Building Beijing

By Eric Setzekorn

Even before Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games in 2001, the pace of construction in the city was frantic and relentless. A combination of expansive central planning, low interest loans, and a real estate bubble have all contributed to the construction of hundreds of new buildings and massive infrastructure development. Lax regulatory and environmental laws combined with a desire by politicians to make Beijing a “showcase” have enticed dozens of the world’s best architects to experiment with new designs and new materials on a scale not possible in New York, London or Berlin. While some critics bemoan these new designs as “shock and awe” architecture and others point to the loss of culturally significant areas such as the hutongs, the scale and pace of development will likely continue well into the next decade as Beijing continues to grow in population and international importance. A more subtle but lingering problem will be integrating these massive center-pieces into Beijing life in a way that is natural and beneficial to residents struggling to adapt to the ever-changing city-scape.

For all Olympic tourists coming from abroad their first experience in Beijing is the massive Terminal 3 building of Beijing Capital airport opening this spring. As the world’s largest building at 10 million square feet (displacing the Pentagon from the top of the list), it overawes visitors with soaring ceilings and a full range of restaurants, shops and convenient services. The Norman Foster-designed structure cost just under $4 billion and went from proposal to completion in less than four years. In addition to its vast scale, the open building layout and obvious attention to diffusing human traffic flow makes the check-in, security and boarding process relatively painless and less like the rugby scrum atmosphere of LAX. This past week the airport express light rail system opened, linking the airport to the rapidly growing subway system. Gushing domestic news reports with riders saying boilerplate phrases such as “Riding it makes me proud to be Chinese” perhaps overstate the importance of the fairly basic light rail link similar to San Francisco’s BART system. However, with tickets costing 25 RMB one way it eliminates the need for a 100-150 RMB journey into Beijing by taxi, the only previous option. The airport link not only makes traffic sense but importantly, for foreign tourists, eliminates the potential for price gouging by taxi drivers on new arrivals which made many first experiences in China a less than happy one. Terminal 3 is not without flaws: food and beverage prices are high, limited electrical outlets and no wireless internet service hinders business travelers, and baggage service is slow. But compared to Heathrow or LAX, it is a comfortable airport.


Perhaps more than any other, the new CCTV headquarters currently being finished in Chaoyang is the most innovative of the new buildings. The lead architect, Ole Scheeren (partner of Rem Koolhaas; the two are in charge of the design), is a household name to many Chinese not only for his architectural work but as the boyfriend of movie star Maggie Cheung, who has reportedly settled in Beijing with him. The main feature of the design is an angled center section joining two towers and that extends dozens of meters at a ninety-degree angle out over the street without independent support. The towers are also angled counter to the joined section at 6 degrees which creates a unique and somewhat disorientating visual effect. A rigid exoskeleton provides support and gives the building the appearance of deep etches at odd, seemingly random angles which adds to the overall effect. At 234 meters in height with a space of 550,000 meters it is planned to hold over 10,000 personnel for China’s CCTV programs.


One of the most important areas of Beijing’s development is a massive investment in academic and educational infrastructure taking place throughout the Haidian University district. Research institutes for the Chinese Academy of Sciences are now scattered around Haidian and outside of town, in the northwest, a new “Space City” is growing as a center of training, research and experimentation for China’s extra-terrestrial ambitions. The new funding dramatically highlights the winners and losers of China’s education system as it enters the twenty-first century. International relations, finance, business and law departments work and study in modern, state-of-the-art facilities, while social sciences and humanities generally remain in drab, concrete boxes with poor lighting and unspeakable bathrooms that retain their mid-50s Stalinist charm. To take one example, the new business and law building at People’s University (Ren Da) is the centerpiece of that campus’s re-development. Towering seventeen stories over a central courtyard, it divides into law department on the east side and business department on the west. However, while the classrooms and offices may be new, the building is at best ill-suited and at worst blights the surrounding campus environment. The courtyard is paved with gray stone which is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. No vegetation of any kind softens the area and there are no benches for workers to eat lunch or students to read. The stark power of the design makes individuals feel insignificant in size and importance—a valuable effect for government buildings but not appropriate for a university campus.


As the capital of a country pegged by many as the next superpower, Beijing has also seen an embassy building boom as nations from around the world seek to bolster their presence and influence. The largest of the new embassies is the American embassy which, except for the Vatican City-sized monstrosity in Iraq’s Green Zone, is the largest American embassy in the world. Opening ceremonies for the embassy are due to be conducted by President Bush during his visit during the Olympics. Surrounded by a drab, sandstone colored blast wall, the mainly glass and silver coated steel embassy main buildings are in the center of the ten acre compound to protect against attack. On-site facilities include housing for much of the six hundred staff and the ambassador’s villa. The embassy is fronted by a water sculpture inside the security wall which serves both a decorative and protective function. Starbucks operates a small stand in the old embassy but will presumably have a larger facility inside the new grounds to compensate for the increased staff. South Korea, Canada, Australia, Iran, India and Germany have all opened new embassies over the past 24 months, mostly outside the traditional diplomatic area around Sanlitun. All the new embassy complexes feature high blast walls that, however necessary in today’s security environment, make the new embassy area a series of grey or beige bunkers standing apart from the city—a sharp contrast to the leafy quiet streets of the old Sanlitun diplomatic area.

The nerve center of the permanent construction revolution in the capital is the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning, which operates a large exhibition space south of Tiananmen Square that explains the larger agenda and program of building under their direction. The 16,000 square meter building draws more tourist than locals, mainly due to the 30 RMB entrance fee, and offers an antiseptic vision of future Beijing with all the hubris of Disney’s Tomorrowland. Vital issues to Beijing, such as completion of the water pipeline from the Yangzi river scheduled to bring 1 billion cubic meters of water per year to Beijing after 2010, are relegated to dark corners, while soaring models of shiny skyscrapers take center-stage. Lingering public health issues such as water safety, sewage treatment, and pollution, which were supposed to be part of Beijing’s pre-Olympic infrastructure modernization, are likewise dismissed with colorful charts and optimistic verbiage. The exhibition’s pride and joy is the 302 square meter model of Beijing in 2020 (much like another in Shanghai’s Urban Planning Hall) which, in contrast to “primitive” old Beijing, is a “modern Beijing of the future.” The attention to detail is truly impressive, with buildings that delight many visitors as they try to find their neighborhoods (which may or may not exist in 2020).

To be continued in Part 2.

Eric Setzekorn is a graduate student at UC Irvine specializing in military history and is currently finishing an exchange semester with the Beijing University history department.

Beijing Olympics 2008: The View from Vancouver (host to Winter 2010 Olympics)

By David Luesink

It is interesting to note the similarities between criticisms of Olympic preparation in Vancouver and Beijing. Although the famously beautiful city of Vancouver is still two years away from hosting the winter Olympics in conjunction with the mountain village of Whistler, we are already running into the standard problems and criticisms familiar to Olympic planners of the past few decades. While air quality and the national human rights record are not likely to be the major issues for Vancouver, other themes show up on a regular basis in the local press, including cost overruns, natural disasters, transportation problems, and the potential irreversibility of turning the city into a virtual police state. Last week’s closure of the highway and rail links between Vancouver and Whistler due to a massive landslide served to show the vulnerability of the “Sea-to-Sky Highway” which connects Vancouver to its world-class winter playground (map).

Although the Olympics claim to bring people together to celebrate the best in sport apart from politics, the clear links between corporate sponsorships and nationalism as a distraction from the increasing gap between rich and poor in countries like China and Canada are only too obvious in the difference between those who can afford tickets and those who must be content to watch events on television. As in Beijing, many Vancouver residents feel that the Olympics will only exacerbate the problem of housing prices for lower and middle-income earners. The city government reneged on early promises for increasing social housing, so some critics claim there will be more homeless people than athletes for 2010.

Perhaps the most interesting Olympic-related story of the past few days in Vancouver is the announcement by the head of Vancouvers Olympic Committee that Vancouver’s Olympics will not organize an international torch relay so they can avoid the kind of protests that marred China’s relay in London and Paris. Perhaps that is as it should be, given the rather monumental job of overcoming the apathetic attitude of many Canadians toward Olympic events unrelated to gold medals in hockey.

David Luesink is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Questioning the Olympic Project: Lessons from Seoul

By Sam Goffman

“You Americans look down on us—you think of us as low-educated and savage. I hope the Olympics can change all that.”

