The Sky is Falling! Fo' Realz!

Chinese New Year in Beijing is hard to encapsulate in a blog post. Really hard. Thankfully a friend of mine went through the trouble of trying to document last week's arrival of the Year of the Dragon on video for the New York Times:



It's an awesome job by Jonah and his merry band of videographers. The only complaint that I have about it is that he was not able to successfully bend the laws of space and time and actually transport viewers to where we who were lucky enough to be in Beijing were that night.

As I have for the past 3 years I organized a gathering for the local Couchsurfing community and visitors from out of town. The result was a raucous, rollicking bash that climaxed with us joining tens of thousands of people gathered around (and on) frozen Houhai Lake around midnight for a pyrotechnic display like none other. It seemed like everybody in this city if 20 million people was shooting off fireworks at once. The sky above my head was alive with light and the horizon in every direction was sparkling with glittering explosions. The noise was deafening.

I took some video myself on Chinese New Year's Eve 3 years ago. It's nowhere near as good as Jonah's stuff, but I was on a hutong rooftop and you can get an idea of the overwhelming sight of fireworks exploding in every direction all at once:

I would HIGHLY recommend everybody putting "Be in Beijing During Chinese New Year" on their Bucket List. This really puts the 4th of July to shame and, frankly, I wonder why we tolerate such comparatively miniscule displays on our national day. Then again, we in the US have only been around for 230-odd years. The Chinese have been at this for a few thousand. Maybe we'll get the hang of it after another millennium.

China in 10 Minutes or Less

Here's a great video that came out last fall. It's a wonderful overview of what's going on in China, its history and interesting highlights about its culture. I love it.

China's Lack of Cultural Relevance in the West

An interesting column ran in yesterday's New York Times, noting China's "charm offensive" of recent years and their attempts to build up "soft power" that can counterbalance the US in much the same way as their economic, political and military strength. Unfortunately for them it's not working.

"[President] Hu was saying that China was under assault by Western soft power — the ability to produce outcomes through persuasion and attraction rather than coercion or payment — and needed to fight back."

"But for all its efforts, China has had a limited return on its investment… A poll taken in Asia after the Beijing Olympics found that China’s charm offensive had been ineffective."

This piece is very good at explaining the Chinese problem and noting how they've been trying to address it, but it doesn’t get into WHY Chinese cultural influence hasn’t been growing outside of China.

And that's, basically, because a lot of what is produced in China isn’t produced for the West. At all.

Building Confucius Institutes around the world and opening a 24-hour news channel is all well and good, but if cultural production is only being done for internal consumption then nobody outside of your market is going to buy into it.

Take films, for example. There is a prodigious movie industry in China, but other than the occasional crossover hit, such as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", there really isn’t much that is coming out of China that appeals to Western audiences.

The same runs true for video games, music and TV. While the Chinese are busy gobbling up all of the World of Warcraft, western club dance hits and Prison Break that they can cram into their brains, there's precious little flowing in the other direction. The closest thing to a hit Chinese TV show that we've seen in the west has been Firefly. (And even that only lasted 13 episodes – stupid Fox network.)

And this is a shame, because Chinese culture is quite beautiful and rich. Unfortunately, the creative juices of a majority of the artists in Mainland China are being squashed by the government's need to censor content. The result is a tragic dearth of Chinese cultural products being consumed in the west.

But there are exceptions and proof that art and culture from China can be successful outside of the Middle Kingdom.

The Flowers of War, a recent film starring Christian bale, is a good example of how movies can be made with both a western and Chinese perspective. The film is about 40% in English and showcases a main character (and actor) who doesn’t speak Chinese. The filmmaking is first class and the result is a gorgeous, haunting film that is accessible by both Chinese and western audiences.

I've got some friends who would be really upset if I didn’t mention the Chinese music scene. There are a handful of bands and artists who are doing their best to mix elements of Chinese culture with western musical influences. And they are awesome. Among my favorites are Hanggai from Mongolia, who mix traditional throat singing with hard rock, and my good friend Miss Melody, whose songs combine classical Chinese poetry-inspired lyrics with western electronic beats.

Here's a sample of Hanggai:

And here's the lovely Miss Melody looking all sultry on the streets of Beijing:

I don’t know what the secret formula to getting more Chinese flavor to sprinkle into western culture might be, but with the government here not very permissive when it comes to pushing boundaries, it will be a while before you see any breakout stars from the Mainland start hitting it big in the west. And that's a damn shame.

Ignoring The Facebook in The Room

A great post popped up on Fareed Zakaria's GPS blog today. In it, Anne-Marie Slaughter opined about how Public/Private Partnerships are playing a larger and larger role in foreign relations and how their new importantce seems to be transcending domestic US politics.

