More internet blocks abolished

In China, when you predict trends, you always keep your fingers crossed, but this time I seem to have been very much spot-on.
My analysis said last week that ahead of the Olympics, the internet censorship would become much more subtle and illustrated this with a few new features. That trend has now continued as also Wikipedia, blogspot and others are unblocked. Danwei does not believe yet it will stay, but unless the new censorship system is an obvious failure (a partly failure would not be that bad, since the system has never been flawless) the url-blocks will be gone.

Who can go to the Beijing Olympics?

Danwei quoted earlier an entry in a newsletter by Access Asia, bearing the hallmarks of Chinabiz Speaker Paul French, where he wondered who would actually visit the Beijing Olympics. Unlike Paul, I have at least one friend who is very sure he will be there, but I must admit, that is not enough to fill a stadium.

So, I was a bit surprised when I noted a headline by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf announcing that almost all flights to Beijing for the Olympics in 2008 were sold out already. The Dutch are mostly pretty serious about planning their holidays and most households would have reached an agreement about their summer destination by Christmas. But one year ahead? Was here a hype brewing I had been missing?

The article itself showed the explanation. Almost all tickets to Beijing, about 6,000, have been bought for the Dutch Olympic Committee and related organizations. So, no hype, only a terrible shortage of flight tickets is developing. I do expect a similar pattern in other European countries. Even if European enthusiasts might want to come to China in that period, there are not enough tickets. Expansion of the flight capacity is hardly possible, so Beijing might have another problem in getting European to the Olympics. They cannot come, unless they arrive a month earlier.

Beijing Olympics has its own nail house

You might still remember those nail houses in Chongqing, Shenzhen and Shanghai? Angry house owners did not want to leave for the bulldozers. Well, Beijing has its own and today it made it to the International Herald Tribune.
Sun Ruoyu is fighting to retain a 1840 bakery that is unfortunately on the route of the marathon of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. They can make a detour, can't they?

Cleaning up Beijing before the Olympics

In my search for new speakers at our now very soon starting speakers bureau I bumbed into this website by Beijing resident Gilbert van Kerckhove, also advisor of the Beijing government regarding the Olympics next year.
On his weblog he describes the still unclear features of what will happen to Beijing during the Olympics and it is not a happy story.

Yesterday I met a lawyer with office in Jianwei SOHO. They received notice they will not be allowed to operate during 3 weeks. SOHO to be closed. Forced holidays. Hm…. interesting. Switch off your computers, lock the door and come back later. More puzzling, many firms in SOHO - and other buildings - will have a peak of workload during the Games as they will be involved in organizing events, assisting visiting foreign colleagues and clients, and much more.

Foreign residents are already planning a holiday in Thailand during the Olympics, he suggests. A much needed call for sanity.

China Development Brief ordered to close

Authorities in Beijing have ordered the leading publication on NGO-activities in China, the China Development Brief, to close its Chinese edition. reports Time at its blog.

Nick Young, founder of the publication that has been around since 1996, keeps hope:

"My hope is that these actions have been precipitated by zealous security officers," he says, "and that more senior figures in the government and Communist Party will realize that actions of this kind are not in China's best interest."

The publication was, according to the local security officials both "illegal" and conducting "illegal surveys". The closure, last week, comes at a time when China seems busy in trying to control non-governmental activities by foreigners, one year ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Earlier a US group also accused China of deporting over one hundred foreign missionaries from China.

While those acts are obvious going to be an embarrassment for the central government, zealous local official might have their own interpretation of what is needed in the country.

Nick Young remains faces a 5-year ban from China, but remains optimistic for the time being:

One irony of the moves against the publication is that the China Development Brief, whose motto is "to enhance constructive engagement between China and the world," has editorialized against what Young describes as "more or less openly hostile" Western criticism of China. "I do consider myself to be friend of China," he says. "I think it's a serious problem if the state cannot distinguish between friends and enemies."

Update: I just learned from a press release that the servers of this online publication are based in the UK, making it - if it has any nationality - a British publication that should adhere to British laws and regulations. When the authorities have any misgivings about an online publication, they can block it.
That is most likely why Public Security in Beijing got the local statistics bureau involved and included "illegal surveys" as another offense. I'm not sure how much meat is on that one. Anyway, even if the accusation by the Beijing authorities are illegal, it would not make the life of Nick Young much happier.

