Beijing Welcomes You

The press—the grasping, curious, unpredictable free-world press—had penetrated Beijing, or a version of Beijing, and Beijing had come out fine. There had been stories of repression, pollution, and dislocation, showing that journalists were serious about China, and so what? The Olympics was a show, and the production values looked great on camera. The city gleamed, the drummers drummed, the Chinese flag waved in mechanical breeze over Chinese gold medalists, against mostly bluish skies. Tens of thousands of smiling volunteers had stood ready with smiles and freshly printed informational handouts and serviceable foreign-language skills. They were, as promised, ready.

“They took an antagonistic world media corps and turned them into purring kittens,” Jeff Ruffolo told me, as the media operations wound down. Ruffolo, an American who had made himself into the native-Anglophone face of the Beijing media operations, was an Olympics obsessive, a former radio sportscaster who had badgered the organizing committee into putting him on staff as a means of getting a role, any role, at the Beijing Games.

For the Chinese staff, he served as an emissary to the foreigners they would be dealing with and as a specimen of what they would have to deal with. His Chinese was nonexistent, his outlook sharply American; in the long runup to the Games, he had frequently either been exasperated with his colleagues or exasperated them—or both at once. “I have a high regard for them now,” he said. “I didn’t when I started. . . . These are true believers in the Olympics. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

In October, when the Games were over, Wang Hui was finally free for an interview, at the Olympic Tower, on the Fourth Ring. The morning was clean and warm, and the mountains were showing again in the west, down to the shadows on the surface of the slopes. The cabdriver was listening to a novel on the radio, cranked up to painful volume. In the story, a mother was telling her son that his father’s illness was very serious. The ten-o’clock chime sounded, and the program switched to a reading of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Fourth Ring interchange sign iridesced in the sunlight. We passed a pair of brand-new black Audis with white protective film on their roofs and hoods, and with splashes of mud all over their sides.

The interview was in room 402. A double row of thick-framed armchairs—covered in cream-colored fabric, with oversized embroidered antimacassars—ran down each side of the room, a standard Chinese meeting-room arrangement, implying comfort while actually evoking stiffness and separation. On a polished side table by each armchair was a paper cup in a plastic cupholder, with dry tea leaves inside. Two more armchairs were at the head of the room, flanked by Chinese and Olympic flags. At the far end of the room were a few ceremonial objects on display, including a dark, flat carved stone with a shallow basin for mixing ink: a desk object enlarged to the size of a small tombstone. The tag said its name was Dragon Welcoming the Olympiad Ink Stone.

I was late, but Madame Wang was running even later—delayed in a very important meeting. “Madame” was how underlings or associates referred to Wang Hui when discussing her in English—no surname, just “Madame,” as in “You should call Madame’s assistant,” or “Madame would like to schedule the interview for Wednesday.”

Her assistant offered me a seat, and a housekeeping staffer brought in a thermos and poured hot water into my paper teacup. The assistant’s name was Selena, and she said she had come to the Beijing organizing committee after getting her master’s degree in economics from the University of Warwick in England. Her hair was bobbed, and she was dressed for work in a green velour hoodie, ruffled miniskirt, and tall brown boots with black tights. She had first come to Beijing from Hebei, to study at what’s now called Beijing Jiaotong University. She preferred the older name, she said, Northern Jiaotong University, because it was more geographically ambitious, and because that had been the name bestowed by Chairman Mao Zedong.

And Beijing? “I love here,” she said. “I love here. This is the most beautiful city in China, I guess.” The futuristic spectacle of Shanghai impressed some people, she said, but her preference was for the tradition of Beijing. “It’s the capital city for six periods,” she said. “I love history, and I think Beijing is a well-preserved historic city.”

I took this less as a message from a propaganda chief’s assistant than as the word of someone who had lived even closer than Beijingers to the leading edge of industrialization. “I feel most comfortable here,” she said. “Especially in autumn.... One of my friends said, in autumn, the sunshine in Beijing is golden and most clear.... China developed very fast, but I think Beijing goes not too fast and not too slow.” She said she had two apartments in the city—one by the Olympic Forest to the north, and one out east in Tongzhou district, a ground-floor apartment with a courtyard garden and a tree.

Before she took charge of China’s Olympic press operations, Madame Wang was head of the Information Office of the Beijing Municipal Government, a post she was due to resume after her Olympic work was done. The Information Office is under the Department of Propaganda, which is not as awkward or ominous-sounding in the Chinese language context as it is in English, because the same Chinese word covers “propaganda” and “publicity.” As far as the politics of language goes, this may be more hygienic than what we do with our own Public Information departments in English. Before the Information Office, Madame Wang had worked for Beijing Television, making documentaries.