One could be forgiven for thinking the above statement is from contemporary China. In fact, the statement is from a South Korean travel agent, who said it on September 16, 1988, one day before the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Summer Olympics, held in Seoul.[1]

It is striking how many of the expectations regarding what the Olympics will do for China’s status in the world reflect earlier expectations in other East Asian countries that have hosted the Games—Japan in 1964 and Korea in 1988—and, to a lesser extent, other “developing” countries, such as Mexico in 1968. The most far-reaching of these is a yearning for international acknowledgement of the country’s status as a major economic power, and confirmation from Western countries of China’s equal standing as a modern nation-state. This expectation has been covered extensively in foreign media, so much so that it has become almost requisite for stories about the Beijing Olympics to include a line about China’s efforts to appear “modern” to the outside world.

As Susan Brownell noted in a recent essay, China’s view of modernity tends to be about 100 years out of date—based on an evolutionary model of history, it focuses on economic achievements and leaves out more recent, Western-centered additions to the ideal of modernity, such as human rights. The Olympics, in its role as stage on which modernity is performed, certainly plays an important role in this broad historical arc. However, the Olympics act as more than a mere passive demonstration of historical progress: it can also act as a destabilizing event, forcing us to investigate the meaning of “modernity” itself.

The Olympics reveals itself as a stage on which modernity can be performed when it is hosted by what is widely considered to be a developing country. In the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Games, as in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Games, much foreign reporting mentioned that the Olympics gave Seoul a chance to demonstrate its “progress” to the world. What exactly constituted progress in the context of the Games, however, was hardly set in stone. Infrastructure was an obvious consideration—the charter of the International Olympic Committee requires its members to select a host country that shows a clear ability to supply the necessary infrastructure to support the Games. In practice, however, “progress” in the context of the Olympics has been much more ambiguous than merely the capability of building roads, telecom equipment, stadiums, hotels, and other physical necessities.

For the Korean government, as well as the Chinese, progress had an economic meaning more than any other. For protesters who have labeled the 2008 Games the “Genocide Olympics” or who have demonstrated against Chinese treatment of Tibetans, human rights hold a more prominent position. Journalists from Western countries have generally shown that, when it comes to China, progress means more than skyscrapers and expressways. Similarly, reportage about the 1988 Korean Games mentioned poverty, the conflict between North and South Korea, and historic national wounds in the same breath as accolades for Korea’s economic progress.

This essay explores the ways the Olympics can encourage us to think about the meanings of “modernity” itself. Rather than focusing on the 2008 Olympics—which are currently being covered to a huge extent—the essay looks back at the Seoul Olympics. An investigation of this earlier entrance onto the modern world stage of an East Asian country will highlight trends that are once more making an appearance in China.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics: Glitter versus Squalor
As in 2008, foreign media in 1988 generally recognized the importance of the Olympics for Korea’s entry into the club of modern nation-states. Brian Bridges, writing in International Affairs ahead of the Games, noted that “the Olympics do symbolize for the Koreans the international recognition of their country’s desired transition from the Third to the First World,”[2] and the majority of articles about the Games as a whole—as opposed to articles about specific sporting events—expressed this idea.

When writing about the frenzy and excitement surrounding the 1988 Olympics, most foreign journalists first set the scene by describing the vast preparations taking place in Seoul. The larger context of the Olympics was Korea’s meteoric economic rise, and the rapid changes there were indeed remarkable. In 1987, Korea’s gross national product increased 12 percent from the previous year. One article expressed admiration of the range of products Korea exported, “from cars to semiconductors,” and a work force that puts in 57-hour weeks.[3] Another noted that the government had “spent billions of dollars to create a showcase for visitors drawn here by the 1988 Summer Games, and has touted the international event as a symbol of South Korea's advancement as a modern nation.”[4] The apparent anxiety of Korea to seem modern, as noted by these foreign articles, was borne out by the persistent emphasis by Korean officials that their country’s status as “modern” was on par with Western countries. As one official on the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee said, “The world is seeing Korea as an advanced, modern nation.”[5]

Korea’s effort to put its modernity on display was a recurrent theme in foreign reports on the Seoul Games. The emphasis on the Olympics as performance of modernity in these articles has several effects that resonate with today’s coverage of China. First, it immediately marks Korea as an outsider to modernity. Korea had previously been relegated to the realm of the Third World or the Second World; now, it appeared to be rapidly remaking itself into a modern nation-state. The modernity that Korea was attempting to achieve, however, was not homegrown or “natural,” but reflected Western-influenced preconceptions of what modernity should look like. Despite Korean pride in these changes, foreign media frequently presented such efforts to replicate the Western experience as superficial and even phony.

Second, the media’s emphasis on the Olympics as performance encouraged a questioning attitude regarding what it takes for a nation-state to become “modern.” This skepticism about Korea’s claims to modernity revealed itself in the foreign press through a focus on human rights, protests, and especially poverty. In the lead-up to the Games, there was considerable controversy over what role North Korea would play (it ultimately boycotted the Games). The South Korean government’s handling of the situation led to several protests by South Korean students, which many Koreans feared would harm their image during the Olympics. The government’s stance was unwavering: protesters would be sternly dealt with because protests would spoil the atmosphere of the Games and humiliate South Korea in the eyes of the world.[6]

Korean poverty provided the handiest counter-image to the false glitter of the Games, and encouraged several Western news articles to question the modern project as panacea to a nation’s ills. Journalists criticized Korea’s almost exclusive focus on economic achievement as the core of “progress.” In the midst of the Games one reporter traveled to a small Korean town not far from Seoul:

Here in Taejon, signs of the new prosperity also exist. But a visit to this town a little more than an hour south of Seoul also reveals a different picture of the much-touted Korean economic miracle, one in which many people have fallen by the wayside in the march toward progress.[7]

In comparing Seoul’s shining symbols of modernity to the squalor of a nearby town, the author challenges a central precondition of modernity: the uncritical acceptance of “progress,” here narrowly defined as economic progress, as vital for the success of the nation-state. The author notes the disjointed nature of Korea’s modernity, in which poverty can exist alongside wealth and the catchall of “progress” does not include every member of the country. The author also notes the official silencing of conflicting experiences that clash with the overriding narrative of the nation-state’s advancement.

The Olympics, which Korea seized as an opportunity to display its modern progress—a “grand spectacle so carefully orchestrated by government authorities,”[8] as another journalist put it—provided the impetus for Western journalists to question the modern project. That they rarely extended this questioning attitude to their own societies, or explored the historical conditions of Korea’s acceptance of that project, perhaps indicates some willful disregard on their part in addition to the single-minded intensity of the Olympic spotlight.

Looking forward to Beijing
The performance of the Olympics on the world stage seeks to concentrate the nation-state’s achievements onto a relatively localized area; in China, this area is Beijing and several other major cities; in Korea, it was Seoul. Both Korea and China have sought to use the Olympics as a way to situate themselves, by means of these cities, alongside other modern states by putting their progress on display. The Chinese slogan of “One world, one dream” is a fitting précis of this idea.

However, any attempt for a non-Western country—or, more specifically, a country that is widely perceived to have not yet achieved modernity—to enter the club of modern nation-states increases anxiety about whether the country is “ready” to become modern. The Olympics is not merely a screen on which these anxieties can be projected. It serves as a catalyst that forces us to investigate the symbols and values that constitute the very idea of progress. Just as Western reporting about the Seoul Olympics focused on problems in Korea that proved it was not “modern”—human rights, the difficulty of staging protests, problems of poverty—coverage of China has followed a similar path, leading readers away from the Games themselves into a critique of a nation’s position in the world. The Olympics, in its role as world stage, invites a public reexamination of what it means to be modern, thus revealing deeply held tensions in the term, and bringing to the surface its intrinsic ambiguity.

Sam Goffman received a Master's degree in East Asian Studies from Duke University and works for Interfax-China, an economic news service.