Child labor on the rise

picked up from Shanghaiist

Child labor is suddenly an issue in China, where it traditionally was not. Children - especially if you only have a few - are too valuable not to send to school. That is suddenly changing, partly because of a research report into companies that produce products for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The rumor was first denied, then admitted and so now there is a real issue.
Access Asia's Paul French focuses on the issue of the labor shortage in Guangdong:

What a visit to Guangdong would tell you is not a story of worker shortages, but rather one of misallocation. Factories with poor conditions often have no shortages, while cleaner, better and newer factories struggle to staff-up... CSR reps, journalists and sourcers visiting factories around Guangdong report that the age of workers appears to be getting worryingly low, as the search for low end assembly workers intensifies. Add to this some more bad news in the run up to the Olympics (see our advertisers nervous about Darfur piece last week) with stories on the BBC, in the Guardian and from lobby group Play Fair 08 claiming to have found children as young a 12 producing Olympics merchandise in Guangdong (click here). All very worrying.

Even worser charges come from Shanxi province where a group of angry parents have set children free that were used for slave labor. Forty of them were rescued from brick kilns. The action came with a petition on the internet and was earlier this week taken up by the state media. From the AP-report:

It said up to 1,000 boys were being held, but that Shanxi and Henan police had shoved responsibility for investigating onto the other side.
"Our children's safety is everything, but who will help us? With governments on both sides passing the responsibility, where can we go for help?" the petition said.

More at the Wall Street Journal.

Paul French is also a speaker at our upcoming speakers bureau. If you want to book him for a lecture, do let us know.

Press freedom with Chinese characteristics

Over the weekend I discussed with an editor of a Dutch magazine for journalists about press freedom in China, and especially the campaign NGO's have started accusing China of backtracking on its promise to allow foreign journalists do their work without any of the old restriction that were placed on foreign media after June 1989 ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Now, at this stage most looks rather positive, maybe with the exception of Tibet: a few foreign journalists have been called in by the headmaster of the ministry of foreign affairs after they went to Tibet without explicit permission. As far as I know this is the only place in China where all foreigners need permission to go to, and journalists a special one that is hard to get.
But otherwise, when journalists were detained for working in a region without explicit approval, one phone call from Beijing was enough to sort the local officials out.
Probably because their is not so much bad news to tell about the position of foreign journalists, in a strange twist now the position of Chinese journalists has become the issue.

"There is no justification for denying to Chinese journalists even the limited freedoms that their foreign colleagues enjoy," said Richardson. "If China is genuine about press freedom for the Olympics, it must also emancipate its own journalists."

First, the Chinese government has never promised Chinese media would be treated equally as the foreign once, so it is hardly decent to say China is breaking its promises. Further, talking about press freedom in terms of giving journalists more rights is not really helping if the ownership relations in the traditional media do not change. (And I do not see that happening.)
Anyway, the editor generously allocated 250 words to explain this story to a largely ignorant audience.
This morning I was reading this translation by ESWN, an interview in Du Daozheng of Yanhuang Chunqiu and a beautiful example on how China's media are changing. No clue how to summarize that in 250 words.

Beijing needs a few language teachers

The Beijing Olympics are around the corner, but there is still a lot of Chinglish that is close to hilarious. Paul French made this picture in a Beijing hotel and that was picked up by Danwei.

Hu Jintao beats Bush in Time top-100

Liu Qi next to IOC-president Rogge

Time magazine published its list of the top-100 most influential people and again I had to struggle through a list of people I have often never heard off. (Here is the list, here the link to Time.)

US president Bush has lost his position, while his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao still goes strong. Beijing Party Secretary Liu Qi made it and that seems closely connected to his efforts to get the Beijing Olympics in 2008 in place. Liu doubles also as the chairman of the Beijing Olympic Committee.
Of course Time had also to include one of the modern Chinese power brokers with weblogger Zeng Jinya, the wife of dissident Hu Jia, to keep the list nicely balanced.