Via the Asia Business Intelligence (ABI) blog, a summary of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s senate testimony on China’s currency.

Greenspan informs U.S. Congress that revaluing the renminbi will not increase manufacturing activity or jobs in the United State.
Listen to the entire testimony to the Senate Panel on U.S.-China Economic Relations. It was a spirited debate, with Greenspan and Snow face to face in the ring. One, and only one, of them at his rhetorical finest.

I agree… and it wasn’t Snow. Video is here:

Greenspan’s testimony starts at around 47 minutes, Snow’s testimony starts from 56 minutes. A copy of Greenspan’s testimony is also available here. Greenspan, sensibly, attacks the tariff that has been proposed in Congress should China not revalue its currency:

The broad tariff on Chinese goods that has recently been proposed, should it be implemented, would significantly lower U.S. imports from China but would comparably raise U.S. imports from other low-cost sources of supply. At only slightly higher prices than prevail at present, U.S. imports of textiles, light manufactures, assembled computers, toys, and similar products would in part shift from China as the final assembler to other emerging-market economies in Asia and, perhaps, in Latin America as well. Few, if any, American jobs would be protected.

Both Greenspan and Snow are worth listening to. The Senators, as ABI notes, have some entertainment value:

Several senators jumped on the pile, as they are wont to do. One performed an execrable impression of Mike Tyson chewing on Holyfield’s ear. (Holyfield won, nonetheless.) Worth your time, if only for entertainment value.

SinoEye is a new find, today the author argues that, environmental concerns aside, killing whales or sharks is no worse than killing most of the animals used in Western dishes.:

Killing is an ugly thing. Animals kill and eat each other. Humans unnecessarily kill and eat animals, this happens all over the world. More attention should be paid as to how these foods are processed, and enforcing control to prevent extinction of any species. Chinese and Japanese people have seen the documentaries too - more and more they are becoming aware of the issue. Just like how western people see their McLibel documentaries, some many decide not to eat this stuff anymore, or at least make more informed choices…..
Whaling and shark-finning may be an environmental and animal rights issue, but it should not be used to vilify Asian culture.

I’m a pescetarian (see Dan for the definition of that) so I sympathize with vegetarian arguments. Still, I I have tried weird food in Asia that is non-pescetarian and non-vegetarian simply because I wanted a different experience. Thankfully in Shanghai I can eat really weird stuff without having to touch mammalian meat.:

Tomorrow, for instance we will eat these "vegetarian hedgehog hydnum balls." There’s decent Chinese vegetarian food in Shanghai - which is an improvement over both Singapore and Hong Kong. Plus, where else can you find vegetarian hedgehog hydnum balls? I have never seen real  hedgehog hydnum balls offered at a restaurant. If I did I would likely try them just for the sake of experimentation. But now, I’ll be able to resist that temptation because I’ve had mock hedgehog hydnum balls.

It’s amazing what can be done with soy protein. And it’s healthy wonderful stuff too.

Wait… what’s that Japundit?

A fertility expert in London is claiming that consuming too much soya can interfere with human conception.
Has anyone bothered telling China about this?

Crap! Sorry Lisa, no mock hedgehog balls for you.

Hmmm…

Here’s a thought: if Taiwan is considered a province of China, renegade or otherwise, why do Taiwanese-owned cars in China have to use black licence plates?
(Black plates are reserved for non-Chinese nationals only.)

Via SerialDeviant

Bingfeng has written a rebuttal to Isaac Mao’s labeling of Microsoft as Evil.

Bingfeng also rebuts my accusation that he supported the banning of ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’ and other terms from the titles of blogs on MSN Spaces’ China service. While he didn’t directly say that he did, I think the support of Microsoft’s China business strategy more-or-less amounts to the same thing.

Beyond that, Microsoft is setting a dangerous precedent by going beyond the censorship requirements mandated by the CPC. If one of the world’s largest companies finds it necessary to do that, then what will smaller entrants to the market do? Great job at trailblazing Mr Gates.

