Huang Hua, the former Foreign Secretary and Vice-Premier of China passed away on Friday at 97. I said my farewells to him last winter during a visit to Beijing, and wish I’d had more opportunities to get to know him, having had one wonderful evening with him during my first trip to Beijing in 2006 when his wife He Liliang and he welcomed me to their hutong for a roast duck dinner. Any conversation that ranges from the negotiations of the end of the Korean War to life in New York City in the early 1970s as the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations (where he served as president of the Security Council) is a dinner conversation that comes along but once in life. He was a true witness to history, having been with Mao from the very beginning, acting as China’s window to the west in his role as friend and translator to the journalist Edgar Snow who’s Red Star Over China is regarded as the book that brought the Communist Revolution to the attention of the western world. From his role in negotiating the  Nixon-Mao talks to his influence over the massive reforms that led to the modern Chinese miracle, he will be remembered as a founding father of the Chinese state.

My condolences to his widow, my brother in law Huang Bin and my sister Deidre Nickerson and the rest of his family. A state funeral will be conducted next month and his obituary in the New York Times can be found here.

During my first visit to China in the spring of 2006 my step-sister took me along to a cocktail party for a Spanish filmmaker in an astonishing old home in the western part of Beijing. The host, an American, was a great raconteur and told me the story of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, the son of a remarkable woman who left the U.S. after World War II to join the Communist cause under Mao. I took some shots of his house, lost in the shadows of the skyscrapers popping out of the ground around it. And was all agog when he took me on a tour through the tunnels and catacombs below.

This morning, while flipping through the New York Times, his mother’s obituary jumped out at me.

“Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88….

“In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”

“In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy-cattle expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and translators in Beijing.

“Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of about 200 cows.”

There’s a movie or book in her life. Grandfather invented the jungle gym. Mother founded the Putney School in Vermont. She qualified for the Olympic Team in skiing. Amazing. My condolences to her son Fred and her family.

While in Beijing I stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel on the Olympic plaza, scene of the 2008 Summer Olympics which remain one of the more fun things I’ve ever experienced. Being a tad plump from the holidays I have entered the New Year a devoted walker — taking inspiration in the poet William Wordsworth who logged an obsessive 15 miles a day in his beloved Lake District of England.

While at the Intercontinental I have taken the habit of a morning and evening constitutional down the broad promenade of the Olympic plaza. With the blue Water Cube and the magnificent Bird’s Nest stadium, the astonishing Blade Runner Media Center tower, it is a very cool place to take the air and stretch the legs.

In the mornings, while it is still dark, at the northern end of the plaza, there is a subway station and beyond it a man-made hill and park. There I stop, kick the wooden fence to mark my arrival, and turn for the walk back to the hotel.

The first morning I was very concerned by the distant sound of a man in distress. A terrifically loud “Ho-Ho-Ho!!!” noise that I can only describe as a human rooster. The single loud voice in the darkness was off-putting. Was the man deranged? Was he being beaten? Would he find and beat me?

I walked faster, bound for my destination but not wanting to cross paths with the Hooting Man.

Then a man behind me hooted. This was bad.  I was surrounded. The asylum had been breached and the psychotics were loose. Then a lady cruised by in the darkness walking backwards and vigorously clapping her hands. Another man along windmilling his arms. He tilted back his head and let fly a lusty “HEY-HA-HEY-HA-HEY!”

I turned on my camera to record the sounds. Listen to the first few seconds. There is no picture as it was dark.  This is a morning ritual on the Olympic Plaza — lung exercises. The ladies-who-walk in Cotuit should do this.  It would endear them to the late sleepers on Main Street.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Arrived in Beijing on Monday afternoon and have been in meetings non-stop Tuesday through today (Thursday). Last  night I connected with my brother Tom who is in country for the first time in his life and his Chinese colleagues suggested a restaurant near the Olympic complex that specialized in “Muslim Cuisine” from the western region of the country. Off we went, ending up in a basement disco where an Elvis impersonator and some ethnic dancers did a floor show while we ate meat on a stick and lots of lamb.

We passed on a whole lamb. This was on the menu and my brother nicknamed it “Snow Puff.”

We drank too much baiju and I am not well today and belching faint reminders of mutton under my  breath.

Home tomorrow. No time for any church/temple visits while in China.

Leon Xie is creating new baseball mythology in China: If he builds it, they will come.

From The Mercury Brief: Olympic colleague Bob Page profiles Olympic colleague Leon Xie on his first year as head of Major League Baseball in China. Having watched the medal round between the USA and Japan and the final between Cuba and South Korea, I count the 2008 Olympic baseball experience at Wukesong Park as one of my personal highlights.

Leon was the man on the spot in managing our massive technology rollout during the games. He’s a great person and has an amazing job and challenge ahead of him.

