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Beijing’s Olympic Building Boom Becomes a Bust

From the LA Times:

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics reported this month that housing sales in the city dropped 40% last year. Chinese economists have predicted that housing prices will drop 15% to 20% in Beijing this year. Shanghai has experienced a similar decline.

“You can look at this perhaps as a healthy correction in the market,” Kuijs said.

In the longer term, he said, “China’s urbanization and overall development is going to lead to a very large additional demand for housing in the city.”

Before that happens, the situation could get worse. Most of the real estate has been financed by Chinese banks, which have avoided writing down the loans. Eventually, they will be forced to, and that probably will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

“At the end, somebody is going to have to pay the piper,” real estate expert Rodman said.
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- February 22, 2009 11:19 AM
Susan Brownell: Was There a Master Plan to Use the Olympic Games to Promote a Positive Image of China to the World ?

The China Beat has reprinted a version of a paper on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and China’s image, presented at a recent conference at the University of Southern California in January 2009. Below is an excerpt:

There was a common perception outside China that the Beijing Olympic Games involved a master plan to promote a positive image of China to the outside world and that this was one of the major goals of hosting the Olympic Games, if not the major goal. I want to argue that while there was widespread agreement in China that the Olympics were an excellent opportunity to promote an image of China to the world, the vast majority of the attention and effort was focused on the domestic audience; that there was never a concrete communication strategy for dealing with the human rights issue; and that in both instances, China’s ability to communicate a positive international image was hindered by the domestic political structure.

…

Olympic China National Image Ad

If there had been a master plan for using the Olympics to promote China’s image, it would have been developed by the Central Propaganda Department. The single person most responsible for coordinating everything would have been Li Dongsheng, who was simultaneously a member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, and – more to the point here - Deputy Director of the Central Propaganda Department, chief of BOCOG’s Media and Communications Coordination Group, and president of the China Advertising Association. Western media tended to make a big deal out of the American (Hill and Knowlton) and British (Weber Shandwick) PR firms that had worked for BOCOG, but in fact the non-Chinese viewpoint that they provided to BOCOG was only one among many collected, and probably not the most influential – and in any case, BOCOG was not empowered to discuss “political” issues.

So the major reason that there was no master PR plan was due to the strict division of labor with regard to communications with the outside world, with only the organs under the Central Propaganda Department empowered to speak about “political” issues. While the sport, educational, and cultural systems were crafting their “cultural” messages, the Information Office was engaged in a completely independent effort to produce a television commercial for “China” at the end of 2007. The difficult eight-month birthing process of the “Olympic China National Image Ad” indicates that if Li Dongsheng were trying to develop more proactive communications with the outside world, he may have had his opponents. The ad had been approved at the start of 2007, but it was not finally pushed through until just before the end of the fiscal year. Pressure was exerted via a long article entitled “Raise China’s Face – Where is China’s National Image Ad?” （《扬起中国脸—中国国家形象广告在哪里》）which appeared in November 2007 in Modern Advertising Magazine, a publication of the China Advertising Association of which Li was president. The article was written with the help of scholars at the Communication University of China and demonstrated the widespread support of the heads of China’s major advertising firms. One section, “Using the Opportunity of the Olympics to Build a National Image,” reviews the risk of negative media coverage but, like the other publications discussed, it does not develop a communication strategy for responding to it.

See also CDT’s stories on Olympic business and publicity.
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- February 3, 2009 11:22 PM
Documentary: World’s Biggest Airport - Beijing Capital International Airport

Discovery Channel’s documentary “Beijing Airport” tells the story of why and how China vowed to build the world’s biggest airport in Beijing, posted by Chinasuperpower via Youtube. Below is a description of the airport from Wikipedia:

Beijing Capital International Airport is the main international airport of Beijing, China. It is located 32 km northeast of Beijing’s city center in an enclave of Chaoyang District that is surrounded by rural Shunyi District. The airport is owned and operated by the Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited, a state-controlled company. The airport’s IATA Airport Code, PEK, is based on the city’s former romanized name, Peking.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

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- February 2, 2009 9:21 PM
Video: Naked China

It has been five months since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China considered the Games as a symbol of the rising of a great nation. Over five nights leading to the opening ceremony, News and multimedia website Current.com came up with a series of documentaries with five parts: Busting Out; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Out of Control; Fighting for Freedom; Let the Party Begin. These video series, anchored by Laura Ling, a Current journalist, summarize Current’s former news videos to explore China’s economic growth, how China prepared for the Games, social ills in China’s society - sex workers, freedom of religion and the press, and the transition of China’s culture, via Current.com:

Naked China: Busting Out

Naked China: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Naked China: Out of Control

Naked China: Fighting for Freedom

Naked China: Let the Party Begin

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- January 28, 2009 3:09 PM
Tania Branigan: China’s Momentous 2008

Tania Branigan recounts extraordinary events from the last 12 months in China and introduces video highlights of the year. Click here to see the videos on the Guardian blog:

