Green Dam Youth Escort Daily Log

After another period of delinquency, I have decided to update regularly at the cost of topicality. This blog now traces the madness cycling in the contours of East Asia writ large, for an audience writ large.

As broader background, the Green Dam Youth Escort was a content-filtering software mandatorily installed on all computers sold in Mainland China. One is not required to boot it, but the program (according to Colin Maclay at Harvard) does log all pages users access. To hold myself accountable, I now offer the panoply of links that the GDYE captures, though unfortunately it may reveal my more economically lilted day-job:

• "Strange Bedfellows" at the FT. Will Manmohan and Hu join hands to stomp the Uighurs?
• "Lifestyles of the Chinese Rich" at the WSJ Wealth Report. A recent edition of the Hurun Report, which puts out reports that mirror the Forbes 100, maps out the consumption patterns of the rich in China. What would Roland Barthes say to the fact that: "The Chinese rich have at least three homes, often filled with porcelain and jade collections mixed with modern art. They spend more than $7,000 a year on piano lessons." ? Let it be also noted that this is the Robert Frank who wrote a widely cited paper titled: "Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" His short answer is YES.
• "Viewpoint: Why China Could Turn Green" at Time. Is China the unrelenting polluter we think she may be? Maybe not... though the author marshals some unconvincing pictures of Tony Blair and Jet Li parading around with solar panels in rural China as evidence. For anyone not yet acquainted with ChinaDialogue (started by the phenomenal woman behind openDemocracy), that's the REAL portal for environmental news. The bilingual site is an experiment in cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, netroots environmental activism in China, and hopefully I'll be able to blog on some of the interesting threads there soon.
• "The Changing Roles of the Media in Taiwan's Democratization Process" via Brookings. Ok so I haven't read this report and am trying to force myself to. I came across it when a colleague at work mentioned that Elton John was attacked by the media in Taipei earlier in August, exploding into a furious ball of glitter, fury, and insult.

FIN!