FLASH MEMORY

My trip to the Fragrance Foundation Awards (don’t ask)

The economy might stink, but some industries are still determined to smell like flowers. Or, more specifically, like fougere, neroli, ambergris, patchouli. On one recent evening, the Fragrance Foundation took over the Lexington Avenue Armory to host their annual awards ceremony, the FiFis, which the group calls the Oscars for the perfume world. The celebrity perfume designers were playing their parts. “This is just like one of those weird dreams that you just accept and you’re happy that you dreampt it,” Diddy said backstage, after he won Fragrance of the Year for his Obama-inspired cologne I Am King. The ceremony, which featured crystal award statues, salmon canapes, the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack and many bottles of Veuve Clicquot, was somewhat of a departure from reality, he admitted. “It,” the recession, “effects all of us, you know what i’m saying? I have a business that appeals to middle America—if they feel the crunch we feel the crunch.”

Yes yes yes. But what, exactly, did the recession smell like? “It stinks it’s like garbage, stank garbage,” the entrepreneur and fragrance-maker explained (it can sometimes be hard to remember what to call him, and a few people referred to him, embarassingly, as “Puffy.”).

“A wet dog,” volunteered Simon Doonan, “but not in a nice way,” the way his Norwich terrier Liberace smelled. Despite – and because of – the stinky economy, the Barney’s creative director insisted men be more scent conscious than ever. “It’s good if men wear fragrances. I remember that time in the ’70s when it was part of a man’s virility to slosh on some High Karate or Old Spice. That whole anti- thing, thinking fragrances were somehow unmasculine, it’s not life-enhancing. You want to smell swashbuckling and pirate-y and fabulous, like Louis XIV, like the glamrock era. You think people weren’t pouring fragrance over themselves then? That whole austerity movement you’re part of, it’s very self-puntative. You need to just go home and drink a bottle of Dolce and Gabbana. The attitude of, ‘how freaky it is that person is reeking of perfume,’ it’s very 90s, very post-grunge.”

But grunge was, probably, the scent of the moment. “Smells like teen spirit,” said Marc Jacobs, Hall of Fame inductee (he was wearing something called Terre d’Hermès). “Smells good to me,” the polo player Nacho Figueras said. “I was just named the face of the world of Polo fragrances. I have a three year contract.” His job that weekend, he said, involved wearing the Polo cologne while competing in a charity tournament against Prince Harry’s team on Governor’s Island. (His favorite smell, he added, was “horses,” which do not smell like the cologne but rather “like horses”.) The actor Ernest Borgnine, 92, was less sanguine about the recession. “That’s why I’m not workin!”

On the red carpet, Dustin Hoffman (who once worked as a fragrance tester for Maxwell House coffee) said his proclivity for perfume was impaired by scar tissue in his nose. Still, he couldn’t escape the stench of the slowdown. “It smells like shit, but that’s what anyone would say.” He thought about it. “We need a metaphor for an answer, because the question is metaphorical….Decay! The culture and the smell. We – not we, collectively – but the people behind it were wanting something for nothing. That’ll catch up to you.” It had not exactly caught up with Paris Hilton, the winner of female fragrance of the year. “I’m doing my part, getting really involved in philanthropy work, and also continuing to go around the world and shop. People need people to shop. If I can do it, I will. People need people to buy things still.” Like, for instance, her new fragrance, Siren, a “sensual and sexy” perfume with a mermaid theme. Both men and women should be scenting themselves throughout the recession. “I was just in Europe and a lot of people don’t even believe in deodorant,” she said. “Not a pretty smell.”

Outside the party in the armory’s foyer, a few national guardsmen who were drinking beer in red plastic cups concurred with Ms. Hilton. “Definitely in Iraq, when you’re working sixteen hours marching the fucking land, you gotta spray yourself with something,” said Sgt. Steve Proctor, who served with the 42nd infrantry division in Tikrit last year. His solution: “Claiborne Sport.” Shortly afterwards, he and his colleagues climbed up the stairs to the armory’s balcony to survey the award’s after-party. “We can’t go down there,” another sergeant, Miles, said. Their staff sergeant, Stacy, disagreed. “We have military ID,” she said. “Let’s go. Now!” They marched downstairs and past the velvet rope. At the open bar, Stacy ordered her sargeants beers, slipped twenty dollars to the bartender and turned to face the party. “We’re going to find Dustin Hoffman.”

He may have lost to Kris Allen on American Idol, but Steve Martin and his banjo album “The Crow” landed on the pop charts this week, his first time back there since 1981’s EP “The Steve Martin Brothers.” Yet if we were guessing that his new Billboard status might have had something to do with his brand name or the bluegrass firepower he brings with him on his new record – Mary Black, Vince Gill, Tim O’Brien, Dolly Parton along with banjo masters Earl Scruggs, Pete Wernick and Tony Trischka – the joke is, well, on us.

That was the verdict last night at the Rubin Museum of Art, after the award winning comedian-actor-playwright-novelist-memoirist rounded out an intimate two-night residency with a mesmerizing display of banjo pickin’, songwritin’, a bit of singing (his voice doesn’t quite warrant the apostrophe) and, yes, jokes. “This is a song,” he began with a folkly lilt, “well — that pretty much says it.” Even tuning his instrument between songs drew hair-trigger giggles and hollers.

