One of my favorite barometers measuring backstage Beijing is the large billboard wall on the northeast side of the Goumao flyover between Guanghua Lu and and the center of the Guomao interchange. This particularly conspicuous message board has been one of the many sites that has prominently displayed Chaoyang District’s tiresomely adolescent PR broadside of Civilized Chaoyang. I first wrote about it 20 months ago here. The campaign has been underway since at least April 2010. That this billboard is now blank heralds an imminent change. Will it be as goofy as the last one, or will it end up being even goofier. Either way, we can pretty much count on it being witlessly puerile propaganda, which is about as close as China can get to implementing soft power. I’ll keep you posted on how this space changes, though I’m betting it will still refer to the 2008 Olympic foreign architecture. Some things, like Beijing’s nasal fishing fetish, just can’t be shaken.

And here is one more before I get into further mischief. Below is still, though barely, the building at the southeast corner of Guanghua Lu and the Third Ring Road. It has been an advertising cash cow for the owners, Tsinghua U or some other educational agency where the accumulation of money is the only measure of intelligence. Located across the street from the CCTV Headquarters Bldg. – the highest profile architectural project in Beijing – this ugly brick lump has been the site of giant advertisements, my favorite being “Air France Business Class, comfort” (with full moon rising) from the end of 2010. As I write on this Christmas afternoon, the once 16 (or so) story building is a crumbled nub. Here are a few of the final bricks in that once-expensive wall as gravity calls them home.

Happy Holidays!

(Click on the pics to see them bigger!)

Friedman, as he normally does when over-bubbling (bumbling) about China, let his pom-poms get in the way of seeing the game as he spewed from Tianjin during the recent Summer Davos. One has to wonder if his trips are subsidized by someone other than just the NYT. He seems to be cut out of the same bolt – though a bit bleachier – than John and Doris Naisbitt, co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society, a shoddy piece of propaganda that gained a modicum of press before being totally blown out of the credible waters. (See my post The Empire from the Official Tour Bus. My post was but one small whisper in the shouting crowd of critics and criticism.) Though Friedman is not as blind as the Naisbitts, he leans on his cane in their direction.

In Tianjin he seems to have become the ear for a woman named Peggy Liu.

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”

That Friedman was able to actually use this as a quote in an opinion piece in the NYT highlights his lack of vetting skills. To not question scientific data, especially data coming from China, is suicidal, not some efficient quick-step that leads to fast-tracked solutions. Science and the CCP are Gordeon-knotted bedfellows. To even insinuate that China has a leg-up because the leaders “don’t waste time questioning scientific data” is akin to believing in parthenogenesis because the Pope (any Pope) said it’s so. (For a very good read on the gutlessness of Chinese science, read Zhang Ming’s, How Chinese science lost its backbone, an article that first appeared in Chinese in the Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine and was translated into English at the China Media Project.)

Friedman and Liu need to spend a little more time in China, perhaps in Shanxi province, covering toxic air issues and the coal mining deaths, and the downwinder effect that has turned north China into a mess. Then let’s get together and talk about legislation that will bring China into the 21st C, rather than struggling along like some post-WWII Pittsburgh, full of enlightened politicos who ride roughshod over environmental disasters on a daily basis, trying their best to keep them from making news. It all looks great on paper, but the environmental hazard that is China continues to grow. Let’s not forget that Beijing alone is adding 2,000 1,900 new cars a day (Guo Jifu, head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7116919.html) . (Yes, Tom, a day. You ought to be able to handle that math: double the number of days you want to figure for, then add three zeroes. One year = 730,000 693,500 more cars, and that’s only in Beijing.) So you can cheer lead about clean tech and green this, that and the other, but at some point your going to have to give your arms a rest, lower your pom-poms, face the traffic and coal, and take a deep breath. The U.S may very well be paralyzed by political rancor and terminal partisan dumb-ass, but China is blowing more smoke than you’ve ever been able to realize. Shame on you and the New York Times you rode in on.

(What follows is not a book review, but rather a response to a promotional book tour interview by the co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society (Harper Collins), John and Doris Naisbitt.)

