Beijing Newspeak

There are few things more unseemly than when diplomatic squabbles overshadow the potential loss of human life.

On Monday, Xinhua reported 12 Chinese fishermen were missing “in south China’s Nansha Islands”. It said the fishermen were working on a fish farm in the Meiji coral islands, also known as Mischief Reef. Some of them were on board the ship “Qiongze Fishing 820″, which was anchored near the fish farm, according to a local Party official in Hainan. The location of the remaining fishermen was unclear. It emerged that the men were reported missing the previous Wednesday, five days before the information was released. The report said local fishery administration staff were searching for the fishermen and the boat.

Now seems a good time to mention the dispute over the sovereignty of this group of islands in the South China Sea. Western media refer to them as the Spratly Islands, Chinese media refer to them as the Nansha Islands. They are claimed either partially or entirely by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan. On seeing “Spratlys” in a foreign media report, one of my Chinese colleagues said, “Urr, I hate that.” Understandable. It reminded me of the reaction of a British polisher in the international department a couple of months ago when he saw the Falkland Islands being referred to as Islas Malvinas in Xinhua copy.

So two days after the initial Xinhua report, a very different version of events emerged in an AP report, which quoted the Philippine coast guard:

Twelve Chinese fishermen were missing after strong winds and big waves battered their two boats near a Philippine-held island in the South China Sea, the Philippine coast guard said Wednesday.

The Chinese Embassy asked the Philippines to help search for the fishermen, coast guard spokesman Lt. Armand Balilo said.

Chinese Consul General Guo Shaochun reported that the Chinese fishermen had called the China Maritime Rescue Center to ask for help after their boats encountered the waves. It was not immediately clear when or how they called.

Balilo said the fishing boats were presumed to have sunk in bad weather near Pag-asa Island - one of several islands held by the Philippines in the disputed Spratly island chain.

The coast guard has asked Philippine ships in the area to search for the missing Chinese. It already has a vessel in the vicinity, searching for 26 missing Filipino fishermen whose boat capsized in a storm Friday.

The location of the missing fishermen had shifted about 250 kilometres northwest to the island of Pag-asa, also known as Thitu Island, which is part of the province of Palawan, the largest province in the Philippines in terms of land area. Xinhua had not reported the Chinese embassy’s request for help because that would be admitting this part of the Nansha Islands was in fact held by the Philippines and not China. According to the Chinese consul, the fishermen had contacted the China Maritime Rescue Centre for help. The centre had remained silent.

For Xinhua to report the situation properly, the task would have to be given to the international department, which could make full use of its bureau in Manila. But handing the task over to the international department would be implying that this part of the islands was not under Chinese control. So nothing was written until the next day, when three of the fishermen were reported to have been found.

The details in the Xinhua report released on Thursday night were sparser than Room 101. There was no indication where the fishermen had been found. Had they been clutching on to wreckage for five days and survived? Who found them? What about the other nine? What did the fishermen say when they were rescued? And so on. The translator of the story contacted the official quoted in the report directly but he denied knowledge of anything. In the end, after polishing, the story adopted the appearance of an irritable note designed to make it clear that no information was being made available.

HAIKOU, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) — Three of the 12 Chinese fisherman who went missing in the Nansha Islands in the wake of Typhoon Hagibis have been rescued, according to the Hainan search and rescue center, but official reluctance to impart information has left details hazy.

The three fishermen were rescued by a foreign ship heading to Singapore, an official surnamed Zhong told Xinhua by phone.

He claimed not to know which country the rescue ship was registered to, the condition of the rescued fishermen or where they were found.

Maybe the “foreign ship” was from the Philippines and had been alerted to the situation by the coastguard. If so, China has gone a bit easy on the gratitude. By Friday afternoon, there were still no further updates from anywhere. As the writer of the story summarised so succintly: “Absurd.”