But it was the songs themselves that drew the biggest reaction. How did it feel to be on the pop charts again after 27 years, I asked him later. “This proves that my hit single, “King Tut,” was not a fluke.”

The comedian known for his wacky banjo playing seemed a little determined to be something more like the banjo player with the wacky sense of humor. Why else had he traded his trademark white suit for near-black pinstripes? “Beats me,” shrugged his wife Anne Stringfield when we asked. “The gravitas?”

On the nostalgic “Daddy Played the Banjo,” Martin showed off not only some deft and swift fingering but revealed a lyrical imagination refreshingly heart-felt (the lyrics came from an intentionally bad poem he wrote, but “they made for a good country song”). Even the funny song he sings, “Late for School,” had a down-home sweetness to it, and wouldn’t be out of place on a children’s album, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

If, for a moment, the city slicker audience managed to pull its eyes away from Martin, they might have thought they were in the hands of a some progressive Carolinian master. (And they were in the hands of a few: halfway through, Martin left the stage to let his backup band, the Steep Canyon Rangers, take over for a rollicking virtuosic performance.)

But the audience was stuck on the wild and crazy Renaissance guy, hanging on every pluck and quip, and probably at times thinking something like, he’s not funny or awe-inspiring – he is a little scary. Agnes Gund, a pal through Martin’s art collecting, sat glued down in front. “I’ve known him for years but never seen this before,” she said afterward. “He’s really great.”

There was modesty and fake pompousness (“I’m in front here, because, you know, I’m the guy,” he explained. Later: “I made a deal with Graham [Sharp, the other banjo player] – every time I make a mistake he has to make one too.”)

But he also crushed any doubts about his chops with “Clawhammer Melody,” a mash-up of standards on which he showed off the unusual style of clawhammering, or frailing. Instead of being pulled by three fingers, like the way Earl Scruggs does it, Martin depresses the banjos’s strings with five fingers – a particularly challenging technique, but one at which he’s considered a master.

He’s also a master at some other things, and he took plenty of opportunities to hit comedic notes. He did it effortlessly too, without anything like a routine. “This song is so great that I wish I wrote it,” he said of “Orange Blossom Special,” an old train standard. “And I was thinking about it recently, and I realized, ‘Hey, I did write it!’”

He didn’t, but he did change one line, intoning the chorus that first made him famous: “King Tut!”

Before he played his new album’s title track, an eye-opening duo with banjo master Trischka, Martin said it had became a minor hit in the bluegrass world.

“And in the bluegrass world,” he quipped, “a minor hit is a major hit.”

Begin with the Indian tabla. Add bluegrass banjo in a contemplative mood. Cue the rollicking bass. Throw in some toe-tapping and jolly head-bopping for good measure. It sounds like a world fusion music parody — or it sounds just awful. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie’s cool Zankel Hall, the penultimate night of the “Perspectives” series, the experiment was being conducted by some of the world’s finest musicians: India’s most renowned percussionist (and the reason for the series), Zakir Hussain, was joined by banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and classical bassist Edgar Meyer. In their breathtaking hands, the resonances between American and Indian roots wasn’t a gimmick. No: they were blending genres like a DJ with a mixer, and sometimes it was hard to tell what they were sampling, between the bright sitar invocations of the banjo, the tabla’s classical bass resonances and the bass’s echoes of both of those sounds. Somewhere in between their plucking and slapping, you could almost make out the undoing of fusion music, and the sounds of its wild rebirth.

To get comfortable with this genre-bending wasn’t just a matter of previous experience in other sections of the record shop — Hussain loves jazz, Fleck has a new album of African collaborations, and Meyer is an able bluegrass player. Their coherence has got just as much if not more to do with a deep and wide-ranging appreciation for and relationship with their instruments. Just as Bela can bring his banjo’s bright tones into darker places, so does Zakir make the tabla sing, turning its brooding stalk into a fleet-footed ramble though the woods of Appalachia (at one moment, over the strum of banjo, the brushing of a frame drum made the unmistakable sound of a locamotive in the distance). His tabla is as open, happy and effervescent as the man himself. As I watched his fingers and facial expressions, the only word that came to mind was — I’m serious — Chaplinesque. Hussain’s spirit was the third crucial ingredient: it lubricated their lively interaction, which was less a jazzy conversation than a manage-a-trois, with lots of unusual positions.

It looked effortless, but this, their first full concert together ahead of a new album (they collaborated once before in 2006 with the Detroit and Nashville Symphonies), wasn’t, said Fleck. “If you sense fear, it’s coming from the stage,” he said at the start. “In fact,” Meyer chimed in, “you can probably smell it.”

It smelled really good.

COCHIN, India — The seaside, southern Indian city of Kochi is said to be on “India time,” which means nine and a half hours ahead of the West Village, but also leisurely, relaxed, a little behind schedule. The same might have been said the other night of Vikram Chatwal – 37-year-old Sikh jet-setter, Manhattan playboy, scion of a hotel empire, erstwhile Bollywood actor – who had flown to Kochi to launch the latest branch of his chic boutique hotel chain, Dream. Just after 6:30 pm on Sunday, everything was in place outside the 14-story neon-tinged hotel: an elaborate tribal drum performance, fashion models, the Chatwal family, high level officials, a pair of giant, festooned elephants. Everything but Mr. Chatwal himself.

