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Gaza demo - Abu Dhabi

2009-01-22T14:36:00.003Z

This was a while ago. I had been mainly watching the war in Gaza on Al Jazeera Arabic and I have to admit they do some very good quality (& obviously partisan) montages using various footage, punchy photos, inventive lettering and dramatic music. So the intro and outro to this slideshow are influenced by that...

The demo itself was pretty big, surprisingly so. There are a lot of Palestinians in the UAE, some (many?) from families that left the Palestine area after the war in 1948, never to return. You sometimes see references to this population in news articles or blogs, they are often described as the "smarter and more capable" Palestinians of the time. Anyway, the UAE doesn't have a tradition of encouraging demonstration so the fact that police closed off the Corniche for several thousand people to walk along yelling is significant. Some of the chants and placards were pretty hairy by sensitive Western standards, with women leading kids in chants of "Death to Israel" and so on.

Indeed had this demo taken place in the UK there could easily have been arrests for "incitement to racial hatred" (which saw people jailed in the UK for encouraging the bombing of European countries during a protest against publication of the Mohammed Cartoons. The same charge could have been levelled at John McCain for his contemptible chant of "Bomb-bomb-bomb Iran").

But obviously this wasn't the UK, this is the Middle East and things are different. The overall mood was lively but not confrontational - one UK colleague professed slight disappointment that there hadn't been more friction between demonstrators and the police. But again, that's how they do things in Europe, not in the UAE...

Covering the GCC summit in Oman

2009-01-04T15:52:00.003Z

The big stories at the GCC summit in Muscat, Oman, were of course Israel's assault on Gaza, which the GCC was unable to react to in any meaningful way, and monetary union for the 6 GCC states, which they were decisive on: we will see the common currency, to be called the "Khaleeji" (Gulfy) or the "Karam" (something to do with generosity), by 2011, allegedly...

Press room at GCC summit, Muscat...

2008-12-28T18:00:00.004Z

Taking a break from freelancing

2008-10-30T12:30:00.005Z

It looks unlikely that I will be working as a freelancer for a while. I've found myself doing it for most of the past 3.5 years and what I've found toughest is managing myself.

Work itself can be found, but it's easier to find the good stuff if you're feeling fresh, positive and sharp. Things like proper sleep, regular exercise, social life and hobbies help cultivate this but in turn the irregularity of freelancing can make it trickier to organise a routine, especially if like me you are the type that works like a cheetah, burning lots of energy in a high-octane sprint and then needing a long break to recharge the battery.

I remember watching a nature programme showing the cheetah performing an unbelievable kill - and then being too tired to prevent a hyena ambling up and stealing the carcass.

A lack of colleagues and of an office to go to to vary your daily backdrop can lead to a sense of isolation, particularly if you work in print and don't collaborate with anyone beyond your interviewees to create the product. It's lonely out there, like standing near the top of a mountain. You have to be tough to embrace the freedom, to breathe in all that oxygen without becoming too dizzy. Of course, jumping into a new country every 6 months doesn't make it any easier...

I hadn;t considered much of this when I launched 3.5 years ago - although of course it's common sense. Anything is easier and better if you're feeling good. Above all, you need to feel good in your life because it's your life.

My plan now is to work full-time for a period and try to use the routine to find some stability upon which to build. If I can find that then I may be able to consider going freelance again. If you;re going to climb the mountains of the mind then you need good kit.

I wrote this after seeing this freelancer profile on Journalism.co.uk. His tips were:

* A few words of warning, and advice: never, ever stop marketing, even when you are snowed under; it is always easier to get new work when you already have work, than to go cold-calling when you have none.

* Never think you've cracked it: I have lost count of the number of times that I have had praise heaped on me for my performance, only to then lose the contract in question. The minute people start telling me that they couldn't do something without me and that I'm the best in a particular field, I start hearing alarm bells.

* Never ever send out an email without a message stating your availability for work, and carrying your contact details.

* Never ever turn down work if you can possibly avoid it. So long as it meets your quality and yield criteria, take it and worry later how you will fit it in. People you reject tend not to come back.

Reading the rest of his profile I was struck by how often he referred to taking a run as part of his routine.

Here are a couple of other sites I saved at Delicious:

A passionate amateur almost always beats a bored professional

Beating the work blues

Making the most of your time

*** Pix taken yesterday at Cherry Tree Wood ***

Few Berlin shots...

2008-10-26T18:58:00.000Z

Cycle through Schloss Charlottenburg

2008-10-26T18:35:00.000Z

Icesave - gits!

