From Beijing

After 23 hours on planes, I am in Beijing. Sort of. I’m in the ultra-swank, ultra-faux-Western China World Hotel. Actually, I’m in the itnernet cafe next door. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see something other than bellboys in their ‘Thirties bellboy caps and computer screens (“How a bellboy got into my computer screen I’ll never know”). But probably not: tomorrow is rehearsal day in the ultra-modern conference hall. Off in the distance some red neon beckons. Sigh. (I’ve been here once before and I’m coming back in the middle of April for an actual tourist visit with my 11-year-old son. More later.)

So what can I tell you about Beijing? Clean internet cafe. It costs either 8 or 80 yuan per hour – roughly a buck or ten bucks. Good connection. Gator pops up every time you log in anywhere, offering to remember your password (yeah, right, in a public cafe) and sending reports on your demographically-crucial browsing activity back to the mothership…just in case no one at the cafe is tracking your browsing paths.

I don’t expect to be blogging regularly over the next week. We’ll see how it goes. But here’s one from the plane:

Voice of Authority

“Private Forecast Rosy: State urge to clear barriers hindering sector”

This is the headline of The Business Weekly (which is confusingly subtitled: “China Daily”). I’m reading it on the plane ride from LA to Beijing, after having flown Boston to LA. While the flight attendants — all women, all young — have a basic command of English, I’ve been nodding vigorously and smiling like a baboon in response to every question. I’ve even given up on “tsieh tsieh” since rather than being a charmingly inept attempt to be polite in Chinese, it’s apparently coming across as an American speaking gibberish.

Here’s the lead of the article:

The private sector in China should have a bright future despite the barriers and hurdles bedeviling it, economists have claimed.

The article refers to a July 2001 speech by Jiang Zemin encouraging “eligible private entrepreneurs” to join the Party. It also says that all sectors due to be opened to foreign investment after China’s admission to the World Trade Organization will first be opened to domestic private investors. And, it says, the private sector was 13% of China’s GDP in 1999.

This is rhetoric I don’t understand, a code I can’t crack. I’ve gotten as far as it translating into: “Private sector good.” Does the rest of it mean that it’s good so long as it’s part and parcel of the ruling party? Probably. Does the comment about opening sectors first to domestic investors indicate a throttling back or a racing forward? Or something else? I read it, grinning like a baboon.

What’s most remarkable to me is how similar this totalitarian language is to the verbiage found in the typical quarterly report from any corporation.

Categories: Uncategorized dw