This autumn, the chill winds of the world’s economic crisis reached Chinese shores, leaving millions jobless. As the year ends, celebrations of the 30th anniversary of its economic reforms – which have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty – are muted by the outlook for 2009. The country will enter this new year with rather more trepidation than the last.
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- December 25, 2008 1:44 PM
Photo: The Search

People search the rubble in Dujiangyan following the Sichuan earthquake in May, 2008, by thenez.
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- December 22, 2008 9:21 PM
Time Magazine on Zhang Yimou

Time Magazine has named Zhang Yimou as a runner-up to Person of the Year, citing his work for the Olympics ceremonies:

In telling China’s story, Zhang explored the character he, or peaceful harmony — an ideal critical to Chinese culture. This level of thematic and creative artistry is rare in the controlled realm of filmmaking, let alone in a multidimensional arena with thousands of performers and visual set pieces that seemed to border on the impossible — yet it was all happening live, before the eyes of the world.

There is much mythologizing surrounding Zhang’s rise to prominence, given that his first job was as a farmhand and then a laborer in a cotton mill. But the story I enjoy most is that he gave blood over a period of months to earn enough money to purchase his first camera. He was 25. When the Beijing Film Academy reopened in 1978 after the Cultural Revolution, he was 27, already considered too old to become a filmmaker and lacking many of the necessary credits. Undaunted, he offered his portfolio of photographic works and was admitted to the department of cinematography.

Zhang became a filmmaker, and for the past two decades, he has inspired the world’s fascination with China through his cinematic vision.

Read an interview with Zhang about the creation of the Olympics opening ceremony, and more coverage of Zhang Yimou via CDT.
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- December 17, 2008 10:15 PM
China Listed U.S. Athletes As Possible Troublemakers

From USA Today:

China’s government was so concerned about the possibility of athlete demonstrations in the Beijing Olympics that it created a list of nine U.S. athletes and one assistant coach it thought might cause trouble at the Games, according to an internal U.S. Olympic Committee e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.

The names included softball players Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza and soccer player Abby Wambach, who broke her leg and missed the Olympic Games. It also included two Paralympians, one athlete who wasn’t a member of the 2008 softball team and a top female collegiate golfer. Golf is not an Olympic sport.

“We viewed these concerns as being entirely unjustified and unwarranted,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said in an e-mail Wednesday. “As such, we rejected the request to address this with our athletes or transmit the letter to them. We saw absolutely no need to burden the athletes with this.”
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- October 30, 2008 7:26 PM
China Dissidents Eye Uncertain Post-Olympics Landscape

From AFP:

Despite hopes the Olympics would improve human rights, China’s crackdown on dissidents before and during the Games has likely set the stage for a lasting period of even tighter controls, government critics say.

Beijing-based AIDS campaigner Wan Yanhai is back at work following a government-imposed shutdown of his activities during the recent Summer Olympics, but he’s treading carefully.

He said police have tailed him recently and the government last month applied new pressure with a surprise tax probe of his Aizhixing Institute, which advocates for the rights of AIDS victims, a touchy subject in China.

“With the Olympics over, it looks like they have even more time to give us trouble,” Wan told AFP.
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- October 21, 2008 5:20 AM
China Issues Wanted List For Olympics Terror Plotters

From Reuters:

China released on Tuesday a wanted list of eight “terrorists” it said had plotted to attack the Beijing Olympic Games and were bent on separating the restive western region of Xinjiang.

It said the eight had also carried out attacks but did not say where.
Resource-rich Xinjiang, strategically located on the borders of Central Asia, has been rocked by sometimes violent unrest this year, including the killing of 16 armed police just before the August Olympics, blamed by China on Muslim militants seeking an independent state they call “East Turkestan”.

China called for international cooperation in tracking down the eight suspects, all Chinese citizens.
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- October 20, 2008 8:33 PM
Beijing Olympics Building Chief May Be Executed for Corruption

In another controversy surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Liu Zhihua, the man who oversaw Olympic building construction and was charged with corruption, now faces a suspended death sentence for two years. His offenses include taking bribes, living an opulent lifestyle, and engaging in promiscuous activities.

If the defendant demonstrates good behavior after two years, his sentence may be changed to life imprisonment. The New York Times reports:

…in June 2006, [Liu Zhihua] was stripped of his post after being linked to a bribery scandal. He was expelled from the governing Communist Party six months later.

Mr. Liu’s case was a major embarrassment to the party. Corruption is endemic, but party leaders had pledged that the $43 billion preparations for the Games would be the “cleanest in history.”

Construction of the Bird's Nest three months after the head of Olympic Construction was dismissed. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

…On Sunday, Xinhua said Mr. Liu had taken roughly $1 million in bribes during his tenure as vice mayor and as overseer of construction for a scientific research park in the city’s university district from 1999 to 2006.

A 2006 article by Reuters details how Hu Jintao was personally involved in dismissing Liu from his position. Analysts believe this move was motivated by Hu’s own political agenda rather than a desire to weed out corruption.
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- October 20, 2008 7:47 PM
China Issues New Rules Giving Foreign Journalists More Freedom (Updated)

From Xinhua:

China issued new rules on reporting activities by foreign correspondents on its territory late Friday, allowing them to interview without application to foreign affairs departments.