2008-10-07T23:45:00.001+01:00

Icesave - gits!, originally uploaded by Tom Spender.

Great - now facing having to claim back my 2 ISAs. Come on Putin - please bail out Iceland so they in turn can bail me out...

Wedding bells

2008-08-31T17:31:00.002+01:00

Congratulations Robbie & Seiko!!!

PHOTOS from the wedding can be seen HERE

Seiko - a big konichiwa to the Spender family...

Kick off

2008-08-08T07:36:00.003+01:00

It's all going to happen tonight. I'm off to Tian'anmen Square for a couple of hours to se if there are any protests - can't imaine there will be but you never know. This picture was taken at th final leg of the torch relay in Beijing - I thought it might be a trror attack given the helicopters circling above my apartment so I went to have a look - in fact it was a lot of excited Chinese and a few foreigners packing the street on the 2nd Ring Road near Ditan Park...

Beijing slideshow

2008-08-02T16:59:00.006+01:00

Woo-hoo - finally getting some multimedia action. Slideshow made using Soundslides and published by The National in Abu Dhabi. Apologies for the autoplay - I can;t seem to embed it without the option of it starting automatically...

Why study journalism if there are no jobs?

2008-07-24T14:06:00.003+01:00

I came across this question about whether or not there's any point in training journalists if the industry they are supposed to be going into doesn;t have any jobs to offer them - and have posted a video response via this video conversation website Seesmic, which looks like a great way to get opinions. It's the next generation of comment boards - video rather than written comments.

平2

2008-07-07T08:54:00.003+01:00

Here it is then, Chinese-language graffiti on the West Bank Barrier. Look for the 平 or "píng" meaning "peace" on the 3rd slab from the left. Nice bit of soft diplomacy there - not on anyone's side, in favour of a solution that benefits everyone...

(last frame in this slideshow - agency picture, not sure which)

平

2008-07-07T04:25:00.005+01:00

Am posting using AnchorFree VPN - virtual private network - which creates a tunnel between me here in China and their server somewhere in the internet free world -

Hotspot Shield creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop or iPhone and our Internet gateway. This impenetrable tunnel prevents snoopers and hackers from viewing your email, instant messages, credit card information or anything else you send over the network.

- thus enabling me to hurdle the Great Firewall and enjoy sites deemed bad for the public Chinese mindset, which at the moment appears to include the Blogger posting page.

Just noticed some Chinese language graffiti on the West Bank Barrier, on the last photo in this Guardian audio slideshow.

It's the character 平 - "Píng" - which means "Peace".

I've now visited probably the three most famous walls in the world - The Great Wall of China, the West Bank Barrier and the Berlin Wall. They are all laughably small compared to the environments around them, even the Great Wall, which lies like a very long piece of string atop huge crags. But symbolically they are big - really big, even defining. I wonder if sections of the West Bank Wall will be retained in the future as a kind of museum or memorial, even if we are talking way way into the future after years of it serving as an international border.

Enjoyed this in the Observer:

Chilling out with Charles Bukowski and Lord Jim

The backpacker
By William Sutcliffe

Looking back on all the times I went backpacking, and all the hours I spent agonising about what I should cram into my pack, I now realise that my clothes were usually ditched in favour of ethno-tat, my toiletries usually got lost and my medical kit was never opened. Only one thing really mattered: my choice of books.

No other activity can approach backpacking for the amount of time spent waiting: for trains to arrive, for buses to leave, for broken-down buses to be mended, all in order to get to some remote spot where you can 'chill out' (i.e. wait). In these circumstances, your choice of reading matter is extremely important. Without a good book, backpacking can resemble an obscure punishment.

Novels are the hard currency of a book-bartering economy that thrives in backpackers' hostels all over the world. The books you take have to be not just good, but swappable. The first thing to be aware of is that there is a Backpacker Canon, which is rigid and unchanging. These books have been read by every generation of backpackers since the Sixties and are, for no apparent reason, compulsory.

The chief pillars of the canon are Catch-22, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On the Road and Steppenwolf. These books all fulfil the criterion of changing the way you see the world, often for up to a fortnight. One of these four titles is an obligatory accessory for any self-respecting backpacker.

The value of a book in the backpacker barter economy has nothing to do with its cover price. The gold standard of swappability is set by classics of the late 20th century set in backpacker-friendly countries: say, Midnight's Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Shortly behind this come novels either about drugs, or by authors who are known to have taken drugs, or which make no less sense when the reader is on drugs. Favourites authors in this category are Hunter S Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, Will Self, Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski.

