I’m @ Hong Kong University for the China Internet Research Conference, and I’ll be liveblogging about the panels on the official blog along with John Kennedy, Oiwan Lam and others. I’ll also be on Twitter, if it behaves, along with all these other people (if you’re attending and your twitter feed isn’t in this mashup megafeed, let me know. Will be on the lookout for chatter on Summize and Twifan).

From Wang Xiaoshan’s:

Regular blogging will commence soon.

“The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, April 13th, announcing the Minerva Consortia (h/t Danger Room):

“The Chinese government publishes a tremendous amount of information about military and technological developments on an open-source basis. However, it is often inconvenient, if not impossible, for American researchers to get access to this material since it is often available only in China. A real – or virtual – archive of documents acquired by researchers and others abroad would help us track Chinese military and technological developments.”

Yes! Because U.S. academics should be thrilled to copy and export unclassified public domain data from China after the U.S. locked up someone for the rest of his natural life for doing the same thing.

The Washington Post quotes Joel Brenner, head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saying “Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets.” If that was the case, that’s some serious espionage. I’d wish somebody could explain to me, though, why it is that the Feds had wiretaps and videotapes giving evidence that he was meeting a Chinese intelligence operative, yet still couldn’t charge him with espionage.

Probably most disturbing is that the prosecutor, arguing why he believed Chi Mak should have the book thrown at him, went with this approach:

Staples noted that the disks Mak attempted to send to China were encrypted, a clear sign that he knew it was illegal to export them.

“Why encrypt if it wasn’t going to hurt the U.S.,” he said.

Encryption suggests guilt? That’s creepy. Midnight rendezvouses, secret code words, a shoe phone - those are signs of a spy. PGP? I hope not. Is it also suggestive of guilt if he locked the briefcase that carried the disks?

The Minerva Consortia idea kinda loses some appeal when you consider that some or perhaps none of the material Chi Mak was carrying was classified, some of it he wrote himself, and I can even download some of it right now, if I can just find a pirated IEEE website password on Baidu that works, which is likely with a little effort. Let’s also not forget Wen Ho Lee’s stolen “crown jewels” were almost entirely in the public domain until after he was arrested. But most importantly, it treads close to what the U.S. government and others have accused China of using, namely the “thousand grains of sand” strategy (supposedly a Chinese proverb, though I can’t find attribution. It’s not Sun Tzu, as far as I can tell).

That aside, I’m not sure what Gates is referring to when he says that open source information on the Chinese military is only available in China. There are plenty of Chinese military websites that are accessible outside the Mainland. And here’s a handy tip for the Pentagon: Dangdang.com alone has about 300 books on Military Technology for sale online. And they ship internationally. You can even buy Tactical Data Links in Information Warfare (信息化战争中的战术数据链), the book that inspired the Army War College paper by Larry Woertzel that inspired a completely irresponsible London Times piece about China’s “secret cyberarmy”. Since shipping is either 50% of item costs or a 50 RMB minimum, they’re even encouraging you to order bulk. Has nobody been doing this all this time?

If Gates is referring to research papers delivered at international conferences, though, I would think twice if I were an academic in China. They might think I’m carrying a copy to hand off to an “American intelligence operative” at Minerva.

A new documentary on the 5-3 Massacre, “Do You Remember, Do You See?”, promises to “guide people through a recollection of history, not to forget national shame, strengthen their sentiments about historical mission and responsibilities, devote themselves to development, cherish peace, in the Chinese peoples struggle to rejuvenate the nation”. (引导人们缅怀历史，勿忘国耻，增强历史使命感与责任感，致力发展，珍爱和平，为中华民族的伟大复兴而奋斗) Many countries suffer humiliating battles in wars. Few nations seem to use losing battles in wars they eventually won to define their national identity, or to inculcate intense emotional feelings in their children about them. In 2005, one school, Cixi City Xufu Primary School in Zhejiang, had a banner that said “勿忘国耻，兴我中华” - “Never Forget National Shame, Let Our China Flourish”, while students signed a similar banner. The author says “This afternoon, all of our schools students and teachers held a “Never Forget National Shame, Let Our China Flourish” name signing ceremony in the courtyard to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance Against the Japanese.” The writer goes on to describe the kids displaying feelings of “indignant nationalism” when they put pen to paper, so that they are “not merely trifling names, but in their hearts have a concentrated patriotic feeling.” Another article from 2007 talks about the “bloodsoaked history” of the Jinan Incident and begins with a photo of a young child being shown around the 5-3 Massacre Monument by an elderly relative, before launching into poetical language of how blood was like water and the rain like tears, how brutal those murderers were, how the past is a guide to the future, and again, to never forget this national humiliation.