On Tuesday, a journalist friend of mine tried to fly from southern China to Shanghai. The whole process took 11 hours. My friend was told the People’s Liberation Army, those lovers of late notice, had imposed airspace controls over eastern China in order to carry out a military exercise (Note to editor: I didn’t learn this from Xinhua so the writing of that line does not constitute a sackable offence). The delays were substantial. Not that this information was released to the public. The airports - and of course Xinhua - were not allowed to divulge the reason for the controls by order of the Central Military Commission. Air travellers were instead fed a phrase sure to make them nod their heads in understanding, relax with an overpriced cup of Blue Mountain coffee and be happy for their plane to take as long it needed. “The controls have been imposed for unspecified reasons.”

The first Xinhua report, released on Tuesday evening, went like this:

Air controls imposed on Tuesday morning delayed at least ten flights at Baiyun airport in the southern city of Guangzhou and stranded about 1,600 passengers, sources with China Southern Airlines said.

The controls were imposed for unspecified reasons over eastern regions of China. Flights bound for Nanchang, Shanghai, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Dalian were postponed.

Flights started to resume from 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

The airline sent staff to provide water and food for passengers whose flights were delayed.

Airport sources said the controls might persist for days, and they advised passengers to adjust their travel plans and follow updated flight schedules.

I once again reverted to indignant polisher mode, demanding follow-ups for every day the controls were still in place. I realised the large majority of air travellers affected would be Chinese, and therefore unlikely to be regular readers of Xinhua’s English-language service, but the incident really bugged me for several reasons:

1) It reminded me of a similar occurrence at almost the same time last year. Shanghai’s Pudong international airport was closed on the orders of the PLA (China’s airspace is controlled by the military) but Xinhua didn’t even report the closure let alone the reason because the whole palaver was a “state secret”. By all accounts, the PLA had not given the airport authority any prior warning. Reuters reported a passenger flight and a cargo flight from Japan airlines had been forced to turn back to Japan. A textbook example to illustrate what can happen when the PLA is not answerable to the State. This latest incident again went some way to highlighting how much the PLA considers the people in its decision-making processes.

2) Xinhua seemed to have deemed the case closed despite the vague warning coming in the last paragraph that the airspace controls would last for days resulting in continued disruption. An awareness of an audience other than its own “leaders” has never been the agency’s strong point. In addition, the initial report only referred to delays in Guangzhou yet there were hundreds of flights affected all over eastern China. There was barely any coverage in the Chinese-language press and only a nib in Shanghai Daily.

3) I am British. Therefore I have an inbuilt mechanism to express fury at even the smallest delay to travel plans. Back in July 2003, chaos reigned at London’s Heathrow Airport due to staff strikes. Images of fuming holidaymakers dominated the television news for days. “Unspecified reasons” would have met with rebellion.

On Wednesay, after being told everything was back to normal in Guangzhou, I found myself saying to a colleague a line that was comical in hindsight but at the time so wretched. “I beg you, please, I beg you, please phone Shanghai airport. You can pretend to be a passenger if you want.”

So when the following update arrived in the evening, instead of it being a bog standard report which had three paragraphs of new information and little clarification (in reality this is exactly what it was), it took on the appearance of a Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative epic for which I felt compelled to lavish praise on the writer.

SHANGHAI, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) — About 7,000 passengers were affected as airspace controls continued in eastern China on Wednesday, this time primarily affecting Shanghai, according to sources with Shanghai Airlines.

By 4 p.m., 150 flights from the city’s two airports bound for Guangzhou, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Beijing and Dalian had been postponed.

The controls were imposed beginning on Tuesday over eastern China, for unspecified reasons.

Passengers whose flights were delayed are eligible for refunds. Those stranded in the Pudong and Hongqiao airports in Shanghai were provided with water and food.

The effect in Guangzhou, where 1,600 passengers were stranded at the Baiyun Airport on Tuesday, appeared less severe on Wednesday and confined to several flights to Shanghai.

It is unknown how long the controls will persist and airport sources advised passengers to adjust their travel plans and follow updated flight schedules.

Two more updates came over the next two days. The airports were reluctant to give out information so many of the quotes came from the airlines. Eventually the Civil Aviation Administration of China told Xinhua the airspace controls would end at midnight on Saturday.

