By Adrienne Mong and Bo Gu

HAIMEN, Guangdong Province—It wouldn’t have been fair or accurate to call it a China Spring, but for a moment it was worth wondering: Was this the beginning of a Guangdong Spring?

Since September, residents in a fishing village called Wukan, in the southern coastal province of Guangdong, had been protesting against their local government over, specifically, illegal land grabs and, more generally, corruption.  This was a town where one man had held sway as the Communist Party chief for four decades.

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The situation grew explosive two weekends ago when one of the protest organizers died in police custody, triggering a widespread and cohesive revolt that saw thousands of people run the local officials and police out of town—the first time the Communist Party appeared to have lost total control of a town.

The authorities responded by laying siege on Wukan, preventing food and other supplies from reaching the 20,000-strong population, and censoring all mention of the latest developments in Chinese media or on the Internet.  In turn, the residents welcomed foreign and Hong Kong journalists to cover their plight.

Negotiations between the two sides kicked into high gear even as the situation escalated. The villagers threatened to march to the government offices of a nearby town unless their demands were met, potentially pitting them against thousands of riot and paramilitary police deployed along the main road leading in and out of Wukan.

In the end, cooler tempers prevailed amidst government compromises, but just as the Wukan standoff appeared to ease, reports of more protests nearby surfaced on Tuesday on the Internet.

Suddenly, the province in which its Communist Party head had promoted a “Happy Guangdong” campaign no longer seemed so happy.  At least not in this southeastern coastal corner.

At least three other pockets of unrest had flared up in districts of a large city near Wukan:  two of the groups were protesting similar examples of illegal land seizures and a third, the largest outbreak of demonstrations, was over government plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Haimen.

Though difficult to confirm, the initial reports described thousands of residents converging on the main local government office and organizing a sit-in on a key highway entrance to protest the development plans.  Local residents were quoted as saying they hoped foreign journalists would cover their story.

Before long, photographs emerged on Sina Weibo and other Chinese microblogs showing large numbers of paramilitary police in riot gear lining up against civilians in Haimen, a large town about 70 miles away from Wukan.  Tear gas was fired and clashes ensued.  Rumors also circulated that at least two boys had been killed in the confrontations; the government denied them.

Protests are not unusual in China.  In fact, according to the most recent official statistics, 2009 saw more than 90,000 “mass incidents,” as the Chinese government calls protests, across the country.  Land grabs and pollution concerns are among the top grievances.

Although the protests in Wukan and Haimen appear unrelated, it seemed a remarkable coincidence that two demonstrations adopting similar tactics would spring up within several dozen miles of one another. 

Heavy-handed police tactics
On Thursday, the streets of Haimen looked like those of any other comparable-sized Chinese town: food stalls, shops, sleepy government buildings, a high school, and a population that relies mostly on motorbikes to get around.

Mid-morning, dozens of those motorbikes were massed near the Haimen highway entrance.  In the distance, scores of black-and blue-uniformed police wearing helmets were standing behind barricades that had been pulled across the toll gate to the highway.

A large gas station on the corner looked open, but was in fact not.  The station's attendants in bright yellow jackets were lazing around, directing traffic to the next station.  The only energy came from a discussion about the power plant taking place among some of motorbike riders.

A short excursion on the highway itself revealed a sizeable police presence.  Police vans lined up against the side, interspersed with ambulances, fire engines, and water cannon trucks.  Dozens of police in riot gear sat on the ground.  Near several other highway entrance ramps, police vehicles could be spotted behind the gates of nearby compounds.

A little over an hour later, the crowd around the main entrance ramp had grown.  Motorbikes whizzed back and forth a couple of hundred feet away from the police barricade.  Many of the riders were young.

Suddenly, a pop rang into the air and a group of young teenagers were scrambling back away from the highway barriers—a plume of smoke rose above them.  The teens had tried to sidle up along the side.  A murmur of “tear gas” arose in the crowd as people began rushing away, covering their faces.  Nostrils burned.

“They don’t have the right to treat people like this,” said a 24-year old local resident who only offered his surname, Li.  “Using tear gas?  It’s wrong.”

Rumors of cancer
A few miles away, a large power plant with two smokestacks sat under the hazy sun.  It was not in operation; local reports said the government had suspended it as well as the plans to build the second plant until further notice. 

