Ban? What Ban?

The South China Morning Post has qualified its claim that Beijing authorities have ordered bar owners in the city’s popular Sanlitun drinking district to refuse service to black people during the Olympics. A report on Saturday quoted a police officer denying that such a ban was been ordered. The paper also suggested that “not all bars in the [area] had been ordered to refuse black customers,” contrary to the original claim that all bars had been asked to discriminate against black people.
The blogger Beijing Boyce, who seems to have done rather more groundwork than the Post journalist Tom Miller, has a useful take on the story here.
Meanwhile, for certain readers of my last post on the subject: my ethnicity shouldn’t matter, but I am a Hong Kong-born Eurasian, not white. Also, I did not “report” the Post’s story as truth. In fact, I took great pains to distance myself from it.