Opening Ceremonies: Sneak Preview

The Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics got leaked sometime last night...here it is:





The government's taking these videos down as fast as they can, so if this one's offline by the time you read this, just find it for yourself on YouTube.

Keeping the "Great Firewall" Up

Not exactly surprising news for anyone who's been in China lately, but the government here's officially announced that they will not in bring down the "Great Firewall" during the Olympic Games.  At various times since I arrived, Blogspot, Wordpress, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook have been blocked by the domestic internet police.  (Stuff on human rights, Tibet, Tianamen Square and Taiwan, on the other hand, are always blocked.)  By and large, you can get around the restrictions with proxy servers, but not everyone knows how to do that. 

Different stuff is blocked for different reasons, Facebook being one of the most interesting examples.  Access has been pretty sketchy since it launched its Chinese site, and from what I hear it's because of a couple different reasons.  First of all, launching anything like Facebook, which allows users to freely express their opinions, is bound to get the government's attention.  And quadruply so if you're launching just before the Olympics start.  Secondly, I've been told that Facebook simply didn't go through the proper channels to get themselves started in China.  They designed a Chinese site targeted at Chinese users, but tried to skip all the legal complications that involved by simply hosting their site abroad.  So that didn't really fly.  Moral of the story: don't rock the boat if you're a big company trying to make inroads into China.

Anyways, even though the government promised that visitors would have unfettered internet access, it's pretty clear that they never really intended to follow through on that.  Once you open the floodgates, it's not really feasible to close them back up again.  It'll be interesting to see what the backlash will be like from foreign journalists doing research and travelers trying to Facebook their friends.

Update: Looks like China's trying to find some middle ground to show how "open" they are while still keeping a tight grip on everything...a bunch of websites that have been forever blocked are now accessible, including BBC Chinese and Wikipedia Chinese.  Amnesty International and other human rights/Tibet/etc... sites are still down though.  Shanghaiist has more.

The Thing About the Chinese...

...is that somehow, two of them look like Charles Barkley.

Unrest in China's West

Not sure hot much press this got back in North America, but there was a pretty serious bus bombing in Kunming (capital city of Yunnan Province in SW China) last Monday. Two died and fourteen more were injured. Rumours that a text message warning of potential danger was circulated earlier that day have been flying for days now, but the government has officially denied it.

It's the second incident involving buses exploding in China since I've gotten here, the first being here in Shanghai in May (3 dead, 12 injured). I happened upon the bus's remains the day after, and though the police officially called it an accident, there were always speculation that it was a terrorist attack.

Now a Uighur separatist group calling themselves the Turkestan Islamic Party is claiming responsibility for these two attacks, as well as one other bombing in Guangzhou, an attack on police in Wenzhou, and another unnamed attack in Shanghai. They're also promising more to come during the Olympics.

"Through this blessed jihad in Yunnan this time, the Turkestan Islamic Party warns China one more time." "Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed."

Again, the government is downplaying it, denying that all those events were terrorist attacks. Pretty safe way to go, considering you're about to host a major international event, but curious given that these guys could have unwittingly provided the government with free reign to crack down on any and all suspicious activities. This Turkestan Islamic Party has never been heard from before and yields no search results on Google, but according to the AFP report detailing the video, "the Turkestan Islamic Party is [likely] another name used by the Islamic Party of East Turkestan (ETIM), an ethnic Uighur and Muslim separatist group seeking to create an independent state out of China's westernmost, heavily Muslim Xinjiang province."

Either way, however, Olympic security is going to be tight. The visa crackdowns are a big part of that, as are the tanks that the government brought in to form a protective shield around Beijing. The Chinese Air Force and Navy are out in full effect too: I'm told that there are/will be 100,000 Chinese soldiers posted in and around Beijing for the Games. By comparison, the US "only" has 130,000 soldiers in Iraq right now.

Hot in Herrrr

Thursday afternoon, as the mercury climbed up to 39, Shanghai consumed a record 22.43 million kilowatts of electricity.  The city's in the middle of a heat wave right now, and apparently we've been straining the power grid by averaging 20 million kilowatts this whole week.  That's just about a million kilowatts per person per day.  It boggles the mind to think how much coal that is.

I've also heard rumours that there are some kind of labour laws that stipulate that factory workers have to be let off work if the temperature hits 40 degrees, but that the government will always underreport the temperature until the next day.  Then it's "oh look, it was 43 yesterday!"  Just a rumour, but I could see it happening.

Tickets! Get Your Tickets!

The BOC just released 250,000 more tickets for the Olympics today, and well, it got a little out of control.  10,000 people were already in line by yesterday afternoon, and by this morning they had been joined by 40,000 others.  The cops had to be called in to control the "chaos".

