China Diary: Behind the curtain

Reporter John Daley's observations and musings while following Gov. Gary Herbert's trade mission to China.

Monday, April 18 11:42 p.m.

No one knows Jon Huntsman now. They will.

My prediction: by the early primaries, the former Utah governor, soon to be former U.S. Ambassador to China, will be getting a serious look by the political world, and more importantly, voters.

Our trip to China on the trade mission with Gov. Herbert only reinforced what was on display when he governed with sky-high approval ratings in Utah: that Huntsman has many of the qualities that put someone in the presidential conversation.

Articulate. Attractive. Access to financial resources. Foreign policy, state government and business experience.

Plus, to see Ambassador Jon Huntsman in action in Beijing, you see exactly what Utahns who've met him personally have known for years: the guy connects with people. In two languages. And this is the key: he does it with folks of diverse backgrounds, from top business or government officials to the vendor of knockoff wares on any Chinese street.

Hosting a reception at his personal residence, Huntsman greeted a delegation including business executives and some old colleagues on a trade mission with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert. Also in attendance, top officials from the Chinese city of Wuhan. Huntsman was gracious, funny and welcoming. OK, so a lot of leaders can do that. How about in English and Chinese? Not just fluent, but excellent (I'm told) Mandarin.

How comfortable would most politicians also be rubbing elbows on the street with the guy selling newspapers? Huntsman told us he loved riding his ancient Chinese bicycle through Beijing. Why? For one thing, everyone in China knows him. He's a rock star here.

A friend of his told me the story of going jogging with Huntsman in Shanghai a few years back. The run was a bit halting, because they couldn't go 100 feet without an average Chinese wanting to talk to him. And he'd stop and talk and enjoy it. He listens.

Plus. His family story is compelling. He and Mary Kaye have seven kids, two sons at the Naval Academy, his adopted daughters are from China and India. Gracie Mei is so well known and beloved in China, she's on a stamp.

The obstacles for any candidate, especially in a polarized political environment, are legion. Presidential politics can be weird and unpredictable. Just ask President Rudy Giuliani or President Hilary Clinton. Who knows how Huntsman will ultimately do? But, it seems to me, what he offers will at least put him in the conversation.

Monday, April 18 11:18 p.m.

Twenty years ago, when I first visited China, the country was just beginning the vast economic expansion now described by so many as "capitalism on steroids."

Back then, you saw none of the signs of wealth you see now. Many more people rode bikes, carrying all kinds of goods. Not so many cars, and no higher-end Western brands. The architecture was basic heavy, drab, blah, Stalinist. There were no real luxury items to buy or hotels to visit. Pollution seemed like a problem then, with plenty of smog in places like Beijing; rivers running through cities an obvious spot to dump trash and who knows what else. There was no disputing China was a pretty poor country.

Fast forward two decades and the changes are simply mind-blowing. There are way more cars, Buicks are a hot brand and we spotted a Mercedes-Benz dealer in the middle of downtown Beijing. Many Chinese have abandoned their bikes. A Western-style consumer culture is not just emerging but exploding. You hear that the best hotels and restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai would compete with their counterparts in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.

The Olympics marked a huge turning point and China obviously wanted to show the world that it had arrived, in style. The architecture, particularly in Shanghai, is fantastic: modern structures of all kinds, are going up; more than 4,000 buildings of over 25 stories have sprung up in a riverside district that 20 years ago was just rice paddies. A new Manhattan in less than two decades. The magnitude and the scale of the place are simply hard to comprehend. Beijing had just two ring roads a decade ago, now there are seven.

The cheap goods they made for the world, and we consumed by the container load, have made the Chinese rich, at least some of them. But beyond the glimmering downtowns, you still see plenty of people living in poverty, struggling to survive. The pollution problems are beyond daunting.

We had two beautiful days in Beijing. But the remaining four days, both Beijing and Shanghai were more typical, smothered in a blanket of smog. It seemed like the entire eastern part of the country was under a shroud. They say they're building a new coal plant a week to keep up with the intense demand for energy. When you see the high rises go up and up and up, you don't doubt it. There's a reason they say the crane is the national bird of China.

