The Debatable Land

Quote for the Day

Yes, I mentioned this post earlier. But...

But the very most obvious thing about today's XXXX is how internally varied and contradictory it is, how many opposite things various of its people want, how likely-to-be-false any generalization is...

XXXX here is China but it could just as usefully be the United States of America. That's something foreign correspondents and, just as importantly, foreign editors need to bear in mind at all times. And not necessarily only with regard to America and China either...

Fallows vs Brooks

And it's no contest: James Fallows dismantles David Brooks' column on China. His advice:

Take a little time and look around, David. The parts that don't fit what you theorized before arriving are actually the most stimulating.

That's in response to Brook's beloved pseudo-scientific hucksterism:

If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

Opening Proceedings

James Hamilton is quite right to suggest that there's no way London can compete with Beijing's spectacular and often beautiful (if also, as he says, "frenziedly gauche") opening ceremony. And he's correct to argue that we shouldn't try to. In any case, opening ceremonies tend towards the vulgar. When they are not bafflingly abstract they're unnecessarily, if revealingly, boastful. Hey, look at us! Hosting the games should be enough in and of itself, without any need for this rather naff sort of preening.

Now admittedly an absence of preening is itself a form of preening. But there you have it. My suggestion for the London 2012 games would be for the band of the Grenadier Guards to play a few tunes (including "Colonel Bogey", "The Dambusters March", "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag" and plenty of Elgar of course...) while the athletes march past. Then Her Majesty can cut the ribbon and declare the games open. Then we could have tea. No need for anything more than that.

At the very least this would permit one to argue that the games are about the athletes, not about putting a city or a country or a civilisation on the map. After a games pregnant with symbolism and all that, it would be nice to have an Olympiad that was just about the sport...

The pomp lies in the lack of pomp, old boy. That'll show 'em that we have no need for vainglorious boosterism. Take that!

Mind you, elements of the Chinese opening ceremony were appealingly amateurish. I had wondered what a pipe band was doing in Beijing. It turns out that the Chinese though the pipes and drums just the ticket to represent europe and, accordingly, the Mains of Fintry pipe band were recruited, largely because, one assumes, they were the fist pipe band anyone in China found. Still, a splendid, bizarre touch: an amateur Grade Four (ie, low-level, Grade One being the best bands) band from Tayside that received an invitation to the Olympic Games. No wonder they thought it a joke at first...

They were sent an e-mail by ceremony organiser Kexin Zhang in September last year after they were spotted performing in France.

But it took them a few weeks to respond to the invitation because they assumed it had been a wind up.

The musicians, who range in age from 13-63, describe themselves as focusing on friendship and family and by their own admission rarely compete in national championships.

Piper Eddie Wighton, who has played with the band for seven years, said he was stunned by the original offer. He said: "Never in a million years would I have imagined that we would have an opportunity like this. "It has been like winning the lottery. It seemed too good to be true but we looked into it a bit further and started to get excited."

Pipe Major Richard Smith, who has been playing for over 30 years, added: "It is a great honour and a pleasure. "My only trouble has been selecting 16 members to play from our band of 26 - no easy task but I was a very popular man for a time."

Local businesses and community groups got together to ensure the band, who are a registered charity, were kitted out for their debut.

Mr Wighton added: "We didn't even have a full set of uniforms never mind the funds to accommodate a trip to Beijing.

"We got busy writing off to everyone we could think of for support and were amazed at the response"

The Eeyore Olympics

Well, the Olympics have finally arrived. James Fallows has been my go-to China blogger for some time. I heartily recommend his blog to you and suggest it will be well worth reading over the next couple of weeks. Not for its coverage of the games as such, but because he has a sympathetic humanist's appreciation of what the games mean to China and the Chinese people. I also think he is right when he argues, as has done repeatedly, that it is in everyone's interests that these are successful games.

Of course, London is next. One of the remarkable things about modern Britain is the joyously jaundiced view many Britons have of the prospects for London 2012. Officially, the country is delighted to be hosting the games in four years times and it's true that many people were delighted that Britain was awarded the Olympics. When the time comes even more will rally round and hope it all goes well.

But it is still striking that so many Britons, I think, reslish the prospect of the London games being a complete, total and utter fiasco. It is impossible to imagine Americans thinking this way had the games been awarded to an American city. The public would be filled with a rah-rah-rah can-do spirit determined to show the rest of the world that this is how the Americans can show the rest of the world how America does these things. Equally, a country such as South Korea or, yes, China sees the Olympics as a means of demonstrating how far they have come.