“The new rules follow the major principles and spirits of the media regulations introduced for the Beijing Olympics,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a late night press conference.

The conference began 15 minutes before the expiry of the temporary Olympic rules, which were introduced on January 1, 2007 and removed media restrictions on foreign reporters during the Beijing Games.

From AP:

China took a further step toward opening itself to the world, announcing Friday that an easing of restrictions on foreign journalists enacted for the Olympics would become permanent.

Premier Wen Jiabao signed the decree, which took immediate effect, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao at a late-night news conference.

Under the new regulations, which had been anticipated by journalists, foreign reporters would not be required to get government permission to travel within the country or to interview Chinese citizens.

Update: Press freedom groups have called on China to extend the new rules to domestic journalists as well. From AFP:

Rights groups and media experts Saturday gave a cautious welcome to China’s decision to allow foreign reporters greater freedom and urged Beijing to extend the same rights to domestic journalists.

[...] David Bandurski, a researcher for the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, said the issue of press freedom in China was determined by domestic media policy rather than rules governing foreign reporters’ work.

“This is not going to have any appreciable impact on domestic journalists,” he said.

Photo: People.com.cn
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- October 17, 2008 5:18 PM
Jiang Haiyan: Did the Olympics Bring About the Cancellation of Aid Awarded to China?

In this piece from Caijing Magazine, Jiang Haiyan channels the voice of Vice-Secretary of China Development Research Foundation, Tang Min, to explain what the discontinuation of foreign aid means to China.

Min says it’s unsurprising that countries such as England and Germany are talking about discontinuing aid to China. Although the discontinuation comes up following the Beijing Olympics and the successful Shenzhou-7 space mission, it is not a reaction to these events themselves, but a logical ramification of China’s sustained economic growth. Min also points out that the amount of foreign aid China receives is miniscule in comparison to the government’s total expenditure.

Min posits that China has reached a new stage in its development, obviating the need for financial aid. Instead, China needs less tangible aid in the form of cooperation, experience, and good ideas from the international community. This article concludes with Min’s summary, “In total, the positive aspects are greater than the negatives.”

Min is right; the prestige and pride China gains from financial independence clearly outweigh the strings-attached pittances it receives in aid.
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- October 17, 2008 5:14 PM
Gym Officials: China’s 2008 Gold Medalists of Age

The Olympics gymnasts who were accused of falsifying their ages in order to compete have been officially cleared, though questions remain about bronze medalists from the 2000 Games. AP reports:

International gymnastics officials on Wednesday closed their 5 1/2-week investigation into the ages of the Chinese gymnasts at the Beijing Olympics, saying the documentation provided confirms they were old enough to compete. But two members of the 2000 squad — Dong Fangxiao and Yang Yun — remain under scrutiny.

“The FIG does not consider the explanations and evidence provided to date in regards to these athletes as satisfactory,” the International Gymnastics Federation said in a statement.

Dong got a Beijing Olympics credential with documents that suggest she was only 14 in 2000, said Andre Gueisbuhler, secretary general of the FIG. Her blog also indicates she was underage in Sydney.

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- October 1, 2008 10:24 AM
Report: Olympic Activist Detained By China Police

From AP:

A Chinese activist who applied to protest in special zones set up for demonstrations during the Beijing Olympics has become the latest applicant to be detained by police, a rights group said Friday.

Ji Sizun disappeared Aug. 11, three days into the Olympic Games, and hasn’t been seen since, the overseas Chinese Human Rights Defenders group said. On Thursday, police from Fuzhou City in southeastern Fujian province told a friend of Ji’s that he had been detained, the group said.

It was not clear when he was taken into police custody.

A man surnamed Teng at the legal department of the Fuzhou City public security bureau said he did not know of Ji’s case. He said his bureau only deals with people once there is a case against them, and Ji might have been detained by lower-level agency.

Read also Olympics “Protest Zones” Applicant Sent to Re-education through Labor from Chinese Human Rights Defenders:

On September 23, Liu Xueli (刘学立), a petitioner and activist against forcible land appropriation from Henan Province, was sent to a local Re-education through Labor (RTL) camp. Liu had been under residential surveillance (house arrest) after he submitted an application to protest at the “Protest Zones” in Beijing during the Olympics.

At 2:45 p.m. yesterday, Liu was forcibly dragged into a car by policemen from Song County Public Security Bureau (PSB). Police told Liu that they were going to have a “chat” at the PSB. Hours later, Liu was told that he was to be sent to RTL. However, Liu was not presented with a formal written RTL order and was not informed of the length of, or the reasons for, the punishment.

CHRD calls for Liu’s immediate and unconditional release. CHRD believes that Liu has been detained solely for peaceful expression of opinion and petitioning. The Chinese government has violated Liu’s right to freedom of expression, a right guaranteed in Articles 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which China has signed as well as Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution. The Chinese government has also violated Article 41 of the Constitution, which guarantees citizens’ right to complain about government misconduct.
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- September 26, 2008 6:06 AM