Beijing Newspeak

Ted Leonis, producer of “Nanking”, wants one billion Chinese people to see his film. Wildly optimistic of course, although apparently it will be shown on CCTV in six months’ time. However, the way in which the documentary has been treated in Chinese cinemas has hardly aided his cause.

I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, six days after its release in ”Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi and other cities” (Xinhua) on July 7. Even then, it wasn’t easy to find a cinema in Beijing screening the film at a time which did not clash with daylight working hours. Not particularly surprising when you consider there were only eight copies of the film distributed to the city’s cinemas. Nanking was also subject to bullying from those profit-guzzling blockbuster types - Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Transformers - sandwiched as it was between the release dates of both of them. A few days after I had seen Nanking, it had been swamped by everyone’s favourite childhood robots (call me fickle but, 20 years on, I have no interest in seeing this film). One of my colleagues wasn’t even aware of Nanking’s presence on the big screen saying he always checked the cinema listings to see if anything interesting was showing but hadn’t noticed it. A few pars from an article by my guardians appear to back this up, although the writer has chosen to quote a random Internet film forum user rather than phoning up someone in the know.

Meanwhile, the US documentary “Nanking” chronicling Japan’s notorious 1937 invasion of the Chinese city Nanjing, and which opened in China on July 7, was left trailing in the dust.

The 90-minute documentary “Nanking” features interviews with Chinese survivors and Japanese soldiers, along with pictures, letters and diaries read by actors portraying Westerners who helped save more than 200,000 Chinese refugees in Nanjing.

“Transformers dominates the cinema screens, so it is natural to dominate the box office,” said one person named “movie worm” on an Internet film forum.

“Profit-driven cinema managers always abandon serious movies like ‘Nanking’ to make way for blockbusters like ‘Transformers’. It surely has a bad impact on the diversity of the movie market,” the netizen said.

The Shanghai New Century Cinema screened “Transformers” 30 times on July 15 but “Nanking” was only screened once on the same day at the same cinema.

My initial thoughts were that the government had missed a good opportunity to promote a film made outside China which corresponded with its own official line on the Nanjing massacre. A reminder to Japan that it is not just the Chinese who remember, or who were directly affected, by the events of 1937. Indeed, these are the reasons why Ted Leonsis and co-director Dan Sturman thought this film would be warmly received by the Chinese authorities, as reported by Associated Press and carried by the International Herald Tribune.

Leonsis and co-director Dan Sturman said they thought SARFT let the film through untouched because it agreed with China’s official version of what happened in Nanjing after the city fell to the Japanese. They said China also realized it might be politically useful to have a third party corroborate their version of history.

“I do think politically, the Chinese say ‘OK, someone else is saying that this incident happened. It’s not our word against the Japanese word,’” said Leonsis, who is also vice chairman of the American Internet company AOL.

I brought up this point at work and another Xinhua journalist titillated me with the words, “Here’s some inside information for you …”, going on to claim the government has played a hand in playing down the film - although I have no idea to what extent. Apparently, it welcomed interest from overseas about the events of 1937 but seeing as there are already a few films on the subject by Chinese directors, it didn’t want to give “Nanking” too much coverage. I’m not sure how seriously to take this line of reasoning, particularly given this line from another Xinhua story:

Zhang Pimin, a chief film censor from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), said the documentary, which remained untouched by the censors, will be shown in the major cities around China until the end of 2007.

It should be noted, however, that the article goes on to say, “He did not specify how many screenings of the film would be shown each week and in which cities.”

Another argument for the possibility of government interference is that it didn’t want to stir up excessive ill-feeling towards Japan by encouraging everyone to go and watch the film (I hope my good friend doesn’t mind me mentioning her post-film reaction of “That’s why I hate the Japanese”). Xinhua’s diplomatic desk is more than capable of doing that when told although the moderate language used these days (since Shinzo Abe became Prime Minister) is unrecognisable from the bitter reproaches I was touching up when I first arrived at Xinhua in early 2006 when the Yasukuni Shrine issue was topping the controversy list. What is certain is that the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television had the power to ensure ”Nanking” did not clash with the mainstream Hollywood offerings and distribute more copies around China.

The film wasn’t released in Nanjing at the same time as Beijing et al. In fact, the plan was to wait until August 15 - the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in WWII - to allow more time for promotion but the main cinema in Nanjing, the Heping Theatre, managed to “borrow one copy from Wuxi” as Xinhua reported in this story. This is where I started to get confused.

The original story, as it came to me, told of Nanking’s popularity in China’s cinemas, directly contradicting the previous Xinhua report of it “trailing in the dust”. It had no real evidence to support this statement (which is what happens when an intern with no experience or training is asked to write news supposedly worthy of international attention) and was entirely focused on Nanjing. The writer said she had seen the previous Xinhua report but had chosen to ignore it.

