Has the entire Asian expat blogosphere shut its eyes and gone to sleep, succumbing to a region-wide dearth of inspiration, or is it just me? Things just seem so slooooow today. I’m definitely grappling with a bad case of writer’s block, which is very unusual for me. So apologies to those who came here seeking my usual sharp wit and priceless insights. Perhaps tomorrow.

Last night was a bit of a surprise. My phone rang just as I was getting ready to leave work and the caller, the wife of one of the big shots at the US embassy here, invited me to a dinner party at the America Club. Forty-five minutes later, there I was.

Back in July I met them at the US Chamber of Commerce, and since then we’ve become good friends. This was his goodbye dinner to all his friends at the embassy; he’s just been restationed to Mexico City (I could tell he wasn’t too happy about this). It’s a State Department tradition that before you depart you hold a dinner and offer guests the food of the country you’re being sent to. So it was all Mexican food.

I got to meet the ambassador, who looks like he’s in his mid-30s; really nice of course, but I thought ambassadors were supposed to have white hair. I sat next to him and the head of public affairs, and they both tried to talk me into taking the test for the Foreign Service. I’m seriously thinking about it, but wonder if I’m ready to swicth gears yet again and go off in a whole new direction.

As far as blogs go, these guys know nothing. I told them all about Living in China, my own little site and about a couple of others, too. They were quite surprised when I told them about some of the “China blogs” and how diverse our points of view can be.

Come to think about it, this is a remarkably dull post. I guess I wanted to capture the moment. It was quite cool, and I really enjoyed “teaching” these diplomats about what kind of bloggers there are out there….

It’s funny how something can make an impression on you, but then you don’t think of it again until years later.

Today, for no particular reason, I suddenly remembered an extraordinary full-page ad I saw in the Wall Street Journal back when dot-com fever was at its very zenith.

The ad was simply announcing the sale of a URL, which was to be put up for auction with an opening price so outrageous you wouldn’t believe it, at least not now. But back then it didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Back then, when people were getting rich trading shares of Dr. Koop and WebVan.

The ad was elegant and formal, as though it were offering for auction a masterpiece by Rembrandt or a case of rare French brandy. A $50,000 ad for a .com address that I’m sure some lucky bidder paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

So out of curiousity, four years later, I just went to see who the lucky buyer of that URL was. Would it be Estee Lauder? Perhaps Prada? Maybe a great fashion designer? Whatever it was, it had to be of the utmost grace and raffinement.

I was surprised to see what I was led to when I clicked on www.woman.com. But then again, I wasn’t surprised at all. [Click only if you’re over 18.]

Yet another cyber-dissident bites the dust as China’s neandrathals lock him up for the most unpardonable of sins — exposing the stinking corruption of government officials.

Chinese official who exposed government corruption on the Internet has been sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted of subversion, a Hong Kong human rights group says.
The sentence, handed down on Wednesday, was the latest in a string of jailings of dissidents and coincided with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the United States and Canada.

The People’s Intermediate Court in Dazhou city in the southwestern province of Sichuan convicted Li Zhi, a 33-year-old municipal financial official, the Information Centre for Human Rights & Democracy said in a statement on Friday.

Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment.

Li wrote essays revealing corruption involving Sichuan officials on Web sites and chatrooms earlier this year, the group said.

Living in an authoritarian country where information flow is a matter of national security, dissidents have been flocking to the Internet as the medium gains in popularity.

Online police have tightened their noose by monitoring Web chatrooms and filtering text deemed objectionable as they pass routers at international gateways.

Wen acknowledged during his visit to the United States that China’s human rights situation was not perfect, but said it was among his government’s top priorities.

Not perfect?? Among his “highest priorities”??? Well, here’s a great opportunity to show you really mean it: Let the cyberdissidents go home and stop imprisoning new ones. That’s all you have to do.

(Not really, but it would be a damned good start.)

If you go to Daytop’s Top list right now you’ll see that some obscure site has stolen the number one position by placing the exact same line and link on literally scores of web sites. It’s a total sham, but by doing this the Site Traffic Thief got me to check it out. (All it is is a sign-up page for some service, in Spanish! The hottest site on the Internet? Yeah, right.)

But now thousands of the curious are clicking on that link and site traffic must be through the stratosphere.

I got really annoyed back in April when someone used my site for similar purposes. I put up a post saying what a good job sarswatch.org was doing in chronicling the disease, and I awoke the next morning to see tons of site traffic, all to this dinky post. It turned out Tim someone who I won’t mention had five other sites along with sarswatch and posted on all of them about what a great post they’d find on pekingduck. IOW, he linked to my post about his post to direct the traffic to sarswatch.