Last week I received an email from a good friend in Texas who wrote to let me know that he was listening to the Diane Rehm Show, a popular Washington, DC-based radio interview program “distributed by National Public Radio, NPR Worldwide, and SIRIUS satellite radio.” The show claims to reach 2.2 million listeners a week. When I lived in the States I often listened to Ms. Rehm’s program. Later in the day I downloaded and listened to the segment with the “two China experts.” It took about three minutes for my blood pressure to start rising.

Mr. Naisbitt was introduced as having been a former Asst. Secretary of Education under JFK – a position he would have held nearly a half century ago – a specialist assistant to Lyndon Johnson, and a former visiting fellow at Harvard. His wife, Doris, is the current director of the Naisbitt China Institute and a professor at Yunnan University. What followed was 50+ minutes littered with painfully shameful pontifications on the current state of China with whole pages torn straight from the Central Propaganda Department’s playbook. Mr. Naisbitt claims that “We wrote the book inside out. Most of the books about China are outside in, and we tried to get inside China and I’ve been going to China for forty-two years. And Doris and I have been going there … ahh … the last ten years. And we tried to write this story from the Chinese point of view.” Unfortunately Mr. Naisbitt’s “inside out” point of view seems to be one from inside a CITS (China International Travel Service) tour bus.

Here are a few highlights:

John: “The social and personal freedoms in China are as open as they are in the western world.” [11:00]

Doris: “Here comes an advantage of the Chinese political system. There is a constancy in the government, so they’re thinking is not election driven, but long-term driven, and they are able to set long term goals in which … and with the long term goals create the frames in which then the people can act and the Chinese government gives the people all the freedom they need to grow.” [15:00]

On Liu Xiaobo [35:50] (John): “Let me say about Liu …. He was sentenced not for speaking his opinion, because that’s done all over China all the time.  He was sentenced because he was organizing an alternative government. He was getting petitions, he had 10,000 signatures to have another … although there are other parties in China, this was a party to install multiple elections and so forth. He crossed the line that all Chinese know. If you cross the line then you take the consequences. He’s well known, because he’s one of the few dissidents who remains in China.  He’s very courageous to do that. He remains in China, so he’s taking his medicine.”

This is a fundamental misrepresentation of Charter 08, the petition that Mr. Naisbitt refers to. Liu was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison on “suspicion of inciting the subversion of state power” for calling for democratic reforms, not as Mr. Naisbitt claims for “organizing an alternative government.” (For Vaclav Havel’s letter to the Hu Jintao concerning the Liu Xiaobo case see here. The letter was delivered by Mr. Havel to the Chinese Embassy in Prague, but “officials would not open the door.”)

On Tibet [44:50](John): “We’ve been there [Tibet] and it is not an oppressed area. In fact it … Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, is a very modern city, a very thriving city, and the Tibetans, the monks and so on are subsidized actually by the Chinese government.” (Doris) “You know, what is not very much known in the west is how the Tibetan society was before 1949, before the Chinese came. It was a feudal society. Ninety-five percent of the population were serfs, and the rest were the aristocrats … aristocratic class and the monks, and they were in power. So life was not a paradise in Tibet, only for 5% of the population.”

This is the same fire-eyed harangue that one can read or hear from any of the official government-controlled media mouthpieces. And this means what? That prior to 1949 China was much different? During both the Ming and Qing dynasties the percentage of imperial officials/bureaucrats numbered about 5% of the population. In the interim between the collapse of the Qing dynasty and 1949, it is hard to imagine a society in any more chaos than China was. If one were to look closely at the number of current CCP members as a percentage of the current population, the golden rule of 5% shows up once again. The finger pointing at feudalism and 5% aristocracy argument is used time and time again to thwart any substantive dialogue on the Tibetan issue. An analogous argument would be that there is no reason to include China at any global negotiating tables, given that sixty/seventy years ago they were involved in civil war, and chaos was the order of the day. The Naisbitts either purposely ignore or just flat-out miss the fact that this red herring has nothing to do with any present possibility of resolution of the ethnic issues at hand. This is CCP boilerplate used ad infinitum as they vigorously displace the nomadic population from the Tibetan Qinghai Plateau grasslands. (See the People’s Daily here, here, and here for a quantification of the numbers being “settled” (read relocated or, better yet, displaced) into permanent housing far from their native lands.)

