I can’t bring you the YouTube video of the Beijing opening ceremonies rehearsal this week but I can bring you something else – a sign of how China is opening up.

Okay, okay, it’s not a big deal. It’s a women’s lingerie show. It’s nothing unusual if you’re used to such things in Europe, where shedding your top on a beach is de rigeur. It’s not even unusual for large cities in the United States.

But Beijing? A few years ago, everyone was in blue and gray cotton suits. And now the doors are opening to all sorts of global trends. This trade show was by Triumph, a German lingerie brand, and took place at the 798 art district. Click here for a feature I did a year ago about this interesting area of Beijing, and don’t fail to visit if you come here on a trip.

In any case, the Portuguese journalist below, Vera Peneda, who attended the show concurred that Beijing is changing in terms of fashion trends. Thanks to my assistant, Hua Li, who shot the video.

Much to the dismay of China, a Korean journalist snuck into the Bird’s Nest stadium Monday night and filmed a rehearsal of the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games.

As background, the opening ceremonies for the Games have been a huge secret, almost equivalent to military classified information. Leakers have been threatened with seven-year jail terms. China’s most famous filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, put together the three and a half hour show.

So when the two-minute Korean network news spot was posted on YouTube, China jumped to action. First, it leaned on YouTube to block the link. Click here to see what happens when you call up the video. (Please correct me if it's only blocked in China.) Then China ordered domestic video websites to take it down.

That’s the Chinese way: if you have a leak, find out how to make it go away, even if you have to pull out a sledgehammer and drive a stake through its heart.

I saw the video this morning on YouTube before it was taken down, but I’ll excerpt from a Sydney Morning Herald article about what the show contains.

It begins with a countdown and thunderous drums. A giant traditional scroll painting unfurls, revealing a lone rhythmic gymnast.

Other highlights include the projection of larger-than-life whales on a giant screen that appears to run around the entire interior lip of the stadium roof, and dozens of airborne acrobats.

There is also spectacular use of gymnastics in which hundreds of performers synchronise to create moving tableaux. In one scene, thousands of white cubes with people underneath move up and down in waves that suggest the explosive growth of high-rise cities in China.

Like most foreign residents of Beijing, I’m keeping a close eye on the weather, or more accurately, the smog, these days. The Summer Olympics are only nine days away.

We had a bad bout of smog earlier this month that only began to blew off on Monday. Today’s Air Pollution index is a very tolerable 43. You can see from the photo that the air is pretty clear now.

So let me offer some resources for anyone else interested in air pollution matters in Beijing. First, click here for a very informative summary from Dr. Ken Rahn, a professor emeritus of atmospheric chemistry at the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Rahn has spent time collecting and analyzing air samples in Beijing in the past several years.

His summary is updated daily with the latest pollution readings. In general terms, Dr. Rahn thinks the sources of pollution in northern China are too broad for specific measures in Beijing, such as knocking cars off the road, to make a real difference. Instead, Beijing is at the mercy of the weather, specifically winds from Mongolia, to clean away polluted air.

Also worth checking out are the informed blog postings of Alex Pasternack at the Treehugger blog. Here’s a link to one.

Then a blog that really delves into the nitty gritty of air quality is the BeijingAirblog. It is there that you’ll learn things like the average API in Beijing is 100, which is six and a half times the World Health Organization’s guidelines for long-term exposure.

At that blog, you get real experts writing in. Among them is George D. Thurston, professor at the NYU School of Medicine, who made the following comment:

…All in all, anything above Chinese API=50 is very unhealthy. Even if it is at API=50, that is still more than double New York City usual levels, so that is not acceptable either. They really need to get the API down to 25 or below to call the air acceptable for Olympic competition. It seems only strong (clean) winds from the North can provide lowered concentrations, and this just doesn’t happen often enough in Beijing.

Several of these blogs are blocked for those residing in China. Seems the Chinese government thinks this information would be unhealthy for your mind. And to hell with your health.   

If you’re having trouble catching the Olympic spirit, watch pedicab operator Sun Dingguo do his rap in the video above.

My office assistant, Hua Li, spotted Mr. Sun outside the Water Cube aquatics center yesterday and found him curious. Before long, he was singing and dancing for onlookers.

