China Connection

I have someone that I chat with quite regularly in Guandong (Canton) on Skype these days. She's an English teacher in a Junior High School - one of life's thankless tasks the world over it seems. But recently it's been her summer break and is planning a trip later in the month.

In some ways this teacher explodes a thousand stereotypes I've carried around for years about China. She lives in a flat with her husband but it's a modern condomimium that they have a mortgage on, close to her mum's house. And she drives to work every day in her second hand car and surfs around on her laptop half the night. She's just like some of the people I met in China myself when I was there last year - to be honest I loved the place even though it left me exhausted. People's lives are just like your own wherever you go, only the forms change.

And yet my Cantonese friend can't read this blog. 'Blogspot' is one of those internet URLS that are blocked in China because of the amount of political material posted there. Curiously I could even write my blog in China on the hotel PC - but not read it once it was posted! I can copy and paste what I write here into an email of course; sometimes emails get there and sometimes they don't. I've grown accustomed to writing something noncommital and oblique about messages like "wrote something yesterday but you may not have seen it yet" and I get an equally noncommital "right" in response. Skype phone calls sometimes unravel too, but then they do that when you make them to anywhere.

That's the day to day practicality of state censorship. I wonder where it will all end up. In once sense you can't stop people thinking or talking about anything, there is always a way around it if you look hard enough and people think for themselves wherever they are. And yet it's so easy to close down whole areas of debate by making people feel afraid, or unreasonable, or disloyal, or just by corrupting the use of language so much that you don't even have the vocabulary left to talk about things that matter any more. That's the scariest kind eh?