This emphasis on national humiliation is quite something in China. It’s interesting to read this on ANZAC day; Gallipoli was an disaster, a pointless and bloody battle that claimed thousands of lives, and Australians are quite frankly nationalistic about it. The Sidney Morning Herald describes Gallipoli as the birthplace of “mateship”, “which gave legitimacy to Australia’s fledgling nationhood”, much as China struggled with nationhood in 1928. Yet the only use of the word “shame” I can find is that the ANZAC monument is a “derelict relic”. Though Gallipoli is considered a horrible mistake and loss, there is no invocation of indignant rage, or bitter grudges. Meanwhile, a Xinhua article on Chinese male celebrities greatest patriotic statements reports that Olympic hurdler and poster boy Liu Xiang “really hates Japanese” and so won’t ever wear or endorse their products “at any price”. There’s only 13 years between Gallipoli and Jinan.

The humiliation narrative connects to sports and the Olympics in a big way. Zhang Boling, one of several fathers of modern Chinese sports, described in this article as the Chinese Coubertin, or pioneer of the Chinese Olympics, said to get rid of the “Sick Man of Asia” label, “a great nation must first strengthen the race, a great race must first strengthen the body” (“强国必先强种，强种必先强身”) and “to strengthen the race, first strengthen the body” (“强我种族，体育为先”). This, as I’ve written before, falls in a tradition that goes back to China’s modern encounter with the West. This means that first of all, he considered the Western diagnosis of China as “sick” as the correct one, which is hardly a positive self-image. Second, he said that the need to cure the nation rested in the hands of every individual, an enormous burden to bear. And you can find references to national humiliation, the Sick Man of Asia and rejunvenating the nation in the official website of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. These are pre-CCP ideas, that continue alive and well.

It’s not just the sense of humiliation, either, that weighs heavy on Chinese shoulders. That’s strongly connected to rhetoric about Chinese people having lost and needing to reclaim their dignity, honor and strength, and its not simply the product of the government’s official history. Invoking the need to make China stronger, and that each individual has a responsibility to do so, is in everything, from Li Yang’s Crazy English “huckster nationalism” to doing push-ups.

Two phrases that are aren’t uncommon are 弱智的中国人 (feeble-minded Chinese) and 丑陋的中国人 (ugly Chinaman). The first made an appearance recently in a post on Time’s China Blog, where a Chinese journalist notes a conversation with a fellow Chinese about Tibet:

When I tentatively raised the topic with a long-time friend, who is well-educated and mild in manner, I was immediately cut short by a righteous lecture. “What do you have to complain about hostile phone calls?” he said. “Those shameless western mouthpieces deserved it! And It’s only for the best that CNN and BBC are blacked out so your lot could not pollute those weak-minded Chinese with your lies!”

The second comes from the book by Taiwanese author Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture. A reviewer on Amazon who has read the Chinese original explains:

His target audience was his fellow Chinese, especially those living in Taiwan, who at the time were still lulled in the belief that Chinese culture (or at least as it was preserved in Taiwan) was the best among all civilizations. While everyone acknowledged that the West was technologically superior, many felt that spiritually and culturally China still triumphed over the decadent West. No one disputed that Chinese society had severe problems. But prior to Bo Yang’s work, it was customary to blame these ills either on Westernization or a departure from China’s true values. Bo Yang turned the tables by arguing that the culture itself was the source of these ills. It is as earth-shattering as William Bennett coming out and identifying Judeo-Christian values as the source of much that is wrong with the West…

When Bo Yang’s work crossed the seas and entered the mainland, the effect was somewhat different. Mainland China had always blamed China’s evils on the “feudal” (whatever that term means) culture of ancient China, so in many ways Bo Yang’s criticism of Chinese culture resonated with what the communist government and mainland intellectuals believed at the time (this anti-tradition stance had reached its height in the 1919 May 4th Movement, and continued ever since on the mainland. In Taiwan, however, the ruling government returned to a staunchly pro-tradition, neo-conservative stance).

