China

Monday

Alex Massie

Media navel-gazing

Panorama tonight: The Olympic Games are special. The biggest show on earth – with an estimated global television audience of four billion people. But hosting the Games brings extreme attention and extreme scrutiny. Chinese Premier Wen Jibao promised that foreign media would be free to report on Chinese politics, economics and society in the build-up to the Games, a pledge at odds with the Western perception of China as a restrictive and secretive state. In Panorama: China’s Olympic Promise, reporter John Sweeney sought to put this assurance to the test as he travelled across China following the path of the Olympic torch. Well, fine. But there’s something mildly grotesque about

Tuesday

Alex Massie

How America is just like China…

James Fallows has a very interesting post about what it’s like to be a foreigner in China, in which he writes: I think I now can explain why, despite the pollution and congestion and overall ceaseless hassle of big-city life in China, I always tell friends or visitors that I “like” Chinese people in general. The reason is that, most of the time, people in China treat me as … a person. Not always and in every circumstance as a foreigner, though I obviously am that. I hear the Chinese words for “look, a foreigner!” and feel the general ripple of outsiderness much less often than I hear or sense

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Adventures in Marketing

Lots of good things come from China, but this is magnificent. Perhaps James Fallows can do a series of posts on counterfeit Chinese whisky? Via, here, here, here, here and here.

Friday

Alex Massie

Department of Fancy That!

Like Philip Salter, I dinnae often agree with Gordon Brown. But fair’s fair (especially the morning after a brutal by-election thumping), here’s some of what the Prime Minister had to say at the Google Zeitgeist conference  this week: The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy that are preventing prices for people that at are at a realistic level, and preventing people from producing in countries and continents like Africa at a level that they should. And we need to

Monday

Alex Massie

The Brown Chronicles: The Laughing Stock Years

Memo to Gordon Brown. This sot of caper explains why people are beginning to think you are in fact a fool: div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; } Gordon Brown will not receive the Dalai Lama in Downing Street in an effort to avoid confrontation with China over Tibet, The Times has learnt. The Prime Minister will, instead, see the Tibetan spiritual leader in Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, enabling him to claim to the Chinese that he is receiving the Dalai Lama in a spiritual rather than political capacity. What is the point of this nonsense? It’s like the decision to sign the Lisbon

Monday

Alex Massie

Defending San Francisco!

I see that heaps of folks are having fun with this sign, recently displayed at a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco: It is possible of course, that our friend here doesn’t know that the 1936 Olympics were held in Berlin*. But isn’t it also possible that our friendly demonstrator is actually asking an excellent question: would we in fact have permitted Nazi Germany  to host the Olympic games? I suspect we would, since, a) the games were awarded to Germany in 1931 and b) the Germany of 1936 was not, quite, the Germany of 1938. In any case, surely the point of the poster is in fact to compare China

Monday

Alex Massie

Good Day in Paris

The BBC: Paris protests mar Olympic relay This, naturally, is entirely incorrect. The problem would have been if there hadn’t been any protestors. Still, the BBC, which is sending more than 400 staff to Beijing, is heavily invested in the Olympics and keeps insisting that London 2012 is something to be jolly proud of whereas much of the population wished the IOC had handed the games to Paris instead.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Why oh why oh why indeed?

Is this Glenn Reynolds post a plea for more coverage of Tibet or less of Palestine? GOOD QUESTION:  Why Do Palestinians Get Much More Attention than Tibetans? But, just perhaps, the Israel-Palestine question receives lots of coverage because it’s a question, at root, of competing rights, not because the media has an incurably anti-Israeli bias or is, in this instance at any rate, acting in an especially hypocritical fashion. The other answer, of course, is that readers, are much more interested in the Middle East than they are in China and Tibet and, consequently, this is just market forces at work. Shocking!

Saturday

Thursday

Sunday

Alex Massie

Quote for the day

Via Samizdata, this from Barry Goldwater: I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be