"The political argument for PPPs is that they stretch scarce government resources and ensure that they leverage other contributions of money, expertise and other in-kind resources. The initial emphasis on PPPs came from the Reinventing Government initiative under the Clinton administration, but the George W. Bush administration was also enthusiastic."

A really nice piece (Zakaria's blog is always fantastic place to find intersting takes on what's going on in the world), but I think that it completely ignored the biggest reason why this evolution is occuring: Social Media.

I think that public-private partnerships are going to continue to grow in importantce when it comes to the "heavy lifting" of foreign policy (i.e. nuclear proliferation, etc.), but this is coming out of a reality that has existed for several years but has only recently snuck up on the career politicans and the diplomatic corps: Governments already matter less when it comes to foreign relations.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to maintain relationships regardless of geographical or political borders. Other sites, such as Couchsurfing, encourage and facilitate real-world interaction and relationships, which Facebook and Twitter then help to maintain/deepen. The role of government in defining or shaping a person's iteraction with a country (or its people/culture/economy) is shrinking. Fast.

For instance, China's relationship with the US has little real effect on me here in Beijing. I don't interact with the government nearly as much I interact with people. Whether or not Obama moves troops to Australia or if Vietnam invites US naval vesels into their sections of the South China Sea has very little influence over mine and my friends' relationships. Whether Putin and Medvedev actually hold fair elections in the coming months doesn't effect my relationship with my girlfriend or our good friends in Moscow.

Sure, there are measures that countries can take to cut off peoples' access to one another or to social media and money, but these are extreme cases and outliers (North Korea, Iran). Travel has never been more accessible and the flow of information and capital has never been so proliferate.

In the near future you'll see governments sliding towards placing a greater emphasis on two items in their foreign policy stances: 1) The tracking of interactions between their citizens and another country's (not necessarily in a nefarious way, but in a similar way that they currently track financial transactions - see this fabulous map for an example of how this could work) and 2) a focus on interacting with another country's people directly. Even today the US is having more of an influence in Iran and Syria than it has had in decades by dealing with the PEOPLE there instead of the strongmen.

In the near future foreign policy will be directed more by people's interactions than the policies of governments.

Another Brick in the Pay Wall

The journey from free news to pay sites is well underway. The latest media giant to make the switch is my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, and I'm dreading it.

Boston.com has been my go-to site for news from home ever since I moved overseas. It's not my homepage (hello, Google!), but it's always the first site that I hit every day after checking my e-mails. The new pay system will essentially sequester all of the newspaper content behind a paywall leaving Boston.com with AP wire stories, bloggers and the Sports section, which will remain free and fully accessible. In addition, Boston.com will be able to feature up to 5 stories from the newspaper each day on the free site, but that's all.

This is frustrating for me because I've been a regular Globe reader since the 4th grade and I was even among the last generation of paperboys for them I the late 80s. Today it remains one of my last links to my hometown and what's going on there. Maybe I should have cut the cord years ago, but I've never been able to walk away from it completely. This may do the trick, though.

I'm a bit of an unusual case since I live overseas (I doubt that the folks at Boston.com have a very large expat demographic that they're worried about), but I'm not even sure if I could justify the cost of paying for the "paper" version if I was still living in Boston. Frankly, it doesn’t pass the smell test for me: Access will cost $3.99 per week, but you can subscribe to the Sunday paper for $3.50 per week and get in that way; it's a pretty obvious ploy to increase Sunday circulation.

Everybody knows that newspapers need to make more money somehow, but this paywall doesn’t feel like the right way. It's basically a retrenchment to the physical paper; it's a step backwards when I think that they should be expanding into different forms of media. They should re-open their Washington bureau and align with outfits like GlobalPost. They should produce more video. They could start broadcasting. They could buy into NECN and produce content with them. They could put some of that behind a paywall. Make the stuff that lives back there premium somehow. Don't make me pay for the same-old, same-old.

Boston's Paper of Record is (insultingly) a subsidiary of the New York Times (which also owns the Worcester Telegram-Gazette), which instituted its own paywall several months ago and, to my own surprise, I have actually come to like it. I even posted on Facebook that I would probably end up visiting the site much less as a result of it, but I'm eating crow now, as I read it just as much as I ever have. It allows for easy circumvention so leeches like me can get onto it for free, but is just annoying enough to get some folks to pay for it, and it has the benefit of helping their circulation, too.

Last month Wired's Felix Salmon wrote a great piece on the success of the Times' rather porous paywall. He posited that letting people get limited, but not exclusive, access to their content makes the Times a more attractive destination than, say, the Wall Street Journal.