It is a mistake to think you have to read about the country you are visiting. Backpackers spend much of their time complaining about the place they have chosen to visit. The job of your reading matter is often to take you away from where you are. I once spent three days on a bus crossing the Gobi desert and, frankly, I needed a book about something other than sand. I read Lord Jim and The World According to Garp and the two books are forever curiously miscegenated in my head. Because of the movie, Robin Williams is somehow in the mix, too. I feel almost as if Williams, Joseph Conrad, John Irving and I spent three days together hanging out on a bus in the desert, with me as host, proud to have introduced them to one another. I hope they keep in touch.

You will never have more time to read than when you are backpacking - until you retire - so if you have any sense, you will use it as an opportunity to read books a little longer and more challenging than you are likely to pick up when earning a living intrudes. No trip will ever be entirely wonderful or relentlessly terrible, but if you get back home having read Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, A Suitable Boy, Earthly Powers and Underworld, or even just a couple of those, your journey will have been worthwhile. You will have travelled the world in your mind, regardless of where you have been.

Olympics - its our party, not yours...

2008-07-03T10:55:00.004+01:00

China is getting weirder and weirder.

Just staying in the country has become a full-time job in itself. Visawise, the place has really clamped down. To get the 2nd 30-day extension to my tourist visa I had to open a Chinese bank account and deposit $100 for each of the 30 days I wanted to stay in it - $3,000. I couldn;t understand what the point of this was - what real tourist (ok, I'm not really a tourist here) wandering around China would open a bank account here? How will this help security? But an American queueing at the Public Security Bureau in Beijing said the move was probably aimed at poorer migrants from developing world countries who come to China looking for opportunity and have in the past fallen into destitution and petty crime.

This new bank account rule has cost me about GBP 200 in credit card charges, exchange rate charges etc etc. And I will have to leave the country anyway at the end of the month, which will cost loads more in travel and so on, including potentially the loss of a month's rent. My media visa application - I'll be astonished if I ever hear anything about it ever again.

China doesn;t want to admit it is making the country an expensive pain to be in - the first swingeing changes came in early spring but it's only this week that the country has actually fessed up to making any changes at all. To quote an Arab diplomat I was chatting with today, it is quietly building another Great Wall as the Games get closer. The Games may in theory be a global party - but China seems pretty determined to keep as much of the world out as possible (as well as non-Beijing Chinese).

Check out the 57 rules for foreign visitors during the Olympics. Note that tourism to Beijing was down 14% in May and that hotels are deserted.

I could sort of understand some of this - it's been a crazy year for China: ridiculously heavy snow in February, T-bet riots, the Sichuan earthquake. Maybe they want to make sure there are as few lank foreign scruffs wearing Free T-bet t-shirts hanging around as possible.

But this NY Times piece puts it all into a new kind of context. According to the writer, China doesn;t give a toss what the IOC or anyone else thinks - these Olympics are for domestic consumption only. The real battle was winning the mandate to stage them in the first place - a new "mandate from heaven" to stay in power.

Now perhaps the Chinese government doesn't care if there's no real party. And any criticism from outside about crackdowns etc will just be badly received by Chinese at home who are particularly sensitive to what they see as foreign attempts to humiliate them. Their hysterical nationalistic responses thus bolster the government. Check out this screamer from China Daily - "The Chinese people don;t want Sarkozy to attend the Olympic Opening Ceremony - survey". Today this was the banner headline across the top of the site's front page.

Here's the message to the world from the Chinese authorities: "Go away - we never wanted you here anyway! These are OUR Olympics and no one can take them away from us. Just try it - we'll jump on these funny segway scooters and shoot you..."

I like China a lot. Maybe I'm just annoyed that my individual plans haven't borne fruit exactly as envisaged. Maybe I just resent all the stress and wish I had planned better. All that's true - but there's still a kind of clenchedness setting in here, hard-edged and gripping ever tighter.

***

In other weirdness, the US discovers that Guantanamo was Made in China. The methods of torture used at Guantanamo are in fact Chines in origin and were used against US POWs in the Korean War. That's nuts - but it might yet afford the US a way to dissociate themselves with the newly "un-American" place.

And Israeli border guards humiliate and assault a young prize-winning Palestinian journalist while he is accompanied by Dutch diplomats. Astonishing really. I'm continually waiting for the moment some of these guys rip into the son or relative of a big US personality - the rebellious son of a Congressman or TV presenter perhaps...

Speak for the Chinese government!

2008-05-14T14:19:00.003+01:00

Oooh, the temptation to be a "language polisher" at Xinhua, China's official government news agency. The salary isn't bad - about USD 2,140 a month plus a free flight home every year.