They - we - do things differently in Britain. Fiasco is not a badge of shame but a confirmation of the extent to which everything is going to the bloody dogs. Perhaps this is just the Eeyore tendency in British life (a tendency that, in different fashions, crosses political divides) but people in Britain enjoy Eeyore and think he's thinking along the right bloody lines.

Equally, it's the case that we revel in cock-ups and fiascos. For instance, if we really wanted a decent train service we might insist upon having one, but actually we often prefer to have a sub-standard service that permits one to complain about it. As with the trains, so with the Olympics: we love being able to complain about the (entirely predictable) cost over-runs. Of course the games won't come in on budget and nor, secretly, do we want them to. A smooth, orderly, on-budget games would deprive us of all the enjoyment to be had from chuntering about the games and their planning. Where's the fun in that? We like being lied to because this confirms our sourest suspicions that it's all a bloody sham and, mate, what the hell would you expect?

And if, in the end, the fat is rescued from the fire and the London games, miraculously, are considered a success then this too can be considered a peacetime example of rescuing victory from the clutches of defeat. Not for nothing does Dunkirk still loom more largely in the British consciousness than D-Day. Arnhem too, for that matter. And that's to say nothing of Ypres, Loos and the Somme all of which are remembered even as the great victories of 1917 and 1918 are forgotten.

Sure, the Olympics are less important than those. But the mentality is the important thing here. Even so, what other country might seriously hope for fiasco when given the opportunity to host the so-called greatest sporting show on earth? I predict many articles making the cse that if only the Victorians were organising London 2012 everything would be running smoothly, on time and on budget...

Media navel-gazing

Panorama tonight:

The Olympic Games are special. The biggest show on earth - with an estimated global television audience of four billion people.

But hosting the Games brings extreme attention and extreme scrutiny.

Chinese Premier Wen Jibao promised that foreign media would be free to report on Chinese politics, economics and society in the build-up to the Games, a pledge at odds with the Western perception of China as a restrictive and secretive state.

In Panorama: China's Olympic Promise, reporter John Sweeney sought to put this assurance to the test as he travelled across China following the path of the Olympic torch.

Well, fine. But there's something mildly grotesque about the notion that the foreign media's ability - or inability - to report freely in China is the biggest issue of the moment. Sure, it would be nice if that were possible, but there's a whiff of solipsism about this. I'd rather watch a programme, for instance, that looked at what the tension Chinese reformers - or reform-minded Chinese - may feel, caught as they are between, I imagine, wanting the games to be a great success (for reasons of self-esteem and national pride) and the fear, again I imagine, that a successful games may set back, rather than enhance, the prospects for reform and greater openess, bolstering the status quo and perhaps even emboldening the regime... I don't know any of the answers to any of this, but that would seem a bigger, more interesting issue than whether foreign journalists can move freely or access the BBC's website inside China...

How America is just like China...

James Fallows has a very interesting post about what it's like to be a foreigner in China, in which he writes:

I think I now can explain why, despite the pollution and congestion and overall ceaseless hassle of big-city life in China, I always tell friends or visitors that I "like" Chinese people in general.

The reason is that, most of the time, people in China treat me as ... a person.

Not always and in every circumstance as a foreigner, though I obviously am that. I hear the Chinese words for "look, a foreigner!" and feel the general ripple of outsiderness much less often than I hear or sense the counterparts in (richer and more sophisticated) Japan. In some rural areas, my wife and I have been the first foreigners that locals had ever seen in person. They were interested but got over it.

What I find interesting about this is that it's pretty much how I felt about being a foreigner in the United States.(Obviously my experience in the US was atypical, but...)

Yes, I would explain to sceptical friends in Britain that I "liked" Americans in general and that, though strikingly different in some particular ways, they really weren't the alien species you might imagine them to be if you merely listened to or read the grosser elements of the British media. Even these "neo-conservatives" or, less frequently, these "libertarians" were not always, necessarily, or automatically candidates for the loony-bin. Nor too were those Americans who, for reasons best known unto themselves and their maker, believed in God, figures who merited only condescension and ridicule. There was, contrary to rumour, life in Flyover Country. These people may be, by our way of thinking, odd but that don't mean they're merely there to be patronised.

And, generally speaking, I never felt that I, as an obvious foreigner, was often there to be patronised either. For sure, location, as the estate agents say (realtors in Americanski), matters, but in my experience folk in small-town and rural America were interested in one's presence but soon got over the idea that there was a foreigner in town. They were pleased to see you, for sure, but it didn't make or validate their day that you were there. And why should it? It would be terrible if it did.

