Not blogging...

I haven't really bothered to blog much. Apart from feeling rough with a bad cold & cough, aggravated by the recent dust storms in Beijing, there is also the problem of censorship, which includes the following forms:

• Skype calls are often disrupted (the rumour is that China Telecom are trying to disrupt this to encourage people to switch to their paid-for service)
• Skype messaging is filtered within the PRC (Skype's CEO has admitted this)
• Any news item about China on BBC World is broadcast, until it gets to a sensitive (i.e. not totally positive) piece, at which point the screen goes blank. What's funny though, is that you get to hear the lead-up, so you know that everytime it blanks out, it's because the news isn't flattering. For instance, I know that Hu Jianto was heckled by someone outside the White House, I just didn't get to see the footage (blanked out)
• I can access the radio page of the BBC website, but not the news pages
• I can access blogger.com to write a post to my blog, but I - and indeed everyone in the PRC - cannot read my blog, as all blogspot.com blogs are blocked (with help from Google, i'm sure, who own the blogger.com service)

No wonder people go nuts over all these American companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) doing business with an authoritarian regime (and disclosing the identities of dissidents to the authorities, leading to their arrest). Reminds me of IBM working with the Nazis, or BAE working with the Saudi authorities, (allegedly) supplying them with kit useful for torture and repression.

Sure, you can make the argument that the PRC regime/administration is not as nasty as the Nazis, or as ideologically wobbly as the House of Saud. Perhaps that's true. But I do not think a dissident with an electro-shock baton upside his head will quite agree with you.

China is a great country, the economy is opening up, but two big stumbling blocks remain - the administration want to keep control (note that control is not the same as responsibility; big difference), and the gap between rich and poor is growing at a cracking pace.

How it pans out depends rather a lot on your time perspective. In the short-term; messy. Long-term (20+ years); better.