Month: March 2007

(updated)
Ya I Yee has this sweet workaround on the blogspot ban, courtesy of Chinese blogger Fermi Zhang (wicked name). Do this:

Use the Notepad (or other text editor softwares) to write a file with the following codes:

function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogspot.com")){
    return "PROXY 72.14.219.190:80";
}
}

save it as proxy.pac and put it in the root directory of C: .Take Firefox for example,click Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings…-> fill the codes below in the blank that under “Automatic proxy configuration URL”:

file:///C:/proxy.pac

then press Reload on the right,press OK,and OK.And relaunch Firefox,done!

Fermi and Yee, I owe you each a beer. And if I understand this right, should the proxy server for some reason go down or be blocked itself, simply grab a new proxy and paste it in. Some of these at the Chinese site Hackbase might work. I’ll try some later. I’d like to point out that Hackbase has been around for a while, and as Yee has nicely pointed out in this post and another, Chinese bloggers have collectively been working on the blogspot ban. I take great pleasure in knowing my newly unfettered access to Blogspot is thanks to a Chinese blogger, not a product from the outside (I still love you, Tor).

UPDATE: Another Chinese proxy service is 9i7.cn, which also gives a list of proxy IPs. Found via webproxies.info.

The People’s Daily provided this crooked image. No pun intended.

While China may be planning to send robots and manned mission to the moon, there’s one thing they’ve decided they aren’t sending: real estate brokers. The Beijing No. 1 intermediate People’s Court has ordered Chinese moon tychoon Li Jie (李捷) to stop selling off pieces of the moon, refund his customers over 14,000 yuan (about 50 acres sold) and pay a 50,000 RMB fine for violating rules on market speculating. Actually, the ruling was made back in 2005, but Li Jie appealed and this is the end of the road. (h/t WeirdAsiaNews)

Li Jie didn’t come up with the idea, though. Dennis Hope has been selling off moon land for years and claims he made a cool million in 2003. You can purchase an acre at his Moon Shop for 19.99, plus a “Lunar Tax” and shipping & handling. At $31.51, that’s 7 bucks cheaper than Li Jie’s prices), then swing by his Lunar Embassy webpage, the World Headquarters of “The founders and leaders of the extraterrestrial real estate market.” Li Jie’s Lunar Embassy (月球大使馆), contracted as an “exclusive distribution agent” of Hope’s in September of 2005, opened for business October 8th to great press attention and criticism. Reports of the amount Li Jie paid vary, but he claimed in 2005 to have signed on to pay a distribution rights fee of $125,000 US dollars and a $2 US dollar per month fee on each acre he purchased, for a total of 7110.32 acres. Later he claimed he lost $125,000 dollars on the failed deal, including roughly $27,500 US dollars buying 110,000 acres from Hope. Either way, Li Jie blew a large wad on his moon shot.

The highest level U.S. – China space summit in years?

According to an interview with Li Jie in December 2005, Dennis Hope had flown to Beijing for a press conference on October 19th, before the shutdown, to clarify Li Jie’s legal rights, telling him he had many lawyers and had solved such controversies before. But the visit cleared up nothing, and a week later authorities had suspended Li Jie’s business. Having spent over 400,000 RMB on the business (he said at the time) and owing thousands of US dollars to Dennis Hope as per their contract, Li Jie found himself cash strapped. Some 600 million RMB he claimed to have made on previous inventions and a line of secretarial products was tied up in real estate and other investments, and Li Jie sold his sports car to pay the bills. When Chaoyang authorities asked Li Jie to produce documents backing up Dennis Hope’s ownership of the Moon, Hope told Li Jie the documents, supposedly in the records of a San Francisco land management office, were destroyed in a flood in 1987. When Li Jie asked for proof of the flood from the office in question, he says Hope was evasive and didn’t provide anything. Whenever he had raised questions about the claim of ownership, Li Jie says, Hope told him to trust him. Though suspicious, Li Jie went along in the hopes of financial success.

Chinese Moon Deed: Who needs the new property laws?

Then, in November, Dennis Hope asked Li Jie to reimburse his airfare for the trip to Beijing to the tune of $6,000, a figure Li Jie thought “impossibly” high. When Hope refused to fax copies of the tickets, Li Jie refused to pay. Hope then gave an ultimatum: revoking Li Jie’s rights as a Moon estate agent and the claim to his 7110.32 acres of the Moon. In December, he followed through. Li Jie immediately responded by issuing a counter claim of ownership to the entire Moon.

If he had his way, Li Jie would sell you “pigsty air in a bag”

Li Jie didn’t quit there, however. On April 6th, 2006, Li Jie announced he owned all of the “atmospheric water” of China (commonly known as “clouds”), the plan being to protect the environment by suing polluters for compensation when they damaged his property (i.e. the sky). Then Li Jie announced he was partnering with a German company to sell “World Cup Air”, small bags containing air from stadiums that hosted matches in 2006 (You can still buy your own WM Luft for 5€ online). Li Jie’s application to sell air was rejected, despite this blistering legal defense:

However, Li defended the idea of selling the air in court and accused the bureau of denying him an sales opportunity that only comes “once every four years.”

“The ‘special air from special places’ in my application includes air from the 2008 Olympics stadiums, Tian’anmen Square, Qomolongma, the moon, a pigsty, a horse paddock and even the Chaoyang District Court,” Li said.

As evidence, Li listed Little Fox Sells Air a story in a primary school textbook about a cunning fox that opens an air-selling business in a polluted city and “does good business.”

