Ben Blanchard

First the Olympics and now National Day -- China is once more tightening the screws on foreigners living in Beijing, with random identity checks and restrictions on movement, because of worries about security ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party coming to power, on Oct. 1.

Of course for Chinese, the burden is far heavier when it comes to these controls. Foreigners are generally given much more leeway in China, possibly because many police are uncomfortable dealing with the hassle of language and cultural barriers.

But those who live in the alleyways close to Beijing's main thoroughfare, Changan Avenue, are in the heightened security zone on either side of the military parade that will be the centerpiece of the day's celebrations.

Instead, foreigners are being given an order that offers a humourous but sharp reminder of how authoritarian China's government can still sometimes be.

The messages being relayed by the police can be summed up this way: Stock up on food, take your passport everywhere and no guests are allowed. 

Here is a copy, in the original English, of a notice being given out in one part of central Beijing, issued for "the pleasure" of residents' "happy life":

ANNOUNCEMENT

To the foreigners:

October 1, 2009 is the 60th anniversary of founding the People's Republic of China, Celebrations and Eve Gala Evenings will be held according. The closedown and cordon off area will include the area that you live in curtain period. For the smooth going of your daily life, we take the pleasure in announcing the following issues:

1. Please reduce your going out as possibly as you can. While having to go out, please definitely take your passport and the <<temporary accommodation register form>>.

2. You had better refuse the visitors who possibly can not arrive at your abode.

3. Please save certain of living necessity, then the peripheral store won't can provide convenience.

4. Please obey the policeman's direction and control. Your co-operations are most appreciated.

5. Please pay attention to the government's announcement about traffic control, and work well your route of travel arrangement in advance.

Dong Cheng District Public Security Bureau wish you having a happy life in our magistracy!

Dong Cheng District Public Security Bureau

September 4, 2009

Photo captions: Top: Participants stand in form in a boulevard leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing during a rehearsal for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China August 29, 2009. REUTERS/Nir Elias

Bottom: Security forces march through a boulevard leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing during a rehearsal for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China August 30, 2009. REUTERS/Nir Elias

Security on Beijing's Tiananmen Square is always tight.
 
But I knew that today it was going to be particularly so when, upon emerging from the subway station, I was faced with three police vans and literally hundreds of security personnel, all on guard against any kind of disturbance ahead of the 20th anniversary of 1989's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.
 
Nervously I made my way to one of the square's entrances, wondering if I would even be allowed to enter.
 
I put my bag on the X-ray machine, was briefly frisked by police with metal detectors, and cleared to go on my way.
 
The square was full of tourists, as usual. What was different was the hordes of uniformed police, military police and plainclothes security every few metres.
 
The plainclothes officers were painfully obvious, shuffling awkwardly in T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, their crew cut hairstyles and poorly hidden walkie-talkies distinguishing them from ordinary visitors. They were also all carrying the same brand of bottled water.
 
Everytime I tried talking to someone, a police officer or one of the guards began hovering behind me. Finally I was able to chat with a trinket seller, who, talking in a low voice, complained
that the security was ruining her business.
 
"June 4 is tomorrow," she said simply.
 
At that point one of the crew-cut men marched over and told the lady to stop talking to me.
 
By this stage. I had had enough and began heading back towards the subway station, passing on my way a foreign television crew. A policeman was telling them in no uncertain terms that they could not film in the square.
 
I felt lucky that nobody had stopped me. I'm sure the police knew I was there though, and why I had gone.

Photo caption: Chinese security personnel try to stop pictures from being taken as they check the documents of the photographer at Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 3, 2009. Chinese security forces blanketed Tiananmen Square on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of the June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

There is a strong element of farce to covering the North Korea story, which should perhaps come as no surprise considering what an unusual, isolated place it is and how hard verifiable news is to come by.

One never knows quite what to believe, with all the strange stories that seep out about Kim Jong-il's love of pizza, the rants of North Korea's official KCNA news agency and numerous other bizarre tales, including these two.
(http://www.reuters.com/article/sportsNews/idUSSEO26227220080314)

(http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUKTRE51I2SE20090219)

But it reached another low this week with the arrival in Beijing from North Korea of a team of expelled nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The Beijing media corps dutifully rushed down to the airport and massed in the arrivals hall, quivering cameras and microphones in hand, desperate for any news from the reclusive country which bars almost all foreign reporters.

Trouble was, nobody knew who the inspectors were or what they looked like. All we knew was that they were on the Air Koryo flight out of Pyongyang.

