By Ersatz Culture: I was super-happy that Rcade wrote up the Smofcon “What can we learn from Chengdu?” panel, as this was something that I felt definitely needed doing, but it wasn’t a task that I relished taking on personally.
However, there are a few additional comments I’d like to add, which I wouldn’t have expected Rcade or anyone else to know about, but which I feel are pretty relevant. I’ll tackle things in the order they appeared his piece, even if that’s possibly not the best logical structure for a standalone article.
These sponsorships will not be accounted for in the convention’s financial report, Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow revealed during a panel discussion in December at Smofcon, a conference for convention planners. “None of that appears on our financial report because we didn’t get any money out of the deal. The convention never saw that money. What the convention saw was Hugo finalists who would show up and their plane ticket was taken care of and their hotel room was taken care of. It means that our financial report is completely accurate and totally misleading.”
It is perhaps worth noting that a number of contracts covering aspects of the Worldcon do appear on various Chinese internet sites. I don’t have an exhaustive collection of these, and I believe that other people may have more complete records. For example, a contract with item number SCIT-GN-2023080147 is for the post Hugo ceremony party, and had a winning bid of 488,500 yuan, or around $68k USD. Another contract covering communications and the con websites may be of interest to Filers, as it explicitly mentions File 770 as one of a number of sites to monitor and respond to. The value of that contract is listed as 765,000 yuan, or around $107k USD.
Whether these contracts show up on any future financial report remains to be seen. [Click for larger image.]
The Smofcon discussion has drawn attention since Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford revealed last week that Chengdu Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty manipulated the nominations and final vote…
This is a minor and pedantic point, but it’s a bit of a touchy subject for me. As far as I’m aware, I was the first person to raise the Smofcon Chengdu panels on social media on January 28th, which was also run on that day’s Scroll. This was over two weeks before the Barkley/Sanford report was published, which makes no mention whatsoever of Smofcon or indeed Smofs. Of course, that report has massively escalated coverage of all the issues around Chengdu, but the subject of Smofcon in conjunction with that report was raised by other people.
Chengdu sponsors “were not particularly intrusive,” Yalow said, but the con could not change a sponsored panel’s scheduled time or panelists without consulting that sponsor.
I haven’t had time to dig out references to back this up, but I believe there were a high number of changes to scheduling of the non-sponsored, more fannish or literary panels. This caused stress to the people who were on those panels, causing scheduling conflicts with their other activities, etc. That’s probably not attributable to the sponsors, but it does feel like the fan and literary panels were treated as second-class citizens.
I’m going to sidetrack here slightly, but can I remind people of an item I wrote up in the November 11th Pixel Scroll, regarding how the con’s commercial activities impacted the more fannish stuff? This was part of a long write-up of a long Chinese-language article from a mainstream magazine, presented here via machine translation with minor manual edits, and with my emphasis added:
Previous conventions would set up a memorial area, which is a place for middle-aged and elderly science fiction fans to reminisce and reminisce about the past. In 2017, the British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss [who had previously visited Chengdu, and has several works published in China] passed away. There was a small space at the World Science Fiction Convention that year, displaying his works, and photos from his life, as well as some of his treasure possessions, and a black and white TV playing back interviews with him. In 2023, Aldiss’ daughter Wendy had also come to Chengdu. She told our reporters that the Chengdu Worldcon was originally going to hold an exhibition for those photos, but it was not possible “because of a lack of space.” …
[Double Hugo finalist, CEO of the publisher 8 Light Minutes, and member of the Chengdu concom] Yang Feng originally planned to stage a commemorative exhibition at the convention, in honour of Mike Resnick, the former editor-in-chief of the American science fiction magazine “Galaxy’s Edge”. After Resnick’s death in 2020, his collection and books were put up for online auction, and 8 Light Minutes bought a large number of items. “Look, this is full of his things,” said Yang Feng, pointing to a glass cabinet. Initially, the organizers promised an exhibition area of 70 square meters. Worried about missing out, “thousands of yuan [was spent] on freight shipping” the collected items. However, the exhibition area ended up being occupied by several technology companies, and Yang Feng was only given a glass cabinet.
Whilst this was probably not directly related to any of the sponsors, I believe it does show how priorities can change for what is supposed to be a fan-run con when business interests are involved.
There was one part of Chengdu that disallowed sponsors. “One of our ‘do not break this rule ever under any circumstance’ was no sponsorship in respect to the Hugos,” Yalow said.