Now to find out if he can help me find an official Chinese Olympic baseball jersey from 2008.

Great interview.

via Leon Xie is creating new baseball mythology in China: If he builds it, they will come. | The Mercury Brief.

The Olympic Green from my hotel room.

Very sentimental trip to Beijing this week, a return to the scene of last summer’s Olympic Games. Amazing how the city continues to sparkle.

Gao Xiqing is the president of the China Investment Corporation, a Duke educated attorney, who established the Chinese securities and exchange system and now, in his current role, controls a huge amount of Chinese capital, capital invested in a lot of American debt.

We spent some time together in August during the Olympics but we didn’t talk economics — mostly sports. In the current Atlantic Monthly the best American journalist writing about China, James Fallows, interviews Gao. I highly recommend it.

“People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.

“We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this? After we are gone, you cannot just go to the moon to get more money. So, forget it. Let’s change the way of living. [By which he meant: less debt, lower rewards for financial wizardry, more attention to the “real economy,” etc.]“

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money” – The Atlantic (December 2008).

Hit the rack at 9 last night, too delirious to hold my eyes open, but drugged myself with a Restoril for extra insurance. Then Junior burst in with news of an unwanted phone call: “Loser!” he said. “It’s not even 9 and you’re in bed!” I pleaded that my circadian rhythms, whatever they are, were confused, and fell back into an uneasy slumber, the dog using my face as its pillow. At 4 a.m. I was back awake, this time with the usual terror dreams of naked public speaking, elevator plunges (naked elevator plunges) and missed appointments. “A fine day to slay the dragon!” I exhorted myself and my irritable bladder. “Up and at ‘em!”

So now it’s five a.m.. I have eaten my daily bowl of oatmeal, am on cup number two of double-strength Peet’s French Roast (espresso ground for that full amphetamine experience), and now have the entire day ahead of me. I need to edit some college essays for a friend’s daughter – and I need to sort out travel for the next month – Bangalore, RTP, Chicago, NYC – I need to pay bills, deal with this quarter’s taxes, sort through my Olympic souvenirs, dig though 4000+ photographs from Beijing, write thank-you notes, file collected business cards, answer moldering emails, set up conference calls, ward off the bureaucrats, and fit in my daily Crossfit torture. From hanging around gold medalists to paying the garbage man …. I feel mentally whip-sawn between the alien exoticism of Beijing and the early fall despondency of a Cape Cod summer town gone quiet and to seed now that the tourists and renters are back in Bronxville and Westchester getting ready for the start of school.

The harbor is vacant. Yesterday I launched my shell at 9 and set off into a stiff northeasterly breeze, the first pure air I’ve had in a month, pumped right down across the Gulf of Maine from Greenland. It was a good row, nearly a fantastic one, with a strong pace that nearly convinced me to start filing more Fall Head regatta applications before it is too late. I lost weight in China and worked out every day using the Crossfit regime, so now is the time to really start focusing on that late February weekend when I intend to do some damage at the World Indoor Rowing Championships. I did make a request to be let onto the rowing course at Shunyi near the Beijing Airport for a personal victory lap. The CMO of one of Lenovo’s key suppliers got on the course a week before the Games and I wanted to do the same, but no, the course was locked down for the Paralympics which starts this week on the tail of the Olympics. Some other time perhaps.

I have a few posts to get out the door. They are:

1. A recap of the Voice of the Summer Olympics program. The metrics indicate the program in terms of traffic, blew away the targets set late in the spring. The media campaigns that surrounded it were also strong and over delivered their targets. In terms of press and reputation, I think the program went beyond what I expected. So, victory will be declared, I need to lock down the final report on the interactive component of Olympic sponsorship today for a review with the CEO next Tuesday.
2. A theoretical post on the future of athletic blogging and its place in the long tail. I sense that PC and consumer electronics marketing is going from what we call “spec pods” (speeds, capacities, dimensions) to a more task/application model. In the mid-80s, customers of the first PCs didn’t ask for an “8088 with 256K RAM” – they wanted a “Lotus 1-2-3 machine” for financial modeling. Today, Best Buy and other retails are starting to show more products marketed with an end-state, or goal in mind. “Get your video on YouTube.” I think the same is coming to consumer PC marketing as the so-called Web 2.0/Social Media revolution climbs down from the mountain of hype and into a sustainable state where everybody from chatty teens to Michael Phelps to your mom begins to seek hardware and software on the basis of how it activates the new consumer of model of “click, consume, contribute” rather than the old one of “configure and confusion.”
3. Search as the proxy for brand awareness and media impact on brands. Avinash Kaushik, guru of web metrics gurus at Google throws the question at my feet about why Google Analytics is showing a decline in ThinkPad searches and an increase in Lenovo searches. As we ran a butt-load of television through NBC during the Games, TV that was designed to build awareness of the word “Lenovo” in the minds of the American public, we saw some interesting side effects, not direct effects that one would expect. So …. Share of voice. Pre- and Post-awareness. Readers of this blog know I detest the notion that one can build a brand online through mindless repetition and pure SOV – that I believe brand is earned through a reputation for customer service and word of mouth about one’s excellence. All well and good. But when the brand actually spends three weeks advertising like its top competition does all of the time what is the net effect and what can be learned the morning after?
4. Digital rights vs. broadcast rights: I believe we’ll see some interesting divisions in the old broadcast model of large events, with Fox, NBC, Eurosport spending a lot of money for exclusive broadcast rights. I bet that the IOC and NFL and others are going to get wise and sell off the digital rights in a separate stream very soon. When that happens, whoo-ee, if Beijing wasn’t a web experience, just wait a few years. It’s a coming.
5. China SMM: lots of smart thoughts and insights shared at a final lunch with Will Moss, Sam Flemming and Kaiser Kuo. I need to digest, but let’s say the forthcoming US blogger tour of China is going to open some eyes in a big way – not necessarily positive. First off – China is not a blogger’s paradise. As Sam F. has pointed out – the world is built on forums over there. As Kaiser puts it, blogs are what he calls “Sick Kitty Blogs” (This is my kitty. My kitty is sick. Please send me money so I can take my kitty to the doctor.)

