Passive-aggressive umbrella-cops foil Tiananmen reportage

In this BBC news video, a reporter with all the necessary documentation tries to visit Tiananmen Square with a cameraperson, only to find himself surrounded by umbrella-wielding goons who use their unfurled bumbershoots to block every shot the camera-person tries to catch.

Media banned from Tiananmen Square (Thanks, Nat!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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lumpi

It’s a national security risk, so they have to block it. Not any different from US politics. Only more clumsy.
Anonymous

It’s hard to take seriously any state that feels it must resort to such silly tactics. This is the next great superpower?
adwkiwi

That was the equivalent of your little brother, after being told to stop poking you, hovering his finger around your face saying ‘I’m not touching you’. Too weird.
Ian70

I would have -loved- to hear the reporter ask the parasol gentlemen to kindly fuck off. Not that it would have ever aired on the Beeb but it would be very New British.
Anonymous

Pictures with strangers tend to have great stories.

I was vacationing alone in Paris and decided to visit the top of the Arc de Triomphe. I saw Japanese couple taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower and offered to take their picture with it in the background. They accepted. Then the husband(?) offers to take mine. So I stand there, his wife(?) slides up next to me, and he takes the picture.

It was fun explaining that one to my girlfriend when I got the pictures developed.
Anonymous

Q: What’s a bigger pain in the ass? Trying to unsuccessfully attempt to hide everything that goes on in a country, or just going with it?

A: This video speaks for itself.
Jonathan

@1:15 — “It certainly protects them from the sun.”
Takuan

fight the umbrella men!
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/05/monkeylectrics-full.html

Think about it
Stickarm

The way that BBC reporter jockeys around the umbrellas in order to stay visible to the camera is sort of like a Monty Python performance. Life imitates art in the weirdest ways sometimes.
sfazzios

They might as well have put a big photo of Barbara Streisand on each umbrella.
W. James Au

“The more ‘exotic’ you look (particularly if you have very blonde or very red hair), the more popular you’ll be.”

Hmm, that wasn’t our experience in the rest of China, and we went to some foreigner-sparse cities like Suzhou. Plus my fiance is blonde, sometimes mistaken for Kate Winslet, and the Tienanmen dudes totally ignored her to take a photo with me, the multi-racial scruffy motherfucker.
mackenzi

Vibe.
Anonymous

That is something amazing about Chinese, they always find very childish ways to trick the westerners, that can be easily spotted cause those tricks are so obvious, but you can’t really accuse them directly. It’s actually a mind boggle cause it’s always at the shady border between impulsive immature act and something previously planned.
W. James Au

I had a weird experience when I visited Tiananmen with my fiance a couple years ago. We were minding our own business taking photos when some Chinese dude walked up to me and said smiling “Can I take my photo with you?”, and sat next to me while his friend snapped a shot. It totally didn’t make any sense, but afterwards it occurred to us they were probably undercover agents keeping tabs, and the photo was their way of telling us that.
2HourHiatus

@36 I was thinking the exact same thing.

I’m glad they aren’t being violent in this case, but man is it infuriating!
JoshuaTerrell

The umbrella men aren’t even taking themselves seriously. I wouldn’t either. It’s funny how this video juxtaposes the stern silent oppression of the blue shirted ChiComm policeman and the surreal almost silly casual deterrence of the men with umbrellas.
cinemajay

@2, you should have done the same to him. He’s not much of an undercover agent if he gets himself caught on someone else’s camera!
jimbuck

I think it’s Improv Everywhere Asia.
dross1260

Umbrella assasins with avian influenza.
Antinous / Moderator

You know, this would be a really delightful solution to the proliferation of CCTV cameras. Imagine if the streets of London were crowded with people carrying gaily colored parasols, carefully angled to shield their identities.
consideredopinion

Credit is due – someone in Chinese security was learning from Kung Fu movies!
Anonymous

About the random pictures: When I was in China, children would have their parents take pictures with me (I’m a blonde American – they don’t see many of those everyday). It happens in other countries too, taking pictures with foreign tourists. I doubt it was an undercover agent.
Category

@4 Antonius

Yes! I know what I’m doing next time I end up in the big smoke!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If you could get everyone in on it, there would be a visually impenetrable ceiling between the populace and the CCTVs. Of course, they’d just develop a camera that can see through umbrellas and charge the taxpayers to replace all the old ones. But, any excuse to carry a parasol…
Anonymous

This is ridiculous. The umbrella men also seem to have fun doing their job.
reesemlm

hah, how creative. though i guess i feel a little guilty laughing at the sinister reasoning, but definitely something to take and apply elsewhere. i could see BB really praising this technique if it were in some reverse situation.

