Josh Chin's Notebook:

Oba-Mao: Beijing in a tizzy over a T-shirt

(Watch Josh Chin's video report on the Obama visit.)

Was it Chinese government officials worried about offending their guest, or White House PR flacks anxious to prevent the Tea Party people adding another image to their posters?

Whatever the reason, the above t-shirt depicting Barack Obama as a Chinese revolutionary hero has been ordered removed from the shelves of ironic hipster clothing shops throughout Beijing in advance of the U.S. president's first trip to China.

According to a report in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper (translation here courtesy of China Digital Times), local shop owners received calls last week from the Beijing Municipal Government requesting they stop selling the item poste haste.

The shirt shows a socialist-realist Obama decked out in a Cultural Revolution-era Red Guard uniform and striking a Mao-like pose over that most famous of the Chairman's slogans: "Serve The People." (Incidentally, it was featured in a GlobalPost video on Obama's impending visit to Beijing, filmed shortly after the ban was introduced).

Your correspondent attempted to interview the man who originally dreamed up the so-called ObaMao image, designer Liu Mingjie, but was rebuffed. The t-shirt appears to have been banned shortly after Liu appeared in this story on the front page of the state-run China Daily's Metro section.

Obama is supposed to arrive in China on November 15th and is scheduled to stay four days. According to Ming Pao, the shirts can go back on sale after he leaves.

Where the ban order ultimately came from, nobody knows. But if the aim was to keep the image out of the GOP's eye, the Beijing t-shirt police seem to have failed.

As often happens in China, it's not until something is banned that it truly takes off. 

Ultimate Tiananmen dissident speaks from the grave, but in China, who will listen?

China watchers have been abuzz all day with news of a forthcoming book, "Prisoner of the State," based on tapes secretly recorded by Zhao Ziyang, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party who was stripped of power and placed under house arrest after opposing the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Media large and small have greeted the book with blanket converage, including a fulsome review by Paul Mooney in the Far Eastern Economic Review and a stunning presentation of the tape recordings (with transcripts in Chinese and English) on the Washington Post website. While some in China will surely try to label the book a hoax, the tapes appear to be authentic.

[For those dismayed at the attention the book has received, suffice it to say that Zhao is considered a mensch by many who followed his career (no small feat for a Chinese government official) and there was considerable worry after he died that he had taken his insights to the grave.]

There's no point in re-hashing all that's been written about the book already. But I feel compelled to note it here because we are fast approaching the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown (June 4) and Zhao — or rather, Zhao's death — is what first started me thinking seriously about how the event is remembered, and not remembered, inside China itself.

Zhao died in January 2005, apparently after suffering multiple strokes while under house arrest. I recall it vividly because the day after he died I found myself sitting in a classroom with several Chinese journalists on the UC Berkeley campus, listening to a lecture on media in China. One of the journalists was slightly older and visbly shaken by the news. It emerged he had been on the square, a college student protesting for democracy, in 1989. When the professor asked him to offer his thoughts on Zhao he made to talk, then covered his face and offered a muffled apology.

The instructor next turned to the younger journalists and asked them to offer their thoughts. Silence. Finally, one of them spoke up, saying, "I'm not really sure why people here think it is such a big deal."

These were not your average Chinese journalists. They were some of the top reporters from some of the country's most daring publications — reporters who, had they been old enough in 1989, very likely would have been marching with the students under banners calling for press freedom. But they were not old enough in 1989. And while they knew as much or more about the episode as any American their age, they didn't accord it the same significance.

An old official, maybe a good old official, had died. That was it.

In subsequent conversations with young people in China, I've found the same thing: A tendency to view the protests and crackdown with a kind of clinical ambivalence. It was a turning point, to be sure, but nothing to get emotionally worked up about. This is not wholly the result of ignorance or propaganda: Any Chinese teenager with a reasonable grasp of Internet filter workarounds (which is to say, nearly all of them) can access Western news reports and documentaries on the subject. A fair number have. And yet, many still refuse to buy the notion that the protests were a good thing, or even a momentous thing. (Others have noted the same phenomenon.)

