Lies, damn'd lies...

...and Chinese government truths.

Since blogspot is blocked from Mainland China, but I can still post here, I see no overt reason for not being a little more forthright about this country. We gave our pupils the first progress test yesterday. The last question in the written part of the test is a short paragraph on some topic. This is what one boy wrote:

Taiwan is one island of China. long long ago, Chinese go to this island and live on it. But now some people want to put Taiwan leave China. It is a bad job. We can't agree with it. Taiwan have many people from China at first, they like get back to China, because they want to see their family together. So, China must be stronger and we must study heart and soul to put Taiwan back to China.

This is typical of the sort of unthinking nonsense that the mainland Chinese believe. As foreigners tend to do, because we acknowledge Taiwan's separateness, I once unintentionally referred to it as a distinct political entity to one of the pupils at my old school near Beijing. She's clever enough to know the truth, but kind of struggled not to retort with the Party line.

But the passage above is ironic, because the kid who wrote it is obsessed with all things Japanese.