Sun, it turns out, is a 30-year-old pedicab operator from Hangzhou who pedaled all the way to Beijing for the Olympics. He began his journey a year ago and arrived last month after passing through 45 cities, including Shanghai, Qingdao and Tianjin.

Hua Li says Mr. Sun collected 300,000 signatures for the Olympic Games en route and was helped “by a lot of warm-hearted people. Many companies and media supported him with money and material. At Jiaozuo in Henan province his tricycle broke down. A nice man helped him repair the tricycle in the rain. In Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, people gave him medicine for a serious toothache.”
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As I write this, it is beginning to rain in Beijing. This morning awoke clear (by Beijing standards), so I grabbed my camera and took a picture out the office window.

You can actually see part of Tiananmen Square in the distance.

This is news because the Olympics begin in only 10 days and the past week has seen progressively worsening air pollution in the city. Yesterday, the air pollution index finally nudged at bit below 100 level, which signals moderate pollution but is more than six times what the World Health Organization considers safe clean air.

Perhaps the weather is breaking, giving Beijing a break as well.
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The new national uniform for Chinese Olympians is coming under some public criticism. It is being called the “scrambled eggs and tomatoes” uniform. The Chinasmack.com blog first noted this phenomenon and comments from readers have poured in. Turns out that many Chinese feel the uniforms are indeed, er, rearend-ugly.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain met with the Dalai Lama Friday in Aspen, Colorado, and soon afterward photos like this one were landing in newspapers around the world.

The image is certain to evoke contrary emotions. Here in China, it causes a certain amount of indigestion at Zhongnanhai, the powerbase of the leadership.

Barely two weeks before President Bush arrives in China to attend the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games, McCain is marking his distance, essentially signaling to U.S. voters that he may tweak the current path of Sino-U.S. relations.

According to a Los Angeles Times blog, here is a little of what the two men said during their meeting:

"I am very pleased and honored to meet with his holiness the Dalai Lama, a man of peace. His holiness represents the profound desire of millions of Tibetans for basic dignity and human rights,” McCain said.

"His nonviolence approach and his lifelong approach of seeking common ground around cultural and religious divides are an inspiration for all of mankind and to millions of Americans."

The Arizona senator did call on China to improve its treatment of Tibetans and release Tibetan political prisoners. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama stressed that the appearance was not an endorsement -- an aide said he’s also spoken to Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Apparently McCain’s policy analysts figure that this kind of image assures voters that McCain can take a tough approach to China, and that it’ll draw votes.

Here's a bit from a Wall Street Journal article about the Aspen meeting (sorry, it's behind a pay wall):

Especially given the timing, Sen. McCain's meeting is a strong show of sympathy for critics of the Chinese regime at a time when the world's attention is focused on the country.

Most voters see China as more of an adversary than an ally, according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week -- the survey showed 54% think of China as a foe, while only 23% view it as a friend -- even though a clear majority, 63%, believe President George W. Bush should attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, while only a quarter said he shouldn't. Sen. McCain's meeting with the Dalai Lama appears to be partly an effort to inoculate himself from the criticism Mr. Bush is likely to get from human-rights activists.

To some extent, "he's trying to draw a distinction between himself and the president, who's going to the Olympics," said Charles Freeman, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In its relations with other countries, China often tries to intimidate foreign capitals to avoid these kinds of meetings with the Dalai Lama, an irredeemable separatist, in its view. Within the past year, it has used such tactics on Canada, Britain, France and Germany, with a fair amount of success. We’re yet to see whether Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, will go ahead with a scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama in mid-August after he returns from a trip to China to watch the Olympics open.

How other countries react to China’s displeasure over the Dalai Lama is an interesting gauge of its leverage on the world stage. If other countries back down, it says less about the issue of Tibet than about fear of reprisal from China.

That’s not generally the case with the United States, though. While Washington generally doesn’t needlessly irritate relations with Beijing, bending to China would certainly not be a route to success in a presidential campaign.

so The censors sometimes fall asleep on the job.

Yesterday’s Beijing News had an interesting article about an Associated Press reporter, Liu Xiangcheng, who has witnessed 30 years of changes in China’s capital.