Madame Wang settled into the armchair around the corner from mine. Had I taken a holiday after the Olympics? she asked. I said I hadn’t gone anywhere, but I had relaxed for a while. Had she? She hadn’t. “Maybe after two months,” she said. With a by-your-leave gesture, she then switched into Mandarin, with the new staffer interpreting. She spoke in long passages, followed by long pauses for the interpreter to provide an English version of each passage.

What I was trying to find out from Madame Wang, here in the end, was what the encounter with the rest of the world, through foreign press, had felt like from the Chinese side. “I have been involved with the preparations for about eight years, and my feeling is that the Olympic Games is not a sports event,” she said, “it is like a media event.” What had she expected, going in? “I hoped through the Olympic Games that the journalists would present a true picture of China to the world,” Madame Wang said.

“It is a pleasure to explain to other people about my country,” she said. For example, there was the issue of human rights. Journalists from developed countries couldn’t see the progress that China had made, because China was in a different stage of development from that in the West. Likewise with air quality—“London also experienced serious fog during its industrialization,” she said, using the old word wu for “fog.” “Yes, we have the issue of pollution, but we are working very hard to improve air quality in Beijing, and I think criticism does not help.... It’s a stage that you have to experience, because there is such huge economic growth going on.... Many developed countries, when they achieved their development, they used maybe a few hundred years to achieve their economic progress and to clean up the environment, but China did it in only a few decades.”

Then she turned to Tibet. The problem with reporting on Tibet, Madame Wang said, was that many foreigners had the mistaken idea that Tibet was not part of China and that the Dalai Lama was a human-rights leader. “Fifty years ago, the Dalai Lama was the biggest slave owner in Tibet, and he used a lamp burning people alive,” she said. “So no one in China believes that the Dalai Lama is a human-rights leader.... And everybody believes that Tibet is part of China. That’s because people in China understand more about the history in Tibet and about the country.

The biggest difference between the foreign reporters and the Chinese media, she said, was that the foreign reporters wanted information immediately whenever something happened. “This is quite different from what we’re used to, working with the domestic media.” The Chinese had learned to adjust. For example, she said, there had been an incident during the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, in which a woman got onto the field and tried to take off her clothes. “We released information about this incident ten minutes after it happened,” she said. I had missed the incident entirely, and when I looked up the coverage afterward, I could see why I had. The foreign press had been told that the woman was mentally ill, and that she had in no way been a protester. Aside from some tut-tutting about the security breach, that left nothing for anyone to say.

Foreign journalists also took a different approach to press conferences from that of domestic media, Madame Wang said: “They normally did a lot of background research, the foreign journalists, and it’s like they’d already thought about it very carefully, and in a very detailed way. And they come to a conclusion, and they would ask you whether this conclusion is correct or not. I think it’s quite a challenge, but at the same time I actually enjoyed it. I think it’s a quite interesting exchange.”

The anti-China bias was disheartening. This was important to convey. Madame Wang paused, sitting up straight, then launched into a story: “You yi ci yi ge Meiguo jizhi . . .” “One time there was an American journalist . . .” She leaned forward in the big chair and tapped her chest for emphasis and kept talking. The wind whistled outside. Finally she turned to her interpreter. “Tai chang!” she said, smiling. Too long! “So sorry.” The interpreter went back to the beginning: “That journalist asked me about eleven questions. None of it was related to the Olympic Games, they are all political, negative questions, and I answered all of them. At the end of the interview, I asked the journalist whether you would like to hear something, know what I thought, as ordinary staff of BOCOG, and that journalist said yes, so I told that journalist a story.

“—a poor villager, a poor villager in that village,” the translator continued. “And the Olympic Games is like a party, and many rich residents hosted these nice parties for the whole village, but China had never had a chance to do so, because China is not developed so well and has so many children, so many people to feed. And later China grew and the economy is better, and finally the rich residents said, ‘Okay, now we can ask China to host this party for us,’ and China is very happy to have this opportunity, and we ask all the neighbors and all these relatives to come to help. We built a bigger house and we planted all the grasses and some people say, ‘You are using chopsticks, and we are not used to it,’ so we bought knives and forks, and we have also learned these languages, foreign languages, that our neighbors use”—“Zhunbei hao duo dongxi,” Wang prompted—“and we prepared many nice food and we welcome, we sincerely welcome all these villagers to come, but when they come they ignore all the nice things, the nice food that we put out, put on the table. They go to the”—“toilet,” Wang said—“the restroom, they go to the garbage bins, and they ignore all these nice preparations that we had put up, and so at the end of my story, the journalist said to me, ‘I’m so sorry, Madame Wang.’ And that was, that interview took place during the torch relay that was the most difficult time for us, because we had the Tibet issue and the Darfur issue and all these disruptions overseas of the torch relay. And I told that journalist that what you did really hurt us, really hurt the Chinese people’s feelings.”

