Actually, aside from the “prestige” and national pride reasons for wanting to host a convention like this, it’s also a source of foreign tourists, who will be staying in hotels locally and eating at local restaurants. If they did, in fact, spend $150,000 to stuff the ballot box, I wonder if that will pay in increased tourism dollars.
From what I understand, science fiction is a tightly regulated political tool in China. The wrong messages just don’t get published.
Very interesting - does there exist a chart of total votes, with the spread between the contenders, for the last few conferences?
Dan
Worldcon site selection is sometimes unopposed - a little quick googling finds that the site selection for 2015 was contested - with these results 2015 Worldcon Site Selection - Fancyclopedia 3 (1300 valid votes)
That being said, I’m inclined to think that the Chengdu votes were from actual science fiction fans in China. That doesn’t mean that I’m happy with the selection (I’m not gong to be attending) - but one can maintain a) it’s bad to have a Worldcon in China because of human rights issues, without holding b) the site selection was manipulated by the Chinese government.
Even if the votes were cast by actual science fiction fans, that doesn’t mean that China didn’t buy the votes. Consider fans like @Wendell_Wagner, who wanted to vote, but then decided against paying the vote fee. Now consider fans like him, but in China. Would those fans have voted if someone else were paying the fee for them? Probably. And now consider fans who would have liked to go to the convention (at least virtually), but couldn’t even justify the cost for that, and now imagine someone offering to pay that for them, too.
And in the early 1990s, that big Women’s Right Conference attended by, among others, HRC.
It’s certainly possible; I just don’t think it’s very likely (I may be wrong, of course). I’d like to think that Worldcon is a hugely significant event, but am somewhat doubtful that it stands out at all among the various international events being held in China on a near daily basis.
Just to add, as amply discussed elsewhere, the main reason China got the 2022 Winter Olympics is that practically no one else was willing to put up that kind of cash. China was. Nor would it surprise me, considering the disreputable nature of the IOC, if a bunch of Chinese money was being advanced under the table, too. And then the head of the IOC has the audacity to say, in effect, “what human rights violations?”.
Less someone thinks my concerns about China are totally baseless, there is this from our own government:
Yeah. That’s a big concern.
And this happened at this year’s Discon III (Worldcon 79): The Chair of Discon III in Washington DC has issued a public apology for accepting funding/sponsorship from Raytheon Intelligence And Space, and for letting them co-sponsor the Red Carpet Ceremony, blindsiding guests and Guests Of Honor with a large “RAYTHEON” sign as they arrived.
Wow.
Good apology, tho.
I checked the history of past WorldCons for comparison, and this is definitely a new low. They only held one in the Jim Crow South (New Orleans 1951), and other than that all of them up to now have been held in fully functional democracies. For shame.
The location of each Worldcon is chosen by vote by paying members. If somebody put together a bid for Easter Island, and a third of the population of Easter Island bought memberships and voted for it, then a Worldcon would be held on Easter Island and all everyone else could do about it is whine.
I would hope it’s not that simple; I would think that the proposed host city would have to demonstrate sufficient available hotel rooms, event space and accessibility via international flights. Much as there are specific requirements for hosting the Olympics.
Worldcons aren’t hosted by cities. They are located in cities (so far) but the city itself plays no role, completely unlike the Olympics. A Worldcon bid is a group of individual people getting together and saying “Hey, let’s have the next party in my town. I could rent this hotel.” As far as I can tell there are no special requirements for the con—accomodations are just an incentive to get people to vote for it.
Nope. If Athol, Idaho, with a population of 692 and the major lodging being the New Athol
Motel convinced enough people to vote for it, that is where the convention will be.
Well, that does at least call for some evidence of an available site (“adequate evidence of an agreement with the proposed site’s facilities, such as a conditional contract or a letter of agreement”).
Yes, but those are pretty minimal requirements to submit a bid. You basically just need a moderate sized hotel convention facility. Worldcon still has a good deal of prestige due to its age and the Hugo Awards it presents, but it’s actually a fairly small convention. The last in-person Worldcon, in 2019, had about 6,500 attendees (a pretty big turnout by Worldcon standards). And that’s total paid attendance by ticket sales (even though Worldcon insists it sells “memberships” not “tickets”) - actually daily attendance was probably substantially less. In contrast, in 2017 Dragon*Con had 80,000 attendees, and GenCon had 70,000 in 2019.
I’m personally skeptical that the Chengdu vote was rigged by the Chinese government. Ordinary fan interest seems like a perfectly plausible explanation. China is a huge country, and it’s never hosted a Worldcon. If some sci-fi fans in Chengdu got together to make a bid and networked with other Chinese sci-fi fans to get support - “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to hold a Worldcon and host the Hugo awards here in China?” or even, “Isn’t it time that China finally hosted a Worldcon? It should be our turn now.” - it doesn’t seem to me like it would be that hard to rustle up a couple of thousand genuine votes in country of 1.44 billion.
And yet they all failed to submit valid addresses making it essentially impossible to verify the votes. That’s the part that tips me towards “organized scheme”. I would assume (possibly incorrectly) that any organized scheme involving a couple thousand people in China has, at least, tacit governmental support.