Accompanied by a 20 strong trade delegation, she is scheduled to meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in the capital.

This is her fifth visit to China, a strategic economic partner for Germany.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. Much of Europe looks to Germany to help pay the bills, but many there dream that China will swoop in and solve the Eurozone’s debt crisis. Today, German chancellor Angela Merkel went to China to discuss Europe’s financial woes, and she’s apparently asking China to contribute to a bailout fund. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing. What is China’s response to this request, Mary Kay?

Mary Kay Magistad: Well, today Angela Merkel met with Premier Wen Jiabao, and he did call the European debt crisis urgent, and said that China is considering more participation in helping to resolve it, possibly by contributing to the bailout fund for the euro. This is new. Up until now Chinese leaders have been saying you know, we’re very interested in Europe getting out of the debt crisis, it’s important to us. Europe as a whole is China’s biggest trading partner. And over the past year trade has fallen off because of the economic crisis. What seems to have changed is that the Chinese government has recognized that if it doesn’t step in this could drag on a lot longer than is comfortable for its economy.

Werman: So it’s kind of self protection. Is there anything else in it for China?

Magistad: Certainly good will, but in the past that hasn’t been high on China’s list for reasons why it would spend billions of dollars or invest billions of dollars somewhere else. There was a lot of push back back in the autumn when China was getting pressure, getting asked from Europe you know, could you help out? A lot of Chinese were saying online, why would you do that? You know, we need money for schools. We need money for better hospitals. We need money for all kinds of things here, why would you be putting China’s money elsewhere? And the government could come back and say you know, one way that we have money to spend on things like schools, and hospitals and so forth is we trade with other countries. And if those countries go down it’s gonna hurt us too.

Werman: Will that be enough to keep the Chinese people quiet?

Magistad: Hard to know. The Chinese people haven’t been very quiet lately. There are 500 million of them online now and they’re very vocal these days.

Werman: What does China make of suddenly being perceived as this white knight being able to come to the rescue of countries in Europe?

Magistad: I don’t think China sees itself as a white knight, and if anything, instead of throwing up its hands and saying “Whoa, that’s not our role; our role is to look for good places to put our money, good investments for us to make for our purposes; and we think you guys should get your house in order because it’s good for you and it’s good for us. But you know, if we invest in you it’s because we see benefit for ourselves. We’re not doing this out of charity.”

Werman: Has anybody in China discussed a worst case scenario in which a big global session happens and where China might find itself it that were the case?

Magistad: Well, I think going back to 2008, a lot of Chinese analysts were looking at worst case scenarios, and that was why there was a big infusion of cash from the government in stimulus spending. Now, the government feels that it actually has a bit of breathing room to be able to slow down you know, white hot economic growth, and think more about the quality of growth, recognizing that it can’t keep putting so much money into infrastructure and into real estate, which is what was driving growth. It needs to be thinking about ways of increasing domestic consumption, and that means fundamentally changing the structure if the economy, including having more of a social safety net for ordinary Chinese citizens.

Werman: Let me ask you this, Mary Kay, just to go back. Merkel also apparently asked China to use its influence with Iran on its nuclear program. How did that go over?

Magistad: Yeah, she said that she’d like to see China persuade Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program. And Wen probably listened politely, but later told Chinese journalists that China objects to Western nations politicizing what he called the normal commercial relationship China has with Iran. What he was referring to is that China imports about 11% of its crude oil from Iran, that makes it China’s third biggest supplier of crude oil. And China opposes sanctions and really doesn’t want to get involved in that way. If anything, it’s gonna use its clout to try to make sure that there isn’t too much pressure on Iran.

Werman: The World’s Beijing correspondent, Mary Kay Magistad. Always good to speak, thanks.

Magistad: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Singing Contest 'Super Girl' (Photo: Shizhao/Wiki Commons)

Satellite broadcasters in China have cut entertainment TV by two-thirds following a government campaign, state news agency Xinhua has reported.

An order by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to curb ”excessive entertainment” came into effect on January 1st.

The number of entertainment shows aired during prime time each week has dropped from 126 to 38, said the watchdog.

However, as The World’s Mary Kay Magistad explains, savvy Chinese youth are simply turning away from their televisions, and switch on laptops and pirated western DVDs instead.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Too much reality on television has lead authorities in China to crackdown on TV entertainment. Officials want fewer programs like this one, called If You Are the One, China’s answer to The Dating Game. A new policy went into effect on January 1 that restricts the number of such programs Chinese TV stations can air. The effect has been immediate. The 126 prime time entertainment on offer on Chinese TV in December have dwindled to 38 now. The programs that have been axed vary, according to The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

Mary Kay Magistad: Game shows, dating shows, celebrity shows, talent shows where viewers vote, although they’ve already cut back on those, time travel shows, spy dramas and basically anything that the government feels is not implicating appropriate socialist values…anything where people are encouraged to be materialistic or sexual bawdy, or not to think enough about the sacrifices that the party made to give people the welfare and rices that they have now.

