Category: China

manninchina.com

Michael Mann from Lenovo.com is on assignment in Beijing. He has one of my favorite China blogs.

“BACK RUBS/PATTING in the bathrooms. This doesn’t happen everywhere, but you will find it at some of the bars in Beijing. A lot of places have bathroom attendants…use a comb, take some mints, hand you a towel. But here, while you’re standing at the urinal letting it flow, they sneak up behind you and start giving you a back rub. Come on, is that really necessary & how many people actually like that? Not to mention, when you start punching my back, it hurts my aim, so you might get some on your shoes (they don’t care). So bathroom attendants…no more back rubs at the stalls. Relax, I’ll give you 10RMB, just give me a clean towel to dry my hands.”

mann thoughts » Blog Archive » I’ve been found out!

Colleague Michael Mann is discovering his inability to read or write to his wordpress.com hosted blog within China. I am a WordPress blogger — but host it on my own server and act as my own sysadmin — so apparently I am visible within the country. The good WordPress folks at Automattic provide an excellent service, but for any blogger trying to work within the Great Firewall … forget about it.

When I posted that I figured out how to read blocked blogs within China — and then coyly said I wasn’t going to divulge the secret — I didn’t mean using IP anonymizers and other backflip moves. The secret is an acronym, has three letters, is the essence of blogs, and can be aggregated in a feed reader like Bloglines. Directly accessing a blocked blog is a futile effort.

Imagethief is Will Moss. A PR pro in China. I like his blog a lot. So does, CNET, which recently picked him up for CNET’s Asia editions. Anyway, the whole American Internet companies operating in China ethical debate thing? He writes an excellent post which puts it all into great, speculative, perspective:

“So far, US Internet companies have been scrupulous in not suggesting that their prime benefit to Chinese users is access to controversial material, a move that would likely be poorly received by the Chinese government. But nor have they done a good job of articulating what benefits they do bring to Chinese users. Combined with their failure to adequately address the moral conundrum of operating in China –as opposed to the legal conundrum, which has been beaten to death– they have left a nifty vacuum for for their detractors to fill. They do not, nor have they ever, controlled this debate.”