Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s been a bad week here. The Sichuan earthquake is, of course, dominating the news and finally kicking the torch relay out of the spots. In fact, there has been much Chinese criticism of the relay now that it has returned to home territory, with calls for it to be suspended and the money saved [...]

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I have been in Beijing for the past two days. Later this morning I will go to Beijing West Train Station to meet the 16 folks coming in from Qinghai, and then we’ll head back to Tianjin. The weather is great in the capital city. Yesterday I spent the day taking photos, and, of course, [...]

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The Chair

I can’t begin to tell you how often over the past ten years traveling within China that I’ve wished I could … just … sit … down. Knee pain? Lower back stiff ‘n sore on another cold morning? Nerves a little bit edgy from the crowd? Be nice to have a place [...]

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Photo 03353
If I could post the photo I write about here, I would. But I can’t. It’s China again, those little rascals. They’re still blocking. They just can’t help themselves. But blog posts are going through, at least for now. I could probably upload the photo, but since I have no [...]

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Posting-in-the-blind test. We received word this morning that blogspots.com has been opened in Beijing, the first time since October 23, 2007. These windows seem to only stay open for very brief periods as the Chinese get more and more security-minded (read “uncommonly paranoid, though well within the historic bounds of Chinese government.” If there had [...]

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I just read on Danwei.org that Blogspots has been unblocked, and one has to wonder why. It is Day Two of the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a jittery time which has been the latest excuse for major crackdowns against anyone who is perceived as having an ax to grind [...]

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Last night we got a taste of what’s to come over the next year. For the last several years we’ve watched from our 10th floor perch as a new stadium has been in the process of being built across the street to host football (soccer) competitions for the 2008 Olympics. There has been a rush [...]

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Well, something has gone awry. Internet access has been seriously altered since yesterday afternoon at about 2 PM. Could not download email from either Yahoo or Google (both of which I have as POP 3 forwarding accounts), though I was still able to get to each email site via the web. The Yahoo website was [...]

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I wrote this piece yesterday and posted it to a listserv I belong to before I realized that yesterday blogspot.com had been unblocked here in China. Or maybe the block was just in Tianjin. Hard to know who blocks what and where the blocks originate. Some seem to be national and others local. Controlling access [...]

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The Flickr site came back within a couple of hours, which was reassuring … at least for the moment. The problems with access to the Internet have been very problematic since the end of November when the only ISP we can possibly use started chugging to a near-halt. Email was difficult to download, though if [...]

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