Looking at the story more closely, it turned out private businesses had actually bought 5,000 tickets and given them away on the cheap as part of a promotion. These tickets accounted for one third of the total amount of tickets sold in the Heping Theatre. Companies had made block bookings until August - it didn’t say whether or not they were state-owned enterprises. According to the manager of the Heping theatre, the film had earned 400,000 yuan in two weeks, which doesn’t strike me as a particularly large amount.

Of course there is another major reason why “Nanking” has been overshadowed by the other foreign films:

Ma Weimin, vice president of the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio (CNDFS), which sponsored the distribution of the film in China, told Xinhua, “We thought the documentary would be less well received by audiences compared with commercial movies, particularly during the summer vacation period.”

Perhaps, many people just aren’t that interested in seeing the film. It is not exactly easy viewing. A colleague said a common feeling among some of her Chinese friends was that they didn’t really want to watch people from outside China recounting how they managed to save the Chinese people during the massacre. There is the feeling it makes the Chinese look vulnerable and weak, she said. I’m sure many would disagree with this thinking. And of course, in terms of entertainment value, Transformers wins hands down. When I saw Nanking, there were quite a few young people sitting near us. One couple chatted throughout, occasionally glancing at the screen and saying “that’s terrible” and then returning to their conversation. They left before the end, as did the couple in front of us who played with their mobile phones throughout much to the irritation of everyone else. These are just a couple of observations - they were in the minority.

A combination of the above reasons seems to have dulled the impact of “Nanking” in China. I find this regretful given the film’s effectiveness in portraying, simply and brutally, the horrors of the massacre of 1937 unlike the often clumsy rhetoric disseminated in news stories from state media.

I reckon if I manage to sell this job to you, I don’t see any reason why I can’t make a fortune flogging dead skunks on Tiananmen Square. Ok, that’s enough, I’m banning cynicism for this post. Believe it or not, I strangely enjoy working at Xinhua although not when we are understaffed. The link below will take you to what I consider (without exaggeration) to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-07/20/content_6404122.htm

In the first line, please replace “is seeking” with “urgently needs”. Two of my foreign comrades departed the battlefield recently which has left two of us drowing in news stories and features about the People’s Liberation Army’s 80th anniversary. Due to the shortage in manpower, we are currently working alternate night shifts, which start at 6pm with the sight of 15 stories that have piled up throughout the day. This is unpleasant. And in case people are doubting the strength of their career prospects after working at Xinhua (ahem), one of my former colleagues left to star in a Chinese drama series opposite Ni Ping and the other is being showered with yuan as general manager of a management training company.

As this is a promotional piece, I see no problem with only listing the positives about being a sub-editor at Xinhua. (You will notice that the word “polisher” is absent from the job advert in an attempt to make the position sound more important. In fact, here me out on this one, the job is indeed a sub-editing role - with the power to reject stories or recommend stories to be written. Stop scoffing at the back. Still like to use the term “polisher” though - sounds like a relaxing pastime.)

1) After two weeks, you will notice a newfound ability to reel off a series of impressive statistics on an eclectic range of subjects such as the number of visitors to Tibet in the first quarter, domestic car sales and foreign direct investment. Seriously though, knowledge of China grows quickly.

2) Rejecting (or asking for improvement in) stories that writers have spent a couple of days working on develops your diplomacy skills.

3) (If I can be sentimental for a second …)  Opportunity to work with some great people (I don’t mean myself).

4) Chance to wave pay check in the faces of China Daily employees (while conveniently forgetting that China Daily is an infinitely more efficient operation).

Don’t all rush at once.

The life of a conspiracy theorist must be a depressing one. When I read the story about the fabrication of the cardboard bun report, I felt ashamed to be standing at the peak of the slippery slope. Scepticism landed a jab to the ribs and I immediately doubted the truth of the police report that detailed the Beijing television’s journalist’s confession. After mulling it over, I frogmarched my opinion away from the dark side. I didn’t want to start doubting everything the Chinese government said. It seemed excessive to cover up one case of dodgy baozi in the whole of Beijing. A blatant lie would also open up the possibility of someone in the know leaking information that there had been a cover-up. Fake news reports are quite common - the local news desk in my department says it has to sift through numerous suspicious-looking stories every week. And Imagethief’s post also served as a sharp thwack to the conspiratorial cheek.

My confidence began to waver when one of the reporters said her 17-year-old son still refused to eat baozi because he was sure the government was lying. Now that’s respect for your mother’s line of work. Then my colleague pointed out that the explanation given in the Beijing television journalist’s confession - as reported by Xinhua - neglected to address the fact that in the video footage the police arrived on the scene to arrest the so-called cardboard baozi makers. Did the reporter trick the migrant workers into making the buns in order for them to be arrested? Or did he dress up his friends in police uniform? I can’t find an explanation for this in English - maybe I am missing something in Chinese. And then I read this at ESWN which also has all the right links. Now I feel like Indecisive Dave from the Fast Show.

Anyway, I only brought this up so I could be cynical about the statement the All-China Journalists’ Association (ACJA) released following news that the cardboard bun expose was a hoax. What is particularly amusing about this stream of righteousness is that the chairman of the ACJA is none other than Tian Congming, the president of Xinhua News Agency. The full Xinhua report on this statement is here but these are some of my favourite bits:

During the same interview, Li Cunhou, a member of the association’s secretariat, outlined the key reasons for the existence of fabricated news in China despite repeated disciplinary actions.

“The quality of journalism professionals varies across the country,” Li admitted. “Some reporters can produce news straight out of their imagination or by making several phone calls at home and surfing on the Internet.

Well I am sorry but how else would some Xinhua reporters based in the provincial bureaus around the country get enough news stories to fill their quota? It is common practice to surf local news websites, copy some titillating nugget and upload it to the central department. I have seen some of my colleagues rightly reject stories by regional journalists that are based on one comment from an Internet forum.

“Many of today’s journalists lack professional training and, with the fast development of the media industry, some institutions are lax in the way they recruit staff,” Li added.

Most of the new journalists - Xinhua only recruits university graduates in my department at least - are very talented individuals. But often they have had no news-writing experience before arriving on their first day, with most majoring in English (obviously a prerequisite for the job), and they find themselves writing news stories which need to be quoted by intenational media. The person who is in charge of giving journalism lectures is highly competent but unfortunately does not have enough time. Last year, the graduates had a two or three-week training course shortly after their arrival. The foreign polishers offered to give lectures on news writing but they would have been out of keeping with the emphasis on political and ideological education. Obviously I am only referring to my department but there is little reason to believe it is different anywhere else in the organisation.

However, “Some reporters just fabricated news under the guise of supervision,” Li said. “They did this either to seek petty profits for their institution or for themselves.”

I am not saying Xinhua reporters fabricate new stories. But many provincial reporters just copy local media and don’t quote the source. An extra story written in this way gains extra points for both individual and departmental quotas.

 ”The content of news is no different from historical fact,” Zhou cited Cai Yuanpei, one of China’s most influential scholars in the early 20th century, as saying, stressing the importance of the authenticity of news.

I think I’ll stop there.

Actually, no I won’t. Because I have just noticed a journalistic triumph for Xinhua News Agency. In a report released on Friday night, it carried a series of quotes accusing the government of lying. Government mouthpiece? Pah! Here are the opening paragraphs:

BEIJING, July 20 (Xinhua) — Relief, disbelief and confusion were evident on the streets of Beijing after the widely aired TV news report about dumpling makers using cardboard as an ingredient was exposed as a hoax.

Chen Huiqin, a retired middle school teacher from Shanghai, said the hoax was beyond belief.

“I guess government departments must be hoping to reduce the negative impact on the public by declaring the TV news report a hoax,” she said.

A cab driver, who asked to be identified only by his surname Liu, agreed, saying he could not believe the investigative TV news report aired by Beijing TV on July 8 was a fabrication.

“It’s not just me, most of my customers didn’t believe it was a hoax either,” said Liu. “But to avoid eating cardboard dumplings, I only eat meat dumplings at established restaurants.”

An Internet user from east China’s Zhejiang Province, wrote in a posting on Sina.com, “It cannot be a hoax, but calling it a fabricated report must be intended to serve the purpose of a harmonious society.”

A woman living in an apartment near Panjiayuan, southeastern Beijing, who gave her surname as Chen, said she was totally confused about the “cardboard dumplings” reports.

“It was awful to watch the pictures — soaking cardboard in water with caustic soda, chefs chopping the soaked cardboard, the oven used for stewing the cardboard — but those pictures seemed so real,” said the middle-aged woman. “It doesn’t matter if it was a lie, I’m going to avoid all filled dumplings.”

I was trying to pretend I didn’t care, didn’t need to feel loved, preferred to let events run their natural course. But sod it - the China Blog Awards are running at the moment and it would be rude not to acknowledge the efforts of their organisers, Chinalyst. So here is a cunning link that will bypass all the other blogs straight to Beijing Newspeak (currently enjoying mid-table respectability in the Best News Blog category), leaving only the need to click on the plus sign. Of course, there are much better blogs than mine - and more worthy of the title “news” - so the whole (not quite, as it is lacking ESWN who I think should make an entertaining late charge) list is here. The result appears to be a formality already but I’ve always wanted to make myself a medal that says “Sixth most popular China news blog 2007″.