“Where is Vikram?” his mother Daman asked someone. The opening speeches began, and each time his name was pronounced, the evening air seemed to get a bit more humid. “May his dream come true,” said T.K.A. Nair, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, who had traveled from Delhi for the opening. Sant Singh Chatwal, the father, an imposing-looking man who founded Hampshire Hotels and famously threw his son a lavish three-city Indian wedding in 2006, grinned intently beneath an imperial red turban. Vivek, the younger, more buttoned-down Chatwal son who is also involved in the family business, stood quietly where his brother might have been.

Later, one publicist said an interview had gone long. Someone else blamed a long day of queries from the media for his exhaustion, which had forced him into a nap. (No mention was made of the rooms’ blue neon lights, which “invite you to take off to a peaceful slumber,” according to a press release.) The elder Mr. Chatwal dismissed the sleeping story, explaining that Vikram had decided to hold a private meeting in his room and let his brother take the spotlight. “He wanted to give his brother an equal part,” said Dad. “They’re two very different sons,” he added with a chuckle. “One is north, one is south. One sleeps at 11 o clock, the other wakes at 11 o’clock. He’s a party man.”

When Vikram did show up to the festivities half an hour later, he played his part, shaking hands, sitting with friends and models, manning the turntables. “I was basically a hip hop kid for the last 25 years,” said Chatwal, who was not wearing the iconic turban that had made him famous at nightclubs like Bungalow 8. “But I started getting more aware of mortality. So I had a few bad accidents, I got married, had a child. Music used to be a lot more about angst for me. Now it’s the only form of meditation I do.”

Once, his public persona was defined by Page Six — palling around with P. Diddy, dating Kate Moss, scoring a cameo in Zoolander. But he was undercutting a reputation built on a Wharton business degree. And more troublesome, he was worrying his parents. After getting married in 2006, that began to change. Now Mr. Chatwal commutes from his hometown of Manhattan to Mumbai once a month to see his wife and baby daughter. “[My parents] thought, “Oh now he’s more mature, he can raise a family,” said Mr. Chatwal. “They’re backing off a bit now.” He recently moved to a new Richard Meier-designed building in the Meatpacking District, while his parents live on east 93st. “It’s as far away from them as I can get.”

If Mr. Chatwal’s father has relaxed, it may be because he recognizes his son’s Bacchanalian persona as a brand-booster. “He knows Naomi Campbell, and anybody who’s who. He creates an international scene whereas I follow the nitty gritty,” said the father, who himself has been dogged by controversy (in 2001 he was arrested in on fraud charges while giving Bill Clinton a tour of India). Explained the younger Chatwal: “He makes sure the numbers really work. Generally his benchmark of success is a monetary one. That used to be mine,” he said, referring to his dream of becoming the first Sikh billionaire. “But now mine’s about what you create.”

Mr. Chatwal has been acting a lot, mostly in Indian films, and recently won an award for his role as a closeted gay Indian-American who marries an Indian woman he meets online. “They both have their own agendas to get married. He’s gay and she wants to get back at her ex-boyfriend,” he said. “In the end I come out and she slaps the shit out of me. But my character becomes a lot more at ease with himself.”

And his ratio of partying to working is down to 50/50. “Maybe that’s because the hotel biz involves partying,” he said. On the rooftop later, Mr. Chatwal appeared beside the emerald pool wearing his tight black t-shirt and jeans. He threw his hands up, jumped in, and floated for a little while.

A version of this appeared in the New York Observer

UPDATE: Beijing’s Olympic Pollution Solution: Luck + Data Manipulation

“Pictures cannot reflect reality.”
-Du Shaozhong

“It’s really good for everybody … to keep such clean air, that’s fantastic.”
-Halie Gebrselassie

Ethiopian running legend Haile Gebrselassie may have been the only person to curse the skies in Beijing on August 24th 2008. Five months earlier, the reigning world record holder in the marathon decided to pull out of the event over concerns that the city’s choking smog would trigger his asthma. As the International Olympic Committee had done in private, the runner called on China publicly to address the smog for the sake of athletes and its own citizens. “I was here in February, I didn’t see no blue sky,” the Ethiopian runner told a Reuters reporter at the Games.

But on the morning of August 24th , Gebrselassie gazed up at a rich blue sky, capping Beijing’s least polluted month in a decade. Later that day, another runner would complete the marathon in record Olympic time–but not faster than Gebreslassie’s record. “Since I came here everything is perfect.” He added with a chuckle: “They should tell us.”

For years, Beijing officials did tell the world that its skies would be blue for the Games. Reports said the air was cleaner than ever, and, in the spirit of banning things (protests, spitting and un-official cultural events were nixed), the city announced it would implement a sweeping anti-smog policy. A two-month stoppage at construction sites and polluting factories, along with vehicle restrictions that would cut traffic in half, coupled with attempts to trigger rainfall, promised to banish smog for the Games.

