Absurdity, Allegory and China

This from Reuters, via Yahoo: China targets big websites in Internet crackdown.
China has launched a crackdown against major websites that officials accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity, including the dominant search engines Google and Baidu.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced the campaign at a meeting on Monday, [...]

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In a recent article in the WSJ, the Bush administration’s chief muffin man and ‘architect’ of the bloody madness, Karl Rove, pitched a possible explanation as to why the Bush White House has been so terribly ineffective. In what can only be described as an act of political taxidermy and stick-in-your-eye propaganda that we’ve come [...]

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I know that picking on party rags is fish-in-a-barrel sport, but it’s Christmas and I’m full of good cheer. A wander over to the (English) People’s Daily Online today found this one floating on the surface: A new year approaching amid intense turmoil,  which outlines the world financial crisis in terms that are pretty odd. [...]

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From yesterday’s Xinhua, China earmarks 73 mln USD for rural environment protection we read that the Ministry of Environmental Protection is throwing what seems to be a lot of money into the polluted countryside to deal with environmental issues.
The fund would help save 600 villages out of severe environment problems and award 100 others which [...]

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In a 2005 essay by OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architechture) partner Ole Scheeren Made in China, which appeared as the introduction to Architecture and Urbanism July 2005 Special Issue entitled CCTV by OMA, Mr. Scheeren stated:
As the national television station, CCTV has a direct relationship to the State – is information filter and propaganda machine [...]

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A good look at the machinations of the folks in censorship central of the Propaganda Department can be found in The American Scholar in an article by the Chinese-American and former PLA member Ha Jin entitled The Censor in the Mirror.

The office that Chinese writers, artists, and journalists dread and hate most is the Chinese [...]

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