Amusingly, the delays coincided with the implementation of new airspace regulations that came into effect on Thursday which opened up more of China’s airspace to civilian aircraft. They are expected to double the number of aircraft flying in China’s skies and reduce delays for travellers.

Reuters implicitly linked the airspace controls with the Kitty Hawk PR disaster in which China blocked the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk from a Thanksgiving visit to Hong Kong only to change its mind when it was too late.

Beijing’s move coincided with “airspace controls” introduced on Wednesday which the Xinhua news agency said affected the air travel plans of 7,000 people in south and east China.

The controls had been ordered for “unspecified reasons”.

(Note: the airspace controls were actually introduced on Tuesday). The only link I can think of is that the PLA denied Kitty Hawk access to Hong Kong because it was busy with its military exercise and didn’t want a US aircraft carrier in the vicinity. But then that’s the kind of wild speculation that gives blogs a bad reputation.

This article by the LA Times put forth a few theories on why Kitty Hawk was denied access to Hong Kong.

Pundits near and far sought to explain what appeared to be behind the Chinese government’s blunt yet hazy message.

Theories included anger over President Bush’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Chinese-held Tibet; displeasure over an announced $940-million U.S. upgrade to Taiwan’s Patriot II antimissile shield; a desire to send a message before an imminent Hong Kong election; and pique over a U.S. report that criticized Chinese espionage activities.

Whatever the reasons, this paragraph from the LA Times sums up the problems that arise from last-minute decisions such as those involving Kitty Hawk and the airspace controls (and the closure of Shanghai airport last year and the destruction of that satellite earlier this year …)

This is not the only time recently that China has made a military move without apparently considering its public relations implications. In January, the Foreign Ministry was caught flat-footed when the People’s Liberation Army destroyed an aging satellite, spewing debris in space and sparking questions about the PLA’s intentions, why there was no warning and even whether China’s senior leadership had been fully informed in advance.

A PR department is not coming to the PLA any time soon.

SIGNIFICANT UPDATE: Thanks to a link provided by Jim in the comments section, it would appear it’s one-nil to wild speculation. Xiao Qiang at China Digital Times has translated an article from Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper which starts like this:

According to sources in China, in recent days the East and South China Sea fleets of the People’s Liberation Army [PLA] have carried out a large-scale “campaign-level [zhanyi ji] naval exercise”; the two big fleets staged a joint combat exercise in the Pacific east of Taiwan; the recent aviation controls in east and south China, which are related to this major exercise, will end tomorrow. Further reports claim that the PLA fleet on exercise had a “chance encounter” with the USS Kitty Hawk battle group which was heading for Hong Kong.

According to foreign news agencies, US Pacific Commander Keating said yesterday that he was “perplexed and concerned” that the Chinese side had refused Kitty Hawk entry to Hong Kong, holding that this was “absolutely not positive.” Keating also confirmed that this was the second time in one week that US ships had been refused entry to Hong Kong; three or four days prior to the Kitty Hawk incident, two US minesweepers requested to anchor in Hong Kong to refuel, having been affected by bad weather in the South China Sea, but this was refused by the Chinese Government. Kitty Hawk has now returned to its base in Japan, and the officers and men were forced to spend Thanksgiving at sea on 22 November.

According to websites in the interior, the joint exercise of the East and South China Sea fleets was conducted east of Taiwan and north of the Philippine archipelago, and its objective was to envelop and make a pincer attack on Taiwan from the sea.

Umm, “a chance encounter”. I think the advance of military technology ruled out the likelihood of one of those quite a long time ago. If this is all true, then the US must have had a pretty good idea why Kitty Hawk’s Thanksgiving Party was cancelled all along. And most importantly Chinese air travellers have their answer …

So the State Council only managed to last seven weeks before deciding the sound of open debate about the Three Gorges’ environmental problems was more unbearable than fingernails on a blackboard.