Haimen residents called Hongdong — the hamlet of one-storey homes nearest the power plant —“Cancer Village.”  But inside Hongdong, a man working in a local medical clinic denied that cancer patients were on the rise.

Back in front of the highway entrance, a young man named Chen and his two friends on motorbikes watched the police.  They had joined in the protests on Wednesday, because they, too, were angry about the health hazards posed by the power plant.

“The ocean is polluted [because of the run-off from the plant],” said Chen, also 24 years old.  “You can’t fish in it any more.”

He and others in the crowd said the number of cancer cases in Haimen had grown since the power plant was constructed in 2009 and quoted local papers as saying 80 percent of the cancer patients at a major regional hospital came from their township.

Chen said news of the protest had spread by QQ, a popular instant messaging service, until it was blocked on Tuesday evening.  Then they relied on word of mouth.

On the following day, the protesters were demonstrating peacefully, without weapons, said Chen, but the police rushed out from behind the blockade into the crowd and began beating up people—including women. 

Many of the participants on Wednesday, according to residents, were young Chinese.  Several were injured, and countless others arrested—just as was the case on Tuesday.

They had picked the highway entrance, said Chen, because it would attract the greatest attention.  Unlike the existing power plant itself or the land where the second plant has been designated—both of which are removed from the main roads.

Hearing about Wukan
“Were you in Wukan?” was a question that crept up a few times in conversation with Haimen’s residents.  In the past couple of days, Chinese media had begun publishing reports on the dispute next door.  Moreover, many had heard through friends or acquaintances or on the Internet about the months-long confrontation in Wukan.

But no one said Wukan had inspired them to take action. 

“This [environment issue] has been a problem for us for a while,” said Li.

There appears to be another difference between Wukan and Haimen.  Local officials from Haimen have promised to come up with some sort of resolution in five days, according to Chen.  But later on Thursday evening, he said that many more young Chinese had been rounded up and detained.

BEIJING — The news that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il had died made its way to the Chinese capital mid-Monday morning.  Very soon, police tape surrounded the North Korean embassy, where its national flag was lowered to half-staff.

State-run newspapers The China Daily and The Global Times posted the news on their websites -- the latter going with a special section dedicated to the eccentric leader of China’s tiny but troublesome northeastern neighbor. 

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Featuring comments by users of Weibo  (the Chinese microblog) and a Kim family tree, the Global Times site was worthy of a Chinese state leader, reflecting the closeness of the two regimes enduring more than half a century.

The Chinese state-run television CCTV broke into regular programming, about twenty minutes before its daily noontime news broadcast, to run a special report on Kim’s death.  Its Pyongyang news team was the first to get reaction within the isolated state out to the world.  The nine-minute clip shows a variety of North Korean citizens crying, almost all unable to speak to the camera.

Despite running his country like a cult, impoverishing and starving his own people while building a nuclear arsenal, Kim was more often than not ridiculed for his appearance and his personality.  Twitter users posted memorable moments such as an Economist magazine cover with Kim with bouffant hair in tinted glasses:Greetings, Earthlings.

We, on the other hand, would like to remember the Dear Leader in action.  After all, the DPRK’s Korean Central News Agency said Kim died while travelling back from a “rural inspection tour.”  What better way to mark his passing away than with a look back at other inspection tours, thanks to this great Tumblr site.

Updated at 6:41 a.m. ET:

Like father, like son.

Within hours of news of the elder Kim’s death, the Tumblr page above spawned a junior: Kim Jong Un looking at things.

BEIJING – Just days after Christian Bale made a red carpet appearance in Beijing for the premiere of his blockbuster new movie, “The Flowers of War,” about the 1937 Japanese sacking of Nanking, he made even bigger headlines in China off-screen on Friday.

Bale invited CNN’s Beijing bureau crew to accompany him Thursday as he attempted to visit Chen Guangcheng, an activist who has been under house arrest since his release from a four-year-long jail sentence last year.

The 40-year-old Chen, a blind self-taught lawyer became a persecuted dissident after he filed a lawsuit in 2006 on behalf of residents of his hometown, Linyi, over the city’s practice of forced abortions and sterilizations, a municipal policy that runs counter to national regulations.

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He was thrown in prison on what human rights activists say were trumped-up charges of “intentional damage of public property” and “gathering people to block traffic.”