So, lots on my mind, lots to do, a desk to clean off, mementos to catalogue and now a holiday weekend on my doorstep. The crickets are frantic in the darkness, the paperboy just tossed the Times onto the end of the clamshell driveway, in two hours the bonito should be crashing out in the Sound, and I’ve got a lot to answer for.

I was scheduled to meet Sam Flemming from CIC Data, the top China social media consulting and monitoring company at 2 pm today, but spaced out and was on my way to Tien’amen Square to snap some shots and buy a new 50 mm 1.8 portrait lens. I got an email from a colleague telling me I was in serious hot water for blogging about how I was conning Beijing cabbies into taking the special Olympic lanes on the ring roads on the basis of my ordinary yellow IOC/BOCOG security pass placed on the dashboard. Since there was a URL of a site that apparently was linking to me – www.accreditationabuse.com (no such site exists of course, but I am gullible as well as a flaming doofus) – I flew back to my hotel room to do damage control. I got into the room, fired up the PC, and there was a direct Tweet from Sam confirming our 2 pm which we had scheduled a month ago.

Whoops. Right. That meeting. As I sent a direct tweet back to Sam and checked my email it dawned on me that I was the victim of a classic jape at the hands of my colleagues who watched me wrestle all last week with a certain entity which shall not be mentioned. They knew I was paranoid and a perfect sitting duck for a practical joke. Got me. Nice.

I call Sam and Sam is in the hotel already getting ready to have lunch in the mall with Kaiser Kuo – he of my top ten resolutions for Beijing list, founding member of China’s first heavy metal band, the Tang Dynasty, and premier Sino-Social blogger and interactive expert from Ogilvy. So I invited myself to finally meet Kaiser.

We did dim sum, told stories, I learned a pantload about SMM and interactive trends – like more in the course of a lunch than in three years of China watching from the States. Then we got onto one topic of another and that led to my saying I wished I could meet the Imagethief, (blog won’t load for me due to a neverbeforeseen “compression” error) Will Moss, with whom I’ve swapped mutual admiration links in the past. Aha, Will works in the same plaza as the hotel, so Kaiser dialed him up and within the hour we were all sitting in the coffee shop yakking it up some more.

Will Moss, Sam Flemming, and Kaiser Kuo

Will brought along Ben Ross, who has been blogging about his experiences as a shampoo/massage boy in a Chinese barber shop. (The kind with scissors, Will and Kaiser were keen to point out). Pretty wild stuff.

This was a great way to spend my second to last afternoon, and after we broke up I made my way to the Nikon dealership, bought the lens, then walked back through Tien’amen and the back streets to the hotel. Off to the farewell staff party, then I pack. Tomorrow will have to be souvenir day. No rowing at Shunyi – the course is locked down in preparation for the Paralympics which begin this week. Thanks to Sam, Kaiser and Will for the nice reception, makes me want to move to China all the more.

No fireworks and fan dancers for me. No way. I ate large with my buddies and caught the end of the show on TV. I’ll buy the DVD and watch it this winter when it’s nasty outside. Tomorrow is a day off! Going to go find some serious Chinese olympic garb (rowing shirts, baseball jerseys), load up on souveniers for the gang, maybe check out some sights with the camera, then hit the big staff party blow out (invitation says it goes until 2).

I can’t believe this is done. Longest three weeks of my life hands down. Need to find something to fill the gap the Olympics filled for the past 20 months of my life.  The next chapter is going to be an interesting one I think.