Frequent readers will note that AsiaPundit has a love of maps and a fascination with internet censorship. It shouldn’t be any surprise that this grabs his attention. The Atlantic has created a map of the globe color coding countries that censor the internet.:

The Atlantic has created a censorship map based on ONI data. (I’ve archived a local mirror of the map and the accompanying article).

The accompanying article is a bit overzealous in its description of China but I liked that fact that the article specifically highlighted that Internet filtering is not exclusive to China but is spreading — essentially becoming the “norm” — worldwide. In terms of targetted content, porn is defintely targetted but the numbers are skewed by the fact that the use of commercial lists (there are open source lists too) allow countries to block a lot of porn easily. But in terms of significance porn is, in my opinion, of rather low importance. the blocking of several key sources of local language alternative information or an social movement group is much more important. The sgnificance of the content rather than the total number of sites blocked in category seems, to me, to be of more importance but is much harder to measure.

Map and text via Internet Censorship Explorer.

Technorati Tags: censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia

Times of London chief Asia Editor Richard Lloyd Parry has been out of commission recently, something AsiaPundit had noticed as he was enjoying Richards recent Thai coverage. Today on his blog, Richard explains the absence.:

I’m sorry for vanishing from this space so suddenly last week. The truth was that, by the time of Mr Thaksin’s resignation last Tuesday night, I was feeling very peculiar, to an extent that could not fully be explained by my elation at witnessing history in the making.

I had a drumming headache, tiredness, aches in the limbs and joints, a fiery thirst, and the shakes - in other words, I felt exactly as most male British tourists in Bangkok do for most of the time. Taking a shower on my last morning was easy enough, although towelling myself dry afterwards required a lot more effort, and packing my three shirts and two pairs of trousers aged me by several decades. At the airport, I looked enviously at the complacent elderly trundling by in their wheelchairs. I spent the flight back to Tokyo shivering under two blankets.

At home on Thursday night I told myself that I’d go to the doctor if I wasn’t feeling better by Monday. On Friday afternoon I made an appointment for that evening. On Saturday morning, the tests confirmed what would have seemed obvious days ago to one better in tune with his own health - I had malaria.

Not the nastiest kind of a malaria - merely Plasmodium vivax, rather than the much more complicated, and frequently drug-resistant, Plasmodium falciparum. The origin of the infection is obvious enough - the trip I made in mid-March to the Thai-Burma border. At some point, a pregnant female mosquito pushed her drinking straw through my skin and exchanged a drop of my blood for the smallest traces of her saliva, in which the vivax parasites were stowing away. Since then they had been biding their time in my liver, and now they were whooping it up in parasitic orgy, new generations breeding one after another in my red blood cells, causing the waves of fever.

Most of the economists AsiaPundit communicates with expect a slow appreciation of the Chinese currency, to a level of around 7.8 to the dollar by year end. This is one of the few outliers.:

Currency Strategists: CLSA’s Walker Forecasts Chinese Yuan Drop

April 10 (Bloomberg) — China’s yuan may fall 2.3 percent by the year-end because economic growth will slow, said chief economist Jim Walker at CLSA Ltd., the Asian investment banking arm of France’s biggest lender by assets, Credit Agricole SA.

Expansion in the world’s fastest-growing economy may cool to about 7 percent this year, from 9.9 percent last year, Walker said in an interview March 28. Foreign direct investment in China, which exceeded $60 billion in each of the past two years, may reverse as company earnings and investment drop.

Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer would not be happy. Which is a shame, South Carolina’s Graham made great friends during his last visit and had even managed to get Chinese vice premier Wu Yi to go stateside for a ‘pimp my state’ visit .

South Carolina has a good business environment and has become one of the hotspots for Chinese investment in the United States, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi said here on Sunday.

Economic and trade contacts and cooperation between the southeastern U.S. state and China have produced good results in recent years, with South Carolina’s trade with China reaching 3.26 billion U.S. dollars in 2005, Wu said at a meeting with U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, both from the state.

The vice premier said she was deeply impressed by the hospitality of the South Carolina people and the desire of the state’s businesses to cooperate with China.

South Carolina has become a hotspot for Chinese investment. China’s Hai’er Group established a home appliances production base in South Carolina in 1999, its first in North America, creating job opportunities and contributing to local economic development, she said.

Technorati Tags: china, east asia, economy, northeast asia, south carolina, yuan