I have come across a number of occasions on which Xinhua reporters in the provincial bureaus around the country have treated breaking news with contempt. Never has this been more apparent when a reporter from the Liaoning office happened to be driving past an aquarium in Fushun on the bitterly cold afternoon of December 13. It had been a quiet news day. Actually, make that month. Wouldn’t it be great if he could just run into a story to justify his employment status of journalist until January. But, look over there. Why are there so many people standing around? The world’s tallest man is saving two dolphins’ lives by reaching his two-metre arm into their stomachs and pulling out life-threatening shards of plastic? Ah well, I suppose I should go and make a couple of notes, he thought. Could make a nib. It’s cold though. The result was a story that was picked up by every news site around the world but completely lacking in quotes. You have to wonder what would have to happen in Liaoning to set this reporter’s pulse racing.

Incidents like these make it easy to forget there are a large numbers of Xinhua reporters around the country who genuinely care about reporting breaking news, particularly when it comes to accidents and subsequent rescue operations, even if a good report will gain them no credit. A common conception is that Xinhua reporters are just spoon fed information that government officials want released. Often this is true of course, but there are numerous exceptions. Local government officials are now obliged by orders from on high to provide Xinhua reporters with all the information they desire when it comes to coal mine accidents. But they are still reticent about other accidents that happen in areas under their jurisdiction.

On Monday, a bus carrying between 20 and 30 passengers slipped off a car ferry into a river in Jiangxi province, as described in this Xinhua report. Local officials quickly cordoned off the area around the riverbank and refused to talk to the Xinhua reporters who had arrived at the scene. One reporter had phoned up the Publicity Department at around midday and a woman had given snippets of information over the phone. But, after that, she refused to play ball.

One of the reporters from the Jiangxi bureau had spent a month last year in my department so he was determined to establish as many facts as possible with the international media in mind. This isn’t always the case. Often, the local reporters who have never written for an overseas audience can not understand the need for so many questions when they produce a hole-riddled story. When they receive a call from one of my colleagues they know it is the English-language department immediately just because someone is asking them a question. So the reporter at the scene of the ferry disaster concealed his pen and notebook and snatched words whenever he could with the divers involved in the rescue operation and local villagers who had seen the bus drive onto the ferry, while trying to avoid looking, acting or sounding like a journalist. And to think I once said in my clueless days, one week after arriving at Xinhua, “What do you mean the government won’t speak to Xinhua, Xinhua is the government!”

The officials soon cleared the area of the relatives of those missing and took them all to a hotel, which made the swift identification of bodies pulled up from the river impossible. As a foreign sub-editor, I normally have a real feeling of detachment from incidents like these. If I want to find out more information I have to go through a reporter from the local news desk of my department who then passes on requests to the local bureau reporter by phone. In this case, however, it was easy to imagine families huddled together in a scruffy hotel not being told whether or not their children/husbands/wives had been found dead at the bottom of the river. The panicked meeting called by the local publicity department. The punches of calculator buttons to work out a compensation amount for families of the victims, a figure that will never be reported.

Secrecy over incidents like these is pointless. The fact a bus rolled off a ferry is hardly the local government’s fault. Unfortunately for the officials, it all comes down to statistics. They will probably be given black marks on their records because, according to the system, someone always has to take the blame, especially when it involves the death of around 20 people. When promotion opportunities arise, people with black marks are overlooked. One freak accident, multiple deaths. All it means to many officials is one black smudge.

There have been a few cases of Xinhua local reporters having to use their initiative in recent weeks. When 25 people were killed in an explosion at a karaoke bar in Liaoning at the beginning of the month, one Xinhua reporter adopted four different guises to speak to local residents who were afraid of being seen talking to the press. At a recent conference on the potential lifting of the ban on tiger parts in Harbin, the local reporter pretended to be a volunteer to gain access and be free from handing in her notebook full of freshly scrawled quotes so it could be given the once-over by the State Forestry Administration.

But why are local officials so scared of Xinhua reporters? Surely they are just cuddly little things who only say nice things about the Chinese government. Actually it seems local government officials are genuinely terrified of them, much more so than local newspaper reporters. A significant proportion - I have no idea of the figure - of Xinhua stories are for internal eyes only, passed up to the central leadership. Somewhere in Beijing, there must be rows and rows of filing cabinets containing stories written for senior officials by Xinhua journalists. One day these will all be made public and maybe then we can observe the true state of investigative journalism in China. For now, they have some serious dust-gathering to do. There is probably a whole drawer devoted to the brick kiln slavery scandal already. The consequences of these reports for corrupt local Party cadres are much more damaging than a local newspaper article could ever be. Often Xinhua reporters play the “I’ll tell on you” card to encourage local officials to start opening up. It is surprisingly effective.