On September 25, at a forum in Wuhan, a statement was released to Xinhua - with the blessing of the State Council of course - detailing the true fears harboured by officials and experts involved in the project. Writing the headline to accompany the Xinhua copy was a liberating experience, given the waves of positivity that have been flowing from the Three Gorges publicity department in recent years. ”China warns of environmental ‘catastrophe’ from Three Gorges Dam”. The floodgates had been opened and the international media was guaranteed a field day.

The candid discussion about the Three Gorges project in September is widely believed to have been conducted for political purposes. By releasing this news ahead of the 17th Communist Party Congress, Hu Jintao and co could distance themselves away from a project that they inherited rather than implemented. The change in heart did deserve applause no matter whether or not it was engineered. Ecological ills can’t be repaired by denials. But it wasn’t much fun for the Three Gorges officials attending the congress. They entered the Great Hall of the People as fellow Party members sniggered behind their backs at the woeful job they had been doing.

Li Yong-an, deputy director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, was one of the first to show discomfort at the public humiliation, beginning the backtracking on the sidelines of the Party congress in this report from Reuters.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Western media have exaggerated the landslides and deterioration in water quality that followed the start-up of China’s $25 billion Three Gorges dam, a senior government official said on Thursday.

“I was surprised when I read overseas reports of possible environmental catastrophes caused by the project,” said Li Yong-an, deputy director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee.

If in doubt, blame the foreign media. He must have forgotten that part of the statement approved for release from the September forum read like this:

“If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe,” officials said.

On November 13, Reuters released a flood of news stories and features about the Three Gorges Dam. A series of headlines contained the words “disaster”, “fear”, “wrenching” and “strain”.  This Reuters story headlined “China’s rising dam brings wrenching exodus” was the kind of report that really irks my Chinese colleagues at Xinhua. It consisted of an interview with one couple who did not want to be relocated - the husband was sick and they didn’t own the house they were living in. They had no idea where they would go and how much (or little) compensation they would receive. A couple of colleagues I spoke to about this were not denying this should be reported but they argued there were other tales to tell. One colleague has a friend whose family was relocated from the Three Gorges area to Qingdao. They were given an apartment, jobs and places in school for the children. They were delighted they could now be called city people. But then news agencies have never had the luxury of the dying brand of “Slow Journalism” I was reading about in the Guardian the other day.  The New York Times, on the other hand, still does, as demonstrated by this superb story on the Three Gorges published yesterday.

The raft of foreign media reports, mostly from correspondents who had travelled around the Three Gorges area, spurred Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, into action to save his face from being lost in the murky depths of the Yangtze. He contacted Xinhua to supply them with “an exclusive interview”. The story was written in English with no reference to the gloom and doom that surfaced at the September 25 forum, presumably in the hope a freak memory loss disease would cripple the globe and also tamper with the Xinhua database. The polisher cut and paste from the story released in September in order to supply some context to the about turn. The final editor dutifully deleted it.

The environmental impact of China’s Three Gorges dam has been less damaging than feared, a high-ranking Chinese official said on Thursday.

Speaking exclusively to Xinhua, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, said that “the (environmental) problems (of the dam), including landslides, trapped silt and algae blooms, did not go beyond the scope predicted by the feasibility report in 1991, and in some aspects, they are even less severe than predicted.”

“We are able to allow more silt than the designed volume to get through the dam, and no major geological disasters or related casualties have happened in the reservoir area since the water level was raised to 156 meters last year.”

“Some algae blooms did happen, but only temporarily in tributaries, and the main body of the water is kept above grade three as before,” he said.

Relocation of 1,570 businesses and 190,000 residents away from the reservoir has led to a substantial decrease in the amount of pollutants discharged, he added.

Remarkable really. The September 25 forum provided a platform for officials and experts to unleash worries that had been building up for years. It only took the State Council’s Three Gorges committee seven weeks to decide it wasn’t so bad after all.

