just two kilometers along the city’s central vista – the Rajpath -- meaning that each of the 70 torch bearers held the flame for just seconds before handing off to the next runner. (A few prominent Indian athletes refused to participate in the torch relay out of sympathy for the Tibetan cause.) All the streets leading into the area were closed, as were two major subway stops near relay route. Government offices that occupy this central zone were shuttered in the afternoon as well. In contrast to its normal weekday bustle, the center of the city took on the deserted feel it often has at weekends.

The government deployed 15,000 police officers, many clad in riot gear and carrying long bamboo poles, to deter any disruption. Throughout the run, the torch bearers were surrounded by a Chinese security team, which itself was guarded by an Indian security team. Security was so tight that even people holding passes issued by Olympic sponsors – such as the computer company Lenova – were turned away at the police barricades erected to control access to the torch run. In a city of 15 million, only a couple hundred people, most affiliated with Olympic sponsor companies, were able to witness the relay. The rest had to settle for TV.

There were a few tense moments: early in the day, a small group of Tibetan exiles attempted to storm the luxury hotel where the Olympic flame had been sequestered under guard since arriving in India last night. But they were quickly arrested. Later, about 30 protestors tried to breach a police barricade near the relay route, but they were turned back with truncheon blows and arrested too. At one point plumes of black smoke rose from behind a group of protestors, causing a stir among the police and the assembled media hordes: were protesting monks setting themselves alight? No, it turned out just to be an unrelated firefighting demonstration being held as part of New Delhi’s “Firefighter Appreciation Week.”

For the most part, New Delhi witnessed only peaceful and lawful protests. A few streets north of the relay route, several hundred people, including monks in saffron robes and others wearing white “Torch 4 Tibet” T-shirts, peacefully paraded continuously around a city block shouting “Free Tibet, Free Tibet,” and “Who is the butcher? Who is the killer? China, China, China.” The demonstrators made little attempt to confront the almost equal number of police officers who blocked them from getting anywhere close to the Rajpath. Elsewhere, a few thousand people, including several Indian celebrities and members of a Hindu-nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has generally been more supportive of the Tibetan exile’s cause than the current Congress Party-led government, held other pro-Tibet rallies.

Indian government officials will no doubt be patting themselves on the back tomorrow. They have done their part to protect the Olympic flame. But the question remains: what have they done to protect democracy?

Why the Guinness taps have run dry

Melinda Liu — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:30:58 GMT

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.

Product Safety and a China-EU Hissy Fit

Melinda Liu — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 08:57:51 GMT

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:

Han: Your report has been presented to China’s State Council, or cabinet, but it hasn’t yet been published. What does it say?

It [sets] out in incredibly clear terms what needs to be done in a practical way.

My concern about the Chinese is they’re very good at setting out the grand objective but they’re very bad at setting out how you achieve it….There’s no particular ministry that has the responsibility for dealing with food safety so when something does go wrong there’s no one there to whom you can say ‘It was your responsibility and you blew it’.

Q: Can you give concrete examples?

A: Four or five different authorities have the authority to go into supermarkets and test things on the shelves, and impose a fine. Because it happens so often the supermarkets are not happy about. It adds up to a very considerable sum of money. [Take] bottled water. They may find one millilitre less than there should be in the bottle…but in terms of public health it’s irrelevant.[They] have to develop some sort of rational, coherent approach, and as far as I can see there’s nobody in China doing that because there are too many players pursuing their own interests. Six government agencies have mainstream responsibilities for food safety, and there are 17 departments or agencies involved altogether.

A: How big a problem is unsafe food? Your report suggested an economic cost of US$4.7 to US$14 billion in 2005, based on medical costs and productivity losses due to food-borne disease.

A: I would be very, very concerned about the controls that exist in relation to foodstuff generally. It’s very difficult to know how big the problem is because the statistics are not there.

Q: What are the major weaknesses of the current inspection system?

A: Authorities are obsessed with testing, which is fundamentally wrong…. The only way of ensuring safe food is you control the production process using hazard analysis at critical control points.

Q: What’s the scale of the present inspection system in terms of budget and headcount? Are rural areas less well-equipped?

A: That’s information that’s impossible to get in China… My impression is that staffing in the SFDA is just inadequate. In broad terms, the central government is under-resourced to do the job.

