Imagethief

An "anti-terrorism" drill in Jinan:

Yeah, these guys won't be difficult to target at all...

Also featured in this quite clearly made-for-TV exercise, a demonstration of that most selective and discriminate of urban pacification weapons, the flame thrower.

Imagethief wants to know why they didn't put the flame-thrower guys on the Segways. That would have been really impressive.

Anyone within earshot will know that Imagethief welcomed his son, Zachary, into the world last March 9th. The nearly four months since have been one long sleepless adventure. Despite my fatigue induced delirium, however, the experience has been a happy one. Like parents everywhere I take the most profound pleasure in things that non-parents wouldn't even notice. This week's new talent: Blowing damp, drooly raspberries. I glow just thinking about it. In Imagethief's parenthood-addled mind, it is but the merest step from a wet raspberry to a full ride at Harvard.

Having a baby means paperwork. Last week's trip home to Singapore was case in point, as I spent my "holiday" dealing with health insurance for Zachary, life insurance for me, a will for everyone in the family, and various other "responsible parent" stuff. It all left me feeling rather old and grown up.

Having a baby abroad means even more paperwork, as one must go through various registrations with various consulates and embassies in order to ensure that papers are obtained and the relevant authorities ("relevant authorities" is Imagethief's top phrase for Summer '08) don't think you're some kind of flesh peddler smuggling healthy Chinese babies out of the country for resale to monied but childless Western suburbanites.

The racial distinction in the sentence above is important because Mrs. Imagethief is Singaporean and Zachary is thus Eurasian, with his looks falling less to the "Eur" and more to the "Asian". Dad's nose and ears, mom's everything else if you must know. Considering my nose, this may not be the optimum distribution of features, but so it goes. Imagethief believes that mixed races are the future of mankind and is glad to be doing his part for ethnic homogeneity and conscientious outbreeding. ("Conscientious outbreeding" is Imagethief's number-two phrase for Summer '08.)

But ethnicity isn't everything. While it hasn't always been the case, the trump-it-all organizing political concept of the last few hundred years has been the nation-state. Imagethief has mixed feelings about nation-states, especially as a proxy for good old-fashioned tribalism, but bows to the prevailing fashion. This means that my boy is a dual citizen, and entitled to both United States and Singaporean passports.

Some people --especially my cynical Singaporean friends-- might ask why bother with the Singapore citizenship. Singapore doesn't permit dual citizenship for adults, and assuming that policy doesn't change Zachary will eventually have to choose a nationality. But it is important to me that he have a say in that choice. He has roots and family in Singapore, and being part Singaporean will always be part of his identity. There is also a good chance that he will go to primary and secondary school in Singapore, where he will no doubt learn the finer points of Hokkien vulgarity. Should he remain a Singapore citizen or permanent resident, national service will fill any gaps in his vocabulary and ensure that he matriculates with a truly colorful assortment of multilingual profanity. I swell with paternal pride at the thought.

So we duly registered Zachary's birth at both embassies. And this is where the surprise lay. Singapore has a reputation for bureaucratic efficiency. Having participated in the registration of a business in Singapore, filed taxes there for many years, and applied for both work permits and permanent residency papers, Imagethief can attest that this reputation is largely justified. Singapore's civil service is cool, crisp, courteous and efficient, and maintains comfortable waiting rooms with widescreen televisions invariably featuring either Mr. Bean reruns or Tom & Jerry cartoons. (Both can be watched silently and neither offends any of Singapore's established religions or creeds, although I personally find Mr. Bean rather offensive.)

The United States' reputation for bureaucratic efficiency is less glittering. Thanks to America's Global War on Terror (TM) this has been especially true in matters of travel and identification, with Vietnam or Soviet Russia seeming better comparisons than Singapore. So I fully expected Singapore to produce a passport within days while the US Embassy waited for the Department of Homeland Security to grind through a months-long analysis of whether my mixed-race, China-born baby constituted a clear and present danger to national security or intellectual property.

I was exactly wrong. The US Embassy approved our application on the spot and had a passport ready one week later. Two weeks after applying, the only thing the Singapore embassy had managed to do was to call my wife and ask her to come back and sign an oath that she had not renounced her Singaporean citizenship. Somehow it didn't occur to them to do this during her first visit. Going on two months later we have a recently delivered Singaporean citizenship certificate, but no passport. Thus, despite the fact that we travel to Singapore far more often than to the US, Zach's Chinese visa is in his US passport, and he just completed his first visit to Singapore as a foreigner. I can stay as long as I want, but after ninety days he is baby non grata.

