Imagethief headed out to The Orchard for a lovely brunch on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, in a mistake that could have been lifted from one of my old Chinese textbook pronunciation drills, my friend who gave the taxi instructions said "Jingcheng Gaosu" when he meant to say "Jichang Gaosu". I, never having been to The Orchard before, didn't catch the mistake until we had drifted well off-course.

On the bright side, the detour gave us a chance to see some of the city on a spectacular morning. What we observed was that every available flat surface in the city is covered with messages celebrating the upcoming China-Africa Cooperation Summit. This is not a casual exaggeration, although my regular readers can be forgiven for assuming so. Literally every billboard, every hoarding, and every building we saw was coated with enormous advertisements commemorating the summit. Pedestrian bridges carried big-character banners saluting the summit. Street-lights on all the ring-roads and expressways flapped with colored flags invoking the summit. At major highway interchanges and along the Airport expressway, huge, tethered, lantern-shaped helium balloons bore aloft more big-character banners.

Imagethief has never in his life seen such a staggering example of municipal suckup. I was in Shanghai shortly before the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference a few months ago, and all that motley collection of Central-Asian dictators rated was a few desultory highway banners (although Shanghai did rearrange the work schedules of twenty-million people for them, which was stupendous in its own way). George W. Bush, when he was here last year, got exactly zero buntings. If I were the American state department, I would complain vigorously, for all the good it would do me.


  I went to China and all I got was this undignified mugshot.

Admittedly, forty African heads of state don't parachute into this burg on a regular basis. The Chinese government is also working hard to deepen its ties with Africa, which is, as I am told, a place where a fast-growing nation-state can acquire a lot of minerals and other natural resources with few awkward questions asked. So it makes sense for the city fathers (or, more likely, the national fathers) to invest a little cashola in some feel-good bunting to wow the big-men extend a warm hand of friendship. And, indeed, the millions upon millions of square feet of outdoor advertising positively overflowed with a heartwarming combination of treacly messages (友谊，和平，合作，发展!)*, and cliche images of light and dark colored hands clasped together, savannah wildlife and African "tribesmen". The tribesmen were conspicuously long on the leopardskins, camels and silly hats and short on the 发展, which presumably will be shipped to them from China at a preferential rate.

The summit begins on November 3rd, Friday. It looks like Imagethief will be spending the weekend at home. And if you live in Beijing and know what's good for you, so will you.

Elsewhere: Shanghaiist warns people to stay away from Beijing during the summit.


  Thanks, but where's the money bouquet I was promised?

*Friendship, peace, cooperation, development! Huzzah!