GroundTruth

After flying late Wednesday night from Hong Kong to Beijing, I tried to post first thing when I hit the ground but ran head long into the virtual wall of China. Wordpress is blocked, apparently. So no blogging. And so welcome to China.

I’m here to continue the journey through Asia to meet with government officials to establish bureaus for Global News Enterprises and to interview and hire our team of correspondents.

A Starbucks in Beijing (by Austin Knight, on Flickr) CC

I woke up early today and rushed to a meeting at, where else, but Starbucks. The whole way over in the taxi I was clicking away on a Blackberry that was angrily demanding responses for a packed day of meetings that needed to be coordinated. I hardly had time to look up at the marvel of a city where I had yearned to come for years.

It’s my first trip to China and my first day in this wonderful, chaotic city made up of ancient palaces and modern high-rise complexes. And I asked myself what the hell I was doing in a Starbucks on the corner of a strip mall.

But I got in line like everyone else to order a café latte and a blueberry muffin. It felt way too much like home. In fact, it felt like a bad dream.

But when I placed my order it was quickly clear I was in China. They had no milk. Only soy milk

Why?

Another Starbucks in Beijing (by Laurel Fan, on Flickr) CC

Well, the woman serving didn’t have an answer and looked flustered when I asked. But it was clear later in the day when Starbucks put out a press release that it was pulling all milk from its stores after a wave of contamination of dairy products, including infant formula.

China’s latest tainted food crisis has hit dairy products and this time killed four infants in the last few days. You don’t really sip or eat anything here with any degree of confidence. You ponder poisons and pesticides with every bite and wonder if maybe the American culture of corporate accountability isn’t such a bad thing after all.

And then you realize maybe that’s why Starbucks is packed and why there are more than 50 of the coffee houses in Beijing alone.

I am a better person with coffee in me. Lots of it. And I was sufficiently fueled when I finally got talking with my first appointment, David Wolf, founder and CEO of Wolf Group Asia. He’s an American business consultant who I was told would provide a great overview of China’s economic situation and business climate.

But David offers more than that. With a lot of knowledge and humor, he offers a kind of primer on the soul of the place, and he gently forces you to reconsider a lot of American preconceptions and misconceptions about China.

His quick summary of China was this: “Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

“And that,” he said, “is the great lure of the place.”

David has a well-trafficked blog and when I told him about my blogging problems he gave a knowing smile. He said there were “work-arounds” for the large community of bloggers in China, and meanwhile I had found one such avenue for writing. So we were back in business. “Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

I had a series of meetings and meals with government officials from the State Council Information Office and the Foreign Ministry, all part of an elaborate courtship ritual for a new news organization to succeed in having a bureau set up in China. In the meetings, the officials were warm and open and a bit scolding about what they felt was a bias in the American media toward China.

They urged me to get our reporters to steer clear of the politics and “the big potatoes,” as one of my hosts kept calling the leading politicians. Tell the story of every day people and how they are faring, they suggested.

I took the information in and vowed that we would do our best to hire correspondents who would be fair to China and try to unravel the complexity of the people and their stories. They gave me the instructions for a small mountain of paperwork and informed me that if our news organization is accepted for accreditation that we would be the first fully web-based news organization to register in China.

“Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

Tomorrow we begin a full day of interviewing prospective correspondents and building the team that will cover China for us.