Q: You’ve called for a Basic Food Law in China. What are the major shortcomings of the current legal framework?

A: The [current] food hygiene law did not contain an obligation that food should be safe and fit for human consumption. To give an example, in 2005 there were reports about children dying because they had inhaled konjac gum, and this is a problem we had faced in Europe so I surprised to see this. They were unable to do anything about it because there was no regulation, no standard, regarding children’s sweets in China. Enforcement had to be based on a regulation, and in the absence of a regulation they couldn’t do any enforcement. This struck me as a fundamental problem with the Chinese food safety law.

You need to have a catch-all, ‘This must not contain any hazard to human health’ so [that] you have a fundamental basis to protect the consumers if something turns up you didn’t predict. It may seem terribly obvious, but after all you do need that. That was one reason I felt there needed to be a basic food law.

Q: You worked for the UK Department of Health during the crisis over BSE (or Mad Cow Disease) in the 1980s, when British beef exports were blocked, and you gave evidence to the public inquiry. What did you learn from that crisis?

A: The biggest lesson… is communication with the public…People need to be brought into the things, people need to have the information on which they can act, and they’re grateful for it. The problem with BSE is they were denied the ability to exercise their own choice.

How do you say 'snafu' in Chinese?

Manuela Zoninsein — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:14:30 GMT

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?"

Could it be that the technological infrastructure established by Chinese organizers, especially the number of servers and bandwidth, was inadequate? Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing who is scheduled to release a report on Web 2.0 in China to the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, dismissed that possibility: "It's really not so difficult to get more." (US$400million has already been earmarked for IT and communications hardware, software and expertise.) As for whether the system had been tested beforehand, Hou Xinyi, deputy director of the technology department at BOCOG, had been quoted by media as saying, “To reduce risk, there will be a lot of tests before the Games.”

In the absence of more concrete information from authorities, many analysts assume there was some disconnect in internal coordination, though the point of breakdown remains unclear. One way to make sense of the snafu, Wolf says, “ is if there was intentional disregard of advice, or you don't have people talking to each other. It comes down to a systemic issue."

Could such systemic issues — both organizationally and technologically —snarl up Beijing’s efforts to ensure a seamless event? The ticketing glitch could teach authorities a lesson, and compel them to install an adequate IT structure and the administrative network to support it. The ultimate test will be, Wolf says, “once tickets go back on sale, and when the Games—which are going to attract tremendous global attention—start.” Of more than 7 million tickets that will be sold, 75% are reserved for the domestic audience. Of course, Beijing can’t host the Olympics and have too few Chinese show up.

A new day, a new headache: Can the Games be too popular?

Melinda Liu — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 08:53:33 GMT

Every day brings a new Olympics twist. By now we've heard a litany of concerns in the run-up to the August 2008 Games: Beijing has too much pollution, too few domestic media freedoms, too many unsavory partners from Khartoum to Rangoon.

Tuesday, Games organizers hit up against another glitch: the Games are too popular, too.

So many Chinese tried to buy tickets to Olympics events that the system crashed. Tuesday 1.84 million tickets became available for sale on a first-come, first-served basis. (That should have been the first hint of trouble: in China first-come, first-served is a surefire recipe for Darwinian chaos.) Eight million people tried to snarf up tickets in the first hour of sales, which was eight times more than what the official ticketing website was designed to handle. Then the hotline for ticket inquiries overloaded, after logging 3.8 million calls in an hour. At 6 PM Tuesday, the sales operation had to shut down.

The poor guy responsible for ticket sales on Beijing's organizing committee, Rong Jun, admitted Wednesday that authorities had underestimated demand and preparations had been "flawed." He apologized, saying he was "ashamed" that the committee's work had "failed to satisfy the people."

What does this tell us? Paradoxically, Chinese officials have often felt compelled to explain to skeptical foreigners that Beijing's hosting of the Games is tremendously popular among ordinary citizens. The 2008 Olympics rack up more than 97 percent approval ratings in public opinion surveys, they point out. Just do the math: 97 percent of 1.3 billion people translates into a heck of alot of grassroots enthusiasm.

So what went wrong? By vastly under-rating domestic demand for tickets, it would appear at least some of China's propagandameisters didn't believe their own propaganda. Turns out their claim about the Games being wildly popular isn't hype, it's real. Go figure.