That seems a shame, because Singapore has a problem: No babies. According to the CIA World Factbook, it has the third worst fertility rate in the world, at 1.08 children per woman. Only Hong Kong and Macau (where everyone is apparently too busy gambling to have babies) fare worse.

In fact, that 1.08 is apparently misreported. A 2007 article from Singapore's Channel News Asia (think CNN stripped of the things that make CNN interesting) gives a figure of 1.24 as the record low, from 2004, with 1.08 being the number for ethnic Chinese women.

But that's still pretty bad given that the ethnic Chinese are about 75% of Singapore's population. And it means that the Malays, the most significant minority group, are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to having kids. The government is unlikely to admit this publicly, but I think they'd prefer ethnic status quo rather than a growing Malay minority that may upset Singapore's carefully nurtured political balance.

In addition to trying to encourage the immigration of educated professionals, Singapore has trundled out the incentives for having children. These apply to everyone, not just the reproductively-indifferent Chinese, and include grants of SGD$3,000 for the first two children, with even larger sums for the next two. But judging from the figures, the incentives don't seem to have helped much. This is not too surprising. The "baby bonus" is nice, but having kids is a complex, long-term project and SGD$3,000 in Singapore is a couple of months rent even if you live in public housing. Personally Imagethief would much rather have free local childcare and less stress about whether his kids will get into a top school or languish in some also-ran academy for mouth-breathing troglodytes.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Singapore needs babies. And what it really wants, it will tell you over a teary, confessional piss-up (if a nation-state could do that), are the high-potential babies of prosperous, educated people. Precisely the people who don't have children because they're too busy chasing the brass ring and spending SGD$150 a pop to tank up their Lexus LS400s.

So, if I may flatter myself, you'd think they'd be going overboard to ensure that the child of an educated, long-time permanent resident who works in China (a country Singapore prioritizes) and an educated, professional, Singaporean woman becomes a Singapore citizen. You'd think they'd have sent salesmen around while we were still pregnant, with brochures explaining why Singaporean citizenship is the best choice for our child. You'd think the embassy would have called to remind us of the top notch medical care and excellent schools that await my child in the motherland. You'd think they'd have had a passport tucked into an immense fruit basket waiting for us outside the delivery room with a letter from the Minister of Babies (or whomever) thanking us for doing our bit for the country's future prosperity.

But no. Two months later and I'm still waiting for a passport. And no fruit basket either. Which is a shame, because Singapore has outstanding fruit (even if it's all imported). Meanwhile, Uncle Sam, who ranks near the top of the developed world fertility league tables and has no baby shortage at all, has stolen a march.

Which brings me to complaint two: Singapore's policy on dual citizenship. It's not having any, thank you. Hence my boy's impending Big Choice. For a country that wants to be the Switzerland of Asia, the antipathy to dual citizenship seems surprising, but I understand where it comes from. Singapore's government fosters a national sense of vulnerability as a political tool. We're economically fragile, surrounded by Indonesians, could lose it all in a heartbeat, etc. Work harder. A conviction that national loyalties can't be divided under such precarious circumstances fits neatly into that picture. After all, when the going gets tough, those with foreign passports might just bail and leave the rest treading water (literally, if the challenge at hand is the rising sea level).

Aside from assuming the worst of its citizens, the problem with this approach is that any visit to Western Australia will demonstrate that educated, prosperous Singaporeans aren't waiting for permission to leave. As always, those who are most desirable will be those with the most options. As a nation that thrives on its international connections, Singapore needs to sell itself not just to foreigners, but also to its own citizens on an ongoing basis.

Even though I'm a foreigner I consider myself pretty invested in Singapore. That's why I want Zachary to have the option of choosing Singapore citizenship for himself someday. I would even consider taking Singapore citizenship myself if I didn't have to renounce US citizenship to do it. Sorry, but that trade ain't happening (America's stone-age expatriate tax policies notwithstanding). And perhaps that's QED for the Singapore government. If I'm not willing to make the big commitment, why should I be taken into the fold?