Related link: Video reveals blind Chinese activist's plight

Since Chen’s release in September 2010, dozens of Chinese and foreign reporters, as well as supporters, have gone to Dongshigu village, in Shandong Province, to try to visit him, but all have blocked from even entering the town. Some were even violently manhandled and beaten up by unidentified thugs, and some TV crews had their equipment damaged or confiscated.

Bale was no exception.  

He and the crew were stopped at a road checkpoint when government security guards wearing green army coats asked what they were doing and punched the camera. When Bale took out his flip camera to record, he was punched and shoved, exactly the same treatment the CNN crew received just a few months earlier when they tried to visit.

After the scuffle, the crew got back into their vehicle and drove off, but they were followed by a security van for about 40 minutes.

"I'm not brave doing this," Bale said on camera. "The local people who are standing up to the authorities, who are visiting Chen and his family and getting beaten or detained, I want to support them."

In a later interview on CNN, Bale said, “It’s amazing a superpower like China is actually terrified of this man. It shows such an intrinsic weakness within the fabric of the country.”

China's human rights detainees 2010

He also stressed that he did not inform any members of the movie crew in order not to implicate them with his own actions.

‘Pandaman vs. Batman!’
Bale’s confrontation with the security guards soon made headlines on Twitter and Weibo, China’s most popular Twitter-like, but government-controlled, social media forum. Posts about the encounter spread rapidly on Friday morning with some joking headlines like “Pandaman vs. Batman!”

The cartoonist known as “Rebel Pepper” who posted the Pandaman vs. Batman cartoon on Weibo said he was somewhat surprised that Bale was treated exactly the same as everyone else.

“Dongshigu village is the only place in China that everyone is treated the same [and roughed up] no matter where you are from,” Rebel Pepper said during a phone interview with NBC News.

Some cynics noted it could be a publicity stunt for Bale's new movie, but most expressed their respect and appreciation.

A Weibo user named Shenan wrote, “You could pretend not to see or hear. That blind man is not your relative or friend in a faraway foreign country. Even if the whole 1.3 billion people were jailed, it’s not your business. You really didn’t have to ask for the roughing up, Batman.” 

By Friday afternoon, Weibo administrators censored all the posts related to Bale’s attempted visit. Steven Jiang, the CNN producer who was with Bale, found all his Weibo posts on their journey could not be forwarded.

It is a common practice for social media censors to jump in and try to put out the fire online before the flames get out of control. But determined Weibo users still spread the news with puns or pictures too difficult to censor. 

A post on Weibo joked that Zhang’s movie “Flowers of the War," would be pulled from Chinese cinemas. But another user said, “No, the movie will be there, only all the parts Christian Bale is in will be deleted!”

Bale left China today for the U.S., but Chen still remains off-limit to all his visitors.

Christian Bale scuffles with Chinese guards

 

BEIJING -- "Batman" star Christian Bale was roughed up by security guards who stopped him visiting a blind activist living under house arrest in China.

Video footage of the scuffle was shot by a camera crew traveling with the Hollywood actor as he promoted a film he has made in the country.

CNN posted scenes of the confrontation between Bale and the guards on its website Friday.

 

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The run-in and publicity is likely to cause discomfort in China's government-backed film industry, which hopes Bale's movie "The Flowers of War" will be a creative success at home and abroad.

• Behind The Wall: Video reveals blind Chinese activist's plight

The star's actions are sure to focus attention on the plight of Chen Guangcheng, guarded around the clock by plain-clothed and uniformed workers who have blocked dozens of reporters and fellow activists trying to see him in the past.

Bale was to leave China on Friday and his representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.

Bale, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for last year's "The Fighter," traveled Thursday with a crew from CNN to the village in eastern China where Chen, the blind lawyer, lives with his family in complete isolation.

They were stopped at the entrance to Dongshigu village in Shandong province by unidentified men.

'An inspiration'
The video footage shows Bale asking to see Chen, with a CNN producer providing interpretation, but being ordered by one of the guards to leave. He then asked why he was unable to pass through. The guards responded by trying to grab or punch a small video camera Bale was carrying.

"What I really wanted to do was to meet the man, shake his hand and say what an inspiration he is," Bale was quoted as saying by CNN.

