I really don’t like the sound of this:

If you’re planning a trip to China and don’t have an up-to-date visa in hand, you may encounter some additional red tape.

On Aug. 1, the Chinese government started requiring that travelers seeking tourist visas, officially known as L visas, submit a letter of invitation and photocopies of the traveler’s round-trip ticket and hotel reservations.

To obtain a business, or F Visa, applicants must now have an invitation letter or “confirmation letter of invitation” issued by an authorized Chinese agency. This is in addition to an invitation letter issued by a Chinese local government, company, corporation or institution.

For tourists, the invitation letter can come from a “duly authorized tourism unit” or it can be issued by a company, corporation, institution or individual in China. If the letter comes from an individual, a photocopy of her or his identification must also be provided.

The new, more complicated rules, unfortunately, don’t completely spell out what is considered a “duly authorized tourism unit” or what constitutes a “letter of invitation.” Consulate officials did not respond to our request for additional clarification.

The new requirements have thrown many travelers for a loop, especially those who filled out the four-page visa application form in July but whose documents didn’t reach the consulate until August. The result has been confusion, communication challenges and, in some cases, a scramble to meet deadlines and travel itineraries.

You don’t need a visa to go to Singapore or Japan or Hong Kong (or most other places I’ve visited over the decades). Why does China have to make it such hell to visit their country? Visas are a cash cow, a way to milk tourists and enrich the national coffers. Okay, I can deal with that, and getting a visa for entry into the US for a Chinese person is not necessarily a walk in the park either. But why does China have to add more barriers and make a process that is already a pain in the, um, neck even more nightmarish?

Despite the hassle, I had learned how to get a visa relatively quickly and painlessly based on the approximate dates of my trip to China. Now, “Travelers arranging their own trips…must lock in their travel dates, purchase their airline tickets and make hotel reservations before they know whether their visa applications will be approved.” Good grief. What’s the point?

A few hours ago I had my adored cat Nick, who was nearly 23 years old, put to sleep by the vet. A few years ago I posted on the death of his sister cat, Daisy. (Anyone who is a fan of The Great Gatsby knows where the names come from.)

Daisy, the grey cat, was the loving one, so affectionate that people who came into contact with her said she was more a dog than a cat. Nick, on the other hand, was the beautiful one, a brilliant orange color with a white thrush of a throat. He was sublimely arrogant; it was his house and all the food in it was his and I never owned him, he owned me.

Nick had been losing weight for months and I knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. Over the past few weeks his legs gave out and he struggled to stand up. When he lost interest in food a few days ago I knew it was time.

I won’t get all sentimental. I’ll just say that Nick was my life, and I always loved his grandeur, his egotism, his self-centeredness. No, I know these aren’t admirable qualities in a person, but in Nick’s case they made him regal, as though he was always holding court. It was funny that he behaved like a monarch. He was spoiled as hell, but what beloved pet isn’t?

I was massaging the back of his ears as the vet injected him with the anesthesia, which put him down in about 30 seconds. Yes, it was agonizing, but it was a relief to put him out of his pain. He’ll be buried in my back yard, right alongside his long-time companion Daisy. May they both rest in peace forever.

Is this op-ed a parody or what? Everyone here will find it worth reading, but may not know whether to laugh or cry. I’d like to know what you think.

If that column gives you a headache, you can also use this as an open thread.

Still recovering from the lung infection/flu that hit me on my flight back home from China. I’m curious why nearly every time I go to China I come home with bronchitis and/or the flu. Is it just me?

Update: I want to take back a part of this post. I wrote the Nazi comparison in great haste, and I probably shouldn’t have, because Nazi is such a super-charged word. Anyone reading the text will see I am not saying Chinese people are like Nazis, and actually say the opposite: “Let me add, however, that while most gullible Germans ate this up, I strongly believe most Chinese are going to reject the race baiting that is setting the Internets ablaze today.” The Chinese will react responsibly and not like Nazis. What I thought was comparable was the use of race-baiting terms like “foreign trash” and sstereotyping many foreigners as spies, law breakers and enemies of China. Racial stereotyping was what I was alluding to. But in retrospect, I should have avoided that term and should have know that its use would be misunderstood by many.