But it all comes back to that desire to grow the population and encourage successful professionals to make Singapore home. Part of that is being flexible enough to do what's necessary to make people feel welcome in a long term, raise-my-children-here kind of way. Singapore is afraid of its citizens hedging their bets, but that's exactly what it does. That's why my "permanent" residency expires every five years and why Singapore won't tolerate dual citizenship. It's a not a big deal for me, but it's a shame for my boy, who will be part American and part Singaporean for the rest of his life, regardless of which passports he is allowed to carry.

Encouragingly, things change. It wasn't that long ago that Singaporean women married to foreigners weren't allowed to register their children for Singaporean citizenship at all. If that can change, who knows what else might come to pass in the sixteen or so years that will pass before Zachary has to choose a nationality. Perhaps he will be part of Singapore's first generation of dual-nationals.

In the meantime, however, just getting that passport would be a good start.

Coming Soon:

Illegal baby part 2: I fought the law and the law won
How I failed to register my son appropriately with the relevant authorities and was made to pay the penalty.

Imagethief will be on vacation in Singapore next week, introducing his son to his Singaporean grandparents for the first time. (And getting him vaccinated and setting up his health insurance and bank account and etc. Not really much of a vacation at all, really...)

Posting and tweeting will be light. And now that I think about it, if I'd wandered around my junior high school in 1980 explaining to people that someday "posting and tweeting" would be important things to me, I'd have a lot more fake teeth in my mouth than I do now. (I owe those fake teeth to skateboarding, juvenile risk equivalent of getting a Suzuki Hayabusa, downing a bottle of Southern Comfort and trying to ride Skyline Boulevard.)

My China phone number will likely be offline next week. E-mail will be the best way to get ahold of me.

-Will

Imagethief was interested to read in the New York Times today an article about the wrangling going on over the  United States Air Force's new monster procurement deal for aerial refueling tankers, one of the biggest defense programs ever. A little back story: There are two consortia bidding for the deal. One is led by perennial American defense contracting heavyweight Boeing. One is led by Northrop Grumman and European aerospace manufacturer EADS (parent of Airbus). Both consortia are, in  fact, thoroughly international.

A couple of months ago, in a surprising upset, the Air Force gave Northrop Grumman/EADS' bid the nod over hometown champ Boeing. Needless to say, Boeing was not going to go down without a fight, and the whole thing has gone into appeals and recriminations, and (joy!) blown up into a multifaceted PR war. Check out, for instance, this relatively recent pro-Boeing blog managed by the hawkish think-tank, Center for Security Policy. Another one of the Center's recent publications is "EADS: Partner or proliferator?" You get the idea. No mention of Boeing's own recent devastating scandal troubles, or the fact that they are reported to have sleepwalked through much of the procurement process. But EADS and their PR proxies will no doubt be reminding everyone they can reach. Imagethief has no horse in this game. He's just a PR voyeur and loves to watch.

Now, in response to a Boeing appeal, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has ordered the Air Force to review the bid, citing some apparent irregularities. I mention this --and go into all the digression above-- because I was interested to see the two reaction quotes, one from each major bidder and both pulled from press releases, that ran in the Times' article. Here they are:

At Boeing on Wednesday, Mark McGraw, a vice president for the tanker program, welcomed the ruling and said in a statement that the company looked “forward to working with the Air Force on next steps in this critical procurement for our warfighters.”

Reaction from Northrop Grumman was subdued.

The vice president of communications Northrop Grumman, Randy Belote, said in a statement: “We respect the G.A.O.’s work in analyzing the Air Force’s tanker acquisition process. We continue to believe that Northrop Grumman offered the most modern and capable tanker for our men and women in uniform. We will review the G.A.O. findings before commenting further.”

Like virtually all press release quotes (identifiable in news stories by the telltale phrase "...said in a statement"; no newspaper will ever admit to taking a quote from anything so grubby as a "press release"), these were never actually uttered by human beings. They are corporate communication (a bad word in Imagethief's book), designed to convey in the trojan horse of allegedly human utterance an institutional point of view and various favorable associations. You can test the ridiculousness of most press release quotes by reading them out loud. Your ear processes words differently than your eye. It's shocking what goes out the door.