(To skip to the actual point of this post, feel free to go directly to paragraph three) I haven’t been able to witter on very much in the last week or so. One of the reasons for this was a long weekend in Shanghai during which they were two highlights, both occurring in the canal town of Tongli, just outside Suzhou. The first took place in a riverside shack that served fish soup from nearby Tai Hu, which thankfully did not have an obvious blue green tinge. I submitted my order with minimum fuss to an old lady who suffered from the two extremes of dental woes - predominantly toothless but the few teeth that still clung to her gums protruded at near right angles. A young female Chinese urbanite then sat down and proceeded to ask what the old lady could provide in the way of speciality dishes. A wholly satisfying conversation for a foreign onlooker with dodgy Chinese then ensued in which neither party could understand what each other was saying and culminated in the city chick storming off in a sulk and the old woman shaking her head in bemusement as if she had just been pelted with Cockney rhyming slang. The second climax of the trip came in the way of the China Sex Culture Museum which is somewhat suprisingly based in the traditional town. As the visitor walks through the entrance, he or she is greeted by a metre-high, Gollum-like character made of stone, his face distorted in a state of anguish and his body wrapped in rusting chains. He has an 80-centimetre penis, erect and substantial in girth. The sign reads, “Not all the parts of the body can be restrained by chains.”

This flagrant digression can be attributed to today’s superb party shift at Xinhua. I arrived at midday for a gathering in a meeting room on floor 15 to welcome three new foreign experts to the fold. Crisps, fruit and popcorn were provided, as were several cans of Yanjing. Everyone was given a piece of cream cake on the condition that they made a wish for Xinhua. “I wish the foreign experts would not kill our stories,” was a common plea. It ended at 1.30 and I had to work a full four hours before a dinner was held with the more senior members of the department. This is of course featured much toasting of baijiu. On to the topic in hand …

As China Law Blog said in a recent post, the new Labour Law, which comes into effect on January 1 next year, is a “huge deal. Huge I tell you”. The significance of the law was summed up by Huawei’s decision to “ask” 7,000 of its employees who had been working for the company for eight years or more to resign. It was seen as a way to circumvent the new law which states that employees can sign open-ended labour contracts if they have worked for a company for ten years or more. These contracts will make it harder for an employer to fire its workers. The Huawei employees would then sign contracts ranging from one to three years but faced the possibility of having to leave the company when they expired. They were paid a total of one billion yuan in compensation but it was unclear how this sum was distributed. One of the employees to resign, according to Huawei, was its own president Ren Zhengfei.

The media quoted many experts criticising the act. The China Daily reported:

“I can’t understand why Huawei has taken such an unwise step,” You Yunting, a lawyer with JoinWay Law Firm in Shanghai, said.

“Once this problem is solved, new problems will arise and the costs will mount up.”

and:

Lu Tong, a researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences, said: “I think it’s a very bad example. Other companies will follow Huawei’s example and mess things up.”

Xiao Fangsheng, director of the labor law committee of the lawyer’s associations of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, agreed that Huawei did not have a clear understanding of the contract law.

“It tries to dodge the disadvantages of the open-ended contract but its efforts will turn out to be invalid.

“Even with the new contracts, employees can still enjoy the benefits of open-ended contracts because they never left the company and are still working for the company even if they quit,” Xiao said.

A few days later, Huawei hit back with a statement reported in China Daily, denying it was trying to evade the law:

BEIJING, Nov. 6 — The country’s top telecoms equipment-maker Huawei Technologies said Monday that the mass resignation last month by more than 7,000 of its employees was simply part of a program to boost its competitiveness.

The privately owned company is one of the first in China to give its staff stock options. However, it said it now needed to revise employment contracts to increase its efficiency, which had been damaged by both the stock option plan and its unique “job number” scheme.

Under the latter, workers who joined the Shenzhen-based company between its establishment in 1988 and 1999 were paid higher salaries and given a better benefits package.

However, in a statement issued to China Daily, Huawei said the stock option and job number schemes, which had initially helped boost morale in the firm’s early days, had in more recent times caused resentment among those not covered by them.

