Mutant Palm

ESWN pointed out this interview with Peter Hessler that I noticed a while ago. The reason I found it interesting was this part:

Culturally, China is vastly different from the United States. What is the most common Chinese misperception about America and Americans? Conversely, what American clichés about China need to be reconsidered?

PH: The Chinese tend to view America in extreme ways. Some Chinese speak of the US as if everybody there is rich and happy — I’d say this is probably the most common viewpoint among average Chinese. But there is also a lot of talk about American poverty, violence, guns, as well as the bullying tendencies of the American government. This line of thought is often encouraged by the Chinese media. When I taught in Sichuan, my students used a Chinese published textbook called Survey of America, which included one chapter about “Social Problems.” This is a sample paragraph:

“In 1981, in California University, robbery and rape increased one hundred and fifty percent. In a Cathedral school of Washington District, a girl student was raped and robbed by a criminal with a hunting knife while she was studying alone in the classroom. In a California university, a football coach was robbed on campus by someone with a gun. It is said that, in South Carolina University, gangs of rascals have been taking girl students, women teachers and wives of teachers working in this university as their targets of rape, which has caused a great fear.”

You can imagine how frustrating it is for an American teacher to be expected to use such a book to introduce the United States to a classroom of young Chinese. I’m sure that these incidents are true — certainly, there are rascals in South Carolina —and I imagine that the details were culled from American newspaper stories. But that doesn’t make them a useful starting point for students in a small town on the Yangtze. They need context, not a bunch of scattered facts and trivia. When I talk to Chinese about America, I often find myself trying to push them away from the extremes. I don’t want them to think of the U.S. as either paradise or hell. They need to see it in human, everyday terms.

When I taught at a university in Xinjiang in 2005, nearly ten years after Hessler taught in Sichuan, I used a similar textbook 英语国家社会与文化入门, or “The Society and Culture of Major English-Speaking Countries”, published in 1997. A cursory search of edu.cn sites on Baidu shows over 800 references to the book, so it’s safe to say it’s still being used. I don’t have the book anymore, unfortunately, but a course page at Shandong University of Finance does have a summary of the chapter I remember:

Chapter 8: Social Problems in the United States
Focal Point:
racial problems
inequality in American society
discrimination against blacks
the black “underclass”
poverty as a social problem
drug abuse
social costs of drug abuse
crime
the profile of a typical criminal
racial prejudice in the high rate of arrests
white-collar crime
the abuse of power by government
the abuse of power by corporations

The chapter in question had anecdotal stories much like Hessler’s. When I taught from this textbook, I told my students that I was happy to answer any questions about this chapter, but I had no interest in teaching it since the topics it covered were hardly unique to the United States or anywhere else, and my students hardly needed me to point out that Xinjiang suffered from every single one of these problems as well. I did point out to them, however, that I was uncomfortable with the fact that the book (two books, actually) did not have a “Social Problems” chapter for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Only the United States received such treatment. Perhaps the authors wanted to impress upon students that the United States was not, as we say, “all that and a bag of chips”.

The Shandong University of Finance webpage also gives all of the test questions to the book, though it is not clear whether they are from the teachers book or written university faculty. There is no answer key, but perhaps you’d like to try and fill in the blanks.

1. American society is a stratified one in which _______, _______, and _______ are unequally distributed among the population.
2. The largest of the racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is _______ who make up about _______ percent of the population.
3. Former President _______ said that crime is America’s “number one enemy.”
4. Name two of the illegal acts by the FBI: _______ and _______.
5. Name two of the illegal acts by the CIA: _______ and _______.
6. The dominant group in American society that has taken control of economic assets and political power from the beginning of the nation is _______.
7. American slavery was finally abolished by _______, _______ and _______.
8. After the abolition of slavery, many states _______ to keep the races apart in schools, housing, restaurants and public facilities, and kept blacks in the lowest-paid jobs.
9. Those arrested for crimes are disproportionately likely to be _______, _______, and _______ city resident.
10._______ had tested variety of drugs, including LSD, on many people who were unaware that they were being used as _______ and had caused several deaths in the process.

Yes, that is a reference to MKULTRA.

Special bonus question from the Chapter One test on the origins of the United States:

1. Which of the following statements was correct around the time of the American Revolution?
A. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans or their descendants.
B. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans with American Indians.
C. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans with blacks.
D. The American had the blood of the English and their descendants only.