A dribble of passengers trickled trough, including occasional North Koreans sporting Kim Il-sung badges pinned to their lapels.

Then suddenly a chorus of "lai le!" ("they're here!") went up from a line of Chinese cameramen facing the incoming arriving passengers, which prompted a mad scramble to surround three rather
astonished-looking Western men.

"When will North Korea be able to restart its nuclear reactor? How did they tell you that you'd been expelled?" a reporter asked one of the men, over and over.

"They didn't expel me, I had to go," the passenger rather gamely replied, before pushing his way out of the airport and refusing to say anything else, aside from that he had to go to Mongolia -- not a country known for its nuclear programme.

Another passenger was a little more forthcoming: "We don't know anything. We're just tourists."

Which would presumably explain their lack of knowledge about North Korea's nuclear facilities.

It later turned out that the real inspectors had slipped out amid the confusion, without saying anything to the press, leaving us none the wiser about the next development in the ongoing drama that is North Korea.

Photo caption: U.N. nuclear inspectors arrive in Beijing after leaving Pyongyang April 16, 2009. REUTERS/Grace Liang

A proposal to have Chinese "diving prince" Tian Liang star as revolutionary model soldier Lei Feng in a television show has prompted an angry response from some of Lei's former comrades.

Lei was idealised by Communist propagandists for his selfless spirit and devotion to the Party and the people, though some historians say his legend has been embellished.

He died after being run over by a truck in 1962 while helping a colleague, according to the official story.

But now, 70 of his former friends-at-arms have written an open letter calling on Tian not be to allowed to play Lei on screen, saying his "indiscipline, frequent scandals and extravagance" made him an inappropriate choice, the Liaoshen Evening Post said.

    Tian was kicked off the national team with fellow Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing for undertaking too many "commercial activities" in the wake of their successes at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Guo later apologised and was taken back, but Tian refused and retired in 2007.

    "After careful thought, we do not believe that Tian Liang is an appropriate choice to play Lei Feng," they wrote in an open letter.

    "Lei Feng is a model for all the people to learn from ... a representative of traditional virtues," they wrote. "Tian Liang is an outstanding diver ... but his outward disposition is very different from what we experienced with Lei Feng.

    "Lei Feng was a unique and great soldier, and his spirit the embodiment of national virtues, which should not be whipped up for publicity nor made fun of."

    Tian, for his part, says the controversy is a good thing. "There would be discussion whoever was chosen to play Lei Feng, and I think that's good," he was quoted as saying on a Chinese website
(http://www.022net.com/2009/4-13/441637232584643.html).

    "At the very least it will get more people thinking about Lei Feng and his spirit. I'll take the pressure and turn it into motivation, grasp Lei Feng's spirit thoroughly and do my level best to play him well," Tian added.

Photo caption: In a 2004 file photo, China's Olympic diving champion Tian Liang is escorted by security guards as he arrives at a conference about the Athens Olympics in Xian. REUTERS/China Photos

2008 was undoubtedly China's year in the limelight, thanks to the Beijing Olympics. But this year, China's longtime political and diplomatic rival Taiwan gets the World Games

And it's not Taiwan's frenetic, fashionable capital Taipei which will be hosting the event. Instead, the island's second largest city and one of the world's busiest ports, Kaohsiung, will be home to the 16-26 July extravaganza.

The World Games, held under the patronage of the International Olympic Committee, is for some of the sports which don't make the cut for the Olympics. That includes billiards, tug of war, sumo, squash, water skiing and even life saving.

"For the spectators, at the venues as well as in front of TV sets, the particular fascinations of The World Games are found in watching these athletes compete in sports of a kaleidoscopic variety that is without match in the entire Olympic Movement," is how the organisation describes the event.

What I have found most fascinating is the preparations Kaohsiung has been making for the Games, particularly as I covered the Beijing Olympics and the run-up to it.

Beijing was beset by problems, all well-documented, including worries over pollution, media freedom, the poor foreign language skills of its citizens and many, many other issues, though in the end it all went off more or less smoothly.

Having been to Kaohsiung many times over the past decade and several times over the last few months, I have been fascinated to observe their build-up.

Media freedom was never really going to be an issue, as Taiwan is a free-wheeling democracy with a feisty press and little fear of foreign reporters. Pollution used to be a problem in Kaohsiung, but it less so now since many of the factories packed up and moved to much cheaper China.

