Yes, it’s back, in a censored and manipulated fashion. It’s another of those totally ineplicable see-saw stories, where one day a site or an entire hosting service, like blogspot or typepad, is banned one day, available the next, then banned again.

The main page of the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) could be displayed and searches for apolitical terms turned up results, but searches for subjects taboo to China’s Communist leadership, such as “June 4”, remained blocked.

June 4, 1989, was the date that China’s military crushed a student-led movement for political change centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and possibly thousands. The incident remains among the most sensitive subjects for the country’s state-controlled media.

China routinely blocks access to Web sites it deems subversive and filters Internet pages for sensitive words. It was unclear why Wikipedia, blocked since October 2005, was again accessible. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said she had not heard of reports regarding Wikipedia, but added that China supports the development of the Internet and now has 123 million users, making it the world’s second-largest Internet market.

“We manage the Internet according to our laws and regulations. This is the usual practice for all the countries in the world,” spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference.

Finally, a Chinese spokesperson who is well media trained. We call this “bridging” – where you briefly note the reporter’s accusation in a way that gets you off the hook (“I hadn’t heard Wikipedia was unavailable”) and then turn it around by stressing the good stuff (“…but we now have a zillion Internet users and they’re all very happy”). Well done.

Anyway, as the article goes on to point out toward the end, in the eyes of the leathery CCP leaders the whole danger of Wikipedia, as with many blogs, is its ability to create a “hive” thanks to readers’ ability to interact and participate. And once you have a meeting place where people can speak out, you have a potential tool for mobilization, which always scares the party shitless. Reporters without Borders says the lifting of the ban was purely pragmatic – banning it sent a bad signal to foreign companies dealing with China. It was a business decision.

Who knows?

The speculation of Apple making an iPhone – iPod plus mobile phone equals must have Apple gadget 7.0 – has been frothing on the ‘net lately. Now there’s a rumor that Foxconn has gotten the order for 12 million iPhones. This would be interesting for two reasons:

1) It would mean Apple decided not to go with its ROKR partner Motorola, to whom it licenses iTunes for mobile phones.

2) It would mean Apple decided to stick with Foxconn, which y’all have heard of because they sued Chinese journalists in a PR nightmare scenario.

Where’s the rumor from? Well, Wired told me they got it from CNN who told me they got it from Digitimes.com who said they got it from the “Chinese Language Commercial Times”. I can only assume they mean the 工商时报 and they indeed have this article, which I believes says the order has gone through and the iPhone will have a 2 megapixel camera as well. I think; translation help?

Opening number of Quanzhou Municipal Government’s short-lived multi-million yuan musical extravanganza, City of Light

Careful readers, or perhaps my stalkers, may have noticed me mention that the past few months I have made my home in Quanzhou, Fujian. Quanzhou is a fascinating city historically. It boasts one of the few surviving Manichean temples in China, the tombs of the Companions of the Prophet, Muslim missionary friends of Muhammed who supposedly brought Islam here, where a Hui community once (not so much anymore) thrived, the remains of a Hindu temple established by Indian merchants, and was known as Zaytun by Marco Polo. It was also the setting for the (probable) historical fraud before 1421, namely City of Light, supposedly a translation of the work of an Italian who beat Polo here by a few years.

Quanzhou is also home to escaped Burmese pythons, security guards who want “Being Able to Walk in 260kg Iron Shoes” to be an Olympic Sport, sterile mothers who give birth to pocket sized babies, con artists who use electronic voice changers (subscription rqrd, stupid Shanghai Daily!), the one and only Huaqiao University, and the Fujian – Taiwanese Kinship Museum, which begins with a giant portrait of a tree (one people, one root!) made by gunpowder burns and maps showing that Taiwan was linked to the Mainland once upon a time by land. Like half a million years ago or something, but that’s how they start out. You get the idea. It’s a big museum.

So it’s a fun place, but all that might change because some Cain and Abel type trouble is goin’ down:

Two Taiwanese fishermen were feared to have been kidnapped by Chinese fishermen while at sea on Monday… Liao Chien-huei said he had attempted to call his father and brother by cell phone, but failed to reach them. He said among the eight Chinese workers, three were newcomers from Quanzhou. Liao said he suspected his family members had been kidnapped by the Quanzhou crew or some group working in collusion with them.”

Ahem. Richard, I have been authorized to relay the kidnappers demands to you, the duly appointed blogging representative of Taiwan here at Peking Duck, which since the Ming Dynasty has been recognized as the key arbiter in these cross-Straits People’s Court/Ricki Lake type dramas. My Geraldo to your Wopner, as it were. Their demands are as follows:

* Stop making fun of our accents and saying we’re from Jiangxi. That’s too low.
* Stop jacking up the price of mangoes.
* Stop rigging cross-Straits cricket fighting championships.
* Stop telling that joke about how you made all “three direct links” with our sister.
* Fulfill your promise to introduce us to the girls of S.H.E. at that club you told us about.

There was a demand about A-Bian, but in the end they decided life was funnier with him around than without. I await your counter-offer.

SIDENOTE: This thread is not intended for a tiresome debate on Chinese astronomy.