Coincidentally, I was talking with a Beijing friend last night about the legacy of 1989 for Chinese people and what, if anything, the older generations are telling their children about it. When the news about Zhao Ziyang's book came out this morning, my friend, who's 30, sent an email about one night 19 years ago when she was lighting off fireworkers with her father. The firework casings were made of old newspapers.

There was enough scrap for me to tell they were all about how anti-revolutionary Zhao was and how Chinese people despised him. So i asked my dad if he was a bad man. My dad said "he's not a bad man and don't read this newspaper!"

They didn't talk much about Zhao or Tiananmen after that.

As of this writing, the Zhao tape excerpts on the Washington Post website and another set of excerpts on the New York Times site are both still accessible in China. It might be China's Internet authorities haven't gotten around to blocking them. Or it might mean they're not all that worried.

Chinese police tactics revealed: Leave no trace

Well, no one ever said police were good at PR.

As the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, a user on a popular Chinese online discussion board has published portions of a police training manual — parts of which read like something out of a Bush-era CIA torture memo — setting off a minor firestorm of online outrage.

The book (pictured) is titled "Practices of City Administration Enforcement." Anger has so far focused mostly on one line, which advises officers to "leave no blood on the face, no wounds on the body and no people in the vicinity" when "dealing" with offenders.

The line comes from a section of the book called "Methods for the Prevention and Control of Violence," translated here for the benefit of GlobalPost readers:
 

1 — Use the highest degree of close-quarters dodging movements to avoid any violent attack — move quickly and react sharply. Before the subject has a chance to strike again, control the subject's limbs, quickly make it so he cannot move and do whatever you can to press him down on the ground while telling the subject in a loud voice than any resistance will result in him going to jail.

2 — It's best if multiple officers work together to control the subject bodily in a single move, acting effectively and forcefully so as not to give the subject any pause for breath. Then remove him from the scene, making sure the subject has lost all power to counter-attack, and confiscate any of the subject's property left at the scene.

4 — Do not attempt to control the subject's violent actions in front of a crowd. If a crowd cannot be avoided, use relatively soft tactics.

5 — When dealing with the violent subject, take care to leave no blood on the face, no wounds on the body and no people in the vicinity. Finish the work in a rapid sequence of actions and leave no trace. As soon as you engage, preventative action must be neat and tidy. Do not hesitate, use all necessary force.

6 — The entire process needs to be carried out calmly and without becoming distracted or flustered. Do not worry about whether you are a match for the subject, whether you might injure him, how long this kind of encounter will take to end, etc. In this instance, you should become ego-less, a resolute law enforcment officer defending the dignity of city administrative regulations.

Several state-run media organizations, including the central propaganda organ People's Daily, have questioned whether the book was actually used in training police officers, even whether it actually exists. But the relatively independant Southern Weekend newspaper has found a link to the book on the website of the state-run Xinhua Book Store, while sister paper Southern Metropolis Daily says a Beijing law enforcement official has confirmed it was used in training.

As the Telegraph notes, the book is aimed at chengguan, or "city administrative officers," a particularly unpopular branch of Chinese law enforcement, often derided as thugs with badges, responsible for rounding up illegal street vendors and other "undesirables."

A completely unscientific survey of online response to the book finds a vast majority of Chinese netizens angry over the book, with a small minority — say around 30 percent — sticking up for the police as a "disadvantaged group."

Interested Chinese speakers can see the original post here.

One nagging question surrounding the furor is, why now? The book was published in 2006, and (despite the Telegraph's talk of "leaks") is apparently publically available. It even appears to have come up for discussion on a different online forum two years ago.  Is the financial crisis making people cranky? Or maybe someone has a grudge against the chengguan and is trying to sabotage them, in which case it could be any one of a several tens of millions of people.
 