Along with the article were several great photos. Unfortunately for some poor censor and some journalists, who will certainly be taken to the woodshed, one of the photos was of Beijing residents rushing wounded people away from Tiananmen Square on the back of a flat-bed tricycle.

While the article didn’t say so, the photo is clearly from the Tiananmen bloodbath on June 4, 1989, when troops in and near the square opened fire on their Chinese brethren, killing hundreds, and maybe more than 1,000, pro-democracy protesters.

China’s Communist Party has tried to expunge this incident from history, generally blocking mention or discussion of it from mass media.

Once the propaganda department realized what the newspaper contained, they reportedly sent employees out to kiosks to seize the newspaper. The page was also deleted from the online edition of the paper. Roland Soong’s ESWN blog said: “It is expected that many people at Beijing News including the reporter, the page editor and senior editors will be punished.”

Ouch! Chinese journalists face a lot of risks.

There’s more speculation _ and I reiterate that it’s just speculation _ that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il might pop in for the Beijing Olympics.

Kim, after all, was given a formal invitation to the Games by none other than Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping on June 18.

Here’s a column from OhMyNews.com in South Korea that suggests that the North Korean ‘Dear Leader’ may see a Beijing jaunt for the Opening Ceremonies as a worthwhile political gambit:

Kim might join the group of world leaders in Beijing if he finds that his appearance at the world sports feast would be useful, and China-mediated talks with US President George W. Bush could generate the atmosphere and dramatic momentum for terminating the Communist state's diplomatic isolation. In addition, Kim's short encounters with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda may lead to direct talks immediately. In other words, it means that North Korea is no longer alone in the world and that the grave decision Kim makes toward reform and openness will certainly save North Koreans from suffering a recurrent tragic famine. The Games can be used to hedge Kim's political risks by joining them. These gambles can be tremendously lucrative.

Many North Korea experts here in Seoul, however, point out that Kim, who is 68, is unlikely to make such a high-risk political and diplomatic gambit due to his paranoid fear about security. Their analysis might be more correct than my passion for the North Korean leader's participation in the ceremony.

OhMyNews isn’t alone in passing along this speculation. Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper noted a few days ago that rumors were widespread in Beijing that Kim might show for the Olympics.

Kim is notoriously paranoid about security. He almost never flies, preferring his specially built bulletproof train. So there’s plenty of reason to think he wouldn’t come.

But then, it’s delicious to think about China trying to figure out seating in the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium for some 80 heads of government and state, including President Bush and the “Dear Leader,” a man he clearly loathes.

Posters are appearing around Beijing guiding locals about how to interact with the (few) foreigners coming for the Summer Games.

The posters instruct residents on the “eight don’t asks” when chatting with foreign guests. Here’s a rough translation, courtesy of the Peaceful Rise blog:

Don’t ask about income or expenses, don’t ask about age, don’t ask about love life or marriage, don’t ask about health, don’t ask about someone’s home or address, don’t ask about personal experience, don’t ask about religious beliefs or political views, don’t ask what someone does. 

So what is one to ask? Maybe the relative merits of fencing versus marathon swimming?

Now, for the foreigners out there, here’s the No. 1 dud question to ask a Chinese person. It’s a question that will draw a blank, non-comprehending stare:

“Hey, pal, tell me about your president. Is he doing a good job?”

I walked into a new shopping area of Beijing, the Solana Lifestyle Shopping Center, over the weekend and my jaw just about dropped to the floor.

Anybody who thinks Beijing has yet to catch up with Shanghai or even Hong Kong should take a stroll through this mammoth place. A few years back, Beijing opened the world’s biggest mall. It was cheesy and noisy. Yawn. But this is different.

When my wife and daughter came home one day last week from the shopping center declaring, “It’s just like Miami!” I still didn’t pay much attention. Then I went, and returned for a second time today just to take photos for the blog. One visit to this center and one realizes how much money is pouring into China and how fast the middle class is developing.

Fact is, this shopping center could be in any prosperous country in Europe or North America. There’s very little in it that signals “China.” The architect is a U.S. firm.