But Gebrselassie might be excused for being skeptical. Aside from the choking, gray skies that the Ethiopian runner saw over the capital when he first visited Beijing, and again on the day of the Opening Ceremony, keen observers had other reasons to be suspicious. For the years and months leading up to the Games, official pollution data, propagandistic pronouncements and temporary fixes left a portrait of pollution as murky as the skies themselves.

*

August 2008 will likely be remembered as one of Beijing’s least polluted months. But for smog watchers, it was also one of the city’s most unpredictable and confusing, too. In July, a series of sudden thunderstorms, reportedly triggered by the government’s arsenal of rainmaking rockets and abetted by cold fronts, led to a rash of clear skies. When the smog returned in full force four days before the opening, the government made an announcement that betrayed its desperation: a possible “emergency contingency plan” would extend restrictions on cars and factories.

But at a press conference one week before the Games, Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing municipal bureau of environmental protection, used another tactic to disperse the smog: rhetorical alchemy. “Clouds and haze are not pollution,” he told foreign journalists following the smog story. “This kind of weather is a natural phenomenon. It has nothing to do with pollution. If we were sitting in a bathhouse, there’d be a lot of steam. But no pollution.” He insisted that photographs that purported to show smog were misleading, and, echoing the Party’s insistence on scientific development, urged the media to “analyz[e] the data scientifically.”

The IOC backed him up. Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, said, “The mist in the air that we see … is not a feature of pollution primarily but a feature of evaporation and humidity. We do have a communication problem here.”

To be sure, a foreign press corps looking for “gotcha” moments has been eager to underscore Beijing’s pollution problem with ugly images. Beijing’s air is not always terrible. On some days, the ancient city’s streets pulsate with life under heart-warming blue skies. The relative rarity of these gorgeous days – and the prospect of perhaps more to come – gives them an added beauty that a similar day in New York cannot claim.

But the “steam” director Du referred to was, in fact, caused by pollution. A few days later, the BBC’s own analysis found that Beijing was breathing in air with a PM10 concentration of 269 mcg/m3–168 percent above the WHO standard for short-term exposure, a smog level the Beijing government once called “unhealthy.” The government’s typical insistence that “there’s nothing to see here” came true on opening day, when smog shrouded the Olympic Green beneath a veil of white. At moments, the city, and even the massive Bird’s Nest stadium, practically vanished before my eyes.

*

Since 1998, when Beijing was ranked as having the 3rd worst air quality in a global ranking of 157 cities, the city has made great strides in reducing pollution sources, if not pollution levels. The government has sought to phase out high emission vehicles, transitioned much of the inner city from coal-fired to electric heat and deployed a fleet of clean natural gas buses. It’s also succeeded in getting cars off the roads in the world’s grandest anti-pollution experiment, thereby reducing emissions in the city by 20 percent, the government says. To clean up the city for the Olympics, it says it has spent $17.6 billion on environmental projects—projects it says will leave a permanent mark on the city.

But longer-term and systematic issues have not been addressed. There remains considerable debate for instance over the sources of the city’s pollution. Is it the automobiles that in recent years have hit the city’s roads at a rate of 1,000 per day? The volatile organic compounds that small factories exhale into the atmosphere? Many point to the high emissions of old trucks – sometimes equivalent to that of 20 new cars — that have lately been banned from the city center. Others single out the pollution and dust that blows in from neighboring provinces. Even straw burning farmers in the suburbs have been a popular culprit.
In 2007, exasperated environmental officials announced they were launching a long-awaited survey of pollution sources to get to the bottom of the problem. But like many other orders from the top, finding and rooting out sources of smog faces an uphill struggle against China’s biggest enemies, including corruption, an official emphasis on economic growth, and the usual accomplice to many of the country’s ills: censorship.

In the tense lead-up to the Games, the air was thick with cover-up and chicanery. Du Shaozhong’s doublespeak—this insistence that pollution was haze – is not a rarity but rather the norm. In 1997, for instance, a new term was coined in official documents to describe the city’s pollution. The old term, wuran, was too descriptive; the portmanteau wumai, or “fog haze,” sounds better.

But no euphemism in Beijing’s green vocabulary may be as fraught as “Blue Sky” day. Launched as part of a national pollution rating system in 1998 and applying to some of China’s biggest cities, the “Blue Sky” designation has nothing to do with the color of the sky. Rather, it is given to any day, blue skies or not, with an API, or Air Pollution Index reading, of 100 or lower. To be more specific, that’s when the air contains 150 micrograms (mcg) per cubic meter (m3) of fine dust or less.

But this threshold for a “Blue Sky” day is still three times more polluted than the World Health Organization’s short-term exposure standard for fine dust (also known as PM10): a concentration of 20 mcg/m3. That means that a “blue sky” day isn’t just lacking in blue skies: it’s not necessarily a good day for breathing either. Even days with actual blue skies can be dangerous due to ozone (O3), a colorless gas with a harmful effect on the lungs. Still, Beijing doesn’t release figures for ozone.

Even more worrisome is that when Beijing was bidding for the Olympics in 2000, the national government lowered – lowered — its standards for ozone and for nitrogen dioxide (NO2). When I asked Mr. Du about this, he responded that NO2 and O3 standards were raised “in accordance with Chinese law.” He did not explain why Beijing does not release figures about ozone.
To clear that up: a “blue sky” day isn’t necessarily blue, and by WHO standards, can still be heavily polluted. Meanwhile, a day with actual blue skies and even low particulate levels can also be polluted due to ozone. But to most Beijing citizens and visitors enjoying a “Blue Sky” day, these fine details, like fine particles, go largely unnoticed.

