Warning: be sure you aren’t drinking anything as the video starts or you will ruin your new keyboard and monitor. Via the ueber-great John Cole. Read him every day.

Shanghaiist covered this back in March but its a fascinating issue:

Via Terra Nova, an academic group blog on virtual worlds, I’ve found out a grad student at UCSD named Ge Jin has been making a documentary on World of Warcraft “gold farmers” in China. Gold farmers are players who “farm” for items and money in the virtual world and sell them in the real. This “real money trading” is highly controversial. Wikipedia states that China has by far the largest gold farming operations, with an estimated 100,000 farmers working as long as 12 hours a day.

Gold farmers, as near as I can tell, is not what they are called in China. The activity is called “´òÇ®”, or “fight money”. Gold farming is considered bad form on WoW and non-native English speakers are unfairly associated with gold farming, even being tested on their English:

As part of the game play for World of Warcraft players are required to form groups of 5 or more to be able to finish certain levels of the game. Now if you have a number of friends who also play World of Warcraft you can make arrangements to meet up in the game to complete these required group tasks. For all others players they will need to build groups by using the games message system where they can send a request out to fellow players to form or join a group of players for a certain task.

There is a common belief among English speaking players in World of Warcraft that most non English speaking players are gold farmers. This is a type of player who is only playing the game to profit, not for the ‘love of the game’. Gold Farmers are largely despised by players who feel they take away a certain purity of the game.

To combat gold farmers, players are requesting anybody who wants to join a group to type one or two lines of English. If the sentences or grammar are not proper English these players are rejected from joining this group. This has recently been creating a lot of backlash among non-English speaking players with feel they are being discriminated against based on their language.

The system has become so complicated there are even brokers such as UCDao, and the demand isn’t going away anytime soon. Questions still remain about the ethics of the practice – on the one hand, Chinese young men are being employed. On the other, there are claims of exploitation. I’m not so sure if exploitation is the right word; certainly the entire industry is based on inequality. The discrimination, however, vaguely reminds me of Chinese railroad workers a century ago. Thoughts? Is this the birth of a new industry? Exploitation? Both?

The lies of China’s lying liars lead a PR pro in China to offer some badly needed advice on how to lie gracefully.

As I’ve said many times, if you have to propagandize, do it with some finesse, a touch of class, a hint of elan. Try to learn something from those who’ve turned propaganda into a fine art.

I’ve never seen a pundit state his case with more passion, more anger, more eloquence or more evidence. Go watch this video clip now, and pass it along to everyone you know.

Update: That clip goes well with today’s eloquent ranting of another Bush admirer turned detractor:

Let me put this kindly: anyone who believes that Donald Rumsfeld has done a “fantastic job” in Iraq is out of his mind. The fact that such a person is president of the United States is beyond disturbing. But then this is the man who told Michael Brown he was doing a “heckuva job.” And, yes, our Iraq policy begins to look uncannily like the Katrina response.

The president, in other words, has just proved that he is utterly unhinged from reality, in a state of denial truly dangerous for the world. He needs an intervention. Think of this election as an intervention against a government in complete denial and capable of driving the West off a cliff. You can’t merely abstain now. Bush just raised the stakes. And he must be stopped.

Have we ever seen a situation even remotely comparable to this in all of America’s history? Have we ever seen so many intelligent, responsible Americans conviced that our leadership is unhinged to the point of putting the entire world in danger?

Okay, now scroll down to the great posts on China that our guest bloggers put up recently – finally, you can comment on them now.

Many thanks to my great site designer Sekimori for their help.

How hearbreaking, that at a time when the civil war in Iraq is escalating out of control the blogs are focused on a single non-issue, a stupid mistake by a senator who isn’t even running for office this year. Yes, Kerry screwed up, and he should apologize just to get this stupidity off the table. But it’s a sign of just how desperate the right is for anything, anything at all, that can deflect attention away from the horrors their man has wrought. It’s irrelevant, it’s inconsequential and it’s just plain silly. And yet all day the right-wingers, led on as always by the deranged Michelle Malkin, have been seizing on this idiocy as proof that the Democrats are incompetent villains, never mind the legacy of corruption, lies and failures for which the Republican leadership now stands. Never mind Jack Abramoff or Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or Duke Cunningham or Halliburton’s no-bid contracts. Never mind depraved anti-gay-marriage amendments and the rape of America’s environment by mining and oil companies. One dumb remark by a Democrat wipes out all the horrors Bush has wrought in Iraq, and in America.

John Cole, who is fast becoming my favorite blogger and who was once outspokenly pro-Bush and pro-Iraq war, puts it best.

A general rule of thumb regarding controversies like this is to count how many posts Michelle Malkin has about the issue, and to note that there is a positive correlation to how trivial the matter is and how many posts she has about it. At my last count, she had four on her site [ed. note: it’s now up to 10] , two on her spin-off site Hot Air (who I still think ripped their name off from me). That would tell me that this issue would be somewhere between Cindy Sheehan and crescent-shaped 9/11 memorials and Terri Schaivo in importance, but the possibility is there for a new record.