[1] New York Times. September 16, 1988.
[2] Bridges, Brian. “East Asia in transition: South Korea in the limelight.” International Affairs. Vol. 64, No. 3. (Summer, 1988), pp. 381-392. P. 382.
[3] New York Times. September 29, 1988.
[4] “Beyond the glitter, some Koreans strive to survive.” Jon Funabiki. 25 September 1988. The San Diego Union-Tribune.
[5] “Korean Official: TV, Not Tourists, Counts.” Associated Press. 24 September 1988. The San Francisco Chronicle.
[6] New York Times. August 16, 1988; August 17, 1988.
[7] “Beyond the glitter, some Koreans strive to survive.” Jon Funabiki. 25 September 1988. The San Diego Union-Tribune. 1,2, A-1.
[8] “South Korea and the Games – on eve of Olympics, survival is more a concern for poor.” Lewis M. Simons. The Seattle Times. 16 September 1988.

Beijing's Olympic Pollution Forecast: "Haze" and Hot Air

By Alex Pasternack

For an idea of what kind of air athletes and spectators can expect during the Olympics--and what Beijingers can expect for some time to come--the past week has offered telling indications.

Or it hasn't.

At the start of last week, for the fourth day in a row, emissions made it hard to see down the street, despite the fact the government ordered half the city's cars off the road and closed factories. Officials said they would implement an emergency contingency plan on top of the existing anti-smog measures if pollution lingers closer to the Games.

Twenty-four hours later, the difference was night-and-day: thanks to a series of thunderstorms, triggered in part by the government's arsenal of rainmaking rockets, the following days were dramatically better, like a nice day in New York.

And then, on Monday, following a gasp of fresh air over the weekend, and what some thought was the last of the pollution, Beijing breathed through one of its worst pollution days yet. From the Olympic Green, the city was covered in a veil of white, making it, and even the Bird's Nest stadium, practically vanish.

The vast disparity in pollution levels despite serious efforts to control them says as much about Beijing's general grasp on the country's environmental problems as it does about its last-ditch attempt to banish those problems for the months of the Olympics and Paralympics.

To be sure, the city has made great strides in reducing sources of pollution, from phasing out high emission vehicles to transitioning from coal-fired to electric heat to deploying a fleet of clean natural gas buses. It's also succeeded in getting cars off the roads in the world's grandest anti-pollution experiment, thereby reducing emissions in the city by 20 percent, the government says. To clean up the city for the Olympics, it says it has spent $17.6 billion.

But longer-term and systematic issues have not been addressed. For example, there remains debate over what the source of the pollution problem actually is. Is it the exhaust from all those cars the new middle class is buying? The volatile organic compounds that small factories exhale into the atmosphere? The high emissions of old trucks that have been banned from the city center? Dust and sand from the factories and deserts growing in Inner Mongolia? Straw burning farmers in the suburbs?

Last year, the government launched a long-awaited survey of pollution sources. But like many other orders from the top, the survey will struggle against China's biggest enemies: corruption, government-corporate collusion, and the usual accomplices: censorship and lack of transparency.

Sometimes this means downright doublespeak and falsification. For example, pollution is officially referred to in weather reports not as pollution, wuran, but as wumai, or "fog haze."

Even the question of how polluted the city is has yet to be resolved. Steve Andrews, an environmental consultant who left Beijing last year for fear of reprisal, demonstrated in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that the government had moved its monitoring stations to low traffic areas to make it look like pollution was decreasing.

He also pointed to the dubious "blue sky day" rating system, which gives that name to any day with an API reading of 100 or lower. Last year, the government beat its blue sky target due to a suspiciously high number of days that were exactly 100. It's made a few people wonder if a teeny bit of pollution readings weren't shaved off the top.

It's also important to remember that the threshold for a "blue sky day" is still 6 times more polluted than the World Health Organization's long-term exposure standard for PM10 particulate matter, at a concentration of 20 micrograms/m3. That means that a "blue sky day" isn't necessarily good for your health, nor does it necessarily mean blue skies at all. To make matters worse, because ozone, a toxic gas, is colorless, a day with clear skies can also be terribly polluted. But that's hard to know, because Beijing doesn't release figures for ozone. It also leaves off the books the smallest type of particulate matter, which is the most dangerous kind for people's lungs.

To clear that up: a "blue sky day" isn't necessarily clean, and can still be heavily polluted. And it doesn't necessarily have blue skies. Also, a day with blue skies can be quite polluted. It's okay, catch your breath.

What's more, officials have insisted, a gray sky doesn't mean a polluted one. "Pictures cannot reflect reality," Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing municipal bureau of environmental protection, warned recently, in reference to recent media coverage. "Clouds and haze are not pollution. This kind of weather is a natural phenomenon. It has nothing to do with pollution." In case that wasn't clear, he added: "If we were sitting in a bathhouse, there'd be a lot of steam. But no pollution."

To be sure, foreign media have been quick to pounce on Beijing's pollution problem with ugly images that may not tell the whole story. But the haze was pollution. Two days before Du spoke, Beijing was breathing in air with a PM10 concentration of 269 microgram/m3--168 percent above the WHO standard for short-term exposure.

Mr. Du has thrown up smog screens before. At a press conference a few months ago, I asked why Beijing has lowered, not raised its SO2 standards in recent years, and why it doesn't even release figures for noxious ozone. Du responded that SO2 standards were raised "in accordance with Chinese law." He didn't respond to the question about ozone.

For all of Beijing's emphasis on "analyzing the data scientifically," for all it has spent on temporary improvements, environmental success during the Games will depend on something unscientific that money can't buy: chance. "They better start praying to the Mongolian weather gods," says Ken Rahn, an atmospheric scientist who has worked on solving Beijing's pollution problem. He says that barring long-term solutions like phasing out high pollution factories and reducing coal use, strong winds and rain are the only way to flush out the smog.

In an ironic but typical turn, at a time when the city needs rain, it is also hell bent on preventing it at critical moments, like the opening ceremony. But even though Beijing has an arsenal of rockets full of chemicals to shoot the rain out of clouds before they hit, stopping the rain will also depend on luck. Last year, when the chief engineer of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau was asked what the chances were of banishing rain, he resorted to an unlikely call in secular China: "God bless Beijing," he said.

The simultaneous need for rain and the desire for clear skies seems like a good metaphor for Beijing's struggle with pollution, and its panoply of other problems, in the midst of its intense economic growth. Local governments need to keep the rain from their parade: they want factories to stay afloat, providing jobs, tax revenues and payoffs to officials. But citizens desperately need the rain to wash away the grime: they want to be able to raise their children in a healthy environment, without the threat of those same factories dumping waste into the skies and rivers.

And because those same citizens are starting to call for rain more loudly than ever before--the environment is the second biggest reason for protest in China, following land grabs--the central government is faced with a conundrum: make rain or keep the smoggy skies dry?

And yet, bringing the rain, or keeping it from falling, is not really in the hands of Beijing. The power of chance in a country so hell-bent on control says a lot about the state of things during the Games and afterwards. Beijing may attempt to take a firm grasp over its image, insisting that smog is fog, or that gray is blue. But it has yet to get a grasp over bigger problems. Including, it seems, just coming clean about what they are.

If they don't, no measures, temporary or not, are going to be able to change the pollution. Or the weather, or whatever they want to call it.

Alex Pasternack blogs regularly at Huffington Post and Treehugger.com.

Contemporary Chinese Journalism: An Interview with Judy Polumbaum

By Timothy Weston

I’ve just finished reading China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism by Judy Polumbaum with Xiong Lei. Given the plentiful recent discussion of the Chinese media and censorship during the lead up to the 2008 Olympic games, this book makes for fascinating and very timely reading. It consists of a short introduction by Judy Polumbaum, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Iowa, and the transcripts of interviews that she and Xiong Lei, who has worked as a reporter in Beijing for twenty-five years, conducted from late 2005 until late 2006 with journalists currently working in the Chinese capital.

The twenty young journalists whose words appear in this volume work for a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations in Beijing (the volume says little about the Internet, a key site of journalistic activity in China today, for as Polumbaum notes in her Introduction, that subject deserves a book unto itself). The journalists presented in China Ink are a very dedicated group—animated by a desire to serve society, to convey truth to readers, and to uphold professional standards for themselves and others who work in the same field. They speak quite freely about both the frustrations and joys of their work. Most of them touch on the topics of censorship of and propaganda in the Chinese media. The picture they cumulatively paint on those subjects is complicated and nuanced, though virtually every one who talks about censorship states clearly that it happens and that it is a bad thing. Xiong Lei is preparing a slightly modified Chinese version of the book, which will be identical to the English edition save for the removal of background information that appears in the English edition but is not be necessary for Chinese readers; what this suggests is that public discussion of censorship as a phenomenon in China is not off limits. It is off limits to talk about some subjects in the press, in other words, but not to talk about the fact of censorship itself. That, to me, is a hopeful sign, and evidence of just how much things are changing in the journalistic realm in China today.