It's called sabotage ...

 It appears the identity of the anonymous bidder who purchased the controversial bronze animal heads in the Yves Saint Laurent auction I wrote about over the weekend has already been revealed. According to a Xinhua report, he is Cai Mingzhao, "collection advisor" to the National Treasure Fund of China. The fact that the buyer is Chinese and has ties to the National Treasure Fund is no big surprise, as few other people would care enough to bid on the items. But there's a kicker: He doesn't intend to pony up the cash.

"What I want to stress is that this money cannot be paid," Xinhua quotes Cai as saying at a press conference in Beijing this morning. "Every Chinese would have liked to do like this at that moment, and I'm honored to have the chance to make the bid."

In other words, this was not buyer's remorse, but a deliberate act of sabotage.

According to Xinhua, Cai registered for the auction at the last minute — something he was able to do only because he had a good reputation in art dealing circles. So why would he sacrifice that reputation? 

One hint comes from Wang Qing, a spokesman for the group of Chinese lawyers involved in an earlier lawsuit against the sale of the heads, who thanked Cai for giving the lawyers time to file new legal challenges.

Cai said at the press conference that he made the fake bid "on behalf of all Chinese people." The question, though, is whether all Chinese people will appreciate the gesture. It seems safe to say now that Cai's reputation is ruined. To the extent the news media take him at his word and portray him as a representative of China, so too will the country's reputation suffer.

(Pictured above: One of the four bronze animal heads, out of set of 12, recovered by the Poly Art Museum in Beijing, photo by yours truly.)

Multimedia: The Old School

As a multimedia reporter, I admit I am occasionally given to bouts of smugness. I may get no respect from the grizzled guardians of old journalism, I tell myself in these moments, but I am the vanguard, the future — the intrepid journalistic do-it-all wading into the torrent of 21st century technology to bring the world a new form of storytelling.

Or not, as it turns out.

This past Saturday was the last official day of China's Spring Festival vacation. To mark the occasion, I went to Ditan Park in the northeast corner of old Beijing to catch the last day of the Spring Festival Temple Fair. The Beijing temple fairs are a Qing Dynasty tradition, revived in recent years, and consist generally in hordes of locals descending on the city's old temple grounds to eat over-priced food, play carnival games and buy loads of useless schlock — like inflatable giraffes, which, for some mystifying reason, were a must-have this year. I went with the vague hope of catching a Beijing Opera performance, which my neighbor told me was available this year. Instead, after 20 minutes jostling my way through the crowds, hands held boxer-like in front of my face to protect myself from the giraffes, I ran into the man pictured above, whose name (according the placard in the picture) is Chen Qihuan and whom I now humbly respect as a professional forebear.

Chen is among the last performers of something called layangpian (拉洋片，or "pulled movies"), one of the "Eight Great Curiosities of Tianqiao" — a genre of traditional entertainment I'd never heard of before but which apparently was quite popular a hundred years ago. The centerpiece of layangpian is a large box with peepholes cut into the front, through which the audience watches a series of slide-mounted paintings manipulated by an invisible pulley system in back. The entire thing is operated by one person, who stands on a stool to the side of the box using one hand to manipulate the pulleys and the other hand to play the cymbals, all while narrating the story in a delightfully crude mixture of song and poetry. In other words, a turn-of-the-century audio slideshow.

My Mandarin wasn't good enough to catch the particulars of the story — something evergreen about the Boxer Rebellion and the effort to cleanse China of foreign devils — but his pitch to the crowd was clear enough: "It can't compare to a modern movie. It's not that entertaining. But it's a hell of a lot cheaper."

I'm thinking seriously of lobbying the GlobalPost editorial board to make that our new slogan. All in favor, please register your support in the comments section below.

[You can see more pictures from the Temple Fair here. Also, try this nice little "sonic tour" of last year's temple fair at the Temple of the Eastern Peak from NPR's Day to Day (RIP).] 

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