We flew over the frozen Bering Straits on our way to China, a clear vast frozen white expanse, that scientists tell us is steadily shrinking, melting thanks to carbon emissions. In China, we heard, 50 percent of the water is so polluted as to be undrinkable, 20 percent even unusable for industrial use. You see China up close, and its stunning growth, modeled after our own, and you can't help but ask: is it sustainable?

Same with the spectacular rise of its juggernaut economy. Growth in GDP of like 10 percent a year lifts a lot of ships, but it seems like the entire country's stability is riding on that goose continuing to lay golden eggs. (How many metaphors can you throw into a sentence, eh?) Upward mobility can paper over a lot of a society's conflicts, but what happens when the economy starts to struggle? Will people start wanting Western-style freedoms to go with their new cars and appliances? You don't detain your most prominent artist (Ai Wei Wei, the man who designed the iconic Bird's Nest stadium for the Olympics) if you're not worried about people and ideas that challenge the state's authority. Again, is the status quo sustainable?

China is a complicated place with lots of promise, lots of problems. Jon Huntsman calls the U.S./China relationship "exhilarating" and absolutely central to solving the world's larger challenges. No doubt that's true, now more than ever.

Monday, April 18 10:22 p.m.

So the plot of the bizarre sign thickens. Next to a huge McDonald's in downtown Beijing that's said to be the world's largest, we spotted this sign, right in the middle of a pedestrian mall:

"Shaping a New Strategic Layout to Promote the Optimization and Overall Function and Maximization of Overall Efficiency of Dongcheng."

My first take was that it was lost in translation, Chinese signage gone wild. Over the next few days we learned more. It turns out the location was also the site of a pro-democracy protest a few weeks ago, one that U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman stumbled upon, much to the ire of China's authoritarian government.

The large and wordy sign appears on a chain link fence, making it look like they're preparing for future construction. Later, we were told it's no coincidence the sign is there.It's aimed at discouraging any more protests.

Sounds like "strategic optimization and maximization" may just be code for "your lack of cooperation could lead to incarceration."

Sunday, April 17 3:25 p.m.

Readers of this blog might be interested in the intrigue and glamour behind the scenes here at the CD (China Diary) and the KSL/Deseret News China Bureau.

As you probably guessed, it takes a team of dozens of highly skilled tech-savvy, multi-platform specialists to create all that we do here at the CD and the KDNCB. It's a complex system, designed by cutting edge innovators, copied by organizations from Google to NASA to the Federal Reserve, studied by academics the world over.

Actually, it's just me and Bob.

Back in the day, I covered Olympics in Nagano and Sydney. For those trips, really any trip outside the Wasatch Front where you wanted a live report, your satellite feed was your lifeline. Satellite windows cost a lot of money, like hundreds, even thousands dollars to buy a 15-minute span during which you'd feed back your video and do a live shot at a very specific time, like 10:02:00. If you hoped to have a future (not just in the business, but just in general) you did not want to fail to get plugged in for the globe spanning, bank-breaking international live shot at 10:02:00. But of course 10 p.m. in Salt Lake might be the middle of the night half way around the globe. The gap between Utah and China is 14 hours, so 10 p.m. SLC time is noon in Beijing and Shanghai.

At the appointed time, you needed to get yourself to the live shot location, through traffic, weather, whatever. In Nagano it was a non-descript dumpy office park 30 minutes from the downtown Olympic venues and like a full time zone away from our hotel. In Sydney, it was a brisk 20 minute walk through a massive broadcast facility to the live shot location near the Olympic Stadium.

In Nagano, our KTVX team consisted of three, a photographer, technical ops/producer and myself. Photographer Mark Wetzel and myself hauled an industrial-strength tripod in a huge plastic case and a pair of three-quarter inch tape editing machines, heavy, metal machines in plastic crates the size of a large suitcase, from Salt Lake to Los Angeles to Tokyo to Nagano to a ski resort at least an hour away up in the mountains. After that, we thought we were ready to become Everest sherpas. Actually the sherpas have it easy.

For Sydney, we had seven, four "talent," (in TV lingo, that's anchors and reporters, though in some quarters "talent" can be a term of sarcasm), two (severely overworked) shooters and a producer.

