Hello Blogspot. Goodbye YouTube

Well, this makes sense... Google's 'Blogspot' blog service has been unblocked by “Net Nanny” - hence this, um, celebratory post - but then, just a few hours later, Net Nanny decided to mess with our heads by blocking (Google owned) YouTube.

Yes, YouTube has been GFWed!

But whereas a conventional website consisting of text or photos can be recovered from behind the Great Firewall with a simple web proxy, or maybe even with a nifty Firefox extension (such as the excellent Access Flickr add-on), flash-based videos cannot be viewed on even a CGI web proxy.

Thailand suffered a similar blockage after the furore over videos which mocked the King of Thailand. What, then, was the cause here in China? Could it be because the 17th sitting of the National Congress has made Net Nanny get the jitters? Perhaps not. Because, according to Marc van der Chijs, who is the founder of the Chinese-language video-sharing website Tudou.com, it was more likely the fault of parent company, Google. Marc explained on his blog:

I suspect the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users. Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google's China offices rang an alarm bell about this before the launch. A typical example of the mistakes foreign companies make while trying to do business in China.

I hope for YouTube it is just a problem with their content delivery system or something similar, and not a real block. I don't like sites to be blocked, even not those of our competitors. But it will be an interesting discussion point for our Tudou board meeting tomorrow, that's for sure.

So, only the agonising passage of time will tell if YouTube will soon be brought in from the cold and be given a steaming hot cup of coffee, or if it is destined for a longer spell in the wilderness, as punishment for Google giving Chinese users the chance to search for videos in their native language that Net Nanny doesn't approve of.

...and there but by the grace of science go I

Or: “A celebration of atheism in China’s schools”

On the walls of China's public schools you might find Karl Marx and even Friedrich Engels (an overture to more weighty propaganda to follow in later life), but you will also find images of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin along with detailed profiles of these great men of science. These framed homages often line corridors, or take pride of place in between the windows inside classrooms, as if Einstein's beaming face or Darwin's fulsome beard might provide light and sunshine of their own.



It has been heartening for me to see, over the past few years, not the visages of Mao, or Lenin, or any representations of some God or other, on the walls of Chinese schools, but affectionate portraits of scientific luminaries. And, in so doing, are sending out a wholly desirable message to the children: that earnest study, thorough research, scientific rigor, and solid and corroborated proof leading towards an insightful scientific theory that advances the realms of science and human thought - that all of those things represent the very best of human endeavor, and is the best possible conclusion to their current studies.

Thankfully lacking from a Chinese student's education and school environment are any images or stories of Gods, or any incitements to what Richard Dawkins would term 'religious delusion' or 'blind faith'.

There may be weekly flag-raising ceremonies - which seem rather staged and overly patriotic to us casual Europeans, with every student lined up and forced to 'dance' in perfect harmony in time to some vaguely militaristic music - but it's surely better than a dose of God and religious fear-mongering, which is the mode of most religions to keep everyone singing from the same song-sheet. And it's religion that peculiarly understands that you've got to nail 'em while they're young. Well, and McDonalds, too.

The children in China are, I understand, being cowed into being one homogenous being, with exhortations to be valuable citizens, with a dosage of fear of being cast-out thrown into the process of keeping the students thinking and acting as one. And yet, essentially because this is outside the stricture of organised religion, it appears to me as a welcome focus on more tangible things, such as striving forward, science, and great effort in the name of achievement. This is in contrast to the religion which pervades schools in many countries, which focuses on moral policing, religious dogma, and a deliberate undermining of science in order to bolster the pillars of whatever religion it is that's seeking to sustain itself.

Look at the ludicrous situation that is ongoing in the U.S., with some schools in deeply conservative and Christian areas seeking to undermine, and perhaps even remove altogether, the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory in American public schools, in favour of the fairy-tale story of human advancement as it appears in the bible. It's like the 16th century all over again: before it was the Catholic church against Galileo (who pointed out, somewhat inconveniently for the Pope, that the earth goes around the sun. Oh, and the earth ain't flat too), and now it's enraged Christian Moms and Dads with no grounding in science who are seeking to have their children's education white-washed of anything that doesn't click with the bible.

