The changes in version 2.0 are not related to design, so they may not be immediately apparent to the eye. But they are rich in content and they will have important implications in the way I blog from now on. See the following points for what’s new:

Switch to Real Identity

Ever since I started blogging, and especially since I started using the Google sharing tools with my real ID, I have suffered from split personality on the net. Those who have been following from the beginning might remember the big fuss about this last year, as I was never completely comfortable with my internet persona.

I quite liked Uln in a way, it was amusing the way it naturally took a surname as Mr.Dice, and it was even cooler to see how some journalists used it freely to create their own heroins. I am not going to kill it completely, I will continue to use the avatar on the internet, but I will sign the posts as Julen. I guess the main reason for this decision is that I put a lot of work in my posts, I care about what I write, and I was growing jealous of that Uln guy who was taking all the credit.

I started using Uln in the first place to avoid problems with the Chinese authorities. Not that they were going to throw me in jail for this, but my life is in China, and if I can’t renew my visa for some part of me it will be like a death sentence. I have learnt a lot since I started this blog, I have spoken to many other bloggers, had my own site blocked and unblocked, and finally come to a point where I feel comfortable with the Chinese internet. I don’t think the risk is zero, but  today it makes sense for me to assume it so that I can be myself.

Following this change of philosophy, I have updated my Introduction and the Instructions Page. They were the first pages I created two years ago, and they were seriously in need of a rewrite. I hope now they give a more fair picture of who I am and why I write.

More New Features

Today I am also presenting a series of new features that I have been playing with lately and are now ready to be released. More detailed descriptions can be found in Instructions. Here is the list:

The MiniYouren: This is the weird midget that lives on the top part of my sidebar, a sort of mini-me. It is a mini-blogging platform that I use to write quick posts and connect it with Google Reader and Google Buzz.

The Roadmap: This is a sort of to-do list with the plans for new posts to come that can be also used for off-topic comments or for proposing new subjects you would like to see me write about, or write them yourself.

Links to the Future: This is a revolutionary new technology that I have invented in this blog. It is an internet time machine that allows me to link to a post that exists only in my mind. These links are green and they all point to the Roadmap page described above.

Gitmo and Laogai: These are my two latest children and let me tell you I am proud of them. I see them as a breakthrough in China blogging, where not only you can enjoy and communicate with other people, but also improve and reform yourself. I am almost tempted to call this Web 2.5. I just hope I don’t have to send many readers there this year.

The Top Tab bar: Embarrassingly enough, this feature is broken, and I haven’t been unable to fix it in time for the presentation. I will see to it as soon as possible. The idea is to add dropdown menus on the Top Tab so that all permanent information can be accessed directly without scrolling.

• You can click on the title of the news item to go directly to that article.
• You can click on the Follow button to see my profile and subscribe.
• You can Reply to any of my notes right here in this page.

There is one annoying thing with GReader sharing system: you still can’t reply directly to a note. That is why I have opened this page. Just copy the note you are replying to in your comment below, or continue an existing thread. If it gets interesting enough I will open a separate post and put it in the front page.

Any other suggestion about this new service is more than welcome!
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Take Spain, for example. The Chinese community there is largely new, not fluent in languages, and originated from one single point in China: the tiny county of Qingtian, upriver from Wenzhou. When it comes to languages, the Spanish are not much better than them, and the whole situation is full of opportunities for the literate laowai. While a simple “nihao” is usually enough to be the hero of the day, some preparation yields better results. Just wander into a Chinese shop casually dropping a Qingtianese greeting, and comment on the remarkable history of the old stone-carving county, home of the Chinese-Spanish. This makes you popular. And you can drink tea and practice your Chinese conversation for hours on end.

What follows is a true story that happened in my last day of holidays. It includes a Chinese family with extraordinary sleeping abilities, and a team of adventurous Spanish ducks. I hope you enjoy it:

It was the first morning flight from Bilbao to Paris, where I was scheduled to connect with the Air France to Shanghai. As I entered the cabin of the A319, I marked immediately a Chinese family sitting in one of the front rows: a middle-aged mother with her son.

She was wearing a shapeless purple jacket in the style of the hundred names, and her teenage son covered his head in a Korean hip-hop hoody. They stood out in the business atmosphere of the early flight. But what made me notice them—and I couldn’t help a smile—is that they were already fast asleep before I even got to my seat. As far as I could see, they didn’t switch their positions for the duration of a rather eventful flight.

From the start, the journey proved trying for my nerves. As we were taking off, there was a loud bang coming from the back of the plane, followed by a vibration that grew stronger as we flew. For a while nothing else happened, but then, as we were approaching France, the plane suddenly leant to one side, and the Pyrenees mountains turned 180 degrees around us, until we were headed back West from where we came.

The noise grew worse, and the passengers with notions of geography were increasingly anxious. The town of San Sebastian appeared below us for the second time, only this time the ground seemed much closer. All the service call beeps went off one after the other. I looked around to the other passengers and they were all looking around. Nobody spoke.

Finally, the cabin crew appeared on the aisle, delivering row by row the official version of the facts: during take off a flying object had collided with the blades of engine 2, producing the bang and subsequent vibrations that we were experiencing. It was a common occurrence, and there was no danger. As part of the normal safety procedure, the captain had decided to return to the home airport for maintenance.

“It was probably a bird,” said the stewardess when she got to our row.

“A bird?” laughed the steward, “that was a team of big fat ducks!”

I figured he must have been instructed to keep a light mood. I tried hard to laugh, picturing circles of ducklings turning in the turbofan as we struggled to get past the sharp Basque valleys.