If you were in it for the long haul, I don't see why this wouldn't be a great opportunity. You could take the time to learn the language really well, the stories that come your way would give you an incredibly broad introduction to China itself and being on the inside of the government mouthpiece would give you a terrific sense of how the Chinese government ticks.

The guy at Beijing Newspeak did this for 2 years - his recommendation is here under the heading Wanted; sub-editor with strong constitution. More of his experiences are here. He now writes for the Washington Times.

I don't see myself going for it though, mainly because I don't want to be a sub-editor and I'm holding out for a media visa for the Olympic period. But it would be an real education...

Quake: Toads in the know

2008-05-13T16:02:00.004+01:00

Horrific scenes of small dust-covered dead children lying amid the ruins of a collapsed school building, their grey skin contrasting so clearly with that of the living and breathing rescuers unearthing their corpses in the same picture. Latest estimate is 12,000 dead and counting. It's a huge number and it comes on top of 32,000 dead and 29,000 missing after the cyclone in Burma. It;s China's worst quake since the 1976 quake in Tangshan in which an astonishing 240,000 people died. Almost quarter of a million people!

The China Daily says seismologists predicted that Sichuan was due a big shock of 7+ on the Richter Scale sometime after 2003 because the average interval between big quakes in the region was 16 years, yet the last big quake to hit the region was in 1976 (not the Tangshan quake).

Seismologists weren;t the only ones: the picture from today's China Daily (above) shows hordes of toads spilling out on to a busy street - and being massacred by the traffic. Local authorities put the unusual reptile activity down to a change in the weather. A pool also mysteriously emptied in the region.

The idea that animals can predict earthquakes is fascinating:

"One theory is that wild and domestic creatures feel the Earth vibrate before humans. Other ideas suggest they detect electrical changes in the air or gas released from the Earth."

Animals also behaved oddly just before the 2004 tsunami.

Its not yet known if Sichuan's panda bears saw the quake coming. Sichuan is home not only to 84 million people (more than Germany, Europe's most populous country) but also to the biggest panda centres in the world. At 21.30 China time, about 2 hours ago, China's Xinhua news agency confirmed that all 86 pandas at the Wolong Centre in Sichuan are safe.

I personally didn;t feel a thing. At 14.28 I was on my bike cycling to a friend;s house for a haircut, which may be why. Some office blocks were evacuated in Beijing's business district. You don't want to find yourself on the 51st floor when the earth starts to shake. When I arrived blissfully ignorant at my destination, my friend had already been asked by friends and relatives in Russia and Beijing if she was ok.

News of and reaction to the quake from both Sichuan and around the world surfaced rapidly on Twitter via Summize, which allows you to track all Tweets containing certain keywords.
Everyone has a phone... There's some buzz now about how Twitter was first to break news of the quake here as well as:

"It is fantastic that so many threads can be interwoven from all over the world in such a short space of time but a service like Twitter is a tactic and not the target. It is a means of distribution rather than a destination and, as such, may never take over from traditional ‘reporting’."

"There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging."

This new found openness is not something I can comment on, having only been in the country for a couple of months. The Telegraph article says:

"It was a contrast to the events in Tangshan 32 years ago, when the Chinese government refused for months to admit the 7.8 magnitude earthquake had even happened, despite the deaths of an estimated 240,000 people."

Contrast that with this remarkable account from a CNN journalist who describes how, with the country and people devastated by the cyclone, a natural disaster, the military junta there put effort and resources into tracking him down and booting him out. Scary stuff.

The China Daily's front page is printed in black with the headline: THE DAY THE EARTH MOVED. I'm not sure how I feel about that headline, even leaving aside the most obvious - to native English speakers at least - sexual association (which I have to say I find not a little clumsy). It's a bit wide-eyed, almost implying that it's the first time an earthquake has ever been experienced. Inside, I thought the coverage was good. It will be interesting to see tomorrow if the China Daily picks up on any of the grief-fuelled rage at alleged cowboy construction and corner-cutting on safety features in buildings that collapsed in these Guardian interviews.

So - death toll now past 12,000 and still rising, with 9,400 still buried in rubble. My thoughts are with them.

***

Update - my and presumably all Blogger blogs are blocked again in China. It's time to move platform - will happen asap.

Drop the fop.

2008-05-01T09:22:00.003+01:00

Bloody hell London - do the right thing and vote for Ken Livingstone for Mayor.

Boris - for and against.