Regarding Mr. Naisbitt’s take on Tibet as “not an oppressed area,” have a look here (h/t to Danwei) to see an excerpt from the documentary Leaving Fear Behind, which earned the young Tibetan filmmaker, Dhongdup Wangchen, a six-year prison sentence earlier this week. If you are trying to reach this site from inside China, you will need a VPN, since you can’t get there from here without one.

On the ‘Falungong as cult’ question John claims that he and his wife have no idea why the government sees it as a cult. This bespeaks a fundamental lack of knowledge of Chinese history. The mid-19^th C. Taiping rebellion – where a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus led an uprising that over the course of 14 years led to the slaughter and starvation of at least 25 million Chinese – is a lesson in why cult classification is part of a much wider strategy in maintaining the mandate. The arrival of 10,000 peaceful Falungong protesters at the main gate of Zhongnanhai on the sunny Sunday afternoon of April 25, 1999 trumpeted a failure of domestic intelligence in a country that prides itself on knowing what the people are doing. Chinese history is littered with ‘cults’ that have led to localized failures of government. It is something all Chinese know. In a word, the CCP got spooked, and so a cult was launched. The ensuing, relentless barrage from all state media outlets (and in China, there are no others) classifying the group as a cult is not something many who were here at the time can forget. The tirades were deafening. If the Naisbitts are unaware of this rigid Chinese ruling mindset, then they have no business talking about China at all.

I cannot even bring myself to address Mr. Naisbitt’s response to China’s internet blocking. When asked why China is blocking social sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Naisbitt launched into the standard party line about stopping the spread of pornography. Leaving Fear Behind is not pornography, nor are any of the social networking sites mentioned above. This week the Chinese blocked the IMDB (Internet Movie Database), a great resource for all things film, though not pornographic films/videos.

To repeat, this is not a book review since I wouldn’t buy this book if someone held a Taser to my head. The Diane Rehm Show should be ashamed to have given ‘air’ to such blatant obfuscation without doing a far better job of vetting the Naisbitts, then holding their toes to the fire. There is much truth to Mr. Naisbitt’s claims at the beginning of the interview when he says, “We tried to write this book from the Chinese point of view.” And one can hardly disagree, though that point of view is one straight from Party Central.

For more on the Naisbitts from the China Digital Times have a look at It’s Time To Stop the Absurd Promotion of John Naisbitt’s ‘China’s Megatrends.’ The Naisbitts are shameless self-promoters, which they are free to be in the west, though if they’d taken a more substantive stand that looked at China with a more critical and responsible eye, they would not now have access to the lucrative Chinese marketplace, which they are so shabbily kowtowing to. It is quite apparent that the view from inside the official bus is much more profitable than getting off and having a real look around. This is clearly a book that will get a lot of exposure in the state-controlled book market. Even the subtitle, The 8 Pillars of a New Society, panders to that market.

Because his positions often parrot Beijing’s critiques of foreign journalists, Mr. Rui is asked whether he engages in propaganda handed down by the government. He compares it with Fox News coverage of the White House during a Republican administration. “I hate the word propaganda,” he says.

Hard not to love this portrayal of both Fox News and CCTV, where Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Chris Wallace may someday find a second life once they are finally tossed for younger, meaner and more blinkered political goofballs, perhaps replaced by party-approved Chinese ‘news’ people. I can see a trade in the works. Chairman Murdoch may yet get his shot at China by working out a cross-pond deal. How do you think Mr. Rui would play on Sunday mornings in America? Or Bill O’Reilly in the the new CCTV Building. Underpants, indeed. With skidmarks!