There is a large amount of formula involved here, which you can see in the way that both of these quotes try to make the whole affair all about bringing the best to Our Boys and Girls in Uniform. They are referred to in the Boeing statement by the unfortunately jargony word "warfighters". Apparently "airmen" wasn't urgent enough. Or perhaps, like me, they didn't want to offend female military pilots (they can easily beat me up), but thought "airpersons" less than sonorous. If so, Imagethief applauds their progressiveness and refined ear.

In fact, both companies are following an unwritten rule of corporate communication, which is that, financial releases aside, whatever is going on is almost never about the money. It's always about the customers, the people, the partners, the man-in-the-street. Or the airpersons and warfighters, as the case might be. And not at all about something like USD$40-80 billion dollars over the life of the program. There is really no other way either company could have worded their release without seeming crass (short of dumping "warfighters"). That's a shame, because Imagethief would have crawled naked over a mix of crushed beer bottles and Lemonheads to see a quote like this from Northrop Grumman, "They're taking it like sissies. Our airplane kicked their airplane's ass. We're taking the 40 billion bones. Get over it." Not, of course, that I'd write anything like this if I was working for them. I'm just saying, it'd be refreshing.

But, no, everyone was very diplomatic, and made sure to stress that it was all about bringing the best to the airpersons. In fact, I'd say that, convention and sentiment aside, it would be perfectly OK for the companies to be clear that they're in this for the bottom line. The stock market, which has been reacting to the ups and downs of this deal, certainly is. The responsibility for ensuring that our airpeople get the best lies with the Air Force and an organization that no doubt always has the noblest of intentions at hear, Congress. Congress wouldn't judge such an important deal on shallow terms, would it?

In Congress, “Buy America” proponents lead the charge for Boeing, deriding the EADS plane as a “French tanker,” even though it would be assembled in Mobile, Ala.

Oh, well. At least we got over that "freedom fries" thing.

David Churbuck with the best angry response to Associated Press' ill-conceived pay-to-quote-us policy (and follow the chain of links there for more info):

Here’s the deal: The Associated Press, a coprolite concept of a global news syndicate used by newspapers to fill their editorial holes with standard news (bus plunges, fungible coverage of the world’s events, items from outside of the local circulation foot print) and to share their original reportage back into the pool in return, has decided that bloggers must pay by the word when they quote from an AP article.

To me that’s like asking me to pay a toll to get off the superhighway and visit a dying town that time has forgotten.

For the record, Imagethief plans on continuing to quote AP articles with a link to the original when appropriate. I consider this fair use (and a fillip to the AP member newspapers who's pages I am usually linking to), and I don't anticipate writing a check. But for those who want to make a point, there is also always the Mike Arrington approach.

Also, Imagethief has talented friends who write for the AP. In no way should my criticism of their employer's silly actions be interpreted as criticism of their work. However, they can think what they want of Mr. Churbuck's rant.

BusinessWeek's Dexter Roberts has written an article titled "Inside the war against China's blogs" that looks at the impact of China's blogosphere on companies doing business in China, and how a group of specialist PR and monitoring companies help clients manage reputation on the Chinese Internet. Among the companies featured is my friend Sam Flemming's CIC, which specializes in monitoring Internet word of mouth in China. The story is interesting, but it rather makes the whole area of managing online reputation in China sound a bit swampy:

Plenty of companies are willing to pay for positive spin. PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: "Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day." Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.

Chinese Web Union is candid about doing this. It pays thousands of people to write nice things about clients, and it compensates forum leaders who spread positive information and quash bad publicity, says CEO Zhong Zhaochuan. "We write out topics and give them to members to put on forums," says Zhong. That's what CWU did for a big Subaru dealer last year. The Japanese automaker had raised the ire of Netizens because its Chinese name sounds like "death to the Eighth Route army," which was perceived as insulting to a Chinese unit that battled Japan in World War II. CWU urged forum leaders to delete negative comments, then asked its writers to post positive news about Subaru, Zhong says.

Imagethief has been doing PR in China long enough to know that the ethics of Chinese media, including online media, and therefore of the PR industry that surrounds it, are still pretty gray. But that's not the whole picture, and it's pretty clear that Sam feels that this story isn't entirely fair to the industry. He's written a substantial post on the CIC blog responding to some of the points made in the story. Among other things, he takes issue with the "war" metaphor:

While we certainly understand there are cases where companies are attacked online, and this behavior is often the focus on media articles, we do not believe "war" is an appropriate or accurate metaphor to view IWOM. As we have outlined here and here, we prefer the concept of the "connected agency," which Forrester defines as an agency that has "a deep understanding of consumer communities, helping brands create and nurture connections, deliver targeted, on-demand messages, and network for talent and insights."