What the fundamentalist Christians (and, perhaps, all Christians) lamentably fail to understand is that scientific theories are, technically, just theories, in that they cannot be absolutely judged as being correct, but that they are essentially correct on the basis of a great deal of rigorously tested scientific evidence. And that's a hell of a lot better than a story, which is, essentially, just a story; and never anything more.

The only possible result of these tussles over Darwinism in America is that the U.S will become even more of a laughing stock and/or pariah than it is already in the international arena (see: Kyoto protocol; Iran; Iraq; trade tariffs), and also that China will overtake America in a number of fields even faster than it is already. Europe seriously needs to sit up and take notice too.

See all those tens of thousands of Chinese kids in universities in the U.S, Europe, and Australia studying sciences, business, and I.T.? And see how they are then snapped up by Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, Microsoft and Google because they are far ahead of most of their Western counterparts in terms of their commitment to success? That's quite possibly because they wasted no time being taught that some geezer called Noah stuffed every single animal on earth (but not dinosaurs, apparently) on a huge boat, and instead sat in class looking up at Einstein's cheeky chops and thought, “I want a piece of that”. And, fair enough, they strived to achieve it.

And there but by the grace of science go they.

NOTE: This is cross-posted over at Lost Laowai, and was created specifically for LLW's 2nd "group writing project", this time entitled China: Love it, Hate it. Please leave comments over at Lost Laowai. Cheers!

Skype is down, millions are speechless

Skype, the internet telephony service and instant-messaging application, has been non-operational, globally, for the past 24 hours.

It's a massive outage: effectively crippling an entire company which was worth US$2.6 billion when eBay purchased it back in 2005. It also leaves the 8 million very regular users (though most newspapers are running with the “220 million users” figure) somewhat speechless, unable to access either the free IM, or the paid calling service.

Since many people across the globe, including a good number of expats such as myself, rely on Skype as an international phone service, a lot of people - and a lot of businesses - have been left stranded, unable to make calls or access their contact lists.

When I attempt to sign in, I get the message, “Failed to sign in: unable to connect to Skype P2P network”, as shown in the dialogue box below.



The P2P bit means “peer to peer”, meaning that the Skype system is not a centralised network, such as MSN messenger's, but actually a more spidery web of individual computers attached to regional supernodes. But, according to the Skype corporate blog which is posting occasional - though vague - updates on the situation, a dodgy algorithm within the Skype software had suddenly come to the fore and crippled the supernodes and servers. Ouch. So that's how an entire company worth nearly 3 billion US can grind to a total halt.

Within China, Skype has 25 million registered users. Though the amount of those who are very regular users probably shrinks to as little as a few million, in reality.

The latest update on the Skype blog was posted at 11:00am GMT (that's 7pm Beijing time), but that is actually a full 5 hours ago from the time of my writing this, showing that the updates are surprisingly sparse, and that the enormity of the problem might well take a further 24 hours - or more - to completely resolve.

And, the mood in the comments section is beginning to show frustration at Skype - with words such as “smokescreen” being used to describe the blog's updates - as a huge number of paying customers head into a 2nd full day of being unable to access the service.

Since Skype is actually cheaper for calling home than using any of the lousy 'IP cards' from China Telecom or China Unicom, and offers better sound quality too, there's no real alternative for calling an international land-line at the moment. Luckily, it's not my Mum's birthday until next month, because I'd be in big trouble if it was today or tomorrow.

(This was cross-posted on the 'Lost laowai' blog, and any comments are best left there)

Japan: where public holidays suck even worse

I have often complained of the mad rush that ensues in the run-up to, and during, the three main Chinese public holidays, when hundreds of millions of people go from A to B at the same time, and try to enjoy a bit of enforced “leisure time” stuck on the Great Wall staring at the sweaty necks of the people right in front of you.