Scapegoats are marvelous tools for energizing the masses. Especially when they are based on race. Der Stuermer, an Nazi rag published by Julius Streicher, often depicted images of grotesquely stereotyped Jews (big noses, fiendish) molesting pure, young beautiful German maidens. It was a successful campaign. Many really believed this was what Jews were, what they did. And it was a conspiracy, designed to pollute German blood and tear down German greatness. Let me add, however, that while most gullible Germans ate this up, I strongly believe most Chinese are going to reject the race baiting that is setting the Internets ablaze today. They are too suspicious of their government at the moment and are getting good at seeing through the government’s propaganda.

Although comparisons with Nazis are used too frequently and can induce groans, it’s nevertheless the first thing I thought of as I read the appalling call by Yang Rui, host of CCTV 9’s popular show Dialogue, calling in violent language for the ouster of “foreign thugs” from China’s sacred soil. This was brought on by two disgusting incidents of foreigners acting like idiots, even rapists, one attempting to molest a Chinese woman, another treating a Chinese woman on a train like scum. Shameful. Sickening. As vile as a crime can be. But these two sorry incidents are being used as red meat by the likes of Yang to rally the masses and breed hatred of all foreigners, even if Yang doesn’t say that in so many words. In his words:

The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera’s Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.”

[Note: I am having serious problems with the GFW and my VPN is making it hellish for me to supply links. This is from the Shanghaiist.]

Just last week friends began warning me to carry my passport at all times, as the PSB was stopping foreigners randomly, especially around Western hangouts like Sanlitun, to make sure they hadn’t overstayed their visa. Papers please. This all smells like a concerted campaign.

China Geeks has some excellent analysis and translations of weibo users’ reactions to this nonsense, and makes a strong argument that all foreigners should boycott Dialogue. I have at least four friends who have appeared on the program, and I really think they need to reconsider. After you read Charlie’s post you’ll have to agree. [Again, sorry but I can’t link.]

An interesting moment to be in China. Something seems to be in the air, an extreme edginess brought on by doubts about the government and concern for China’s future. I’ve never heard so many Chinese people tell me they oppose their government, even hate it. Obviously that’s not scientific, but my expat friends agree. China almost seems on the brink, unable to control its dialogue (no pun intended) and floundering in the wake of recent embarrassments we all know about. Rifts and fissures are becoming more apparent, and there’s a sense that “something’s got to give.” Will it?

This is an open thread, presuming I have any readers left who may want to chat. Apologies about the post below. Talk about Chen Guangcheng’s incredible escape, or the Bo Xilai soap opera or anything else.

I realize that nothing is as dull as narcissistic bloggers going on about their own blogs. I’ll only do it once every ten years, I promise.

While I was away in the Caribbean a few weeks ago this blog reached a milestone that I was reminded of a couple days ago when I saw this post about the 10-year anniversary of Sinosplice, one of my long-time favorite blogs. I had missed my own anniversary, which I’ll try to correct now.

I launched this blog on March 21, 2002, just a few weeks earlier than John Pasden’s. To the best of my knowledge the only other English-language China-centric blog that’s lasted as long as mine is this one.

I wrote my earliest posts almost as a diary, and I had no intention or hopes that anyone else would ever read it. I’m not really sure how it happened, that other people started visiting, but soon I found myself with some very busy comment threads. (Thousands of comments from the first year were deleted when I switched from blogspot to WordPress, unfortunately, so the earliest ones are gone.)

As of now there are 92,552 comments, 5,015 posts and about 3.34 million visitors, though I didn’t have my site meter installed until after my first year blogging. If you look at the archives you’ll see the upward trajectory of postings, from 16 a year the first year to 1,123 the next. Sadly, after 2006 this number went straight down again as I got tied up in my work with the Beijing Olympics; I never really got back the old fire of the earlier years, when all I had to do was open up a thread and get 300 comments within 12 hours. Back then I also had a team of five or six co-bloggers, and for a couple of years this was a very, very busy blog.

Some of the material here is extraordinary, not because I’m a good blogger, but because the comments were so explosive, so unpredictable. This thread, for example, may be the strangest in this blog’s history, and maybe the strangest for any blog. It is so bizarre that words truly fail. Another odd thread was about OJ Simpson and the murder of Nicole Brown, which drew all sorts of fanatics out of the woodwork. For a while that thread was a circus. Another thread dear to my heart dealt with the suicide of an old friend of mine. I had presumed, wrongly, that all his friends knew of his death. Most of them learned of it through my post, and the comments they left to say their farewells are incredibly moving.