***

After an endless flight we were safety landed back onto Bilbao airport. As we were waiting to disembark, the pilot confirmed that the airplane was done for the day. We had to pick up our luggage first and then go to the Air France office on the second floor to request a new ticket. As usual, my suitcase was one of the last to appear on the rolling band, and by the time I got to the office there was already a long queue, about the length of a duck-stricken A319, and every bit as noisy.

The crowd was growing unruly. Some French passengers harangued the masses with true revolutionary spirit, launching slogans against all winged creatures, including ducks, airbuses, and Air France pilots. Since I was last, there was not much point in queuing, so I just stood on one side in a way to signify my disapproval. Then I noticed the focus was gradually shifting, as the keen Robespierres directed their anger to some unidentified target at the front of the queue. I walked over to have a closer look.

It was the Chinese family.

Clearly, they hadn’t understood the instructions to pick up the luggage, and they had come straight to the airline office before anyone else. They were first, and they showed no intention of giving up their position.  On the contrary, they were holding it admirably. The mother covered the rearguard with her fierce eye, while the son held fast to the desk. They were obviously well trained in conflictive queues, and they seemed unimpressed by the mob.

Linguistically, the situation was not ideal. The mother was screaming in Qingtianese, the son translated into Chinglese and an Air France employee replied in elaborate Spanglish, while the French head of office stared in disbelief. I was alone, and my faithful friend the Electronic Dictionary & Thesaurus was out of reach in the bottom of my bag. But the time was to act, and I did not falter in the hour of peril.

I cut right to the front and put in a “Qué pasa? 什么事?”. All four faces turned to me at once. The queue became suddenly quiet.

“They want to go to China!” cried the employee in Spanish.

“We want to go to China!” cried the son in Chinese.

The positions of the parties seemed to me very much unanimous, and ripe for an easy consensus. But further enquiry proved that it was not exactly so. I managed to reconstruct the following facts:

The family had slept through the flight, right until we landed back in Bilbao. Then they had not understood the strongly accented message of the pilot and they had dashed out of the plane straight to the connections desk, where they had been redirected to the airline office. And they acted so urgently because they only had one hour to catch the connecting flight. All they asked is to board their plane immediately, and they were pretty suspicious of this whole attitude of the staff in Paris.

Because they actually thought they were in Paris.

The problem was not an easy one to explain. Not only the mother’s mandarin was as bad as mine, but also she was determined, and she had a deep rooted common sense. They had just flown into Paris and therefore this was Paris, she would take no nonsense from a laowai. I used all my persuasion. I noted how the souvenir shops were selling bullfighters, and not tour eiffels. Finally the young son understood, and he helped me convince her. The fact was settled: We were in Spain, and there were no direct flights to Shanghai from this airport.

The rest was fairly easy to manage, and after a few minutes the three of us left the office with a new ticket. Once their infinite gratitude had been sufficiently expressed, I couldn’t help asking the son:

“But, how could you not realize that this is the same airport as before?”

“Well,” he smiled shyly, “Mum was just telling me that she finds all airports in Europe look strikingly similar!”

And his mother, who was tough but good-humoured, found it rather funny, and we all joined in a face-saving laughter. Then I knew I was engaged as official interpreter of the sleeping family.

***

In the end, my work as a translator served my interests well. We got our new tickets before anyone else, the last three places left to connect with the evening Paris-Shanghai. The revolutionaries were so stunned by the performance that they forgot to guillotine us, and the Air France employee gave us some free lunch vouchers for the VIP lounge. To make our wait more pleasant, she said, the company was offering one of their specialty dishes in the “Restaurant des Mondes”.

It was still far from the Spanish lunch time, so we had to wait while they opened the kitchen for us. The prospect of a free lunch worked well to improve the mood of my Chinese friends, and we had a lively chat in the VIP sofas. I took the chance to impress them with my baidupedic knowledge of their hometown. After that they opened up to me, and the last lines of suspicion finally vanished from the woman’s brow.

I listened distractedly as the son informed me of the state of the rap scene in Zhejiang. A terrible state that was, apparently, and I waited for a chance to switch topics. It was his mother that I found most intriguing. All the while she was sitting very still, as if lost in her own thoughts. She had an outside appearance that in China would be classified as “peasant”, but her proud, resolute eyes didn’t quite fit in the picture. What was she doing flying around with her single son? I finally asked him.

As it turned out, she was a renowned chef back home. Qingtian is the origin of thousands of Chinese restaurants across Europe, and their extended family had made a fortune with a popular chain of Chinese food. She had come as an expert to establish new recipes in the family restaurants in Spain, all the while teaching her son the secrets of the Chinese cuisine. They had toured the country for three months, making the company’s food “more delicious, more authentically Chinese”.

“Her most famous recipe is Beijing Duck,” said the kid, licking his lips, “You have never tried anything like that!”

“I would love to have a chance to try it,” I answered, suddenly hungry for duck.

Then the mother, who hadn’t said a word all this time, looked at me with a strange smile. I felt there was an invitation coming. Instead, she opened her eyes wide and nervously shook her son’s shoulder.

“Heavens!” she cried, “we still haven’t picked up our luggage!”

***

When I took them down to luggage collection, their belongings were still lonely turning around on the band, a number of shapeless pieces covered in woven tarpaulin. As we loaded them one by one onto a trolley, the son suddenly found something was wrong. It was the last packet, a cardboard box with some strange little holes pierced on the top. He held the box on his knees and showed me one of the corners where it had been torn open. The box was empty.