I asked her about the reporting that had come out after the Olympic Opening Ceremony—the replacement singing, the fake procession of fireworks footprints on Beijing, the crippled dancer. The substitutions, she said, were standard for television. For any big event, you have the option of cutting to the rehearsal tape if something goes wrong. “It’s the same practice in Seoul, in Athens, in Sidney, Atlanta,” she said. This did not seem exactly true, but it was hard to object on behalf of American epistemological standards, given that NBC’s Matt Lauer and Bob Costas had coyly described the fireworks as “almost animation” and “quite literally cinematic,” then tried to take credit for that almost-honesty.

What is real, in an entertainment production? “I read the stories about the girl, the little girl,” Wang Hui said. “It’s not lip-synching, because she actually also sang, but we used the voice of another girl. And also the footprints, these are all common practices in TV broadcasting. And when I saw those stories, I thought the Western media were just trying to play up these issues.”

She was, she said, a documentary filmmaker. “I think people have some misunderstanding about what is true and what is authentic,” she said. A director like Zhang Yimou wants to have perfect sound and lighting. “They want the sound to be pure and clear, but they did this based on true things, true performances. So I think this is quite a small issue, it’s an issue of which technique you use. But some people interpreted it as ‘We lied to the world,’ but it’s not true. But I think, in the future, maybe the artists should strive for purity, pure things, and true things. Maybe in the future, people should go in that direction.”

What sort of documentaries had Madame Wang made before she went into the official information business? “I did many documentaries, many of them about ordinary people,” she said. “For example, I did a documentary on fifty mothers, how they live their dreams, how they treat their children, and how they live their dreams through their children. There was a mother who was an amputee, and I did that documentary in 1994. At the time, I started to give some financial support to this mother because her husband died and she had to raise two children. Now her two children are in the university, but I’m still giving to the family.”

She had also done a series on Chinese students in foreign countries. “I still remember that when I was editing the tape, I had to stop because I had to cry, because I had to go outside the studio and cry, and then come back to work, because the stories are so moving. And I think making documentaries changed my views about life and about society, and I saw that many ordinary people are great in their own right. And I wanted to tell their stories so that more people know how great they are.”

Another foreign reporter, she said, had once asked her a question that supposed that despite China’s pursuit of Olympic championships, there was no interest in sports among the Chinese people in general. “So I told him a story from my childhood,” she said. China did not have many sports facilities then, so when she wanted to play table tennis, her father made her a paddle by hand, from wood. “It was rough, it’s not very smooth, but even that—I brought it to school and I showed it to my friends, my schoolmates, and at that time, even this wood table tennis paddle was the envy of many children.” This was in the mid-sixties, after China had won a world championship at ping-pong. “At that time, the school made a table tennis table of cement, and there was no net in the middle, so some people placed a piece of wood in the middle to use it as a net. So we played on this cement table tennis table.”

She said she had visited Beijing often when she was young. Now, she said, “I think the buildings are taller and streets are wider, and everybody’s talking on mobile phones. But I think the biggest changes are not material. I think the biggest changes are that people have new ideas—their way of life, and their dreams, and what they want to achieve . . . When I’m walking on the streets, I always look at the crowds that I’m passing by, and I want to catch the smiles on other people’s faces. I think decades ago, people did not smile, but now they smile. People smile a lot.”

We were on message; the message was good. “You didn’t ask me about my biggest impression of the Olympic Games,” Madame Wang said. “I think many people would say that the lighting of the cauldron in the opening ceremony left them impressed most, but I have another story. I was working in the stadium during the Games, and every time I walked out from the Bird’s Nest, normally I walk out from the basement floor.” She held up sheets of paper to model the slope of the land. “So when I walk out of the stadium, I see many people in the Olympic Park taking photos, smiling, and making funny gestures and taking photos of each other, and I think the smiles on their faces, and kind of joy and satisfaction that these people are enjoying left me the most impressed. And every time I came out of the stadium I stood there for ten, fifteen minutes.”