Werman: Okay, and before we go on, how does time travel programming fit into that?

Magistad: Well, that’s a really good question and I can only hazard to guess that if you were to say travel back in your time capsule, or car or whatever to say, 1945. And imagine a future where someone other than the Communist Party came to power things could get kind of interesting.

Werman: Mm, gotcha, okay. Now describe for us this show, Super Girl, which apparently has been one of the shows that’s cut. What’s wrong with it specifically?

Magistad: Well, Super Girl, it’s been constrained and that actually happened a while ago. Super Girl was wildly popular with huge swaths of the population. People would go out and campaign on the streets for the Super Girl who they wanted to win.

Werman: And it’s a talent show?

Magistad: It’s a talent show, it’s like American Idol.

Werman: But only for girls?

Magistad: But only for girls.

Werman: Right.

Magistad: Or young women. And then people would really get into voting. And the government looked around at this and was like uh, no, we’re not going to encourage this. And in fact when I went out and talked to people when they banned voting for Super Girl and said we’re just going to have judges in the studio, a number of people I talked to said but this was really great and I hope at some point in the future I’ll actually get a chance for my leaders for the government, which is exactly what the government didn’t want people to be thinking about.

Werman: Now, President Hu said we must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China. Why is this happening now?

Magistad: President Hu has been thinking a lot about how China can project its culture out into the world. It looks at the soft power that American culture has, the ability to attract, the ability to make others want to emulate you. And he’s thinking I want China to have that. Not just him, but the Communist Party in general. But they don’t know how to go about it. So they spent billions of dollars on Chinese television for external broadcasts. They have their Confucius Institutes around the world where they’re teaching Chinese and having Chinese cultural programs, but it’s still not taking the way they’d like it too. And indeed the television, and films and video games coming into China from the West are attracting Chinese youth. They’re much more interested in seeing a lot of that than they are seeing the sorts of programs that the Chinese government would like them to be focusing on. And what’s interesting here is the government seems to think that by limiting entertainment programming on television it will get China’s youth to sit down in front of the screen and watch what they want them to watch. But these are young people who have computers and have smartphones, and have pirated DVDs, and they can basically do whatever they like, so it’s kind of a losing game.

Werman: So this weekend practically speaking would you be able to go out in Beijing and see any Hollywood movie you wanted?

Magistad: You could go out in Beijing and go to a DVD store which is a legitimate store selling pirated DVDs. It’s very hard to actually find a non-pirated DVD in China. And you can get releases from 2-3 weeks ago that are still showing in American theaters.

Werman: The World’s Asia correspondent Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing talking about new restrictions on entertainment programming in China. Thank you very much.

Magistad: Thank you, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

It was a little much for one observer, who remarked on a Chinese newspaper website: “Paying respects to a leader doesn’t have to go so far. After all, everyone will die one day.”

But for China’s leaders, somber condolences were the order of the day. On Tuesday, President Hu Jintao visited the North Korean embassy in Beijing, as did his likely successor, current Vice President Xi Jinping, other officials and other visitors, carrying bouquets of white flowers. Foreign journalists, looking for visas to cover Kim Jong-Il’s funeral, were told to come back next year.

North Korea has turned inward for 13 days of mourning, limiting the flow of traffic across its usual trading point with China, at Dandong. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu delivered a statement from China’s top leadership.

“We are shocked to learn that DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea’s official name) top leader comrade Kim Jong Il passed away and we hereby express our deep condolences on his demise and send sincere regards to the DPRK people,” the statement read. “Comrade Kim Jong-il was a great leader of the DPRK people, and an intimate friend of the Chinese people, and he had made important contributions to developing the DPRK’s socialist cause and promoting good-neighborly and cooperative relations between China and the DPRK.”

Kim didn’t always cooperate as China might have liked. He resisted calls to enact economic reforms; he made sure years of nuclear disarmament talks that China hosted went nowhere; and much to China’s dismay, he launched missiles or carried out nuclear tests whenever he wanted to get international attention and food aid.

North Korea gets most of its food and fuel from China, and that’s become more important this year, with about six million North Koreans – a quarter of the population — in need of food aid, in the face of a bad harvest and UN sanctions. North Korea also supports a million-man army, which needs its food and fuel, too.

“I think it’s clear that the sanctions had been biting, that they’d taken a toll, that the North has definite cash-flow problems,” says Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the International Crisis Group’s Northeast Asia project manager. “And I think North Korea is fundamentally uncomfortable with having to rely on China. Ideally, they’d like to be able to balance out that dependency with the Russians, with the Americans, with any other European country, some of which are already quite engaged with North Korea.”

It may be with the expectation of food aid that North Korea announced on Saturday – around the same time Kim Jong Il is said to have died – that it would suspend its uranium enriched nuclear weapons program, a central U.S. demand for the resumption of disarmament talks.

Whether such talks would lead anywhere is another question. Brian Myer, an international relations professor at Dongseo University in Seoul, told the BBC he doesn’t expect new leader Kim Jung-Un to veer significantly from his father’s path when it comes to North Korea’s nuclear program.

