Funny poem on Chinese regional differences

I have run into this amusing poem about Chinese regional stereotypes here. It's from the "Ich bin ein Berliner" blog of former Tang Dynasty guitarist Kaiser Kuo.

"In Dongbei, whence the Manchus came, the men do like their liquor.
While effusive with their friendship, with their enmity they’re quicker
Though they’re honest and straightforward, at the slightest provocation
They’ll show why they’ve been slandered as the Klingons of this nation.

The leggy Dongbei ladies for their beauty are renowned,
(I attest that in my travels, few more fetching have I found.)
But they suffer from one drawback, and it’s very sad to tell—
When they open up their mouths to speak, they break that magic spell.

The stalwart Shandong people grow as hearty as their scallions
On their noodle-heavy diet they’ve been bred as strong as stallions.
They’re known for dogged loyalty; they’re known as trusty folks,
But a bit slow on the uptake—thus, the butt of many jokes.

In Hunan and in Hubei in the country’s center-south
They say the people there can really run it at the mouth
In Hubei in particular, the saying is often heard
That a single Hubei codger can drown out a nine-head bird.

The Hunanese, in temperament, are piquant as their dishes,
Like duo jiao yu tou—capsicum with slow-braised heads of fishes.
Add to this mix the province’s infernal summer heat,
And you see why Hunan’s Xiang Jun had the Taiping rebels beat.

The teahouses of Chengdu represent the Sichuan Way:
The women toil in earnest while the men drink tea and play.
The Chuan hou plays at mahjong as the Chuan mei cleans and mends,
And like the Sichuan peppers do, she burns it at both ends.

The Pearl River Delta in the southlands of Guangzhou
Is home to China’s most industrious people, as you know:
They’re scrappy and they’re gritty and they’re free of all pretension,
And they’ll make a meal of any living beast you’d care to mention.

They say that Henan people are a sly and cunning lot.
But my ancestors are from there—proving some, at least, are not.
My co-provincials countrywide are blamed for every ill,
While provinces that suck as bad get let off easy still.

The Shanghainese are philistines, and this they’ll gladly own:
Commercial instincts permeate them to the very bone.
Their pride in Shanghai’s petit bourgeois ethos is immense
But what they lack in culture, they make up in common sense.

As you might well have expected, I have saved the best for last,
For my love for Beijing’s people is immovably steadfast.
From their gargling r-drenched accent to their dry sardonic wit,
The denizens of Jing Town are the dope, the bomb, the shit.

Beijingers love to gab, and though they’re lazy and they’re slow,
There’s nothing about politics that they aren’t apt to know.
They may complain a lot about the traffic and the air
But scratch beneath the cynicism and you’ll find they care.

So be grateful that you live here, and be clear on what it means.
Be grateful you don’t live among Klingons, or philistines.
Be grateful for the legacy of Yuan and Ming and Qing—
And most of all be grateful for the people of Beijing."

The part on the Henan people rings very true. Living in Beijing, the most common regional stereotype I have ran into is that the Henanese are basically not a very decent bunch. There is a widespread idea that a lot of them are untrustworthy, swindlers and people to be wary of.

For those of you China-illiterate, Henan is a huge province in north-central China, where Chinese civilization is supposed to have originated. It is the third most populous province in the country, with 94 million people living within its borders. If it were a country, it would be the twelfth most populous in the world. Despite its historical prominence, it is nowadays a relatively backward province which produces rather than attracts migrant workers, and not a few of Beijing's immigrants come from there.

I have never really been to Henan, even though I have crossed it by train various times. Although I have friends and acquaintances from all over China, I have never had much to do with anyone from Henan as far as I can recall, so I really haven't got much personal experience on the matter, although in general I certainly don't approve of negative stereotyping of entire peoples.

The small village in Shanxi where I spent a week last year was just over the border from Henan. Even there, when I asked one of my hosts about this regional stereotype, they replied: "well, not all of them are bad people of course, but it is just that Henan has lots of people and it's very poor, so you get a lot of them who do questionable things to make money". Of course in some parts of the world people might say the same about the Chinese in general: overcrowded and poor, so sometimes they do questionable things for money. I kept that thought to myself however.

