Fun While It Lasted

There that goes. Appears as if the glorious PRC has once again placed my blog site, as well as anyone else's, behind the Great Firewall. This means that, once again, I'll be incapable of viewing my own posts or anyone else's who is hosted by blogspot.com.

The most annoying part of this is that I was just getting fully sucked into the "blogosphere." I had experienced an "instalanche" and I was linking with strangers. Sounds dangerous, I know, but I used protection. (Somewhere someone will laugh at that.)

My own blog aside (and all those other wonderfully addictive blogs listed on the side of my page there), the People's Republic went even further this time, rolling previously available sites behind the GFW, e.g. the Wall Street Journal. I'm not sure why the sudden crackdown on a reputed news source that previously stood on good terms with the Party gets the axe, but, well, there that went.

The censored media will never cease to shock me. As an American, it is difficult to imagine a life where I can't say/write/publish/read/hear/disseminate anything I wish. I constructed an activity a while ago that revolved around things Americans took for granted (milk comes in cartons or jugs, not bags; the date is mm/dd/yy; etc.) and the first item on the list was simply the First Amendment. Many of my students couldn't comprehend it.

I know the American media can be annoying. They can over-analyze, over-hype, under-play, and hound you at every corner; but I'd rather constant unwanted information at my command than a drought of desired. Check my posts around the times of the London bombing, Katrina, or the recent water fiasco here in Harbin. I can't handle being out of the loop, and you can't fault the American media for ever letting anyone fall out of the loop.

Maybe the Chinese need the censorship for a reason, but I can't think of any that I could ever agree with. But then, well, American in China = culture gap the size of the Pacific.

So, in the meantime, please send me emails of good articles from reliable sources if I'm to keep up with the rest of the world. In the meantime, I'll be sitting around waiting for the local newspaper to dry.

UPDATE: Another perfect example: A 250,000+ man protest marched the streets of Kong Kong yesterday in support of democracy. This event was not reported by the Chinese-language newspapers. It received only a small mention from the (yes, "the") English-language newspaper here. However, the English language newspaper did not mention the number "250,000+," but only described the quantity off protesters as being "a few."