Now, thanks to the glories of the vaunted digital technology and the interweb (or is it internets? I forget) you can do pretty much the same thing, with a pair of laptops, a decent quality video camera, a mic and, your friend and mine, Skype.

Basically, we'd use the Skype the same way we use a satellite feed. We'd shoot, write and edit stories we uploaded to an FTP site on the web. Back at Broadcast House, an editor would download our video. We'd connect via Skype a few minutes before our Skypeshot and we were ready to roll.

The video quality at times can clearly be kind of sketchy, but doing it this way allowed us to do Skypeshots from our hotels in downtown Beijing and downtown Shanghai. Which rocked! Especially in Shanghai. It was mind boggling. Our live shot location, also known as Room 4501 on the 45th floor, gave us this stunning view of one of the world's most amazing skylines. We could show it to KSL viewers just by moving this tiny little web camera plugged into the laptop over to the window.

I'm not sure if your average viewer was wowed by it or not, but for me and Bob, who started in news back when smoke signals and petroglyphs were the norm, it was felt truly revolutionary.

The only major trouble came with some mysterious interruptions in our Internet connection. (Oh, Chinese censors, you guys crack me up! Actually, I think it was just a wrong setting on my computer, though we were never quite sure what caused it.) In my hotel room in Beijing, I kept losing my connection. Not good. At one point, we were a few minutes away from our Skypeshot and we lost the link. What?!?!!? We call back to Salt Lake on the phone and try to get it back up again. Which we did eventually. And it was all good.

Aren't you glad you now know how we create the magic at the CD?

Now if I could only figure out how to set the clock on my VCR at home.

Saturday, April 16 7:56 p.m.

A lot of the time, China seems like many other counties. Until you're reminded you're in a regime where there's no press freedom and complete government control.

When we went over to the U.S. Embassy to meet Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr., for an interview Monday, my photographer Bob Brown asked me if he should shoot some video of the exterior of the Embassy building. Sure, I said, why not? Genius that I am.

As I crossed the street to meet Huntsman's public affairs staffer, a tall thin Chinese man in a black track suit got into Bob's face within, literally, seconds. "No pictures," he said just as Bob had gone to look through the view finder. Bob, who speaks Chinese, tried to explain we just wanted a couple of shots of the building and weren't interested in getting pictures of the intimidating Chinese guards at the gate. "No! No! No pictures!"

The Embassy staffer, Sonia, intervened, speaking Chinese to the man, clearly a plainclothes security officer, saying "OK, OK, they won't take pictures." Once inside the first gate, at another gate, Bob, thinking we were now inside and essentially on American property, went to get video of a large U.S. Embassy seal on the side of the building. Same deal. Chinese security inside the plexiglass waived Bob off. We get it. No pictures.

Even inside, between a second entrance and third, Sonia warns Bob we had to be careful about shooting video there, on what seemed to us, again, to be clearly U.S. Embassy grounds.

"They're very sensitive," she said. Yeah, kind of getting that idea.

We've heard stories about a U.S. citizen, a PhD from Chicago, working here in China who downloaded some geological images from the Internet, but had apparently crossed someone powerful. He's now in jail, sentenced to eight years. An embassy staffer told us Huntsman had visited the guy several times in prison, but the U.S. government is powerless to intervene.

Outspoken, world-renowned artist Ai Wei Wei, one of China's most famous citizens, who designed the iconic Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics, was detained in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East. We heard from someone who had talked to one of Wei Wei's friends that no one has seen or heard from him. No one knows where he is.

When I visited China twenty years ago, I picked up a book about the massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. In a stark nearby department store, I stumbled upon the book, which was obviously put out by the government. It was entitled, in English, "The Tiananmen Uprising" and was filled with all of these photos of dead and mangled government soldiers, making it look like the demonstrators had attacked and massacred the innocent patriotic troops, instead of the other way around.

The winners get to rewrite history. Don't forget, we're in charge.

At the Ambassador's personal residence, Jon Huntsman and his wife Mary Kaye told us in China you had to expect you were being watched literally anywhere and everywhere, no matter who you were. "There's no expectation of privacy in China," Mary Kaye said. "None."

Throughout our trip, my computer, and that of my colleague Bob Brown, experienced weird problems and would lose Internet access randomly, something not uncommon in many parts of the world. But in China, you start to wonder.