Kaohsiung's transport infrastructure has been revolutionised by the opening last year of a sleek new subway system, which is not only fully bilingual in Mandarin and English but includes announcements in the Hokkien and Hakka dialects.

The people in Kaohsiung could also not be more friendly and welcoming to foreigners, a trait Taiwan is well known for.

Of course, it has not and will not be all plain sailing, and politics has begun to intrude.

Kaohsiung's city government is run by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which lost last year's presidential election to the Nationalists, who once ran all of China until being forced to flee to Taiwan at the end of a civil war with the Communists.

The pro-Taiwan independence DPP has been accusing the central government in Taipei of not giving them the money they want for the World Games.

Will Kaohsiung be able to attract that many spectators? The World Games hardly has the draw of the Olympics, and is being held in a city many foreigners have probably never heard of, let alone can pronounce. The global economic downturn could stymie the plans even of those who would like to go.

I for one will be watching with interest to see how the Games turn out, and if they manage to raise Kaohsiung's or Taiwan's international profile.

For a Reuters city guide to Kaohsiung, please click here.

Pictures of Games poster and building of the stadium in Kaohsiung by Pichi Chuang/REUTERS

Psst, want a gun? Or an illegal satellite television connection? What about some porn?

It's all on offer in China, judging by the spam text messages and solicitation calls to mobile telephones in the world's biggest mobile phone market. Black and gray-market goods have proliferated via free-wheeling texting spam that has become a menace.

Some messages offer increasingly desperate sounding offers for real estate as economic growth pulls back sharply and demand dries up.

But a lot of it is actually quite funny.

More than a few are scams, hoping to snare the gullible in mobile phone-obsessed China.

"I'm pregrant and it's all your fault," reads one from an anonymous woman, who demands money and includes her supposed friend's bank account details.

"I'm going to get rid of it tomorrow, and the consequences will be on you for the rest of your life," it concludes -- unless you pay up, of course.

Another offers titillation.

"Do you want to know what Miss Chen got up to with her boss on the business trip?" it says, providing a telephone number to listen in to her sexual antics.

Then there are the offers for revenge, selling guns and other weapons to settle personal scores, though these types of message have tailed off of late.

The government, telephone companies and regulators periodically pledge crackdowns on the flood of spam, but to little apparent effect. Spam texts come through at all hours, even in the middle of the night.

Other countries have similar problems, of course, but a particularly Chinese twist comes in the form of advertisements for "fa piao", or receipts that by law have to be provided to tax authorities for auditing of business expenses. As a result, a robust black market has developed for receipts that can be used to justify reimbursements for "expenses" such as meals and travel. Hawkers use any number of creative games with the language of text messages to skirt filters and reach potential customers. 

Instead of using the actual Chinese characters for "fa piao", they alter them slightly, transforming the meaning but not the pronunciation, a little as you would in English by changing a spelling to slip past spam filters.

Responding to these texts, and asking not to be contacted again, has little effect.

A friend of mine was becoming increasingly miffed at texts offering emigration advice to Canada. She happened to be Canadian, and sent a message back, asking whether they could remove her number from their list because she was already a citizen.

The texts continued to flow.

Photo caption: In a file photo, a man receives a call on his mobile phone at Beijing's Wangfujing Street Jan. 7, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Lee

A hot topic conversation these days amongst my friends is Beijing's enormous new airport terminal, often incorrectly referred to as the new airport.

And opinions are very divided. It generates strong views -- people either love it, or hate it. There seems to be little middle ground.

Personally, I'm not a fan. For a start, it's way too big. To get to and from the international section, you have to take a little train. Fun if you have the time, but a drag if you are in a hurry to get out of the airport and on with your life.

The much vaunted promises of better shops and restaurants also appear to have been ignored, aside from the arrival of the city's first Burger King outlet, a much welcome addition.

At least when it comes to one gripe, poor serivce, the message does seem to be getting through to some of the staff ahead of the Beijing Olympics. On a recent flight, the lady checking me in gave me a broad smile once I had completed the proceedures, and wished me a pleasant trip. It was such a surprise, it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Still, I have found a way to avoid all the problems associated with the new terminal -- use the two older ones. Since Terminal Three opened, Terminals One and Two have been relatively deserted.

They are much more compact, making getting to and from the gate a breeze, have a good selection of restaurants in the basement, and there are still a large number of destinations you can fly to from there.

The international side of Terminal Two these days is especially unhurried.  So my suggestion? Sure, go and admire the amazing architecture of Terminal Three, but when it comes to flying, stick with the much nicer old terminals.  