In an excerpt online, you can read:

Why must a Chinese person with the courage to speak even the thinnest slice of truth suffer this sort of fate? I’ve asked a number of people from the mainland why they ended up in prison. Their answer was, “I made a few true statements.” And that’s the way it is. But why does speaking the truth lead to such unfortunate consequences? My answer is that this is not a problem of any particular individual but rather of Chinese culture as a whole.

Just as Bo Yang is Taiwanese, there are other Chinese people around the world who talk as if there is something fundamentally wrong with China or Chinese people themselves. Doug Saunders received lots of congratulatory emails from overseas Chinese after he wrote an article some, though not Sauders himself, believed proved a conspiracy against China and interviewed one writer:

One typical e-mail came to me from a young man named Bin Wang, born to Chinese parents in a New England town, married to a white American woman, holding an advanced degree, well-travelled, fluent in English but not Chinese — that is, fairly typical of the pro-China movement. I know this because I actually phoned him to see if he was real and not a product of a back office in Beijing…

“Being Chinese,” he replied, “is not something easily forgotten when you move to a new land. Perhaps we don’t assimilate as well as others. But Chinese Americans are much more Chinese than Irish Americans are Irish. For them, it’s neat to discover their past. For us, it is very much a part of who we are. And the CCP is responsible for bringing pride back into being who we are. And that is why Western Chinese still consider themselves very much Chinese and would use the term ‘we’ to connect ourselves to China.”

But, I asked, isn’t this giving in to a paternalistic myth? His view of the Beijing’s regime as a kindly house builder portrays the Chinese as too weak to be trusted with the candy bowls and matchbooks of civil society without the helping hand of a strongman party.

To my surprise, he agreed with me, and turned this argument on its head, describing “paternalism” as exactly what the Chinese in his circle wanted and needed: Yes, he said, we need a paternal force ruling Beijing. For, without it, this ethnic nationalism will become more profound, more loud, more dangerous, and it will become a deadly menace.

There it is again; agreement with the idea that to be Chinese is to experience shame on behalf of your entire people and culture, a sense of weakness, that pride was lost and now needs to be returned. The second part I’ve highlighted is also quite critical of Chinese people, since it implies that Chinese people cannot control their own anger but instead need a strongman to do it.

Taiwan is proving to be an interesting example in all of this, as Bo Yang’s work was meant to counter excessive pride, and meanwhile the recent election of Ma Ying Jeou has been described as a blow to the stereotype that Chinese people “can’t handle real democracy”, a trope that does have some adherents.

There is a long-standing argument that the Chinese - who have lived through thousands of years of autarchy - are not fitted for and would find it impossible to create democracy. They cite places like Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau which don’t enjoy real democracy. However, Taiwan’s historic performance in these few days has contradicted such a theory, indicating that Chinese people are great - we have not only created a splendid civilisation in history and resurrected ourselves even after western exploitation, but also self-questioned and refreshed ourselves so as to step onto a main avenue of human civilisation. As Taiwanese have fulfilled all of this, then theoretically, mainlanders too will have no problem to be able to do so as well.”

These are just some of thousands of ideas that float around in the Chinese world of ideas. By no means is it monolithic. Rather, there are enormous debates again and again around these concepts. But the doubts, the anxieties, the pressure and the stress are real. And so when a foreign voice comes in, adding a new litany of complaints and pointing out flaws, it can sometimes be the straw that breaks the camels back. You can almost hear “I get enough of this s**t at home, don’t you start!” in the chants of protesters outside Carrefour. And as commenter Munir Ming points out, again at Time’s China Blog, pointing out China’s problems at this particular time is doubly bad, if not counterproductive. And to my Chinese friends, all I can say is, chill out. You’ve accomplished alot. Be proud of that, and cut yourselves some slack whether others give it to you or not.