Polumbaum and Xiong’s interviewees provide a vivid series of snapshots that enable us to gain a feeling for the fast pace of that change even if it is difficult to draw any really firm conclusions about the way the media work in China today from this book. China Ink’s great virtue is that it offers rich and interesting primary material that, to the best of my knowledge, cannot be found anywhere else, at least in English. The book’s readers are treated to a range of authentic voices from people who are engaged in journalistic work in China and are invited to draw their own conclusions based on the different accounts presented. I, for one, came away with several unmistakable impressions: First, many Chinese journalists are bright and feisty people who are pushing hard to expand what can be discussed in the media. Second, the Chinese media is segmented into many different worlds, each of which needs to be studied in its own right. Third, the Chinese media is becoming commercialized very rapidly, which is leading to new opportunities, new frustrations, and new pressures on journalists. Fourth, the field of contemporary Chinese journalism is very exciting and well worth studying. Fifth, reading accounts from Chinese journalists is useful for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses, relatively speaking, of journalism in the United States (or elsewhere).

What follows is my interview with Judy Polumbaum.

Timothy Weston: What motivated you to do this book? Is there anything else like it in the fields of journalism or communications?

Judy Polumbaum: The book arose from my conversations with my Chinese colleague, journalist Xiong Lei, who had recently retired from her job at Xinhua News Agency. Both of us have long been following changes in Mainland Chinese journalism–she as a practitioner and participant, I as a journalism teacher, scholar and observer. We both had been encountering interesting young journalists and, as we thought about the new generation of practitioners, wanted to assess the state of the field from the perspective of people who not only were in the thick of things right now, but would be shaping journalism for some time into the future.

Of course every author has to say his or her book is the only one like it! In this case I believe the claim is true—I know of no other book that really turns a microscope on individuals’ experiences in Chinese journalism. The format I emulated was that of Studs Terkel, the great Chicago oral historian. He specializes in documenting the lives and ideas of ordinary individuals in all walks of life, through their own words. I have tried to do that with China Ink.

TW: Who is your Chinese co-editor? In your view, what motivated her to do this book?

JP: Friendships resulting from my early time in China as the country was beginning to open up to the outside world have endured over decades, and Xiong Lei is one of those friends of long duration. China’s college entrance exams resumed in 1977, and graduate student exams in 1978, and she was among the latter—in the first entering class of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences postgraduate school. I worked with the second graduate cohort, entering in 1979, but got to know that brilliant first group very well since they overlapped and we shared many classes and activities. Xiong Lei went on to become an accomplished reporter and editor for Xinhua’s English-language feature service, China Features, and developed special expertise in science, medical and environmental reporting. She comes from revolutionary Communist stock and is a feisty, idealistic woman who is both fiercely committed to China’s progress and highly critical of what she sees as affronts to social justice and equity. I think she was motivated to join me in interviewing young journalists because, like me, she saw a great deal of ferment in the field and wanted to know more about the thinking of younger generations. As I say in my introduction, she started calling me a “slave-driver” because every time I arrived in Beijing I’d insist on setting up a slew of additional interviews—but, as I also note, she found the sessions truly engrossing. It was eye-opening to me to see a native I thought knew everything about Chinese journalism come to the same realization I did—that there was a lot we didn’t know, and both of us were learning new things.

TW: China Ink consists of a short introduction outlining some key themes and the transcripts of medium-length interviews you and Xiong Lei conducted with twenty journalists working in contemporary Beijing. Why focus in depth in one place rather than sampling from many different environments in China?

JP: This is totally a function of our own time and travel constraints; Xiong Lei of course lives in Beijing, and I was spending the most time there on a variety of other projects.

TW: If you had focused on another city, would the book have looked substantially different? Would the content of the interviews have been significantly different?

JP: Of course this is impossible to say—but surely we would have encountered a wide range of other experiences and stories. As I say in the introduction, we do not claim to be presenting a representative sample of Chinese journalists. Of course there certainly must be regional variations as well as local idiosyncrasies in the practice, management and interpretation of journalism. We do, however, think the young journalists we spoke with have much to tell us about the direction in which their field is headed. And journalism emanating from Beijing, especially in national media, tends to set trends and agendas nationally.

TW: I was struck by the numerous references to “professionalism” made by many of your interviewees. Did so many of them speak to this issue specifically because you asked them about it?

JP: Not at all—we asked very broad questions, and the term “professionalism” was one many of them came up with again and again. In the foreword to the book, Aryeh Neier singles out this concept as a key to progress in Chinese journalism, and he did so entirely without prompting on the basis of what emerged from the interviews.

TW: In any case, why does that concept—professionalism—have so much salience for the journalists you interviewed? It seems to be a matter of great pride to them, would you agree?

JP: Professionalism actually is a pretty complex concept and in many ways a multi-edged sword; it can be wielded as a noble sword in the cause of genuine social progress, but it also can serve as a shield for an occupational group wishing to promote and preserve its own interests. The concept has been much studied in Western contexts as part of a fascinating sub-field of sociology—the sociology of work and occupations; and there is a great deal written, from both normative and critical perspectives, on adaptation of the concept in journalism. I tend toward the critical perspective; on the other hand, in China at this particular time, I think claims to professionalism in journalism serve an important strategic role in advancing progressive, enterprising reporting about key social issues.

TW: Do you think the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has done enough to protect foreign journalists’ professional rights in Beijing during the Olympics?

JP: The IOC has leverage, but the Chinese are still the hosts and have final determination on what actually happens. I think it’s important to recognize that different constituencies in China look at matters of freedom of expression and free flow of information in different ways, and often are working at cross-purposes. My impression is that the people managing the nitty-gritty of media operations for the organizing committee, BOCOG, for the most part are very much in favor of openness and want to be facilitators for the foreign media during the Games–and more broadly, that prevailing sentiments among the Chinese press corps itself also are resistant to bureaucratic and political management. However, these people have to deal on a day-to-day basis with government officials, propaganda functionaries, public security people, and many other agencies, groups and interests. Western observers tend to tar and feather “Chinese” across the board about policies or activities we dislike, without acknowledging the efforts aimed at improvement coming from within the system itself. My book in part attempts to show how journalists working doggedly within the system are part of such efforts to improve both journalism and society.

TW: What different interpretations of professionalism do you see the Chinese journalists representing? What are some of the key ideas or codes of conduct associated with “professional” behavior for the people you interviewed?

JP: Some of the basic ideas should sound familiar to Western journalists—above all, basing reports on facts and being fair. The subtext, I think, is that in contrast to propaganda, whose objective is pushing predetermined conclusions, reporting is a foray into the unknown. Propaganda is an exercise in confirmation. Journalism is exploration, whose results should be a surprise to the journalists themselves. This is a very simplistic rendering—but of course people can read the book for the details!

TW: Would American journalists stress the same basic ideas and standards if asked about their professionalism?

JP: I think U.S. journalists and Chinese journalists share many basic news values—from accuracy and timeliness to consequence and human interest. But Chinese journalists do add a dimension that I think is missing here. U.S. journalists are trained and socialized to be dispassionate in order to avoid “bias.” Chinese journalists emphasize empathy and compassion; those who report on marginalized people, for instance, freely admit to feeling outrage, sympathy, and admiration, and so forth about the topics of their reporting. In contrast to assertions of detachment, which can be a way to escape making moral or human judgments, I find this emotional dimension refreshing and, indeed, perhaps preferable!

TW: Approximately how many people are employed in the journalism industry in Beijing today? How would you break that down?

JP: I don’t have such statistics—but I have heard numbers like half a million nationwide, and I would suspect the numbers are a lot greater than that.

TW: Is working as a journalist considered a middle class career in Beijing today? How much do journalists earn? I’m sure there is a considerable range, right?

JP: Absolutely, it’s a middle-class occupation—but other than a small number of celebrity journalists, mostly TV anchors and hosts, it is not a hugely lucrative occupation. Many of the journalists we interviewed mentioned the huge gaps between what they earn as reporters and editors and what they might earn in the business world. Money clearly is not what drives these people. However, journalists do have writing and communication skills as well as social contacts that enable them to take on moonlighting jobs; and in addition, many write books which if successful bring them additional income. In addition, as many of our interviewees mention, they get to travel around the country at their employers’ expense on reporting assignments! So while they are not rich, they are not economically suffering.

