The Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, committee has voted by unanimous decision not to accept passalong funds from the Chengdu 2023 Worldcon.
/s/ Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Chair, Glasgow 2024 , A Worldcon for Our Futures
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This is just wrong in so many ways, I don’t even know where to begin.
It’s a glib comment, meant more for humor and coloration. Don’t take it too seriously.
Thank you, Mike. I don’t even know why I try to embed links.
Maybe if we just think of it as tainted money – I mean, are we even sure the Chinese members of the Chengdu concom are okay? – it would make more sense that Glasgow would rather go without?
I’m of a mixed mind on this.
Yes, coming from the Chengdu Worldcon, it’s tainted money — but if my surmise is correct, the money being offered is from the U.S. bank account that we all paid into with our Site Selection fees, money that was never transferred overseas.
It’s money with which we purchased our Hugo Awards nominating and voting rights. It’s money that should be given back to us, because we were screwed out of having the legitimate Hugo Awards process to which we were entitled.
I just could not come up with a way to write a bylaw requiring vetting of potential sites using commonly uses human rights indices. I know that the US could fail this depending on the November Presidential election but I am willing to risk this. I suspect though that even though Uganda is ran by a pretty bad government in not just the oppression of LGQBT+ folks (which is really bad especially since fandom is a welcoming place and an ally) but they also have a poor record in press freedom, they will not pull the shenanigans that the Chinese did. I suspect that it would be a normal fan ran Worldcon and not used by business interests and be exploited.
@Linda Robinett said:
While I’m not super excited about the sponsorships in Chengdu, the shenanigans we know about were all perpetrated by North Americans. It’s probably important to remember that.
You are correct. The Chinese treasury was kept separate. So there were effectively two treasuries. That’s part of why no sponsorship information will be released by Chengdu.
The Chengdu Worldcon committee is required to provide a financial account of the convention. They should include a list of sponsors and the services they provided in that accounting.
These are not exceptionally burdensome requirements, as anyone who has examined a past Worldcon’s financial report can attest. As WSFS members we’re entitled to know what is being spent on behalf of our event.
As best I understand it, the treasury portion was done in two parts, yuen, and dollars. The dollars portion was handled traditionally, the yuen portion was handled entirely by Chengdu. This was partially done because exchange rates would have made a joint treasury an absolute nightmare otherwise. But it also means transparency will only be available on the dollars side of the event. We may never see the Chinese balance sheets.
The Chengdu Financial Report in the 2023 Business Meeting Agenda does have a Yuan column and a USD column but isn’t as detailed as other reports.
I believe they think the con doesn’t need to report these because they never received actual money. The sponsors paid for goods and services that benefited the con, but no dollars changed hands to show up as income and expenses. I agree that a convention acting transparently would show these as in-kind donations, but Chengdu has never shown any interest in transparency, and it seems unlikely to start now.
A case can be made that everyone who bought a supporting membership to Chengdu for the purpose of voting in the Hugos should have their money refunded.
Glasgow doesn’t want any of the taint of Chengdu. But fans might decide differently. Chengdu could announce that for the first 800 members who request it (supporting first, then attending) they will fund the purchase a supporting membership in Glasgow or Seattle or a 2027 site selection voting fee (and thus a supporting membership in 2027) for that member. The latter for those who are already members of the other two conventions.
We produced a few transcripts of Octothorpe last year but found it very timeconsuming with the auto-transcription available at that time. We are currently looking at having another go and you, Mike, will be the first to know when we get it sorted.
Given that (according to reports on BlueSky) one of Chengdu’s sponsors is under U S. sanction, it certainly seems likely to me that the legal advice — to determine whether a U.K. entity doing business in the U.S. can legally accept money from a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese entity which receives sponsorship from a U.S.-sanctioned business — might well cost more than $40,000.
^ Yes, that now does seem to move it from the “principled stand” to “no-brainer” category.
I was coming here to say that I wonder if Glasgow knew of the sponsor issues, or even that they were refusing to account for sponsors money in the financial reporting and that influenced the decision that they made.