November 4th, 2008 at 9:46 am (Uncategorized)
ChinaSMACK has a post on shanzhai 山寨 brands. The first was this picture:
Which reminded me I took this photo a year ago. When I took it, I thought to myself “I’ll bet there’s a KFC knockoff for every letter of the alphabet”. Anybody got anymore? Baidu tells me there was a DFC (”Daintily Fried Chicken”) in Taiwan, and there’s some old BBS chatter about AFCs, BFCs and JFCs. If we can find enough it could be a Flickr group.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 am (Uncategorized)
Actually, more like a brief post of self congratulations. Encyclopedian Jess Nevins got to the issue of spiritual warfare a year before Sarah Palin made it a household name. I’ll see his spiritual warfare, and I’ll raise him a I had Pastor Muthee’s number a year ago, in a post on spiritual warfare in Xinjiang (and the rest of China). Talk2Action has the whole background and what Sarah Palin has in common with Harold Caballeros, a Guatamalan pastor who ran for president and condoned extrajudicial death squads for doing “holy work”. Xeni Jardin has quite a bit more on C. Peter Wagner and other parts of the movement.
Also, the recent Khalidi kerfuffle has brought out John McCain’s past leadership of the International Republican Institute (IRI). IRI President (and former McCain staffer) Lorne Cramer has been out speaking for the McCain campaign on Afghan issues and the New York Times reported on McCain’s IRI fundraising ties and how he moved the organization’s focus from Latin America to Eastern Europe (McCain’s friendship with Georgian strongman Mikhail Saakashvili started at an IRI meeting). I wrote about the IRI’s claims that it’s an “NGO” and its similarity to Chinese “NGOs” in June of last year.
I don’t seem to have any posts relating to Barack Obama or Joe Biden’s affiliations. Opposite End of China has an interesting one on Biden’s role in establishing CIA listening posts in Xinjiang.
Guess who I voted for.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:26 am (Uncategorized)
Back in May, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, a few China correspondents started talking about the possibility of a “Chinese Glasnost”. First was Philip Taubman, veteran of the New York Times Moscow bureau, warning what happened “When The Kremlin Tried a Little Openness“. Four days later, Nicholas Kristof called Chinese media’s coverage of Sichuan “China’s Glasnost“. Kristof doesn’t seem to understand what Glasnost was, saying:
In the 1980s, China’s hard-liners ferociously denounced “heping yanbian” - “peaceful evolution” toward capitalism and democracy… My hunch is that the Communist Party is lurching in the direction, over 10 or 20 years, of becoming a Social Democratic Party that dominates the country but that grudgingly allows opposition victories and a free press.
Kristof was in China at the end of the USSR and his hunch about gradualism seems more on the money about China. Taubman saw glasnost first hand, however, and gives a better description of what it was. Ironically, it makes clear why both of them are wrong that anything like glasnost is likely to occur in China now: