• Stuck behind the scenes as China's leadership changes hands

    Clockwise from top left: Carlos Barria / Reuters, Ng Han Guan / AP, Alexander F. Yuan / AP, How Hwee Young / EPA

    Scenes from the corridors and anterooms of the Great Hall of the People during the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

    By Le Li, NBC News

    BEIJING — More than a thousand reporters turned up at the Great Hall of the People on Wednesday, expecting to cover the closing session of the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress where the final leadership line-up would be revealed. But they soon discovered the election of the country's new leaders had ended before they had even entered the main conference hall.

    Instead, they heard about the results the same way everyone else did: from state news agency Xinhua.

    Xinhua live-blogged the event – both in Chinese on Sina Weibo and in English on Twitter, even though the latter is still blocked in China.  When the news agency posted a message that President Hu Jintao was casting a vote, the journalists were all stuck in the long corridors of the Great Hall of the People.

    Ed Jones / AFP - Getty Images

    Journalists wait in a corridor to be allowed access to the main hall during the closing ceremony of the Communist Party Congress on November 14, 2012.

    I was one of them. By then, we had been waiting for over 10 minutes. Most of the others had been in the Great Hall of the People for almost three hours, but I was in good spirits, joking with the journalists around me about when we'd be allowed in.

    When I saw Xinhua’s tweet announcing that Hu would be casting his vote, those feelings evaporated. There was nothing we could do – the line of reporters still wasn't moving. I could feel the temperature rising around me.

    China's communists pick country's new leader

    Clockwise from top left: Vincent Yu / AP, Wang Zhao / AFP - Getty Images, David Gray / Reuters, David Gray / Reuters

    Scenes from the Great Hall of the People during the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

    Xinhua started reporting that Vice-President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang had been elected as members of the Central Committee, the highest authority in the party. Although we had shuffled forward a bit, we were still outside the entrance to the main hall. Some journalists didn’t even bother to wait in line and sat around with the conference hall staff pouring themselves tea.   

    Le Li / NBC News

    Surrounded by tea cups, a reporter rests while waiting in the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

    I tried posting the news on Weibo but the name “Xi Jinping” was blocked.

    “Was the previous Party Congress like this, too?” a man asked someone behind me.

    A woman replied, “No, I came here ten years ago. It was not like this at all.”

    I turned around and saw they were reporters for a local Chinese news website. “Can you tell me what’s different?” I asked.

    She took one look at my press pass and stopped talking. On my pass, it was clearly written in big Chinese characters: “USA.” She turned her head away.

    Carlos Barria / Reuters

    Security personnel sitting as they guard different areas of the Great Hall of the People.

    Communist Party's Congress grinds on amid widespread indifference in China

    I tried checking Weibo again but there were no updates from Xinhua. Instead, I heard a quarrel at the entrance. Some photographers were arguing with security guards who were trying to block the half-open entrance. One guard yelled, “No one is allowed to enter!”

    Eager to know what was going on, I pushed to the front of the line. Suddenly, the entrance opened and the grand, cavernous Great Hall of the People lay before us.

    Mark Ralston / AFP - Getty Images

    The closing ceremony of the Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People on November 14, 2012.

    From my distant vantage point, I aimed my camera at the stage and started madly snapping photos.

    But which one was Xi Jinping? All of the men were wearing the same clothes. The only person who stood out was Liu Yandong – a woman, and she was wearing bright blue.

    Yawns and other expressions of boredom as China's Communist Party Congress begins

    I looked at my phone and read Xinhua’s final tweets. “The voting concludes,” Xinhua said. “The new Central Committee of the Communist Party Congress and the new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection have been elected. The hall filled with great applause.”

    Le Li / NBC News

    Reporters taking pictures of cars parked in the courtyard of the Great Hall of the People.

    It was all over.

    All I had done was wait around in a corridor and take some pictures – along with every other journalist there. The best shot was of the courtyard, where more than 50 Audis were parked. Everyone else took the same photo and posted it on Twitter. The pictures were deleted within minutes, after netizens questioned why the Chinese leaders did not drive their own national brand, Red Flag.

    One blogger noticed a Lexus among the Audis and commented, “One is even Japanese brand.” 

    We might not have been able to report on the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress, but at least we could prove that the Audi is the Chinese leadership’s car of choice.

    Read more about China on NBC's Behind the Wall

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    Carlos Barria / Reuters

    Black Audi cars fill a parking lot inside the Great Hall of the People.

  • China cracks down on media’s use of English

    China has banned websites, publishers and newspapers from using “unnecessary” English words, prompting a wave of online sarcasm and criticism.

    The General Administration of Press and Publication, which supervises all media in the country, said on Monday that foreign languages, in particular “English, English words and acronyms,” have diluted Chinese in recent years.

    “Such abuse of language … destroys the harmonious and healthy cultural environment and causes an unhealthy social impact,” the government media watchdog said.

    As a result of practices that damage the “purity of the Chinese language,” the regulator prohibited the “arbitrary” use of English words or acronyms from foreign languages mixed with Chinese. It also forbade the use of “ambiguous” words that are neither Chinese nor foreign.

    When words in a foreign language have to be used, the government decreed that a note or annotation in Chinese must be added. And the names of foreign people, places and science terms also have to be translated into Chinese.

    If the order was to be strictly exercised many English acronyms Chinese people often use, such as DNA, GDP, CEO and WTO, would have to disappear or be replaced by Chinese equivalents.

    Sarcasm
    While decrees like this one alarm few – such government notices are rarely followed – they do elicit bouts of pungent sarcasm.

    In April, TV channels were told to ban English acronyms like NBA, which translated into Chinese in as long as 10 characters: “Mei Guo Nan Zi Zhi Ye Lan Qiu Lian Sai.”

    One commentator responded to the ban in April with: “Ban English acronyms? Fine, don’t call yourself CCTV anymore.” CCTV, a.k.a. China Central TV, is China’s biggest official TV service and displays its logo with four English-language letters on-screen.

    The most recent notice elicited similarly acerbic responses.

    “I suggest we get rid of Arabic numbers too, they’re also foreign,” one person said in the comment section on news giant Netease.com.

    Another said: “Dear Administration, can you tell me how to say ‘iPad,’ ‘iPhone’ in Chinese?”

    Some commentators seemed to take the issue a bit more seriously: “Tell me, in modern science, which word comes from Chinese? They are nice enough to let you use their words, and now you want to protect your ‘language purity’?”

    Authorities’ obsession with power is at the root of the decision to ban English, one commentator says.

    “(The government) is so proud now as China’s economy is booming,” Zhu Xueqin, a history professor at Shanghai University, told BBC News in an interview. “They think foreigners ought to learn from us, we do not need to learn from them anymore.”

    It isn’t only the use of English that is imperiled, Zhu said. A large number of frequently used Chinese words in science and sociology come from Japanese, such as constitution, cadre, and socialism.

    “If we are not allowed to use such words we simply won’t be able to speak anymore,” he said.

    NBC’s Beijing Bureau requested an interview with the General Administration of Press and Publication but received no answer.

  • China blocks some foreign media sites ahead of Nobel

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – In a sure sign that China is gearing up for a major censorship battle with Western media agencies in the lead up to Friday’s presentation of the Noble Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, major foreign news websites were blocked in China Thursday.

    The tell-tale error message, “Your Connection has been reset” now comes up online when trying to access popular news websites like the BBC and Norwegian state broadcaster, NRK. 

    Earlier Thursday, CNN’s website was also blocked, but as of 9 a.m. ET, the site was loading smoothly in China.

    In recent years, China has proved willing to block foreign websites it deems critical of the government or a potential source of political unrest.

    During the Tibetan riots of 2008 and the Uighur unrest in Xinjiang last year, popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were blocked after censors became concerned that protest organizers were using the sites to communicate and disseminate anti-government messages.

    Similarly, YouTube has remained blocked since 2009.

    Even popular movie website, IMDB was blocked earlier this year by censors after it provided details about a documentary on the Dalai Lama that was critical of China’s government.

    Meanwhile on TV throughout the week, news broadcasts like BBC, CNN and French satellite channel TV5 have all been regularly blacked out when stories on Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Prize come up.

    State television broadcaster, CCTV, has not been reporting on the Nobel Prize presentation.