The face value of the tickets go anywhere from $4.50 to $145. 

I would post more, but I just found out that I got ripped off to the tune of $300 for two "tickets" to the China-US basketball game.  Apparently in my excitement I didn't catch the difference between the fake site where I bought my tickets and this official site.  Fuck.

Adidas: Together

I've been looking for these ads on YouTube for a while now, and I just stumbled upon them tonight. The other three videos in the series can be found here, here and (my favourite) here. The print ads can be found here. The Adidas Together 2008: Impossible is Nothing campaign just won a gold Cannes Lion advertising award last month.

Pollution Pollution Go Away

That (very scary) satellite picture of the smog enveloping Beijing was taken sometime last year, before the Chinese government turned the knob up to 11 (and spent $17 million) on their air cleanup initiatives. In the last few months, Hu Jintao and his crew have done everything from construction freezes to forced factory shutdowns to prohibiting gas-powered leaf blowers. The last of these pre-Olympics cleanup programs kicked into effect on Sunday, as Beijing cut its automobile traffic in half (Beijing has 3.3 million cars). It's actually a less drastic plan than it probably seems; you can drive on alternate days depending on whether your license plate number ends in an odd or even number.

(If you don't think shutting down construction is a big deal, by the way, consider that China's construction industry is absolutely booming right now. The country will consuming over 1 billion tons of cement this year, and tradesmen are working on sites through the night, often in pretty dangerous and poorly lit areas. I walked out of my house one day at 9am, came back at 5pm and found an small one-storey building on my way home had been completely razed. A couple days later, they had an earthmover in there, and the day after that you'd never know that a building had ever been there. A couple days following that construction started on whatever they were building next.)

Whether the cleanup efforts are too little too late remains to be seen. As discussed on the Freakonomics blog, Mexico City's been on a similar system for years now (depending on your plate number, you have to park your car one day each week) but the whole scheme has actually served for further dirty the air as older and more polluting cars are being kept on the road longer. Beijing actually did a test run of the system last summer, and even though car usage was cut by 50%, Kenneth Rahn writes in the Journal of Geophysical Research that particulate matter floating around in the city's air only fell by 10%.

Beijing obviously doesn't have to deal with the old dirty car factor in the short term, but as Rahn tells Wired, you still gotta worry about the (goddam) Mongolians.

"[The city's] worst air-quality days are often not the result of human activities, but meteorological phenomena -- namely, the lack of cold fronts pushing across the city from Mongolia...China's basic air problem is that the city experiences roughly weekly meteorological cycles in which stagnant, polluted air coming from the provinces south of Beijing is flushed out by cold fronts from Mongolia. When the weather doesn't cooperate, there is little that the authorities can do."

I hope for everyone's sake that the Mongolian cold fronts cooperate. Now there's a sentence I never thought I would say.

Faces of China

A pretty cool photo gallery of some of the Chinese Olympians just went up at CNNSI.com.

More coming soon...been busy for the last week.

The Thing About the Chinese...

...is that they have no idea what their shirts say.

Exhibit 2:


Exhibit 3:


Exhibit 4:


And there's plenty more where that came from.

I Give You Best Price...

Me: How much for the DVD?
Vendor: Y7.
Me: Y7? I'll give you Y5.
Vendor: 6.
Me: 5.
Vendor: Are you Korean? (I get this a lot.)
Me: Me? No. My parents are Chinese.
Vendor: Yeah sure, 5.

That actually happened to me. Bargaining is a great microcosm of the Chinese way of life. And it's one of the things that really still gets foreigners. I saw some white guy trying to bargain for some toys a few weeks ago, and he was absolutely brutal at it. He just kept asking for the "local" price. "Don't mess with me, lady, I just want the local price. I live in Shanghai! Here, look, this is my business card. See? Shanghai! My company is here, I work here, I live here! Give me the local price!" Meanwhile, the lady, understanding very little English, just stuck to her price and laughed to herself. The whole scene was just retarded. Buddy, if you're so Shanghai, why don't you speak some Chinese? There are no Price Club cards here like there are at Costco.

Getting a good price here isn't that hard, you just have to have an idea of how it works here. Usually this comes after getting screwed a few times. So here are some tips for anyone looking to come through China:

1. Don't bargain for stuff you don't want. The vendors will hate you for it. It's a saving face thing.
   
2. Know that the starting price is outrageous. The more you look like a foreigner, the worse the price will be. Come back with 20% of whatever they said and stick to that. If your price is just too stupidly low, they'll shut you out right away. The fact that they're still bargaining means you're in the ballpark.
3. Know how much it "should" be. Ask someone. You can definitely get that price again. You can even say that your friend bought it last time for that price (lie if you have to).
   