There were moments in which I stuck out and doubtless, in my outsider's zeal, pressed the matter too hard, straining my knowledge of, for instance college football (Go Blue!), too far. But what remains with me is the easy acceptance, the idea that anyone could be welcome at as American-as-apple-pie institution as the pre-game, RVing tailgate. You're from Scotland? Great. Now have some ribs. How much will Michigan beat the spread by today. Remember, we're playing Penn State... I could have been from New York City, where college football is a foreign sport...

In fact, the only town in the United States where this ever seemed an issue was Washington DC itself. You would be mistaken if you thought that the Capital of the Free World and its inhabitants would be above such concerns. Perhaps it is for many foreigners. All I can say is that I was surprised by the number of occasions in which, even in this city well-stocked with professional and other, more permanent, immigrants, the idea that one was from Scotland occasioned a degree of incomprehension. Usually it would go something like this:

"So you're a journalist? And you write for a Scottish paper?"

"Er, yes."

"So what do you write about?"

"Well, this is Washington so I tend to write about American politics..."

"You mean people in Scotland are interested in what happens here?"

"Um, some of them are. Sometimes anyway."

"So you write about Nancy Pelosi?"

"When I have to, yes. But mainly about the White House and the next presidential election. Folk back home have this quaint notion that it sort of matters to all of us - whether we be Americans or not - who the next President of the United States is. Plus, you know, you have to love the circus: it's P.T. Barnum does politics..."

"Cool..."

In that respect, DC was the most provincial place in America. New York City, of course, was very different. There, one sometimes felt it was required to be a foreigner to fit in with the ceaseless ebb and flow of city life. Most importantly - and most refreshingly - nobody gave a damn where you were from or what you had done before. All that mattered - and perhaps this is a foreigner's fancy - was what you were planning to do once you were in the United States and, more specifically, New York City. New York, in that respect, offered a blissful anonymity. Nobody, it seemed, is really an outsider in New York City. That, of course, is one explanation for the thrill of the city. It's a place for reinvention just as, I suspect, Beijing or Shanghai must be to thousands, perhaps millions, of Chinese.

And in one respect New York is America writ small: it is a self-contained unit, large enough and sufficiently confident in itself and its culture as to be able to absorb or, if it chooses, ignore any outside influence. Paradoxically it is an open yet hermetic society. That's its genius. Even today, at its best it is too busy with the business of being New York - or, to extrapolate, America - to worry too much about anything else. In much the same fashion, I imagine China is too busy being China (On the March!) to worry too much about anyone who isn't Chinese, let alone what they might think of China... In this sense, size - and a communal sense of improvement - matter. This can be refreshing, liberating stuff for the outsider.

Foreigners often mock Americans for their ignorance of the world outside their borders while forgetting just how vast those borders are. We forget  - or choose to ignore - that even in this homogenised age there's something startlingly different about New Hampshire and New Mexico, Wisconsin and Louisiana. We forget that you can travel across  - and through - cultures while remaining on US territory. And we forget that the American people have, by and large, a startling capacity for generosity, hospitality and, if it comes to this, forgiving you the mistakes you made in your previous, non-American life.

If all goes well, hopefully we may one day be able to say something similar about China.

Adventures in Marketing

Lots of good things come from China, but this is magnificent. Perhaps James Fallows can do a series of posts on counterfeit Chinese whisky?



Via, here, here, here, here and here.

Department of Fancy That!

Like Philip Salter, I dinnae often agree with Gordon Brown. But fair's fair (especially the morning after a brutal by-election thumping), here's some of what the Prime Minister had to say at the Google Zeitgeist conference  this week:

The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy that are preventing prices for people that at are at a realistic level, and preventing people from producing in countries and continents like Africa at a level that they should. And we need to have flexible markets there.

Also this:

So here we have this contradiction. We know that the only way we can have a successful globalisation is following the principles of your industry - open, flexible, inclusive, empowering. We know also that public sentiment, just as at other times of rapid change, is moving to be protectionist.

So what do we do about it? It seems to me pretty obvious, that we have now got to put the case for globalisation. First of all we have got to show people that the growth in the world economy as Chinese and Indian people become consumers is going to be very substantial in the years to come. I expect the world economy to double in size in the next 20 or 25 years, and even although we are going through the credit crunch and growth is faltering in America and Europe at the moment, we must not lose sight of the basic optimism of a world where producers become consumers in Asia and the world economy is going to grow at a very rapid rate.

The second thing that I think we can tell people that is about an optimistic view of the future is of course this - that there are huge opportunities for people in every continent of the world. It is estimated that there will be a billion more people in skilled or professional jobs within the next 20 years. So the opportunity for social mobility, not just in China or India, but the opportunities for people to make the best of their talents in countries like ours and in America and across the whole of Europe are enormous indeed.

