It has been a very long time since my last post that nobody read. The primary reason for the delay is, of course, laziness. The secondary is, of course, Chinese censors blocking Blogspot until the recent international pressures due to Tibet coverage (or lack thereof) has persuaded the government to relax its limitations (Wikipedia!). With the combination of these two situations I simply forgot about posting and/or moving to another site. I assumed (partially correctly) that all other major foreign blog sites would also be blocked.
But anyway, as you may imagine, a lot has happened in 9 months. I have, since last posting, enrolled in Chinese classes, semi-officially dropped out of Chinese classes, bought a motorcycle, had a motorcycle stolen, moved apartments twice, gotten a contractor/internship at Ogilvy PR Beijing, and bought another motorcycle. Of course, more has happened, but this really isn’t meant to be an “about me and my wacky/mundane life” type blog
Note: any life that is described as “wacky,” isn’t.
Of course it is an “about stuff that I think about” blog, which strikes me as moderately less self-involved, self-important, and pretentious. Remember, I said moderately.
But anyway, Here’s what’s on my mind now. Working for the corporate communications department at Ogilvy is interesting. Not interesting in the sense that bizarre, inexplicable human behavior occurs on a daily basis (one of the supposed perks of entry-level, white-collar office society, I’m disappointed,) but interesting in the sense that it requires massive consumption of topical information, most notably in technology, media, and anything else that could be used to sell stuff. Because this is China and because this is 2008, it should go without saying that a large part of my daily job is spent reading news that relates, however tangentially, to the Olympics, Olympic sponsors, and ways to sell their customers stuff. My own idea of telling people, directly “I like stuff. Stuff is fun, stuff lasts, you should buy more of it,” has not gone down terribly well in meetings. Nevertheless, I find it might soon be the only way for Olympic sponsors to sell foreigners stuff, since foreigners are not terribly happy with Olympic Sponsors right now. People are angry with sponsors for not “speaking out” against the Chinese Gov’t and BOCOG because of Darfur, Tibet, and their wholesale slaughter of the Twi’Lek race of the great planet Narflak 7.
OK. Where do we begin?
Is it bad for sponsors to support a harsh regime that, while changing (and quicker than many think,) continues to oppress people that it has pseudo-conquered, simply to make profit? Of course it’s wrong. Is that what is happening? Kinda. Is it in any way avoidable? Not really.
I guess I need to explain how I see the situation. China is taking a lot of flak for what it’s doing wrong in Tibet. Unfortunately, most of the most major complaints lobbed at Beijing are for the wrong reasons. China is indeed repressing one of its regions, especially its religiosity and its leader, the Dalai Lama. Beijing is always nervous about sharing the spotlight of power, even with a non-violent religious figure because a.) it has been used to being the only power for so long, and b.) the Chinese realized long before the West (actually we haven’t yet,) that religion is simply a way of repressing and controlling the masses, with the added benefit of making the masses feel good about their slavery. Another major complaint is that Tibet is not a part of China and should be independent. This is stupid. The Dalai Lama knows this is stupid. Tibet has no resource reserves, no competitive industry, it cannot sustain itself as a country. What he wants, and what he should get, despite my aversion to religion, is a more autonomous level of control for Tibet (not necessarily for him) and safe passage into his home lands. Another issue is that Tibet sort of is a part of China. Provinces and territories in Asia switch hands as much as in Europe, and so while at times Tibet has been independent, it has also been part of China and other pre-China states. This isn’t to say that Beijing has total rights to occupy it, but it does make it a grey area.
What people should be outraged about is not the police suppression of riots, which has been, by even the most inflammatory accounts, less than terrible. They should be outraged about the inability for foreign media to observe Tibet. After their promises of transparency they have pretty much failed to deliver. But the real problem with this is the PR. Beijing has hurt its own cause far more by denying them access. And here’s why: if you can journalists from an area, no matter how impartial they are, they will instinctively believe that something is being hidden. They will instinctively trust nothing that you report and most likely assume the opposite (China’s track record for this sort of thing in the past doesn’t help matters either.) This emans that the denied journalists will form a profound and decidedly negative view of Beijing in the conflict between the State and its province, which is indeed journalistically unfair, but the Beijing government cannot make claims of biased, unfair, or incomplete reporting when they prevented it in the first place. I suspect that if journalists were allowed in Lhasa during the riots their articles would be substantially more fair minded. Mentioning that, while police have arrested many dissidents (details on their imprisonment is, as always, unacceptable opaque), it was likely the Tibetan minority that started the riots and were the first to harm Han Chinese, not the other way around.
It turns out that my hypothesis was completely correct. One journalist, Mr. Ted Plafker from The Economist, was in Lhasa during the riots and presented the most complete, fair, and balanced reporting of the events. For the article:
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10875823
Now, Beijing and the Chinese government don’t exactly come across as the good guys, but the reader can tell this is a conflict between two peoples, two ideas; not a one-sided crushing of dissent and opinion.
That said, Beijing’s media reaction of not letting in journalists and refusing (as ever) to entertain even the slightest notion of compromise, is both pathetic and damaging. As they are learning, China has too much money and clout to be ignored, so they can probably get their way by bullying. But Beijing should realized that it can also retain all its power while providing small but massively substantial concessions, which would boost its worldwide image and support, and make China even more attractive for investors.
This brings me back to sponsors and CSR. Are they supporting a totalitarian regime bent on destroying dissidents of all kinds? Well, the nukes are still cool to the touch, but I digress. The sponsors are doing what they always do, trying to make money and build markets for their products but aligning themselves with the Olympics. Of course, their intent is also to penetrate the Chinese market and gain a couple hundred million new, avid consumers, but it’s not their fault that Beijing is being stubborn, and it’s not the Chinese peoples’ fault either. If people want Coke, they’re going to get Coke, if Coke wants more people to want it, they’re going to advertise. So it’s unavoidable. Not to mention the fact that after investing millions upon millions of dollars marketing and building infrastructure (thanks GE!) for Beijing and the Games, there’s not much more the sponsors can do. The die has been cast. The money has mostly been spent, the campaigns are on the ground, and Beijing has gotten all the publicity whether the sponsors pull out, get kicked out, or what. Should massive corporations be more responsible globally? Probably (well, actually, yes,) but the point is that they have committed to see this thing through, and that is what is going to happen.
So I probably haven’t made 100% sense, and I might not have convinced anyone, but I did want to share some views.
One last note on Tibet: What’s really sad is what I said earlier: people are mad about the wrong things. What we should be mad about is the “cultural genocide,” the Dalai Lama has mentioned. That is an excellent sound byte for purposely half-informed activists in rich countries with BMWs, and it’s true, but no one has stopped to look at or care why or what it means. In fact, it is the whole reason for the start of these riots. Western people who like to shout about things they can’t control believe the riots are about Tibet’s “slavery and repression,” but that’s not really true. Tibetans are angry about true cultural genocide, meaning that the Beijing government has incentivized Han Chinese moving to regions primarily occupied by ethnic minorities in an attempt to “breed out” minorities, and make Han Chinese the only real ethnic group in China. This is clever and questionable, but it’s scary because it might work, especially if foreign activists continue to scream at the top of the lungs about the wrong things.