The woman was very upset. She started moving her arms up and down and speaking in her sing-song dialect at an alarming speed. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but the replies of her son were more composed, and I could more or less make out the gist of it:

“I told you we couldn’t take them on a plane, mum!”, he was saying.

“But how can we pass the long winter without them?”, she replied.

Suddenly I had a very dark premonition. While they were busy arguing, I walked over to the broken box and examined it carefully. As I held it up in front of me, a small, delicate object floated down from the broken corner. It was a feather.

I dropped the box as if it burned my hands, and I kicked it behind the rolling band were it wouldn’t be seen. I was in panic now, and I joined the arguing party with my own version of alarmed mandarin:

“We have to het out of here, NOW!”, I said.

“What? But the box?,” said the mother.

“Forget it!” I pushed the trolley towards the door, “we will see to that later!”

“What? But we have to file a complaint. They might have found …”

“No!”

I tried to control my nerves, as I envisioned charges for terrorism, and the dire diplomatic consequences of China’s national dish being presented as evidence of the crime. I tried to relax telling myself that at least there hadn’t been any human casualties.

“Please help us,” she said.

“We can’t do this now! Spain is a bureaucratic country, these things take a long time…” I muttered. “And anyway I’m sure your little friends are going to be fine!”

She gave me another inquisitive glance, like the first time I suggested she was not in Paris. She was clearly reconsidering about my sanity.

“Well, excuse me,” she said, “but they are important to me, and if you don’t want to help me I will have to file the complaint myself”

Just at that moment the airport PA system cracked with a life-saving announcement. All the passengers of the cancelled flight were asked to go back immediately to the second floor, were new information was awaiting us from the captain.

“Quick, this must be our lunch, let’s go before we miss it!” I translated, and this argument finally seemed convincing enough for the stubborn lady.

***

On the second floor, the slick French captain was putting in practice the company’s open information policy. The maintenance staff had just confirmed—he said—that  it was indeed the impact of external objects on the engine that had caused the vibration. The strange bodies had been already extracted and brought in from the hangar for analysis. The decision to return to the airport had proven a good choice, as it was the chief engineer’s opinion that we would have never made it to Paris.

A drop of cold sweat fell down my right temple as I considered the chances of those little animals finding their way into the turbine. Even if they managed to tear open the box and then break free from under the piles of luggage, even if they could unlatch the hold door with their little beaks, still,  how could they fly over to the engine? It seemed impossible. I remembered the laws of fluid dynamics, and how turbulent airflows exhibit nonlinear, chaotic behaviours. For the first time in my life I felt I understood the real meaning of the Chaos Theory.

In the meantime, the mother had sent her boy to inquire about lost objects, and he was explaining their problem to the captain in such a perfectly unintelligible English that the brave man could only smile politely. They looked around at a loss, only to see that their laowai friend was nowhere to be found. I had just in time slipped into the gentlemen’s restroom.

At this point, the airport loudspeakers buzzed again:

Passengers of the AF2435 to Paris, please proceed into our VIP lounge. As a special attention, we are offering you the chef’s specialty in our exclusive “Restaurant des Mondes”

***

I joined the family again as they walked down the corridor to the VIP Lounge. It seemed that the luxury meal kindly offered by Air France had conquered the heart of the frightful woman. Her expression showed no more pain for the loss of her beasts, and I hoped she had decided to give up the search. Presently, she was impressed by the quality of the service, and her mood was chatty.

“They know how to treat a client, in France,” she said conversationally, “back in China it’s not even comparable.”

“Oh, sure, great service here,”

“Even if they don’t have any proper backup plans,” she noted, “they are just great at doing nice surprises.”

“Oh, yeah, you can count on the French for surprises”

“It is all in the attitude, isn’t it?”, she said, and her only child nodded in agreement.

As we approached the “Restaurant des Mondes”, the atmosphere was so relaxed that I thought we had passed the worst. I just had to get them on our plane right after lunch, and there would be no more nonsense of lost object complaints. Then I saw the stewardess at the restaurant door, smiling. She held a large sign written in all the major languages of the World, including mandarin. It read:

TODAYS SPECIAL DISH:

“Thin-sliced duck Beijing style”

In case there were any doubts, underneath the text there was a colourful picture of a team of ducks thinly sliced as if by fast rotating blades, swimming in the dark sauce of the traditional Beijing recipe.

I tried with my body to hide the sign from their view, but I was too late. There was not much point anyway, the pictures were all over the place, and the food was coming out any minute. As we sat down, I peeped at her out of the corner of my eye. Her expression was enigmatic, the initial apprehension had turned into something more lofty. Was it triumph? I trembled.

The dishes were served and, unexpectedly, nothing happened. I glanced at my two friends. The were obviously enjoying their meal, emitting now and then favorable grunts and other judgements with the assurance of the true connoisseur. Then, halfway through their ducks, they looked at each other with an understanding smile and, following some mysterious signal, the lady suddenly stood up, knocking her chair behind her, and crying out loudly:

“I want to speak to the person who cooked this!”

There was a spark in her eye as she glared at the kitchen door on the other side of the dining room. I could not think of anything to say this time, so I just sat still, helpless as the slings and arrows flew swiftly towards their target.

Seeing that no help was forthcoming from my side, the mother ignored me and took direct action. She strode across the room and, without further preambles, she thrust open the kitchen door, roaring in Qingtianese. In a minute, the cook came out sporting a high chef hat and howling even louder than her. To my surprise, he was also employing some variety of Zhejiang dialect.

