Apparently not only will traffic drop and all construction in Beijing cease before the 2008 Olympics, but the Chinese government apparently plans to ban smoking at the Olympics. The details are a little sketchy. The ban could mean anything from disallowing the smoking of cigarettes by competitors during the 100m backstroke to actually banning all smoking within Olympic venues. If the latter, there will likely be formidable and disorderly lines of smokers huffing away at the entrances. Considering that all men in Beijing (and a couple of women) smoke, a lot, this ban could be a very tough one to enforce.

Some guy actually listened to the early 90’s song Informer, by Snow, for six hours non-stop. I know I’m a year late in passing along my appreciation, but wow. This man’s one act undoubtedly caused a rupture in the space-time continuum.

For those of you who don’t remember the song, it’s a sort of gangland anthem sung in an impenetrable and speedy Jamaican patois by a Canadian white guy whose name is not really Snow. I think the only word I can understand in the entire song is “Informer”, everything else is an interestingly syncopated blur. The song was pretty catchy back in the day, and was #1 for a while on some chart, but now people remember it as an oddity if at all.

There’s a reason I just now remembered the existence of this song and did the net searching that led to discovery of the 2005 Snow marathon, and it’s not that I’m just trying to distract myself from thinking about the fun I’m going to have going through airport security on Monday for my trip to the U.S. The real reason is that a good friend stopped by Beijing for a visit. He hooked his iPod up to my stereo, and in rotation along with a bunch of forgotten songs from the 80s and 90s was Informer. We listened to it once, which was pleasant, but I can’t imagine what 6 hours of Informer could do to a person. (Don’t remember the song? You can hear a clip at iTunes, or Amazon)

In Beijing, when you enter a bank or an area with ATM banking machines, sometimes you’re presented with not just one type of ATM machine, but instead two types of ATM (one local-only and one that works with foreign accounts), a machine or two for cash deposits, and maybe a new multi-purpose machine with two card slots that looks more like an information kiosk than an ATM. There’s one near my apartment that features a fancy touchscreen and graphics that wouldn’t be out of place in a video game menu, which can apparently be used to buy subway tickets, pay the electric bill, and if I’m guessing correctly as to the meaning of other buttons on the display, pay for medical services, airfares, and music? I’m not sure how any of those functions work, but given how much fun I had last time I went to the bank to pay the power bill, I figured I’d try the scary touchscreen machine out.

I’d seen the machine used once before, but didn’t really remember how it all worked. Before touching the machine, I tried to anticipate the possible problems I could have and decide on a course of action.

1. I can’t read enough Chinese (I’ve struggled through interfaces I couldn’t understand before, both professionally and for fun, so this minor detail wouldn’t alone stop me)
   
2. Due to problem 1, I might accidentally enter my PIN number when the machine wants to know how much power I’d like to buy, and end up buying over 100,000 kilowatts? (hence my decision that if the machine asks for a number, and I can’t tell whether it wants my PIN or the amount of power, I’ll enter the smaller of the two numbers — if I entered the small number and instead it had wanted my PIN it should display an error message that I could hopefully suss out with the help of a dictionary)
   
3. Which card to place in the slot when? (hopefully it will be obvious, likely bank card first in order to do the financial transaction, then the power card to be recharged)

As it turns out, all my guesses were right, I bought 400kw and only had to deal with a couple of minutes of button pushing and waiting, and when I inserted the newly charged card into the power meter at home it showed that the power had been added. What a nice experience. A huge improvement on the bank queue.

I may later go and take a photo of the machine and add it to this post.

Citing political and ethical considerations, Google hasn’t yet launched its free email service, Gmail, in China. But why is this Gmail China login screen online?

Google, in order to comply with Chinese government policy, censors the search results it displays to users who access its www.google.com.cn site (that ‘cn’ at the end of the name indicates a Chinese website). This was big news a little while back, as it marked the moment that the company which proudly cites “Do No Evil” as one of its guiding principles made compromises for the sake of reach and profit that many outside China found distasteful. Google is in good company, Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blocks Chinese users from posting articles that include words like “democracy” and “freedom”, Skype’s text chat here censors certain words, and Yahoo has gone even further in its compliance with Chinese government censorship policies –I’ll return to this topic in a bit. All of these companies justify their actions by saying that they must comply with local regulations when they operate in other countries.Users in China who can read English (such as myself) can still search the web using the good ‘ol www.google.com URL, and get uncensored search results. It’s a pyrrhic victory — you can see the unfiltered results but the sites are generally blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so it feels as if Google is just returning many dead links. For an amusing visual look at how the censorship affects Google image results, see this great side-by-side comparison of a politically sensitive google image search.