“I think he’ll want to make progress, not in the sense we would use, but for him, I think progress means further weaponizing the nuclear potential he has,” Meyer said. “North Korea really has no reason to disarm or to make peace with the United States, because if it were to do so, it would really lose all reason to exist outside South Korea as a separate state.”

Kim Jong Il, and his father Kim Il Sung before him, kept power by isolating the North Korean population, and feeding it stories both of North Korea’s superiority to all other places, and of the imminent threat of attack from external enemies — the United States, especially. That’s justified the expense of keeping a huge army, and maintaining a “military first” policy. But with ever more North Koreans succeeding in traveling to China and coming back with stories of the outside and pirated DVDs, a growing number of North Koreans are getting a clearer idea of what the outside world is like, and how much they’re suffering by comparison.

Still, power remains in the hands of the elites, with the Kim family at the core. And North Korea’s nuclear program provides insurance that North Korea won’t become the next Libya or Iraq. It’s also a bargaining chip for aid, which has proven lucrative over time, especially to North Korea’s small core of elites. The urge for those elites to protect their privileges – while much of the population suffers – may help the succession go smoothly, in the short run. Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group said the concern is what might happen later.

“Our greatest worry would be that if Kim Jung Un or his closest supporters feel insecure or weak enough, if for example, there were splits in the leadership, they might feel they have to demonstrate their military prowess, and we might go back to a phase of seeing more provocation,” Kleine-Ahlbrandt said.

But for now, the focus is on presenting a united front, mourning the dead, marking the passing of one era and the beginning of another. Whether the young third-generation heir to a socialist dynasty can do any better for his country than his father did, China’s leaders stand ready to offer help and guidance.

On Tuesday, they invited Kim Jung-Un to visit, once a decent interval has passed.

Rwanda Aspires to Become the ‘Singapore of Africa’

November 16th, 2011

A new conference center being constructed in Rwanda (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Blog: Chinese in Rwanda

October 17th, 2011

Chinese happy hour in Kigali. (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Confucius in Kigali: China’s Cultural Outreach in Rwanda

October 17th, 2011

Kung Fu lesson in Kigali (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Chinese Investments in Zambia

October 4th, 2011

Zambian coal miners for Chinese mine NFCA wait for bus to work (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Speaking at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii, President Obama said China needed to follow the same rules as other nations.

The value of the yuan has been a key point of conflict between the US and China over recent years.

Marco Werman gets more from The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Even as he keeps an eye on Syria, President Obama is focused elsewhere at the moment. He’s getting ready for a trip to Australia and Indonesia, after hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Hawaii. Speaking there yesterday, Obama warned China to stop ‘gaming the international system’ and he said ‘enough is enough’ when it comes to China’s refusal to allow its currency to float.

President Obama: Most economists estimate that the RMB is devalued by 20 to 25 percent. That means our exports to China are that much more expensive and their imports into the United States are that much cheaper.

Werman: The President also called on China to relax its trade practices. All this is not going down well over there. Mary Kay Magistad is The World’s Beijing correspondent. This was a pretty direct and highly public attack on China from the President himself, Mary Kay. How is it being received there?

Mary Kay Magistad: Well, all over the front pages of the Chinese newspapers today were comments very similar to each other that said, basically, the United States’ economic problems were not caused by the level of our currency. Its problems are much bigger than that, and even if we let our currency float, it’s not going to solve the U.S. economic problems. And we maintain a responsible policy toward our currency. We’re letting it increase in value gradually because we have to protect our export sector. If we were to suddenly let it float, we would have a lot of factories shutting down, a lot of jobs lost, and a lot of social unrest. Of course, this is perhaps responsible from the Chinese perspective toward the Chinese population and the Chinese economy in the short term. It’s not necessarily responsible for China as a global player that likes to be seen increasingly as a global leader.

Werman: You know, President Obama said about China that it’s now grown up, and needs to start acting like it. Is that what he was talking about? That kind of stuff?

Magistad: It’s part of it, yeah. Interestingly the Chinese media didn’t really grab onto that particular part of what he said, neither feeling offended that he was suggesting that China was not acting like a grownup or saying China actually is a grownup now and should be acting like it. In the last few months, in particular, China seems to have been wanting to have it both ways. To say ‘Hey, look, we’re still a poor developing country, so you can’t be looking to us to bail you out when you have problems. You sort it out yourselves, and if you get your economy so that it is stable and attractive to us, maybe we’ll put our money there.’ And yet they also want to be seen as a global leader. And what they’ve said in response to some of what President Obama said is look, you want us to play by the global rules? Well we didn’t help set those rules. If you want us to play by rules, we should have a say in what they are, and we should make sure they work to our advantage.

Werman: You know, there’s this other impression too, here in the U.S., Mary Kay, and that is of the declining USA and a rising China. I imagine Chinese leaders would like to leave most people in the world with that impression, but is the reality in China that this is the Chinese century?