If you hit the paywall on a regular basis and barge past it, eventually you start feeling a bit guilty and pay up. By contrast, if you hit the FT or WSJ paywall and can’t get past it, you simply go away and feel disappointed in your experience.

He even noted that given the "gentle" quest from a valued institution to pay a little or make a donation, people tend to actually do it:

Here’s the thing about freeloaders: if they value what they’re getting, a lot of them will end up paying anyway. What happened when the Indianapolis Museum of Art moved to a free-admission policy? Its paid membership increased by 3%. When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did the same thing, paid membership increased by 33%.

Given their modest success, I wondered why the Globe didn’t just follow its daddy's model, but then I realized that the Times actually produces a shitload of content while the Globe, well, doesn’t.

The division between the website and the "paper" started last week and you can already see the difference. Boston.com has looked mighty thin of late and seems to have basically turned into an AP wire site (which I can get in a million different places in a much better-organized, cleaner format) with lots of trash (i.e. fashion, parties photos and celebrity garbage) that newshounds like myself couldn't care less about. They also seem to be putting their bloggers more front-and-center instead of burying them at the bottom of the site like they used to, turning them into low rent columnists, while the real ones are now hidden behind the paywall. (I wonder how they like the idea of going from a site with 7 million unique hits per month to a subscription-only audience of under 250,000 people.) I'm quickly finding that I have less and less reason to stop there since most of the local news content has been (or will be) put behind the paywall.

Which is, I guess, the whole point of the operation. Unfortunately, while this method may help to stabilize revenues, I don’t see it as being the foundation upon which the Globe can re-build itself into the pre-eminent news organization that it used to be. And that's a damn shame.

You Can only Remember 9/11 if You're on The List

This past Sunday my country stopped to remember the tragedy of the attacks from 10 years ago. What should have been a day for all Americans and sympathetic people from around the world to reflect and support one another was, for myself and dozens of Americans in Beijing, a day when our country turned us away at the door, refusing to let us beyond their velvet rope and forcing us to walk away in dismay.

Here's what went down.

On Friday, I was alerted to a posting in City Weekend announcing a public ceremony to observe the 9/11 attacks:

…A 9/11 memorial service led by U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke will honor the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of ten years ago. The American community is invited to come to the U.S. Embassy at 7:30pm on September 11 and light floating lanterns, a Chinese custom for mourning. Those planning to attend must arrive 30 minutes prior to the event and bring photo ID.

I'd already made plans for a private get-together with some American friends (several of whom I had not seen in a while) but decided to delay it by an hour to check this out. My only worry was the "American community" part. My girlfriend, Alya, as I often still find myself amazed by, is a Russian citizen and I was concerned that she might have trouble getting in.

I called the embassy to see if people of any nationality would be allowed to enter, and while the polite woman who answered the phone did not know right away (and could not reach the "duty officer" at that moment), she asked me to call back in a bit and said that she would have an answer then. I  dialed them up again about an hour later and the woman cheerfully told me that the duty officer had told her that it "should not be a problem" getting my girlfriend in because the ceremony was not being held inside a building; it would just be on the grounds.

[An aside: My good friend Iris also called the embassy for some information but had a much worse experience. She said that the person that she spoke with was "rude" and that the call was entirely unpleasant. The embassy has a reputation in Beijing for bad service, lousy communication and general inconvenience.]

Fast forward to 7:00pm. Alya, Iris and I walk up to the security gate and get into line. There is already a sizable crowd gathered:

There were lot of families, contingents of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and lots of people that I did not know. (I don’t hang out with very many Americans here in Beijing.) Between the three of us, we only recognized one face, but I could see that lots of the folks in line were of the full-Expat-package and/or Big Business Owners crowd. A warning bell in my heard started to go off. Where were the "regular" folks: the students and "Halfpats" like us?

As we moved closer we saw that there was a table with 4 people seated behind it, each holding a list of names in front of them. When we got to the front, we were asked for our names and if we had RSVP'd. I said that we hadn't and that we'd had no idea that an RSVP was required.

The way it was explained to me, the event at the embassy was by invitation only. There was never supposed to have been an announcement made on the expat websites and the woman who was coordinating the staff at the gate didn’t even know who had given the information to them in the first place. The best that she could do, she said, would be to put our names onto a waiting list and let us in if some of the invitees who had RSVP'd did not show up.

This did not sit well with me. But then it got worse.

I saw a Girl Scout in uniform turned away, her mother calling out to another parent in the troop, "Did you guys register the whole troop? They're telling me that she's not on the list!"