*

If the name is misleading, the usage of “Blue Sky” days can be much worse. In 2007, the Beijing government met its “Blue Sky” day target of 246 due to an abundance of days when the API reading was exactly 100. Setting aside the question of whether these days could even be considered healthy, more than a few people simply wondered if some pollution readings weren’t shaved off the top to meet the official goal.

This number massaging piqued the interest of Steve Andrews, an American environmental researcher in Beijing on a Princeton in Asia fellowship. After some digging into official pollution data, Andrews found that the Beijing environmental bureau wasn’t just widening the goal posts. It was moving them. Literally. Officials had relocated smog monitoring stations to areas away from roads and to places outside the city, creating the impression that pollution was decreasing.

In a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Andrews found that if the same monitoring station locations used in Beijing from 1998 to 2005 continued to be used in 2006, 38 ‘Blue Sky’ days would have exceeded the “blue sky” standard. He went on to pick apart Beijing’s claim that pollution levels had dropped between 1998 and 2007, concluding that the improvements, as measured in “Blue Sky” days, were due to “irregularities in the monitoring and reporting of air quality and not to less polluted air.” As he told me then, “The impact of the new monitoring stations in Huairou and Changping on ‘improving’ Beijing’s air quality for this year can not be overstated.” (Andrews’ study focused only on Beijing, but it raises questions about the monitoring of pollution in other Chinese cities where the “Blue Sky” rating is used, including Chengdu, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Guangzhou.)

When I and other reporters asked Mr. Du repeatedly about the monitoring station issue, he would switch between insisting that “improvements” to the monitoring network were being taken and condemning Andrews’ findings. “This phenomenon does not exist, because this is a misunderstanding,” he said in April. “Some reports also blamed us. This is not fair.” Numbers were not being fudged, he said, though he did concede that “we need to enhance observation and enforcement and supervision” of the air-quality data.

But the readings released during the Olympics left much to be desired. The first few smoggy days of the Games, for instance, government-issued numbers on pollution would not only hover suspiciously below the “blue sky” cutoff, but vary wildly from analyses made at populous areas.

On the day of opening ceremonies of August 8th the official API was a “Blue Sky” 94, or a PM10 concentration of 138mcg/m3. That afternoon the BBC measured PM10 concentration of 156mcg/m3 – just above the “Blue Sky” cutoff of 150. Later that day, the Associated Press measured a PM10 concentration of 345mcg/m3 at mid-afternoon at the Olympic green. Two days later, when the BJEPB reported a PM10 concentration of 114mcg/m3, the AP and BBC reported PM10 concentrations of 278mcg/m3 and 604mcg/m3 respectively. Even in the months after the Games, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau declined to release details about what was in the air in August, hampering efforts by researchers to verify the number of “Blue Sky” days or to help target pollution sources down the road.

*

One morning in the middle of August, as the Games began to hit their stride, Beijing awoke to a dreamy blue sky that would, with the exception of (and thanks to) a few thunderstorms, persist for weeks. Pollution indices dropped to almost unheard-of levels. The government’s anti-smog measures, one of the grandest environmental experiments in history, seemed to have worked. Intense debate about the future of the car policy ensued on the Internet – commuters liked it, car owners didn’t – and the government eventually announced it would continue an amended version of the policy for a six month trial period. Each day, a fifth of the city’s cars would be taken off the roads. “Beijing will be built into a liveable city,” minister Du said at the close of the Games.

But as crucial as restricting cars may be in helping Beijing breathe easier, the use of such a blunt instrument represents a failure in Beijing’s multi-pronged fight against pollution. Like a recovering drug addict, the city will need to first come clean about its problem before it can get clean.

The city’s pollution problem is so substantial, researchers say, that even “quitting” cars cold turkey has a limited impact on the pollution. More important is something the government cannot control (at least not completely): weather patterns. Kenneth Rahn, an American atmospheric scientist who has studied Beijing’s pollution problem, has concluded that due to polluting factories, coal use and weak emission standards in areas south and west of Beijing, strong winds and rain are the only way to flush out the city’s smog. “They better start praying to the Mongolian weather gods,” he told me a few months before the Games. In August, Beijing did indeed enjoy a cold front that washed into the city just after the opening ceremony.

Some officials did in fact pray to the gods—but in the hopes that rain would not hit Beijing. (When an official from the Beijing Meteorological Bureau was asked in 2007 what the chances were of rain during the Opening Ceremony, he ended his answer uncharacteristically for a Communist Party official: “God bless Beijing.”) In an ironic but symbolic twist, the city’s need for smog-clearing rain ran up against a pledge to keep the Games dry.
Indeed, on the damp, smog-smacked night of the Opening Ceremony, as thousands of fireworks ringed the stadium, an onslaught of over 1,000 rain-making rockets were containing thunderstorms in the far outskirts of the city. Untouched by rainfall, the show shimmered in front of a TV audience of millions. To those of us inside the stadium, in spite of the spectacle, the night was weighed down with humidity and smog.

