March 19, 2008

• China Blog: Day 528

  10:14 Beijing Time

  Phrase Of The Day: Qi guai ji shu yue (A strange few months…)

  
  Hey there, folks! Been a while, huh? In truth, I just seem to have lost the blog bug lately. I think it’s a combination of the hassle of breaking through the Great Firewall every time I want to post, and writing for a living anyway. I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but I just couldn’t be bothered to blog, and I think this has been a large part of my unhappiness here in Beijing.

  So from here on in, I’m going to make a special effort to blog regularly once again. Whether I will succeed has yet to be seen. One thing I do know – this weekend I’ll be putting up a bunch of pics on Flickr, and I’ll post ‘em here.

  For a quick summation of my life in the past five months, my co-author and I finished writing the Sichuan book back in October. Since then it’s been a nightmare getting the damn thing to publication, and now the final release is caught up in a dispute between Sam and Myra, our publisher. More to come on THAT story later. Once the manuscript was finished I embarked upon a brief career as a freelancer, writing for That’s Beijing and a few other places, before landing a job as Editor-in-Chief at Bilingual Time, China’s largest bilingual current affairs magazine.

  Outside of the professional life, Fio and I got engaged back in December.We’ve not set a date yet – heck, we don’t even know where we’ll be in six months – but at the moment we’re considering a destination wedding in Thailand.

  Okay, I think that’s most of the important stuff covered. Now, back to the blogging!

  It’s odd being in Beijing at the moment, particularly working in the media. In the run-up to the Olympics, the city is developing this almost-palpable aura of excitement and anticipation that seems to be ever-present. Now that the bitter Dongbei winds of the winter months are drawing to a close and we have a brief grace period before the sandstorm season kicks in, Beijing’s starting to look really nice.

  Except, of course, for the ever-present haze of smog that blankets the place. This weekend we had a rugby tournament and, by some miracle of nature, had the most beautiful clear blue sky I’ve seen in Beijing, ever:

  

  Y’see what I mean? That’s a sky worthy of Somerset, right there. Everyone I spoke to commented on it – there were even a bunch of lads who flew out from London for the tournament who were amazed at how clear the air was. I was chatting to one of the players and he said “All we hear about back home is how dirty and polluted the air in China is. I’m shocked at how clear the weather is today.”

  This spell of clear weather lasted right up until Tuesday morning, at which point that delightful cloud of particulates came rolling back into town:
  
  

  And this is a fairly mild case. I swear, the pollution is Beijing’s biggest problem, and the main reason why I dislike living here. Beijing is a beautiful city, and on a nice clear day it’s a fantastic place for a stroll. Even on the slightly-smoggy days (like today) it’s not too bad – I’ve certainly seen worse in China. But when the smog really settles, this place is hell on earth. Pollution headaches, black snot and runny eyes are all far too common here. It’s a shame, because the smog really does kill the beauty of this city. I’d like to see how they deal with it during the Olympics, too…. I’m not sure if even the drastic measures they have in place (taking half the cars off the road, using artillery to lob silver iodide into the sky to make it rain, etc.) are going to be enough to guarantee the month of “blue sky days” China has promised during the Olympics. We can but hope, eh?

  Speaking of the Olympics, yet more calls to boycott them from Reporters Sans Frontieres and the French Government, adding their voices to German Athletes and… er… Richard Gere over the clashes in Tibet this week. News from Tibet has been fairly sketchy thanks to the massive crackdown on journalists reporting from the region, but a couple have made it past the police checkpoints and the security cordon around the area. Thing is, despite the claims of heavy-handedness, in a lot the images I’ve seen it’s the Tibetans who are causing the violence. In this series of photographs from The Guardian, there’s not a single shot of the reported “heavy-handed military action”, but there’s plenty of Han Chinese getting beaten with shoes and sticks. I’m pretty certain China’s not blameless for the violence, and I’m sure that the full story hasn’t been told, but from what I’ve seen so far, there’s a fair amount of responsibility on both sides for what’s kicking off.

  That said, some of the YouTube films of the riots and the way they’re being handled are pretty damn shocking. It’s an ugly situation across the board, and it’s something that the Chinese government is going to have to handle pretty damn carefully if they want their beloved Olympics to go off without a hitch. Will a boycott help the Tibetan people? Maybe, maybe not. Beijing has shown that it has absolutely no intention of relinquishing Tibet, or even granting it autonomy – but if anything is going to get thair attention, the Olympics are a good place to start. Should they be used to make a political point? The IOC doesn’t want the Olympics used to make political statements, and many would agree that they shouldn’t be and that a boycott would be unfair to the athletes, but others argue that this is the only way to make China sit up and take notice.

  I’m certainly very interested to see how this plays out.

  • 11:59 pm
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