Still, I have had this argument in the less authoritarian environment of Singapore. While I take a libertarian view on free speech issues, I will admit that the ‘other side’ has a point.

Bingfeng writes:

let me elaborate my points here - i am not supporting the ban of any nice words on the web (as mr. asiapundit misinterpreted me).
labeling something you don’t like as "evil" is quite easy, how to make
things move and advance requires something more than simplistic
labeling ("evil"), confrontational criticisms (like some media
commentators did) or merely an escape (the levi case), it requires
patience, wisdom and "change-seat perspectives". now you ask me what’s
my point, simple, let MS Spaces compromise and in, to help young people
learn independent and critical thinking, to foster a culture in which
people tolerate and benefit from different voices (in MS Spaces), to
contribute to the local communities and prove MS is a positive power,
not a danger to social stability, to create a virtuous circle and
therefore detoxify the me-you and black-and-white mentality (existing
in both chinese and western sides). all these, and much much more, are
valuable work for MS to do and are important for chinese as well.

According to an article pointed out by China Words, China has decided to move forward with an international television station along the lines of Al-Jazeera, seeing it as a possible foreign-policy tool.:

Among his set of six canvases that were mostly covered with images of Saddam Hussein’s two sons was one entitled Al-Jazeera TV, an abstract work that Wang said represented the role the television channel had played in challenging the dominance of Western networks.
Followed not just by Chinese artists but also by government officials and intellectuals, the Aljazeera story has become a sort of model for China’s own attempts to create a globally recognised television network….
Discarding their original preconceptions during the Iraq war, Chinese officials are now looking at Aljazeera from a different angle. How can a developing country produce an internationally successful television network?

How indeed? Well, for starters, not like this… (Richard Willmsen describes CCTV International)

You have this guy, for example, who preens and stammers his way through some pretend economics programme, accompanied by a Chinese woman whose attempts to pronounce the word ‘aluminium’ brought tears of pity to my eyes - although I hasten to add that he didn’t do much better. There is a young American woman who, during an incisive piece I saw on the important subject of how mobile phones, like, exist?, and how, like, people in China use them?!? changed her clothes no fewer than seven times, which is more costume changes than in an average Kylie Minogue concert. Then there is a fairly geriatric guy who provides the links between the domestic news (propaganda) and the foreign news (footage from international news agencies with all the interesting bits cut out), and whose exclusive qualification for the job seems to be an Australian accent. Also, viewers are treated to the sight of a team of wide-boys in ill-fitting suits who tell us about China’s weather. They do it surprisingly quickly considering the size of the country. They also bounce in a jolly and wide-eyed fashion around the screen, and I could try and think of something nice to say about them but to be absolutely honest what most comes to mind is the word wankers.

This is a surprise, of sorts, and a moment to be hopeful. A government-appointed fact finding team in Indonesia have concluded that the State Intelligence Agency (BIN) was involved in the assassination of Indonesia’s best known anti-corruption and human-rights activist Munir Said Thalib.

Jakartass has a wrap, which notes that one of the country’s political fixtures, former intelligence chief Henrdopriyono, may be in trouble:

As for BIN’s suggested involvement, it can’t have helped that
former State Intelligence Agency (BIN) chief Hendropriyono and his
former deputy Muchdi Purwopranjono … both … failed to comply with
two summonses for questioning by the fact-finding team investigating
the murder of human rights campaigner Munir.
In
a staggering display of the scornful arrogance that was prevalent
during the era of former dictator Suharto, Hendropriyono … publicly
mocked the team, accusing it of being completely unprofessional and
seeking only to tarnish his name.
The
dapper retired four-star lieutenant general, nicknamed ?the Butcher of
Lampung? by his critics over a 1989 massacre of Muslim youths, is now
suing two members of the team for slander. His lawyer has derided the
late Munir and callously questioned why President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono felt it necessary to form a special team to investigate the
activist?s death.

