Nanny’s off her meds…Anonymouse, Blogspot back behind the GFW?

Ah the vicissitudes of a government petrified of information…after a brief revival this past week, blogspot is YET AGAIN blocked in Beijing. This time joined by the popular workaround site anonymouse which has, until now it would seem, been a decent way to access blocked sites. Hopefully this is all temporary and somebody will get the nanny a cocktail and a neck massage.

But for the moment can I just address (again) the purple elephant sitting in the corner: societies that block information and are afraid of alternative viewpoints cannot be considered modern and developed…and no amount of high rise buildings, synchronized hand claps, Audi A6s, or Olympic games will make it so.

Sorry.

June 14th, 2008

Mao and Chiang Kai-shek are walking down the street, and Mao says…

Whether or not our Google culture is making us smarter, dumber, or somewhere in between, I do get a fair bit of traffic from Google searches. Many of them a bit random, but a few are questions plugged into search engines like messages in electronic bottles floating in the Internet sea hoping for a bit of information and enlightenment. I dare not suggest that either information nor enlightenment are available in seller’s quantities from this little hobby of mine, but some of the questions do get me thinking.

Today a user followed this query to the Granite Studio: “How do Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong continue to influence Taiwan and China today?”

It’s obviously a complicated question, but it does recall a comment a Beijing acquaintance of mine made the first time we went to the old South Bar Street to take in the spectacle of a Sanlitun Saturday night:

“This is what all of China would like if Chiang Kai-shek had won the war.”

But didn’t he?

If the ghosts of Mao and Chiang somehow reconciled over shots of baijiu in the afterlife, and then wandered around Beijing on a rainy afternoon O-Minus 55 days, what would they be

June 14th, 2008

The Historical Record for June 14, 2008: Song on the run….

June wasn’t an a particularly auspicious month for the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Thursday marked the founding of the Southern Song by what was left of the Song court who had just been chased out of the north by the Jurchens. In the confusion, they left behind two emperors, Song Huizong (Zhao Ji 1082-1135, whom Chinese historians frequently blame for spending too much time painting and not enough time worrying about invaders from the north) and his son Song Qinzong (Zhao Huan 1100-1161). Huizong had already abdicated in favor of the Qinzong as the Jurchens began heading south (here son, my gift to you: an empire about to fall), thus giving Qinzong the honor of presiding over the sack of the Song capital, Kaifeng. Taken prisoner by the Jurchen, both Qinzong and Huizong were demoted to the status of commoners, and on this date in 1161, Qinzong died in his cold and remote exile in northern Manchuria.

If it only ended there…Today is also marks the beginning of the end for the Song Dynasty. The penultimate ruler, the child emperor Song Duanzong (Zhao Shi 1268-1278), took “power” on June 14, 1276 while, yet again, the Song court was on the run,

June 14th, 2008

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