@cstross I'm the person who wrote much (most?) of the Chengdu coverage on File 770 that you link to as a reference. Certainly all the daily updates between late September and early November were written by me.
As it's 00:30, I'm not inclined to write anything long up, but I will say that whilst Chinese fandom might be isolated in many ways (language, visa issues) they are very aware of lots of stuff that goes on in the rest of the world.
@cstross A major factor in me doing the write-ups was that I felt they deserved reciprocal coverage in the Anglosphere.
I suspect some of my Chinese contacts will have already seen your piece, but I'll check now, and maybe they'll have some comment.
Also, IIRC SF World published some of your stories for the first time last year. Do you have any direct contact with them? At least 3 SF World employees of them were on the Chengdu concom, so maybe they can tell you more?
@ErsatzCulture I have only very tenuous contact with SF world, and while I sold them translation rights to some stories, it wasn't as recently as last year (I suspect they have a large back-list inventory pile).
(CSFDB is the Chinese equivalent of ISFDB; I work on the latter, & I've been in contact with people who work on the former, which is a large part of how I got embroiled in all of this.)
BTW, dunno if you've ever seen this (Time Traveller's Almanac)? I'm long overdue on sending it on to the intended recipient, another contributor...
@cstross What I'm hearing: a global event that's been running for decades, with an annual budget that must run in the millions of dollars, gets to pretend it's only a bunch of fans volunteering to set up a little get-together. When it ends up taking place in frickin' China, nobody thinks to help the poor sods pussy-foot around the obvious issues, given the famous openness of the host country. Instead people wash their hands of the entire thing, claiming it couldn't have been anticipated. Right?
@felix "Annual budget that must run in the millions of dollars"—nope, unless you look to the very largest worldcons the budget's unlikely to break $1M. And if they run a surplus they usually start by refunding the membership fees of volunteer workers and program participants.
You fail to factor in the amateur aspect of the thing. It's like a pub meet-up that accidentally snowballed into an international incident.
@cstross Perhaps. Don't get me wrong, it's good to know it was likely an honest fuck-up as opposed to corruption, but this spells "we take the credit, you take the risks" in letters the size of the Hollywood sign. How appropriate.
@felix The general assumption people are making, that there was malfeasance involved, begs the question; cui bono? There's no incentive for financial graft because nobody's being paid (except hotels and conference centres); the only currency in play is reputation. And the reputational damage here is great. So it's almost certainly cock-up not conspiracy.
"Chengdu Business Daily" is an unlikely name for an organization comprising people working for free, wouldn't you think? They had at least 4 people on the concom, and 2 on the Hugo team.
@ErsatzCulture@cstross@felix That's likely the CCP members assigned to be sure all messaging coming out of the con was in line with Party directives. You know there had to be CCP involvement with this event that took place in the eyes of the world, right? The reputation that counted here is that of China, not any individuals.
Not sure if I'm missing your point, or if your question is rhetorical.
Based purely on reported membership count, it would be surprising if none of the Chinese concom were so affiliated.
As I've stated in a few places, I'm far from comfortable that I've been the one researching & documenting this stuff, because I don't have the language skills or cultural knowledge to properly do it justice. But no-one else was stepping up for the job - do you want to take a go?
@ErsatzCulture@cstross@felix My point was just that it wasn't about profit, as putting on a Worldcon is a labor of love, or at least it is here in the USA. All the fan-run cons are. No one makes money off these events except the venues and the vendors.
Or reporters or other paid media people. The Chengdu Business Daily sounds like a newspaper or website, but the con is unlikely to be paying them.
I think you've got the payer/payee relationship the wrong way round.
Assuming I'm reading these contract summaries correctly, and Google Translate hasn't made errors, CBD are the ones paying for this stuff.
But no-one else (outside China) seemed to be terribly interested in looking into and understanding all this, and now we have endless WSFS Inc and similar discussions taking up the oxygen in the room.
(Disclaimer: I did not attend the worldcon last year and have no Chinese connections or knowledge of the language.)
In previous worldcons, corporate sponsorship was sometimes obtained for the Hugo awards (and could be controversial—there was a row over Raytheon sponsorship at the 2021 worldcon). So could this company have been sponsoring part of the con for advertising/marketing?
I wrote all the sponsor stuff up in great detail for File 770 last year, but it was yet another thing that no-one else seemed bothered about, including the fact that the sponsor list they submitted for the Business Meeting minutes bears little resemblance to the official sponsors announced a short while later.
Add comment