Via ESWN, this is simply one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read. A must-read, and a great blog.

Note from Richard: Okay, I am having massive trouble keeping this post intact due to its length. I’ll try reposting now, and if it fails I’ll have to get back to it later today. Sorry – MT doesn;t seem to like very long posts.

Update 2 – well, the whole post is here, but a lot of the comments are missing and I can’t get them to show up. If there is an MT guru who wants to try to fix this, please let me know. So sorry.
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Sit back, folks, turn your speakers on (there’s some classic jazz and blues coming), and maybe pour a shot of hard liquor for yourself. Dr Ivan (part time cartoonist) is gonna take you on a tour through the darker recesses of the American psyche (and some of the darker parts are the richest and tastiest), as illuminated by some of our best cartoonists and animators.

Now, as some of you know, in a recent guest-blog (“How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Hate The Left”) I expressed my concern about – and unmitigated contempt for – the current tendency of the American Left to dwell on shallow, fashionable identity politics, principally race and gender, at the expense of truly burning emergency issues like the pending oil crisis and the possible end of life on earth. And in particular, I have zero – let me repeat, zero, naught – “respect” for any presumptuous demands of exaggerated “sensitivity” about race or gender. Such histrionic displays of “sensitive” reactions to perceived racial or sexual slights often strike me as the 21st century version of Victorian women fainting whenever anyone said “leg” instead of “limb”, lest the wrong word lead to further wrongful thoughts (like, thoughts about how women actually have legs.) Today I perceive a similar pandemic of histrionic sensitivity (whose motives are vanity and desire for social prestige, rather than concern for any social ideal) pervading America – to some extent even among the so-called “Right.”

Does that seem inconsistent with the relative sexual license we have today, compared with Victorian times? It should not, because sex was never the issue for such Histrionic Sensitives, not then, not now. The issue was, and remains, their own vanity, their own desire for social prestige and respectability. The means for achieving those things change with the times, and so do the standards of what they find “offensive.”

And that’s what I want to take a good long look at now: How the standards for “offensiveness” have changed superficially, while the hypocritical habits of demonstrating “sensitivity” have not – and so, in the end, the REAL offenses just carry on in different guises. Those middle and upper class Victorian women who fainted at the mention of “leg”, turned a blind eye to their husbands’ dallying with prostitutes, and continued to scorn the plights of the working class. And at the end of this post I want you to think about some similar hypocrisies of today, perhaps especially among America’s so-called “Left.”

(more…)

#1 – Iraqi Insurgents: In a devastating own-goal, Iraqi insurgent media group Al Fajr issued a video proclaiming jihad on China in Xinjiang, and named Wang Lequan, the region’s CPC Secretary, strongman and Politboro member as a prime target. Considering Iraqi insurgents have absolutely no proven or even alleged connection to Xinjiang, this will only give China another excuse in its otherwise evidence free persecution of Uyghurs and Muslims in Xinjiang. Way to look tough, guys, calling out a fight thousands of miles away. (h/t: Shanghaiist)

#2 – The New York Times: actually, I’m happy to see Howard French write about heroin and AIDS in Xinjiang, but I can’t believe he didn’t mention at all that the government banned a student HIV prevention organization. (h/t Opposite End of China)

#3 – Maria Bartiromo: CNBC’s host of The Wall Street Journal Report went to China, and had this to say about it on Public Radio’s Tavis Smiley, as reported by blogger William Dodson:

In reply to Tavis’s query about her first impression of China she said, “The stench.” She screwed up her face with those great beautiful eyes and full lips of hers. “When I stepped off the plane the stench was so strong. And that’s because the factories are going night and day.” I nearly coughed out the bean burrito I was eating when she said that. “Then there were all the people. People were crossing the highway as we drove into the city.”

Stick that in your portfolio, kids! This is the cutting edge of television business news! (h/t: This is China!)

#4 – The Mass Protest Meme: right after stinkiness and “all the people”, a recent journalistic shortcut/cliche about China has been the 87,000 protests canard. ESWN puts on his professional statistician hat once again and reminds us all that these are PRC provided statistics, a.k.a. vast trove of inconsistent and opaque data sets. So next time someone uses that number to claim the Party is about to end, remind them it also counts the time Uncle Wang, drunk, put his foot in a grocers basket of eggs and ended up in a shouting match on the way home from a wild mahjong session. Indeed, revolution is at hand.

#5 – U.S. Cable Providers: for not even optioning the new Al Jazeera International, while CCTV9 is available on carriers such as Time Warner. Thanks for taking a clear stand on not airing propaganda. Clearly, David Frost is way more full of s**t than Yang Rui. Freedom is on the march!