Chen's case has been raised publicly by U.S. lawmakers and diplomats, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, all to no response from China.

CNN said Bale first learned of Chen from news reports when he was in China filming "The Flowers of War," China's official submission this year for best foreign language film Oscar.

"Chen Guangcheng is a newsworthy figure ... and as such it is in the interest of CNN's global viewers to hear from him," CNN said in a statement. "Mr. Bale reached out to CNN and invited us to join him on his journey to visit Chen."

• Rebellious Chinese village under siege by police

Chen, a self-taught lawyer who was blinded by a fever in infancy, angered authorities after documenting forced late-term abortions and sterilizations and other abuses by overzealous authorities trying to meet population control goals in his rural community. He was imprisoned for allegedly instigating an attack on government offices and organizing a group of people to disrupt traffic, charges his supporters say were fabricated.

Although now officially free under the law, he has been confined to his home in the village eight hours' drive from Beijing and subjected to periodic beatings and other abuse, activists say.

• Story: 10 prominent Chinese activists jailed ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize

While Bale's visit focuses new attention on Chen's case, CNN's role raises questions about activism and advocacy among reporters, said David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project website at the University of Hong Kong.

"It made me instantly uncomfortable, wondering how it all came together. It raises questions about where the lines are drawn," Bandurski said.

 

Politically sensitive subject
The incident also drew strong interest — most of it highly positive — on social networking sites such as Twitter and its Chinese equivalent, Weibo.

Having their star's name pinging across the Internet in connection with such a politically sensitive subject puts promoters of "The Flowers of War" in a bind. The film opens in China on Friday and next week in the United States.

Directed by the renowned Zhang Yimou, it is also the most expensive Chinese movie ever made, at $94 million, some of which came from the state-owned Bank of China.

The movie centers on the 1937 sacking of the eastern city of Nanjing, a central event in China's pre-revolutionary "century of humiliation" and has been described by some critics as hewing to official propaganda portraying Chinese as heroic victims and Japanese as one-dimensional cartoon villains.

While China has the world's third-largest film industry — both in box office and output — it has made relatively little global impact. Story lines are often heavily influenced by the ruling Communist Party, whose culture commissars must approve scripts and have final say over whether a film gets released.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• 'A new chapter': US shuts down Iraq war
• Village defiant as government creates new narrative
• Rev. Jesse Jackson to London protesters: 'Jesus was an Occupier'
• Identity, not policy, driving the new Egypt
• From Napoleon to Liz Taylor: perfect pearl's $11 million journey
• NBC's Richard Engel answers your questions about Iraq

The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

 

BEIJING – As the Chinese village of Wukan entered its fifth day besieged by a police cordon cutting off food and water from entering the village, reports from inside the cordon suggest villagers have continued to resist government overtures to end their protest.

What’s going on outside the cordon, though, is a very different story.

Even as Chinese and foreign press have begun sneaking around the security cordon into town – likely assuring at least temporarily that no draconian, military-style raid on the villagers occurs – Chinese state media have started to create an alternative and unverifiable storyline about what triggered the hostilities.

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‘Official’ version of events
The China Media Project at Hong Kong University noted Thursday that late last night, the state-run China News Service reported on a press conference that allegedly confirmed that “preliminary investigations have ruled out external force as the cause of death” in the case of Xue Jinbo.

Xue, a village representative who was detained along with several other local leaders by police last Friday during a raid on Wukan, died in custody – alleged of a heart attack.

But his family was permitted to see the body and reported seeing fractures and bruising all over his body. And they were not permitted to take his remains home for burial.

However, the China News Service report said the town’s medical expert had shared photographic evidence of Xue’s body which refuted the family’s accusations that police beatings caused his death. The reporter was allegedly not permitted copies of the photos for publication.

Xue’s death and its suspicious circumstances sparked the mass protests in Wukan that eventually drove village officials and police out of the area earlier this week.

Another report from the China News Service said various Wukan village officials had been detained for discipline violations.

That no other local Chinese media – and certainly no foreign press – had reported on the press conference suggests that local government officials are engaging in what the China Media Project dubbed, “public opinion channeling” tactics.

In layman’s terms: they are dictating the narrative by creating only one plausible sequence of events.