The working week after a run of night shifts is luxurious, perhaps even equivalent to being served a glut of cardboard-free baozi banquets after being force-fed two-year-old zongzi for seven breakfasts in succession. Working 9am to 4pm means the story flow is light, the opportunities to discuss old journalistic adages - it was “jia chou bu ke wai yang” (something like: don’t spread bad news outside the home) this week - are numerous and I have left the building by the time the ministry “urgings” pour in. Basically, there is more time to think. This week a series of ”items” caught my attention but none of them were really worthy of the “whole post” treatment. So I thought I’d do a medley:

1) Maybe my nose for a news story has been bashed out of joint by too many “bilateral relations” epics. Maybe the last thing anyone wanted to do last Saturday afternoon was to look at Xinhua’s English wire service. But I have to admit to thinking this story about the Ministry of Education banning students from renting private accommodation off campus, released by Xinhua on Saturday, would be picked up by the foreign media.

The story was reported by the Beijing Morning Post but the paper did not detail the reasons the Ministry of Education gave for the new regulation, muttering something about safety. We found the MOE statement and the first four paragraphs were born:

BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhua) — China’s Ministry of Education has banned university students from renting private accommodation during their studies, telling all students that they must share four to eight-person dormitories.

In a notice issued on Friday, the ministry instructed all universities to make the dormitories “another front for political and ideological education” in order to create a “good climate for the students’ growth”.

The ministry told the universities to strengthen the administration of dormitories, in what it says will ensure the safety of students and facilitate communication between them.

It also ruled that students sharing dormitories should be classmates with the aim of making it easier for teachers to monitor students’ lifestyles outside the classroom.

A subsequent conversation with an intern, who is in her third-year at university, was interesting. She had read about the story in the Beijing newspaper and, describing herself as a traditional kind of girl, said she much preferred living in an on-campus dormitory. But she was visibly taken aback by the “political education” line from the ministry. “But it makes no sense, what does it mean? … If that was given as the main reason, I would find it very difficult to accept.” It was as if she was surprised that Chinese government departments still speak in such an antiquated fashion.

When I first started working at Xinhua I used to try and make every government statement sound human so the language wouldn’t sound so awkward. Officials sometimes do of course - it’s just that Xinhua has an outstanding ability to make them appear like robots anyway. But ministry statements are as dry as a Xinhua annual dinner (plastic cups of coke all round apart from the leaders who have red wine). So I suppose if this stiffness is not reported accurately, it may falsely appear that officialspeak is undergoing a shift to something approaching natural.

2) I often cringe at Xinhua’s clumsy treatment of the war between China and Japan. The worst aspect of this is when the veterans - who must have a multitude of fascinating stories to tell - are made to sound like government officials. Last weekend, former soldiers gathered at Lugou Bridge to mark the outbreak of the war against Japan in 1937. I received the following quote from a son of a commander who was killed in battle:

Every time I come here, the seed of hatred grows inside me, but hatred doesn’t mean we should seek revenge. In fact, to build a peaceful and harmonious world is a better way of remembering and learning from the past.

I felt guilty questioning the quote - the reporter had actually been given the rare opportunity to leave the office and conduct the interview himself - but it was just that word “harmonious”, the catchword of the present-day CPC. And as it turned out, he didn’t actually use that word although the sentiment was the same. He actually said, “To maintain world peace, we should learn from history.” The reporter said he hadn’t really thought about it - the allusion to harmony was subconscious.

3) The first line of a story from Reuters about dumplings stuffed with cardboard could have sounded odd if read too quickly: “Dumplings stuffed with cardboard and bogus rabies vaccines are the focus of the latest health scares in China, where the government has banned an industrial solvent used in toothpaste after a spate of global recalls.” Maybe it was just me but I was ready to throw my arms up in the air in indignation that fake vaccines were being put in my baozi.

It occurred to my colleague and I that the propaganda department should accept a portion of responsibility for creating a market for fake rabies vaccines, which has led to cases like this one:

Beijing was also investigating bogus rabies vaccines, the Beijing Times said, after a woman bitten by a neighbor’s dog injected vaccine she bought from a local hospital.

Authorities found the hospital had been selling phials of vaccine taken off shelves two years earlier for quality problems, the paper said.