By tracking and analyzing IWOM, brands can tune into and connect with the most informed, active and influential consumers in the market. Brands can learn consumers' language, learn that they watch the NBA online and virtually cheer in BBS conversations, learn how they meet up offline, and learn how they research products online. In the end, we see that for brands, tracking and analyzing IWOM is not a threat, but an opportunity.

Read the story and Sam's response and see what you think.

Update:

Don't miss Paul Denlinger's post on this topic and article at his blog, The China Vortex. Paul digs a little bit further into what kind of company Daqi is and their potential conflicts of interest, and asks why this wasn't highlighted in the article.

I didn't really offer much opinion in this post because I was one foot out the door when I wrote it, but there are clearly a lot of hard questions to be asked about how online PR works in China (and, let's be honest, offline PR too). Perhaps I'll get into this when I have a bit more time. However I know Sam and CIC well and have no doubts about their ethics.

Ok, so we know that Chinese bloggers criticize a lot of stuff (and we can say from experience that bloggers from other nations do as well). From the Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog, here is an interesting piece quantifying what, exactly, Chinese bloggers are complaining about. It's from a research paper by Ashley Esarey, an assistant professor at Middlebury College, who specializes in Chinese media.

The finding: Sixty percent of Chinese blog posts are critical of something. (Imagethief wonders how this compares with American bloggers, who are no slouches when it comes to griping.) Criticism of corporations accounts for a relatively small ten percent of all posts, although one sixth of all critical posts. Not surprising: There is essentially no explicit criticism of local or national heads of government. Somewhat surprising: There is a lot of implicit and explicit criticism of government itself at all levels, and especially national government. It seems people are off limits, but institutions are fair game. Also surprising: Criticism of foreign countries is a bit lower than you might expect, especially if your impression of the Chinese Internet is formed largely by western media reports of brand crises in China.

I've not seen the paper itself (although I'd like to), so no info on methodology or how implicit and explicit are categorized. I'd be interested to see the whole thing. The full-size chart image is in the Journal post, above. 

Could be worse. 

Cliff Coonan has a story in showbiz trade Variety that examines the broadcasting problems I posted about last week. The article is something of an omnibus piece on current Olympic issues. Among other things, it gets into the organizers' efforts to develop and promote an official cheer. This part is worth highlighting:

While Beijing is on the defensive against attacks, it is also taking extensive steps to make everyone feel welcome -- and to show national enthusiasm at the Games.

The four-part Olympic cheer will be taught at schools, promoted on TV, and instructions will be available as part of a poster campaign. It officially will be used to fire up the national team, but can be used to inspire other countries.

Step 1: Clap twice while chanting "Olympics."

Step 2: Give the thumbs up with your arms extended upward, while chanting "Let's go!"

Step 3: Clap twice chanting "China."

Step 4: Punch the air with your fists, your arms extended, shouting "Let's go!"

The cheer is a joint invention of the Communist Party's Office of Spiritual Civilization Development & Guidance, the Ministry of Education and the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. It was launched in the Media Center of national state broadcaster, China Central Television.

"We want to engage in activities to better promote civilized gestures in the stadiums, to cheer on the Olympics and to cheer on China. This gesture demonstrates to the world the charisma of the Chinese people and our enthusiasm," says Guo Zhenxi, head of CCTV's Center for Advertising and Economic Information.

The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee has assigned 30 cheering squads to show spectators how it is done at Games stadiums, the Xinhua news agency reports.

But it isn't just all about the home team. The government has appointed hundreds of schoolchildren to cheer for various countries during the Games, with individual schools ordered to adopt a specific nation.

Unsurprisingly, the schools that were given Japan, China's long-standing regional rival, have an opt-out clause in which they get to cheer for China if there is a head-to-head between athletes from both countries.

Imagethief can think of no organization better equipped to craft an expression of mass public joy and enthusiasm than the Communist Party's Office of Spiritual Civilization Development & Guidance, the Ministry of Education. I get tingly just thinking about it, and I'm sure, despite the description above, that it will look nothing like the "Macarena" in practice.