Boris is such an unknown quantity - is he a racist snob, as some say, or could he genuinely do a good, non-political, able and inclusive job for London in a position that anyway does not wield that much power, as others say? Neither he nor Ken is a party lackey.

In the end - beyond floppy foppishness, photos on bikes or on the Tube, charisma and broken marriages - we're talking about a city. It takes a really long time to get anything done. Right now the city has momentum - Crossrail, the Olympics, congestion charging, integrating the various transport networks. I'm unwilling for that momentum to be halted. Bring Boris into the fold - after 4 years we'll know a bit more about what he's made of. Ken will have to leave at some point anyway.

So, even giving Boris the benefit of the doubt - i.e. that he is not a racist fop with an attention span that makes a Coca Cola-drinking kid with ADHD look like a Confucian scholar - I'd vote Ken out of caution, as a safe air of hands.

Unfortunately I'm in Beijing, so I'm relying on everyone else. Don't stuff it up - vote Ken.

Great Wall...

2008-04-22T18:07:00.004+01:00

To continue a theme from yesterday, here's a pic of a Qin warrior statue guarding the Great Wall of China from my visit there today...

The hapless foreign labour/slaves in the UAE can be pleased they weren't stuck on this particular construction project - the Lonely Planet says hundreds of thousands of workers - including a lot of prisoners - had to shovel 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth together for the wall and the bones of workers who died on the job are also in there, it is said...

Taking it from the Qin

2008-04-21T07:48:00.005+01:00

Wow - this is entitled "The state of Sino-US relations" and depicts a Chinese Qin warrior having his way with the Statue of Liberty - I got it via Shanghaiist, where there is some lively discussion about how to interpret it, including the significance of the little girl in the background, which someone suggested represented Taiwan.

The warrior seems to represent a strong, unified, virile, powerful and potentially violent China and a swooning, acquiescent US, which depending on your point of view could be either a good or a bad thing. Perhaps this would not be unflattering to some Chinese people, given perceptions of having been humiliated by foreign powers in the past and most recently taking a pasting in the media over Tibet/human rights etc (even as carnage unfolds in Iraq etc). On the other hand, the "Trafalgar Square is not Tian'anmen Square"-type hysteria in the West belies real fear about the rise of China and spread of perceived illiberal "Chinese values" across the world. In this sense, the values represented by the Statue of Liberty don;t count for much in the face of China's huge economic power...

Whatever - it's a great and punchy piece of political art.

***

Add - Roger Cohen in his terrific Passages blog at the IHT writes that while Europe is blue - Democratic-supporting - Asia would prefer the Republicans to win in the US. He says:

But China and India rising see the world more in terms of classic balance-of-power equations, driven by the might and self-interest of nations, than through the post-sovereign European prism of international institution-building and soft power.

In Cohen's view, rising China would see itself as a 'giver' rather than a 'taker' - in the soap-on-the-prison-washroom-floor sense, not the altruism awards sense...

798 - DaShanZi art district

2008-04-18T16:21:00.010+01:00

Spent the last couple of days in the 798 DaShanZi art district - a former munitions factory area way out in NE Beijing just off the Aiport Expressway - for a travel feature I'm writing.

The top picture was the first thing I saw - great fun and also a bit of a jolt becaus although Beijing is a modern city in which people live wild, lurid, raucous lives and although the city is quite a sexualised space, with girls cutting around in miniskirts and this kind of urban grimy feral quality, it isn't punk at all. These irreverent tits were on a different plane to what I've been around for the past month or so, a reminder that there is more space for expression. They set a different tone.

The place is packed with galleries, workshops, cafes, shops, all looking great and containing some really exciting art. I saw the Hong Yong Ping retrospective at the Ullens gallery, which was pretty special. Hong Yong Ping is based in Paris and he deals with big big ideas, interesting and clever concepts nicely executed. I liked all of what I saw. I also found this alternating Ping Pong sign quite amusing. I couldn't find the caption for it so can't be sure it was actually part of the exhibition...

But I was more interested in seeing how Chinese artists were responding to the contemporary China around them. Saw a whole range of stuff - photos of youth culture, photos of people wearing scuba masks in towns to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam project, many a painting of Lolita-type young but sexy Chinese girls with school uniform/toy/cigarette motifs, showing a lot of thigh etc, a Chinese water torture cage, various videos, graphics work etc - liked it a lot.

I also had a chat with Robert Bernell, who runs the Timezone 8 art bookshop and was one of the first businesses to move into 798 back in 2002. Most of the artists who were there at that time have now moved out again because rents have tripled. He was saying that in 2002 it really wasn't easy to find contemporary Chinese culture. The art scene was very dispersed and modern China was really reduced to a lot of empty new office buildings and imported cars and not much else. So when 798 got going, thanks to some well-connected and determined people, there was a lot of interest, not least from foreigners.

