Because I am in no mood to put up new posts tonight. Apologies; I’ll be back tomorrow with a vengeance.

I just had a long talk with the boss and we agreed this company is simply not ready for a serious public relations program. I will write my resignation letter in a few minutes. It should be a friendly enough departure, and she said they’d try to give me freelance writing work. But that would be a continuation of the high-tech career I so despise; I need a divorce, not more of the same.

It feels good, even though there’s a huge amount of concern for my future. But the good feeling is greater than the concern, and that’s the important thing.

Just tell me, is this a common thing in Taiwan??

It very well might be. If so, Adam has made history.

Before you comment, please check out Gordon’s letter to the editor on censorship and democracy in China….and also Martyn’s very first post as Gordon’s guest blogger. Also, the state of China’s air quality is obviously a subject dear to the heart of Laowai, and he’s written a thorough (and thoroughly depressing, though with glimmers of hope) post about it.

Okay, so who will be first to comment?

Poor Chinese villagers always seem to get bent out of shape when the government evicts them from their land and bulldozes their homes into rubble. I think I would, too.

Thousands of farmers demonstrated against a land eviction in China’s southern Guangdong province, with clashes erupting after police detained some protestors, a rights group said.

Four villagers were rounded up by police on Thursday after the farmers tried to block bulldozers from levelling about 670 hectares of land near Sanshangang village, the Empowerment and Rights Institute said.

On Saturday, the third consecutive day of protests, demonstrators surrounded Sanshangang’s public security bureau demanding the release of the arrested protestors, said Maggie Hou, an official with the independent institute.

“Some 200 demonstrators began the protest on Saturday, but by the evening several thousand protesters had arrived, with farmers from other areas also joining in,” Hou told AFP.

Around 600 police watched as protesters shouted slogans and carried banners that said “give our land back” and “the land law should be implemented equally”, Hou said.

Always the same nowadays. Either the poor villagers’ land is poisoned with industrial waste or stolen from them outright.

I listened this morning rather spellbound as National Public Radio had people read the entire Declaration of Independence, each reader uttering a different sentence. Never before did I realize just how exquisite a document it is, and how it really can serve as a chedcklist for when revolution is called for. As I listened, I kept thinking how so much of it applies to today’s disenfranchised Chinese, and how, armed with this Declaration, they could justifiably start the next peasants’ revolution — the two words that keep Hu Jintao up at night chewing his fingernails.

I strongly urge you to read it. I mean, really read it and “hear” it as a modern-day document as relevant to the world today as it was 230 years ago. It’s a work of art, and the fact that we were so lucky to have such geniuses among our Founding Fathers is one of the greatest miracles of modern civilization.

Aside from the unfortunate reference to the “indian savages,” which reflected the thinking of all Westerners at that time, it’s practically perfect. I suspect it isn’t taught in China’s public schools.

Link via CDT.

Could it be that poor Chinese farmers are happier than the rich and famous? From the ever-unlinkable South China Morning Post, this just in:

BEHIND THE NEWS
No price tag on happiness

SIMON PARRY

He might be surprised to hear it, but a poor farmer in rural China is likely to be as happy, if not happier, with his lot in life than a millionaire in Hong Kong, a group of academics have concluded.

Psychologists and anthropologists from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Harvard University in the US have been researching how economic changes affect people’s levels of happiness.

Studying 48 villages in Shandong province, they concluded that levels of happiness were based heavily on the way people viewed their level of material comfort compared with their peers.

“Put simply, we are happy not because of the amount of wealth we have, but how we see our wealth compared to the rest of our [peer] group,” said Professor Dominic Lee Tak-shing of Chinese University.

“Someone may be wealthy by most people’s estimates but may not be happy, because he may compare himself with Li Ka-shing or Bill Gates. Social comparison explains why people can be wealthy but not be happy, and even depressed.”

People in rural villages on the mainland are less likely to be exposed to such comparison. “They are separate from the rest of the world and they tend to be happier, because if you look at their whole
village, they are more or less the same,” said Professor Lee.

“The economic gradient isn’t so sharp and the people are generally happier. If they feel they are more or less the same as the rest of their peers, they are content.”

Maybe that’s the answer to life’s miseries — owning a farm in Shandong. If I’d only known earlier…

Let the fireworks begin.

Only one writer in our blogosphere could have written this upsetting diatribe, but since he apparently is trying to be anonymous I won’t say who it is. It’s long, it’s torturous and it’s a jaw-dropper. Go see for yourself.

Update: Like Gordon, who hosted this post, I’d like to say that it does not reflect my own viewpoint and that it might offend some readers. Maybe it’s over the top and maybe I should have thought about it longer before I linked, but I still think it will be of interest to many readers. I know, I sound somewhat conflicted – because I am.

And who can blame them? I thought the days of Mao were over.

China must be the fastest-changing society on earth. Yet those who oversee the Communist Party want the change to be on their terms. They want to preserve the old ways that have ensured that this highly centralised and secretive organisation has maintained its control over 1.3 billion people for more than half a century.

But grumbling is to be heard even at the grassroots of the party, and the latest source of the discontent among the party faithful has been a nine-month “education campaign” that ended this week.

Party members have been required to study a series of secret documents. They had to stop work for days to attend classes and group discussions.

They were required to put down their own views, a practice that conjures up the self-criticisms of the ultra-leftist days of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. This had to be done in longhand: using a computer was forbidden lest participants delegated the job to tech-savvy children or e-mail each other a pro-forma essay.

Party members complained that they were ordered to come to work more than an hour early or stay late to join study sessions. Many pretended to be abroad or out of town. Most were banned from unnecessary travel. “Maintaining the education of the advanced nature of Communist Party members” was the campaign’s less than catchy title, and even after nine months few party members could explain what it meant.

That’s almost as awkward as the Three Represents. China is still such an anomaly, one foot striving to enter the modern age, another deeply mired in the idiocies of Mao’s failed past.