My favorite posts remain this one and this one. I felt so inspired, they kind of wrote themselves.

I started TPD after I read a post by Andrew Sullivan about how blogging was the way of the future. I had never heard the word “blog” before and decided if what Sullivan said was true I might as well get on the bandwagon. At that time the China blogosphere was dominated by a blog called The Gweilo Diaries, a biting right-wing blog that was far more critical of the CCP than I would ever be. Its writer Conrad helped get TPD off the ground by linking to me frequently. Blogging was so new then and there were so few of us. We were a tight community, until blogs proliferated and lost their novelty. We would hold “Peking Duck dinners,” which for a couple of years were a big deal. So many cool people I met at those affairs. I think about 40 showed up at the last one back in 2007.

The very first words I wrote on this blog was the legend in the upper left-hand quarter: “A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him…”

I wanted everyone to know I was a dabbler, not an expert, and that nothing I wrote was necessarily true. People have accused me of presenting myself as a “China expert,” but I’ve never done that. I saw stuff, either in the news or with my own eyes, and wrote about it. Period. This is partly why I am posting so little now. I stop and wonder, “What do I have to add to this story about China?.” And I often conclude, Not much. Especially now that there are so many wonderful blogs that are devoting far more time and energy writing about China, like this one and this one and this one and this one. And so many others. And living so far from the action in Beijing, I find it increasingly pointless to post as though I’m still there.

In 2003 I was in the right place at the right time, just as blogs were starting, and after Gweilo Diaries disappeared this blog became the dumping ground for all types of commenters, CCP loyalists, John Birchers, progressives and right-wingers. Not to mention my trolls, Ferin, Math, HongXing and others, who added a lot of “color.” All of these commenters with wildly different viewpoints meant threads that were like nitroglycerine.

TPD, at least until recently, became a gathering place, even if I never meant it to be. I still get comments from readers who were here nearly a decade ago. I know at least two couples who dated after meeting on this blog, and one couple that got married.

Nothing can last eternally. I doubt there will be another ten years. But so far, despite my recently going dark, it’s been a life-defining experience.

I know, this blog has gone to hell in a handbasket over the past couple weeks. And now I’m about to leave for more than 10 days, and I will have little or no Internet access (and no, I won’t be going to China this time, unfortunately). So this will probably be the longest-running thread ever. Post links, chat, etc.,and try to keep it Tibet-free; that’s one subject we have totally exhausted. Thanks to my hall monitors who will be watching things while I’m gone.

I really don’t like the sound of this ad, which played locally in Michigan during the game. It plays off of stereotypes and the growing paranoia about the rise of China. I’m calling it ill-conceived at best, racist at worst. The explanation of the ad sounds pretty feeble, too.

The campaign of the Michigan Republican hit racial notes as a new advertisement argued that the policies of incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) were helping China to the detriment of the United States.

The advertisement, which will run in Michigan during the Super Bowl and afterward, features an Asian female with a conical straw hat riding a bike through a rice paddy field.

“Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good [sic],” the actress says, in broken English.

“Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie ‘Spend-it-now’. Debbie spend so much American money [sic],” the actress says, without a Chinese accent. “You borrow more and more, from us… we take your jobs. Thank you Debbie ‘Spend-it-now.’”

The Hoekstra campaign called the advertisement “satirical” and explained the broken English in the video as a reflection of China’s increasingly competitive education system.

“You have a Chinese girl speaking English – I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now,” Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. “It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally.”

You can see the ad at the link above. I find it racially charged and plainly “anti-China.” As if the fact that the Chinese girl is speaking English tells viewers China’s education system is superior (that’s what the Hoekstra camp is claiming). Nonsense. This ad is designed to instill fear and touch a racial nerve.

PLEASE NOTE: This site has been hacked by our favorite commenter. I apologize for all the damage done yesterday. For a while I’ll be moderating all comments on a one-by-one basis so please bear with me, as comments may not appear for a few hours after you post them.

A new thread.

The last one may have been the strangest ever. To my sockpuppets and mischief-makers, I know how you work.

Possible topics:

Chinese New Year
Apple Iphone mania
Taiwan elections
Alleged torture of a Chinese dissident
Or, of course, the latest Forbes column by….well, you know. (Includes a swipe at James Fallows.)

Or talk about anything else. A gentle reminder: If you try to impersonate other commenters or play games as in the last thread, you’re out forever.