We both recalled last year’s debacle in which the “crackdown” on dogs in Beijing, spawning the one-dog policy, was preceded by countless stories of how rabies was the deadliest disease in China for the sixth successive month and how ten people had died from the disease in Beijing. Too busy whipping up mass hysteria which had Beijingers piling into emergency rooms with minor scratches from their neighbours’ overexcited puppy, the Chinese reports neglected to mention that all ten fatal cases of rabies originated outside the city of Beijing, particularly in Hebei, and the victims had been brought to Beijing hospitals where they later died.

4) Thursday was a special day. It was the last Foreign Ministry conference for a whole month so the FM bods can enjoy their summer holidays. Which means the “China told A to stop meddling in its internal affairs” stories will be kept to a minimum until mid-August. As a result many of the staff members of the diplomatic desk take annual leave at this time. Which means that the “A met B in Beijing Thursday and said the two sides should hold hands for mutual benefit and work together to promote bilateral ties and further the strategic partnership of cooperation” scenarios will be thinner on the ground. Nice.

5) I can’t read Chinese which is a great source of frustration to me. But it does mean I can’t be tempted to read Xinhua’s Chinese-language service. However, I am all too aware of the depths of acceptability the output can reach because sometimes the worst of it slips through the net and is polished by a colleague who is leaving on Sunday. You can hardly blaming him for turning a blind eye:

Hangzhou, July 11 (Xinhua) - A British businessman with a fractured cervical vertebra was rushed through immigration procedures Wednesday at east China’s Ningbo City so that he could fly out immediately on a chartered plane to be operated in Singapore.

Immigration officials knew that Philip Morris, 31, had been injured in a road accidentin Ningbo and that every minute was precious for him.

Guards waited hours on Wednesday afternoon at the parking apron for Morris’ ambulance to arrive. A Singapore-registered plane landed at 4pm with two doctors onboard.

The guards finished border control procedures in less than three minutes on the parking apron after the ambulance arrived at 7.05pm and then helped move the stretcher and medical equipment into the plane.

Ten minutes later, the plane took off for Singapore.

Morris’ family members thanked the Ningbo airport border check officials for their aid.

A line that was actually deleted from the final version was that it was a particularly hot and humid afternoon - which makes the Ningbo officials’ achievements all the more remarkable. I sincerely hope Mr Morris underwent a successful operation and I must express sympathy for him and his family that his emergency was turned into a PR exercise of “Look how we helped the foreigner” by the people who were doing their jobs and helping him to get to Singapore.

It reminded me of a story about a friend who was in east China at the age of 18 in 1998 for a year. He left his jumper on a train, which carried on for a further 15 hours after he had left the train at Wuxi, his temporary hometown. He mentioned it to a lost property employee and someone personally delivered the jumper to him a day later in Wuxi. The local transport authorities contacted the local television station for the landmark handover and he still has the interview on VHS cassette.

6) The end of the week was signalled by this headline: “Ex-convict given death penalty for robbing mistress to death”. A man had hit a woman over the head with a brick, killing her, and then took her handbag. The reporter insisted the court tried him for robbery. It was one of those conversations that makes you doubt your own sanity.

Oh, Xinhua all is forgiven. I doubted you during my run of night shifts but you have bounced back with a story to make my existence seem acceptable. Well, ok you plagiarised the main body of it from a local news website based in Henan but never mind that. You showed an eye for a story and you did phone up and ask a couple of questions. You even welcomed my polishing comrade’s god awful pun in the second paragraph. And the cheeky last subordinate clause. I think it deserves a full spread (copy and pasted from China Daily website for IPR purposes).

Bounty on flies sets central China city buzzing

LUOYANG — The authorities in a central China city have set a bounty on dead flies in a bid to clean up their image and promote public hygiene.

But critics have swatted down the move, questioning the benefits of paying 0.5 yuan (seven US cents) per insect turned in at the Xigong district office of Luoyang city, Henan Province.

Xigong District paid more than 1,000 yuan (US$125) for about 2,000 dead flies on July 1, the day it launched the bounty, with the aim to encourage cleanliness in residential areas.

“I and colleagues believe it’s the best way to push residents to do more for their living environment,” said Hu Guisheng, the office chief, adding it had proved effective with the district’s 390,000 residents.

The payment scheme is the first of its kind in Luoyang, a medium-sized city of 1.55 million people, which is striving to earn the title of “state-level hygienic city”.

The “State Hygienic City Standard”, issued in 2005, has ten criteria for the award, including the prevention and treatment of disease-transmitting lifeforms, which requires hygienic cities to effectively control pests like rats, mosquitoes, flies and blackbeetles.

The Xigong District office has set up cash desks with signs urging everyone to “participate in the campaign against mosquitoes and flies” at the entrances to six residential compounds. The office staff have been busy in counting dead flies and giving out cash.