Photos by China Daily (top) and Jason Lee.

I was one of the first foreign reporters on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on May 12.

It all seemed so normal when I arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu, some 12 hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit, that I thought maybe the area had got off lightly. But heading in the hard hit town of Dujiangyan, just north of Chengdu, two hours after arriving in Sichuan, I realised how bad the situation was.

Dujiangyan looked like a war zone. There wasn't a building that had not been damaged. Some had lost just a wall, or had a few cracks. Others had crumpled into the ground, as though a giant foot had descended from out of the sky and stamped on them.

Survivors, for the main part, either stood around in a state of total shock, or huddled together in tents, buses and cars, trying to avoid the drizzle that made what was already a depressing scene a thoroughly miserable and distressing one.

We had heard that a school in the town had collapsed. Finding it was not a problem -- everyone could point the way there.

Having seen bodies lying in the streets I thought I would be emotionally and mentally prepared for what I would see next. I was wrong.

Soldiers and police had formed a cordon around the school to prevent overwrought relatives from rushing onto the rubble and look for their children themselves. In none of my stories from Dujiangyan did I quote one of these relatives directly.

I couldn't talk to them; it upset me too much. I tried, but when I thought I might burst into tears myself, I had to look away, almost ashamed that I was unable to perform the job that I had been sent there to do -- report.

In the days that followed what impressed me most was the huge outpouring of kindness from people in cities like Chengdu which had not been as badly affected by the quake.

At one refugee centre at a stadium in the city of Mianyang, where thousands had sought shelter, I saw an endless stream of voulunteers coming in bringing whatever they thought would help.

One lady from a village next to the stadium had cooked up a huge vat of rice porridge and brought it over on the back of her tricycle, and was busy handing it out to anyone who wanted it. "I just had to help," she told me.

Others brought in bags of clothes, bottles of water and packs of instant noodles. One volunteer tried to give me some water, saying she thought I looked like a "hard-pressed reporter". I was touched by the sentiment, but could only decline and insist she give the bottles to survivors, who needed it a lot more than me.

In the last few months a swirl of bad publicity has surrounded China in the run-up to this summer's Beijing Olympics -- notably with the problems in Tibet and the violence that accompanied parts of the international leg of the Olympic torch relay. It will be interesting to see how global public opinion, if you can call it that, will be affected by this earthquake, and if the almost incessant criticism of China now ends, or at least abates for a while.

Pictures of relatives trying to enter a collapsed school building and resident walking past a row of destroyed houses, both in Dujiangyan, by Claro Cortes IV/Reuters

There is a common myth perpetrated about China -- that everyone speaks "Chinese".

There is in fact no single "Chinese" language.

There is an official language, Mandarin, taught at schools and used on the airwaves, yet even the government admits that only about half the country's 1.3 billion population speak it fluently.

But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other Chinese languages spoken in the country. The government calls them dialects, but linguistically the likes of Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese are as distinct and mutually unintelligable as French, Spanish, German and English.

Linguists consider them separate languages, though many others are genuinely dialects. Mandarin has been promoted as a single unifying tongue by the Communists, and the Nationalists before them, as otherwise somebody from Guangzhou would find it impossible to speak to somebody from Beijing or Shanghai.

That makes total sense. But Chinese "dialects" today are increasingly marginalised, which is, I think, a great loss for Chinese people and their centuries-old culture, both in China and abroad.

I love going to Singapore and hearing people chatting away in Hokkien, Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese and Cantonese, even if my knowledge of these languages is limited to being able to say "pai sei" ("I'm sorry") and "ti a bo" ("I don't understand") in Hokkien -- phrases I picked up from my time in Taiwan, where the language is normally known as Taiwanese.

I'm sad to hear more and more young Singaporeans speaking to each other in Mandarin, and more than one Singaporean friend has told me that they think they'll be the last generation who can speak so-called dialects.

In China, there is now a recognition that dialects form an integral part of the nation's fabric, though there are no moves, as far as I know, to introduce teaching in dialects at school, as happens to a limited degree now in Taiwan.

Tang dynasty poetry, taught to every Chinese schoolchild and extremely beautiful, sounds a lot better read out in Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.

At the time they were written, the court language more closely resembled these southern Chinese tongues. Today there is only very limited official support in China for dialects: a few radio shows in Shanghainese or Cantonese, and the odd academic trying to protect dialects in danger of dying out.

