Kyodo News Beijing
I’m down in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, again but this time on our annual firm outing. Tonight we went to a hot pot restaurant in the Old Town, the same place we went to last night because the food was so good. Yvette, one of my colleagues, saw a rat running across the floor - we were a bit disturbed by this but kept on with the meal. What drew the line was a rat running across my lap. I am not kidding. We were sitting on these benches and I don’t know how it got up there but I felt something on my lap as I was eating and I looked down and there was a rat there!!!! It was awful.
Once upon a time, there was a gentle and fair young maiden named Rachel. Rachel lived in a chaotic city in a distant land, far far away. One Saturday afternoon, she was sweeping and cleaning (there are no ugly stepsisters, but her mother would be happy to know that my apartment is clean. I mean, her apartment…oh nevermind.), when she received a note on a mystical device that receives strange characters from far abroad and…this is stupid. Okay - she gets a text message. There will be a gathering at Ye Olde Durty Nellie’s Irish Pub for the FA football championships betwixt Chelsea and MANCHESTER UNITED! HUZZAH! Ahem. Sorry about that.
Her rooms are clean and - thankfully - there are no mice or birds inside the abode to sing and/or help her dress, as that would be really creepy. She slips on her shoes, grabs her purse and heads out to walk. Alas, she has no carriage as that would cost her 10å…ƒ and she is but a poor young girl (plus her cool new electric bicycle is parked beneath the building, which is majorly 麻烦 to take out…).
The law took effect within the past half year or so to give Beijing a good name ahead of letting 5,000 reporters (my estimate) come in 2008 to cover the Olympics. (What happens to the law in 2009 no one’s talking about yet.)
I asked my hardened journalist friends, particularly the Kyodo News Beijing bureau chief, about this law when I was back in Beijing on a break last month. It’s for real, they said.
But, they added. But your sources can still get their crap beat out of them, get locked up, be tried in a court of hatchet men and get followed around for the rest of their ambulatory lives in case journalists visit them again. Just like before.
This retaliation could start literally right as the foreign reporter who started it all walks out of the Foreign Affairs Office with a friendly nod from the officers, hails a taxi back to his expenses-paid four-star hotel and orders a tall thick one at the wifi-equipped bar.