Magistad: It’s interesting. Over the last couple of years, Premier Wen Jiabao has made a point when he has spoken in public, of trying to put a damper on that way of thinking of China. At the World Economic Forum, which in some ways tends to be this cheerleading session for China’s economic rise, Wen Jiabao said twice, last year and this year, look, the model of growth we have is neither stable nor sustainable. We have serious problems. We need to be dealing with them sooner rather than later. So, yes, China has great aspirations. Yes, China has had strong economic growth. If we’re going to continue to have strong economic growth, we need to make some changes and we need to make them soon.

Werman: The World’s Beijing correspondent, Mary Kay Magistad. Thanks, as always.

Magistad: Thanks, Marco.

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Read tweets about the yuan

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. The debt crisis in Greece still has Europe in a tailspin and it’s got Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou fighting for his political survival. Today, Papandreou offered to scrap his plan to ask the Greek people to vote on the European bailout plan. The referendum plan had set off an uproar in the European Union and in the Greek Prime Minister’s Party. And now opposition leaders are calling for Papandreou’s resignation and for new elections. As the turmoil in Greece continues, European leaders are still looking to China for some financial help. But today at the G20 Summit China’s Vice Finance Minister said it’s too early to talk about Chinese investments in the European stability fund. Well people inside China aren’t thrilled with the idea either. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing and she says Chinese are venting their frustration online. They’ve posted more than 100,000 Microblogs, that’s China’s version of tweets about the Eurozone debt crisis.

Mary Kay Magistad: Overwhelmingly they’re against China helping to bail out Europe. They’re saying you know, why help Europe when we’re poor Chinese and we could use the money here? Well, one easy answer is that for China to bring the money home it would have to convert US dollars or euros into yen, which would drive up the value of the yen or the Renminbi, the Chinese currency, and the Chinese government has been trying for years to keep the value of the currency low because that keeps the value of its exports competitive. However, it is coming under this kind of pressure, a couple of the comments that have been made online in Microblogs, which is like Twitter, are “this is the people’s blood and sweat money that’s being used to bail out glutenous and lazy Greeks” and another one, “the average wage of Chinese workers is a few US dollars. The average wage of European workers is thousands of euros. Do they need China to rescue them?”

Mullins: Well, here’s the problem, I mean maybe they do need China to rescued them and China needs them to be rescued, is that not the case?

Magistad: Well, that is certainly a fair comment because the European union is China’s biggest trade partner and Europe accounts for about a quarter of China’s trade. So China can’t afford to see Europe go down. But the attitude so far has been yes, we’re invested in seeing you come out of this, we believe in your ability to come out of it. In fact, Hu Jintao, China’s President Hu Jintao said on Monday, “We’re convinced that Europe has the wisdom and the competence to conquer its difficulties” which is a way of saying we’re gonna stand back and if it becomes clear that the only way that you’re going to survive this is with our help we’ll do something, but it’s gonna come at a domestic cost to us, so we’d prefer not to step in and do that if we don’t have to.

Mullins: Is it suffering any kind of domestic or political cost though right now, China, because the crisis may well dent if it hasn’t yet, the demand for Chinese goods, and hurt what is an export-dependent economy there? Is that showing itself right now?

Magistad: Well, even as it’s criticizing the Greeks right now for being too democratic, the Chinese government which is not democratic is having to behave like a democratic government. It has to be responsive to the public outcry of how dare you give away our money? There’s a leadership transition coming up next year in China. Communist party transition followed six months later by the state transition, president, premier, etc., and there’s a lot of jockeying for position now and even though the population doesn’t vote for the next generation of leaders, there is political capital in having the support of the population.

Mullins: How are the Chinese media, state run media there covering what’s happening financially in Europe and elsewhere?

Magistad: Well, there’s been a lot of criticism over the last few weeks of the western capitalist model and how it’s basically been shown to be an utter failure. And I find this kind of amusing because China now is very much in most ways a capitalist economy, sometimes brutally capitalist. So you have China playing by some of the rules of capitalism even as journalists are saying you know, shame on you, and why didn’t western journalists pay more attention to the Occupy Wall Street protestors…it’s because it’s all you know, the game is fixed and you only care about the elites, and that’s why our model is better.

Mullins: The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing. Thanks, Mary Kay.

Magistad: Thank you, Lisa.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Should diplomats learn the languages of the countries they’re assigned to?

Diplomat Sherard Cowper-Coles says yes. But, he adds, be careful not to overreach.

Cowper-Coles tells two stories of foreign language overreaching.

The Hebrew Overreach

When he was the British Ambassador to Israel, Cowper-Coles liked to try out the Hebrew that he had learned. So once, in a restaurant, he ordered (he thought) chicken breast. He did this, logically enough, by combining the Hebrew words for chicken and breast. But to the native Hebrew ears of the restaurant’s staff, the dish he had actually requested was not one they had ever before served: a woman’s breast on a chicken.