Meanwhile the authoriies took the decision that they wanted to foster creative industry in China, and to do that they had to allow a certain freedom of artistic expression. So 798, way out from the city centre, was allowed to flourish. He was pretty interesting and I may try to make a podcast out of his quotes...

These were some of his tips: The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, The Long March Space, Commune, Continua.

***

2 really interesting things from the web: The Asia Times has this informative article on the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Autonomous Region - it's the most fulsome thing I've read about the situation there.

And the Russians are reportedly anxious about Chinese migration into Eastern Russia:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russians in Siberia, the Far East and European Russian have been concerned that Chinese guest workers and traders will move into Russia beyond the Urals in such numbers that Moscow will not be able to hold the region within the borders of the Russian Federation.

From Russia on skis

2008-04-16T15:10:00.006+01:00

Russian is more difficult than Chinese, my Russian former flatmate told me (in German), because it has a billion cases, suffixes and forms for different types of whatever action you happen to be doing and how long/often you are doing it for.

So it may be an arse to learn - but you need this complexity, another Russian told me (also in German), in order to be able to communicate properly.

But this is clearly a language touched by genius.

In which other tongue could the English phrase "out of the blue", meaning something completely unexpected, be rendered as kak iz pizdy na lyzhakh, which translates as “like out of a cunt on skis.”

I can;t think of anything more unexpected - both in terms of the nature of the event and the speed with which it would take place. Geniuski! Respektovich!

Read this at an Economist blog by a correspondent who has learned Russian/Hebrew/Spanish/French while on the road - the blog even has a cheeky picture of Russian roadsigns in the shape of skis with the caption: "Where do you take your skiing holidays?"

The blog also mentions that in Slavic and Semitic languages, the root forms of most concepts (as expressed by nouns/adjectives etc) are verbs. Thus, anything related to writing is, in Arabic, some form of the root Kitab - to write. This means there are some unfamiliar kinds of verb in Arabic for English native speakers. For example, "he was angry with me" could translate as "zarla ma'iy", literally "he angered with me". The Arabic adjective - "zarlan" - means "angering/being angry".

I was chatting to a German student in Berlin about this and he said the same of German. For example, the word for life - das Leben - translates more accurately as "the living", or "the process of living".

His idea was that, politically, this kind of language is a good thing, for if everything is process rather than static situation, people's ideas of property are different - in fact, concepts of property have less of a place in such a system. Thus, instead of saying "she is my girlfriend", I might say "I am with her", which is both a more equal relationship and a more fluid concept as it only describes what is happening in this moment.

It's a bit like the maths of not being able to calculate both the speed and position of a moving object.

Of course, no one's saying Arabs/Israelis don't like property - that's clearly not true - and communism didn't end up working completely for the Slavic countries. But it's a nice idea.

The Yellow Peril for 2008

2008-04-14T14:26:00.003+01:00

All Blogger blogs are now blocked again, which means I can no longer see my blog, although I can post to it. I'd love to know which blogs the Chinese government deems so dangerous that it can't allow for the possibility of some Chinese actually wanting to read them. Or, if it's not about individual blogs, then what actually leads the government to block/unblock.

Anyway - it;s not my intention for this blog simply to link to really good stuff that other people are writing, but there are some great comments looking at racist undertones in the China-bashing in the West following what happened in Tibet last month.

My initial view was that a) the US sees China as serious competition and would like to prod and weaken it as much as possible to maintain itself as No.1 and b) Europeans are still suffering Empire hangover and want to lecture brown-skinned people as much as possible to let them know they remain uncivilised, even if they are nominally free.

But it is perhaps way darker than that.

"Trafalgar Square is not Tiananmen Square"

Brendan O'Neill goes postal with his "The invasion of the robotic thugs", which unpicks the British media's treatment of the blue-tracksuited Chinese paramilitaries who have been designated by the Chinese government to protect the Olympic Torch. He sees it as an update of traditional fear of the "Yellow Peril". Although it was the British police who were armed, making arrests left right and centre and banning certain kinds of t-shirts, the media jumped on the Chinese, describing them variously as "robotic", "mysterious", "flame retardants" (read: retards) and "thugs".