A day later the fun started in Xinhua’s English department. The reporter in Shenzhen tried to claim an “exclusive interview” in which he had somehow managed to persuade Huawei to comment on the issue. As Xinhua has a wonderful talent at doing, a story was formed which sounded like it came straight from Huawei’s publicity department - a hammed up version of the statement that had appeared in China Daily. It spoke of more than 6,000 Huawei staff being reemployed without explaining what had happened to the other 1,000 of the 7,000 reportedly forced to resign. No one could explain the discrepancy. I asked for quotes from some employees and they came suprisingly swiftly. Two employees were full of praise for the practice but I couldn’t help but feel suspicious. Yes, the total compensation figure appeared generous but no sums could be attributed to the individuals making the comments. It was also impossible to assess how reflective the feelings of these two employees were of the general opinion. In the end, the story was never released. It had too many holes. Once again the thread had been pulled and the whole yarn had been unravelled into something that didn’t stand up.

While the Shenzhen Bureau of Labour and Social Security had decided nothing particularly untoward was going on, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions launched an investigation into the mass resignations at Huawei. A story then appeared at Xinhua with news that the ACFTU had persuaded/told Huawei to suspend the resignation plan.

HUAWEI Technologies Co Ltd has agreed to suspend its controversial “voluntary resignation” scheme after talks with trade unions, the All China Federation of Trade Unions said on Saturday.

The federation said it called on China’s biggest maker of telecommunications network equipment to protect workers’ interests after its plan sparked fears that the company was trying to sidestep a new labor law.

There was no further comment from Huawei or any mention of what had happened to the workers who had already resigned, which by all accounts was the vast majority of the 7,000. Unfortunately, we will probably never know as I heard on the state media grapevine while down in Shanghai that the Publicity Department issued an order last week to cease all coverage of the Huawei employment issue and to make no attempt to question Huawei staff about it. Xinhua only reported the ACFTU findings because the trade union federation is an “official” source.

The fact that the media has been silenced has presumably got something to do with the influence of Huawei president Ren Zhengfei, formerly a senior People’s Liberation Army officer. Incidentally, an article in Forbes back in 2004 spoke of Huawei’s “opaque ownership”:

The company says 1% belongs to Ren (enough to land him on the FORBES list of China’s 200 richest people at $96 million) and the rest to a “union” whose principals Huawei has never identified.

Adding to the air of mystery, Ren rarely accepts press interviews (including the one requested for this article); instead, he dispatches insiders to public events. Set against a global wariness among businesspeople regarding China’s dismal record of intellectual-property protection, it’s an approach that makes Huawei a magnet for suspicion, even as it consistently delivers winning products (routers, switches and wireless networking equipment, among other things).

It seems the decision by the ACFTU will deter a raft of companies from following Huawei’s example which is good news for employees. Unfortunately the intervention may be too late for the employees of Huawei. According to Xinhua, the Huawei workers will have their say at a company conference scheduled for an unspecified date. Given the media muzzle it is unlikely we will hear what comes out of it.

Last month, the Information Office of the State Council released a few signed articles (as mentioned on this blog here) accusing the Dalai Lama of betraying Buddhism and worshipping evil cults ahead of his rendez-vous with President Bush. The author of two of these articles was Shi Shan, who, after a curious polisher pressed for a clue to his identity, was described as “a research fellow in Tibetan Buddhism who used to work in Tibet for a long time” and actually accompanied the DL and the 10th Panchen Lama to Beijing during the 1950s.

Yesterday, the State Council appeared to abandon the approach of seeking credibility through the opinion of a sole expert. It released a signed article entitled “Has the Dalai Lama truly given up ‘Tibetan Independence’?”, distributed by Xinhua and planted on page ten of today’s China Daily. The author’s name was given as “Zang Yanping” which can be translated as “Peaceful Tibet”. You have to admire their sense of humour.

I wrote a very foolish thing in a previous post. I referred to a story released on October 22 as “(seemingly) Xinhua’s final congress story”. It wasn’t. I somehow managed to forget about the in-depth ”analysis” of Hu Jintao’s speech and the exclusive report on how such a barnstorming piece of oratory came into being, which, in basic terms, was achieved by “extensively soliciting suggestions” and “pooling wisdoms” from Party and non-Party members.