The French Overreach

Cowper-Coles also tells a story about Tony Blair. Blair “had learned his French in a bar outside Paris” between high school and college. So it wasn’t perfect.

Fast forward several decades. Blair, as Prime Minister, was hosting his French opposite number Lionel Jospin. After a “drinky” lunch, Blair decided to address the French media in French. Intending to say something like “I’ve always been envious of Lionel’s policies and whatever positions he’d taken,” Blair instead said “J’ai toujours envie de Lionel, même en toutes positions.” (Roughly: “I’ve always lusted after Lionel, in all positions”).

At least that’s the way Cowper-Coles tells it.

Music as Language

Yang Ying grew up in the 1960s and 1970s during China’s Cultural Revolution. It was a time when people deemed enemies of communism were forced to work as manual laborers.

That happened to Yang’s father, who ended up working in a coal mine.

He thought his daughter might escape that fate if he taught her to play an instrument-well enough to enter an elite music academy.

And so she learned to play the traditional two-string erhu. She studied under her father’s tutelage for several hours a day. Because the family’s apartment was so small, and the walls so thin, she would practice the erhu in the park.

The hard work paid off. Yang won a national competition playing a famous piece of music called River of Tears.

Her success led to a place at a music conservatory in Beijing. From there she became a soloist with the Chinese National Song and Dance Ensemble. She performed for countless foreign dignitaries on their visits to China, including American presidents.

“I played for Ford, Carter and for Nixon,” Yang says. “I remember three. I probably performed for more.”

More important to Yang though, were her tours of China, where she learned about the country’s regional differences, the music and the dialects. The many dialects of Chinese “really had an effect on the music.”

But while Yang was being exposed to new sounds, she still had to perform the same old stuff.

As an erhu soloist with a renowned national ensemble, “you probably only play two, three, four repertoires your whole life.” Yang says it tired her out. “And I really wanted to do something new.”

It was the late 1980s. China was opening up. Yang started going to rock concerts put on by the US Embassy. Clubs were opening, bands were forming. She taught herself the bass guitar. She said it was like learning a new language.

Yang founded Cobra, China’s first-ever all female rock band. She knew that she was breaking several taboos at once, and that many people would disapprove.

Yang says her father was “not very happy.” And other classical musicians, “thought I was crazy.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fk9mG5kasM]

Yang tried to infuse some of Cobra’s songs with traditional elements. She even re-imagined a traditional folk song as a rock anthem.

That spirit of anything-goes fusion ultimately moved Yang in another direction. She emigrated to the United States, and began studying jazz. She recognized common elements between jazz and Chinese folk music. Both rely on improvisation, and make the instrument sound “as if it’s singing, like the human voice.”

She started playing the erhu with an American jazz group.

That has brought her back to China, where she and her group recently performed at the Beijing Nine Gates Jazz Festival.

Also in the pod this week: teaching in two languages in Massachusetts, where bilingual education is banned. And Pakistan’s Sindh province is introducing mandatory Chinese for schoolkids aged ten and older.

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Last month, a Chinese tourist posted online a photo he took of Locke sporting a small backpack and buying his own coffee at the Seattle airport Starbucks. That photo launched endless online comments in China – surprise, admiration, because Chinese officials would have legions of flunkies to do this kind of thing for them, jokes that America must really be short of money if the US Ambassador has to fend for himself.

On Friday, Locke gave his first speech as ambassador, at Beijing’s Foreign Studies University, and he threw the joke back at his student audience.

“I know that there are very high expectations for my tenure as US ambassador to China,” Locke said. “After all, I am the first Chinese-American to hold this post. And I do have a proven record — as a governor, as a commerce secretary, and as a person who has mastered the art of buying his own coffee, wearing a backpack and carrying my own luggage.”

That prompted some laughter. It may make Locke seem to Chinese like a typical American, but he recalled how just two generations earlier his grandfather came to America from a village in southern China.

“He arrived in Olympia, Washington, to work as a houseboy in exchange for English lessons,” Locke said.

A century later, Locke was elected governor of the state of Washington, becoming the first Asian-American governor. “I moved into the Governor’s mansion, just one mile from the house where my grandfather washed dishes and swept floors. We joked that it took my family 100 years to travel that one mile.”

What made that possible, he said, was American openness.

“The America I was raised in was open to new ideas, where I was allowed to think what I wanted to think and say what I wanted to say – except to my parents, of course – to join organizations that could question or challenge American government policy.”

Locke stressed that that openness breeds creativity and innovation, and that all of these things are as good for China as for anywhere else.

It’s usually around this point in a US official’s speech at a Chinese university when the audience starts to get a little defensive. But not so much this time.

One student named Feng Jie stood up to say, “I’m very honored to ask the first question. And my question is what made you decide to give your first speech as US ambassador at this university?”

Students at Beijing’s Foreign Studies University (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

“President Obama and I reject the notion that China and the United States are engaged in a zero-sum competition, where one side must fall for the other to rise. We can and must achieve security and prosperity together,” he said.