The stereotype of people from Dongbei (the Northeast) being heavy drinkers, frank and straightforward, and easy to anger, is another one which I have heard a lot. I have been to Dongbei and know people from there, and I have a feeling that there is some truth to it. Perhaps it is the cold weather which just turns people into heavy drinkers who like a punch up, since Northern Europeans are the same.

When it comes to the Shanghainese, what I have always heard about them is a stereotype unmentioned in the poem: they have a huge superiority complex towards the rest of China, much greater even than the Beijingers do. I have also heard numerous people say that they will insist on speaking to outsiders in Shanghai dialect even when they know Mandarin, just to be difficult. Given the current state of health of the Shanghai dialect, this complaint  may not be heard for much longer.

It is interesting that in China you do not find the same stereotype which exists within Europe, in other words that people from the hotter regions in the South are less efficient and hardworking than the ones from the colder North. This is even though the climactic difference between the South and the North of China is as great as that between the South and the North of Europe. In fact China's hottest region, Guangdong, is supposed to be home to its most industrious people, as the poem mentions. Clearly hot weather and a laid back lifestyle do not always have to go hand in hand

Yang Rui's rant and foreigners in China

More news related to the recent crackdown on foreigners has attracted the attention of the foreign community in Beijing.

First there was Yang Rui's demented post on Weibo. Yang Rui is a Chinese journalist who presents a show called Dialogue on CCTV 9, the only channel in English on Chinese state TV. The show consists of him interviewing foreign guests, usually on political issues. Here is the man's entire Weibo post, translated by the Wall Street Journal:

"The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera’s Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.^"

Lovely stuff, hey? The "foreign bitch" in question is Melissa Chan, Al-Jazeera's China correspondent who was recently refused a renewal of her visa by the Chinese government, effectively kicking her out. Apparently she had made some reports on sensitive topics. Yang Rui complained that this translation was incorrect, because the Chinese word he used in the original (泼妇) can best be translated as "shrew", rather than "bitch". Foreign shrew then.

Yang Rui later released a statement claiming that he was only targetting foreigners who behave badly, which he again called "foreign trash", and that he wants to distinguish them from "the silent majority in the expat community that respect our culture and society". He did not apologize or display any understanding of why his comments provoked so much offense.

A few days ago this rather absurd page appeared in the English section of Sina Weibo (which is a listed company, not a government department), with the title "Beijing Welcomes you, Decent Foreigners". At fist I wondered if it might be a parody, but it is all too real. It's not that there is anything specific which is downright racist. It's more that the whole thing comes across as extremely patronizing, fake and frankly ridicolous. I suspect that few Chinese would understand why it feels patronizing and fake to foreigners, including clearly the people at Weibo who cobbled the page together. If someone asked them how they would feel if someone made a web page called "the World Welcomes you, Decent Chinese", with articles about both decent and indecent things done by Chinese abroad, then maybe they would begin to figure it out.

It is easy as a foreigner in Beijing to become extremely upset about this sort of thing, but it is good not to get overly worked up about the situation. Yang Rui's rant is extreme and unrepresentative for a public figure, and some of the Chinese comments under his Weibo post criticize him for being prejudist. I have not experienced any particular abuse or hostility by anyone in the last few days, any more than I have at any other time in Beijing. The crackdown on foreigners continues, but I have yet to be stopped and checked up on by the police (although a friend of mine told me the police went round knocking on doors in his block of flats, which is packed with foreigners). It also seems that the penalties for those caught working illegally are not that great (a 1000 RMB fine according to one person who was caught, with no deportation).

One must also remember what it is like to be a foreign immigrant back in one's own part of the world. Idiotic rants about immigrants on the level of Yang Rui's outburst are nothing new anywhere in Europe, even coming from members of parliament and celebrities. Hysterical talk of Muslim immigrants wanting to "impose Sharia law" in Britain is really not much less disconnected from reality than Yang Rui's talk of foreign spies and human traffickers. Let us also remember all the unfair complaints about immigrants not learning the language and not adjusting to "our values" which you hear all over Europe, and the way that foreigners get blamed for crime all the time. If you come from a rich and respected Western country and live in China, you actually have it pretty easy by comparison.