Tony Arbour, a Conservative member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, said ‘the Chinese security men seemed to be managing events [in London]’ (which was patently not true) and then insisted: ‘Trafalgar Square is not Tiananmen Square.’ This hysterical statement captured the dual fear and loathing behind the attacks on China’s robotic thugs: fear that a weak and ‘supine’ UK (as Free Tibet described Gordon Brown’s Britain) is being overrun by Chinese, and loathing of those unsmiling, retarded foreigners who have of course never done anything of note except massacre people in Tiananmen Square.

Less strident but no less on the button is Shanghai Scrap. He notes that the Chinese current 110m hurdles champion Liu Xiang said of his victory that it "proved that athletes with yellow skin could run as fast as those with black and white skins".

The Chinese narrative claims that the games are about sport and harmony; the Western narrative insists that they are about politics and human rights. To be sure, both narratives are legitimate, but I think it’s fairly obvious, especially after the last two weeks, that race (and the emergence of a non-white superpower) is becoming the central narrative of Beijing 2008.

So who's winning the argument? The NY Times says the Free Tibet supporters are better at PR than the Chinese, but Danwei counters by saying that the protests - and particularly the attack on a one-legged Chinese athlete holding the torch in Paris - have been big PR victories for the Chinese government in that they have rallied the population.

The Chinese government appears to be winning the user generated propaganda war.

A US-based Chinese academic writes:

what we are witnessing is an emerging synergy of cybernationalism connecting many Chinese at home and abroad.

And in another NY Times piece, Matthew Forney notes that because educated young Chinese people have benefited the most from China's economic progress, they are among the most patriotic people in the world and have little patience for Western lecturing about human rights etc.

Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet.

As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. One Chinese friend who has a degree from a European university described the conflict to me as “a clash between the commercial world and an old aboriginal society.” She even praised her government for treating Tibetans better than New World settlers treated Native Americans.

It's certainly true that the very few Chinese people, mainly young, that I've had a word about Tibet with (always in English), have all expressed support in the government in words you would be unlikely to hear anywhere in the West. "Our government is very strong and I'm sure they will manage the situation," said one young woman. "I support our government," said another.

Who knows what's next. Whatever it is, it's sure to be fascinating...

Pengyou to Zhengyou

2008-04-12T18:03:00.002+01:00

Chairman Mao, originally uploaded by Langoustine.

Aussie PM Kevin Rudd appears to have pulled off something of a coup during his Chinese-language speech (text here) at Peking Uni, according to these expert commentators.

China - government and people - is getting way hacked off with being lectured by the West (see China expert John Pomfret's post here) over Tibet/anything else, yet the alternative might be simply to have to shut up, thus avoiding any Chinese loss of face, and perhaps have a quiet word behind the scenes, which can then be easily ignored. This latter course, apparently, is how a Waiguo Pengyou - foreign friend - is expected to behave. But, in words not reported by the China Daily, Rudd told his audience straight that he had a problem with human rights in Tibet.

Rudd, with his knowledge of China, was able to do this by casting himself as a Zhengyou rather than a Pengyou. A Zhengyou is the valuable friend who tells you the truth, unpleasant as it may be, and thus truly helps you rather than just saying what you want to hear. Pomfret is good on this here, suggesting Rudd could be the West's "secret weapon" in dealing with China, while an Oz China prof goes into more detail here, saying finally:

By introducing the term zhengyou with all of its liberating connotations into our dealings with China, Kevin Rudd has achieved something of considerable significance.

Riveting stuff...

New photos...

2008-04-10T13:19:00.003+01:00

Spent a happy afternoon uploading a load of pix to Flickr. Actually took way too long, but still - this and many more are to be found here.

I've been in this Starbucks cafe far far too long now so that's the lot for today.

Finally - have a look at the Twitter bit on the top right of the page. Essentially Twitter is blogging from your mobile phone by text message. There's lots more you can do with it but I'm yet a novice and have no idea. Quite exciting though. My Twitter page is here.

A huge amount of really intelligent comment and discussion on China. I'll get beyond the big newspapers soon but meanwhile this form the IHT was interesting - suggesting that ruining China's "Olympic coming-out party" will simply be counter-productive and will see the country simply retrench into a previous anti-the rest of the world rhetoric and stance... True enough, but being part of the world involves exposing yourself to it. Bush and the US is also the focus for a lot of protest. On the other hand - China is big big big and it matters to the world.

Australia's Kevin Rudd spoke to Peking Uni students in fluent Mandarin yesterday. According to the China Daily (hard copy - can;t find the article on the web), Rudd said: "Some have called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics because of recent problems in Tibet... I do not agree... I believe the Olympics are important for China's continuing engagement with the world."