"Sorry," came another parent's reply from the approved group. "You had to RSVP as a family."

Disgraceful.

Not only was there no mention of needing an invitation on the expat websites, but there was no mention of the event on the embassy's own site. There still isn’t, in fact. If you want to see what went on, you've got to check out an expat site or China's state news agency, Xinhua. (Really?!) Furthermore, neither I nor Iris were informed when we called to ask about admission that it was invite-only.

And not for nothing, but what the FUCK is the US Embassy doing holding a private 9/11 ceremony in the first place?! Of all of the days to encourage the local American community to come together, this was it! Hell, they should have welcomed all comers, no matter their nationalities!

At brunch earlier that day, an Italian guy that I know came over to me, shook my hand and said in a low voice, "Today we're all with you." People in the embassy should have been falling over themselves to get him, and other like-minded folks, to join the memorial ceremony. This was a missed opportunity to try to engender some goodwill among the international population here.

It seems like a trivial thing, not getting to enter the embassy for a little ceremony, but it was such a symbolic event, and I was in such a patriotic mood, that the experience made me feel absolutely disgusted.

On a day when our country could have reached out and tried to reclaim the spirit of togetherness that was squandered so shortly after the attacks occurred, the US Embassy in Beijing displayed incompetent planning, absent leadership and a laughable lack of vision by not doing so.

Our tax dollars at work.

Media "Bias" in Israel is Our Own Damn Fault

OR

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

Protests are legion and there are revolutions galore. There are a lot of good things happening in the Middle East these days.

And by "good" I mean, not "bad" on the face of it. We don't know if the nascent freedom movements in some countries will blossom into friendly, prosperous democratic societies or mad, oppressive, Islamic caliphates. Nor do we know if the protest movements in others will win out or be brutally crushed. All in all, it's a crazy time.

As you might imagine, the media has been working overtime to cover all of the happenings. At times they have shone brilliantly (like during the Libyan rebels' push into Tripoli) and at others then have been almost drowned out by social media's tidal wave of re-posted photos and videos from citizen journalists. (Think the confusion during Egypt's uprising.) And in some cases, there is little or no independent coverage because of journalist bans and media blackouts. (See: Syria)

All in all, though, I think that the coverage has been pretty good and as thorough as can be expected, especially by outlets like Al Jazeera, Sky One, the BBC and CNN. If nothing else, the sustained happenings in such an important part of the world have exposed the self-imposed deficiencies of American media as they have scrambled to keep up with events. More often than not their newscasts or cable affiliates' hourly updates are using footage and breaking news from their international competitors. Years and years of closing foreign bureaus and stripping the region of staff have resulted in a dearth of contacts and ability to react quickly to situations.

So why am I going on about the media? For one, I am very interested in the subject. (I majored in Journalism after all.) Also, I had a very interesting back-and-forth on Facebook last week with an old Frisbee buddy back in Boston.

He was upset that the media wasn't covering the hell out of Hamas' recent missile attacks from Gaza into Israel and the resulting escalation after an Israeli counter-attack ended with the deaths of some Egyptian soldiers. To a person who is a passionate supporter of Israel, who lives there or who is Israeli themselves, the sight of hordes of journalists flooding the streets of Cairo and Tripoli, and beating down doors trying to get into Syria, the utter lack of media boots on the ground in Gaza and Southern Israel has got to feel like neglect at best, or overt media bias at worst.

I didn’t like the sound of that. In today's fragmented landscape, consumers have more control than ever (some might say too much) over what gets coverage and what leads newscasts. I happen to think that a lack of media coverage/outrage over what's going on in Israel is because massive numbers of people simply tune out when it comes on in the West. Newspapers and other media outlets know exactly which headlines and stories garner the most interest these days. And while some events will always garner big headlines no matter what ratings/hit scores say, these days the seemingly-intractable dispute/conflict in Palestine no longer feels like "news".

Here's a copy of our exchange. I've omitted a few comments from people that didn’t speak to the topic and made a few edits for grammar and punctuation, but otherwise they are as-posted.

@Gideon: Why is the international press not uttering a word about the latest salvo of terrorist rocket fire out of Gaza today (let alone this week)? Oh wait I remember now... Israeli blood doesn't count.

@Joni: What even funnier is that Syria is murdering Al Falestina (ie Palestinians) by the truck load and no one is saying anything about how they're actually killing Palestinians! I guess it's only bad when the Jews are supposedly doing that (which they're not!). Syria is doing what Israel gets falsely accused of all the frikkin time!