Via the now-banned-in-China Lost Nomad a link that will distract me from blogging this evening, PBS has put their entire Frontline North Korea documentary Kim’s Nuclear Gamble online.

Laowai 19790204  has written to his Senators:

Dear Senators Gregg and Sununu,
I would like to draw your attention to this post by
TV-reporter-turned-blogger Rebecca Mckinnon:
http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2005/06/confirmed_all_t.html
In it she describes how companies like Microsoft and Cisco Systems are  complicit in providing the architecture for China’s terrorism on free speech and pro-democracy advocates, by selling to them and installing technology that assists in the suppression of freedom of speech on the internet….
…Furthermore, in permitting this activity we are passively allowing China to wage a war of propaganda on its people, a war that has thus far helped to create the phenomenon that we very recently saw:  the riots against Japan.  It is this hatred and malice, this racism that is partly fueled by historical mis-information that we help to create, in allowing Microsoft and Cisco Systems to help China censor its internet content.

Interesting turn to frame the debate in terms of US and Japanese security, rather than simply another ‘internal matter.’ Doing so puts a different spin of suggestions, via ESWN, that encourage "the US government to invest US$100 million to provide unstoppable proxy servers."

I’m not recommending such a thing at present, serious due diligence would be needed before such a proposal is even debated, but I wouldn’t discount it as an option.  It really doesn’t step too far beyond the ideas that were behind the development of Voice of America and BBC WorldService - it just updates them.

Chinese hackers have scored a small victory against Nurse Ratched. The China Digital Times picks up on this item from the Straits Times:

Chinese hackers have defaced the website of a police-run security
company leading a new effort to strengthen government control over the
Internet.

The attack against the website of Beijing General Security Service came amid its drive to recruit a corps of 4,000 ‘Internet security guards’ to monitor the online activities of people in Beijing.

‘A security company that cannot even protect its own website can
hardly talk about security,’ the hackers wrote in a notice that
appeared on the site’s news section last week.

Co-pundit Gordon is building a directory of proxy-linked censored blogs at the Horse’s Mouth.

That’s a good start. And it’s welcome in the interim as it will likely take weeks for John at Sinosplice to insert all the needed proxies into the China Blog List.

Rebecca McKinnion has confirmed that the blackout on TypePad-hosted blogs is throughout China. As well, it has spread to the ‘blogs.com’ domain.

Rebecca’s site was accessible from Shanghai as late as yesterday afternoon, but it was only accessible via a proxy by Wednesday evening.

Thanks to the other bloggers who are drawing attention to this. I am pessimistic that any change can be imposed on the Communist Party through outside protest. It may also be too late for actions against companies that have helped build the Great Firewall. But I think it is still possible to prevent this from happening elsewhere (for instance Iran).

If Cisco removed itself from the equation in China, I have no doubt that another company would quickly take its place. Still, I would like an accounting of just how far US and European companies have collaborated with China in censoring the net and I would like to see them prevented from acting against freedom in the future. At the very least, it should be mandated that they disclose their actions.

Rebecca has information on the Internet Freedom Act, and asks:

Why doesn’t the Global Internet Freedom Act address corporate complicity at all? If you’re American, write your congressperson and demand that it should.

Fellow Tokyo resident and budding legal scholar Joe and I have
previously discussed the legality of women-only train cars in Japan.
See Joe’s take on the issue here,
or see my own prior posts here and here.

Some background information for those of you new to the subject.  In
Japan, trains and subways are packed during rush hour.  The Tokyo
Police Department reported that the number of groping cases rose from
778 in 1996 to 2,201 in 2004.  Are Japanese men just that hornier eight
years later?  Probably not — more likely, women have finally found the
courage to speak up (a major concern in the comments section of the
previous posts), and technology has paved the way.  Cell phones that
can send email and take pictures, are excellent tools for proving the
charges, finding the culprit, and promptly reporting the offense.  21st
century Japanese women have decided that they ain’t gonna take it.
This is all welcome news. 