The two separate reports are intended to get the following results:
1) Absolve local police of brutality and murder accusations – eliminating at least one of the reasons for unrest in Wukan.
2) “Detaining” – as opposed to arresting – Wukan’s senior officials demonstrate that the government is being pro-active against corruption, without officially conceding guilt. And it obfuscates the other central reason behind the villagers’ anger – illegal land seizures.

PHOTO BLOG: Chinese villagers defy government in standoff over land rights

Scapegoat a few
Another piece of the local government’s strategy to quell the unrest has emerged: scapegoat a few to spare the majority.

The Shanwei County government Thursday named two village leaders it claims are ringleaders behind the revolt and vowed harsh punishments for them and other protest leaders.

Wu Zili, the acting mayor of Shanwei County, accused two village leaders, Lin Zulian and Yang Semao, of actively spreading rumors and encouraging villagers to build barricades around the city. The mayor gravely warned that “the authorities will firmly crack down on anyone who organizes and incites the villagers,” according to Telegraph reporter Malcolm Moore.    
 
For longtime China watchers, the combination of the earlier local media reports, news that the government is attempting to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff and Mayor Wu’s threat toward the supposed ringleaders are clear signals that the government is eager to bring an end to the conflict by providing an exit plan for the majority of Wukan’s citizens.

However, taking that path will come with a price: selling out the people the government has branded as ringleaders of the rebellion.

For at least one person, this is unacceptable. “Everything they said at the press conference [about Lin and Yang] is a lie!” said one villager NBC News reached by phone Thursday afternoon. “We simply elected those two to be our representatives.”

Villagers’ side of the story: Beijing will come to the rescue
Villagers in Wukan Thursday were actively working the phones, talking to the media who called in or slipped into town. However, as the world’s attention has started to focus on the events in Guangdong, they appeared anxious to push their own storyline, which is full of condemnation for corrupt local officials and deep-rooted respect for the central government, which they seem confident will come to their rescue.

“We don’t want any foreign press here! We expect the central government to come here and rescue us,” said another villager by phone, “We have great leaders in [President] Hu Jintao and [Prime Minister] Wen Jiabao!”

However, that sentiment is not shared by all. As one Wukan native told NBC, “If the press was not here, the police would come into the village and harass us.”

National implications
Whatever tact the local government takes in Wukan, the results could have serious implications for one man in particular: Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief of Guangdong Province.

With China poised to complete a rare leadership change next year, Wang had in recent years been positioning himself to compete for a promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee, which serves effectively as the nation’s top political body.

Having championed a “Happy Guangdong” campaign that he claimed would focus on improving the living standards in the province, Wang has instead found himself dealing with labor protests that have coincided with the economic slowdown in China. Public anger over rising inflation and fewer jobs has led to factory strikes and violence throughout Guangdong, which has been dubbed “The Workshop of the World.”

Now with open rebellion in what was once proudly referred to as a “model village,” Wang finds himself struggling to peacefully and definitively end the uprising – before it kills his chances of being elevated to the standing committee.

Until that elusive win-win resolution appears, expect the siege of Wukan to continue.

NBC News Producer Bo Gu contributed to this report.

Related link: Rebellious Chinese village under siege by police

BEIJING– For years, in the name of social harmony, China’s ruling Communist Party has been highly successful in masking, placating or simply distorting the tens of thousands of protests – dubbed “mass demonstrations” – that occur here ever year.

The Wukan rebellion will prove a tougher dilemma for Beijing to solve.

From The Telegraph newspaper’s Malcolm Moore comes details of the stunning story of Wukan, a fishing village of 20,000 in China’s southern Guangdong Province.  Earlier this week, the entire town rose up and threw out local party officials and police forces following years of having the people’s land sold out from underneath them.

The villagers’ frustration mixed with anger over news that one of the protest organizers, Xue Jinbo, died in police custody, allegedly from a heart attack.  Since the start of the revolt in September, Wukan residents have successfully thwarted multiple attempts by the police to re-enter the town by creating roadblocks out of fallen trees or just using themselves.

They are now in a tense standoff with security forces, which earlier formed a cordon around Wukan--although a villager inside the perimeter told NBC News earlier today by phone that the cordon has been removed, leaving one checkpoint blocking the central access into the town.

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Scores of state security officers are said to be still positioned around the edge of Wukan, which has begun seven days of mourning for the fallen protest leader.

