Speaker by Various Artists

Emma,

i enjoyed reading your post.
both the topic and writing style appeal, so I hope you will be back with some more in the near future!

the Chinese government agencies' certainly seem to know how to play to a local audience. but their lack of PR skills vis-a-vis the outside world is pretty startling at times. sorta reminds me of certain other countries in the 'hood...

the fact that their propaganda is so transparent is good, though. the Orwellian pronouncements can just be taken at Owellian face value! night is day. black is white. war is peace. easy once you get the hang of it.

but this "we want the Olympics (to increase our prestige) but keep all those (insert friendly adjective of choice) foreigners outa here!" is a bit beyond my modest decryption skills.

Nice one, Emma, entertaining and informative writing. We need more blogging out of China. I think there's been a vacuum of useful information about China in the NZ news media in the recent past but hopefully that's starting to change.

How about this Sichuan earthquake? Felt in Bangkok, Vietnam and Beijing. BBC World are broadcasting a video taken inside Chengdu airport as it happened. Very dramatic.

All the BBC earthquake video is here.

Bonus: they finally have decent embedded Flash video instead of that RealPlayer crap.

so... emma, are you an ex-pat?

your writing style seems fairly familiar! :)

Emma, I'm also in Beijing so I enjoyed your post. It reminded me how disengaged I am from the expat community apart from my fellow students. We haven't had any problems with visas at our university but the rumours were rife, and the work visa thing has affected a couple of people here.

Keep posting!

Hey Emma - our apartment block was visited by a contingent of very grim-faced PLA folks a few weeks back, and the resulting queue at the local police station was very impressive.

('Aliens' need to register their whereabouts within 24 or 48 hours of arriving - nobody used to bother, but it suddenly seems more important).

As the Beijing screws tighten up, its the gradual disappearance of the DVD shops that's starting to bug me. The local CNN bloke did a story about the copy DVD trade a couple of months ago, doing his final piece to camera standing in front of the Sanliturn Friendship Store which had a pretty good movie collection - and is also Government owned. The DVD section of the store has now disappeared, and so has another good one close by. Beijing is going to look so squeaky clean by the time August rolls around.

Local consensus is if the CNN guy does a story on the fake handbag trade here, he may get lynched.

('Aliens' need to register their whereabouts within 24 or 48 hours of arriving - nobody used to bother, but it suddenly seems more important).

A pretty standard situation in most of Asia. Here in Indonesia technically we can't have anyone staying at our house without registering them with the police. It's often ignored but the threat hangs over you. I think Malaysia is the same.