But the official threefold increase has motivated the authorities to do
something.  Forty years ago Japan had women-only cars.  Osaka
reintroduced them a few years ago, and now some subway and train lines
in Tokyo have followed suit.  Now, during rush hours, there are train
cars for women only, also known in Tokyo as "pink cars."  For many,
this is a royal pain — the subways are cramped enough as it is.  Now
the men get shoved in even harder.  Plus, isn’t it sexist?  Would this
survive a discrimination suit in the US?  Does its implementation
violate Japan’s constitution? 

It isn’t just us star students of jurisprudence getting all pissy about
this.  Take Takahito Yamao — civil rights hero — who started an
organization to oppose women-only train cars and organize protests to
take on this sexist garbage.  So far, his group has 46 members. 

"This system is discriminating against men… We pay
the same fare and yet are labeled as evil persons. Not all men are
gropers. This is insulting."

Preach it, brother!

Yamao and his group make some good points: excluding men from some cars
doesn’t eradicate the problem of molestors; trains are packed at times
outside of rush hour.  Yamao suggests train companies install security
cameras inside each car, increase the number of guards on platforms,
and give discount tickets during the off-peak hours.  Until then, he’s
taking his protests to the front lines and defiantly riding
the pink car! Rosa Parks, step aside!

So, are the police rushing to arrest him?  Not at all: it turns out all the fuss we made over the legality of these things was for naught.  Cooperation is voluntary.  The pink signs, the broadcasts over the intercom informing commuters of the women-only cars, the entire thing is a charade!  Men can ride the pink car as long as they don’t mind ignoring the repeated polite requests from women to leave. 

I think American men would see "voluntary" pink cars and ride them just to spite the system.  In Japan, such antagonists are few and far between — but at least all 46 of them now have a support group to help them cope with their rebellion against the system.

The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P) has come up with a plan to fight the rising crime-wave by providing all beggars in the state with jobs. The state cabinet approved a plan to have a "beggar census" throughout the state and the "physically fit" ones will given employment with state’s construction agencies. The government terms beggars as "potential human resource" going waste.

      The Indian Express reports:

After the cabinet discussed the issue at length, orders went out to district magistrates in charge of all major towns, asking them to start a census of beggars in their areas. Once identified, those who are found physically fit to work will be engaged as ‘unskilled labourers’ with government construction agencies. Those who are physically challenged would first be given aides to make their lives easy before they are trained in different vocations.    
      On being asked how the government had made this connection and reached the conclusion that they needed to be roped in for work, Neera Yadav, U.P Chief Secretary said, ‘‘Since they are not a part of the mainstream of society, it is understood that they indulge in anti-social activities.’’ Yadav admitted that government agencies like Rajkiya Nirman Nigam were facing shortage of manpower. So, the beggars who were physically fit could be taken in as unskilled labourers for construction work.

U.P is the most populous state in the Indian Union, with over 140 million people. However, it remains one of the most under-developed regions in the country with high rates of illiteracy and poverty. It is one the last regions in the world still inflicted with Polio. The state is ridden with corruption and a rising crime-graph. But, due to its size it becomes the "make or break" state during national elections. The crime-wave in the state is mostly due to corruption at all levels of government, with more criminal politicians than anywhere else in India. Therefore, it is highly moronic to blame beggars for the crime wave in the state. Hopefully, the government would actually go through with this plan, if not to cut down crime, but help the most destitute who turn towards begging to make a living.

(Tuesday afternoon) It seems AsiaPundit, Glutter, BillsDue and a number of other sites are presently not directly accessible from Shanghai or Chengdu. I’m not sure if this is temporary or not, although my initial impression is that the ban on TypePad-hosted sites may have been restored.

