It appears the graphic Olympics-themed Amnesty International ads I mentioned in my previous post have started to attract attention outside the Anti-CNN circle. The controversy turns out not to be the one I identified, i.e., whether the firm that produced the ads could be slammed for gross hypocrisy for having previously produced pro-Olympics ads for Adidas, but instead whether or not Amnesty International is willing to claim them.

As noted on ESWN a few days ago (h/t John Kennedy of Global Voices), Amnesty International’s official website is Amnesty.org while the website listed at the bottom of the ads is Amnesty.com, raising questions about who actually commissioned them. ESWN then dug up the following explanation, from France 24:

A campaign about the Beijing Olympics produced for Amnesty International France was considered so aggressive by its creators that they decided to call off its release.

Advertising agency TBWA\Paris did however seek permission from their client to present the project at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. And it even received a prize. Since then the images, which show Chinese prisoners tortured with the help of Olympics sports equipment, have been circulated on blogs and forums in China, causing outrage in the country.

Further down, France 24 published the following comment from Marie Holzman, a French China specialist and human rights activist:

I was there when they shot the photos for the campaign. The imagery was very provoking and direct. It was designed to blow your mind - if you’re French, not Chinese. But because of advertising, the French understanding has become very sophisticated; this was perhaps a little brutal.

Leaving aside the question of how such blunt images could be said to be aimed at a “sophisticated” audience, the interesting thing for me here is Amnesty’s decision to allow TBWA to enter the ads in the Cannes contest after rejecting them as too aggressive (which we presumably can read to mean counter-productive). Did they honestly think the images wouldn’t get out, wouldn’t end up on some Chinese message board or another, especially given the hyper-sensitivity of certain portions of the Chinese online population these past few months? Even if Amnesty asked TBWA to remove their name from the ads and TBWA simply ignored the request, somebody somewhere appears to have made either a very bad, or a very naive, decision.

This business also raises some interesting questions about the value of arguments for or against Internet content based on the notion of audience. Certainly, people who post audience-specific content to the Internet (or who produce audience-specific content that is then posted to the Internet by other people) are allowed to offer the audience-specific defense when that content is misinterpreted by people for whom it was not intended. But when does that defense fly, and when does it do a big, embarrassing face-plant? In the case of the Amnesty ads, saying they were intended for French people certainly sounds like a case of the later–a little like a pair of giggling Chinese teenagers excusing themselves for joking about the Mandarin-speaking French person’s gigantic nose because they had no idea he would understand.

[NOTE: None of this would appear to apply to the Amnesty Olympics ads produced by Slovakian ad agency WUW Saatchi and Saatchi, which display a legitimate website (www.amnesty.sk) and which, as far as I can tell, still have Amnesty International's stamp of approval.]

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Tags: advertising, anti-CNN, human rights

Surveying the statistics for this blog earlier today, I noticed a strange surge of visits to a post I’d done way back in January, on the crippling expectations being placed on China’s athletes in the run-up to the Games. The focus of the post had been Adidas’ 2008 Games “Impossible is Nothing” campaign, with its images of Chinese Olympic athletes riding to glory literally on the backs of the Chinese masses. Further investigation revealed new traffic was all being directed to the post from a single source: Anti-CNN.com, the website founded in aftermath of the Lhasa riots last March to chronicle evidence (both real and imagined) of anti-China bias in Western media.

It’s happened at last, I thought. Well, then, let it come.

I was relieved (and also, I will admit, a little disappointed) to discover I had nothing to fear. There were no new entries in the comments section. No jingoistic outbursts accusing me of hating China. No obscenities leveled at my family. No response whatsoever. Visiting the page that linked to my blog, I was surprised to discover all of the vitriol had instead been bestowed on TBWA, the group that had dreamed up the Adidas campaign.

What landed TBWA on Anti-CNN’s shit list is not the Adidas campaign, which appears to have thrilled most Chinese people, but its contributions to a separate 2008 Games PR blitz being undertaken by Amnesty International.
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Tags: advertising, anti-CNN, human rights, nationalism

On forced hiatus in Hong Kong this week while I wait for approval of my Beijing Olympics journalist visa.  This morning, on my way to the visa office, I ran across an announcement for an upcoming vehicle registration mark (license plate) auction in the South China Morning Post.  The announcement reminded me of the time I spent here in 1998 as a foreign student and the story (apparently apocrphyal) of the “8″ license plate being auctioned off the previous year for several tens of millions of dollars.

I’m not sure exactly how the Hong Kong transport authority determines which license plates will be auctioned at any given time, but the list for this next auction has some interesting entries. There’s plenty of local-sounding names (MRS CHUM) and animals (SHEEP, BUNNY) but then there’s a whole range of other options ranging from the ironic (EM1SS1ON) to the utterly baffling (TOMCRUZ).

The general portrait this particular list seems to paint is of a religious and, yes, materialistic city, but one with decent taste in secondary Hollywood action movie characters.