However, if I were the Japanese I'd feel aggrieved by the cheering opt-out and ask for permission to import an extra quota of cheering schoolchildren from abroad. They could come from Japan, or, if that's too expensive, from lower-cost nation like, say, Burundi or Suriname.

Less ridiculously, People's Daily Online reports that the fine for illegally webcasting Olympic events will be steep:

According to the spokesman of the State Copyright Bureau, any illegal Olympic events webcasting and violations on video websites will be forbidden from now until mid-October 2008.

Any individual without authorization who uploads recorded Olympic events or pirated Olympics video broadcasting websites will face up to 100,000RMB in penalties.

***

People with copyrights and the public are welcome to participate in this anti-piracy campaign. Xu revealed that the public could report illegal broadcasting through the reporting platform on the State Copyright Bureau website or dialing the "12390" anti-piracy hotline to collaborate with the government. People involved will be rewarded for the reports that are verified.

Got that? Collaborators will be rewarded. Considering that uploaders themselves will probably be able to remain anonymous, video sharing companies already under the regulatory thumb may want to ask themselves whether their staff will be eligible for a reward for selling them out, and manage appropriately.

Finally, as reported by Richard Spencer in the Telegraph, the BBC has said that it will damn sure (my choice of words) show any protests that occur in or around events where it happens to have cameras:

The BBC, the only British broadcaster with access to stadiums this summer, says it cannot be expected to hide demonstrations if they happen at events where they have cameras.

Its decision, which it stresses will be applied "responsibly", will increase Beijing's nervousness as the Games approach.

The Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, BOCOG, has already had angry exchanges with the world's leading broadcasters who complain of delays over permits to bring their equipment into the country and to deploy them around the city.

Dave Gordon, head of major sports events for the BBC, told The Daily Telegraph that Beijing had become "more difficult" for broadcasters than the Moscow Games in 1980.

He said international representatives had tried to get answers for two years on whether the Olympic broadcasting agency that provides the only feed of the actual events would show footage of protests if they occurred.

"They fudge the question," he said. "They won't commit to saying yes, they will cover it or no, they will not cover it. They put a lot of stress on the importance of covering the sport. I think we have to draw our own conclusions."

Call me cynical, but Imagethief is prepared to hazard a guess that the answer to Mr. Gordon's question is "no".

Update:

Charles Frith has a graphic of the Olympic cheer. Check it out!

See also:

Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog on Duncan Clark's presentation on Chinese video sharing services, from the China Internet Research Conference. (And Kaiser's guide to official write ups on all the sessions.A and, as long as I'm at it, the CIRC site itself.)

China mavens will know that China has tightened up its visa issuance regulations significantly in recent weeks. There has been much piecemeal reporting on this, but it has been hard to find good, comprehensive information on the situation. While several blogs have covered this pretty well, the most comprehensive information I have found so far is on Travelpod.com If you are traveling to China soon or wrestling with the visa situation, check it out.

Update: 

Imagethief always likes to give credit where it is due. As you'll see in Rebekah Pothaar's comment, below, the original source of the information in Travelpod's post was the China travel forum Chinatravel.net. Given that this situation is subject to change at any time, and they seem to have done a good job tracking this situation, their "passport and visa" forum would probably be worth checking periodically.
 

During the official mourning period declared a week after last month's Wenchuan earthquake, I put up a post remarking on the government message that replaced the foreign entertainment channels on my building satellite TV system. This got me zapped by a commenter who felt I was displaying ignorance of Chinese mourning rituals. While I disagreed with the commenter, it did say something of the how important ritual and custom can be in times like these.

Fortunately for anyone interested in the topic, Don Sutton, an author and academic who specializes in such things, has posted a comprehensive article at the China Beat addressing the issue of quake mourning. It gets into several aspects of the issue, including the Internet, and is well worth a read:

Yet another longstanding obligation is to express one’s bereavement with sincerity, in the case of women, vocally. Bereaved women have been photographed wailing at quake sites displaying photographs of their loved ones. Some have called angrily for investigation into shoddy building practices at some of the schools where a total of 9,000 children and teachers died. Such demonstrations are usually proscribed, but given the moral resonance of mourning, the police have been hard put to stop them. Whether the calls for legal remedy will outweigh the need to protect local party officials, who are part of the leadership’s base, is yet to be known. But the obligation to condole sincerely is equally Chinese. While official ceremonies favor speeches and dirges, Premier Wen and other officials, realizing this obligation, have displayed arduous commitment and genuine emotion. A Chinese journalist’s account of “Grandpa Wen” refusing to treat his abrasions when he slipped in the rubble is strongly reminiscent of imperial officials who fasted and braved the elements during drought and other emergencies in order to share their people’s suffering. 