I guess if you don’t mention that someone won a Hugo when you use them in an advertorial for one of the sponsors, that was published on the con’s website, then it doesn’t count as “in respect to the Hugos”?
The moderator Coxen read the question aloud: “One of the objections to Raytheon as a sponsor for DC 3 was not just who they were but the perceived lack of transparency around it. How do you think we could reconcile that with the effective but relatively subtle sponsorship Chengdu had?”
To be clear: no-one on the panel ever mentioned Raytheon in the main discussion about sponsorships, although they did namecheck Google and Boeing. It was only when an audience member at the very end asked a question that the most controversial Worldcon sponsor ever was included in the discussion.
She [Tammi Coxen] responded jocularly. “Nobody knew who the sponsors were, at least from the West, so nobody asked you hard questions about them from the West!”
Yalow dodged the question. “That’s a political question that is in a sense above my pay grade,” he said.
I guess SMOFs don’t read File 770?
In the October 9th Pixel Scroll, I wrote an item with the title “Who’s sponsoring the Chengdu Worldcon?”, pointing out that the two named sponsors in the Chengdu section of the just-released WSFS Business Meeting agenda did not match what had been previously announced at the June 12th Brand Conference, which named China Telecom as the first sponsor.
The photos from that Brand Conference show Yalow, McCarty and Montgomery both in the audience and on stage. The China Telecom logo can be seen on a large video wall, in English, so all three of them would surely have seen it. [Click for larger images.]
Observation 1: Per the Diane Lacey emails, June 12th is one week after Dave McCarty said that he would be arriving in China i.e. it seems almost certain that in the same visit that included this brand conference, he was also working on interfering with the Hugo nominations.
Observation 2: Whilst I wouldn’t expect someone to pick up on this in the bustle of a flashy PR event, perhaps they would have been curious enough to have researched who exactly China Telecom were after the fact? That person would have quickly learned from Wikipedia that
“In January 2021, China Telecom was delisted from the NYSE in response to a US executive order.[27] The same year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoked China Telecom’s operating license in the U.S. for national security reasons.[28] However, China Telecom (Americas) Corp plans to keep offering other services on United States soil.[29] In March 2022, the FCC designated China Telecom (Americas) Corp a national security threat.[30]“
As I am not a US citizen, what US agencies might think about China Telecom is fairly academic to me. Perhaps I’m being naive, but following the 2013 revelations from Edward Snowden, I’d be surprised if their relationship with China’s government is much different from US telcos and tech companies and the NSA/CIA/etc. However, given the history with the Raytheon sponsorship, maybe someone on the Chengdu concom might have wondered whether China Telecom might not be seen as a problematic sponsor? NB: As I understand it, China Telecom are one of the big three mobile phone networks in China, so I imagine for a Chinese Worldcon attendee, their sponsorship of the event would be no more controversial than, say, AT&T or T-Mobile sponsoring a Worldcon in the west.
The October 11th Pixel Scroll contained a further update about the sponsors. In it, I linked to a Chinese language WeChat/Weixin post from the con’s account, that listed all the actual sponsors, with brief descriptions of what business sector they operated in, thanks to help from a few different people online who researched them.
If after all that coverage “[n]obody knew who the sponsors were”, then I guess I was wasting my time doing the daily Chengdu write-ups.
One slightly curious thing is that Huawei is not listed as an official sponsor, but their branding did appear on at least one panel, at which (IIRC) one or two of their employees appeared. Additionally, per the Smofcon panel, they paid, or offered to pay, the expenses for at least one guest. Huawei might be considered another controversial sponsor, given the multiple entries in the relevant section of their Wikipedia page. However, despite them being namechecked at least twice, this did not provoke any reaction at Smofcon. (Disclosure: I’ve owned a couple of Huawei Android devices in the past, and both I thought were decent and offered good value-for-money for their price point. And again, they are a mainstream mass-market brand in China and many other countries, so their inclusion would not seem surprising to a Chinese attendee.)
I still intend to write-up the other Chengdu panel from Smofcon, which features three of the employees of Chengdu Business Daily from the Chengdu concom, plus Yalow, McCarty and Montgomery. There are elements of that video that I find much more upsetting than this “What did we learn from Chengdu?” panel. However, properly writing it up will involve a fair bit of re-reading of con reports and other research, in order to properly discuss some of that video’s content. I know that at least one Chinese member of the con has now purchased a Smofcon membership in order to watch that video, and perhaps they will also have comments to make on it.