@2, that happened a lot when i lived in china. usually it was just friendly chinese behavior.
sluggo

So they wouldn’t mind if I spayed them with water?
Anonymous

Such gentle oppressors…
Tian

Forget pens & swords, the umbrella is mightier than freedom of press.
Anonymous

I never noticed that the BBC video player volume goes to 11. Love it.
Anonymous

I know why they tried to do it on the 4th, but I think it’s ridiculous to assume that there would be some sort memorial to remember.

@2 That happens all the time. It’s nothing. The undercover guys stay undercover unless ‘something’ happens. Spend as much time here as I or any other expats living in Asia have and you won’t think it’s ‘weird’ any more.
Anonymous

Time to bring out the stilts!
Daemon

Easily the best possible way for them to repress the foreign media. Nobody is threatened, nobody is hurt, and they aren’t even stopped from doing their job.

It’s easy to tell there was anything to see other than the umbrella-wielding folks anyways.
Anonymous

@11 I didn’t think China had freedom of press.
Doc

It’s like a sinister real-life version of a Mr. Show sketch.
Marja

In America or Britain, they’d arrest you and delete your photos or destroy your camera.
freeyourcrt

I dunno, maybe they shouldn’t trust the Queen’s media services.
Micah

@#2, #7 is right. When I lived in China I also often had random Chinese folks ask to take pictures with me–particularly at major tourist sites like Tiananmen. And sometimes they didn’t ask, just posing their kids near me so I’d be in the frame (it took a while to overcome my instinct to jump out of the background of others’ family photos–since the photographer would often just pan to keep me in the frame).

Exotic foreigners are a “sight” for domestic tourists to add to their scrapbooks. “Here’s me in front of Tiananmen, here’s me in front of Mao’s Tomb, and here’s me with a real live foreigner we saw in the square.” The more “exotic” you look (particularly if you have very blonde or very red hair), the more popular you’ll be.

It seems a little strange to most Westerners. But it really is just friendliness, not the security apparatus at work.
Anonymous

Real classy, ChiComms.
jahknow

Learning that these umbrella-men had earpieces, I thought that the umbrellas might have contained parabolic microphones for recording those under surveillance.
webmonkees

Please put down any umbrella before reading this:

Respectfully:

Vinaya Buddhism vows have several prohibitions
with full ordination vows, including:

“#245. teaching Dharma to anyone holding an umbrella or parasol.”

They were just demonstrating compliance.
shadowfirebird

CHINESE AUTHORITIES PLAY INTO THE HANDS OF WESTERN MEDIA

One reporter at Tiananmen Square was quoted as saying “That was a relief. For a minute there I thought I was going to have to do a piece about an empty square.”

Assuming that China wanted the reporters to just go away without a story: complete PR fail.
StRevAlex

That’s all? I guess I expected they’d do a little dance a la Dick Van Dyke in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
Anonymous

You know, it’s really weird to look at tactics twenty years ago in China and England

…and then look at this and the tactics used at the G20. Though I guess there may be reports of what couldn’t be photographed later,
AsteriskCGY

I saw this on NY Times and clicked on the link to CNN’s experience which was also funny.
blitz

The BBC really does have by far the worst flash movie player ever made.
simonbarsinister

Say what you want about China’s totalitarian government, but here in the States those cops would have had their tazers out already.

PS My CAPTCHA says ‘Irked defiance’ :-)
Anonymous

It’s a fantastic way to repress unwanted reporters, they get to prevent them from capturing good footage and generates zero international outcry because it’s:
1) peaceful and non-harmful
2) bloody hilarious for the people watching at home
Ugly Canuck

Can’t wait for the Western media coverage of the anniversary Mexico City massacre of 1968 – or will they be too busy covering US military aid to the Mexican Gov, for to fight the “narco-war”?

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/mexico/facts.htm
Anonymous

Are you sure they weren’t goons for the Umbrella Corporation and were actually in Raccoon City?
Anonymous

So whatÂ´s the differenc? Here in Madrid we are literally infested with CCTV surveillance. And nobody gives a fuck…
Bugs

@2 – When I was doing the tourist thing in and around Beijing some years ago with my dad, we had loads of Chinese tourists asking to take their photos with us. From the ones we managed to speak with (either they had some English or our friend translated) they were visiting from more remote cities and towns and had never met a white person before, especially two white guys with blonde hair. They weren’t nearly as interested in taking photos with the dark-haired people with us; if they were secret police then there was some crazy racial profiling going on!

I have a friend currently working in a small town in Zambia who’s having the same experience: all the kids want their photo taken with the white woman.
Anonymous

I’ve always marveled at how China’s demonstrated desire to be respected is so often compromised by its never ending childish behavior.