By the way, the China Beat has expanded from modest beginnings to become a really excellent resource and one of the most essential China blogs, with a dynamite list of contributors.

Related to the issue of quake mourning, one of the most amazing images to come from the quake was not of broken bodies or collapsed schools, but of the Mianzhu Communist Party secretary on his knees in front of grieving parents holding photographs of their dead children:

This incident merited prominent mention in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Roland Soong, of EastSouthWestNorth, has translated and posted an interview with the Party Secretary, Jiang Guohua, from Modern Express Daily. It includes this interesting Q&A on the incident above:

Q: Why did you kneel down in front of the parents?
A: I made a mistake in my initial judgment.  In the past, people seek out the leaders when they have a problem.  Once the leader shows up, the matter calms down in deference to the party secretary or mayor.  But what happened that day deviated from custom.  The parents were bounded together by the bitterness and sorrow of losing their children.  Overnight they refused to recognize me.  Wufu is not the heaviest hit town in the earthquake.  But the classroom building of the Fuxin Number Two Primary School collapsed with 129 schoolchildren dead.  The parents thought that the classroom building had collapsed as the result of a natural disaster as well as human faults.  I promised to make a thorough investigation of the building, but I needed time.  The parents did not think so.  I was worried.  I knelt down to express a certain degree of sincerity, not to put on a show.  I don't remember how many times I knelt down.  Afterwards, someone said that I knelt four times.  I have never thought about kneeling down in the past over any issue.  But in the face of this catastrophe, I can put aside all personal concerns and misgivings.

There you have it. It was an error of judgment, and, one must assume, should not be read as an expression of contrition on behalf of the party.

In fact, the "Earthquake Spring", in which both foreign and Chinese reporting was relatively unfettered and there was a great deal of tolerance for open discussion of the quake, rather seems to have come to an end as me move into the sweaty, Olympic summer. A pity.

The number three video sharing site in China has been offline for a week. What's going on? No one outside of the company or the government seems to know. Kaiser Kuo has been trying to find out. From his blog at Ogilvy:

This looks to be fairly grim, and Tudou’s episode now looks like a very minor slap on the wrist compared to this. SARFT has already begun issuing video licenses, but conspicuously absent in the first batch are the leading sites; 6rooms and user-generated ad driven vid site Ku6, along with Sequoia-backed P2P site UUSee.com, are among the first recipients.

Also see Kaiser's post from June 4th on the same topic, and Tangos Chan's report.

Hello? Anybody home? 

Previously:

Chinese YouTubes courting controversy? (July, 2006, from my old CNET Asia blog.)

My brother, Jesse Moss, is a documentary filmmaker who's major projects to date include films about a notorious con man, a demolition derby driver, and Republicans in Hollywood (all three available on DVD from Docurama, via Amazon). His latest film, co-directed with Tony Gerber, is "Full Battle Rattle", about "Medina Wasl", the simulated Iraqi town in the Mojave Desert where the US Army trains troops bound for Iraq.

The film has screened at the SXSW and Berlin film festivals, among others, and opens at New York's Film Forum on July 9th. He's just put the trailer up on YouTube. Check it out. Looks interesting. I've not seen the film yet, but looking forward to it. Jesse gets better with every picture, an the trailer looks great.

There is also a clip of Jesse and Tony talking about the film on YouTube. Jesse's production company is Mile End Films.

In May Imagethief had a chance to get together with Chinese propaganda poster expert, Prof. Dr. Stefan Landsberger of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Stefan literally wrote the book on Chinese propaganda posters (it's no longer available new, but he kindly sent Imagethief a copy, for which I am grateful) and runs a great online archive of them.

Stefan is currently participating in the establishment of another online archive at www.chineseposters.net. While its collection isn't yet as comprehensive as Stefan's original site, it features some choice materials, the scans are larger and more supplemental information and thematic galleries are being added.