Moore also reports that the town has enough food to last ten more days and that the security cordon is in fact still in effect (Click here to read more on how Malcolm Moore slipped through the security cordon).

 

That we know anything about this explosive story – which has been months in the making but appears to be coming to a head this week – is largely due to Moore, who earlier successfully slipped through the security cordon and since has been filing articles and Tweets on events occurring within Wukan.  (Follow him on twitter: @MalcolmMoore)

The reports have given everyone a rare inside look at the mindset and mechanics of a popular uprising in China--a rarity for foreign journalists who often face tight, sometimes arbitrary restrictions, and harassment by local government forces when trying to report on issues deemed sensitive.

Slipping through China’s security
To say that foreign journalists in China know a thing or two about security cordons is an understatement.

Over the years, the security apparatus has become exceptionally good at quickly sealing off and containing problem areas while at the same time wallpapering over dissent with state media coverage.

In 2008, during the spring Tibetan uprisings, NBC attempted multiple times to enter the Tibetan areas of Sichuan Province for coverage but was turned back by security forces that had formed roadblocks around the region to prevent independent reporters and observers from entering.

Similar restrictions have continued this year.  Journalists have attempted to enter those areas again following a wave of self-immolations by Tibetans that has called renewed attention to the plight of China’s Tibetan minority.

Most recently, local government officials in the Shandong town of Linyi have effectively bottled up local dissent by keeping blind lawyer and social activist, Chen Guangcheng, under perpetual house arrest.

Supporters of Chen – who in 2006 famously filed a lawsuit on behalf of his fellow residents against the local government over its practice of forced abortions and sterilizations – and foreign journalists have attempted many times this year to visit the activist and his family.  But they’ve been met at the town’s edge by plain-clothed security agents who forcibly restrict visitors from entering by throwing rocks and swinging sticks.

It was only in the last week – under intense public pressure – that the provincial government of Shandong intervened, permitting ulcer medicine to be brought to Chen.

Will other Chinese dominos fall?
The dramatic chain of events in Wukan begs the obvious question, could this be the proverbial “first domino” that falls in a wave of similar copycat protests nationwide?  As Moore stresses in his coverage of the rebellion, the people of Wukan are counting on the central government to come to the rescue and depose the corrupt local officials whom they believe responsible for their current plight.

That hope has manifested itself in the numerous rumors, as Moore reports, swirling around the village.  The most recent is that China’s state news channel, CCTV, is coming later this week to cover the standoff.  Some of the villagers have concluded amongst themselves that national coverage of their plight will lead to swift action by China’s ruling party against the corrupt Wukan government.

How the central government manages Wukan’s revolt against party authority is a source of intense speculation.  Its action will generate strong responses both nationally and abroad and will reveal to China watchers which audience the party wishes to anger less.

On one hand, Beijing could do as Wukan’s villagers wish and come down hard on the local officials, reaffirming the Communist Party’s often-repeated mantra of “serving the people.”  This path, however, could have the unintended consequence of convincing local governments throughout the mainland that Beijing is willing to sell out its own in order to preserve social harmony, potentially forming a rift between local and central government apparatuses.

On the other hand, Beijing could determine that preservation of Party rule is the single most important priority and elect to crush the rebellion through force or the threat of it.  Such a tack would instantly draw international condemnation, but as China has shown in the past international opinion plays a very distant second to its interest in preserving national stability.

A dark horse in changing that thinking is the ever-evolving Chinese blogosphere, which increasingly has filled the role as national zeitgeist.  Ironically, even as state censors work overtime to scrub the web of news and discussion of socially delicate issues like Wukan, decision-makers here increasingly must account for public reaction on these matters and factor potential online anger in the complex calculus that is governing.

Where China will fall on this matter remains to be seen, but the next few days will tell us a lot about how Beijing plans to handle mass disturbances in the near future.

NBC News producer Bo Gu contributed to this report.

BEIJING – Zhang Bingjian’s art studio in the northern suburb of Beijing looks like a simple one. Spiral stairs lead to a small penthouse where he stores his books and makes tea for guests, a big wooden desk sits downstairs, and a huge map of China hangs on the wall. 

But something catches your attention when you walk in: Dozens of huge portraits on the wall, all in bright pink, all of Chinese government officials convicted of corruption charges.