But the China Daily did not mention Rudd "talking tough" over Tibet, comments that can be seen (by those outside China - not me) here.

先在－晚饭。

再见

Ouch...

2008-04-08T08:03:00.004+01:00

Great image (AFP/Getty via The Guardian)- China is going to have its work cut out to stop this kind of thing defining the Olympic feel, at least until the flame arrives in China (and Tibet). Hard to see what even a crack mercenary Western PR team can effectively do against such a brilliant twist to the Olympic icon.

Having recently spent a year in Israel/Palestine, it's impossible for me not to compare the conflict there with the current Tibet blowup, which claimed 18 civilian lives, including some Tibetans, according to the Chinese media, and in which around 150 Tibetans were killed by Chinese security forces, according to Tibetan sources quoted by Western media. Western bigwigs are up in arms and demanding an Olympic boycott.

One key difference between Tibet and Palestine is the former's geographical isolation, which the Chinese authorities are actually able to enforce, as the Guardian's Jonathan Watts found out. He travelled more than 6,000 mils to try to get the story, even considering taking a donkey at one point, but was blocked at every turn. An Aussie cameraman who was there told me that big agency journalists were only able to get into Tibet by hiking around the checkpoints and rejoining their drivers on the other side. Palestine on the other hand is crawling with journalists and, aside from the occasional "closed military zone", Israel lets them do what they want.

But Tibet is the kind of cause the West is able to fall in love with - a remote mountain kingdom of enlightened peace-loving people led by a romantic figure of an exiled leader, popular destination for travellers and nothing to do with Islam at all (very important). Not being able to get hard reports may simply make it more tempting to believe the most lurid accounts, since why else would the Chinese behave as if they were covering something up?

Israeli activist Uri Avnery is quite good on all this. Contrast to the attention given - zero - to the situation in neighbouring Xinjiang, a vast area, populated this time by Muslims, some of whom also have a separatist agenda for an independent "East Turkestan" and where the Chinese authorities also reportedly behave harshly.

So the Chinese are angry about what they see as Western media bias against China, particularly given some Western media - particularly in Germany - appear to have used images of Nepalese police beating demonstrators in Kathmandu believing them to have been Chinese police in Lhasa. If true, and he pictures look convincing, it's breathtakingly incompetent and suggestive of a desire to believe the worst of China.

There are some slight echoes of Palestine in Tibet - both some Han Chinese and some Jewish Israelis claim historical legitimacy for occupying and settling territory. The Chinese say Tibet has been an integral part of China for longer than the combined histories of the USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand, while some Jewish people say God gave all the land between the river (Jordan) and the sea to the Jewish people and they were there first anyway.

But one of the key differences is that China is very big and there are only 2.6 million Tibetans, while in Israel the picture is almost the reverse if you take into account the mass of Arabs around Israel. Even if you don't, there are roughly the same number of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.

Resources also come into the picture - Israel gets a lot of its water from the aquifer running under the West Bank. Israelis live a Western lifestyle and use far more water than the Palestinians. Israel has proposed selling Palestinians desalinated water from the Med. Presumably if Palestine were to become a sovereign state it would have to have access to what would be its water. Jonathan Cook suggests this as one reason why there is no peace deal as yet and why there will not be one, despite the fact that everyone knows what a workable deal more or less looks like.

In Tibet, China reportedly has its eyes on natural resources, as it also does in Xinjiang. If Tibet were to split off, then the Tibetans in Sichuan, the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the Mongolians in Inner Mongolia might fancy their chances too. That's more or less a quarter of China's total area. It ain't gonna happen.

But the most interesting thing I've read about Tibet is in Foreign Policy magazine, where a Tibet expert interviewed says that China is aware that "nationalism is no longer a tameable force". Robert Barnett says that what happened in Tibet was really, really big.

The most significant of the 50 protests are the rural peasants taking over the countryside. These are people who get on horseback or march down to the local government office or police post, burn it to the ground, and raise the Tibetan flag. You can be shot on sight for having a Tibetan flag in Tibet in a non-Olympics year. Nothing like this has been seen in Tibet for decades, and it has untold political significance for China.

This must have significance for everyone - Tibetans, Palestinians, Kurds, Basques etc. Perhaps in a post-national world it won't matter anyway. The Catalans no longer need independence - it would cost them too much money and in a borderless Europe what would it be worth anyway? They have control over their taxes, education, all their .cat domain names, Catalan language promotion anyway. In peaceful times perhaps it's natural for big blocs to break down into smaller Luxemburg-style fiefdoms. But the background of a worldwide scramble for limited resources doesn't bode well for peace...

再见！