Then something strange happened. The moment he saw the chef, the son stood up and ran across the dining room charging like a fighting bull, and when the three of them were at a close distance, they came together in a long, warm hug.

I stood rather awkwardly next to them, wondering what was next. The chatter of the adults had risen to undecipherable speeds under the flow of emotions. I looked at the teenager for an explanation, but he was too absorbed speaking to the cook. Finally, I managed to catch some fraction of the conversation:

“Uncle Li, we knew it had to be you, nobody else in the World can cook Beijing Duck like mother! What are you doing here?”

“You know, I got a catering contract with Air France, didn’t I tell you?”

“Uncle, you really need to help us, mother is really worried! This laowai is with us, but his Chinese is so-so, and he just doesn’t get it!”

“Say, my boy, what is the problem?”

“It is the new down-filled coats that mum bought to take home for the winter. She was so upset when we found out that they’ve been stolen from our luggage…”

But seriously. It’s been a month since the events of Urumqi, and it feels like there hasn’t been much done in the way of analysis. All the channels of the media were red hot for a week, but they cooled down as soon as the blood dried on the streets, and no new insights are forthcoming. Too soon the debate has been hijacked by unproven claims of opportunists like Kadeer, and the predictable responses from China. The peace loving Uyghurs and Han who lost their lives in Urumqi deserve better.

So yes, I am consciously watching XJTV, and I suggest you do the same. For lack of anything better and in protest against the rest of the media establishment, both Chinese and foreign. Because no matter how awkward XJTV’s efforts might seem, at least this TV station is doing its job.

The events of Xinjiang are more important than the bland Summer coverage would lead us to imagine. It is probably the most deadly single political riot that has happened in China since Tiananmen 1989. It is also the only major case of social unrest where the international press has been granted permission to report from the ground. And there are important lessons to draw from the experience, particularly in the fields of 1- Media and 2- China’s policy.

The Chinese Media

I am and I will always be against State-controlled media, and every person I respect here, some CPC members included, agrees with my point of view: without the freedom to blame, all comment is meaningless.

But precisely because we don’t believe in that media, we don’t expect too much from them. After all, it is not the fault of the writers or editors if they live in such a system, not everyone can be a hero. From this relative point of view, we can say that the Chinese media – or the CPC, which is the same in this case – has done a good job.

Indeed, one interesting phenomenon in the aftermath of the July 5th events is the media’s role in calming things down on the Han side. We made fun of all those silly heart warming articles, but probably the love talk was crucial at a moment where ethnic feelings were getting out of control. How many times in the World have you seen interethnic clashes* killing more than a hundred to simply peter out in 2 days with no more than moderate force applied by the State?

By choosing to focus on the positive, turning the blame on external elements and being loyal to the principle of harmony, the Chinese media did a valuable service to their country and probably avoided many more deaths. This might seem obvious now with hindsight, but it might have been just as easy for them to try to appeal to the pride of the Han and disaster would have ensued.

The Free World Media

But what about the media from the free World?

The Xinjiang events were of particular interest for many of us following the debate of anti-China bias in the Western media. In the highest point of the discussion, after the Tibet 2008 events,  the Western media always had the point that, since they had been banned from the area, they couldn’t be held accountable for inaccuracies in their reporting. Now we have the first major riot where this argument is not valid. The time is to evaluate the results. How well have they fared?

In my opinion, it has been disappointing, at least for two reasons.

1- In a large part of the media there was a clear prejudice against the Han and against the authorities. Not all were as extreme or ignorant as this example, but the principle was clear: their mission was to witness how inhuman the Chinese system is. Even if some of them later moderated their reports, the harm was already done, and when travelling in Europe mid-July I found it a common opinion that “China is slaughtering its minorities again”.

2- Fortunately, free media IS to some extent free and diverse, and we have seen some examples of fair reporting from the ground. In particular I was following the Telegraph journalist Peter Foster, who did a great job of reporting honestly what he saw. And then, I got to this article, only 4 days after the events, and to my despair he announces that he leaves on holidays. Like blogger B&W Cat noted, almost all the others soon followed suit and, to this day, nobody has told us what really happened in Xinjiang.

In the meantime, Xinhua and the others stayed at their posts, showing the Chinese and the World who really cares about Xinjiang, and who really cares about China.

Some Conclusions

There is something very wrong with the World media, and it is something much deeper than a anti- or pro- China stance. It has to do more in my opinion with how it is organized. Remember the line:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

It is a pleasure to read Adam Smith and imagine that, indeed, the invisible hand is working every day to make our lives better. And yet, this example has made clear that if there is one industry were the hand cannot work it is the media. That is, of course, unless we accept that its role is to produce “the truths we like to hear” in the same way as the role of Apple is to produce computers we like to use.

Because that is exactly the problem. The minute the media sees that there are no obvious CPC crimes, that the police is handling the situation well, and that actually a communist authoritarian regime sometimes does things better than a democracy, this is not interesting. It is not even about political lobbies or advertising companies’ pressure, it is simply that most readers don’t like it. It is more comfortable to live with their solid categories, Islamism bad, communism bad, democracy good. And the invisible hand says: journalist shut up.

There is a lot of talk on the internet about the future of traditional newspapers, and many are analyzing the reasons for their demise. Well, how about this one:

There has been a major political riot, the most deadly in 20 years in the most important rising country in the international scene, and the media has still not even attempted to explain the reasons behind the events, instead working full-time as a mouthpiece for a self-appointed leader in Washington with very dubious legitimacy, and who might possibly be connected with the terrorist group who has organized the killings of more than 100 people.**

I am not so idealistic to think that internet and blogs are going to change the situation. The information lobby will always be powerful, whatever the shape it takes, and in the end the mainstream reader will always read what he wants to read.