Most of the officials are in prison, some have been executed, and others have been sentenced to “death with reprieve” – which in China means a life sentence.

Zhang came up with the idea of creating his “hall of shame” as early as March 2009, during China’s National People’s Congress, the annual meeting of Communist Party officials.  It was then that he learned that 3,000 officials had been convicted for corruption in the previous year alone. 

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“I was shocked at the numbers, I did not realize there were so many,” Zhang told NBC News during a recent visit to his studio.  “China is in such a transition period, those corruption issues also should be witnessed in a historic context.”

The artist decided to depict the history of China’s shame as part of an ongoing project. But he is not the actual painter – the portraits are mass-produced just like other “made-in-China” commodities. 

Zhang picks a publicly prosecuted government official, finds his age, crime, and most importantly, a photo of him – then he sends it to Dafen village in southern China, a place famous for churning out cheap, Wal-Mart-quality oil paintings for the whole world.  Through an assistant, Zhang finds artists in Dafen village to paint the portraits in a deliberately tacky and assembly-line style to reflect China’s 30 years as the world’s leading exporter of low-end, mass manufacturing. Their rosy hue is the same bright pink color as the Chinese currency.

Zhang doesn’t remember all the names of the officials portrayed and says he doesn’t want to play the role of a judge or prosecutor. “For me, I see the project as a whole instead of each individual portion,” he said.

Widespread corruption
Critics say corruption has long been one of China’s most chronic problems. Chinese presidents and premiers, including the current leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, have publicly denounced rampant corruption for years, but standards of conduct only seem to deteriorate. 

Out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perception Index – which measures the perceived levels of corruption in public sectors – China ranked 78th.

That’s lower than most other developed countries, as well as many developing countries such as Brazil and Cuba.
According to a Beijing News report last May, 24,406 government officials were jailed in 2010 for corruption, up 9.4 percent from 2009.  Almost 6,000 of them were sentenced to more than five years in prison.  

China is also one of the few countries in the world that executes its citizens on corruption charges.  Some of the officials captured in Zhang’s portraits have already been executed, including the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration and the former governor of Guangxi province.

As of today, Zhang has produced about 1,600 portraits.  Some hang on his studio wall; others are stacked in wooden crates, waiting to be displayed either in China or overseas. 

Zhang joked about ideas for his next exhibition.

“Maybe we can do another project for the U.S. America also has corrupt officials so the painting would be green, the color of U.S. dollars,” he said.

When asked whether or when he will ever finish the project, Zhang admitted one day he might have to stop producing the portraits if he cannot continue to finance himself and the 20-plus painters he employs.  Still, he doesn’t really know when he’ll move on.
 “It could end soon, probably within the next five years.  It could also be the next 15 years.  Part of the beauty of this piece is it’s open-ended,” he said with a smile. 

(Celeste Ho contributed to the story.)

BEIJING—While China’s chief climate negotiator is getting rock star treatment at the Durban climate summit this week, his peers back in the capital are suffering a third straight day of foul air.

As a leading Canadian newspaper put it, China provided “the few glimmers of hope at the stalled negotiations” in Durban, where "photographers and television journalists swarmed around the chief Chinese negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, as he entered a news conference on Monday to announce his list of conditions for considering a legally binding treaty on carbon emissions after 2020."

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It seems that despite being the world's biggest carbon emitter, China could be the key to a deal on a legally binding agreement to reduce emissions.

However, not many glimmers of hope could be spotted back home.

A persistent 'fog'
The Chinese state-run print media all ran headline stories Tuesday morning on the persistent "fog" that has blanketed Beijing and parts of the country’s northeast since the weekend. (See video above of the "hazardous" level of smog on Monday).

Much of the coverage focused on the hundreds of flights cancelled at the Beijing Capital International airport—the world’s second busiest hub—or the rising and very vocal concerns about air pollution.  Some local reports referred to sales of air filter masks and air filter machines spiking in the past week.

Still more reports tried to cast the air pollution issue as one of sovereignty.  "The heavy fog or smog that has shrouded Beijing in the past couple of days has triggered a renewed round of debate over the different air pollution standards applied by China and the United States," said an opinion piece in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper with a strong nationalist overtone.