Locke can’t expect to have an entirely smooth tenure ahead. There are tensions related to China’s growing military prowess, cyber-espionage, trade issues and the basic friction of a rising power challenging an established one. Locke has also gotten flak in China for not speaking much Chinese.

But at least, on this day, his audience went easy on him. An accounting major named “Elvis,” Chinese name Zhang Wen Feng, almost gushed about the new US ambassador.

“I really feel proud. He has the blood with us. He’s Chinese-American and I feel proud of this.”

A business major named Jacob – Liu Jia Xi – said Locke just may be the perfect man for the moment.

“As a Chinese-American, he bears more hope from the Chinese people, and we have reason to believe that he, as a person, will do good to the relationship between China and the US.”

That’s a heavy burden of expectations. But as Locke joked in his speech, he’s already proven he can carry a load.

For most of the last 40 years, radio station WILD in Boston was the go-to place for African-American music, news and talk featuring talk shows hosted by the Reverend Al Sharpton and Tom Joyner. But earlier this summer all that changed.

In June, Boston’s “Home for Classic Soul” quietly turned Chinese when WILD began leasing its air time to an English language service of China Radio International, a product of the Chinese government.

The programs are an eclectic mix of news and information on Chinese culture and society interspersed with syrupy English and Chinese pop music and the occasional Chinese language lesson.

A one hour-long program focused on the Chinese custom of confinement for new mother’s in the first month post-partum. No driving, no leaving the house, no cold food and no washing your hair.

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam has spent much of his summer listening to the new Chinese WILD. He found some of it amusing — features on hermaphroditic butterflies and snoring police at Beijing hotels, for example. But he also detected a decidedly pro-Beijing bias on some news stories.

Even so, Beam thinks China International Radio might just work.

“I think it could easily be as effective as Voice of America, Deutsche Welle,” Beam said. “I think you’re hearing Chinese people talking about China, there’s always a huge interest all over the world. I think good will does spread that way in the sense that people care that others are reaching out to them.”

While China Radio International has been peddling its programming overseas for many years, an hour here and there, WILD is only the second station in the US, to adopt the Chinese format full time. The radio initiative is part of a much larger charm offensive to try to improve China’s image overseas. Beijing has even marketed itself alongside the bright lights of Broadway.

Harvard Professor Joseph Nye has written extensively about China’s use of soft power. He says there are limits to how much goodwill China can create through government projects.

“Well I think the Chinese don’t understand that a lot of American soft power comes from our civil society, it’s outside the government,” Nye said. “And the problem that CCTV or China Radio International faces is that its a governmental organ. And if its propaganda, it’s not attractive, and doesn’t produce soft power.”

Nevertheless, China is throwing a reported $6.5 billion into this soft power initiative. But AM radio may not get them much bang for their buck. The ratings at the new WILD are dismal: they are reaching only half of their previous audience, about 500 listeners during any given 15 minute interval.

Radio Industry watcher Greg Fitzgerald, whose agency distributes the English language program of Germany’s Deutsche Welle, says international broadcasters who ‘pay for play’ lack the credibility to attract American decision makers. But Fitzgerald says, finding an elite American audience may only part of their goal.

“Some people in different industries like to see dots on a map and if you are in the Information Ministry and you can point to that map and say ‘see we’re on in Boston, people do hear what we have to say’ as a propaganda tool and can be effective within institutions, but in terms of actually reaching listeners, it has very little impact,” Fitzgerald said.

China Radio International is still trying. It broadcasts in 43 languages including Spanish, Russian and Arabic and claims to reach 300 million people. But putting your programming out there is not quite the same as actually finding someone willing to listen to it.

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Marco Werman: As we heard earlier, details about the Gaddafi regime’s secret dealings with US and British intelligence emerged from documents found literally in the rubble of the regime in Tripoli.  Similar documents have proved a source of embarrassment for China.  These papers were discovered by Canadian journalist, Graeme Smith, as he looked through what appeared to be garbage in a wealthy Tripoli neighborhood.  He says the documents showed that Chinese firms had agreed to supply Gaddafi’s forces with weapons during the fighting in Libya in July.  Smith wrote about his findings in the Globe and Mail newspaper.

Graeme Smith: Well, my eye was caught by some maps sluthering in the wind that appeared to be tactical maps, drawing of troop placements and there were high quality satellite photographs of Misrata.  The pile also included, upon further inspection, signed confessions, interrogation records, transcriptions of people’s phone calls; and sort of among all this intelligence material was a four-page memo written on the letterhead of the Supply Authority, the procurement authority for the Libyan government that appeared to document a business trip by a Libyan delegation to Beijing in July. They visited three Chinese state-controlled firms and asked them whether they could get any weapons from them.  And to their delight apparently the answer was yes, of course we can supply everything we have in our arsenal.

Werman: Now, China has said that there was such a trip but that no deal was made.  Is there any indication though that Chinese weapons actually made it into Libya?