Red crescents and Cindy Sheehan. Emotional hot buttons that Michelle and Charles and Assrocket et. al. know how to push to obfuscate issues and push people to act on raw, ignorant impulse. How dare we surrender our critical faculties to these guttersnipes? How dare we let their banshee-like shrieking over this non-event silence serious debate on life and death issues and overwhelm us with a hate-driven mob mentality?

Can the American public be so foolish, so short-sighted and naive as to allow this idiocy to be a determining factor in next week’s election? I want to think not, but I have seen Rove and his demons too many times take pure bullshit (Ann Richards is a lesbian; McCain is mentally ill; John Kerry’s wounds were self-inflicted) and use it to delude voters into making disastrous decisions that go directly counder to their interests. Now, after so many years of being lied to, brow-beaten and manipulated, after so much needless carnage in Iraq, after so many outrageous acts of deception – after all this, will the American public really fall for yet another Big Lie? If so, then I will really have to give up all hope for America. We are dying a death from a thousand cuts, all inflicted by the Bush administration and the cronies who support them, and Americans finally seemed to be getting this. The thought that a one-line gaffe from a junior senator who isn’t running for election could threaten to reverse the trend toward realizing we’ve all been had, we’ve all been screwed, our country has been fucked – it’s just too unbearable.

I still have hope in America. I believe Malkin and Rush and Drudge will fail. But it certainly won’t be for lack of trying. Today they have reared their heads and shown their true faces. They are whores and parasites who somehow, through some fluke of fate, some great and incomprehensible accident, have won sway over the minds of millions. Until I see them and the depraved “ideals” for which they stand defeated and discredited, I have no intention of moving back to the country I once loved so deeply.

I know comments are still down, so debate may have to wait until tomorow.

Yes, I know. Working on it.

Update: The site was hit once again by a massive spam attack. I may have to go back and close down all the old threads to protect against future attacks. Meanwhile, it may be another whole day before things are back to normal. I appreciate your patience, and topics of burning importance can always be brought up in the forum.

The Chinese government has announced new legislation marking a major change in its death penalty policy:

China’s official Xinhua News Agency hailed the amendment as “the most important reform of capital punishment in China in more than two decades.”

The change “deprives the provincial people’s courts of the final say on issuing death sentences,” the agency said. “Death penalties handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by the Supreme People’s Court.”

The change adopted by the legislature Tuesday enshrines last year’s announcement by the Supreme People’s Court that it would start reviewing all death sentences, ending a 23-year-old practice of giving the final review to provincial courts.

“It’s great news. This is a big step forward for China’s legal system and human rights,” said Li Heping, a prominent activist lawyer.

“It’s going to have a psychological effect on local judges when they are making decisions because they are going to be afraid that if they approve capital punishment, the supreme court will overrule them,” Li said.

China is said to carry out more court-ordered executions than any other country in the world, and many of these cases have been problematic to say the least – riddled with errors, carried out in haste with no opportunity for judicial review, in a process that is arbitrary in its uneven application. Unquestionably innocent people have been put to death.

I’m against the death penalty. To me it’s a mark of shame that my own country pratices state-sanctioned executions. But it’s a step in the right direction to at least apply the ultimate penalty with some care and opportunity for redress.

The cynical part of me wonders if this is another part of the Central government’s efforts to reign in unruly and disobedient local governments. The optimist hopes that it marks a further strengthening of a rule of law in China with a foundation of justice, as opposed to the whims of authority.

Let’s bring out the big board!

* Shandong: don’t mess with Blind Master Chen! Coming soon: Chen Liangyu, Sun Luyi and others in the corruption crackdown show up to court doing their best Ray Charles impressions in hopes of leniency.

* Cars in cycle lanes: Beijing has 646 days remaining to learn not to scream at the laowai and throw their bike around. Look for an instructional cartoon where Huanhuan slaps around Nini in front of Sam the Olympic Eagle, only to have Beibei chew him out for embarassing China in front of the foreigner.

* His Ilness: got his leash yanked.

* Panda Bears: are Communist Godless Killing Machines. You have to bite them before they bite you.

* Yang Xiaokun: is the official who said in Athens:

“I don’t think we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.”

I’d tell you how the BBC reported this but…

* Republicans: c’mon, you’re not even trying to go negative. This ain’t no pillow fight.

* Blogspot: that’s what you get for Chinabounder.

* Comedy Central: stealing Colbert clips from expats whose only lifeline is YouTube. You are this close to being dead to me!

make your own on notice board here

In a stunning move, an appeals court has overturned the guilty verdict of activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng. Chen was sentenced to four years in prison this past summer after launching a crusade against the forced sterilization of peasant women.

Mr. Chen’s first trial was widely condemned as a travesty. Beijing-based lawyers whom Mr. Chen chose to defend him were harassed before the trial and then barred from the hearing. The court assigned Mr. Chen two local attorneys who introduced no evidence, called no witnesses and did not contest the charges against him.

It is unclear why an appeals court in Linyi, which is the same urban area where local officials ordered the crackdown on Mr. Chen, would decide to overturn the verdict against him.

It is possible that higher authorities told the court to do so. But it is also possible that the maneuver was intended to prevent having the case appealed to a higher court that does not answer to local authorities.

The actual prospects for a new trial are uncertain.

Cross-posted at Jottings from the Granite Studio