TW: Does China have celebrity journalists as we do in the United States?

JP: Indeed, as mentioned above, mainly TV personalities.

TW: How would you summarize what your interviewees say about the issues of censorship and propaganda in the Chinese media today? How will Chinese journalists think about the IOC’s ability to protect freedom of the press in Beijing during the Olympics?

JP: I just returned from a week in Beijing, where 23 of my students from The University of Iowa are working as media volunteers. I think Chinese journalists are pretty psyched about the Olympics and feel the atmosphere is quite good—if anything, I would say they are hopeful. All those covering the Games have strong advocates in the staff of the Media Operations department, from bottom to top—many of them journalists themselves on loan from news organizations, who are trying very hard to create an accessible environment for both domestic and foreign journalists. None of us are privy to the dealings between BOCOG (and the Beijing government) and the IOC, nor to the negotiations among the various BOCOG and city departments, but I’m sure there have been many back-channel discussions resulting in both accommodation and resistance to the desire for freedom of information—a desire that both Chinese and foreign media practitioners share.

TW: I was trying to figure out how to place your interviewees on an ideological spectrum – left being very close to the Chinese Communist Party and right being rather aggressively independent of it. Can they be plotted that way? Does that kind of spectrum work as a way of talking about the Chinese journalism field today?

JP: I don’t think so. Those labels have become so confused—we have the “old left,” the Chinese Communists who think their Party has lost its way, and the “new left,” with its progressive critiques of the Party, and the neoliberals, for whom things are going merrily down the capitalist road, and the Communist Party mainstream, which certainly pursues an agenda that is more capitalist (at best with a social welfare cast) than socialist, and so forth. One of the purposes of this book is to get away from labels or generalizations and present individuals who are trying to work within this complex confluence of ideological tendencies and document their real-world results.

TW: Do you see the Olympics as a moment when Chinese and Western journalists might join together in a way that could help defuse the tension caused by the intense Chinese and American nationalisms, especially vis-à-vis one another, stoked by the Games? On the other hand, could the media do damage to the way we see one another as countries?

JP: Both Western and Chinese media wax and wane friendly and frigid toward each other, but I think the Olympics is a place where, for the most part, they will get along and develop a sense of occupational solidarity. That said, one of my students who’s working in the Main Press Centre told me about a German TV cameraman violently shoving a Chinese photographer who was blocking his line of site at a press conference. This may be medium-specific rather than national arrogance, though, with TV typically asserting primacy-of-place. (An MPC manager, who happens to be an American, took the German guy aside and warned him that any repeat performances would be cause for lifting his credentials.)

TW: Will the IOC’s inability to guarantee a completely free media environment in Beijing during the Games become a major subject of protest for foreign reporters in China?

JP: I suspect foreign reporters will be pretty busy covering the Games, both as sporting events and as the context for any other news that arises. In advance of the Games, however, with the impetus of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, they have less activity to cover and thus are expending more airtime, web space and ink on even fairly insignificant information obstacles. The blocking of websites that’s the subject of a page one story in The New York Times, for instance, is not worth such attention. Not only is it an old story, but even with some sites or categories blocked on the web, abundant information is still available. And while the web might be useful for quickie background information, no self-respecting journalist should be relying on what Google can pull up on Tibet or Tiananmen in any case.

TW: Many of your interviewees talked about journalism as a passion, as a career that makes them feel quite free and intellectually alive. Can you say more about the degree to which the passion conveyed by your interviewees is typical for most Chinese journalists?

JP: Again, this group does not speak for all Chinese journalists; but it’s clear that individuals who see stories they think are important to fruition find great reward in that.

TW: Many also talked about how journalism can be a grinding career, especially at the early stage. Can you comment on that?

JP: They talk about pressures of time and space, exhaustion, and the limitations of their own skills and knowledge as much as, if not more than, bureaucratic and political constraints.

TW: Would you call any of the people you interviewed “public intellectuals”? Would any of them use that term for themselves? Out of the twenty of them, how many of them have already written books or hope one day to write a book? Have any of them had great commercial success through their books? If so, which people, and for which books?

JP: The book authors in the group have had good response but not blockbuster success—Wang Jun with what is now two books on the history of Beijing’s urban development, Jin Yongquan with his books on mask-dancers, Three Gorges displacement and photography, Xiang Fei with her memoir, and a few others. They certainly see themselves as intellectuals, and they certainly wish to be of service to the public, but I don’t think they’d feel comfortable with the term “public intellectual.” That implies a kind of special status that most of them wouldn’t want. Some of them like earning public accolades, but others are exceedingly modest about their achievements. Like many of the best journalists here, the best ones in China don’t see themselves as the story—rather, they see themselves as instruments to convey important stories about others.

TW: What other English-language book(s) would you recommend readers interested in China Ink read? I mean books with a strong China focus especially.

JP: I admire some of the recent books by some of the most sensitive Western journalists who’ve spent time in China—such as Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (as well as his earlier River Town) and John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons. I found Oliver August’s Inside the Red Mansion fascinating as well as quite revealing of the challenges foreigners face in trying to learn about China. The edited collections by Chin-chuan Lee, a friend and mentor of mine, are all terrific; and the wonderful Chinese-Canadian scholar Zhao Yuezhi’s new book Communication in China is a must for academics—and an important representation of “new leftist” views, although its density and highly theorized nature make it very difficult for general readers (her earlier Media, Market and Democracy in China is far more accessible, though dated).

TW: Did you ever practice journalism in China? Elsewhere?

JP: First the elsewhere—as an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal, I did some writing for the McGill Daily that got me interested in becoming a journalist, so I went on for a master’s at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I subsequently worked at the Rutland Herald in Rutland, Vermont and at the paper’s Burlington, VT bureau for a couple of years—and that time as a rookie reporter was hugely important in shaping my ideas about journalism’s importance to community knowledge. I later worked for local papers in California and Oregon, and I continue to freelance for newspapers and magazines. I call myself an unrepentant newspaper reporter. In between my stateside jobs, working as a “foreign expert” in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I taught journalism for two years at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences postgraduate school, spent two summers with Xinhua News Agency’s English-language service as a so-called “polisher,” and joined the staff of the then-new national English-language paper China Daily, where I worked alongside the original staff of feisty old rightists and fresh young recruits. Although I did get to write a lot of arts features for China Daily, my work for these Chinese publications was not exactly “practicing” journalism—rather, it was trying to help Chinese journalists turn what had been useless crass propaganda aimed at foreigners into something resembling real news reporting that might actually be of interest to foreign readers.

A Few Olympic Readings

Just in case you can’t get enough, here are a few more:

1. Geremie Barmé’s excerpt on Wang Shuo on Danwei is a fascinating twist on "sports competitions" and national humiliation.

2. Monroe Price has a recent piece up at the Huffington Post on internet censorship.

3. Check out this charmingly self-reflexive piece by the L.A. Times' Ching-Ching Ni on the experience of returning to Beijing and finding the city of her childhood gone.

4. Exhausted by the Olympics already? How can you feel this way when there’s 2016 to think about?

5. Find out “Who’s Your Buddha?” in this Howard French book review for The Nation.

6. Also worth a look (with nod to CDT for the tip): this satirical little news broadcast about "Are the Games a Trap,” from that trusty news source, The Onion.

Wishful Reporting

This is the second installation in our series on media coverage of the Olympics around the world, this time from England.

By Pierre Fuller

My tea nearly dropped to the table here in Leicester, England, when I saw The Independent headline. “Beijing 2008 Olympics: Tiananmen orchestra fails to drown out clamour of protests,” it read, conjuring up images of Richard Gere and a chorus of Tibetan monks chanting a hundred violinists off a Tiananmen stage. So, it’d finally come, the wellspring of protest of the regime had burst, I thought. I started to read. An orchestra of 2,008 musicians was flown in from all over the world, I learned, while “foreign and local groups... have been told to give plenty of notice” for permission to protest. Little news there. I read on. More on the orchestra, and then a paragraph on the fact that “China’s critics are keen to use the Olympics” to put issues in the spotlight. Fair enough, but there were stories on that years back when Beijing won the contest to host.