For the people who care, the only hope, now as always, is in diversity. And fortunately the internet works in the right direction for this. Visit this link for just one example of how a blog can provide you –if you take the time to read carefully- with better commentary than your Sunday paper.

* Interethnic clashes:  whether or not the initial violence was organized by terrorist elements, by the time the Han mobs went out with bats it clearly became an interethnic clash.

** More about this upcoming.

Prevention – Try to stay out of trouble

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

• Be careful with what you publish. >>>
• Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. >>>
• Choose where you want to be hosted. >>>
• Choose a good, flexible hosting service. >>>
• Host your blog/site on a subdomain. >>>

Action – When trouble is at your door

Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

• Make sure it is really the GFW. >>>
• Check if there is an IP block. >>>
• Find out if the target is really you. >>>
• Check if there is an URL block. >>>
• Move to a new IP address. >>>
• Change your URL and Redirect. >>>
• Check that you don’t have links. >>>
• Try to eliminate the keywords. >>>
• Take it easy, and send feedback. >>>

Notes and Disclaimers

• Don’t forget to read the party of the first part >>>

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PREVENTION

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

1. Be careful with what you publish. Sites in English have more leeway than Chinese to publish political content, but the more popular your posts get the tighter the line will be. Any kind of political activism can get you blocked, in particular subjects that are seen as potential menace to the one-party system. You can easily be misunderstood if you mention those subjects, even if your intention was different. Apart from politics, the other big subject that can get you blocked is porn.

2.Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. OK, if you need to write about these subjects, then try to avoid writing GFW keywords. To test which words are GFW keywords, run a search on Wikipedia in China, and see if it resets the connection. There are many ways to avoid keywords, such as periphrasis, or use of similar characters (omicron “ο” for “o”, etc.).

The problem is nobody will find your words on Google if you use this, so up to you to see how much you want to trade safety for search engine hits. Bear in mind that keywords won’t get you blocked automatically, and if your site is small enough you can relax and write as many as you want. The risk is some day a big website may link to you, then your keywords will attract the attention of GFW and your trouble starts.

3- Choose a good location for your host. If you are legit business with a business license you can apply for a permit and host your website in China. The permit is easy to get, as long as you don’t do politics or journalism. This solution will make your site faster for users in the mainland, and it will avoid all sorts of trouble with the Great Firewall.

If you are planning to write some controversial content, or if a large part of your readers will be outside the mainland, then it is better to host out of China, otherwise you risk to get your whole site closed down and your data lost. A good location in the middle is Hong Kong. It is well connected internationally and close to one of the nodes entering the mainland. Therefore it should be quick on both sides, plus many Hong Kong hosts are reportedly understanding with the GFW problems and they will help you to get rid of an IP block.

4- Choose a good, flexible host. Regardless of where you are hosted, the most important is that you choose a hosting company that will give you flexibility and will try to help you if anything happens. In particular you should check if there is an affordable option to change your IP. In my case it was 30$/year, I heard from other webmasters they paid double. The essential is to check that your host will give you this options, because not all hosts offer it.

5- Host your website/blog on a subdomain. I learnt this trick in my recent experience. When you get an URL string block, it will not necessarily affect the whole domain, but only the particular subdomain where your site lives.

If you host your site on a subdirectory, such as www.domain.com/blog/, this will allow you to deal with a URL string block very easily, just by moving to, for example, www.domain.com/myblog/. This way you can save the money and the trouble to register a new domain, and you can continue to use that domain that your users already identify with you.

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ACTION
Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

1. Make sure you are actually blocked by the GFW. The first obvious step is to check that you are really blocked by the GFW, and not by some other problem. You should get in contact with some friend who is outside the mainland and a friend inside the mainland. If it is a GFW block, the outside friend should see no difference at all, whereas the inside one should get a Reset Connection error or sometimes a Server Time Out error when he tries to open your site. There are also online tools available to do the test, but  I haven’t tried their accuracy.

2- Check if there is an IP block. The first thing to do in this case is to check if you have an IP block. It is very simple, from China type your site’s IP in the address bar of your browser after the “http://” and if it doesn’t work  then it is an IP block. IP blocks are the most common GFWs blocks so this test should normally confirm step 1. NOTE: If you don’t know what is your site’s IP there are many Firefox free add-ons, and other web based services that will give you this information.

3- Find out if the target is you, or some site living on your server. Very often when you are down to point 3 what is actually happening is that you are collateral damage of the GFW. They are not targeting you, but just somebody else’s site which lives in the same IP or the same subnet (group of IPs). It is not easy to check this, but there are 2 simple techniques that can give you a clue. One is to use a reverse IP service, such as this one, where you can see more or less how many sites are sharing IP with you, and you can get a list of these sites. If you are hosted in the same address as FLG.com (ie. an anti-CCP organization) then you know it was not you.

4- Check if there is an URL block. In China, go to Wikipedia search box (or some other search bar on a site hosted out of China ) and type the strings you want to test. First try domain.com, and then domain.com/blog. If you are lucky only the second one will reset your connection, which means that your domain root URL is still unblocked and you can easily switch to a new subdirectory as explained above.   NOTE: URL blocks typically give RCs. When you do RC tests you must wait for at least a minute after getting a Reset Connection, otherwise you will RC again no matter what you type in (the connection is still not re-established)

5- Change your IP address. OK, so you have done all the checks. It is time for action. Supposing you followed the prevention steps in the first place, you have a cool, understanding host that is not pissed off each time you get his whole subnets blocked in China, and who is willing to swap IPs for a moderate price. Get in contact with him or select a new IP directly from your admin panels functions (if available) from the site.

