Absurdity, Allegory and China

The last two mornings have seen capital sunrises in the capital city, and below are a few photos of Beijing architecture from both mornings, shortly after sunrise. (Click on each photo for a larger version that opens in a lightbox.)

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In case there is anyone left on the planet who actually holds out any hope of substantive ethnic autonomy in western China, you need to take a look at China’s railroad plans, which includes a translation of an interview by the German edition of Spiegel news magazine with a member of the Chinese Academy of [...]

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(This post began as a comment in response to comments to my previous post, Civilized Chaoyang: What Was It Before?. It “grew” into this. I could post another photographic example of the Civilized Chaoyang Campaign, but I won’t. Even I’d consider that as “piling on.” The “new grads” alludes to one of the comments, by [...]

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What’s the role of Web 2.0 tools in the political sphere, especially in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes?  Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky take on this and other issues regarding the real power (or lack of it) of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking programs that have been hailed as revolutionary democratizing tools in this [...]

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Blogs and tweets are alive with the sound of Google v. China. The bare bones details can be found from hell to breakfast, though a good place to start is Danwei’s Bye bye Google. The chatter right now is incessant, though other than the fact that they’ve pulled the plug on censorship, weighed anchor and [...]

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There is a good piece by John Leicester in the Seattle Times concerning the former Chinese gymnast, Dong Fangxiao, who won a bronze medal at the Sydney 2000 Olympics: China leaves underage gymnast in the cold. Ms Dong is now at the center of a records falsification storm, abandoned by the officials who most likely [...]

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Google just can’t seem to keep themselves out of the news. With the developing tales of Chinese hacking – possibly traced to Jiaotong Univertsity in Shangahi and a particular class taught by a Ukranian prof at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province – and their warning to China that they would be, sometime in the [...]

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Here’s a question from the “things may not always be what they seem” file. Is Google’s rushed and premature rollout of its latest product, Buzz, related to its ongoing cyber tussle with China? With the world’s two most popular social networking products, Facebook and Twitter, blocked in the People’s Republic (PRC), and Google believed to [...]

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I’ve ranted in here for the past two days concerning Google’s saddling of all Gmail account holders with Buzz, and what that might mean for info/data miners in countries where public security bureaus use geek goons to harvest information and lists. I think that if you have people in your Gmail contacts list who might [...]

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I am a hard sell when it comes to supporting conspiracy theories. That said, I am also not one to buy into private corporations’ self-promoting jingles, even if they have a long trail of mission statements, supportive philosophical documents, digitally spinning prayer wheels and mumbled mantras. Google doesn’t get a pass because they preach a [...]

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