But at least these same newspapers are now calling it "smog" rather than "fog," as they were just a day ago.  The China Daily, another state-run newspaper, ran a headline on page 3 crying, "Exposure to smog is severe hazard."  Later in the day, the paper’s web site posted four stark images of the same location showing changes in air visibility. (See photo above). The images are pretty staggering.

Only 13 days of 'good' air this year so far

And as we write this, the ever-trusty and ever-reliable @BeijingAir Twitter feed has been down five hours, prompting followers to wonder whether the pollution has finally gotten to the air quality index monitor that lives on top of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

A sobering analysis of the @BeijingAir feed can be found in this post by China Dialogue, which notes that the improvements in air quality claimed by officials at the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau "are due to irregularities in the monitoring and reporting of air quality – and not to less polluted air."

Moreover, based on the analysis using the @BeijingAir data, this year there have only been 13 days of "good" air quality. 

Buried further amidst the quantitative data was one more alarming point: "…if Beijing’s fine particulate concentration even reached the polluted levels of Los Angeles, life expectancy may increase by over five years."

We at NBC News Beijing are trying to claw back a few months to our life span.  We have just taken delivery of two air filter machines for the bureau.

By Adrienne Mong and Bo Gu

BEIJING — If there were one place that is living proof that global carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 jumped the largest amount on record, it’s got to be the Middle Kingdom.

Emissions leapt 5.9 per cent last year, according to the Global Carbon Project.

And the world’s biggest emitter —yes, China — was a big contributor.  It pumped 2.2 billion tons of carbon into the air, compared to the 1.5 billion tons of carbon by the U.S.

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On days like Monday — and there have been way too many this year — it feels like Beijing is the receptacle.

'Hazardous' days
We’ve already written about it, but this time returning to the Chinese capital after a break, I found my hardy NBC News colleagues ordering air filter machines for their homes and air filter masks for cycling (to get around the traffic).

Monday, while the @BeijingAir index — which comes from an air quality monitor housed atop the U.S. embassy in Beijing — tweeted hourly “hazardous” readings all day, we took a peek at readings back home to see how levels of air pollution were faring across the Pacific.

Across a map of the United States, it was a depressing monochromatic “green” color signifying “good” quality air — with only a few slashes of “yellow,” meaning “moderate.” 

Bear in mind, according to the chart developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “hazardous” is the highest alert level, which would trigger “health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected,” according to the site.

There were no readings from the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau’s (EPB) own air monitor until mid-afternoon Monday, when it acknowledged “slight pollution.” 

Last month, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection suggested it was finally heeding growing concerns among Beijing residents’ about air pollution.

The ministry said it would begin publishing measurements for the smallest particulate matter or PM2.5, also considered the most dangerous to human health because they’re tiny enough to enter the lungs and cause damage to the respiratory system.

On Thursday, however, the Beijing EPB emphatically announced PM2.5 readings for the city would not be made public.

A 'mirage'
To add insult to health injury, officials have been quoted in local newspapers as saying they will set up a new air monitoring system for Beijing in … Tianjin — a metropolis 80 miles away from the capital.

Mind you, photos posted on the Shanghaiist blogsite suggest we in Beijing are not the only ones suffering.

(There’s been plenty of supporting visual evidence coming out of Beijing all day.  One user of Weibo, the popular Chinese microblog, posted a photo of high-rises apparently floating above a cloud of pollution, calling it a “mirage.”  And YouKu, a Chinese version of YouTube, posted a video of this morning’s commute.)

Soho property mogul Pan Shiyi, who led an online petition to get PM2.5 readings published by the EPB, has begun posting on his Weibo account screen shots from an iPhone app that compiles the U.S. embassy’s BeijingAir index.   

In the meantime, Chinese authorities are still determined to call the smog by any other name.

Flight after flight on the Beijing Capital International airport website was shown to be cancelled — owing to “fog.” A Xinhua news agency report described it as “heavy fog.”

But an AFP report called it “smog,” tallying the airport casualties: 213 domestic and 15 international cancelled flights.

See Shanghaiist for more photos of the smog in Beijing and China

Update: Since this posting, a state-run newspaper, The Global Times, quoted meteorological officials as saying the “dense fog” enveloping Beijing and parts of the northeast will persist until Friday. One official described it as a “normal climate condition in Beijing.” Good thing we got our masks.