6- Change your URL and Redirect. This part can be very easy or very difficult, depending largely on how well organized is your website. In any case, the process is not without pain, and you will lose many incoming links. Why? Because even if you have a Redirect on your old URL, anybody in China clicking external links to your old site will get an error, as the connection resets before your server has the time to redirect to the new URL.

If your blog is powered by a good system like WordPress, and if you have been consistent with the use of permalinks over the years, it should be very easy for you to move to the new directory in your same domain. Just follow the steps given in your blog engine and you will be done on a few minutes. If you need to move to a new domain because the whole domain URL is blocked, then it will take a bit longer, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.

7- Check you don’t have remaining requests to your old URL. Many of the blog’s elements, such as pictures, are probably still linked to a URL in your old subdirectory, and therefore when the page loads they instruct the users computer to connect to that subdirectory in order to display the picture. If you have been paying attention you know what will happen in this case: the fretful RC. Don’t panic, run a search in the whole blog (not the search for users on the website, the admin tool in your blog admin panel, you might need to install it as a plug-in. In wordpress it is called Regex Search) and replace all instances of the blocked URL with the new URL.

At this point, you might still see that the blog continues to trip RC. In this case it might be some JavaScript or other active content in your site that is sending requests to the old URL. Use a traffic viewing tool like the free Firefox add-on Tamper Data which will easily show you all the requests sent while loading your site. Type the blocked string in the search bar and you should see the old URL coming up at some point, and the software will tell you which application is the culprit. There is a bit of detective work to do in this case, as it is not always obvious which widget or active element made the call.

8- Try to eliminate all keywords. If you have followed the instructions up to now your site should be open again in China. What I recommend you to do is to run a search for keywords in your blog and try to eliminate/disguise some of them. Especially look at the posts that were linked by big websites and they received a lot of hits in China. NOTE: you don’t need to eliminate outgoing links, a link to a forbidden site does not usually get you blocked, otherwise every major website in China would be down.

9- Take it easy, and tell me about it. Go back to step 1 “prevention” above and try to get smarter so next time you don’t have to go again through the whole process. Or else remain blocked and take it as a honour, make yourself a T-shirt saying “I was blocked by da GFW”, after all not every site is worth the effort of blocking. You must have had at least some relevance in the eyes of the GFW for it to censor you. In any case, if you get GFW’ed and follow these steps, give me your feedback in comments below so we can improve the method.

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NOTES AND DISCLAIMERS

• There is no such a thing as censorship in China, the GFW is due to a bug in the Chinese internet that defies all scientific explanation.
• These instructions are empirical knowledge, I have no internal information on the GFW, and the basis for these instructions is my own experience and that of a few other bloggers shared with me by email. I am not giving credit to anyone here to avoid getting them in trouble again, but guys let me know if you want to be linked.
• It cannot be excluded that the GFW reads these instructions and changes its blocking devices. Also the GFW has a random nature and not all the steps above will work in al the situations.
• These instructions are best used by websites of a small to medium size who are blocked more or less automatically by the GFW. I you are big, especially if you have content in Chinese, then chances are you are followed by human censors. The IP/URL swap will not fool them very long, and they can take you down again easily if that’s what they want.
• If you are hosted within mainland China, GFW instructions do not not apply to you, instead you get what is usually known as the Net Nanny. See this post if you want to understand the difference.
• As far as I know there is nothing illegal in writing instructions for webmasters to deal with an internet bug. However, if this text is somehow illegal or inharmonious, I would be grateful to the concerned department if they can inform me so I can correct it before they take more drastic measures.

That is how I found again this beautiful passage which I can’t resist copying here, although I know in these fast times some readers may find it somewhat old  (231 years to be exact).  It was written by a  watch-maker, inventor, playwright, musician, politician, publisher, spy, arms-dealer, and notorious activist of the American and French Revolutions:

They tell me that if in my writing I will mention neither the government, nor public worship, nor politics, nor morals, nor people in office, nor influential corporations, nor the Opera, nor the other theatres, nor anybody that belongs to anything, I may print everything freely, subject to the approval of two or three censors.

Figaro satirizes. And then goes on to say:

Foolish things in print are important only where their circulation is interfered with; without the freedom to criticize, no praise is flattering, and none but little men are afraid of little writings.

So beautiful and so up to date, every bit of it. A few bureaucrats in this country should read this, and realize that already 231 years ago their same little game was well known to the people. And that some day, in China too, the attitude of silencing, detaining, firewalling and suppressing the freedom of speech will be remembered as one of the “4 Shames” of the past.

Mind you, I know that quoting a comic writer, even if he is a classic of Literature and Revolution, is not exactly a solid scientific argument. But who speaks of science here? This is all about common sense, about opening your eyes and seeing what is obvious, and about concepts so simple that a child can understand. If I am not allowed to criticize you, all of my praise will be empty of value.

And this leads us to speak of the latest little wave of protest in the China blogs. Like it happens every now and then, all the main blogs are (rightly) complaining against the new Net Nanny ’09 campaign. The adult babysitting agency CIIIRC has published a list of websites who have been caught posting “vulgar” pictures of beautiful ladies. And warned them to “seriously clean up their unhealthy content”.

I don’t think there can be a better example of a petty departure getting large circulation thanks to the censors. And if I know my fellow men, Chinese or Western alike, I am ready to bet that the offending sites have noticed a dramatic increase in traffic today since the publication of that list, and that blogs like Danwei have done a great service to the community by putting all the links together on one single page for us to check. Bravo!