Just as Granite Studio had figured out how to use the Blogspot ban workaround posted earlier, the Great Firewall goes and unblocks it. Obviously the Net Nanny is just trying to mess with J’s head. Still, the workaround is now applicable to WordPress.com, which remains blocked.

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some bizarre access problems myself. For one 24 hour period, I lost access to Bloglines and Del.icio.us. Then yesterday and this morning, I had no access to Yahoo! Mail, Bloglines or, interestingly, ESWN. Perhaps a cable somewhere was unplugged. And within Bloglines, Global Voices Online and Virtual China always timed out – until I deleted saved posts on police corruption and 1940s Tibet, respectively. Perhaps there was a hiccup at a routing point somewhere. Some of it maybe tripping content filters, such as the GOV and Virtual China posts, but don’t seem like it. This all leads me to a bit of speculative paranoia: What if this wasn’t just a hiccup? Meanwhile, a colleague told me that they lost access in Shenzhen to Baidu.jp, which has been “under observation” *ahem* because it allows Chinese mainlanders to search for porn. More interestingly, Chinese users are driving the majority of traffic at Baidu.jp. Then, hours later, Baidu.jp was accessible in Shenzhen. Tech problem? Or something else?

For the Blogspot ban, there are two reasons I can think of why it suffered a brief ban. The first is that someone, somewhere on Blogspot posted something that someone, somewhere in the PRC found offensive, and a spank was applied. This seems unlikely, since the Nanny is quite capable of singling out a single blog. The best example of this is at the URL voyage.typepad.com: click “Letters From China”, which is located at /china, and you get blocked. Click “Saturday Night”, located at /saturdaynight, and there’s no problem.

The second, and more likely reason that Blogspot was banned is that when Google moved Blogspot out of Beta, it changed the root IP address. As a result, China sat up and took notice, and implemented a test run to ensure it could blanket ban Blogspot at the push of a button. The test was successful, and now the ban is lifted since they have that ability in place.

But a third possibility strikes me: if I were working on China’s Golden Shield (金盾工程) project, I wouldn’t be interested in having 30,000 Net Cops (an oft-repeated number that isn’t even proven to be true). No, I’d be interested in neural networks – software agents that learn and adapt based on new input, that would be able to examine large amounts of internet requests and identify particular users who often view questionable material (like me). Like Ren Jiadong and Huang Huiyu, who wrote a paper in 2004 entitled “基于人工神经网络的有害信息过滤智能决策系统: An Intelligent Decision-making System for Ill Healthy Information Filtering Based on Artificial Neural Networks”. The abstract says that in tests their neural network was quick and highly accurate in filtering “evil information”. And moreover, I’d test different approaches and software in different provinces and ISPs – not unlike how economic and political reforms have been carried out in China.

So are random hiccups in the system the work of experimental software agents doing “smart” censorship? Hell if I know. But I’d bet good money that the Chinese government has quite a few people working on such tools, and one day they will be deployed.

OK, so this meme was started over at TheThinkingBlog.com, where the goal stated is to name “5 Blogs That Make Me Think”. I got tagged by the always-making-me-think Granite Studio, so J can’t be on this list. He’s already on three, so he’s covered. So, in no particular order:

1) Chinese Blogger Yee at Ya, I Yee has been racking up the hits, such as a nifty workaround for the Blogspot ban and being the first to catch that Baidu.jp allows porn searches (for now), setting up a possible confrontation between the Net Nanny and China’s most prominent internet company.

2) Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the blog of Jess Nevins, librarian and pulp fiction expert extraordinaire. His explorations take him into such topics as Bad Girls of Early 20th Century China and Pulp Fiction of the Qing Dynasty. He also blogs over at No Fear of the Future with the likes of Chris Nakashima-Brown, where he’s tackled such topics as the Sixty Degrees of Sherlock Holmes, which has to be one of the ultimate pulp fiction blog posts ever. OK, so that’s two blogs, but one cool blogger. (blocked in China)

3) Looking for a wickedly funny confessional of the expat life in China? Look no further than Shenzhen Zen. (blocked in China)

4) BLDGBLOG. Go. It’s awesome. (blocked in China)

5) Xinjiang Watch is the only blog ever ambitious enough to do semi-regular translated rundowns of Chinese press about Xinjiang. Something tells me these guys are only going to get bigger and better soon.

(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.