It is hard to really compare Europe and China in this respect, because in Europe there is mass immigration of people from poor countries doing menial jobs, while in China most of the foreign residents are students, professionals and English teachers concentrated in a few big cities (with some drug dealers and shady businessmen thrown in). Furthermore, few of the foreigners in China are really settling in the country long term, and most of those who do have married a local. Things may be changing though, as Chinese police recently repatriated some illegal immigrants from Vietnam working in a factory in Anhui province. Rising wages in China could mean increasing numbers of illegal immigrants from poorer countries working low paid jobs, just like what you see in Europe. At that point, it will be interesting to see how the issue is dealt with.

In some ways, China strikes me as being in a similar position to most European societies a few decades ago, in the sense that it is not traditionally an immigrant society, and most Chinese are just not used to the idea of sharing their cities and neighbourhoods with foreigners who look and act differently. It is a fact that as long as you don't have Chinese blood you will always be seen as a foreigner here, for good or bad, and I doubt this will change any time soon.

Crackdown on foreigners in Beijing

The entire world seems to have taken note of the current campaign to crack down on illegal foreigners in Beijing. It has been reported on all the main Western news outlets, including the BBC, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal.
The campaign, which started last week, is set to last 100 days. It has been announced that foreigners will be subjected to random checks on the street, and that they should have their passport and residence permit on them at all time, or at least a copy. I have already heard of police actually going to bars where foreigners are known to hang out and asking to see people's papers, and knocking on doors in neighbourhoods where lots of foreigners reside.

The Chinese authorities, with their penchant for making lists, have declared that their aim is to crack down on the "three illegalities": foreigners who have entered the country illegally, stay illegally and work illegally (luckily I do not currently fall into any of these categories). There is even a hotline for reporting cases. Foreigners in Beijing are a varied bunch, and I have little experience with some of the foreign communities here. When it comes to the group I am best acquainted with, in other words young expats from Western countries trying to make a living and gain some experience in China, I can say that I am pretty sure few people actually overstay their visas, and that nobody enters the country illegally. (How do you do that? Do you trek through the mountains on the border between China and Kirghizstan?)

What happens more often is people working illegally, in other words with no work visa. Work visas are hard to come by, and many of the foreign English teachers in China work on business or student visas, which are easier to obtain, and sometimes even on tourist visas. The same is true even for some people doing other kinds of jobs. The fact is that until recently, nobody really seemed to care. It was an accepted practice for language schools to get their teachers a business visa through an agency, or to employ foreign students. I myself worked part-time in a university while studying in Qinghua, and since I was on a student visa it was technically not allowed. This didn't stop the university from officially declaring my salary and me paying tax on it. As the dean of the college said "here in China no one checks, no one cares".

Things seemed to have suddenly changed, with talk of police raids on language schools and places where foreigners are known to work. A friend of mine, a young American on a one year tourist visa who works as an English teacher, is so freaked out that he is seriously considering quitting the English teaching job, and possibly moving to Korea until the crackdown is over. The authorities have threatened penalties ranging from fines to detentions and deportation. Personally I doubt it will go beyond fines, and I am supposing they just want to catch a few people to make examples of. Still, nobody wants to be one of those people.

There is a myth that the crackdown was motivated by this video which appeared on the internet a couple of weeks ago. It shows a foreign man apparently attempting to rape a Chinese girl on a Beijing street, and then getting beaten up by some local men in retaliation, before the police come and arrest him. The man looks either retarded or drunk out of his mind. The police have confirmed that he is a British citizen on a tourist visa and that he is being held under arrest. Although the case was reported in the media and has caused an uproar, it appears to be untrue that the crackdown on foreigners was started because of it. Authorities have denied a link, and articles in the Chinese media were already reporting on a coming drive to crackdown on illegal foreigners before the video came out.

