freedom of information

Never offend your rulers by inappropriate answers.
When you are blue just knock on wood.
      

Related Justrecently Story: Dear Fenqings
My good friend Taide brought an article to my attention: “Can Fenqing or Angry Youths Think for Themselves?”
The Can Fenqing or Angry Youths Think for Themselves article (in the following: angry article or angry author) refers to an earlier article by Jamil Anderlini in the Financial Times.
I have no doubt that [...]

The Western China-related blogosphere sometimes seems to be split down the middle - pandahuggers and pandabashers. (Actually, I think it is a bit unfair to equate the Pandas and China in its current shape. Imaginative Chinese people make take offense from that because they think of themselves as self-strenghtening and rising while Pandas are kind of [...]

… inspired by Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China Gospel
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Prologue
“The Imperial Court announces with raging sorrow that her Imperial Highness, the horse-faced Dowager Empress aka Noble Consort Yi, has joined her Celestial Ancestors from the Middle Sea Hall of Graceful Bird today. Unreliable elements in our Sacred Kingdom are advised to keep their mouths shut and [...]

I hadn’t seen anything that might count as real evidence before. (Maybe that is because I didn’t pay much attention to the theory anyway.) But Michael Bristow of the BBC quoted an official paper four days ago, and that looks somewhat more substantial. According to Bristow’s article, local authorities started hiring commenters some years ago [...]

Be nondirective, make
your few words precious.
When the work is done, end
gained, everyone will say:
We did it by ourselves,
naturally.                     –  Tao Te Ching, 17
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China’s state chairman Hu Jintao yesterday praised the achievements made during the past 30 years of reform. He also said that that China would never adopt a “Western political system” - the success of [...]

There are some international news websites I usually don’t link to. Seems to me that their pages get removed frequently, maybe in order to save server space. But more recently, I’ve found out that there are other pages too that get lost too soon after linking to them.
Like the patriotic reincarnation theory for example, which I found on [...]

Besides music, my MP3 player also contains a number of audio books. The friend who put all that stuff onto the player probably knew very well that I’ve never cared about the more spiritual writings of Tibet’s supreme monk - I was only interested in his role as Tibet’s spiritual leader, and the cultural [...]

I’m not trying to make fun of Chinese probable censorship on “Cape No. 7″ (海角七號). Censorship easily turns into real-life satire anyway, and this story looks like one in the making.
China has suspended the screening of the hit Taiwanese film Cape No. 7. The film had passed Chinese censors and was scheduled to premiere in China [...]

Jiang Yiping (江艺平) has apparently been removed from her position as an editor of Southern Metropolis Daily. She is a co-founder of Southern Weekend, was - or still is? - Southern News Group’s deputy editor-in-chief, and has apparently been demoted to Southern Agriculture News and Southern News’ Journalism Research Institute, according to Boxun News.
Underthejacaranda [...]