A paragraph followed ending with the fact that Beijing had a “fear it could be embarrassed by protest groups out to make a point.” But there can't possibly be a segment of the readership who hasn’t read about that at this stage in the game. I’d begun to wonder what the point of the story was. Then there was a mention of the slight loosening of protest restrictions... “last week.” That takes the “new” out of “news.” The only mention of protest left in the story was the fact that “despite ongoing pressure over human rights and pollution” – without a single example of who, in what form, and where in the entire article – “the normal business of the Games is continuing to gather steam.”

So if the official orchestra steamed ahead after all, where’s the “failure” in the headline? The “clamour?” Even the “protests?” Certainly the ambush of police killing 16 in Kashgar on Monday was one. Maybe The Independent could have waited for an event like that to “drown out” the two-thousand piece orchestra. Or maybe it’s just a case of wishing protests into existence. Since when is that reporting?

The Olympics Around the World: Japan

Many China-centered English-language websites (China Beat included) tend to focus their coverage on China and the US (or, rather, coverage of Chinese media and then coverage of China as it is discussed and written about in the US and perhaps the UK as well). In recognition that the Olympic Games are a global event, we thought this would be a unique opportunity to gauge how China was being covered all over the world. To that end, we sent out requests to China Beat contributors from around the world (or contributors who regularly follow the media in other parts of the world) to send in reports about how the Beijing Games were being covered in their home countries. We'll post these reports as we get them. Here is the first--from James Farrer, who lives in Japan.

By James Farrer

While the English language press has been reporting that over 100,000 police and 30,000 soldiers have been readied to protect China's Olympic city, Japan's Asahi Shimbun has come up with figures a full order of magnitude higher. The August 4, 2008, morning Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo edition) ran a front page feature article reporting that despite claims by the Chinese government that no one has been made to leave the city, nearly 1.4 million migrant workers have been moved out of the city for the Olympics. In turn, the report says, nearly 1.2 million police and 200,000 army personnel have moved into the city, comprising an astonishing 10 percent of the total urban population. The article cites an unnamed public security source as claiming, "In the central city nearly 1 in 5 people are security personnel, a so-called 'human sea strategy' for protecting the capital city."

Despite the large numbers, the security personnel are told to avoid standing about the most touristic spots of the city. Fears of terrorism, particularly by Uighur radicals, are cited as one reason for the massive mobilization of security personnel. Chinese security have also reportedly contacted Japanese officials were about the possibility that East Turkistan Islamic Movement terrorist sleepers based in Japan could take advantage of Japanese tourists' visa free access to China in order to slip into the country to disrupt the Olympics. As an illustration of the deportations of migrant workers, the article featured the story of a Mr. Ge who worked as a house painter and cleaner supporting his wife and two children who were also living and studying in Beijing. He was forced to return to Sichuan although their house there had been destroyed in the earthquake, and he would have no place to return to.

On Aug. 5, the focus of coverage was the deadly attacks on police in Kashgar. A smaller article on page two points out that members of the Japanese Olympic team are expressing concern about their personal safety during he games. One Japanese participant in the shooting events is quoted as saying, "This didn't happen in Beijing, but it is scary." The word "scary" made it into the article headlines, and it now seems that fears about security are added onto negative coverage about pollution and political repression. In this story, the same 1.2 million figure for police and 200,000 number of military personal were repeated, pointing out that both had been brought in from across the entire country. The article quoted a Chinese source who said that such huge concentrations of security personel in the capital had left security thin in other regions of the country.

As one Japanese media observer said to me, it is doubtful if such negative coverage would be happening if the games were in Europe.

James Farrer is associate professor of sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo and the author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai.

Class and the Olympics

By Eric Setzekorn

Only a short six-hour ride on board the shiny new bullet trains moving at 230km per hour from Beijing, the formerly sleepy port city of Qingdao will be host to the Olympic sailing events for 2008. As a sport with relatively high costs and requiring access to the ocean or at least large lakes, sailing is not a popular sport in China but is emerging as a favorite of the newly rich. In Qingdao and Beijing the influence of class has fundamentally affected government planning and China’s Olympic development. Rather than bring investment and tourism into poor or less developed areas, most Olympic venues in both Beijing and Qingdao are concentrated in the wealthier parts of town. Post-2008 the incredible facilities built at great expense will likely remain as isolated from ordinary citizens as during the Olympics itself.

Construction site for apartments adjacent to the Qingdao coast with Olympic signs used to block view of site

As a former German colony from 1898-1914 Qingdao is justly famous for its European-style architecture with tree lined streets and stone buildings. Over the past twenty years, new development has seen investment pouring into Qingdao as it became the ideal commercial center for easy access to the Shandong countryside. North of the old city, glittering skyscrapers housing the main Chinese banks and luxury highrises line the shore heading to the Olympic event center. The Qingdao Olympic sailing center has become the focal point of a large development plan which features luxury apartments, shopping malls featuring Gucci, Prada and Cartier, along with dozens of seaside villas. After the Olympics, its grounds can be recast as a luxury hotel and the boat landing into a marina for local private sailboats and speedboats.

Oceanside villas north of the Olympic sailing center

Transportation in this area of town is almost totally centered on private vehicles with expansive parking lots for Porsche SUVs, Range Rovers, and the always-popular black Audi A6 sedans. A single-line subway which would ease congestion and allow easy access from the wealthy north of the city to the poorer south and west side of town is neither under construction nor planned. Those citizens that endure the long bus ride across town face privately fenced and policed communities that close off most of the scenic areas to the public, although the beaches remain open for public use. Unlike many Beijing residents who are overwhelmingly supportive of the games seemingly no matter what the cost, several people I spoke to in Qingdao were more skeptical of the Games’ trickle-down effects. One man in his mid-thirties remarked that for the rich all the growth has been very good but the ordinary people have gotten no real benefits and many have been forced to move further inland due to development.

The wide clean streets of north Qingdao with PLA troops providing security and Olympic themed lights.

The situation in Beijing is more complex and diffuse. The sheer number of Olympic venues has entailed they be spread around town, but in general they are in the northern half or the edges of the city where many of the new middle class live. The Olympic Park is easily reached from the leafy university district of Haidian or the wealthy business district of Chaoyang but any spectator coming from the overwhelmingly working class district of Fengtai in the south of the city is forced to transfer repeatedly. Local teams such as the blue collar Beijing Guo’an soccer team continue to use old facilities in the south of the city which have been not included in the Olympic facelift. In contrast, the massive Olympic tennis center on the north side of town is adjacent to large new parks, has convenient access to major roads, and boasts a large car park. The four billion dollars spent on the new Airport Terminal Three has not been matched by any redevelopment of either of Beijing’s chaotic train stations. Instead of building new waiting rooms in the train stations to disperse crowds and increase comfort, armed security guards patrol the corridors and man the entrances. New rail lines are being built for comfortable, high-speed trains traveling between large cities but the lack of spare capacity and the poor infrastructure that was fully on display during the New Year snowstorms remains an issue.

While the Beijing Olympics have proved to be widely popular with the Chinese public at the moment, future generations might not be so forgiving of the massive subsidization of playgrounds for China’s rich.

China Overload

What's that, you ask? We couldn't tell you. We can't get enough of the China coverage splattered across magazine covers and op-ed pages. A lot of the stuff is for subscribers only, so we won't be directing you to recent China pieces in Harper's and elsewhere. Here are some links to the free pieces, found on the pages of the usual suspects as well as some unusual ones:

1. Here's an unusual one: Architectural Digest has a series of stories on contemporary decor and architecture in China, including a photo spread of a "villa" outside Chengdu, a slideshow of 19th century "period pictures" (teachers, start right-clicking "save picture as..."), and a feature on the Shanghai St. Regis.

2. The New York Review of Books has several China pieces in its current issue, including the longer version of Orville Schell's piece on "China: Humiliation & the Olympics" (which, in shorter form, was this week's cover story for Newsweek) and Jonathan Spence's review of The Man Who Loved China (on Joseph Needham, by Simon Winchester), as well as a discussion of several recent books on North Korea and Jonathan Mirsky's piece last week on the Dalai Lama.

3. In addition to an uptick in quirky side pieces on China (like the odd little one--replete with accompanying video, cause how could they pass that up--on the "sport" of pole-dancing in China), The New York Times has also been providing steady Olympics-related (often sports-centered) stories, like this one from Sunday's Times.