To compound matters, another video has recently made the rounds of the Chinese internet, showing a foreign man behaving like a moron and swearing at a woman in Chinese on a train in China. The man turned out to be a Russian cellist in the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. He has now lost his job because of the uproar. Although the man does appear to be behaving in a boorish fashion in the video, he has broken no law, and I can't help feeling sorry for him. He had even posted a second video in which he apologized for his behaviour in Russian (with Chinese subtitles). This only prompted Chinese netizens to comment that if his Chinese is good enough for swearing at people, it should be good enough for apologizing as well (perhaps they don't realize how many foreigners can swear in Chinese in spite of speaking the language really badly).

It is a sobering thought that nowadays if you get into an argument in a public place and someone films you with their mobile and uploads the video on the internet, you might lose your job as a result. Of course, the fact that the man is a foreigner arguing in broken Chinese is the main reason the video grabbed such a lot of attention in the first place.

Personally, I feel that if it was made easier for foreigners to acquire work visas it would not be a bad thing. After all there is clearly no question of foreigners stealing jobs from the Chinese. Most of the foreign workers here fill positions where foreigners are needed for one reason or another. This is true of professionals and of English teachers. The number of foreign residents in China is minute in comparison to the local population anyway (less than a million as a opposed to 1400 million).

There is also no issue of foreign immigrants depressing the wages of local workers, like you find in Europe, for the simple fact that most foreigners earn more and not less than Chinese workers for the same sort of position. This can also cause resentment, but it is the result of the fact that people from Western countries simply would not work here for the sort of wages local workers get.

Most of the foreigners I have spoken to feel that the authorities would do better to crack down specifically on the foreign drug dealers who line the streets of Sanlitun, Beijing's bar district, and accost other foreigners. It is a well known fact that the trade is controlled by Nigerian gangs (of course, you would not want innocent Nigerians living in Beijing to get harassed by the police as a result). But as usual, the people who should really be targeted will probably be the ones who remain unscathed.

When it comes to the Chinese, it is hard to say whether the recent episodes have produced a hardening of attitudes. The comments in Chinese under the videos I linked in the article are mostly pretty ignorant and xenophobic, although not all of them. It should be remembered, however, that internet forums tend to be the place where the most ignorant and backward people and opinions run loose. If you look at any YouTube video concerning crimes committed by foreigners in any European country, some of the comments underneath are enough to make your blood chill.

In any case, I am not going to be walking around in Beijing without a copy of my passport on me for a while.

My first post on "lost laowai"

I've just had my first post published in the "lostlaowai" site. It's about the tendency of many young Chinese to believe in horoscopes and in the superstition that your blood group affects your personality. Here's the link:
http://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/china-stuff/chinese-culture/new-chinese-superstitions-horoscopes-and-blood-groups/

Hong Kong

I have just got back from a trip to Hong Kong.

It was the first time I go to the SAR (Special Autonomous Region) of Hong Kong. To get there I took a train from Beijing to Shenzhen, which took 24 hours, and then the subway to Hong Kong. Shenzhen is the big city right on the other side of the border from Hong Kong, which sprung up out of nowhere in the eighties after the government turned the area into a special economic zone. Shenzhen and Hong Kong are so close that the two subway systems are connected, although you have to get off and go through a border checkpoint in the middle. If it weren't for the border, which runs along a river and includes walls and barbed wire to stop people from swimming to the other side, Shenzhen and Hong Kong would probably have merged into a single mega-city by this time.

I was already aware that Hong Kong is completely different from Mainland China in all sorts of ways, so the strong feeling of being in a different country which I received was no surprise. I already knew that the currency and official languages would be different. What really struck me about the center of Hong Kong is how it looks almost exactly like the center of London, in terms of both the buildings and the atmosphere. There are even double-decker buses, as well as certain chains of shops which are only normally found in Britain. The place clearly wasn't a British colony for nothing.

I quite coincidentally arrived in Hong Kong during the weekend of the "rugby seven", a famous rugby tournament between seven nations which is held in Hong Kong once a year. The tournament is also the occasion for the city to have a huge party. It has become traditional for revelers to dress up, turning the occasion into a kind of carnival for the city's expat community and visitors.