First round:

1) ALPHA
2) 1CEMAN
6) HUNG 678 (A reference to the 678 International Club massage parlor in Shenzhen? Or maybe it’s the Best Casinos Online Directory?)
30) 20061122 (The Playstation 3 launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, but that can’t be it. Please help.)
35) 1LUV2EAT, available in 2 rows: 1LUV 2EAT
43) BOBAFETT, available in 2 rows BOBA FETT
49) CASHMERE
62) ANALYST
68) PUKKA
83) CNOOC
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Tags: cars, Hong Kong

According to one source with UC Berkeley’s Group in Asian Studies, the university has at last decided to restore funding to its East Asian languages department. In other words, one of the United States’ foremost Asia-focused research institutions has decided not to let itself become irrelevant at a time when Asia is capturing damn near every other headline on damn near every international news page.

As some will recall, Berkeley announced earlier this year that it would have to cut its Chinese, Korean and Japanese language classes by a total of 1500 students. In real terms, that meant East Asian language classes would be off-limits to all non-majors. The reason had to do with state funding cuts in the range of $30-40 million. Students and staff launched a frantic campaign to keep the classes available, a campaign that now appears to have succeeded.

According to an email I received yesterday (subject line: “Victory!”), the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture will be funded at its 2007/08 level for at least the next academic year. I haven’t been able to suss many other details of the deal so far. There’s nothing about it on the university website’s press release page. The “Fighting EALC Budget Cuts at UCB” Facebook page and various student-run blogs set up to protest the cuts likewise have yet to mention the decision. But a “Budget Update Coming Soon!” notice printed in red on the EALC website at least suggests the decision is not just rumor.

Assuming it’s true, I imagine many hundreds of people in Berkeley have just heaved a big, sweaty sigh of relief. What the department really needs is an increase in funding. As I’ve noted before, Chinese classes at Berkeley are woefully oversubscribed, the instructors criminally overburdened. But this is public education we’re talking about, so a hearty congratulations to all the people who fought this battle.

The odds were not in their favor.

[Image: Graphic representation of UC Berkeley's new CV Staar East Asian Languages Library, from Save East Asian Languages and Korean Studies at UC Berkeley.]

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Tags: language study, public education, UC Berkeley

From the Ch-infamous shameless self-promotion department, my review of Michael Meyer’s new book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, published recently on China Digital Times:

Western observers have been lamenting the demise of “Old Beijing” since at least the 1920s, when the Chinese capital started itself stumbling in the direction of modernization. Each time, the city’s ancient charms-it’s intimate lanes ( hutong) and enigmatic courtyard houses ( siheyuan)-are said to be not long for this world. Each time, they survive to seduce the next generation of would-be eulogizers. Now comes Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” due out from Walker and Company this month. How much is there to be gained in listening to yet another requiem for a place that never seems to die?

The answer, in Meyer’s case, is plenty.

An award-winning travel writer, Meyer has done what few other foreign residents in Beijing are willing to do: actually live in the hutong. It’s true, many Westerners rent courtyard houses, but theirs are the neo-imperial mini-palaces of New Beijing, cleared of riff-raff, retrofitted with radiators and equipped with sit-down toilets. Meyer’s perch in the neglected lanes south of Tian’anmen Square is not so luxurious. For heat in winter, he relies on cups of Nescafe and the bowls of dumplings foisted on him by the Widow, his busy-bodied old neighbor. The dumplings and instant coffee processed, he walks across the lane to the public latrine, where one of his students once bowed to him as he squatted, pants around ankles, over the open trough.

Read the full review here (proxy required for those in China).

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Tags: architecture, beijing, book reviews, China, urban planning

Another China Internet conference, another excruciating walk along the cliff’s edge of mental collapse. Like last year’s gathering of Chinese bloggers, this year’s gathering of China Internet researchers (the China Internet Research Conference, held at Hong Kong University over the weekend) featured an avalanche of information and opinion about the development of the Chinese Internet delivered in such volume and with such velocity I occasionally had to resist the impulse to raise my computer up in front of my face as a shield. It’s taken me this long just to recover.

I’ll sift through my notes for more substantive observations later, but in the meantime, here are a few of the more surprising/noteworthy statistics that surfaced in the presentations:

80: Percentage of Chinese Internet users who think the Internet should be managed or controlled. (From survey cited by Deborah Fallows of Pew Internet Research)

85: Percentage of above who think government should do the controlling.

300 or so: The number of Chinese blogs in a sample of more than 500 that carried content critical of the government, corporations, social phenomena, etc. (From Ashley Esarey, assistant professor, Middlebury College).

Midnight to 4am: Time during which majority of politically critical blog posts in China are written. (A. Esarey)

43: Percentage of Americans who answered “yes” to the question “Do you think China will inevitably change with the Internet?” (From Zogby Poll, January 2007, cited by Lokman Tsui)

1: Hangzhou’s position in ranking of 30 major Chinese cities based on percentage of people who blog (from China Media Monitoring study cited by ESWN blogger Roland Soong.)

What to make of all this? It’s anyone’s guess. If there’s a singe line to summarize the findings presented at the conference, it’s this: China’s Internet is a schizophrenic and slippery–and, therefore, as unpredictable–as the country itself.

To get a fuller sense of the confusion, see the official CIRC blog (heroically compiled in real time by John from Global Voices and Dave from Mutant Palm) as well as coverage from Kai Pan at CN Reviews here and here.

[Image: CIRC 2008 group photo, courtesy of RConversation]

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Tags: bloggers, China, CIRC2008, Hong Kong, internet