Terracotta Ambassadors, the First Emperor, and the “Cursed” Farmers

In honor of the current exhibit of Terracotta Warriors in China Beat's own backyard (in other words, Orange County, California), we asked contributor Xia Shi if she would visit the Bowers Museum where the warriors are on display and reflect on the exhibit and the warriors' history.

By Xia Shi

About twenty terracotta figures are currently on display at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, California in an exhibit scheduled from May 18 through October 12. Later, the exhibit, including statues of ten warriors, court officials, an acrobat, a bare-chested strongman, musicians, a stable boy, chariot horses and bronze water birds, will make stops in Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, D.C. It is said that this exhibit not only includes pieces of the highest quality, but is also the largest collection of the figures ever to leave China.

“As China gears up for the 2008 Olympics, it’s a debut timed to the Beijing Olympics that was millions of dollars and four years in the making,” says Peter Keller, Bowers president. Last year, a similar exhibit attracted 500 people per hour at the British Museum. At the Bowers, there are about 250 visitors per hour, according to staff.

The Underground World
Life-sized, over two thousand years old, but only unearthed since 1974, these soldiers are generally believed to be the guardians of the mausoleum of China’s first emperor—Qin Shi Huang (r. 246-210 B.C.), which is located in Lintong, Shanxi province. The terracotta army has been regarded as one of the grandest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and is ranked as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

It was the emperor’s belief in eternal life that brought the necropolis into being, reputedly a vast underground palace that took about 700,000 conscripted workmen more than 36 years to complete. The first great Chinese historian Sima Qian (145–85 B.C.) left a record that allows us to imagine this mysterious and still not fully excavated underground world:

“The laborers dug through three subterranean streams, which they sealed off with bronze to construct the burial chamber. They built models of palaces, pavilions, and offices and filled the tomb with fine vessels, precious stones, and rarities. Artisans were ordered to install mechanically triggered crossbows set to shoot any intruder. With quicksilver the various waterways of the empire, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and even the great ocean itself were created and made to flow and circulate mechanically. With shining pearls the heavenly constellations were depicted above, and with figures of birds in gold and silver and of pine trees carved of jade the earth was laid out below. Lamps were fueled with whale oil so that they might burn for the longest possible time.”

Scientists have repeatedly found that the mercury concentration in frozen earth samples from the mausoleum is much higher than that of areas nearby and that the mercury map surprisingly matched the shape of the Qin empire and its waterways. However, since the site has not been fully explored (archaeologists say they are delaying some exploration until preservation technology is better developed) there remain at least nine major questions about Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum, such as how many precious treasures are in the underground palace and whether there is really an automatic ejector on site.

The First Emperor
The arrogant, Chinese-inflected voice of the museum’s audio guide makes the visitor even more curious about the ancient strongman who built the tomb. Qin Shi Huang, who lived for about fifty years, has been a controversial figure over the past two millennia.

Chinese have largely remembered him as one of two things: a unifier of commendable achievements, or a brutal tyrant who favored legalist policy. It could be said that both of these images have greatly impacted the political mentality of Chinese rulers and subjects for two thousand years. His unification made the concept of “oneness” take root in Chinese people’s minds and led to the preference of a unified empire over separate states competing with each other. Since his death, all rulers of China have prioritized unification; for their subjects, unification also became an important criterion of a ruler’s political achievements. Accordingly, Qin Shi Huang ranks among the greatest rulers in Chinese history, and he is often mentioned alongside other powerful emperors, such as Han Wudi, Tang Taizong, and Kangxi of the Qing dynasty. Almost all these emperors were greatly admired by the populace and in recent years history dramas in which they feature as the protagonists have been a favorite for both the general public and the central propaganda machine, to the degree that some commentators have coined the phrase “the great emperors drama fever.”

However, Qin Shi Huang’s second deeply entrenched image—that of a ruthless tyrant—apparently troubled some Chinese political leaders and made for special treatment even of his historical dramas. Unlike other great emperors’ dramas, the handsomely sponsored CCTV show “Qin Shi Huang” was “hidden” for six years after it was finished and was said to be repeatedly re-edited to cut or alter some scenes which did not “accord with history.” When it was finally shown on CCTV, it was not scheduled at prime time, for although its eulogizing of national unification is a politically correct theme, one of the central anxieties was that the First Emperor’s popular image as a tyrant might incite agitation and stir social conflicts as opposed to promoting the social harmony that was so carefully nurtured in the difficult and crucial reform period of 2001.

The power of Qin Shi Huang’s image as a ruthless despot is not only witnessed in the case of this history drama. Over the past two thousand years, rulers have been learning from his lesson based on Confucianists’ view and often remind themselves to “give people rest” (与民休息). On the other hand, the populace also gradually began to use the name “Qin Shi Huang” to accuse rulers of being a tyrant and justify their rebellions. This kind of accusation usually worked, until they met Mao Zedong, who as a ruler displayed not even a single tinge of fear of being compared to the First Emperor. Reviled for his persecution of intellectuals, Mao reputedly responded: “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive...You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.” Even with regard to the First Emperor’s achievements, Mao also hinted that his aspiration was even greater than his and that of all other revered emperors. After the victory of the Long March and the establishment of his control of the Communist Party, in high spirits, the later “Great Helmsman” wrote a dashingly ambitious poem titled “Snow” in 1936, later published in school textbooks in the PRC, with the following key lines:

But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi,
Were lacking in literary grace;
And Tang Taizong and Sung Taizu,
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan,
Proud Son of Heaven for a day,
Knew only to shoot eagles, bow outstretched;
All are past and gone!
For truly great men,
Look to this age alone.

As we all know from later history, in China communism found its most iconoclastic leader, whose ambitious idealism stirred red China into fervent revolution. A similarly controversial unifier who also preferred Legalism to Confucianism, Mao still retains his reputation as the ruler who most resembles the First Emperor in China’s thousands of years of history.

So far, readers may wonder how cruel the First Emperor truly was, that his tyrant image has lasted so long? Interestingly, recent history research suggests that few verifiable actions can testify to his presumed ruthlessness in implementing his decisions. The well-known stories of the burning of the books of Confucianism and burying scholars alive have already been discredited by modern scholars. Perhaps it is helpful, when thinking about this question, to keep in mind two key points. First, Qin Shi Huang was an emperor who strongly favored Legalist policies, the philosophical basis of which is that people are bad by nature and so need to be controlled by the government. Second, the historical commentaries of most far-reaching influence were primarily written by Confucian scholars under the rule of Qin’s overthrowers—the Han emperors. Recent research has also noted that probably the most controversial parts on Qin Shi Huang of Sima Qian’s the Historical Record were actually later additions to it, judging from the language used in them.

The standard Confucian judgment of the emperor and his short-lived empire was that of a Han Confucian scholar and statesman called Jia Yi (贾谊，201 BC-169BC). In his political essay The Faults of Qin (过秦论), he condemned Qin Shi Huang’s ruthless pursuit of power, harsh laws and unbearable burdens placed on the population in projects such as the Great Wall. Admired as a masterpiece of rhetoric and reasoning, this classic illustration of Confucian theory has been extremely influential upon Chinese political thoughts—quoted often by later Chinese intellectuals almost any time they evaluated Qin Shi Huang. It also seems that the imperial patronage of Confucianism received under Han Wudi (140-87 BC) symbolized to the world who was the final winner of the longtime struggle among different schools of thought, and especially signaled the victory of Confucianism over the once predominant Legalism, as represented by the “cruel” Qin Shi Huang. However, it is better not to forget that historian Ho Ping-ti has already pointed out that, after the founding of the Han Empire, the various schools of thought—particularly Confucianism and Legalism—began to merge.

It seems that it would be wiser to cast a doubtful eye on some of the historical records on Qin Shi Huang, especially those compiled by Confucian scholars. In this sense, any archaeological evidence already presented or to be discovered from his tomb is of great significance.

The Terracotta Ambassadors
The minute they emerged from Qin Shi Huang’s over two thousand-year-old underground palace, his terracotta soldiers stunned the world with their unique charms. Each and every one of the thousands of soldiers has a unique face. It has now been shown that the manufacture of the army was an early feat of mass production instead of individual portraits in clay of actual soldiers. People are also amazed by the detail and accuracy of their creators: dozens of individual rivets on their plate armor; shoes sculpted with delicate shoelaces; or soldiers sporting strands of hair that delicately curl over their foreheads.