The website calls for Chinese Canadians to renounce their citizenship and provides links on how to do so. It also argues that the Canadian citizenship pledge is unpatriotic for Chinese since one swears allegiance to the Queen of England, who is the chief representative of Western colonialism, since England took part in the Opium War and humiliated the nation. The website doesn’t appear to give any information as to who has actually done this, or a forum for discussion.

This seems like a really bad idea, considering Yang Hengjun’s brilliant call for media reform in China and increased efforts to reach the true masters of Western media, the audience themselves. Curling into a ball and retreating to China doesn’t seem like it would help with that sort of engagement.

In the book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing”, Robert Jay Lifton cites the writings of the American journalist Edward Hunter first used it “as a translation of the colloquialism “hsi nao” (literally, “wash brain”), which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Chinese takeover.” The term was later applied to indoctrination techniques in other parts of the world. Hunter was a propaganda specialist for the OSS during World War II, and collected a great deal of Chinese propaganda material, which is now available in the Chinese Pamphlets e-collection at the Center for Research Libraries. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word was in an article by Hunter for The New Leader in 1950, while Wikipedia cites an article by Hunter in the Miami Daily News the same year titled “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party”.

In the years that followed, “brainwashing” got alot of play to explain defection among American POWs in the Korean War, and that in turn later became part of the premise of “The Manchurian Candidate”.

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that xinao was an official phrase in the Chinese government, but referred to what is typical translated as “thought reform”, or 思想改造 (sixiang gaizao), which referred to the re-education of the intelligentsia and educated after 1949. Official history says that thought reform started in 1951, but according to one Chinese blogger, the roots can be traced back to 1950 (when Hunter first heard the term xinao referring to political re-education) in Mao Zedong’s speeches at the Second Meeting of the 1st CPPCC National Committee, when he exhorted intellectuals to use their free time to study Marx-Leninism, educate the masses and engage in self-criticism. An English version of the speech, “Be A True Revolutionary”, does not appear to mention intellectuals or holidays, but does quote Mao Zedong saying “Towards the people, on the contrary, it uses the method of democracy and not of compulsion, that is, it must necessarily let them take part in political activity and does not compel them to do this or that but uses the method of democracy to educate and persuade. Such education is self-education for the people, and its basic method is criticism and self-criticism. I hope that this method will be used by all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people’s organizations and patriotic democrats in the country.”

The blogger quotes Mao Zedong speaking at the 3rd Plenary of the 7th Central Committee of the CCP, which can also be found on Xinhua, “对知识分子要办各种训练班，办军政大学、革命大学。要使用他们，同时对他们进行改造.” “Intellectuals need to do every kind of training, military education, revolutionary education. They need to be utilized, and at the same time reformed.” Most likely these campaigns, which the following year would solidify as “thought reform”, were the ones Hunter’s informant was referring to when he used the term “brainwash”.

In contemporary China, “xinao” is a bit of a curious word. It is often used precisely as we would use it in the West, right now across the Internet in reference to CNN, or more loosely when author Wang Shuo called the 80s generation brainwashed by Hong Kong and Taiwan pop culture. Numerous stories appear talking about pyramid schemes “brainwashing” people into scams. But then there are the political campaigns mentioned online, such as “City and Rural Party Branches Hand in Hand”, which says that in tackling rural poverty, material donations are not enough but city and rural party members must go to each others areas to “brainwash” and “liberate their thinking”. [突出抓好思想共建。共建不能只是停留在给钱给物的层面上，更要抓好党的建设，解放思想，要组织城市党员进村入户，组织结对村党员进城洗脑，按“一加一模式”结对帮扶贫困党员和贫困户。]

Other instances often use the term brainwash positively (and in quotation marks suggesting its sorta slang) when referring to educating cadres, human resources (no quotation marks), public anti-corruption campaigns and to describe (again, positively) the controversial remarks of Professor Zheng Qiang (郑强), who railed against defects in the Chinese education in a speech in Jiangsu, saying “the higher your test scores, the more disabled you are”, early education overloads students, English education at a university level leads to students who only understands “English with a Sichuan accent”, and other thought provoking stuff.