“A textbook could not possibly advocate breaking the law, could it?” Li asked in the court.

Meanwhile, the press was still having a field day with the Moon business. In October 2006, a rep
orter asked Sun Laiyan, head of the China Space Agency, what he thought of the Moon Embassy. The Moon, he replied, is not for sale.

One commenter has asked: after all this, is Chang E crying or laughing?

Following up on the block of Livejournal, Blogspot now appears to be blocked again in China. Blogspot was blocked in China from January 10th 2003 to August 2006. Vox, Xanga and WordPress are also blocked in China at the moment. Blogspot’s backend, blogger.com, however, is still accessible. Hence this post.

The recently publicized GreatFirewallofChina website also appears to be blocked.

No access here in Fujian.
Imagethief reports no access in Shanghai.
Bokane reports no access in Beijing.
Positive Solutions reports no access, but points out profile pages are accessible and access problems only started this afternoon.
Danwei points out Blogspot was reblocked in October, then unblocked in November.

Naruto’s Inner Fox Kyuubi

“What is the Chinese counterpart to Naruto? Even more to the point, will Japanese producers start making more Pan-Asian type stuff that can be accepted everywhere? Or are they doing so already?”

I’d say they are already, and Naruto is a good example. The international anime hit centers on the main character Naruto, who is the host (unwillingly) for an evil nine-tailed demon fox. Nine-tailed demon foxes appear in ancient Chinese folktales, most notably the Feng Shenbing (封神榜), often translated as “The Creation of the Gods”. Not your straightforward creation story, most of its tales take place in the legend-shrouded early dynasties of Chinese history. In one story, Zhou Xin (紂辛), last ruler of the Shang Dynasty, married Daji (妲己), whose body was possessed by a fox spirit (hulijing 狐狸精) with nine tails. Zhou Xin had offended the spirit and it sought revenge by seducing Zhou Xin into becoming a ruthless tyrant, which led to a revolt. Fox spirits are found in Chinese, Korean and Japanese mythology, and are typically seductive women who rob men of their yang and ruin their lives. Not surprisingly, the term hulijing is now used to refer to a “gold digger”. In another example of how much Pan-Asian crossover there is, the slang term is the name of a popular song by Taiwanese Alan Luo (who speaks fluent Japanese), which also appears to be a cover of a song by Shim Mina, a Korean pop star who found fame when she was photographed cheering at the 2002 World Cup.

Daji and the Creation of the Gods is a major inspiration for Chinese Cosplayers

I’m not sure what the formula is for Japanese cartoons success, but I suspect it has something to do with marketing and collectible card games. It doesn’t help, either, that when people in China call for the removal of a cartoon because it is “derivative of domestic wuxia novels and foreign cartoons”, since that seems to be part of the formula as well. It’s not clear whether China’s domestic cartoon initiatives will encourage more cartoons drawing from mythology. They have made a cartoon about Nezha, the mischievous youth who goes around killing the Jade Emperor’s pet dragons in the afore-mentioned “Creation of the Gods”, but it doesn’t seem to have the same danger or continuous storyline as something like Naruto. Then again I haven’t really watched it. I’ve always wondered if such material sets off the “feudal superstition” alarm for Chinese TV censors. It certainly gets around in other media: Chinese software company Kingsoft has a Feng Shenbing MMO game.
And a Chinese painter, Li Zou, recently displayed her series of paintings depicting 100 concubines of Chinese history, including Daji:
And I just love this Japanese woodcut by Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi (1798 – 1861), titled THE INDIAN PRINCE HANZOKU AND HIS SERVANT ARE BEING TERRIFIED BY KAYOFUJIN WHO REVEALS HER TRUE FORM AS THE NINE-TAILED FOX and from a series very appropriately titled ‘Japanese and Chinese Parallels to the Tale of Genji’, published by Iseyoshi in 1855. (Purchase for 780 Euros at Mattia Jona in Milan!)

Tom Barnett pinched a graph from Stratfor (h/t Danger Room) showing China’s steady upward contributions to UN peacekeeping, now totalling 1,814 combined troops, police officers and observers. Back in 2005 I made a map of China’s PKO presence across the world, when China was the number one contributor on the Security Council. Now, they’ve been surpassed by France (2,023), but Russia, the UK and the US all donate around 300-odd troops. I thought I’d dig up the old map I made, with a few adjustments, and post one for this months current PKO deployments (all stats from the UN Peacekeeping website). As Mountainrunner points out, China ain’t got nuthin’ on Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, who contribute 39% of all PKO forces, but it continues to become more and more present. Robot Economist notes that PKO duties provide free training and support for these countries armed forces, and China may be doing the same. I think there’s a myriad of reasons for China to step up its peacekeeping contributions: on the ground experience, public diplomacy, observing operational methods and domestic pride all benefit. It’s worth noting that China has more than kept up with increased PKO operations. At the end of 2005 China contributed 1.5% of PKO forces – last month it gave 2.2%.
One other thing: on the earlier map, I noted where the Chinese International Search and Rescue Team (CISAR, or 中国国际救援队) had been deployed. In 2006 they were sent back to Indonesia, but it hard to find clear data on them. PLA members are part of CISAR personnel, but CISAR is part of the China Earthquake Administration (formerly the Seismological Bureau). CISAR has also stayed busy responding to domestic disasters such as Typhoon Kaemi last summer.
If I find anymore info on CISAR deployment I’ll add it to the map.