Charming enough to arouse national pride and attract foreign admirers, the soldiers have been frequently dispatched by the Chinese government on important diplomatic missions. Since open reform, these military men have become ambassadors of Chinese culture and friendship. The majority of them remain in Xi’an, where they have received more than 50 million visitors and 130-odd foreign leaders since 1979, according to People’s Daily Online. Meanwhile, a small, carefully selected group has been sent to more than 30 countries and regions with more than 20 million people having had a glimpse of China’s past imperial glory. Handsomely sponsored by the government, it is hoped that they might display the “great Chinese civilization and its splendid history.”

Obviously equipped with superb work ethic, these warriors had been patiently and lively explaining to hundreds of Bower visitors per hour of their imperial duties, despite the fact that they are not in great shape. After the large fire set by general Xiang Yu to the wooden structures that once housed the Terracotta Army, only one kneeling archer survived intact. However, these cultural ambassadors decided that they would never let people down. In Britain, the protagonist was the First Emperor, so they dutifully played their supporting role, to testify to the vast territory he controlled and the enormous power he wielded. In the US, they learned that this is a country without a monarch and were happy to know that the focus of the Bowers Museum exhibition would be on them. After their initial excitement, they were told that they were required to speak English—the international language of the 21st century--with a deliberate Chinese accent to “authentically” tell their stories via audio guide. Being military men for two millennia, they were not so good at rhetoric; however, they tried their best to present an impressive display of the greatness of China, especially since they heard that their hosts—the museum curators—hoped their show would “pique the interest of Americans who are inundated with news of lead-contaminated Chinese toys, human rights violations in Tibet and rapid economic expansion—but who know nothing of the nation’s ancient and storied past.” Mixed in with public interest in them, they also found, are several reports that go beyond the mission of their visit. For instance, their trip to the U.S. was used by an American Express delivery company named UPS as an advertisement to boast their “incredible” capability of “planning and logistics,” in the words of the president of UPS Airlines. Even for those who are still in China, they are used as witnesses to remind people the world over how bad China’s air pollution is nowadays and to show their deep concern for them as victims who are suffering from “nine different kinds of mould.” Confused as to whether the report is due to foreigners’ genuine concern about their health, they decided to focus on the satisfying idea that they have been continuously attracting the world’s attention since they were dug out of their common grave.

The “Cursed” Farmers
In terms of the attention they have received so far, they are indeed lucky, especially compared to the seven farmers who first found them but have been continuously denied their proper recognition as the discoverers of the Eighth Wonder of the World. Since the moment in that dry spring of 1974 when these seven farmers were digging a well on their communal farm in Yang village stumbled across “the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times,” until today, they still find it difficult to say whether this event was a curse or a blessing. Thanks to the Western media’s curiosity, we now know that one of them committed suicide, two “died in their 50s, jobless and penniless” and the four remaining men “earn £2 a day sitting in official souvenir shops at the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and sign books for tourists,” after spending three months learning how to write their own names.

If the act of “discovery” can only be applied to “an intelligent action of recognizing what the objects are,” as some officials once claimed, these farmers are indeed a far cry from Indiana Jones. Assuming that the statue head they accidentally dug out was a head of Buddha, they were afraid to touch it for fear that the Buddha would punish them. Someone even hung the head on a tree to expose it to the scorching sunshine to pray for rain. Their fellow villagers regarded the seven as inauspicious and kept a fearful distance. Before long, they learned that archeologists “discovered” that what they found was a big treasure related to Qin Shi Huang and magnificent enough to be called “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” They also saw how subsequent “pioneers” utilized these clay figures to make money, and heard about the new local popular saying: “to be liberated, you need the Communist party, to get rich, you need Qin Shi Huang” (翻身要靠共产党，致富要靠秦始皇). Perhaps out of an elusive consciousness of their rights of discovery, or maybe just to get a share of its benefits, they petitioned the government for compensation, but were denied and got nothing. Disappointed villagers believe that “almost all the compensation paid by the government was siphoned off by officials” according to the report.

It is also said that one particular farmer, after pondering over the superstitions that surrounded their discovery, “has vowed never to set eyes on the Terracotta Army again.” The farmer is afraid “they might have brought misfortune in some way,” and still wonders “if maybe the soldiers should have been left beneath the ground.” In sum, the report links the reasons why the famous Terracotta Army brought wealth and glory to many but not to the poor villagers who first found them, to “the brutal pace of development in modern China.”

Emperors, soldiers, and farmers: stories behind the Terracotta statues are admittedly complicated. Back to the exhibit itself, it is lively and creative, as demonstrated by those personal stories in the audio tour. It is reasonable to predict that these Terracotta ambassadors’ American debut would be a success.

All photos for this story taken in Xian, China by Matthias Merkel Hess.

Nobody (?) Likes A Spoiler

By Miri Kim

On July 31st, SBS, a major South Korean broadcast network, aired a short clip showing details of the carefully guarded rehearsals for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics (the video clip has now been removed from all major news and video sites). As the news (and the clip) spread on the web, Chinese and Korean news, portal sites, and users on blogs and message boards expressed, to put it mildly, consternation. On popular Chinese portals like sina.com and 163.com, polls show that a large percentage of the respondents support revoking the offending station's broadcasting privileges, or investigating who bore responsibility for the leak and levying a heavy fine on the station (presumably, the other two major South Korean networks covering the Olympics this summer, MBC and KBS, would be unaffected by such sanctions).

Korean reactions on blogs and comments that I have seen range from dismay, embarrassment, and strong (and often vicious, as par the course in online discourses) condemnation of SBS, to defensiveness and indifference (basically, 不关心), and even to excitement at the promise of the beauty of the opening ceremony captured by the footage. In what is one of the most tech-savvy societies in the world, South Korea's wired citizens, or "netizens," can be found at the cutting edge of any controversy, and the SBS incident is no exception. Furthermore, Korean users are just as, if not more mindful of developments on Chinese-language sites than internet users in predominantly English-speaking countries like the U.S., and true to form, are following this issue very closely on both international and home fronts, though for how intensely and for how long remains unclear at this point in time.

The majority opinion of Koreans regarding the SBS broadcast might be expressed with the following phrase: "쪽팔린다"--roughly equivalent to "losing face." But with this incident as with others like it, the reactions of Korean netizens have already covered a seemingly infinite array of opinions. Comments from Korean users run the gamut from SBS-bashing, finger-pointing at Chinese security measures, anti-China rhetoric and nationalistic calls for the return of unrelated landmasses to sighs of disappointment. And no matter how clear-cut a point being debated may appear on screen, an observer is sure to notice a contrarian, off-the-wall, or downright inflammatory voice in a comment thread; if you have braved internet fora of any linguistic and national type, this won't sound like anything new. The level of connectivity and breadth of involvement of Koreans in online discourse, however, still outpaces that of a number of other countries.

The Korean media's coverage of the leak has so far tended to reflect one subset of sentiments expressed by individual netizens in various discussions--regret, and concern over the possible loss of respect from other nations at this perceived breach of media etiquette--not only in relation to China, but to everyone who will be participating and tuning in to the Beijing Olympics. (For examples, in Korean, see these reports at Star News, Sports Seoul, Dalian, and dongA.)

China's economic growth in recent years has brought both opportunities and worries domestically and internationally. Many countries around the globe share a similar sort of anticipation where China is concerned, but particularly in South Korea, there is a widespread feeling that the Beijing Olympics may decisively raise China's international profile, perhaps to the effect of marginalizing its East Asian neighbors. There are precedents for the first notion--the Tokyo and Sapporo Olympics in 1964 and 1972 and the Seoul Olympics in 1988 also served to showcase the economic and political development of Japan and Korea on an international stage.

For now, feelings are running high, but internet firestorms have proven to be unpredictable in the past, and international relations between China and South Korea will probably be able to weather this incident, barring further negativity. Will things cool off before August 8? Will governmental investigation and censure bring resolution? Will another controversy soon take the place of the SBS debacle in the wilds of the net? Hard to say. Some netizens may be scoffing at rumors that South Korean athletes will be shut out of the Olympics (not likely) or booed or given the silent treatment at the opening ceremony by irate Chinese spectators (somewhat more likely). Other, scattered voices are asking for restraint and civility, and that spirit of goodwill may prevail. But certainly, if the mood of many Chinese and Korean internet users are any indication, SBS's leak is a faux pas on a grand scale indeed.

Miri Kim is a graduate student in Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.