A passerby surnamed Ge was attracted by the red board at a compound. “I couldn’t believe anyone was willing to buy such disgusting things,” said Ge, who admitted his compound seemed to have fewer flies since the campaign was launched.

“I support the move,” said Ge.

However, not everyone agreed. A shopkeeper criticized the campaign, calling it an attention-seeking gimmick.

“It is a typical act of paying for an image, in this case the state-designated hygienic city title,” said the shopkeeper who would not give his name.

The bounty has sparked an on-line debate. An Internet user named “Jiejiaguitian” said that although the office had good intentions, the action itself had made the district look like a laughing stock.

“The key point is the government should encourage residents to clean up the environment so that no flies can live there, instead of spending money on dead flies,” wrote “Jiejiaguitian”.

Hu maintained the district was working for the common good: “It is meant to draw attention, but what’s wrong with that? The money is being spent properly.”

However, he would not reveal how his colleagues would dispose of the 2,000 dead flies, which were stored in the district office health department room.

I’m eagerly awaiting the follow-up stories on how Xigong residents are cultivating the most rotten food products known to man (except those in the polishers’ waste bin) to attract even more flies to the area, how street vendors are sacking off selling those infeasibly pink sausages and investing in huge crates of yellow plastic fly swatters, how a “mass incident” broke out, sparked by the protests of those employed to count flies and how people from all walks of life descended on Xigong with suitcases of dead flies in search of their fortune.

Given the official refused to reveal his fly disposal plans, I am staying clear of any garibaldi biscuits with a “Made in China” label.

UPDATE: The ability of google to come up with entertaining ”flies in China” links is truly astonishing. This guy could have saved the Xigong district authorities a bit of cash:

http://www.webtvhub.com/chinas-fly-slayer-video-mr-hu-is-a-one-man-swat-team/

I am on night shift this week. This can involve editing 25 stories in the space of six hours. The stories that arrive late in the evening are mostly ministry statements, accident reports and various “urgings” by vice premiers. Naturally, I can be a thoroughly inhospitable human being for seven consecutive days. Some nights I maraud the corridors debating the difference between “slavery” and “forced labour” in connection with the brick kiln (slavery) scandal. On others, I sympathise with my colleagues who have to knuckle down, cast talent aside and translate meaningless policy announcements into English. Sometimes, I just stop moaning and feeling sorry for myself, switch to auto-pilot and change the grammar as quickly as possible. Because when it boils down to it, that’s all I’m technically required to do. The rest is optional.

In this mood, I am rankled fairly easily by events or actions that make the whole process even more hapless. One reporter from the economics desk has started to ask me on a regular basis if it is worth translating certain Chinese stories from the domestic news desk into English. I am grateful for the consultation as it saves everyone a lot of time. I only wish I could get more excited about some of the topics but unfortunately 80.9 percent of them are rejected out of hand.

Bombarded by bumf as we are, even a snippet of information that sounds anything like news is a cause for a celebratory piece of dried pork. “What about this one - 80.9 percent of all products made in China for domestic consumption meet quality standards,” asks the journalist. Er … yep that tickles something. As long as your lead is 19.1 percent of all products made in China for domestic consumption do not meet quality standards.

No problem. The reporter writes a good story, I add in some background - something like “the latest embarrassment etc” -designed purely so the senior editor has something to remove and it is ready for release. Unfortunately, the released version went like this:

BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) — China’s quality watchdog said on Tuesday that a sample survey shows 80.9 percent of products made in China for domestic consumption were up to quality and safety standards in the first half of 2007.

    The survey covered 7,200 different products from 6,362 enterprises, with an emphasis on food, everyday commodities and farming machinery and fertilizers, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ) said at a news conference on Tuesday.

    The administration found that 93.1 percent of products made by large enterprises are up to standards — the figure was 84.2 percent for medium-sized enterprises and 72.9 percent for small enterprises.

    The survey revealed that 19.1 percent of products made in China for domestic consumption are substandard in the first half of 2007,moving down from 21.6 percent from a year ago.

    Tinned and preserved fruit and dried fish registered the lowest quality scores with key problems being excessive amounts of microorganisms or additives, the administration said.

    The quality watchdog cracked 23,000 cases of fake and low-quality food from December 2006 to May 2007 and a total of 180food manufacturers were shut down for making substandard food or using inedible materials for food production.

    Meanwhile, “99 percent of food exported to the United States was up to safety standards over the past two years, which is a very high percentage,” said Li Yuanping, a senior official in charge of imported and exported food safety in the GAQSIQ, in June.