Smith: I have not seen any indication that the Chinese weapons went in Libya, no.  The rebel council or I guess you’d say Transitional Council now, feels convinced that the weapons did make their way onto the battlefields.  Omar Hariri, the chairman of the defense council here, told me that he looked at the list of weapons and he said yeah, you know, we saw these on the battlefield as we were fighting our way out of Nafusa Mountains and into Tripoli last month.

Werman: What kind of weapons were the Chinese offering to sell?

Smith: There were a heck of lot of just you know, conventional arms, AK-47s, but there were a few more exotic things, what looked like thermobaric weapons, surface to air missiles.  The most exotic item on the list was the GW18, what they called MANPAD; it’s a man portable shoulder-mounted surface to air missile, very similar to the American Stinger missile, I think.

Werman: If this deal was indeed in the works it would’ve violated UN sanctions on Libya.  China even voted in favor of Resolution 1970, they stated their sympathies with the rebels and the civilians under fire in Libya.  What will be the consequences for China if the deal is proved true?

Smith: My sense is that this will be politically embarrassing for China, but there will likely not be any legal consequences.

Werman: You did a dumpster dive to get this material, but do you often go through other people’s trash to find, I mean let’s face it, to find stories?

Smith: Actually, you know, looking for documents has become something of a pastime for journalists here in Tripoli because the doors are wide open on all kinds of places that were top secret for many, many years.  So, I have been looking at documents in the internal headquarters, the external intelligence headquarters, private firms, all kinds of places that I couldn’t previously get access to.  So, my hotel room here in Tripoli looks like a really messy archives just exploded all over the place.

Werman: Graeme Smith with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper speaking with us from Tripoli.  Thanks so much, Graeme.

Smith: All right, thank you.

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A Chinese rock drummer got hooked after taking lessons given by a San Francisco-based teacher in Beijing.

Now, he is giving lessons.

The World’s Mary Kay Magistad checked out the class herself.

A drumming class in Beijing

It was all part of the American vice president’s four-day visit to China. Biden’s affable manner seems to be connecting with the Chinese – online, where bloggers have been buzzing about how he had lunch in a noodle shop – and in the halls of power, where both President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao welcomed him Friday.

“I see we were born in the same year,” Wen said. Biden looked around at the opulent meeting hall and joked, “Now I know why even though we were born in the same year, you look so much younger.”

Biden even managed to make the usually pokerfaced President Jintao crack a smile. But Biden also had a serious message to deliver.

“To get straight to the point, Mr. President, President Obama asked me to come to Beijing to meet with you and others, to reaffirm our commitment to a strong and enduring positive relationship with China.”

Jintao said Biden’s visit will help build that relationship. The Vice President is spending much of the visit with China’s Vice President Xi Jinping, who’s eventually expected to succeed Jintao as president and community party chief.

“We shoulder ever more important common responsibilities,” Jinping told Biden. He added that people in China, the U.S. and around the world want to see more U.S.-China cooperation. Biden said he hopes that includes more Chinese investment in the U.S.

“President Obama and I, we welcome and encourage and see nothing but positive benefits flowing from direct investment in the United States from Chinese businesses and Chinese entities. It means jobs. It means American jobs.”

Jinping said China is confident in the United States as a place to invest, a departure from what has been said recently in state-run media, and by other Chinese leaders.

Jim McGregor, a Beijing-based business consultant, said the other statements were for a domestic audience. This was for an international one.

“Part of that may be [Xi’s] personality,” McGregor said. “Let’s hope we have a new Chinese leader coming in who’s looking to be more cooperative than confrontational. But he also knows the world’s watching, so he knows it’s time to send the message, ‘we’re going to get along with each other and make this work’.”

The last couple of years have been a little rocky on that count, with charges against China of protectionism, piracy and cyber-espionage, and concerns about China’s growing military might, and aggressive rhetoric. A different kind of aggression came out last night in what was supposed to be a round of basketball diplomacy.

A friendly game between China’s People’s Liberation Army team, Bayi, and the Georgetown University Hoyas turned into a brawl.

Sarah Burton was at the game. The Chinese team is known for being aggressive, and last night they lived up to that, Burton said.

“A player from the Hoyas team was on the ground, and one of the people from the Chinese team tried to stomp him with his heel,” she said. “That’s when the bench completely emptied. When they saw that, that was it. Chairs were thrown, signage was thrown, and it got violent.”

White-gloved Chinese security stood by and did nothing. Eventually, the Georgetown team left, with Chinese fans throwing trash and full water bottles at them, and the game was indefinitely suspended. Not exactly auspicious, in the middle of a high-level visit meant to build the kind of U.S.-China cooperation each country needs in the middle of a global economic crisis.

The Chinese censors kept the story out of the local media. Chinese Central Television led Friday with 15 minutes on Biden’s visit. The visit continues Saturday, when Jinping accompanies Biden to the western province of Sichuan. The two men seem to be hitting it off. It just may help smooth a frayed China-U.S. relationship – at least enough for both sides to be able to use the other, to weather this latest economic storm.