As the rockets were slamming clouds far out of sight, the opening ceremony reached its middle section. In a segment titled “Nature,” children painted a landscape at center-stage and recited a poem as tai qi masters twirled around them.

The air is warming. The ice cap is melting…We plant trees /
We sow seeds. The earth turns green. The sky is blue indeed…

For all of Beijing’s “scientific” emphasis on eliminating sources of pollution, it was a drastic last-ditch policy, weather patterns and perhaps a bit of luck that ultimately cleared the air for the Games. Meanwhile, a Potemkin village campaign to varnish the city’s green image for the Olympic period foiled more substantial improvements. If the city hopes to extend the legacy of the “green” Olympics, it needn’t depend on luck and blunt instruments. It needs to be honest in its reporting of pollution, rather than leaving everyone guessing. To borrow the words of would-be Olympic champion Mr. Gebrselassie, “they should tell us.”

From China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, ed. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Kate Merkel-Hess, Kenneth Pomeranz (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Amazon

Rendering of the green suburb (Flickr: Telstar Logistics)

Happy April Fool’s Day

The bustling streets of Wuyang, a small, 4 million person city in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, epitomize China’s slowing economy. Fleets of small cars chug past construction sites that are slightly quieter than usual — the city now counts only 560 cranes on the skyline — while bicyclists swarm through clouds of white “fog” created by nearby power plants.

But in three years Wuyang could transform into a Chinese vision for the future. As part of a bid to boost struggling industries amidst an economic downturn, on April 1 Chinese officials signed a contract with a major US planning group to turn Wuyang’s outlying areas into the country’s first demonstration “green-colored suburb city.” “For our sustainable vision to spread, green cities must spread out,” said the city’s mayor. “We are confident that this green city will be twice as green as any other green city in China.”

In the massive migration from the countryside to cities — one projection sees 5 million new buildings being built in China over the next 20 years — designers saw an opportunity to do something at once different and familiar. Though modeled primarily on American suburbs, the new ambitious plan calls for buildings made of “futuristic” glass and steel and, crucially, thousands of gallons of green paint.

“The paint will be low VOC,” said Yu Dongfan, a minister at the local environmental and economic development bureaus, referring to paint with toxic volatile organic compounds.

The new suburban layout has already received a “Shiny Greenish-Gold” rating under China’s new “green building” standard, LEAD, or Leadership in Environmentally-Friendly Appearance and Decoration.

“We want to make it clear to the world that even as we grow our city amidst economic hardship, we’re still concerned about our environmental image,” said Mr. Yu, who is helping to oversee the project. “The suburbs meet the rising demands of residents while ensuring that we have enough room to pursue development inside the city itself.”

A number of brash new skyscrapers are planned for the center of Wuyang, including China State Tobacco Company’s new headquarters, the so-called Negative Energy Tower, as well as the environmental bureau’s new digs, a wind-powered skyscraper that rotates 360 degrees every hour. “With a rotating building, we can keep an eye on all ecological problems in the city without having to turn our heads.

“Our green suburbs on the other hand should really turn some heads,” he added, between drags on his cigarette.

National Geographic

Green Leap Forward
Unlike a number of other new green cities, Wuyang’s “suburb city” will not produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. “We have absolutely no plans to use hydrogen fuel cells to power our growing public transport network,” said Dong Linyu, the head of the city’s transportation department, who is overseeing a massive 500km expansion that could take one year to construct. “But we are exploring clean coal as a possible fuel.”

Especially notable is the lack of any provisions for new public space or for smaller scale buildings. Instead, officials have approved a swath of new highways to connect the suburbs that will soon sit outside the city’s fourth ring road with the vast housing complexes that currently sit outside the third ring road.

Following an urgent request from local economic officials, the highway concrete will be covered in a green coat made of recycled US currency notes and Treasury bills.

“Our GreenWay system is a convenient way to remind new drivers that green means go, and that the road to Western-style prosperity is paved by the automobile industry,” said Roger Moses, chief of road building for Crain and Steele, the Chicago-based planning firm behind the project. “It’s really a very developed-world vision — in many ways it reminds me of Los Angeles.”

Malls, Big Boxes
The plan also calls for ample strip malls and big box stores, which have become popular in recent years as Chinese consumption has grown, while their popularity has waned in the US.

As American sales of expensive items like barbecue grilles and flat screen TVs sink, Wal-Mart, which is pursuing an extensive greening of its supply chain within China, is eying record numbers in Wuyang.

In cooperation with the Wuyang government, both Wal-Mart and Home Depot have announced a program to relocate U.S. stores that have been shuttered in recent months to Wuyang. Fifteen newly-closed stores in North America will be dismantled, transported by ship and erected in Wuyang.

“We see this as part of our commitment to recycling as much as we can,” said Brenda Tiller, a Wal-Mart spokesperson.

To ensure that the suburbs are as realistically green as possible, planners have also called for almost all flat areas to be covered in trees and grass — or to be painted green.

“After a slump in exports in toys and other products, this is going to be a great way to boost our paint industry,” said an official with the National Development and Reform Commission.

Some paint has already been applied on the city’s outskirts

Though local authorities have chosen the simple name “Wuyang Green Super Suburb City,” Crain and Steele has yet to settle on its own set of names for the project, as is customary. Some possibilities include “Emerald Necklace,” “Park Forest,” and “Greensberg.”