Simon World can still be read from Shanghai, although not in Chengdu. (UPDATE: Simon is live in Chengdu, see comments)

I’d appreciate it if China-based visitors who can access would comment on whether this site is blocked in your region.

(more…)

I have had a lot of traffic from XiaXue over the past two days. Some have littered the comments section with items noting my impotence, small penis size and my love of porn. All of that is true, of course, but I’m wondering how they knew.

However, most have been civilized visitors. With that I will step up to the defense of Chloe XiaXue whose reputation has been endangered by improperly placed captions in Singapore’s Wanbao newspaper.

Chloe XiaXue, you see, is described in the caption on the left (click to enlarge) as being the Sarong Party Girl (SPG).

SPG is the blogger who ’shocked’ Singapore by posting a relatively artful black-and-white nude photo of herself on her blog. Why Singapore is ’shocked’ by this but legally permits 17 year olds to be prostitutes confuses me. Nevertheless, Singapore was ’shocked.’

While I had a sense of schadenfreude amusement over that incident, I am more sympathetic to XiaXue’s current plight; after getting an apology from Wanabo two Malaysian papers have made the same error.:

I am defamed across South East Asia. My photo is splashed across the Malaysian papers as the nude blogger who goes for regular Aids check-ups and took off my clothes for money.
Here: One stupid paper, and another stupid paper.
Even worse, for both papers it is ONLY my photo used. Happy lor, Chloe. Somebody else is paying time for your crime - your face is not even shown. Can someone tell me why I am suffering for some f**king editor’s f**king CARELESS MISTAKE?!
It will affect my career because I am only blogging now, and no brand would want to be associated with me after this. The potential damage is really not little.

I’m also concerned that SPG’s chances of a modeling gig or book deal may be damaged by this.

An item similar to the Wanabo item on SPG has been translated and reprinted at Asian Sex Gazette (not safe for work, but not seriously pornographic).

I won’t explain the title for people who don’t get the cultural reference (hint: he was in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film although he was never a character in the comic). Nevertheless, it seems that Richard Willmsen has completed the final chapter of the Da Shan Dynasty. I recommend reading the whole thing, but I’m linking to Part Seven.:

Don’t call me sir. My name’s Richard. What’s your name again?
"Jamily, sir. Er, Mr. Richard."
Jamily? Your name is Jamily?!? What’s your question, Jamily?
"Well, sir, it’s just that…I was thinking about that story you made us read, sir, Mr. Richard. The one about the picture. By that guy, er, Oswald Wo-’
Oscar Wilde, Jamily. What about it?
"What, sir?"
Don’t say ‘what, sir?’ It’s … oh it doesn’t matter. What’s your point, Jamily?
"Well, I was thinking, because, you know, Da Shan came to China in 1988, sir, and that other guy, the one you asked about yesterday? I did some research, and I found out that he was locked up under house arrest, sir, Mr.Richard, in 1989, so I thought-"
Are you suggesting that Zhao Ziyang was like the picture in the attic, while Da Shan is like the-
"Yes, sir, exactly, Mr. Richard, sir! And Da Shan is like the guy who couldn’t, I mean doesn’t, get any uglier!"

Cheem, but funny.

The Flea has discovered Singlish, from a source at Australia’s University of New England.

Since the 1960s linguists and sociologists have studied the features and the functions of English in Singapore from a number of perspectives. Those who would like to know about studies of Singapore English should look at my annotated list of the major works on Singapore English. You might also like to look at the articles which I wrote on Singapore English for Speech Therapists. David Deterding maintains a full scholarly bibliography of academic work on Singapore English.

Aiya, kena get… cheeminology! Get Coxford English lah!

(Note, my Singlish not so good. AsiaPundit admits to being ‘keng chio kia’ and rather ‘cheem.’)

I haven’t fully established how far the TypePad block extends or whether it is a block of all TypePad hosted sites. Fons has noted that some sites have not been affected, although from here I’m seeing a block of "anything.typepad.com" plus domain-mapped sites such as this one, Glutter and Andres Gentry.