In Kazakh, “IZ” means footprint, and the name of the band’s new CD, Kolengke, means shadow.

The band’s title track has a dark, insistent rhythm with a discordant, metallic undertow. The singer, Mamer, comes in with his gravelly bass, singing, “Passing through life, his hair becomes white. Time passes on, through many lifetimes, on and on over an endless journey, through the bottomless abyss.”

Even a song called “Cradle” sounds a little sinister, with the same dark rhythm juxtaposed against the traditional Kazakh lyrics: “Sleep, sleep my little one, lying in the clean white cradle. I will slaughter a plump sheep for you. Eat well and grow strong.”

The band’s drummer, Zhang Dong, who’s the only ethnic Chinese in this otherwise Kazakh group, said Cradle is supposed to be a lullaby. “But this is our lullaby for the modern world, heavy and industrial.”

It’s all a sharp contrast from what Mamer was doing before, when he put out the album “Eagle” under Peter Gabriel’s “Real World Records.”

It was more true to traditional Kazakh music. Mamer himself grew up in an ethnic Kazakh family with 10 kids, and learned to play traditional instruments like the mouth harp, and a two-stringed lute called the dombra. He worked for a local television station in Xinjiang, doing voiceovers, before he decided he could make better use of his distinctive voice, performing. He moved to Beijing a decade ago and formed the band IZ – but he said only some of their original audience back home in Xinjiang fully appreciates the creative path IZ has traveled.

“The folk music was what we did in the past. We adopted traditional ethnic songs. Then we picked up more international influences – from Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and German and Czech bands,” Mamer said. “Now, we have a sound that’s more like the sound of the city.”

But when IZ recently went back to Xinjiang to perform, drummer Zhang Dong said the audience didn’t totally accept it. Call it their Bob-Dylan-goes-electric moment, though no one booed. Mamer shrugs, behind his dark glasses, saying, this is to be expected.

“There are all kinds of music. Someone likes this, someone doesn’t like that. That’s the way it is. People in Xinjiang may not be exposed to music like what we’re playing now.”

They’re hoping for a more receptive audience in Europe, where they’ll be touring over the rest of the summer. The urban alienation overlay on ancient Kazakh rhythms, may just do the trick.

Weibo provided the first public word of the train wreck when someone onboard tweeted within a couple of minutes after the crash. Over the past week, it has become the place to vent anger, share information and often scoop the state-controlled media. There have been tearful accusations by relatives of those killed, one of whom appears in a video on the website of the Southern Metropolitan Daily.
In the video, Wang Hui said she wants to know the truth about why her husband died. “Give me the truth!” Wang said. “Don’t try to fool me! I’m not afraid to leave this world with him.”

But instead of giving straight information, railway officials first tried to change the official time of the crash, moving it forward several minutes, so it wouldn’t be as hard to explain why the second train hadn’t been alerted that the first train was stalled ahead of it.
This comes on the heels of other recent scandals and disasters that have frayed public trust, said Shi Anbin, a Tsinghua University media studies professor. “So this Wenzhou incident really served as a kind of fuel. It intensified public anger accumulated since the beginning of this year.”

He added that Weibo has poured still more fuel on the fire, in part because much of China’s online community, the educated middle class, intersects almost perfectly with those who take the new high-speed trains. This is the sector of society that has been increasingly more vocal in demanding the government do better. One such person, Liu Dongdong, put his frustrations to music.

The song “Nothing to My Name” by China’s most famous rocker, Cui Jian, started out as an anthem for pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Now it’s been set to different lyrics: “Passengers need your hand, not your excuses. But you just dodge and talk nonsense. Oh, you seem to be doing a PR show. Oh – are you feeling guilty?”

All of this and more has been flying around Weibo, despite a Propaganda Department directive that Chinese journalists should not do their own
independent reporting or analysis on the train crash. The state-run media have largely ignored the directive. Still, media analyst Michael Anti thinks what’s going on is less an online revolution forcing more transparency than the government allowing people to vent – within limits.

“The clever journalists already know that the railway ministry has become a convenient target. It’s not about success of freedom of the press. It’s because the Railway Ministry is so corrupt even the top leaders think it’s time to end the situation.”

And in that way, Weibo outrage can be a useful tool. Still, Anti suspects this week’s freewheeling criticism on Weibo might lead to more government controls over it in the future. Already, censors have deleted some posts and photos. Anbin said another effect is possible: “I think it will also facilitate the transformation of the official media to public service media, because now they have pressure from citizen journalism. And the mainstream journalism has to be changed in accordance with the public interest, not always with the official interest.”

At least that seemed true this week. Chinese Central TV anchor Qiu Qiming said on air that perhaps China’s development is moving too fast, without enough regard for human safety and respect for human life.
“Can we drink a glass of safe milk?” Qiming said. “Can we live in apartments that do not fall down? Can the roads we drive on in our cities not collapse? Can we afford the people a basic sense of security? China, please slow down. If you keep going so fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind.”