After a year and a half at Xinhua, I still find this kind of thing difficult to swallow. It’s like saying “shhhhhhhh … just change it around nice and quickly, no one will notice, it’ll be fine, hee hee.” Unfortunately for this mode of thinking, the foreign media isn’t full of stupid people. The real story was picked up - why wouldn’t it be given the current uproar over anything with a “Made in China” label on it?! - here, here, here etc. The New York Times lead:

SHANGHAI, July 4 — China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country’s exports come under greater scrutiny overseas.

The argument is a tired one: Xinhua serves the Party. Everyone knows the foreign media will report the story correctly but it should not come from the government throat itself. And product safety is improving. Last year, the percentage of substandard goods was closer to 22 percent.

However, the China Daily report which focused specifically on food safety was even more blinkered. The headline was “Food quality up to standard” and it extolled the improvement in the safety of fruit juice, of which one in five cartons is apparently substandard. It even went as far to say:

Figures showed 92 percent of dried food and nuts were also up to required standards. Inspectors did not find any excessive use of food additives, a problem once common in dried food.

Brazen to say the least when Xinhua says:

Tinned and preserved fruit and dried fish registered the lowest quality scores with key problems being excessive amounts of microorganisms or additives, the administration said.

The final paragraph of the Xinhua article is the real kick in the teeth for the Chinese people, which of course include the editors who prefer to play the food safety issue down. The reporter was glad to see it had been kept in the article as a reminder that 99 percent of food exported to the United States was up to standard while Chinese people have to make do with less lofty figures.

I saw a story - which I deftly passed to my neighbouring polisher - at work the other day which will explain to those living in Hong Kong why the People’s Liberation Army soldiers that travel around the Special Administrative Region (I’m getting more politically correct by the day) are so unswervingly (to quote a popular Foreign Ministry adverb) friendly and polite.

The article featured an interview with a driver of a PLA truck charged with ferrying supplies to the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison from Shenzhen, who was “overwhelmed by capitalist Hong Kong” with its “high-rises, dazzling advertising hoardings and crowds”. Good job the guy had been living in Shenzhen, famed for being at the vanguard of China’s embrace of capitalism, or he might have died from shock. Anyway, as Xinhua reports, surveys conducted by Hong Kong newspapers before the handover showed that only 30 percent of Hong Kong residents supported the PLA’s presence. And the PLA’s self-consciously stern image wasn’t helping.

Whenever the trucks pass, people on the streets would stop to watch, and some would wave to the soldiers on the truck. But to maintain the PLA’s serious image, the drivers are trained to sit ramrod straight and look straight ahead when driving, Li recalled.

“There was little interaction between the soldiers and the HK people, and that alienated the PLA from the Hong Kong people.”

Revolutionary action was needed.

Soon the company incorporated waving and smiling into their daily training.

Some adapted quicker than others.

To train himself how to smile, Ma Wei, an introverted soldier from the vehicle transportation company who seldom smiles, bought himself a pocket mirror. Whenever he had a minute, he would take out the mirror and exercise moving the corners of his mouth upward.

Before long, Ma found he was smiling when he passed the Hong Kong control points, when he saw Hong Kong people on mission, and soon he got into the habit of smiling at his colleagues whenever he saw them.

The results are there for all to see.

They have an excellent image and excellent manners, just like all the other soldiers stationed here,” said one Hong Kong resident. “If there’s a single vegetable leaf left on the ground after they have unloaded the food supplies, the soldiers pick it up and put it in the trash bin.”

Actually, inanity aside, it was interesting to read that the PLA truckers are not allowed to set foot on Hong Kong soil other than inside the confines of their Hong Kong barracks.

We are not allowed to get off the trucks when we are on mission,” Zheng said.

His relatives have asked him many times to bring back gifts from Hong Kong. Zheng has a hard time explaining that he is not allowed to go shopping in HK. “They couldn’t believe me when I told them,” he said.

Clearly, the sight of the PLA down Hong Kong high street would still be a bit too much. Ah, such a waste of their new six-billion yuan uniform range that debuted yesterday. A report by AP on the General’s new clothes resembled that of a disgruntled Premiership football fan who has had to fork out another 50 quid for the new season’s kit which features a subtle collar change and an extra washing instruction label:

The refit received a preview during weekend celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese rule. Troops marshaled for public events wore a dark green camouflage design, although it wasn’t clear what new features the uniforms possessed.

The Xinhua report explained why the AP reporter was disappointed with first impressions:

Working from the”97 Style”, designers refined the cut and the sizing of the uniforms to enhance the appearance of the wearers. The new casual uniform for spring and autumn fit more tightly because they have been taken in the chest, waist and bust. Female servicemen will find their shoe heels have grown by a centimeter from the previous four centimeters.

Maybe the PLA should put replicas on general sale to try and recoup some of that cash.