4. If it's something unique (like an antique), figure out how much you want to pay, start below that and work up. Don't get sucked in by the bargaining game.
5. If you've been bargaining and not getting anywhere, just leave. Watch how fast the price drops when you get up. And even if they don't chase you, you can just bargain for the item somewhere else with a little more information.
   
6. The best way to get a good price is to go back to the same guy. You're building up guanxi by giving him business (more on guanxi on a later post).

Bargaining is just a way of life here; there really aren't any hard feelings. People will spend 15 heated minutes haggling over something, but once the deal is done, they'll be friendly again, and the vendors may even tell the buyer that he bargained well and to bring some of his friends by.

The local price thing isn't really as bad as some Westerns would make it out to be. It's not like those prices are reserved for the real locals. They wouldn't not sell something to you at the local price (once you get to it) just to show you up. They're there to make money, after all. The local price is just the normal price locals would expect to pay for it, having a good idea of what it should cost (this comes back to rule #3).

Rule #3, knowing what to pay, is also tied into some other aspects of the Chinese mentality. People inevitably ask someone they know how much something should be, and that someone will take his friend to his "guy", who will give him that price because they have a business relationship (i.e. they have guanxi). That's all fine and good, except that this is also kinda how business is done at the top in China. People just get contracts and strike deals with their friends or their friends' "guys". It runs counter to the capitalist (and probably more efficient) way of doing things, and often totally confuddles Western businessmen.

Economically, bargaining here is kind of a neat exercise. The vendors have pretty perfect information about their goods and their cost, but you, being fresh off the boat (take that, Whities), have no clue. And Westerners, typically being a little more affluent, have a higher willingness to pay. When they find out they just got screwed, they feel shitty about it, but it's actually a pretty good solution. Paying Y20 ($3) too much is really no skin off a foreigner's back, but that's several meals worth of money for the seller. Everyone's relatively happy.

For more tips, watch some Russell Peters.

Gaokao: the Redux

Just to follow up on my post about the gaokaos, the students in Sichaun who received a reprieve just finished writing it this last weekend. They were given an extra month to prepare.

Also, confirmed through a friend that you really can just bribe someone to get a better score. Costs a lot though.

My New Favourite Song

No matter how far you go, Beijing welcomes you back
One plus one plus one is three
In Three, In Three, In Three
Bringing the true Beijing style
Watching the old heads play Chinese chess
Keep on speak-singing the true Beijing way
Enough of these brothers with phony spirits
Stick to speak-singing the true Beijing way
In Three is dropping a beat

From track & field to swimming
From the Bird's Nest (National Stadium) to the Watercube (National
Aquatics Center)
China's people are realizing an Olympic Dream
Participating determinedly, achieving victory
Winning glory for our socialist country
Our national flag rises above Tian'anmen with the sun

Nothing's impossible in 2008, listen to In Three
Beijing is your home
Let's cheer together for the Chinese team
Friendship matters most
Have fun in Beijing
We'll welcome you back

Gotta love it. The song's by a group called "In Three" (Yin San'er), basically three Beijingers who are "not about Chinese hip hop, or American hip hop, or English hip hop, ...[but] Beijing hip hop."

Rap and hip hop are really just starting to find their legs here in China; I saw a show a couple weekends ago and everyone in the club loved it. Definitely something I'll explore more in a later post.

For now, you can check out the music video for In Three's song Hei (Black) here.

Spreading the Olympic Cheer

Utterly ridiculous. And they'll also have training sessions and "cheering squads" to show you how it's done, just in case the diagram's too complicated. You're supposed to chant "Go China" and "Go Olympics" while you're doing it, though apparently if you're feeling crazy you can change that up and go with "Go China, go Yao Ming" or whatever else instead. Let those creative juices flow, China.

Video here.

China: where they'll tell you how to cheer and how many babies you can have, but somehow forget to ban drinking in the street (not that I'm complaining).

Imitation...

... is the sincerest form of flattery. Or so they say. Everyone knows about Guantanamo Bay by now, but according to to an article in today's New York Times, the American "interrogation" techniques were copied directly from the Chinese.

The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a [Chinese Communist] chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

Should make it a little harder for Americans to criticize, I guess. Though I'd bet that it still won't discourage them from doing so. Isn't there some sort of old proverb about how you can't help others until you help yourself?

Murphy's Law

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Slate has a good take on everything that could go wrong in Beijing this summer. My favourite? The threat of locusts. The most underrated? That the food (all of it grown locally) in the Athletes' Village might be too stuffed with steroids and the like for Olympic competitors to eat. It'd be a huge black eye for China if a bunch of athletes got disqualified and blamed it on the food provided by the BOCOG.

Ironically, the Chinese love to eat locusts, so maybe if the bugs can't be kept at bay the whole steroid-food issue might be a moot point.