Liar, liar, underpants on fire

Beijing, Feb. 11, 2009: It was, quite literally, an unmissable event. A giant inferno that engulfed a 30-storey building in east Beijing, drawing a crowd of hundreds of onlookers.

Even those Beijingers who didn't see the fire itself on Monday night were affected by it the next morning as the firefighting operation shut down a major highway – the capital's Third Ring Road – for much of the day, causing traffic chaos throughout the city. The fire also contributed to Tuesday being one of the worst air-quality days in Beijing in recent months.

The blaze destroyed the nearly finished Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this spring but is now an empty blackened tower. One firefighter died from smoke inhalation and seven others are in intensive care.

Making the fire even more obvious was its location, inside the complex that contains the iconic new headquarters of Central China Television, or CCTV. Dubbed the dakucha (the big underpants), by locals, the futuristic CCTV headquarters is one of the most striking new buildings on the Beijing skyline. In fact, CCTV owned the adjacent Mandarin Oriental building that was destroyed in the fire, and hosted the fireworks party that was found responsible for starting the blaze.

And yet, the news staff at the state-run CCTV were apparently the only people in Beijing who didn't notice the tower of flames directly in front of them. That night's newscast began not with live footage of the fire inside their complex, but with news of the fatal bush fires in faraway Australia.

As Han Han, one of China's best-read bloggers, sarcastically noted: “If CCTV's premium evening news program started airing at that time, the cameramen could move their lens toward the window after news anchors introduced what was happening with the fire — they would get the images of the fire and produce the first unedited news story in CCTV's history.”

In comments that were themselves censored before being reposted by other Chinese bloggers as well as websites outside China, Han Han compared the Mandarin Oriental to “the thing underneath the big underpants” and said that by burning it, CCTV had committed a symbolic act.

“Such self-castration just perfectly fits the image of CCTV being the world's number one eunuch media,” he wrote. “For sure, the present CCTV does not deserve to have one.”

Han Han is not alone in his disdain. Last month, a group of 22 prominent Chinese intellectuals called for a boycott of CCTV, saying the network churned out only “low-grade propaganda.”

(For a taste of why many Chinese people might be fed up with CCTV, check out this YouTube clip of how the network covered Barrack Obama's inaugural address. The live feed is muted and the presenter awkwardly cuts in just as Obama mentions that “earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.”)

CCTV eventually acknowledged that it was responsible for the fire, and that it didn't have the required permit to use fireworks that the deputy chief of Beijing's fire control bureau said were identical to those used during the opening ceremonies of last summer's Olympic Games.

It has yet to apologize for its shoddy coverage of an event that couldn't have been any easier to report.

The Ox's thunderous, and occasionally terrifying, arrival

Beijing, Jan. 30, 2009: Bang. Bang. Bangbangbangbang.

It's Day 5 of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Ox, and the celebrations continue. All day and every night, the Chinese are still celebrating, setting off enough ordnance to make most armies blush -– and send to Odessa the Travelling Cat scrambling for furniture to hide under.

As someone who spent the last four years living in the Middle East, I have to admit that the occasionally spectacular fireworks have made me jump more than once too. The explosives may be intended to scare away evil spirits and bring in good luck, but the first days of the Year of the Ox have made Beijing sound a little too much like Baghdad or Beirut. An unbroken night's sleep is out of the question.

On Sunday night, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, a firework sailed into a café near Beijing's Houhai Lake that my wife and I had been sitting in not an hour before. The café was set ablaze, one of 75 fires in the city that night that were caused by the celebrations.

To prevent such kinds of incidents, fireworks were actually banned inside Beijing and most urban areas of China from 1993 until 2005. But while the government frequently said the restriction reduced injuries and property loss, the ban was wildly unpopular -- and largely ignored. For the past three years, the government has bent to reality and lifted the ban for the Spring Festival period.

This year, the government is not only allowing the show to go on, it's helping to make sure no one in this city of 17.5 million (and that's a low-end estimate) runs out of explosives until they're fully done celebrating the Ox's arrival. The Beijing Municipal Office of Fireworks said that a stockpile of half a million boxes of fireworks -- some of them miniature versions of the ones used during the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games -- was available for the 15-day period between the Lunar New Year and the Lantern Festival on Feb. 9. The value of the fireworks that will go up in smoke over that time has been estimated at more than $15-million.

In many ways, it's an astonishing decision by a government that otherwise exerts so much control over people's lives. Want to buy a copy of Ma Jian's latest book Beijing Coma or surf the website of Amnesty International? The government has banned the former from Chinese bookstores and blocks access to the latter.

Want to whistle a firework a few metres above your neighbour's head in the middle of the afternoon? Go ahead. There's no better way to say happy New Year. I even saw policemen surreptitiously set off a few rounds when they thought no one was watching them. According to the Xinhua news agency, 46 people were injured on the first night of the celebrations. The latter number, though, was portrayed as good news since it was barely half the number who were hurt during the celebrations 12 months ago to welcome the first day of the Year of the Rat.

So what is a recently arrived Canadian -- brought up to think that fireworks displays are something that only the National Capital Commission can properly handle -- to do amid all this unhinged revelry? How does one respond after nearly being burned to a crisp in a coffee shop?

The only thing I could think of to do was join in. Later that same night, we headed down to the public square that stretches between Beijing's historic Drum and Bell towers with a plastic bag full of explosives that you'd need a license to buy in Ontario. With hundreds of other revelers, we welcomed the Ox in the noisiest, most reckless way we could.

Call it self-defence.