So I was #1 on daypop! I was awash in site traffic, all of which was promptly directed away from my site to the the traffic thief’s site. And it showed me just how easy it is to manipulate traffic and create gross misimpressions.

Not at all in the same category, but somewhat related in that it involves intentionally manipulating traffic our way, is the issue of using our blog headlines to suck in site traffic from google and the other search engines. Adam has put up a very funny and unashamed post on how he does it, and I find myself doing it, too.

This is a recent thing for me. It struck me that after putting up a post with a cliche in the headline — specifically, “Defamation of Character” and “Pushing the Envelope” — I drew zillions of hits, probably from students seeking the derivation of these phrases. So now I find myself almost automatically thinking of keyword-rich headlines. Once bitten by the site traffic bug, there’s no turning back. You want to inhale it, more and more and more. There is never enough. The more you get the more you want.

But aren’t we really fooling only ourselves? If the searchers just come to your site for a split-second and then see your post is irrelevant to their search and flee, is it anything to boast about? Not really, and yet it does soothe the ego to see those rising numbers….

Adam in the aforementioned (and linked!) post says this more poetically and concisely than I do:

Yum, munch! Daypop oughta love this. Snap, crackle! Link whoring is fun… It’s posted and updated and there’s comments to read and I haven’t checked Sitemeter in almost three minutes. Crack, pop! There goes my neck. Hit, smack! My girlfriend is impatient… I found a new site but I’m not on his blogroll, a trackback ping just might do the trick. Boink, splat! Masturbating in cyberspace. Slip, slide! My hand’s spollen from wankin’… There is no judge for my writing skills /’xept the egregious number on the technorati. Gawd, damn! I got more than he. Hut, hike! Don’t know which sport I’m playin’… I joined a group blog but I contribute only a pic so that I might rank higher on obscure searches. Clink, klang! My most hits are from google. Sling, slang! It’s all in the keywords… I shoot on over to a reference site where it told me how to manipulate searches. Woosh, wham! My name in lights. Suck, splat! Everyone’s doin’ it…

(I think somebody put too much MSG in his jiaozi.)

Site traffic. The blogger’s raison d’etre, the single tangible entity to which we can point to validate our grubby blogger existence. Mine’s bigger than yours. “Ha-ha,” as Nelson would say.

Oh, and did I mention my site traffic is WAY UP lately?

The f-word is taken to new extremes in this funny, depressing article:

WASHINGTON—According to the results of an intensive two-year study, Americans living below the poverty line are “pretty much fucked,” Center for Social and Economic Research executive director Jameson Park announced Monday.

“Although poor people have never had it particularly sweet, America has long been considered the land of opportunity, where upward class mobility is hard work’s reward,” Park said. “However, our study shows that limited access to quality education and a shortage of employment opportunities in depressed areas all but ensure that, once fucked, an individual tends to stay fucked.”

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, 34.6 million Americans were living below the poverty line in 2002.

“Not only are the down-and-out fucked, but the number of down-and-out fucks is growing,” Park said. “Conditions of disadvantage are often passed from one generation to the next, making it especially difficult for young people to emerge from the cycle of poverty.”

Being away from America for three years, I have to assume none of this is true. Right?

Check out the shocking illustrations from Apple Dailyas the flesh eaters go at it. It’s quite incomprehensible, and such a pecuiar way to spend your free time….

This morning some a-hole littered my site with comments leading to some penis enlargement service. They’re mainly on older posts, and I don’t have time today to remove them. Apologies.

(Anybody know a way to prevent such mischief?)

My friend Ben wrote a comment to my post on the new biography of Chou Enlai, and I wanted to display it a little more prominently. It tells me something of just how much the Chinese idolize him (something I never doubted) and how they will continue to do so no matter what is said of him, proven or not. This is they type of thing that gives me vast insight into the Chinese psyche, and though I may often disagree with posts like this, I believe thay are vital for us on the outside to see and understand.

A new comment has been posted on your blog The Peking Duck, on entry
#807
(Zhou Enlai, Saint or Sinner?).
http://pekingduck.org/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=807

Deification or Humanization?

Chinese always intend to deify national leaders. In ancient China, we
looked at the kings or emperors as gods or saints to prostrate before.
After the PRC was founded, we still sang for our great leader Mao and
wish him can live for 10 thousands years. Such deification finally let
Mao feel so inflated and made big mistakes in his last years.

