Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

Here’s an angle I’ve never heard before: Why the people of China WANT censorship. In his article, he writes:

Nationalistic pride, mixed with a feeling of racial superiority, mixed with the idea that the government is never wrong, mixed with saving face… It is a scary/irritating situation I live with every day. […] When censorship happens, it is not so much the government controlling the people, as it is 1.3 billion people putting their fingers in their ears and saying “Mmmmmm!!!!! I can’t HEAR youuuu!” Not only are conflicting ideas censored, but any negative events or occurrences within China.

It’s a good read, go check it out! While you’re at it, you might also want to read the thesis that Chinese people are naturally superior and hard-working, so SE Asian countries with high numbers of Chinese are naturally more prosperous.  I’m not sure that I believe that one…

Justin Timberlake has the four elements tattooed on his torso in Chinese characters:

The tattoos should read 风土水火 (feng, tu, shui, huo) or Wind, Earth, Water, Fire.  As far as I can tell, they’re done correctly!  Hurray for the four elements.

ESWN just posted this translation of a chain email circulating in China:

Will everybody please go to the GOOGLE homepage and search for “Nanjing Massacre” and “Diaoyutai Islands”!? Then please check out the search results. The results will always be the “This page cannot be displayed” notice and you will also be informed that you cannot use GOOGLE to search for a brief period hereafter.

But if you search for “Senkaku Islands” (which is how the Japanese ghouls call China’s Diaoyutao Islands, you can get results (I recommend that you search ‘Senkaku Islands’ first before you search for “Nanjing Massacre’ because if you searched ‘Nanjing massacre’ first, you will be prevented from searching for anything thereafter).

This is an obvious display of contempt against the People’s Republic of China and the men and women of China.

The ugly American ghouls are attempting to block information about China on the Internet! Their intention is extremely dangerous and evil!

Will everybody please attempt to experience this personally. If I am correct, then will you please relay this message so that all the Chinese people will know! We must resolutely boycott GOOGLE and use the search engine for the Chinese people: BAIDU! Let us use GOOGLE out of China!

I’m not sure what I think, except that the problem is larger than a search engine company.  The Chinese people shouldn’t be blaming foreign technology, they should be reflecting on their own government, which forces companies like Yahoo and Google to censor their results.

When I hear Fergie’s new single, London Bridge, I noticed it contained the line “Love you long time:”

VIP ’cause I know I gotta shine–
I’m Fergie Ferg, and me love you long time!

At first, I assumed this was a coincedence, but then I heart Nelly Furtado’s hit single Maneater:

You doing anything to keep her by your side
because, she said she love you, love you long time!

The lyrics have shown up in other, older songs, like Jay-Z’s I Just Wanna Love You and Nitty’s Nasty Girl, but they originally were introduced by 2-Live-Crew in their outrageous song Me So Horny:

Ahh! Me so horny!
Me love you long time!

This was in turn sampled from the Stanley Kubrick movie Full Metal Jacket, where a hooker in Vietnam asks two US soldiers, “Hey, you got girlfriend Vietnam? Me so horny. Me love you long time.” The phrase has since been used in countless other productions, and seems to be reviving in usage in modern pop music as a cliche of sexuality.

According to this guy, feeds powered by Feedburner are now being blocked by domain in China. Feedburner, in case you weren’t aware, services 200,000 blogs and 20,000,000 feed readers. So, when William Long noticed his subscriber count drop to 0, he tried to access Feedburner from China (which failed), and then access Feedburner through a proxy (which worked). So, the Chinese government made a smart censorship move against bloggers and cut a huge amount of access with one fell swoop.

Steve Rubel cuts to the heart of the problem:

This is a big deal. Essentially, the Chinese government is choosing to block some of the most popular RSS feeds in the world. That’s like they decided to block the largest airline from their airspace. It is as close as you will see a nation coming to blocking the entire RSS/podcast transport.