I will complain no more, however. Because I have seen footage from this week's O-bon festival in Japan on Youtube that will blow your mind. It comes from Tokyo's Summerland amusement park, where the punters get to swim like a fish. Well, a sardine. First, here's a little photo:



Beneath that seething (yet very polite) mass of humanity is a swimming pool. This grope-tastic experience certainly boggles the western mind, who would think “well, fuck that for farce, I'm off down the pub”, but is all too common and familiar in Japan, and in China too.

To me, it seems totally pointless; even utterly stupid. I'm familiar with Japanese culture, but this scene goes beyond 'efficient use of space' to 'utterly bonkers'. Isn't the point of being in a swimming pool actually being able to, er..., swim. Or at least paddle. Or, at the very least, see the water.

Oh, wait, here's the best bit. The swimming pool finally has its wave machine turned on, for a bit of wavy, drown-tastic action. Check out the video:


(or click this link for the video if using a feed-reader to view this page)

Note: All credit to the Trends in Japan blog for the photo and video.

Cartoon: Made In China

This is a darkly toxic issue, in which a string of dangerously defective goods have given the “Made in China” label an almost sinister overtone.

It has even gained traction internationally, so that disparate Western cultural figures, from British newspapers to the American chat-show host Jay Leno, are making jokes and offering up critiques of Chinese-made products and their threat to human safety.

Just today I've read of lead in Mattel toys, lead in Toys'R'Us babies bibs, anti-freeze in hotel complementary toothpaste, and bridges that collapse before they've even been opened.

Time, then, for this week's 3-part cartoon:

One year on a Mac (in China)

Happy birthday, of sorts, to my laptop, a cutesy white Macbook. It has been one full year of using nothing but an Apple Macintosh computer at home, day-in-day-out, for leisure and business purposes.

The experience has been marked by how easy and pleasurable everything has been. Viruses? No. The “blue screen of death”? Nope. Spyware? None. System crashes and freezes? Nope. Seriously...

My last year as a Windows user was characterised by re-installs, slow-downs, random crashes, and spyware. Although the spyware issues stopped when I discovered Firefox.

What has been unusual about using a 苹果 is the simple fact that I'm in China, where Windows 2000 and XP (mostly pirated of course), have what appears and feels like a 99.9% reach of all home and business computing.

This has led to issues with Chinese websites. These are generally created with lots of needless 'Active X' elements, which are unsafe and clunky, and are designed solely with Internet Explorer in mind. A lot of Chinese websites will not allow log-in or sign-up for, seemingly, anything but IE or Firefox on a Windows machine, as I have been unable to register for the 'Tudou' video website, and Chinese friends who have used my computer have been totally unable to sign-in to their Sina email accounts or Sina blogs, prompting one friend to pointedly ask, “Does this computer only work with your websites?” Which is a fair complaint.

Apple deserves some criticism too, for having failed to get into the spirit of Chinese enterprise, and the Californian company still cannot really understand what Chinese consumers want, or need. There are no Apple Stores anywhere in China, though most cities have one or two authorised resellers, which are getting increasingly flashy and mainstream, especially the cool new shop on Shanghai's Nanjing West Road.

One more point of criticism is the awful Chinese text entry on my Mac. My level of Chinese is not great, but I can type quite well using the Hanyu-pinyin input method on either a Windows machine or a Mac, and I can see clearly that the Mac's Chinese input is lousy, with some complex characters unreadable, and the 'intelligence' of the predictive text is lousy, and most common phrases are not intelligently put together.

Thus, typing Chinese on a Mac is a pain, and perhaps explains why I know a grand total of two - yes, two - Chinese people who own a Mac. Nonethless, I have switched, and have started enjoying using a computer for the first time ever, and shall not be going back.

Cartoon: Who's watching the Asian Cup?