#6 – SEZ Bubbleheads: aka Shanghai Syndrome aka Shekou Shingles aka Zhongguancun Jubilation Syndrome aka Friedmanitis. A thread at China Law Blog got Dan Harris and I talking about the globalization tunnel vision that seems to continue to grow about China. The business world continues to hype China, when really the China they’re talking about seems to be at most half the population and a quarter of the territory. Ideas that Chinese youth are cosmopolitan consumers, China will back office the world, and Starbucks will reign supreme seems to be talking about one China, while another China suffers the worst drought in 50 years, high suicide rates, a corrupt dog-eat-dog battle for higher education, no social safety net, no reinvested capital (that all goes to the cities) and not a Starbucks in sight (though Mingtien Coffee Language seems to get around just fine). And then there’s a whole gradation in between MNCs and the Sichuan migrant workers, which is dominated by Chinese businesses. I call shenanigans on the China version of “Dow 36,000”.

#7 – Slate: As if it’s not annoying enough that an army of China consultants are running around claiming they know the market because they heard Deutsche Bank is offering wealth management to Chinese millionaires, apparently you can get paid by Slate to write what any freshman China blog does, with slightly better writing. Deborah Fallows astonishing investigative journalism reveals:

* “We moved here a few months ago, abandoning our home and friends in Washington, D.C., to come learn about China” by living, apparently, in a “59-floor high-rise—which resembles a rocket ship”. You will learn much, intrepid explorer, for all Chinese live in rocket ships. By which we mean white tiled monstrosities.

* There’s pollution in China. This is the inside stuff, kids.

* Right outside her house someone brushed their teeth over the gutter. This, however, did not spark one iota of contemplation that he does not live in the rocket ship, and, indeed, few do. Never mind the coolies, Debbie.

* The woman she thought wanted to introduce her to another laowai was in fact collecting electric bills, she realized an hour later. This sort of ability to understand the locals is indeed rare amongst China correspondents.

* The traffic is crazy!

* They sell knockoffs on the street!

* When she found chicken breasts at a supermarket, she “like a frantic shopper on one of those free shopping sprees you see on Sunday morning TV”, because Chinese people only buy “piles of chicken feet and pig feet; hanging carcasses of generic meat; and scary assortments of inner organs. I could not figure out what happened to the real meat”. Way to learn the culture, Deborah. I’m gonna call you “Pearl”, if that’s ok.

* Look at this precious Chairman Mao teaset!

* Name cards are important, Pearl learned from anonymous sources.

* The English version of a Chinese air ticket website doesn’t work so well, Pearl reports from the gritty streets of Shanghai.

* A Chinese credit card is “a terrible pain for a foreigner to acquire”, and the only one you can use for the ctrip.com website. The English Customer Service page says they accept Visa, Mastercard, Diners, JCB and AMEX. More to the point, as far as I know all you need to get a Bank of China “Great Wall” card is the appropriate minimum balance. Am I wrong, people?

* They have crazy English names like Winkie and they suggest my Chinese name should be “”djye-bi”. That’s right, she’s doesn’t even know pinyin. Pearl S. (for “Shanghai”) Bubble, everyone! Give her a big hand! She’ll be at Slate all week! Oh dear God why!!!!!!

#8 – TalkTalkChina. Dead to me.

Police in Beijing have begun a crackdown on unregistered and otherwise illegal dogs:

The conflict is over city regulations that limit households in eight designated districts to a single dog and also forbid people from owning large dogs like golden retrievers and huskies.

The regulations, considered misguided by many dog owners, were introduced in 2003 but have been only loosely enforced as the city’s pet industry has boomed. Dogs in Beijing can now eat at a dog restaurant, be groomed at a dog boutique and swim in an outdoor dog lap pool.

Last Tuesday, though, Beijing newspapers carried a notice about the new campaign, under way since October, concerning “pet dog management work.” It said households with too many dogs, or with big dogs, would have 10 days to relocate them. In essence, owners had 10 days to get rid of the dogs or the police would do it for them.

The note also promised to pay rewards to people who helped the police catch neighbors violating the dog rules.

Beijing dog owners are outraged, with some threatening “to defend their dogs at any cost.”

“What kind of rules are these? I don’t expect everybody to love animals. But I do want to have my rights to keep pets,” said Clare Xiao, an account manager at an advertising company. She sent her larger Brittany to a kennel run by a friend and kept her Pekinese, a stray she found on the street.

“What the government is doing is just disappointing, cold and emotionless,” said Xiao.

See, this is the thing about the middle class. Middle class people have certain expectations. They start talking about their “rights.” Maybe you can restrict their right to participate in the political process. You can muzzle their right of free expression.

But don’t mess with their dogs.

Note the sign held up by the protestor in the photo above. It’s hard to see in this view, but it reads: “This dog is your friend. He fights for freedom.”

My cat Murphy would like to express her revolutionary solidarity with Chinese canine freedom fighters everywhere. Power to the pets!

Well, that sure didn’t take long. Via Danwei, which also led me to this excellent story on the condoms. I loved its conclusion:

When pressed about the logic of using Lei Feng’s virginal visage to sell rubbers destined for carnal use, Zhang {the condom maker] had a prompt reply. “Lei Feng would have supported safe sexual conduct and responsible family planning, I believe. And our condoms are stronger than his socks. He would not need to repair them.”

I always thought there was something fundamentally funny about Stalin:

http://private-eye.co.uk/pictures/lookalikes/big/borat_stalin.jpg

China is reaching its environmental limits, Friedman says in this alarming column. (Word file.) And I mean alarming.