In any case, as a result of this, I was almost unable to find a room for my first two days in Hong Kong, and I ended up staying in an infamous building called the "Chungking mansions". The building, situated in the middle of the city, is basically notorious for its collection of very cheap and low quality hostels, with names like "the pay less hostel", and as a focal point for shady businesses and people. The first few floors are taken over by little shops, restaurants and businesses run mainly by Indians and Africans. The whole building is supposed to have about 4000 full time residents. Although it is the sort of place most well to do Hong-Kongers probably won't go near, it has featured in films because of its unique atmosphere. An anthropologist who spent some time studying the place estimated that about 20% of the mobile phones currently sold in Africa pass through the Chungking Mansions, although I have no idea whether this is true.

The atmosphere within the building is certainly unusual. It reminded me a bit of Tel Aviv's old bus station, but seedier and more down-market. Although the mansions are well known for attracting a certain amount of criminal activity, I did not feel unsafe there, since there are people around at pretty much any time of the day and night, as well as security guards. The accommodation within the building is certainly cheap (though not by Mainland standards) and not too comfortable, although the owner of my hostel was as helpful as possible. What was most irritating was the lifts, which are incredibly slow and few in number. I had to wait in a queue for about ten to fifteen minutes every time I wanted to go up to the floor my hostel was on. One of the lifts also got stuck with people inside it while I was waiting in the queue, although technicians were called to unblock it immediately. The building is also a bit of a fire hazard, although standards of safety have apparently improved in recent years. In any case, as soon as the rugby tournament finished I moved to a different hostel in a more decent part of town.

A big distinction between Hong Kong and the rest of China is the level of political activism and protest allowed. Just as I was there a new Chief Executive was elected for the Hong Kong SAR. The election is not open to the entire population, but only to the members of an election committee made up of representatives of different professional categories. Incidentally, universal suffrage never existed under Hong Kong, even under British rule. On the day of the elections a small protest was held in front of the voting venue to complain about the system by which this electoral committee is supposed to represent all the citizens. Some of the protesters attempted to storm the venue and clashed with the police, just like in a good old Western country.

I personally happened to pass by a couple of street pickets held by Falun Gong, the religious cult which is banned in China and directly opposed to the Chinese government. Wandering around the city I also happened to bump into a picket protesting about the Chinese government confiscating land in Shenzhen, and the "Occupy Hong Kong" encampment, obviously modeled on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, located just under the HSBC headquarters. Of course, all of this would be out of the question in the Mainland.

Hong Kong's is also a truly cosmopolitan city, on quite a different level from Beijing. There are Indian and Pakistani communities who have lived in the city for generations and feel just as "Hong-Kongese" as anyone, and large communities of Filipino and Indonesian migrant workers. Walking around the center of Hong Kong on a Sunday afternoon, I came across a park where a few thousand Filipino women were picnicking and chatting. Most of them apparently work as maids, and Sunday is their day off.

Not far off in a square I came across a different spectacle: an African evangelical preacher on a stage, preaching to a crowd of women, again mostly from the Philippines (which is supposed to be a Catholic country, but clearly these evangelicals are making their mark even there). The preacher claimed to be a healer, and while I was watching I witnessed some improbable "miraculous healings". At some point a young woman claiming to be deaf emerged from the crowd, and after the healer touched her and prayed a while, she acted as if she had suddenly regained her hearing. The whole thing was so obviously staged that it is a wonder how anyone falls for such stuff.

Another discovery I made in Hong Kong is that the locals can actually speak Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), although with heavy Cantonese accents and varying degrees of fluency. On the other hand, contrary to what I had been told, not everyone speaks English, although a lot of Hong-Kongers certainly do speak it extremely fluently. Underneath the international and British flair, Hong Kong is still clearly part of the Chinese world, and the locals still Chinese at heart. This was especially clear to me when I visited the peripheral suburb of Wong Tai Sin to see the temple dedicated to the deity after which the area is named. Although the center of Hong Kong feels more like London than Beijing, when I got off the subway in Wong Tai Sin, I immediately felt like I was in China again. The high rises are even taller than the ones in Beijing, reaching forty floors at my count, and they look almost as run down as well. Foreigners were nowhere in sight, and the local shopping mall felt almost like a typical mall in a Beijing suburb.