So, last night the Chinese team was knocked out of the AFC Asian Cup by Uzbekistan, by an inglorious score-line of 0-3. The teams played in the modern Shah Alam stadium on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

According to Wikipedia, the Shah Alam stadium can host up to 80,000 individuals. Last night it appeared that approximately - oooh, let me count - several of those seats were filled.

Here's this week's weekly cartoon, arriving as ever in a weekly fashion on a week-by-week basis (3 images which will load below):

Let's play I-Spy in China!

Here's a variation on the common “I spy” game, which might already be familiar to anyone who grew up in Britain and knows the 'I-SPY' children's book series, such as 'I-SPY in the Street', 'I-SPY Cars', and the more curiously named 'I-SPY People in Uniform'.

These heart-warmingly innocent books encouraged children to keep their eyes wide open to spot various sights. Best played in conjunction with others, the books could be used to form an informal competition as to who could spot the greatest number of sights mentioned in a particular book.



Thus a book such as 'I-SPY on the Road' could turn a boring car journey into hours of healthy banter and competition, attempting to spot as many of the illustrated sights as possible, as the scenery outside whizzes by.

So, to get to the point, let's have a bash at an ad-hoc game of 'I-SPY the Sights of China', to re-awaken one's jaded eyes and get a re-freshened look at the interesting sights to be seen even on an average working day. The list of sights is, potentially, almost limitless, so feel free to add to that list. I'll also assign points to each sight, on a sliding scale or 'rarity' from 100 (a very rare sight) down to 1 (a quite common sight). Needless to say, some curious sights are so common as to be rendered, erm..., point-less.

For example, seeing a foreigner with a Chinese girl or woman is quite common in the cities, so it would merit only 10 points. However, seeing a foreign woman partnered with a Chinese man is pretty damn rare, so it would net you a whopping 70 points. See how it works, yet?

One further example, the ubiquitous CCCHHHHHYYYYUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRR *splat* of ejected phlegm is so common as to score zero points, so I won't even list it below. In contrast, if you spot a car that stops at a 'zebra crossing' to willingly allow pedestrians to cross the road, you would score a hefty 85 points, and also suffer a case of shock, presumably.

OK, here's my initial 'I-SPY the Sights of China' list. Please feel free to submit you own sights (with a corresponding score), and also submit your daily scores - please do this over at Lost Laowai, where this is cross-posted, as that site has more traffic (and is not blocked on the mainland, unlike this and all other blogspot blogs!).

**********

A foreign man partnered with a Chinese girl or woman of similar age, 10 points
A foreign man partnered with a much younger Chinese girl, 25 points
A foreign woman partnered with a Chinese man, 70 points
A gay or lesbian couple of any nationality, 95 points
A foreign man wearing sandals with socks, 15 points
A very drunk foreigner puking on the street, 25 points

A very drunk Chinese guy puking in broad daylight, 15 points
A DVD shop that has 'closed down' for a few days because there's some VIP in the city, 5 points
A brothel that has 'closed down' for a few days because there's some VIP in the city, 5 points
A DVD available on the street before it has premiered in America, 5 points

A “watch, shoes, DVDs” hawker with pretty good pronunciation, 60 points
A man carrying at least 50kg of junk strapped to the back of his bike, 20 points
4 people on an electric bike, 15 points
5 people on a motorbike, 25 points

The 'Great Wall of Stupidity' when people on the platform block the subway doors as they rush to get in before you can even get out of the carriage, 5 points
A queue-jumper, 1 point
A queue-jumper who notices their mistake, apologises profusely, then moves to the back of the queue, 75 points
A car willingly stops at a 'zebra crossing' to allow pedestrians to cross the road, 85 points
A traffic warden that people actually listen to, 75 points

Someone smoking in a no-smoking zone, 15 points
Someone smoking in an elevator, 25 points
A doctor smoking as he examines you, 55 points
A doctor smoking as he delivers a baby, 80 points