There’s an old joke I heard nearly three decades ago concerning a Fish and Game warden named Joe, whose jurisdiction included a large, well-stocked lake. (I was living  in Wyoming at the time, and the ‘lake of the joke’ was ID’d as the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, west of Cody, but you can make it any lake you’d like.) Warden Joe knew that one of the locals, Floyd, fished with dynamite – no need for hooks, lines and sinkers when you can toss a stick into the drink, let dynamite do what dynamite does, wait for the dead to float to the top, and then scoop ‘em up with a net. (It used to be a lot easier to get your hands on TNT, especially in mining areas. Not altogether different than it used to be in China. Who can forget Shijiazhuang, 2001. But I’m drifting.) So Joe subtly followed Floyd (don’t ask me how, it’s a joke) and laid in wait. When finally he heard the telltale explosion he sped his government craft up alongside Floyd’s boat, which by then was surrounded by floating fish, and fisherman Floyd was busily gathering in the day’s catch. Warden Joe, in full-blown victory gloat, said, “Ha! I finally got you, Floyd. I’ve knowed you been doing this all along, and now I caught you red-handed.” Floyd, very cool about it, reached for another stick, lit the fuse, and tossed it to Joe, who frantically grabbed it as Floyd dead-panned, “So, what are you gonna do? Fish or bullshit?”

So why did this one float up from the depths today? Not really sure why, though I can tell you it surfaced as I read the following AP report.

A group of more than 20 Chinese lawyers, writers and intellectuals called for a boycott Tuesday of China Central Television, saying it was feeding viewers propaganda — charges that were rejected by the state-owned national broadcaster.

This wasn’t what caused me to remember the old joke. But the response by Wang Jianhong, deputy director of the CCTV general editing department, who was obviously quite ruffled by the “charges” and who had fired off a fax to the Associated Press (nothing like meeting charges head on), did.

“China has more than 1.2 billion TV viewers. Even if 22 people boycott, I personally don’t think it’ll have any effect or harm the reputation of CCTV.”

And from who knows where, clear as today’s Beijing skies, Warden Joe and fisherman Floyd and all the dead fish scooped up in the net rose to the surface. And, oh yeah, the dynamite too. The brain, isn’t it great: an old joke unexpectedly floats up, and, out of nowhere, you just start laughing.

It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

It is worth a look, though for those with a weak stomach when it comes to being fed anything presidential over the last eight year, I recommend that you view it as an Onion article rather than as a piece that resembles anything credible. It made me wonder if the president was practicing for the book duel when Katrina visited New Orleans? It must have been riveting, since, obviously, he couldn’t tear himself away from it. I wonder if the FEMA’s Mike Brown was part of the book club, too, and this is what really explains their lack of response. An incalculably long string of miscues and missed opportunities, and all because the White House was frantically reading James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief or Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number when they should have been wondering about the moral and legal legitimacy of their extrajudicial playground at Guantanamo Bay?

At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.

Crass, Karl, really crass, and despite the impressive list of titles I’m still left with the image of the leader of the free world reading My Pet Goat to Florida elementary students when the news that New York was under attack was whispered in his ear. He kept reading through that one too. And that was several years before the contest.

My take is that this is the opening volley in the fundraising campaign to finance Dubya’s Presidential Library, an attempt to make the wealthy right believe that he can actually read. A lot of us are still not convinced. Good luck with collection development, boys.

Stay tuned for The Karl’s next political fish tale: Hu and Wen in a calligraphy clash: zhuan, kai, li and cao shu. Gentlemen, start your brushes!

* Apologies to Alexandra Day’s and her wonderful – and nearly word-free – children’s classic, Good Dog, Carl, an illustrated story of a Rottweiler who looks after the baby when Mom steps out for awhile.

Some 1.4 billion people living at the brink of extreme poverty are in developing countries. Any economic crisis could result in the most serious consequences for these people.

One rule of thumb I’ve learned to live with is that if I’m around someone who refers to himself in the third person I instinctively start looking for cover. At the risk of sounding provocative, I have to wonder what percentage of that 1.4 billion is here in China.  Whenever I go to Beijing now I start humming, “Where have all the migrants gone, long time passing.” A good place to start looking for “serious consequences” is here, the villages in the countryside that have supplied the human fuel that has kept this revved up engine humming. When the work dries up there’s nowhere left to go but home. Or as Frost so aptly wrote it: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.” And going home they are, though there doesn’t seem to be a lot of joy in their return. The frightening question that everyone has been trying to avoid is “What do you do when there’s nowhere left to go but home?”