China's Two Parliaments

March: the time of year when the heating in Beijing is turned off, flowers and blades of grass startappearing on the capital's streets, and the "two congresses" are held in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.

The two congresses ("两会" in chinese) are the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (henceforth CPPCC) and the National People's Congress (NPC), the closest thing China has to a parliament. They last a few weeks each. Many of you may be surprised to realize that the CPPCC includes representatives of different political parties, and the NPC includes elected representatives. However, on a closer analysis, these two assemblies can hardly be seen as examples of Western style rapresentative democracy.

The first time I came to China, I was surprised to read in a government-produced booklet introducing the country that there are a number of different political parties in China, including something called "the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang" and a "China Democratic League". There are indeed 8 officialy sanctioned political parties besides the Chinese Comunist Party (CCP), collected into something known as the United Front, which also includes the All-China federation of Industry and Commerce. Two of these parties have the word "democratic" in their name, although this should come as no surprise to those who know that the Chinese government claims to preside over some form of democracy.

The Chinese political system is referred to in official parlance as "multiparty cooperation and consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party". Basically, rapresentatives from all the different parties in the United Front join CCP representatives and indipendents to form the CPPCC. The proportion of seats allocated to each party is decided by established convention. In practice, it is understood that the CCP has the largest representation and dominates the assembly. It is also understood that the other parties hold no real power independent of the CCP.

The other congress which is held every march, the National People's Congress, is slightly more important than the CPPCC. It is the highest state body and the only legislative assembly in the country. Typically for China, it is the largest parliament in the world, with 2987 members. Since the nineties it has apparently moved away from its role as a rubber stamp parliament for the government, and become a place where genuine differences in opinion within the state are sometimes mediated. The Congress does sometimes actually express its opposition to certain bills put before it, which usually results in them being modified before they are put up for vote. By convention, around one third of the seats are reserved to people who are not members of the communist party, normally technical experts or representatives of certain groups within the society. Rapresentatives of China's 55 ethnic minorities are of course always present. On television they always show shots of them wearing their colourful ethnic costumes, which are in fact only worn in daily life in remote areas.

In theory the delegates to the NPC are elected indirectly by the Chinese people. Ordinary citizens can vote for the deputies of their local people's congresses for five-year terms. These local people's congresses then vote for the deputies of the larger people's congresses which represent entire provinces or cities divided into districts, which in turn then vote for the deputies of the National People's Congress. At the lowest level, there is officially no bar on non-party members proposing themselves as candidates in the elections.
Recent years have seen the appearance of more genuine independent candidates who use the internet to campaign, although this is not encouraged and they have faced harrassment by the local authorities. Just this year, a journalism professor who campaigned as an independent in the constituency of Beijing's Foreign Studies University lost his campaign, and claimed that the authorities did everything they could to disrupt his effort to campaign within the campus, even though he was breaking no law.
Even if independents get elected to the lowest level of the people's congresses, the multi-tier election process means that the governemnt firmly controls who will reach the National People's Congress.

In practice, it is obvious that there is no genuine opposition within this political system, and the amount of debate and dissent allowed is firmly determined by the government. However, it is also easy to see how a move towards a more genuine representative democracy could in theory take place within its framework.

The line of the Chinese government is that China's current political system represents the best choice given China's "specific national conditions", since implementing Western-style multiparty democracy in China would bring to chaos and collapse, because China is still a developing country with such a large population. Articles produced by government organs and newspapers point to the failure of China's only experience of multiparty democracy after the Republican revolution of 1911. They also adore pointing out how elections in Western countries (which they still call "Western capitalist countries", despite being capitalist themselves in most people's judgement) are dependent on which party has the most money to campaign, with the different parties rapresenting different economic interests.