The term xinao then, seems to have two lives in China. One is the sort of contemporary usage familiar to English speakers, as a negative term for indoctrination and people in China, where the word and concept originated, is now applying it to others, while the other xinao continues to be a term for a kind of “thought reform”, though now applied positively as a buzzword to things like Six Sigma training. Heh. I’ve lost count of the levels of irony at play here.

Photo courtesy of BCostin, under Creative Commons (Flickr)

昨日一个名叫「我爱榨菜君」的网友发表文章称，于昨日上午6时许乘坐地铁2号线，有4名男子在陆家嘴站上车，「穿着黑西装，面容严肃，非常之一本正经，在车上站成了一排」，然后4人各拿出1个录音机，开始播放「我们支持西藏独立」的录音，还「请大家上飞机时记得携带汽油炸药酒精」等。当时车上乘客不多，无人採取任何行动，4人放完录音就跑到另一车厢。

此外有网友称，有朋友停泊在上海音乐学院门前的汽车被喷涂上藏独字样和符号。

Yesterday a netizen called “I Love Mustard King” posted an article, yesterday morning riding the No.2 metro line, 4 men got on at Liujiazui Station [wearing black suits, solemn expressions, unusually serious, entered the car in a row], then the 4 each took out a tape recorder, began to play a [I support Tibetan Independence] recording, as well as [Please Everyone, When Boarding the Aircraft Remember to Bring Gasoline, Explosives, Oil], etc. At the time there weren’t many passengers, no one did anything, the 4 men ran to another car after the recording finished.

Other netizens report friends at Shanghai Music College cars were graffitied with Tibetan independence slogans and symbols.

Either there’s a really imaginative poster out there, or Shanghai is the first victim of Pro-Tibetan Independence performance artists. The article also claims that in the past couple of days Shanghai police have already confiscated more than 100 “volatile materials”. [此外，上海公安开箱检查地铁乘客行李以来，两日已检获百余件易爆物品。] Nail polish remover or C-4?

At 225 million users and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China - within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called - with searches performed from outside.

The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong.” Mind you, these were the kind of lawyers who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities.

So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

I guess somebody had their Wheaties that morning. This doesn’t seem fair. Banned keywords are, after all, illegal. It might be stupid, but its the law. While there doesn’t really seem to be any laws against searching for illegal keywords, the keywords themselves are illegal which makes it that risky shade of gray we all know so well in China. There are things that foreign law firms ought to stand up for in China. Doing a search as a favor to a colleague overseas doesn’t seem worth the risk - these are law firms that believe in a process of engagement. Calling them wimps seems unfair, and dismisses that they’re doing good in China in a different way.

Besides, why should they have to recreate what the Berkman Center already did? They get billed by the hour (ba doom ching). Even better, why not use the Blossom tool and do Google searches through a Tor node located in China? (The Tor page appears to be unblocked in China at the moment)

Web sites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, Wikipedia and wiki platforms generally, social networking sites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of Internet technologies.

In general, this is true. China’s filters have struck at overseas Web 2.0 applications in particular. But saying its “the full panoply” is inaccurate. China has now unblocked YouTube again and its being bombarded with Chinese made videos about the Tibet controversy. MySpace.cn has 2 million members, which presumably doesn’t include those who signed up on MySpace.com, which has remained unblocked, though it seems to be hanging on a connection today. Facebook.com is unblocked. Chinese users responded to a flickr block with annoyance and proceeded to route past it. Twitter remains unblocked. And nothing has ever seemed to stop BitTorrent, eMule or other peer-to-peer services. I’ll grant Wikipedia is only newly unblocked, and we’ll see how that goes. Blogspot, livejournal, wordpress.com and it seems now blogs.com have been blocked, and the government certainly takes a less than friendly view on them. But Scheer gives the impression these services are totally cut off, while its more patchy and randomly changes.