Maybe someone is reading this blog secretly as I'm writing this. Better not post this while I'm still in country. Am I being paranoid or just prudent? In a county where you have no rights and could be arrested and held without anyone knowing, it gets you thinking. And holding back.

Keep your head down. Don't make trouble. Just blend into the scenery.

As Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke sings in a detached voice, on Karma Police: "For a minute there, I lost myself."

Which is exactly what they want.

Saturday, April 16 2:17 p.m.

In China, apparently the best gift to receive is Jazz gear. The folks on Utah's trade mission brought along all sorts of swag with the Jazz logo: hats, t-shirts, even money clips, which these days could come in very handy.

Gary Herbert saved the most coveted item for meetings with four top Chinese government officials -- signed Jazz basketballs. Lew Cramer, of World Trade Center Utah, says Greg Miller was more than happy to pitch in as long as they brought back "a seven footer who can shoot."

Friday, April 15 9:03 a.m.

Every foreign country has unusual customs that make people not from here a bit queasy. One of our China Diary readers, Monique who moved to Shanghai from Layton, reminded me of a noteworthy example.

The spitting.

The Chinese seem to really enjoy spitting, or at least they do it early and often. My first trip to China twenty years ago, my brother Matt and I were taken to our first meal in drab restaurant in Guangzhou that had all the ambiance of a hospital ward. That's how things were in China back then. None of the luxury you see here today, at least in pockets of what is still a poor country in many ways.

As we ate, a curious-tasting chicken dish as I recall, we started to notice the Chinese folks around us occasionally hocking up pieces of chicken in their food and sending them flying on to the floor. Then we looked around the floor and noticed lots of little chicken pieces here and there. EUUewwww. Elsewhere, especially with the poor air quality, you'll see a lot of coughing and ejecting. I'm not sure it's something you get used to.

Thursday, April 14 5:03 p.m.

I'm just getting up and looking out the window at a morning of a thousand Utah inversions. Shanghai has been pretty pleasant temperature wise. Mostly mid-60s. A tad humid but not bad. It's been sunny. At least above the soup, but this is our third day and I've only seen the sun just poking through as a hazy orb. I'd love to see this city on clear day. Not sure when that happens.

One of the people on the trade mission tells me that the air quality here is so poor that it's often hard to find skilled middle managers and upper managers from the West who'll commit to living here for an extended time, especially if they have small children who they don't want to subject to a potential lifetime of health problems.

It's a bit sad, no, a tragedy really, after seeing the beauty underneath the muck in China. Our first day here, we went along as the governor and his group visited the Great Wall. It was a bluebird day, like one we'd see in the Beehive State. The wind had blown out the smog the night before and it was just crystal clear. Just a slight touch of a chill wind. The blossoms were blooming on the trees: white, yellow, fuscia. It looked, I kid you not, like Southern California, if you manage to get a clear day in the LA basin.

Last time I was at the Wall in 1990, it was just a solid gray, which is what Beijing is usually like, but the first two days there were just made to order perfect weather.

Then, the gunk started to build up and it's been basically smogland, in both Beijing and Shanghai, ever since.

Thursday, April 14 9:13 a.m.

Spotted another thought provoking headline in today's Shanghai Daily. It reads, "5 detained over tainted steamed buns scandal." You just can't make up that stuff. Long live the free press. Oh yeah, it's a state-run press here.

The inside headline is also eye catching -- "Five tainted bun managers detained." Insert your own joke here.

Thursday, April 14 5:25 a.m.

Little known secret: Sometimes the best time to see a city is right at dawn, out on a morning jog. No one is out. It's quiet, the smog hasn't built up. Yet. Few cars to worry about.

This morning in Shanghai, as I was lying awake at 4 a.m. (still suffering from the dreaded jet lag), I did what I normally do when I'm wide awake and it's not morning. I get up, reluctantly. So I headed for the hotel gym and ran into another guy on the Utah/China trade mission: Rich Hartvigsen. He invited me to join a couple of other sleep starved guys from the group -- Kevin McMurray and Chris Shurian, on a brisk morning run.