Yet two places in the Chinese world buck this trend -- Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is still very much alive and kicking. The more racy newspapers fill their columns with stories written in colloquial Cantonese, using Chinese characters which only exist in Cantonese, and make no sense to a Mandarin speaker like myself. I now have a Cantonese dictionary to try and make sense of some of these words.

And in Taiwan, where the Nationalist government once ruthlessly supressed Taiwanese and Hakka in a bid to get everyone to speak Mandarin, Taiwanese is once more very much back in the limelight, thanks to the Democratic Progressive Party of President Chen Shui-bian, which has tried to promote the island's native culture. Taiwanese words are liberally peppered into everyday speech, almost as a fashion statement, and appear in newspapers. I learnt a new expression in March when in Taipei to cover the presidential election. "Ao bo", meaning "dirty tricks".

Now that I have mastered Mandarin (I would never dare call myself fluent as I'm not a native speaker), I'd like to learn another Chinese language. It would either be Cantonese or Hokkien -- both have some great swear words. Yet the one thing that rather daunts me is the number of tones in these two languages.

Mandarin has just four, and it took me rather a long time just to master even them. Hokkien has 5, 6, 7 or 8, depending on how you classify them and in what part of the Hokkien-speaking world you are in. Cantonese has around 9. Again, there is debate on that. I think I'll be sticking with Mandarin in the short term.

Picture of a sign promoting the use of Mandarin by Alfred Cheng Jin

A lot of rude things are written about Chinese pop music, often referred to as "Mandopop", as opposed to Hong Kong's "Cantopop". That it's syrupy nonsense and all the lyrics are the same -- boy/girl meets girl/boy, they fall in/out of love, it's all so tragic/happy etc etc.

I beg to differ. Mandopop rocks.

It's all a matter of who you listen to. There are plently of interesting artists, who sing plently of interesting and unusual songs. I actually learnt a lot of my Mandarin from singing Chinese songs at karaoke in Taiwan, the spiritual home of Mandopop.

Visitors to this year's Beijing Olympics will no doubt be subjected to a barrage of songs about the Games (most of which really are not that good). But I recommend you go into one of the many coffee shops, bars or restaurants that abound here, and the chances are you will hear some really cool songs.

Though China does have a growing popular music scene of its own, artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore tend to dominate. So here is a little list of some of my favourite singers, and some of my favourite songs.  

1) Faye Wong. The goddess of Mandopop. Though she started out on the road to fame singing in Cantonese under the English name Shirley Wong, she is Beijing born and bred. And her music has just gotten better and better as she gets older, though she has more or less stepped away from the music scene of late. She has done Chinese covers of songs by Tori Amos, the Cranberries and the Cocteau Twins, and on her album "Fable" even experimented with trip-hop. Unusually, she also writes some of her own songs. Her understated cool, effortlessly glamorous image and fairly stand-offish public persona have all added to her popularity.  

2) Sarah Chen. Very old skool. I admit I don't really know that many of her songs, but every time I go singing I will always sing her "Waking from a dream". I think it's the desperate lyrics that impress me most (that and her 1980s fashion in the music video) -- "There are some things you can't ask/There are some people you must never wait for". She no longer sings, and I'm sad that I'll never get to hear her sing in person.  

3) Faith Yang. A Taiwanese-Australian indy rock queen. She burst onto the scene with songs like "Stars piled up to the sky" and "Alone", the later a furious rock track with Taiwanese rocker Wu Bai providing backing vocals. Later collaberations with Chang Chen-yue ("The love I gave") were equally well received, and she returned last year with a new, much calmer and more mature album.  

4) Jacky Cheung. One of Hong Kong's "Four Heavenly Kings" of male singing superstars, Cheung is basically popular everywhere in the world where ethnic Chinese have settled. He came to my attention with Cantonese classics including "Why do breakups always happen on rainy days", but it was his Mandarin mega-hit "Kiss and Goodbye" (bizzarely later covered in English by a European band) that won my undying loyalty.  

5) Chang Hui-mei, aka A-Mei. I will always love this petite Taiwanese aboriginal star. "Can I hold you?" was an album I listened to over and over again, and I screamed and screamed when I saw her in concert a few years ago. It also helps that she appears to be a genuinely nice person, bursting into tears on stage because she is so moved by her fans' support. You may get to see a lot more of A-Mei as the Olympics approaches -- she is submitting a song to be sung at the opening ceremony on Aug. 8.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  

Pictures (from the top):  Faith Yang by REUTERS/Kin Cheung, Faye Wong by REUTERS/stringer, Jacky Cheung by REUTERS/Tim Chong