Larger Plans
The suburb city is both an outgrowth of China’s new stimulus package and of the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), which includes a so-called 7th two-year “10001 plan” that outlines a strategy for future suburban development. The “10001″ number is apparently in reference to the number of square feet to be included within each new home.

In recent years, China has seen a boom in luxury villas — part of a trend that also includes cognac, Mercedes-Benz sedans and diamond-coated “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” totes.

“These villas are symbols of our wealth and arrival,” said Kang Dong, a professor of social sciences at Hafo University in Jiangxi. “We know that in America, the suburbs are usually seen as a sign of homogeneity. But for us Chinese, owning a big house is a statement of individuality — a rejection of Mao’s Little Red Book for My Big Green House, if you will.”

“It’s important that the growing trend of luxury villas isn’t restricted to the upper classes and government officials,” Mr. Yu, the development and environmental official, said at a press conference. “But if it must be, we will make plans for more, smaller, suburbs, outside these suburbs.”

Local Concern
Meanwhile, some locals inside and outside Wuyang have voiced opposition to the plan, fearing what suburban sprawl might mean for their land use rights and an already suffering environment.

While a recent Internet poll by the government showed resounding public support, many citizens said that when they tried to go to the voting website, they were redirected to youtube.com.

Others have more practical concerns about new “green suburb-city development.”

“I sincerely believe in scientific development and the new socialist countryside and the harmonious society,” said Li Tian, a 29-year-old factory worker. “It’s just getting hard to remember all of phrases I’m supposed to believe in.”

“Two Birds, One ‘Burb”
National officials have also hailed the green suburban idea as an innovative method for building out urban centers while developing rural areas, which have lately experienced growth as unemployed workers return home from urban factory jobs.

“Green rural infrastructure is still weak and needs improving,” President Hu Jintao said before a special meeting of the CPC Central Committee. “We will firmly push forward the green rural reform. Green reform is crucial. Important is a reformation to rural areas, with more green, and scientific planning, by expanding farmers’ incomes, or the size of their homes. Also: scientific development.”

In a separate document, Hu wrote, “We will continue to emancipate our rural areas from an absence of green reform. We shall work out new scientific concepts and green ideas to solve the problems in rural development. One fundamental way to do this is simple: green, scientific reform.”

But Western experts have voiced concern about the plan, which one report calls “an unsustainable pipe-dream — no, no — pipe-nightmare.”

“It’s very upsetting to see China making the same errors we made during our development,” said Morester Greene, an economist at the Center for Urban Misuse based in Washington, DC, which produced the initial report. “Low density, car-based planning is going to haunt them for a century.”

“Why should China learn from the West?” Yu responded. “There are plenty of other developing countries out there. Maybe they should learn from our mistakes.”

Posted at TreeHugger

Last week, as Chinese police fanned out across the Tibetan plateau, the chairman of Tibet’s government made a hushed departure from the official line on the unrest that erupted into violence there last year.

There were all kinds of people, some of whom weren’t satisfied with our policies, or had opinions about them, or because our government work hadn’t been fully completed, Qiangba Puncog told reporters at the National People’s Congress annual meeting in Beijing, veering from the government’s oft cited condemnation of the Dalai Lama and his splittist clique. Not everyone was a splittist.

If it was the conference’s most obvious and extreme understatement, it was also a rare public sign that Beijing grasps some of the complexity of its Tibetan quagmire.

But this brief burst of enlightenment may not amount to much. Against the backdrop of the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule — and as a raft of other ominous anniversaries loom in a year of economic hardship — government officials are marching on a tightrope that could snap at any moment.

On one side is a smile campaign celebrating Tibet’s democratic and economic reforms and its freedom from a repressive theocracy — a move, a recent government white paper declared, no less significant than the abolishment of slavery in the United States and Europe. So determined are Communist Party celebrants this year that when it became clear that Tibetans across the province were refusing to commemorate Losar, the Tibetan New Year, in late February, police began handing out money to encourage festivities.

It’s not hard to see why people didn’t want to party. Weighing down the other side of Beijing’s balancing act is a campaign of severe police intimidation meant to clamp down on dissent and prevent the violence that struck Tibet last year, when authorities say 20 people were killed. Exile groups meanwhile contend that as many as 200 people died, most of them Tibetans.

But even without violence, Beijing’s tough approach to Tibet is planting deep seeds of resentment and casting greater doubt than ever over China’s legitimacy in the remote Himalayan region. The specter of instability arrives at a sensitive time for Beijing, as unemployment sinks in across the country and police warily tighten control in Xinjiang, the province to the north of Tibet and home to the Muslim Uighur minority. (The situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year, the chairman of Xinjiang’s government warned last week.)

Tibet, however, remains Beijing’s most fraught territory, a proving ground for its struggle to maintain stability by force while promoting economic growth. As some improvements — such as the much-touted Qinghai-Tibet railway — have partially backfired with the migration of droves of job-seeking Han Chinese, other benefits from economic development have been annulled, some say, by the onslaught of police forces. As it tightens its grip over Tibet, Beijing is fast losing its hearts and minds. From some perspectives, China’s west is looking increasingly like its West Bank.