A taxi driver who obeys most road regulations, 75 points
A taxi journey in which your cab doesn't nearly waste at least 3 people, 45 points

A computer that has a genuine copy of Windows XP installed on it, 50 points
A computer in a 'net bar' that doesn't crash at least 2 times an hour, 15 points
A 'net bar' that has humanly breathable air, 25 points

Seeing the sun and a blue sky in a small Chinese city, 20 points
Seeing the sun and a blue sky in Shanghai, 30 points
Seeing the sun and a blue sky in Beijing, 50 points

**********

And the list could go on... As mentioned before, feel free to put your own sights or tally-up your daily scores over at the comments section of Lost Laowai. Thanks!

Use Feedburner's RSS to beat the Great Firewall

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this earlier, but if you want to read a blog that is currently being throttled by Net Nanny - such as blogspot domain blogs, as well as typepad and wordpress, etc - then it is possible to use Feedburner to handle the RSS.



This bypasses the Great Firewall because the domain name is changed to feeds.feedburner.com which - touch wood - has not yet incurred Net Nanny's wrath.

Thus, my own humble blog, should some-one actually want the RSS feed to subscribe to my updated content, is now available through Feedburner. Please click on the words “Subscribe to RSS feed” in the right-hand column, or just click here. Cheers.

Shanghai LOLcat

If China is famous for certain things (an ancient culture, a beautiful writing system, etc.), then it is also not particularly associated with certain other things, such as health and safety, or animal welfare.

Thus it was with a warmed heart that I read about this week's rescuing of a truckload of cats in a suburb of Shanghai. The cats, stuffed into wooden cages which were packed onto a blue flat-bed lorry, were destined for the southern city of Guangzhou, to be eventually cooked-up and sold as over-priced culinary delicacies for those people that are still into that kind of thing.

Cats are not terribly popular here, and the only pet fashion right now is for pampered pooches, especially small breeds of dogs such as little terriers. So, it was something of a surprise that a group of fired-up Shanghainese had taken it upon themselves to stop the truck-load of cats and come up with the 10,000RMB (that's just over 1,300USD, or exactly 650GBP) necessary to buy the freedom of the poor moggies that would otherwise have been served up at a Cantonese corporate banquet.

Thanks to their efforts, all 840 cats on that truck have been spared. In celebration, here's my weekly cartoon, which is quite probably the first-ever Chinese incarnation of the long-running LOLcat internet meme. Here's the cartoon - 3 images, which will load below:

Blackberry finally launching in China

After an eight-year battle by the Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM), their famous Blackberry mobiles and PDAs will finally be sold in China. Better late than never, perhaps.

The delays have been seemingly caused by legal and technical wranglings over the service agreements; a situation hampered, perhaps, by their being only two mobile providers in China, and therefore little choice or competition.

Thus Blackberry devices will serve up their email via China's largest mobile operator, China Mobile. Service plans have not been detailed yet, nor the prices of the devices over here. Also, service will be limited to “key cities” on the mainland, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Despite coming so late, at least RIM now have at least 6 months over Apple, whose all-singing, all-dancing iPhone will see it's release in Asia in Q1 of 2008.



Presumably the internet service on Blackberry devices will be subject to the same - ahem! - pesky Net Nanny constraints that frustrate most mainland internet users.

Video: boating in Tongli, China

What with Net Nanny being a complete biatch and continuing to block Blogspot, and all the attractions of this very warm summer, this blog has been running low on energy.

To freshen things up, here's a video that I've edited together from a snippet of digi-cam footage of the very pretty “water village” of Tongli (同里) which is located just 40 minutes south-east of this city, Suzhou, or it's a 90 minute drive from Shanghai.


(The video is located here if you prefer to watch it on Youtube; or check it out right here on Vimeo).

It's an enjoyable day-trip for anyone in the area, with no cars allowed in the village, and very good food served at the canal-side restaurants. You could even wash down the food with some local “Tongli” beer. Here's the proof:



Cheers!