It’s pointless to protest to Chinese authorities, of course, so I’ve decided to just take this lying down and continue to use a proxy to visit my own site and others.

Really, in cases like this nothing can be done. As the below article notes, it’s not just a matter of going up against the Chinese government, it’s also a matter of taking on major IT companies.

the Chinese government had no trouble keeping a firm grip on the
reins of the news media. Then came the Internet. Could the government
open the floodgates to the waves of information washing up on every
shore yet keep out the ideas it was afraid of, such as ones about
sexuality, democracy, religious expression, and Taiwanese independence?
So far, the answer has been yes. China’s Internet is the most
efficiently censored in the world. From a computer in China, try to
visit the Web site of the banned activist organization Human Rights in
China, based in New York City, and your request will be blocked by
filters in the network.Instead of the group’s home page, you’ll get an innocuous error
message such as "File not found." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites
are similarly blacklisted. The exact number can’t be determined and
changes daily.
Now China’s experiment in cyberspace censorship is about to take a
dramatic turn. A massive upgrade to the country’s Internet will soon
give China a robust, state-of-the-art infrastructure easily on a par
with any in the developed world. China Telecom Corp., in Beijing, is
investing US $100 million in what it calls the ChinaNet Next Carrying
Network, or CN2.

The former national telephone monopoly is snapping up new network
routers from four of the largest telecommunications equipment companies
in the world: Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks of the United States;
the French giant Alcatel; and Huawei Technologies, the only Chinese
company to get a CN2 contract. During the next 12 months, the
routers—the vertebrae of an Internet backbone—are to be installed in
200 cities throughout China’s 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and
municipalities.

As a demonstration of my weakness in the face of the Cisco, Juniper and Alcatel, I have decided to cave in and give them free advertising. Larger images can be obtained by clicking on the pictures. These would make keen additions to blogs hosted by TypePad, Blogspot, BlogSpirit and some other providers. I recommend that like-minded bloggers on those hosts join me in a mass display of weakness.

For those who are still not yet blocked, you can show your weakness in the face of corporate-communist collaboration by posting this:

There is no hope, surrender to Cisco and the CPC.

Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines has passed away. Though he had critics, including myself, he was - in an active sense - more instrumental in bringing down the Marcos dictatorship than Pope John Paul II was in tackling communist authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.

Rest in peace.

So the Catholic Church has lost two of its most politically-active servants this year - first Pope John Paul II and now, Cardinal Jaime sin.  He was .
He was a social conservative who always fought to have the Catholic Church play a prominent in Filipino public life whilst his religious conviction drove him to be the people’s champion against Presidential dictatorship and corruption.  He did not respect the division of Church and State, railing people against artificial birth control whilst revelling in his role as political powerbroker.
But just like you take the good times with the bad, you do the same with people.

Also visit By Jove.:

Wanbro points to a distressing China Daily item noting that China’s use of Esperanto is declining, and that the Esperanto gap between China and Europe is widening.:

"There are much fewer Chinese Esperanto speakers than European ones. Besides, their language proficiency is also lower," Yu said, adding that Esperanto is far from a "universal language" in China.
The statistics show that only 10 percent of the 10,000 Chinese speakers can use the language to conduct in-depth discussion while 40 percent are only capable of daily conversation and the other 50 percent merely know several sentences.
Yu said it is because Chinese, based on the pictographic system, is much more different from Esperanto than European languages. The difference causes difficulties in learning Esperanto for Chinese people.
However, this conclusion can hardly explain why there is a nationwide mania for English, which is also a European language.

Indeed, I’m puzzled. If anyone can think of a reason why English is more popular than Esperanto over here, please do leave a comment.

This is also troubling given China’s growing gap with Taiwan in the study of Yiddish.