ME: I'd go more with the fact that it's not really "news" that Hamas is attacking Israel, or that Israel is retaliating. Honestly, when faced with the choice, which would you rather pay attention to: Two children fighting incessantly and futilely over the same crap they've been fight over for ages, or the teenagers around the corner who seem to be growing up a bit and exhibiting some signs of maturity? I'm not saying that's the right attitude, (or even that the teenagers around the corner will be successful, or even that they are who we think they are) but you've got to at least admit that the desire to focus on something else is understandable. And not for nothing: Don't these Hamas attacks feel more than a little "Pay Attention to Us"-ish?

@Joni: I just think that's a bad analogy.

@Gideon: Well Mike, I totally get your perspective and would probably be merely disgruntled (rather then angry) with the media blackout if it was applied uniformly. Unfortunately it is not. This week alone the whackjob terrorists in Hamasastan have... lobbed scores of rockets at Israeli cities and sent "activists" with machine guns across the border who killed eight Israelis who were guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the story is a flash in the pan. However, the moment Israel drops a bomb on a rocket squad and kills the would-be attackers, it's all across the headlines and the world explodes in furor. It's not the silence that I detest, it's the hypocrisy.

@Mike Kuznetsov: It's because Israel has a modern military that it uses to defend itself, while Hamas presents itself as a rag-tag group of "freedom fighters". I think it's similar to the propaganda from the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 80's. This makes the Palestinians seem like the underdogs.

ME: You'll get no truck from me on that score. I think that Mike is right about the air of "underdogs"-ness that can accompany coverage of Israel bombing Gaza. But it's the same kind of undercurrent that exists when we see footage of us bombing Iraq or raiding a home in Afghanistan. It's not sympathetic; it's just stark imagery.

I want to emphasize that I think that your frustrations are REALLY misguided. And by that I mean, they are focused on the wrong people. In the West, our media is almost 100% market-driven. This means that coverage is dictated in large part by what people want to see and are interested in. Should national newscasts/cable outlets curate their news more and emphasize some judgment about what people SHOULD know rather than what they WANT to know? Of course. But that's a very different thing to be mad about than anti-Israel bias. I'm by no means an apologist for the US media (hell, I've all but abandoned them since my move overseas, save for NPR- I'm an RTV, Al Jazeera & BBC guy now), but when you get pissed off at them, you're missing the real issue: People don't care as much about this stuff anymore.

Face it, we've got 2 major wars on, multiple countries in some stage of revolution in the Middle East, a near-depression in the US and the real danger of a breakup of the EU/Euro Zone and all that implies for the Western & World economies. Oh, and China's on the march in the developing world. Straight away, Israel is up against some serious competition for (even completely unbiased) mental and editorial bandwidth.

Israel's biggest problem in terms of coverage of events in Gaza (and the West bank) is that people in the West are, generally, just fed up with things there. I know that I am. Nobody cold ever convince me that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, that it shouldn't be defended or that it doesn’t have the right to defend itself. But you know what? In the US (and even here in Beijing) Arabs and Israelis and Jews of all nationalities live, work and socialize together with no problems whatsoever. So why can’t they do that there? (Simplistic, I know, but this is the perspective of most Americans and Westerners.)

I'm pissed that the Palestinians don’t just accept Israelis' right to live in a state of their own in Palestine and then go the non-violent route in massive ways to address specific concerns within that context. (Think thousands standing in place in an area where the West bank wall is going up, people going on mass hunger strikes, scores laying down in front of bulldozers, etc.) They'd win a lot of their arguments in short order if they did that. And if a bunch of psychos REALLY wanted to martyr themselves, there'd be plenty of ways to satisfy them… I'm also pissed at Israel for not just telling Jordan that they can have the West Bank back and Egypt that they can have Gaza back, acknowledging that it's a different world now and that the current situation is deplorable and unsustainable. I'd also like them to adopt an idea that Alan Dershowitz had 10-15 years ago: After re-establishing the 1967 borders, they pledge to re-take -permanently- some measurable plot of land for every terrorist attack or missile fired.

These are just ideas. But the point is that neither side would be willing to consider them because the extreme whack-jobs on both ends control the debate. And after a while, the sight of both parties even refusing to agree to a process for talking about things makes people like me throw our hands up and say "to hell with these fucking children!" My gods, it's been 20 years since the 2nd Intafadah and every time there are "serious" talks, one side or the other pulls out/sabotages things when measurable progress starts. How long am I supposed to carry the fire in my belly? Even the Northern Irish got sick and tired of the violence after 20 years.

So don't get sucked into the trap of blaming the media for the lackluster/unenthusiastic coverage of Israel and its environs. Blame Israel and its environs.

++++

Thoughts?