Note: Translation of “Marriage of Figaro” by Edward J. Lowell in the book “The Eve of the Revolution”. Some slight modifications from my part.

I mean, take the weather in Shanghai, for example. Did you ever imagine we would see these long weeks of clean blue skies? You lose faith in things and then they happen, and it makes you dream. If this is possible, then everything else must be: World Peace, End of Poverty, China winning the soccer World Cup.

On Fridays like this my mind drifts on the world wide web and I end up reading funny bits of information, like this delicious “boat drifting skills” I found over at the Engrish website. I saw it and laughed for a bit, and then I read the comments and I thought I might do something useful for the community.

So I went on Google Translator and I asked it to translate the drifting instructions into English. This is the disappointing message I got:

What! No translation English-English? What kind of service is this? And who said that it was English in the first place?  If there is someone at Google reading this now (other than my friends the bots) please raise the issue immediately to your management:

“You are missing out on the largest market in the World. Develop Chinglish translator ASAP!”

Fortunately, we still have the Learn Chinese post of the week to do. So here we go. Today’s tip is sponsored by Chinese uber-teacher Fu Ting.

It is called: The Goose, the Goose, the Goose!

Anyone brought up in China will be familiar with this little poem, but surprisingly few foreigners know about it. It has a very interesting story that you can read in detail here. The poet Luo Binwang wrote it about 1400 years ago, when he was only 7 years old. It goes like this:

Now, the essential thing to remember is the Rising Tone of the Goose: 鹅. You have to pronounce it stretching your neck and pulling your head back, just like a Gandle would do if he caught you messing with his Goslings.

It is very important to master the gaggling technique before we can proceed. Practice in front of the mirror or go to the Bird and Flower Market in Shanghai and find a professional Goose to coach you. Beware: a slight mispronounciation of the Rising Tone can have you saying extreme things such as: Hungry (饿), or Disgusting (恶), or just plain Crocodile (鳄).

OK, now we are ready, here are the INSTRUCTIONS. The Goose Trick can be used for the following purposes:

1- If you want to see how your Chinese friends looked at age 7.

Have them recite the Goose. This is a poem that many generations of Chinese children have learnt by heart, memorized in that childish singing way. You will be surprised with the results. I got some spectacular performance from the old flower lady down the road, she got carried away. Didn’t work so well with the bicycle repair man.

2- If you want to sound cocky and in control of the situation.

For example, when you are stuck in the Shanghai Taxi Comic Dialogue:

- Dai wo qu YuYuanLu!
- WuYuanlu?
- YuYuanLu!
- YueYangLu?
- YuyuanLu!!!
- Huh Huh huh ??
- 鹅, 鹅, 鹅!! -> Qu xiang xiang tian ge…etc.

3- When you are in the wild and you encounter an aggressive Goose, the kind that would snap at your picnic sandwich before you have the time to open your electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Final tips: In case your mandarin mental age is under 7, you probably can’t figure out the quackings of a 7 year old poet. Here you have some rather creative tranlations from Baidu. I especially like the last one, by a blogger called wangwuming. It comes with rhyme and all:

Quack Quack, merrily sings the goose,
Raising its head a tune from its mouth pours.
Bule water moors the white feathers,
Its red palms ply the waves as oars.

So that’s all for today. Have a nice weekend and happy gagglings!

I didn’t know exactly what it was, but something in it looked very familiar. Very Chinese. I saved it in my Obama bookmarks, and didn’t think of it again until Sunday evening.

That was the evening when I went to the barber’s to have my hair uncut.

I like the barber down the road, I’ve been going there every month since I came to Shanghai, and by now he knows exactly what I like. This is a great advantage, because I am always at a loss when giving instructions to a Chinese hairdresser. I feel even more embarrassed when they proceed to show me pictures of men supermodels, and rather optimistically ask me to point at one of them.

But Wu Shifu will do none of that. He is a no nonsense professional, and he delivers 20 kuai worth of real styling value. A true perfectionist, he takes care of every detail and will not give up until every single hair is at the right lenght.  Every now and then he stops cutting and reaches for the little mirror with which he shows me around my own head, asking eagerly if all sides are well shaped, and secretly hoping that I will request some virtuoso manoeuvre, perhaps a re-balancing of my temples.

Like usual, last Sunday the man was doing a great job. When it was almost finished and he came up with the little mirror for the 5th time, I thought I might as well give him some little bit of satisfaction for the trouble. And, since we are at it, why not test him for Chinese characteristics.

- Is it OK this side? And here? And the top?

- Um, no, no. Too short over the top, I will have it a bit longer this time.

- Uh, er… longer what, here?

- Yes, please, can you do that?

- Yes we can!-  Snap, snap, snap.

And there he goes snapping away with his scissors, cutting the air close to my head in his efficient fashion, and probably thinking that if he goes on for long enough, my hair will have actually grown longer by the time he is done with it. After 5 minutes of cutting the air thin, while I watched the ultra boring Shenhua-Tianjin  on his TV, I decided that my hair was long enough already, and informed him thus.

- Thank you, master Wu, it looks much better now.

“Yes we can” is the magical phrase that’s always ready in the mouth of the Han. It has the extraordinary power of making the impossible possible.

