Occasional Tales

Now I don't. For quite some time now, I've been able to get onto blogspot via a very effective proxy. It seems, however, that that may have come to an end or a strong block (whatever one of those might be) has been placed on blogspot since the events in Τιβέτ. It's quite possible that the latter is responsible, because sites that might've been available via proxy before were also blocked. But it's also possible that a recent update to Firefox has messed things up. As usual, Nanny has been incapable of being consistent during recent events in the imperium sericum . The main page of the Guardian Unlimited got blocked (though it's now available once again), but everything else was still accessible via RSS feeds. The BBC is now back in a way that it hasn't been in my 5½ years in China. As I type this in the early evening of a grey day in Chengdu, I'm listening to R4. The Beeb seems to have become fully functional mere days after the protests in Тибэт were ef...

Now what's going on? Yesterday and, it now seems, today, the mobile network was in a parlous state. My phone spent most of the day bleeping, which means that it was losing the signal and then getting it back again. I'm surfing around Cyberia, but finding several websites off the menu. No Map-Center or its successor, or Q3W forums ; the whole of MSN is down (last minute pre-Yuletide tinkering?); can't get onto The Independent (even via IE 7; I had a problem accessing the site with Firefox the other day, but no problem with IE); the formatting on The Guardian site in IE is complete shite (but all right with Firefox), as if the style sheet isn't getting rendered (which it probably isn't knowing MS's lax adherence to Web standards); no Danwei or ESWN or lost laowai . Japundit didn't even waste time dawdling and delaying before it proved inaccessible, which suggests that Japan-based sites may be blocked in general at the moment (although I'm not implyin...

Redirect this! I seem to be a little behind on the news from Cyberia. I've just found out that Nanny was redirecting Google, Yahoo! and live.com searches to Baidu a few days ago. This seem to have been the petulant response to a certain sovereign nation awarding a medal to some old homeless guy from a place in Asia. Did Nanny think that the Chinese Cyberians were all dashing off to one of the foreign search engines to find out more about this event? Or was Nanny merely trying to annoy the expats again since they're more likely to be affected by such puerile doings than the Chinese themselves. Anyway, I've just checked Google blog search and have found that it's back to normal. If you search for "green bamboo", guess which two blogs are top of the list. ^_^ Appendix A Did the redirecting actually only affecting the .cn versions of the search engines or did it affect them across the board? Appendix B Hmmm. That was interesting. When I first tried to post this, I...

Down with Christmas! One of Chris's posts was about this article reporting a call by PhD students at several top universities calling on young people to be less excited about Christmas. PhD students from the most authoritative universities including Peking, Tsinghua and Renmin University hope to "wake up the Chinese people to resist the western cultural invasion". Is it really a cultural invasion? Yeah, lots of Western businesses want a piece of the action in China, and the Chinese themselves aren't averse to embracing them or things Wetsern. The statement also implies that foreigners are waging some sort of deliberate campaign to turn China into a Western society. I might be some dumb foreign boy, but this seems to assume that modernisation = Westernisation, and that it comes from without. Modernisation doesn't imply Westernisation for one thing; modernisation has deliberately come from within; it follows cultural trends within society. It's like clothing. ...