"A justified noose awaits them!" Imagethief is a fan of Korean War
era material, much of which depicts MacArthur as a ghoul. Note the
comprehensive catalog of atrocities. From Chineseposters.net.

Chineseposters.net is also supporting a museum exhibition of the original posters. Unfortunately (for us in Beijing) it's in Rotterdam, but for any Imagethief readers who may be in The Netherlands between now and September 21:

Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Address: Museumpark, Westzeedijk 341, 3015 AA Rotterdam
Opening hours: Tuesday till Saturday 10am-5pm, Sundays and Holidays 11am-5pm
For more information: www.kunsthal.nl.

Finally, Stefan is currently seeking examples of propaganda posters related to the recent Wenchuan Earthquake. Imagethief owes him a favor, so if any readers --especially Beijing-based ones-- know where such can be obtained, please let me know. Meanwhile, you can browse posters from the 1970s quakes at at his site:

"Earthquakes don't frighten us. The people
will surely vanquish nature."

See also:

China Visual's earthquake poster design competition (中) for contemporary earthquake posters. 

Imagethief has a good friend who wrote for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent for many years. This person (who shall remain gracefully anonymous) had three main complaints about his job: He was paid like a chump; his editors were idiots who didn't get the region he was reporting from; and the newspaper was steadily dialing the word count of its features down into oblivion in an attempt to compete with the Web.

This person, like many journalists who spend long hours writing at home and fending off --ahem-- obnoxious flacks, is a bit of a misanthrope. But his final complaint definitely rang true. That mainstream media should shift its distribution onto the Internet and reshape itself to take advantage of online delivery is a given. That it should dumb itself down in an attempt to compete with the brutally short-attention-span nature of much online media (hello, Twitter!) is at best debatable.

I like to read. I like to read long articles, long books and long blog posts. (I also like to write long blog posts, as some of you may have noticed.) I attribute such writing skills as I have to a lifelong love of reading and catholic (with a small "c") tastes. And I used to read the dictionary on the school bus, which probably explains the patchy nature of my elementary school social life. I find reading from print a fundamentally different aesthetic and intellectual experience than reading from an electronic device.

That's why I was interested to read in the (online) Atlantic Monthly an article from Nicholas Carr, author and heavyweight blogger, titled, "Is Google making us stupid?" Carr's article is not actually an attack on Google, but a general examination of how the intrinsic qualities of different media affect our cognitive abilities, and a specific examination of how the Web is now affecting us:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Imagethief is a big fan of the Internet. (And, ironically, I came upon this article through one of my many Google news alerts.) But I find that many of Carr's arguments ring true. It's not a Luddite rant. Have a read online. And then go read a book. A printed one.

Coincidentally, Imagethief had a (ahem) Twittered discussion about printed magazines with David Wolf and Paul Denlinger yesterday. I have two print subscriptions: The Economist and The New Yorker. It was a toss-up between the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. If I had time for a third print sub, it'd be Atlantic Monthly. But for the moment I'll continue reading it online. Like I said, I'm a big fan of the Internet.

Somewhat related:

The New York Times on the trouble with e-mail.

Cory Doctorow on "interruptive media".  Imagethief took some cues from this. For my work account I now automatically redirect all subscriptions and alert mails to a separate folder, and I've turned off all desktop alerts. Of course, I also use Twitter client Twhirl, which has desktop alerts, so I break slightly negative. Oh well.

As an occasional contributor to That's Beijing The Beijinger, Imagethief heard a few days ago that the Chinese publisher has decided to appropriate the That's Beijing brand from True Run Media, the company that has actually run the magazine for the past several years. The magazine will continue under the name "The Beijinger". Presumably the old publisher, China Intercontinental Press, will develop a competing title under the That's Beijing brand. As a friend of the True Run guys, Imagethief urges you (sight unseen) to shun it.

At roughly the same time, another local English mag, Time Out, has found its July June English edition banned, as reported in the UK's Times. (The issue is available online.) If Imagethief was a superstitious type who believed that disasters come in threes, he'd be wondering when some misfortune was going to land on City Weekend's head.

Shanghaiist has a comprehensive review of both situations, as well as link to That's co-founder Mark Kitto's classic and entertaining tale of the dangers of the magazine business in China. Zhongnanhai also has some good info.

Not in print she doesn't. 

Update: Corrected which month of Time Out was affected. H/T: Reid.