The “yes we can” phenomenon is one of the most remarkable Chinese characteristics, and one that few Westerners fail to notice. Some explain it as a consequence of the Chinese constant obsession to save face. I take the view that it has more to do with their culture of group and consensus. In such cultures, the only way to obtain something from a discussion is to be extremely cautious with the other party’s sensibilities, and make sure that nothing is said to arouse even the slightest bad feelings. Feelings tend to get in the way of consensus.

Now, I know this kind of behaviour is found at the very least annoying by most Westerners dealing with Chinese, but this is only a consequence of the clash of cultures and the aggressive rationalism that characterises us. The interesting question here is: is this an effective way of conducting human activities, and in particular business and politics? I think it is. By humouring the other party and managing its sensibilities, the Chinese negotiator can slowly erode its position, and end up getting an upper side in many difficult situations. I strongly recommend the reading of Carl Crow for some funny anecdotes of table-banging devils in China.

Some day, when I am allowed to speak about my work here, I will tell some funny stories about negotiations held with a Chinese company by the extraordinary and exhausting method of achieving consensus. Remind me also to speak about the longest meeting in my life, which I am submitting for Guiness book approval. It lasted 12 days non stop, weekends included, during the first weeks of July 2008 in Beijing. Panda eyes, flocks of Kaoya and Litres of baijiu were the price to pay to be able to reach a common understanding on whatever it was that they wanted us to understand.

All this being said, Iet’s remember some of the memorable moments of yes we can-ism in China that have happened in recent times:

• When asked if they could deal with the developing SARS epidemic, local officials reportedly answered: Yes we can.

• When asked if they could ensure free press during the Olympics, Chinese government officials said: Yes we can.

• More recently, now that the financial crisis is being felt hard in the world, Russia, USA and many other countries ask China if it will guarantee the world’s stability. Yes, we can!

• One of the most scary and best documented cases in the history of yes we can-ism: In year 59, Mao asked the Party cadres that he met at the local Communes: can you produce tons of high quality steel with these makeshift backyard furnaces? Yes we can!!  In case you are not familiar with the history of China, you can read about the disastrous consequences of this answer here.

It is easy to see the bad side of a consensus culture when we look at these examples, and I can understand that you may have mixed feelings about it. But it might be as well to remember that, without this characteristic, China would probably have never managed to create the strong, united country that is preparing to rule the world of tomorrow.

In the meantime, the rational, table-banging inhabitants on the other side of the world have been too busy arguing and fighting endless wars, and even today are not capable of taking any consistent decision in their precarious European Union.

But if you are wondering how all this works, or where I’m coming from, you might want to read below:

Political position

I already gave a bit of my background in the Introduction page, but I want to clarify this point so that everyone knows what to expect. I am not an activist, I am not an ideologue and I am not here to tell the Chinese how to rule their country. Most people agree that Western democracies are better systems  for their citizens, and I think so as well. But this does not give us the right to force China to follow our model, nor does it give us any moral standing to judge the Chinese.  In the international scene, Western countries have committed immensely more crimes than China, so whatever ideas you want to express, drop that moralizing tone now. Or else you risk being sent to my Gitmo page for suspects of bigotry.

Freedom of Speech

Any French reader can tell you that I’ve copied my motto from a famous newspaper, but I just couldn’t find a better way to say it than this line by Beaumarchais. This is my a statement of principles:

Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n’y a point d’éloge flatteur

Without the freedom to criticize, any other opinion becomes meaningless. Censoring is a form of lying, because it gives the false impression that what information is available represents the only truth. No matter its achievements, any government that forbids its citizens to speak the truth is a weak government. I am convinced that censorship is bad for China and bad for the World. That is why Freedom of Speech is the only exception to my non-activist rule.  I do what I can from my little corner on the internet to support it, by writing about subjects that have been censored, or by helping other people to unblock their websites in China. If this makes you very angry, I suggest you visit our 劳改 page for Reform through Labour.

The comments policy

Don’t hesitate anymore, stop thinking, press that button. Comments make me happy. Just try to keep it reasonably polite and on topic–if you want to write about something else send me an email to see where we fit it. There is only one kind of comment that I really dislike, and that is ad hominem attacks. Don’t bother with those, they will be erased without notice. You are welcome to disagree, but you have to address directly the points in discussion, not the qualifications of the writer. Your diplomas and medals will not impress me: on the internet you might as well be a dog.  But if you really know what you are talking about and you make the effort to explain it, then I will be convinced.

The new Mini-me

Otherwise called the MiniYouren. This is the absurdly named mini-blogging service that I set up on the top sidebar of my blog. It is connected with GBuzz and GReader, so if you follow me on those sites you can see the same stream. Otherwise, use the Reply and Stream buttons, or Subscribe to the feed. The posts I do here are not included in the main Chinayouren feed. They are often latest news translations or comments, they are short and sloppy but they can be more interesting than the main blog content.

The Content

While this might not be immediately obvious to everyone, content has real value and it is not alright to steal it or copy it elsewhere on the internet without my permission. The CC license of this blog lets you use my content as long as you put a link to me, but you should not copy whole posts to your site, or else Google will penalize both of us. The right way to do it is to quote a few key sections, or even better write your own comment/excerpt with a link to me.

The Mysterious Row of Colourful Indicators

I write this blog completely free of charge and I have never posted adverts nor I intend to do it in the future. Writing a blog  is hard work, and all I ask in exchange is that you come to my site with some sense of humour and an open mind. You will notice that there is a row of colourful buttons below each of the posts: those are sharing services. There is Facebook, Twitter, Google and many other sites that you can use to support my work and spread the word. If you are not a user of any of those services, then you can click on the icon with the shape of a little envelope and send an email to your grandma with my latest post. She will enjoy it, guaranteed!

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