Occasional Tales

Rebellion is never justifiable, is it? I’ve just been reading an article on The Economist about China’s attitude to the rebels in Libya and its wibbly-wobbly approach to dealing with the rebellion there. It includes one of those deathless lines, viz.: It does not want to send signals at home that rebellion can ever be justified. Let’s think. What happened the last time there was a change of government in China? Oh that’s right. A small number of people decided that by violently opposing the previous regime, which itself had not gained office through a popular vote, they had the legitimate right to govern the Empire. Did they bother asking everyone else what they thought? While we’re talking about irony, why are the Mainlanders complaining about the Americans selling posh kit to the Taiwanese? They should be quite pleased because Beijing doesn’t have to spend 一角 on the defence of Taiwan which, as we know, is part of China. (True, but a stupid truth.) Since the Taiwanese a...

The hole in the wall is still open. I had thought that the hole in the wall (by which I don’t mean some species of ATM) had been closed and that my brief return had been cut short once again. The news, unexciting, is that the weather has turned quite cool after last week’s summer-like temperatures, and the forecast isn’t looking promising. There would seem to be no gentle decent into autumn although I’m hoping that the present spell of chilly weather isn’t the harbinger of a long, cold winter to come. In my first year here, it snowed on the 1st of November and did not get warm again until late April The bicycle inventory which I mentioned led to reg. plates for our bikes. My plate is in my rucksack. I completely forgot about it last night. Honestly, I don’t want to attach such a thing to my machine, and I don’t see the point because foreigners, at least, don’t have to register their bikes. In fact, I’m not sure anyone does these days. The joy vampires have been at it ag...

...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 pu...