Be patient before you go thinking this is just an ex-pat haven. Sure, there are plenty of foreigners strolling around the area. After all, more than 100,000 foreigners live in Beijing, many within a few miles of this center. An embassy district is within walking distance, and the new U.S. Embassy is going up a few blocks away. But there are also many Chinese.

The place is an open-air project covering 32 acres. It has 19 two- and three-story Mediterranean style buildings with hundreds of shops and restaurants along themed “streets.” If you live in the First World, it’s probably the kind of place within a drive of your home.

What is really striking is the premier location. The center sits on the northwest corner of Chaoyang Park, which is the largest urban park anywhere in Asia, and a good deal of it is lakefront property, with a long promenade. The world’s tallest Ferris Wheel is going up nearby. In most Asian cities, there simply isn’t a big enough piece of land at a reasonable price to have such a sprawling shopping district. That in itself raises a lot of questions. The owner, according to this article, is Beijing Blue Harbor Properties, which boasts of having the “support of many state leaders.” Interestingly, no one seems to know if the state actually has any ownership in it. Who gave this project the green light on such a valuable piece of parkland and how much green did they get in return?

In China, you can’t just walk into the property assessor’s office and check on ownership. So who knows where money landed to get this baby built.

So as I stroll in to the place, past the Stone Cold Creamery what do I discover but an LL Bean store about to open. Downstairs, beside The North Face, Adidas, Nike and Columbia Sportswear are some European brands I wasn’t familiar with.

Beijing now has plenty of glitzy shopping centers full of super high-end luxury stores, like Ferragamo, Tiffany’s, Louis Vuitton and the like.

But this place targets China’s growing middle class, the same kind of middle-class people that populate any such mall in Europe, the Middle East and North America. It makes you realize how globalized the middle class has become, no matter if its Dubai, Frankfurt, Orlando, Vancouver or Beijing.

Some press and blog reports are already describing these as the “no-fun” Olympics.

That’s because so many regular Beijing nightlife haunts and restaurants popular with ex-pats are being shut down for the Games. The music scene is also taking a hit. Blame security concerns.

Beijing is usually a hopping place on summer evenings. Bars and restaurants open rooftop gardens. An increasingly vibrant music scene enlivens the city. More and more foreign musicians come through the capital.

But not much of that will be happening in August.

The popular Timeout Beijing magazine is producing a double issue for August and September because there are not enough events in August to justify two separate issues of listings, according to this Newsweek article.

"They want to make sure everything looks clean and goes smoothly," editor Tom Pattinson told Newsweek. "They're not so interested in making sure that everyone ... [learns] what a great, vibrant, exciting city Beijing is."

Two popular venues for live music _ D-22 up in the Haidian university district, and the Stone Boat in Ritan Park _ have had to halt live performances.

A few days ago, authorities pulled the plug many foreign musicians coming to China, saying that even the songs they play in encores have to be vetted beforehand. This is fallout from the Bjork concern in Shanghai in the spring when the Icelandic singer shouted “Tibet! Tibet” after belting out her anthem about independence.

This Agence France Press story notes that popular bars and restaurants deemed too close to some of the Olympic venues, such as the Workers' Stadium in downtown Beijing, have been ordered shut for security reasons.

A popular pizza joint outside the Workers’ Stadium, the Kro’s Nest, has already shut down for a month or so (much to our family’s dismay).

And then there are the increasingly frequent requests to provide IDs, open bags and purses for searches, etc. The level of grumbling is increasing among foreigners, but not Chinese, who take at face value explanations that the security threat to these Olympics is greater than at any other.

For visitors to Beijing who want an inside look at the nightlife, check out the Beijing Boyce blog, which recently noted how vital it is to carry your passport around with you. Here’s what the blog said:

Question: Do I really need my passport when I go out in Beijing?

Answer: Yes. Most definitely, absolutely, unequivocally yes. Well, unless you like taking unnecessary risks, talking at length with the local authorities, and possibly making a visit to the police station.

Several Sanlitun bar owners told me today that the authorities will be making the rounds and checking patrons’ ID, and that bars are now expected to check patrons’ bags for anything “dangerous.” Add in the general increased security measures in Beijing ahead of The Games and the previous crackdowns in the city, and carrying your passport or a copy of it should be a ‘no brainer.’