On a pedestrian mall, dozens of generally older folks perform Tai Chi. The street sweepers (human and machine) scrub up yesterday's trash. Along Shanghai's famous Bund, the old historic riverside district famous for old structures left over from European colonial days, we spot the postcard view of Pudong, the towering series of skyscrapers that rose out of what was rice paddies 20 years ago when I was last here. Now it's a new Manhattan, built, I'm told, in a decade or less.

Rail thin Chinese runners passing us wave and smile, knowingly I'm sure, at my Made in America Buddha-esque belly. Several men fly colorful kites, some with a fishing reel-type set up with wheel. On the river, barges slowly slide by, many filled high with stacks of coal, China's fuel of choice for power plants, going up at a rate of something like one a week.

After Kevin and Chris split off, clearly prepared to go the distance, Rich tells me about hitting the a.m. streets of cities around the globe. Good times.

We're out for about an hour. By the time we return, the cars start to show up for another day of work.

Thursday, April 14 4:37 a.m.

Buddha casts a large shadow over China. Sometimes literally. KSL photographer/editor/translator extraordinaire Bob Brown was out getting some video in downtown Shanghai when a family approached him and asked him about whether he might be carrying a child under this white button-down shirt. No, he told them, "it's all me." They thought that was pretty funny and honored him with a new nickname: American Buddha.

A few days ago, at a jade market near the Great Wall, as the folks on Utah's trade mission made their way through a seemingly endless array of items carved from the lovely green stone (including dragons and necklaces and a full clipper ship listed at a cool $1,000,000), one Utah lawmaker spotted a must-have item. It was laughing Buddha with a jolly smile and a prodigious belly. Lawmaker Paul Ray quipped "I'm looking for a feral Buddha for Curt Oda."

Thursday, April 14 12:27 a.m.

Shanghai is a mind boggling place (and it's not too difficult to boggle my mind, as many have noted.) For one thing it's like Disneyland for Architects. The array of new buildings, thousands of new towers reaching more than 25 stories, many built in the last decade or so, is impressive enough.

The architecture may be even more wild. The variety of skyscrapers includes features like large orbs on top, holes in the middle, crowns, slices lopped off the sides, soaring towers, curved sides, communication needles stabbing up into the sky, three-sided elongated pyramids.

They say Shanghai is like capitalism on steroids. Though buildings here may not quite be the work of architects on LSD, the city's builders are definitely getting creative in ways no other city has likely ever seen.

Tuesday, April 12 5:12 a.m.

One of the most entertaining parts of travel in non-English speaking countries is the signage. The good stuff comes with the random translations that somehow don't make sense. At least in English. I'm no judge about Chinese. Es muy complicato. (Spelling anyone?)

So we're walking down the street in downtown Beijing and I spot one of those plastic screens on the fence surrounding a construction site. It shows a skyline of new buildings and Chinese characters, below which there's this: "Shaping a New Strategic Layout to Promote the Optimization of Overall Function and Maximization of Overall Efficiency of Dongcheng." Oh! Now, I understand! They're not putting up a new structure, they're "optimizing" and "maximizing." Very efficient and strategic. If she were here, my high school English teacher would no doubt bust out the red marker to write "trim."

Saw another one yesterday near the mall food court lovingly known as "Gourmet Street." It read: "Food Kitchen." Seems kind of obvious, but if you're not cooking food in the kitchen I may not want to eat there. Would you ever call it the "Food Livingroom" or "Food Bedroom" or "Food Dining Room"? Well, I guess some people would. But still. I can see the red marker noting "redundant."

Optimize or maximize this sign. Or at least make it more efficient. Please.

Monday, April 11 9:25 a.m.

So we go out to buy a phone, ‘cause my Droid 2 with Verizon service isn't working for some reason in China. We were warned that some phones might not work here, or it depends on your system, or any electronics you might bring could be subject to hacking and attempts to steal intellectual property, etc.

Down the street from our hotel, there's a wide array of businesses including these little phone stores with like a dozen people working there. I'm with Bob Brown, our photographer/editor/translator/man of the world, and Kit Burton, our wise-beyond-his-years China liaison from the state, both who speak fluent Chinese. Which is very helpful, because I speak maybe five words, none of which anyone in China seems to understand.