The Communist Party didn’t survive for 50 years because it killed people, but because it killed some people and listened to others, said Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University. The big question is, why the hell is it not doing that in Tibet?

Although Beijing boasts of its restraint in the area and is desperate to maintain peace, its show of force is predictably stronger than ever. Rather than taking heed of Tibetan dissatisfaction with Chinese rule, authorities have instead ramped up police campaigns. Monks and laypeople have been widely detained without charge; monasteries are under increased surveillance; the presence of soldiers has multiplied; and though officials have boasted of no executions since March, prison sentences have grown excessive. Last month, a number of people were detained on accusations they had downloaded reactionary songs to their cellphones, and one man was sentenced to more than a decade in prison for copying CDs that promoted the Dalai Lama.

China’s increasing vilification of the 73-year-old Tibetan political and spiritual leader has only added insult to injury. For more than a decade, simply possessing an image of the Dalai Lama could land a person in prison. But the Chinese government’s condemnations of the Dalai Lama since March have united formerly distinct Tibetan regions behind cries for greater autonomy. In recent weeks, officials have dispatched legions of police to Tibetan areas outside Tibet that once enjoyed greater freedoms but are now hotbeds for anger, such as Sichuan and Qinghai, where improvised explosives damaged two vehicles March 9.

What has happened is that now all the Tibetan or Buddhist people on the Tibetan plateau are speaking as one group, said Tenzin N. Tethong, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and former chairman of the cabinet of the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala. It’s almost as if nationalism has been reignited by these Chinese policies.

At the same time, Tibetans inside and outside China have begun to appear increasingly at odds with the Dalai Lama’s call for a middle way in dealing with Beijing. At a six-day crisis meeting held in Dharamsala last November, exiles and monks vigorously debated a continued push for autonomy as the chance of successful dialogue with China narrowed. Rangzen, or independence, once again became a popular buzzword.

Equally dangerous to stability in Tibet is the prospect of rising distrust between Tibetans and Han Chinese. During last March’s protests, China Central Television took the unusual step of airing footage of the unrest in Lhasa, a move that helped foment nationalist sentiment among China’s Internet-powered generation, inspiring deep distrust of the Dalai Lama — and those who follow his teachings.

This moment is a sea change, not just because of the government’s reaction, but especially because of the Chinese intellectual and cyberspace reaction, Barnett said. It’s the one thing China was good at — not really looking at Tibet as an ethnic problem. It’s baffling why the leadership is letting this rampage across Chinese thinking, the thought sphere, instead of saying sincerely, ‘These are our brothers; we have to have a family of nationalities.’

In spite of a government-mandated harmonious society, growing nationalism among both Chinese and Tibetans is only engendering a mutual suspicion along ethnic lines. Ethnic hatred, said Tethong, is starting to mirror already deep tensions between Chinese and Muslim Uighurs in neighboring Xinjiang. The Chinese in Tibet are beginning to think the Tibetans hate us, and the Tibetans think so too, he said. The ethnic hatred has been very muted for a long time, but now it’s gotten worse.

Even when I visited in October, during a painfully brief season for the province’s tourism industry, armored personnel carriers and Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers encircled the old city of Lhasa, patrolling near monasteries and keeping watch from rooftops. Tibetans, many confined to the old city, and Chinese, who live in shinier buildings outside it, both kept glancing over their shoulders and kept their distance.

Everyone is on edge — Tibetans, Chinese, the police, said a Tibetan hotel manager in Lhasa’s old city who did not want to be named. Although a curfew imposed after the riots had been lifted, few people ventured out after dark. These streets used to be busy with life at night. Now people stay at home.

Some observers are now asking whether the Dalai Lama’s proposed nonviolent middle way is still even viable.

If the Dalai Lama can reach a solution, the majority of the Tibetan people would support it, said Bhuchung Tsering, vice president of the International Campaign for Tibet, in Washington. But some voices are pointing to the Palestinian case, saying ‘Without violence, the world won’t pay attention.’

No government supports the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, and the Tibetan issue has lately disappeared from the lips of U.S. and other Western leaders. Although the most recent U.S. State Department report on human rights said China’s level of repression of Tibetan Buddhists increased significantly during the year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took pains not to publicly mention Tibet during her trip to Beijing last month. Pressing China on Tibet and human rights, she said, can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crises.

Even if rhetoric dies down, the crisis in Tibet will likely earn more interest as it highlights the threat of instability for the greater region, including India, Central Asia, and Burma. One area of southern Tibet, India’s Arunachal Pradesh, has already been a long-standing point of dispute between Beijing and New Delhi. We do tend to think now that China and India are going to be major players in the world, Barnett said, and so the place that lies between them starts to become much more significant.

For now, there are signs that Tibetans are relying on quieter and nonviolent demonstrations to make their point, like the recent mass refusal to celebrate the New Year. The pick-up by the Western media of the New Year boycott may have sent a message to Tibetans that you don’t need to go out on the streets [or] do things that get people killed and get officials upset. And the Dalai Lama has made an appeal for that, Barnett noted.

Having said that, there’s a lot of very upset people. And they’re getting more upset.

from Foreign Policy

Pasternack: why is it called “tweeting”? Just sounds wrong. Like “blogging”