After Malaysia’s ‘Miss Tourism Pageant expells Miss Tibet‘ due to pressure from China, Imagethief again notices that the Communist Party of China is public-relations deficient.:

Ignore for a moment that beauty pageants are insipid (and muslim Malaysia seems like an odd place for a pageant, although its large number of ethnic Chinese are less wound about such things). If it were a question of international recognition, a political statement or a major piece of journalism I could understand diplomatic involvement. But a beauty pageant? Do you have a hobby? Friends? A dog to walk? A charity to start? Visas to issue? Is there really nothing better that the Chinese consulate in Malaysia could be doing than obsessing about beauty pageants?

Plus, it’s obviously bad PR for the CPC to be attacking this cutie.

UPDATE: Angry Chinese Blogger has more.

Via ESWN, 11 people are being tried for criminal use of the internet.  But it’s not about politics, it’s about porn.

So what exactly were they doing that constituted criminal behavior? Well, this should have been easy to guess.  As a country, China has the second largest number of Internet users.  When Chinese people get on the Internet, most of them are not banging the keyboard to talk about freedom or democracy.  Similarly, as a country, the United States has the largest number of Internet users and most Americans do not get on the Internet to talk about the privatization of social security or the nomination of John Bolton as US Ambassador to the United Nations.  The common thing about the United States and China is that the most popular subject on the Internet is … pornography.
The name of the web site in this case is "99bbs.com."  It was founded in 2002 by a 19-year-old Fujian resident named Wang Rong.  The web servers for the website are located in the United States, and therefore beyond the reach of Chinese law enforcement.  The web site may have begun as a general interest forum, but in 2003 it began to distribute pornographic movies, pictures and articles.  During this time, Wang Rong recruited the defendants over the Internet to manage various aspects of the operations.