Anyway, we're going through all the options for this little Nokia phone and how many minutes to buy and can I call and receive calls from the U.S. and blah, blah, blah (however you say that in Mandarin). Then the saleswoman asks us what phone number I'd like and hands me a sheet of paper in a clear plastic cover with dozens and dozens of numbers. I'm looking at all the numbers and thinking, "You know, it's all good, whatever number it is. I'm only gonna have this phone for a week." Then I realize there're different prices for each number. Some are like 680 rmb (ren men bee--not sure how to spell that; it's the Chinese currency); some are 580 rmb and there are some as low as 280.

The exchange rate is close to 6 to 1, so my option is to buy a phone number for my new phone that will cost from like $110 down to $40. Uh, let see. Which one should we get?

Then we ask, why the different costs? And she tells us, some numbers are better luck. Eights are very lucky. It's no coincidence the Beijing Olympics kicked off on 8/8/08, probably at 8:08. Fours are not lucky because I guess the way you say four in Chinese is similar to the word for death. Don't mess with Death Star Four. The guide on the tour up to the Great Wall with the trade mission delegation, Cynthia, explained to us that eight has the best Feng Shui. Which I've always thought was true about the Great Eight. Apparently the main subway line is called the Dragon Line, or the Lucky Line, because it travels along the main sites in Beijing, like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Not sure if the subway line has anything to do with eight, but it obviously brings good luck when you ride it.

"We love eight and we don't like four. Six is also a lucky number," Cynthia tells us. I tell her, in America we tend to stay away from the sixes, especially when there are a few altogether.

The Magic Number? 136930335007. No eights, no fours, but in my book very lucky, with the 007 and all, plus I've always had a thing for threes and nines. And zero pretty much rocks.

Plus I saved the company $70 just by not being superstitious. Again, very lucky.

Saturday, April 9 4:45 p.m.

Greetings from Beijing!

Nice to be Back in the PRC. Didn't the Beatles do a song about that?

The journey from the Beehive to Beijing was long. Not Pioneer Trail long, but any flight that requires four movies (in this case, Gulliver's Travels, The Tourist, The King's Speech and True Grit) is pushing the limit. Twelve hours from San Fran to China's Capitol. We flew in a 747 and no one said anything about 477. Which was good.

We're here covering Gov. Gary Herbert's trade mission to China, as well as Jon Huntsman's final days as US Ambassador to China. Should be very interesting. More on all that later.

First, some first impressions. I first came here 20 years ago, on a fascinating, at times challenging, but always fun, summertime post-college road trip with my brother Matt, that included Beijing, Lhasa, Guilin, Guanzhou and Shanghai. Back then the super-fired dragon that is now the Chinese economy was just taking off. So big buildings were just going up in Shanghai. Now we're told they have something like 4000 buildings taller than 25 stories. Not sure if that number is accurate, but the hyper growth is staggeringly obvious after 20 years.

Flying in the pilot advised us we we'd be landing into the normal Beijing haze. Which is like Utah's worst inversion times a population of like 20 million. The airport is a stunning, massive and modern architectural wonder, no doubt meant to be a major showcase during the Olympics.

The drive in from the airport was impressive. Compared with 20 years ago, there's just a staggering variety of super-modern large new buildings. There's lots of greenery being planted along the airport road and the trees are in bloom. And the most notable thing of all is the wealth. The bikes ever present two decades ago have been mostly replaced by cars, cars and more cars. Apparently the hot "status" vehicle here is a Buick. Downtown Beijing has high-end luxury shops and huge neon signs, once much more common in a place like Hong Kong than here. It almost feels like someone took Berlin and plopped it right down the middle of China's capital.

Twenty years ago, you could walk into a street market and pick out your eel or turtle or carp from a plastic tub and the cook would just fire it up for you on the spot. Tonight, we ate at a Chinese restaurant tonight in the food court, which they called "Gourmet Street", in the middle of a huge mall--you could have been in the Gateway or Cherry Creek in Denver. Still, on the menu, with huge glossy photos were Braised Turtle in Brown Sauce, Simmered Big Fish Head in Iron Pot and, of course, Roasted Crisp Baby Pigeon. Can't get that in SLC.

Email: jdaley@ksl.com

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