Friend’s refrigerator, 2 days before Thanksgiving…[UPDATED]

November 25, 2008 | Category: food | 3 Comments

Behold:

and photos from the actual meal here and here

Tags: food, indulgence, refrigerator, thanksgiving, turkey

Photos of Art: Caochangdi/草场地

November 21, 2008 | Category: Art, China | 1 Comment

Just returned from a very mixed attempt at beach vacationing (Thailand, about which more later) and have now finally gotten around to posting some long overdue photos. This set is from a trip my girlfriend and I took a couple months ago to Caochangdi, the village outside Beijing commandeered by Chinese uber-artist Ai Weiwei as a supposed alternativre to the Soho-ification of the 798 Art Zone, née Factory 798. The village’s name (草场地, literally “Grass Field”) suggests a rusticity and Woodstocky spontaneity I’m not sure it has, but…well, see for yourself.

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Tags: beijing, photos, village

Obama + San Francisco = Bongorific

November 7, 2008 | Category: California, politics | 3 Comments

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Tags: 2008, election, obama, politics, san francisco, video

Video: Olympics Over

August 26, 2008 | Category: China, Media, Olympics | 6 Comments

As this video suggests, my tenure as a hired gun on the Wall Street Journal’s Olympics video team is essentially over. Three weeks lugging a camera around Beijing by day, staring dry-eyed and drooling at a computer by night…If only I were a full employee, I’d have the health insurance to pay the team of chiropractors and opthamologists I’m going to need to turn me back into a functioning human being after I pack up my gear and drag it back home.

Having said that, the pain had its pay-offs: We managed to produce 27 videos, more by far than any other US newspaper. And I now have a much clearer sense of what a strange dance these American titans of print are doing with multimedia. I’ll try to write more on that score after I’ve had a chance to recover…

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Tags: beijing, food, Fuwa, video, WSJ

Video: The Book on China’s Fashion Police

August 20, 2008 | Category: China, Olympics | 3 Comments

Another video done in cahoots with Loretta from the Wall Street Journal. This one covers a book, Civilized Etiquette (文明礼仪), supposedly distributed to all Beijing residents four years ago as part of an effort to keep the city from embarassing itself in front of foreign guests during the Olympics. The book got a lot of play, including on the WSJ website, in the pre-Olympics coverage.

One part of the book that didn’t get much coverage was the fashion chapter. We thought it was a bit dubious for a government led by men in ill-fitting suits and clunky gold wire-frame glasses to be telling others how to dress, so we decided to do a story on it. Enjoy.

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Tags: beijing, etiquette, fashion, video, WSJ

Video: China’s “Angry” Youth

August 12, 2008 | Category: China, Olympics, politics, 荒诞 | 2 Comments

I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.

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Tags: fenqing, nationalism, video, WSJ

Park Record Beijing Bureau: Why Utahns Should Care About the Beijing Olympics

August 5, 2008 | Category: China, Utah | Leave a Comment

With the Olympics about to dawn over Beijing’s polluted skyline, the free time I usually devote to writing this blog is about to evaporate. In lieu of fresh blog posts, I’ve secured permission to instead republish the semi-regular Olympics column I’m writing for my hometown newspaper, the Park Record, in Park City, Utah. I’m willing to admit these may hold little interest for anyone not from Utah, except maybe some lonely grad student somewhere studying the localization of international news. So, for you, Mr. Grad Student…

From the Beijing Bureau: A tale of two Olympic cities
Park Record, 2008.07.22

This was fortitude of historical proportions. On September 11, 2001, just as people in northern Utah had started decorating their cities in earnest for the Winter Olympics, a global party more than a decade in the making, two planes veered murderously off course 2000 miles to the east. The story from there hardly bears repeating: tens of thousands killed, a nation plunged into morning and, months later, an Olympics held despite it all. For years, it seemed the 2002 Winter Games would go down in history as the only Olympic gathering to take place so fast on the heels of a national disaster.

No longer.

On May 12th this year, with Beijing entering the feverish final stages of preparation for China’s first Olympics, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck roughly a thousand miles away, in rural Sichuan Province. Seventy thousand were killed, the nation was plunged into mourning. And next month, yes, the Beijing Games will go ahead despite it all.

On the surface, Beijing 2008 has so little in common with Salt Lake City 2002 it seems ludicrous to even begin to compare them. The 100-meter dash versus the downhill. The Forbidden City versus the Mormon Temple. Five hundred thousand volunteers for one versus 22,000 for the other. The two Olympics feel about as comparable as the foods for which each city is best known: Roast Duck, meet Jell-O Salad. But look a little harder and striking parallels begin to emerge——parallels that suggest Utahns are in better position than most to understand what may be going through the minds of people in Beijing as their big day approaches.
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Yes, really, a unique take on the Beijing pollution story

August 1, 2008 | Category: China, Environment | Leave a Comment

If there is one thing this world doesn’t need right now, it’s more stories about Beijing’s air pollution. The Google news search says it all: Over 4,000 articles under the first three headings alone, more by a few hundred than a news search for Britney Spears (and this in the wake of John McCain’s infamous anti-Obama “celebrity” ad featuring the world’s most Googled girl).

Having said that, anyone with a genuine interest in the problem will sooner or later want to click over to Clearing the Air, launched by the Asia Society this week.

Full disclosure here: I am the recipient of Asia Society funds and consider some of the people who worked on this project my friends. And I am proud of those friends, because they have done what my brother the delightfully pithy ski coach/art teacher would describe as a “kick-ass job.”

Why such high praise? The site opens with a highly produced mini-documentary from the multi-media rock stars over at MediaStorm featuring photos from Natalie Behring (definitely one of the most kick-ass photographers working in China at the moment) and an interview with Orville Schell (whose kick-ass fund-raising skills have helped financed this and many other a valuable projects). Beyond that, it provides a nice little summary of the issue with definitions of mysterious terms like “blue sky day” and “API,” some links to resources, and——the feature that truly puts the boot to the government’s hindquarters——a monthly calendar of air pollution levels made with photographs taken from the window of a single Beijing apartment building [see screen shot above].

Minus a few days here and there, the calendar (called “Room With A View”) visually documents the air in Beijing every day from April of last year to the present. Click on a day in the calendar and a full-size image of that day’s pollution pops up in the main screen, making it convenient for anyone outside Beijing to check on government claims of blue skies. The calendar also has pop-down menus with links to the best and worst days, plus a list of the days on which pollution climbed or fell the most. (Interestingly, the greatest changes all appear to happen in May and December…)

For those people smart enough to live elsewhere, this is as close as you’ll get to experiencing the pollution that blankets Beijing without actually having to breathe it. For the rest of us, the combination of the photos with statistics on average pollution levels and official blue sky day counts confirms all too vividly the sacrifice our lungs make so that we make partake in the madness.

More on the Amnesty International Olympics Ads

July 14, 2008 | Category: China, Media, Olympics, politics | Leave a Comment

$Amnesty International\'s rejected Olympic Weightlifting Ad$
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.]

2008: Anti-CNN vs. Advertising Greed

July 6, 2008 | Category: China, Internet censorship, Media, Olympics, politics, 荒诞 | 2 Comments

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

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About the Author

Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.