In any case, the Chinese press is currently full of reports on the decisions which are being taken in the "two meetings". The talk is all about the reform of the legal system, with 保障人权（protecting human rights) the watchword. The reform includes provisions on preventing forced confessions, notifying an arrested person's family within 24 hours, and "killing few, killing carefully" when it comes to the death penalty. I can only hope these reforms are succesful and implemented in practice, which is all to be seen.

The Chinese Press

My Chinese has reached the point where I can read Chinese newspapers and understand them, albeit slowly and painfully. Before my language abilities reached this level, the only Chinese press accessible to me were the two Chinese newspapers published in English, in other words China Daily and Global Times.

So what is the press in Chinese like? The main thing I have discovered is that, just like in other countries, every newspaper is different. I have found two papers which particularly struck me, for opposite reasons. One is the 南方周末（Southern Weekly), a weekly paper published in Guangzhou. It is well known within China for being particularly serious, open and indipendent, and for publishing reports on sensitive topics, pushing the limits on free speech. It is no accident that it is published in Guangdong, traditionally the province where society is least affected by the central government.

I have found that it does indeed have a superior style to other Chinese newspapers, publishing serious reports on government corruption and discussions on social problems, with a complete lack of nationalistic rabble-rousing or towing the Party line. I also find it much harder to understand than other publications, since it tends to use more serious and literary language. I have heard from Chinese people that the owner of the newspaper has been put under great pressure by the government to moderate its publishing line. Recently, a stack of Southern Weekly newspapers was set on fire by some people in Taiyuan, who called it an instrument of US imperialism which denigrates China's government. I was also told by a Chinese friend that it contains "extreme" anti-government opinion, although by Western standards it is hardly revolutionary.

The other newspaper which has struck me is the Chinese version of the Global Times, 环球时报, which is very different from the English version. It is also well known for having a controversial approach, but for quite different reasons from the Southern Weekly. Basically, it focuses almost entirely on international affairs, taking a decidedely nationalistic and anti-Western line.

The front page headline is often something sensationalist related to world news.

For instance, today's headline is "Putin's victory makes the West unhappy", with an editorial inside the paper entitled "Break free from Western public opinion, look at Russia objectively". The articles are usually full of quotations from major Western newspapers designed to further the idea that the West is biased against the developing countries and China.

Another newspapers I sometimes read is 信报，the free paper they hand out in the subway. It is basically similar to such publications in other parts of the world, except that in the last week they have been going on about the government campaign on "the spirit of Lei Feng", in common with all other newspapers. I have never dared to buy a copy of the People's Daily, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which looks as boring as hell and probably is.

My general opinion of the Chinese press in Chinese is that it is not as censored and propagandistic as many outsiders probably imagine, with reporting on many national and international issues at the same standard as you might expect in the West. Even the Arab Spring has been reported on honestly and completely, in spite of the fact that it could be seen as a sensitive topic. Intelligent commentary on social issues can also be found.

However, it is clear that there are lines which cannot be crossed, and topics which cannot be mentioned. The famous events of '89, for instance, are completely off bounds. I have only ever seen oblique mentions of "the political disturbances of the eighties" buried in the middle of articles on China's recent history. Any reporting on the government's activities, Taiwan or separatism within China which doesn't follow the official line is also quite unthinkable, as are calls for a radical change in China's political system. Disturbances and protests (for instance illegal strikes) within China are sometimes reported on, but it is hard to know how much of it goes unreported.

I was also surprised at the way that the passing of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il was reported on recently. There was absolutely no mention of the fact that he was seen in most of the world as the leader of a particularly brutal regime and of the most closed country on earth, or of the famine which occurred in the nineties under his rule. Even the Southern Weekly stuck to a rather pointless article on a troupe of North Korean actors touring China who suddenly had to go back home because of their leader's death.

All this even though North Korea is generally seen as a poor, backward and ridicolous anachronism even within China. I can only suppose the press had received instructions to keep their reporting completely neutral and non-critical of North Korea, so as not to affect the two countries' relations at such a delicate time.