My premature statement also failed to take into account what was happening in the international news department. One polisher from the English-language section spoke of the unbridled joy brought about by editing endless reams of congratulatory addresses from foreign heads of state and leaders of political parties on the successful conclusion of the congress and Hu’s reelection as CPC general secretary. An example. It was worse for those working in the Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese and Arabic departments though - they have to translate these reports rather than being mere grammar janitors.

Dress me up in an anorak, sellotape up my thick-rimmed glasses and call me a geek but I had a look through these congratulatory messages during a quiet night shift. And what fine records of China’s diplomatic relations they are. The first set of congratulations for Hu from China’s bestest buddies was released on October 22 in careful order. Kim Jong-il of North Korea, Nong Duc Manh of Vietnam, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Choummali Sayasone of Laos.

The following day, the first goodwill messages from Africa were released. Gabon, Zambia and the Seychelles. Then Syria, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Singapore. Nicholas Sarkozy appeared the next day as did Sonia Ghandi. The list goes on and on with well over 200 names, some fairly obsure such as Doureid Yaghi, the vice president of the Progressive Socialist Party in Lebanon. This did serve to highlight the absence of certain names from the list. No Bush or Brown. And no Merkel, who riled China by meeting with the Dalai Lama in September. Five years ago, the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was one of the first names on the list to congratulate Hu on his election as CPC leader.

You can read into it what you will I suppose, concocting theories about the order in which the names appear on the list, the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. I have no idea myself - you would need to sit down and study these lists going back a couple of decades, an act that does not tickle me into action. (It reminds me a bit of Ian Lamont at Harvard Extended, who has just completed his thesis in which he used “a computer content analysis based on state-run media content to evaluate China’s foreign policy stance towards Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping era”. His blog is well worth a read as, I’m sure, is his thesis). However, I did notice one significant omission from the stream of congratulators. Robert Mugabe. (He was present and correct in 2002).

Anyway, these stories are now gathering dust but the spirit of the Party congress lives on. Journalists from the main mouthpieces - Xinhua, People’s Daily, China Daily etc - are currently being sent all over the country to report on how the Scientific Outlook (the word “Concept” seems to have been ditched by Hu Jintao’s speech translators) on Development is being implemented in the provinces. A few lucky journalists have been given a month in Hainan to carry out this task, an opportunity that proves working for state media certainly has its perks. Presumably, most will lounge on the beach and knock up a report on some local entrepreneur who has invented a highly accurate toe nail trimming machine which highlights the wave of innovation that is spreading through the land. And why not - good luck to them.

The congress is still fresh in the minds of Xinhua journalists in the Beijing headquarters simply because they can’t forget about it. Workshops are being arranged in which Hu’s speech can be studied and discussed. It seems the “shi qi da” has taken a lot out of the whole agency in fact. In the last couple of weeks, we have welcomed three new polishing comrades which has coinicided with stories drying up faster than a thimble of water on the Saharan sand. Why the drop to around five stories between 9am and 4am every day? Some people cite post-congress tiredness, even those who didn’t report on it. Others say there are no stories coming from the local bureaus. Maybe everyone is too busy writing about scientific development. Apparently, at this time of year the bureaus in Xinjiang, Tibet and other western areas go into some form of semi-hibernation because of the cold weather. It’s like the West’s silly season without the frivolity.

At least there is a reminder of Xinhua’s congress glories though. As you enter the main building, to the left stands a huge collage of the front pages of the Chinese newspapers which Xinhua was entrusted to monopolise during the congress. A source of pride no doubt. And a beautiful reminder that all the front pages of the main Chinese newspapers during the congress period were virtually identical. And on that note, Happy 8th Journalists Day!

I would equate the enjoyment experienced by a Xinhua journalist tasked with writing a story relating to Tiananmen Square 1989 to biting into a hollow baozi. Staring into a situation with the neon words “NO WIN” looming large, the writer has to craft the story without stringing the numbers 1, 9, 8 and 9 together, making sure he goes light on the implication; just a sprinkle to prove the subject hasn’t flown over his head, but not so much that his pay check is chopped in half at the end of the month.