But here’s the part where Scheer really blows my mind. After saying Western Internet companies in China should disclose their role in censorship (fair), openly assert their disagreement with government policies (problematic), and move Chinese customer data off shore (Rebecca MacKinnon also recommends this) and if they can’t do that at least warn Chinese customers they are adhering to local laws (I believe the terms of service for Yahoo!, MySpace and the like do just that when they mention “damaging public security, revealing state secrets, subverting state power, damaging national unity,” etc.) Good. Fine. But then he goes on to say:

Finally, where warnings are not possible or go unheeded, companies should force customers to give their real names when using their Web sites. That will force users to think carefully about what they say or do online. Ironically, the barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn’t want to hear.

What? How exactly would you “force customers to give their real names”? Obviously you would need something like the real name registration system the government attempted to place on all web content in 2005. Who else but the Chinese government is going to confirm the name is real? Nobody else has anything like that kind of data. You can’t do a credit record check with ChoicePoint or something. Anyway, the system never happened, and later a voluntary “pledge system” was suggested and mocked. And only 15% of the public seemed to like the idea in the first place. This was a government program that free speech advocates such as RSF were against. Yet Scheer is saying that you should go offshore, but if you can’t do that issue a warning, but if you can’t do that - make them all do what the Chinese government once wanted to do and overseas activists feared?

Am I reading this right? Is he actually saying that overseas Internet companies should deny Chinese citizens the right to anonymity so that they’ll get mad and demand rights? Is he really suggesting that Chinese citizens are completely unaware of the consequences of certain speech, and ought to be forced to learn about it by Yahoo! and Google? Is he saying “stick it to them so they’ll learn the hard way”? Because that’s flabbergasting.

Nationalist sentiments about Chinese air have been simmering for quite some time, and have recently exploded after recent violence in Tibet. Chinese authorities claim that Tibetans attacked innocent Han Chinese air conditioner salesmen, while Tibetan activists abroad point the finger at China’s occupation of Tibet’s atmosphere and discriminatory breathing policies. The Chinese government has not allowed foreign correspondents to enter Tibet except in specially designed sealed bubbles. “The atmosphere is not good right now, we must take these precautions for the safety of foreign journalists”, said one official.

Tibetan activists counter that the air is fine, but is being exploited by the Chinese. “The air in Tibet is very thin. The growing Han Chinese settler population will soon breath it all up, leaving no Tibetan air for Tibetans,” said Soblang Rimpoche, director of Free Breathing for Tibet. He also points to a massive air pipeline constructed in 2007 to ship air from Tibet into the interior in an effort to support a rapidly developing China’s growing hunger for air.

Meanwhile, the Chinese nationalist web forum Anti-CNN.com has begun a new campaign against “biased foreign air” that “hurts the feelings and the lungs of the Chinese people.” A demonstration outside the offices of Air France last week left 23 dead of auto-asphyxiation, while 44 sustained injuries from holding their breath for too long. An internet manhunt also singled out an overseas Chinese student, who was spotted in photographs breathing European air. “You can clearly see her mouth is open,” said one commenter, “filthy traitor dog!”

Foreign critics of China’s air policies point out that the country has become the world’s number one air polluter, and that China would benefit from paying more attention to its own air rather than others. Chinese supporters believe this is simply a ploy to prevent China developing a more modern climate. They also point to reports that the US Olympic team plans to bring breathing masks and oxygen tents to Beijing, arguing this demonstrates that China’s efforts are no different than any other countries desire to maintain its atmospheric sovereignty.

While it is not clear precisely how the Golden Fan Project works, it seems to involve an array of different methods to block “harmful” foreign air. These methods include blocking breezes from particular regions, filtering for specific scents, and monitoring local air for “inappropriate exhales”. Expatriates in China report that there are numerous ways to breath foreign air, if one uses the appropriate tools, for example the proxy breathing service Anonymouth. “It’s only a minor nuisance,” mumbled blogger Davesgonechina from within his portable Hyperbolic Chamber.

“Foreign air is often very yellow, very violent,” croaked one official at the Ministry of Information Industries wearing a white mask during a Reuters interview, “and is not conducive to a harmonious society. Therefore we are doing our best to protect the Chinese people from its malignant influences.” He then turned blue and collapsed to the floor.