Red Star News points to an item suggesting that market forces, particularly relating to the development of a competitive (though not free) media in China, are also a driving force behind rising nationalism.:

A personal anecdote serves to illustrate how the market, as much as government censorship by the Department of Propaganda and the Press and Publications Administration, is often responsible for this type of editorial decision.
A few years ago, the editors of a Beijing-based weekly with which I am acquainted were deadlocked over which article to put on their front page. The choice was between a minor story critical of Taiwan and a larger piece about a domestic issue of potentially historic significance. Unable to get his staff to reach a consensus, the chief executive decided to ask the newspaper’s distributor for his opinion. The distributor had not graduated from high school, but he knew readers’ tastes well. “Condemn Taiwan, of course,” he said. The chief executive issued his order accordingly.

Pandering to jingoistic nationalism to increase market share is reprehensible behavior. I’m so glad that doesn’t happen in America.

Michael Turton prefaces a look at Israeli arms and related technologies to China with this comment.:

Many years ago, when I was working for an independence-related organization in Washington DC, I asked one of Stephen Solarz’ staffers why the Jewish Congressman from New York City was so interested in Taiwan affairs. The staffer replied that the Congressman, long a friend of the island and one of its most influential Congressional supporters during the 1980s, saw Taiwan and Israel as small nations threatened by mighty numbers from without, and needing the support of great powers, two examples of the same case, moral commitments both. One could not be honored without the other also being honored.
It is thus hard to see Israeli arms sales to China — most recently upgrades for China’s drones — as anything but the most extreme perfidy.

Perfidy may be a bit harsh, as well as one of those words that sends people to a dictionary, but Israel’s move to get closer to China militarily and diplomatically is an exceptionally short-sighted one. While China has become a bigger arms market than Taiwan in unadjusted terms, Israel’s best interest has been and will continue to be in maintaining a warm relationship with Washington. Cuddling up to Beijing is not going to win it another ally on the Security Council.

Bingfeng Teahouse has written a provocative article in support of Microsoft’s unilateral decision to prohibit words such as "freedom" and "democracy" from the titles of blogs hosted on the MSN Spaces China service.

…Bingfeng dismissed the accusation that Microsoft’s behavior harms Chinese bloggers as simplistic and naive. Bingfeng told us his story with the Microsoft Groups, in which he was actively involoved into a movie fan club and later the fan club evolved into a virtual self-governing organization, with club chairman, CTO, CFO (for off-line activities), etc. are all elected by club members. This story, Bingfeng says, shows how important to offer such places to young people in China instead of chanting for several nice words to appear on the web. On-line communities offer the Chinese youngsters a golden opportunity to learn the skills that are critical to building a civil society in China. Given the current circumstances and constraints, Microsoft did something good to Chinese bloggers, not the opposite.

I’ve heard similar arguments from mr brown, vis-a-vis Singapore blogging, and they are worth debating. Still, I doubt mr brown would defend the banning of specific words.

Nor, for that matter does the Communist Party require it. Microsoft is going well beyond what the CPC demands in terms of censorship.

Does it make business sense?  Maybe, there is the mythical ‘China market’ to consider. Microsoft has to always keep in mind that there are 1.3 billion people over here in need of a single copy of Windows XP to pirate.

But given that Microsoft’s biggest market is in the US, I think the company made a disastrous slip with this. Sure, Cisco has been supporting China’s censorship for years - but they never banned ‘freedom’

Americans are ‘a bit sensitive’ about such things. I doubt many will find this excusable.

I certainly don’t.

(Full disclosure: I use a Mac, I browse with Firefox, I do own an xbox but I think I’ll switch to playstation rather than upgrade with the 360.)

Over at my home blog ComingAnarchy.com, I recently posted pictures of a Turkish Sunni Mosque and a Russian Orthodox Church… both in central Tokyo!

Click the posts to see the whole story and more photos, or see a sampling below.  (All photos taken by yours truly.)