Back when Google’s compliance with the Chinese government was a big news item, articles often contained statements such as the following:

Neither Google’s e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn’t want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone’s personal information.

This is because any company that plants its servers on Chinese soil will place information on those servers within reach of the Chinese government. If Google were to store user’s personal information on servers within China, the Chinese government could request for this information, and Google would have to comply or risk the consequences.

Yahoo found itself in exactly such a sticky situation last year. The Chinese government decided that information posted to the web by a user with an anonymous Yahoo email address was a state secret and asked Yahoo’s Hong Kong office to provide them with the user’s personal information. Yahoo complied, and former Yahoo user Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. News of Yahoo’s disclosure of the anonymous user’s identity, and a recently discovered case of another unmasked Yahoo user who received an 8 year prison term for discussing pro-democracy issues in a web forum, has caused some people in Western countries to criticize, boycott, and perhaps even advocate divesting from Yahoo and other U.S. internet firms operating in China.

Which brings us back to Google and this post’s title. Google may not be ready yet, politically, to roll-out their anonymous gmail service to Chinese users, but they do appear to have some Gmail China functionality online, ready and waiting for the green light. I know this because out of simple curiousity I added a “.cn” to the “gmail.com” URL in my browser, and lo and behold I reached this Gmail China login screen. Attempts to login fail with a “can’t find the server at mail.google.com.cn” error. This suggests that the login screen is programmed to eventually bring registered users to their mail on servers in China.

I wonder when Gmail China will launch and what criteria Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, will use to decide when the time is right.

In a tangentially apropos comment to my Hao Wu post Angus asks “I really enjoy your blog but why do you call it Spiritual Pollution?”

The answer is that the title of the blog is actually In Beijing, which I plan to keep in place. But below the title is space for an amusing or evocative phrase, a subtitle. At the moment, that subtitle is Spiritual Pollution. I love this phrase, it is so colorful, and springs from such a grand utopian vision.

I ran across this great little phrase when I was reading about the Chinese novelist Mian Mian. She wrote a very popular book entitled Candy which was banned by Chinese censors. The barely-fictional book includes both sex and heroin abuse, and I guess the censors weren’t too keen on either topic. Most articles about her mention that authorities or censors have called Mian “a poster child for spiritual pollution.” You can see Mian Mian read some excerpts from Candy on the internet, courtesy of U.S. Public Broadcasting.

I’m embarrassingly ignorant of Chinese history, so it is fun to learn so much about of it by merely investigating one catchy little phrase. The phrase spiritual pollution did not originate with Mian Mian, nor is she the first Chinese novelist accused of spreading spiritual pollution.

Spiritual Pollution’s heyday was back in the early 80s. Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese leader generally described as a reformer, had opened China economically, but was very wary of Western cultural influences. He gave a speech calling for a campaign against spiritual pollution (精神污染 – jīngshenwūrăn) an umbrella phrase used to categorize Western influences, bourgeois attitudes, and anything considered vulgar or anti-party. Painter and author Ma Jian was interrogated by China’s Public Security Bureau and faced arrest on the charge of spiritual pollution after neighbors reported his “bourgeois” activities to the police (activities such as reading xeroxed underground magazines and chatting with dissident friends late at night). Ma fled Beijing and travelled through remote areas of China for 3 years under pseudonyms. He wrote a book about his 3 year journey entitled Red Dust: A Path Through China. The book was translated into English, and I’m now a couple of enjoyable chapters into it.

Prosecutions on the charge of Spiritual Pollution seem to be much less in vogue these days than they were back in ‘83. China has opened up culturally to the point where kids here happily flaunt NBA basketball jerseys and watch the latest US blockbusters on readily available pirate DVDs without worried neighbors turning them in to the police. But though the phrase may have lost its (punitive) bite, the comments from censors about Mian Mian show that it is not dead.

Here’s a bit more history on the phrase. According to an article entited China; Rectification and Reform:

… A campaign against “spiritual pollution” was initiated by a speech given at the Second Plenum by Deng Xiaoping (see Policy Toward Intellectuals , ch. 4). The campaign targeted “decadent, moribund ideas of the bourgeoisie” that questioned the suitability of the socialist system or the legitimacy of the party’s leading role. It also sought to establish a basis for ideological continuity between the emerging younger generation and the older, civil-war-era veterans. Conservative Political Bureau members attempted to use the campaign to rectify what they considered decadent behavior and corrosive liberal thought. Following this example, some lower-level party cadres began to exhibit behavior similar to that of the mass campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Young men and women with long hair or Western-style clothing were subjected to ridicule and abuse. Peasants who had prospered were accused of selfishness; in response, some ceased to participate in rural reform. Intellectuals were again under suspicion, and party and government cadres adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude to avoid making political errors. …

I hope this answers your question.