And so it played out on Friday with news that Peking University had removed public notice boards at the centre of the campus to the annoyance of many students. The boards were mainly used to advertise apartments for rent or for job hunting so the act of demolition came as a great inconvenience, especially as the students were apparently not told of the removal. The trouble with this piece of news is that it was a local issue at best - certainly front-page student rag material - but hardly worthy of international attention. What’s that? The boards have a political history, you say? Oh dear.

The boards served as the hub of student discontent during the Tiananmen democracy protests, displaying poetry and slogans denouncing the government. This of course was the main reason why this story was worth writing. Time to take the highly entertaining self-censorship game to a new level.

We came up with this lead paragraph:

Peking University officials have sparked controversy by removing public notice boards from the center of the university campus that were formerly used by students to express their political, cultural and academic opinions.

Personally, I thought this was fair enough. Clearly, after nearly two years at Xinhua, I am still drowning in naiviety. The published version:

Peking University officials have sparked controversy by removing public notice boards from the center of the university campus that were formerly used by students to get various informations and express opinions.

And that’s the risk you take. Push the political limits and the lead paragraph ends up being clumsy and grammatically incorrect. I had gone easy later on in the story and my wishy-washy paragraph remained intact:

In the 1980s and 1990s, students published their poems, essays and other thoughts on a wide range of social issues on the notice boards and reading the posters at Sanjiaodi became part of daily life.

Overall, given the restraints were tighter than King Kong’s (even they snapped eventually I suppose), the Xinhua effort was as good as can be expected and included this attribution to the Nanfang Daily:

A Southern Metropolis Daily report said the university had demolished the boards in order to earn good marks in the upcoming inspection by the Ministry of Education later this month.

I should mention the headline though, for which I take full responsibility. I came up with the rather embarrassing: “Peking University prompts debate by removing notice boards with political history”. In hindsight, I should have a cone stuck on my head and be hoisted up the flagpole on Tiananmen Square at sunrise. The amended version was the amusingly awkward: “Peking University prompts debate by removing notice boards for trim campus”.

The next day Xu Zhiyong, president of Peking University, made an announcement, reported by Xinhua and picked up by Associated Press.

President Xu Zhiyong was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency on Saturday as saying the recent demolition of “Sanjiaodi,” a triangular plaza in the center of the campus featuring the boards, was needed to maintain order.

“No university in the world has a place in such disorder,” Xu was quoted as saying, adding that the boards had been used for advertising space by exam cheats and companies selling shoddy products.

He has a point of course. Ministry of Education inspectors do not like mess. I saw a photograph of the area under debate and around the triangular lawn, leaning against the fence, were rows of fluorescent advertisement boards. They were indeed creating a major eyesore. I’m not sure why these weren’t just removed, leaving the permanent boards intact.

I have had only one pathetic triumph regarding the insertion of “1989″ into Xinhua copy. In September last year, Chinese film director Lou Ye was banned from making films for five years for submitting his film Summer Palace to the Cannes Film Festival without government approval. The film featured scenes from the Tiananmen 1989 demonstrations. Xinhua’s policy appears to involve referring to anything untoward that happened in 1989 as occurring in the 1990s. After some pesky polishing:

“Summer Palace”, the only Asian film in the main competition of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, features a young Chinese couple’s erotic and complex relationship against a backdrop of civil unrest in Beijing in 1989.

I did this not out of mischief but because it was fact. But, yes, a Xinhua polisher does lead a petty life. And is immune to editorial fines.

The Ministry of Public Security announced today at a press conference that “large-scale mass activities” in Beijing would not be banned during the Olympics, according to Xinhua (Chinese version). I had no idea this was even an issue and it’s just as well the MPS has shown leniency when you consider Xinhua’s definition of “large-scale mass activities”.

“Large-scale mass activities refer to those events with more than 1,000 participants, such as sports events, concerts, exhibitions, fairs and firework displays.”

Glad that’s been cleared up.