Posts by Chris Waugh
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Quick and perhaps not entirely coherent comment before I run off to the office and try to do something useful:
I do think there should be a media code of conduct and a regulatory body in charge of all media - including us lowly bloggers and microbloggers. But I think such a code needs to be very carefully and precisely written - not China-style where there's always some weasel clause to allow the CPC/government to shut down inconvenient voices. And the powers of such a body, including the punishments it can impose, need to be very tightly limited. I'm not comfortable with the idea of banning anybody from making their voice heard, no matter how obnoxious they may be, as DexterX seems to suggest.
We need to find that sweet balance between maximum freedom of speech, protection of the vulnerable, and holding people responsible for there actions.
And there remains the problem of jurisdiction. Is what I write on blogtown.co.nz subject to Chinese law because I am in China, New Zealand law because of the .nz in the address, or whichever jurisdiction the server is in because that is where my writing is physically located, or all of the above?
Right, time to get moving...
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Islander,
Did you receive the Matariki calendar?
Not yet. Will check again. China Post is generally reliable, but things go missing every now and then.
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She may have been born in Beijing, but she's telling you where her loyalties lie....
...or back in the real world, she's decided Daddy's hat looks much cooler on her than on Daddy.
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Very nice column. I especially liked this bit:
"So infuriated was lobbyist Mark Unsworth that he sent a late-night email that made up for its lack of commas with extra vitriol,"
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
they provide interesting challenges.
Yup. My observation - especially comparing those with some international or genuinely multicultural experience with those who grew up in regular Han China and were dragged through the Chinese education system - is that for most of them actual cultural difference is a purely abstract concept, something they've heard of but can't quite come to believe in. Getting my kids ready to do a degree at/from an Australian university (they have the option of doing the whole degree here or going to Australia to complete it) is difficult. I wonder how the cope when they first get there - I am, after all, sending them off to a fairly smallish town to study in an educational culture that has completely different expectations of them than they've ever heard of. And I've nursed an awful lot of people through culture shock over the years, including more than a few who've found themselves stuck at rock bottom and can't get back up to normal.
Fire off an email if you want to compare notes.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Leigh Russell,
Never mind, yours is a much cooller and craftier crab then the river crab that eats the unharmonious parts of the internet.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Ah, yes, if they were using blogger that may well explain the trouble. Anything with 'blogspot' in the address is blocked. There are ways around the block, but they're not always reliable even when the Net Nanny isn't playing silly buggers with the VPNs to remind us we're not supposed to be jumping the Great Firewall. Blogs run using blogger but with their own address are generally accessible (though I don't know if blogger is, which could make it difficult for people in China to run such a blog, anyway) so long as they're not on a server or within an IP range that is blocked and they don't draw the attention of the authorities for posting unharmonious content.
A few years ago I got sick of being collateral damage of yet another tweaking of the Great Firewall's settings and went looking for a NZ-based blog service, the reasoning being that small services from small countries generally fly under the radar. So far that plan has worked. Another option, which I'm using for my writing class, is to use one of the Chinese blog services and avoid posting anything sensitive. Of course, setting up your own website or arranging to do something on the university website would also work.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
China appears to want to be seen as a responsible senior player : enlightened self interest perhaps , but who cares why they want to clean up their act?
China's environment is.... well, 'degraded' isn't anywhere near strong enough. My father in law has told me of catching huge fish down in the river and the mountains behind his village teeming with wildlife when he was young. He even saw a leopard once - and that's only 70-odd km from downtown Beijing. Now? Forget it. 4000+ years of deforestation with precious little being replanted has left the whole northern half of China extremely vulnerable to desertification and, in the spring, sandstorms. I've been caught out in more than a few sandstorms and I'm pretty sure I'd prefer any other kind of weather. Not long after I moved to Taiyuan a storm came up from the south - typical Taiyuan, it was short and sharp and gone within half an hour, but as soon as the rain hit I had jet black water shooting through the gaps under my windows and balcony door. When I got caught in sandstorms in Taiyuan, on arriving at my destination I'd head straight for the bathroom to clean the dust off face and hands and rinse the mouth at, only to see in the mirror my face pockmarked with yellow loess and black coal dust.
Photo: The view from a friend's apartment, coal-fired powerstation.
Why should we care why China wants to clean up? If New Zealand's population continues to increase and Kiwis don't clean up their acts, China's now will be New Zealand's future. Personally, I would prefer New Zealand to clean up now and avoid China-degree ecological catastrophe.
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Toby Manhire on Dr Joy and 100% Pure:
New Zealand's environmental record is far from being all bad. Where it is chiefly disappointing is in the trend. We are a young country, and have done too much harm in a short time.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Leigh Russell,
I do have readers in China so presume that all is not entirely obscured!
Hi Leigh. The problem for those of us in China is that the government/Party has decided that everything with blogspot in the address is unharmonious, therefore all websites with blogspot in the address are blocked. For a while blogspot.co.nz was open, but the Net Nanny wised up and blocked them, too. You still have readers in China for 2 reasons:
1: Not all Chinese ISPs are as strict as they're supposed to be at blocking websites deemed unharmonious.
2: Many in China use VPNs and other such things to "jump the Great Firewall" - tools that put them virtually outside China so the River Crab* doesn't know what they're up to, allowing them to look at stuff deemed unharmonious.Don't take being blocked personally, in your case it's simply because your blog address contains the word 'blogspot'. If you were to use blogger to run a blog on you own address, say 'rushleighchronicles.co.nz' or whatever you chose, you'd likely be accessible VPN-free in China. But even then there'd be the risk that your blog would share a server with something the Party took a disliking to and find yourself blocked because the whole server was blocked. Of course, then you could get your host to shift you to an unblocked server..... This could go on a long time. Let's just say China's internet censorship results in a lot of collateral damage. Searching for rushleigh and cranmer will get us in China links to your articles, but we won't be able to open them without a VPN or other way to jump the Great Firewall.
*Hu Jintao's favourite word, harmony, héxié in Mandarin, sounds almost exactly like the word for river crab, héxiè, only a difference of one tone, so Chinese people use river crabs as a sarcastic way of referring to what they're not officially allowed to be doing online.