Premier Zhou is another kind of deification, because he was such a
kind, selfless, and busy premier who was full of wisdom. He is one of my
idols till now, but I appreciate him more on his style and wisdom of
diplomacy. From my primary education on, this people’s good premier
constantly appeared in our textbook as if he was still living near us. Zhou
Enlai is perfect however you look from every aspect: he was so sinless,
he even had no descendants and impossible to leave anything to them; he
worked extremely hard for our state; he was so beloved by the whole
country. Such a person, can you find any flecks from him? The “sinless
officer complex” which formed in 3 thousand years of feudal society would
let modern Chinese people love this great premier so much. But, do you
think Zhou looks like a natural man, I think he looks more like a
saint, even he was so close to his people. The same saints will include Lei
Feng and Jiao Yulu, although they were not in such a high position as
Zhou.

Actually, I had awared some negative reports about my idol from some
Taiwan and Western media. If the reports are really facts, I will not be
mad at them, at least, we should hold an objective attitude to
criticize a person. Even the reports are truth, I think it will make my idol
look like a real man who I can close to, and I do not like a man who I
can only look up to. Why should we be so hard on our national leaders?
Yes, because he was our premier and on behalf of our country, but he was
also a human being, he could make mistakes, he would has his private
life, so what? We should accept these things as well as accept his
excellence, no one in the world is absolutely perfect! I know it was so
difficult for Zhou to be in stead of himself at Chinese political stage. As
one of Chinese sayings said, “It is impossible for two king tigers to
exist in a mountain at the same time.” I think this saying probably
suits the whole world. Especially in China, power-centralization tradition
is so outstanding, even Zhou could not be out of its control and had to
be defined as assistant position sometimes.

Anyway, I hope to return nature, to see real human. Though the media
will always be partial, let us accept people’s excellences and
shortcomings whether s/he is a great leader or a common person.

Bloomberg reporter William Pesek has a great column in BusinessTimes warning of the dangers of getting sucked into the euphoria over China’s booming economy. His comparison with the Internet bubble is perfect:

There’s no denying China’s potential – an economy growing by 8 per cent and powered by 1.3 billion people hungry for capitalism. Multinational companies are seeing dollar signs when looking at maps of China, and big ones at that. So are Asian governments as economies ship more and more goods there.

The emphasis in all of this has to be on the word ‘potential’. Though China could indeed be the biggest economic success story in modern history, much could go wrong with its move from socialism to capitalism, not least of which are tens of millions of job losses as the economy is opened. There’s no guarantee.

Investors should keep that in mind. So should US President George Bush, who this week meets Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Washington. While China is an important economy, its true influence is far more about tomorrow than today.

China is the economic equivalent of Internet companies during the late 1990s. Investors and corporate executives have no time to discuss the risks. Such a ‘China.com’ is run by geniuses and it’s all good. It’s Asia’s New Economy and anyone who doesn’t see that is a fool.

Do you remember when we were told by the analysts on CNBC that there was a “new economy,” an age of perpetual low inflation and near-zero unemployment, when stocks would always be high and kids in t-shirts would chart the couse as venture capitalists dumped staggering amounts of cash down the toilet?

Then think about China. There is a perception of a booming China that will provide the world’s engine of growth for generation after generation. It is unstoppable. It is a juggernaut. It’s The Next Big Thing. It’s the sure bet, just like eToys was.

It really is booming, at least relatively, but for now, so much is about the future. So much of it is investment money being spent by companies that want to be there when the floodgates open. And I really hope they do; I want the people there whom I love to succeed and be happy.

But when I see all of the businesses rushing in as though it’s a sure thing, when I see people speculating, people neglecting to do research into the fate of most foreign traders who’ve tried throughout history to tap The World’s Biggest Market — when I see the irrational exuberance, I can’t help but wonder about the foundation on which all these hopes are based. Just like the dot-coms.

We’re all smart people, we know what profits are and basic business plans. Yet a lot of us got sucked in. And a lot of us are getting sucked in again, failing to consider that China just might not be quite the miracle it appears.

I wrote about this topic on Living in China [note: I think the link may be dead – sorry] a few weeks ago and will soon do a follow-up. I want to believe otherwise, but this just may be a story of mass hypnosis on an almost unimaginable scale — just like the dot-coms. Like tulips in Amsterdam. We humans are certainly capable of falling for this sort of thing, and it almost inevitably disappoints us.