Whatever else one may say about him, Brown is on the right side here. and I'll just add that it's refreshing - after spending five years in Washington where, it sometimes seemed, Sino-Panic was the coming mania - to see a significant politician welcome the idea of millions of people across Asia (and Africa) being able to dream of a better, more comfortable, option-filled, life than their parents ever did. That's a great thing indeed and something that merits celebrating in its own right, free from any calculation of what our own economic interest might be in the matter. (Though happily, the rise of the east is also good for us in many ways. Hurrah!)

The Brown Chronicles: The Laughing Stock Years

Memo to Gordon Brown. This sot of caper explains why people are beginning to think you are in fact a fool:

Gordon Brown will not receive the Dalai Lama in Downing Street in an effort to avoid confrontation with China over Tibet, The Times has learnt.

The Prime Minister will, instead, see the Tibetan spiritual leader in Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, enabling him to claim to the Chinese that he is receiving the Dalai Lama in a spiritual rather than political capacity.

What is the point of this nonsense? It's like the decision to sign the Lisbon Treaty but not in public with the rest of the european leaders or, as Mr Eugenides reminds one, of the Olympic Torch fiasco. It convinces no-one and makes the government look ridiculous.

Meanwhile, let's remember that though the Dalai Lama was received at Downing Street by Tony Blair and John Major, though Angela Merkel met him at the German Chancellery and George W Bush showed him round the White House, the title of Gordon Brown's last book is Courage: Eight Portraits. Clearly it's no mistake that a self-portrait ain't among 'em.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, Fraser Nelson almost feels sorry for Brown (but not quite!), while James Kirkup finds Frank Field asking: what's the point of Gordon Brown? Er, good question.

Defending San Francisco!

I see that heaps of folks are having fun with this sign, recently displayed at a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco:

It is possible of course, that our friend here doesn't know that the 1936 Olympics were held in Berlin*. But isn't it also possible that our friendly demonstrator is actually asking an excellent question: would we in fact have permitted Nazi Germany  to host the Olympic games? I suspect we would, since, a) the games were awarded to Germany in 1931 and b) the Germany of 1936 was not, quite, the Germany of 1938.

In any case, surely the point of the poster is in fact to compare China to Nazi Germany, not to display the protestor's historical ignorance. Why, the poster may be saying, are we not holding China to a higher standard? Shame on us for not doing so. If we would not permit the games to be held in a country such as Nazi Germany, why are we permitting them to be held in China? Now you may think this baloney and typical hippie nonsense, but it does get to the guts of all the questions over who should be awarded the games in the first place (eg, Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984, Beijing 2008)

At least that's what I think it's trying to say: sadly, of course, it's always much more amusing just to laugh at Californians...

*In the light of recent rumpuses, it's worth remembering that it was the Berlin Olympiad which, I seem to recall, also marked the "resurrection" of the "ancient" tradition of the Olympic Torch's journey from Olympia to the host city. Each time it's lit we tread in the footsteps of Josef Goebbel's imagination, flair and sense of pageantry.

PS: Berlin beat Barcelona for the right to host the 1936 games. When the decision was made, in 1931, it's perfectly possible to imagine how it must have seemed a fitting, symbolic return for Germany to the family of nations. By 1936, of course, Barcelonans had other, more pressing, matters to deal with. Daft hypothetical of the day: might the Olympics have prevented or delayed in any way the Spanish Civil War? It seems unlikely, but...

Good Day in Paris

The BBC:

Paris protests mar Olympic relay

This, naturally, is entirely incorrect. The problem would have been if there hadn't been any protestors.

Still, the BBC, which is sending more than 400 staff to Beijing, is heavily invested in the Olympics and keeps insisting that London 2012 is something to be jolly proud of whereas much of the population wished the IOC had handed the games to Paris instead.

Why oh why oh why indeed?

Is this Glenn Reynolds post a plea for more coverage of Tibet or less of Palestine?

GOOD QUESTION:  Why Do Palestinians Get Much More Attention than Tibetans?

But, just perhaps, the Israel-Palestine question receives lots of coverage because it's a question, at root, of competing rights, not because the media has an incurably anti-Israeli bias or is, in this instance at any rate, acting in an especially hypocritical fashion.

The other answer, of course, is that readers, are much more interested in the Middle East than they are in China and Tibet and, consequently, this is just market forces at work. Shocking!

Department of Appropriateness

From James Fallows' Tibet-blogging:

CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV)

Lots more interesting stuff here and here.