And on a possibly related note – though I am still unclear how it all hooks up, I fear it spells out where this is heading – today I spent a few hours with friends who live in a large and relatively new development close by the Water Park, one of the prime cuts of the developing middle class Tianjin. They bought in three years ago and things looked pretty good: walkways, clubhouse, a large pond stocked with fish, a quiet refuge a good way off the street. In every sense a fair little haven to escape to.  But that’s all changed in less time than it takes to say…. Well there you go. Said and done. What is at the heart of it is hard to nail down, though it seems to stem from a shady land deal, an arrest of one of the principals, a withholding of deeds, disgruntled homeowners refusing to pay monthly service fees and an ad hoc association of one form or another banding together and firing the management company (wuye) who sabotaged the place on their way out, leaving a mess for the new wuye who lasted all of four days before throwing up their hands and disappearing with whatever was left to take.

It’s no longer a sight to behold. Garbage is piling up, barriers that kept walkways free of cars have been destroyed, turning paths into access roads to freestyle parking zones, the guardhouse at the entrance sacked and empty, and no one accountable to be found at all. From prime cut to gristle in less time than it takes to say …. You get the picture.

But back at the People’s Daily I learn that

During the financial crisis and its resulting global economic turmoil, China’s ability to maintain its own high-speed growth is its biggest contribution to the global economy.

“Migrants heading back home” has become a common story, which speaks directly to growth or, more accurately, the lack of it. I am just as clueless as to where this is all heading as the professionals in the biz of predicting where it’s all heading are. They all keep telling us things like, “We’re sailing into new waters here,” or “If there’s a bottom we haven’t seen it yet,” which is just another way of saying, “No one’s got a clue.”

But the People’s Daily Online optimistically throws around a lot of numbers which I don’t imagine are very comforting to those in the countryside who are finding their way home long before the annual Spring Festival crush.

However, the global banking crisis had little direct impact on China. China has strong foreign exchange reserves, a fiscal surplus which accounts for 1% of its GDP, and a current account surplus which is in excess of 10% of the GDP. These three factors has [sic] enabled China to adopt a proactive fiscal policy to strengthen construction in infrastructure, environment, social security, education, health care, to stimulate domestic demand and to upgrade export.

And all of this in a country where a blast of Siberian cold and a few inches of snow closed several major arterial highways bleeding and feeding the capital for two days this week. And when I say a few inches, I’m being generous.

But an email I received today from a young Qinghai student asks the better and more relevant question: “Happy chorsmas!!!!!!! how was you been in there?”

Not bad in there at all as long as I got the People’s Daily Online to keep it all clear. So, how was you been out there?

The office that Chinese writers, artists, and journalists dread and hate most is the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. In addition to its propaganda work within the party, this department, through its numerous bureaus, also supervises the country’s newspapers, publishing houses, radio and TV stations, movie industry, and the Internet. Except for the Military Commission, no department in the Party Central Committee wields more power than this office, which forms the core of the party’s leadership. Its absolute authority had gone unchallenged in the past, though even the Communists themselves understand the sinister role it has played. Luo Ruiqing, who was the first to head the Propaganda Department after the Communists came to power, once admitted: “To let the media serve politics means to tell lies, to deceive the above and delude the below, to defile public opinions, and to create nonsensical news.”

These are some of the very same folks who will be permanently camped out in the cantilevered head of the CCTV Headquarters Building, doing their best to keep things diluted. No nitrogen boosting melamine in their bag of tricks. Just lots and lots of tepid, murky water to help “to deceive and delude” all those “below” with “nonsensical news.”

And speaking of the CCTV Building, I have a feature article in the October issue of the True Run Media’s print mag Urbane on … hold your breath … the CCTV Building and how it’s changed my life. A link to the pdf can be found here. Lots of photos in this one. Since I am not in Beijing at the moment I have no idea if it is available in print yet, though I imagine if it is not, it will be soon.