30,000

On Friday Jim and visited the Panjiayuan market, where all variety of antiques and “antiques” can be found. We were accosted for a long period of time by a gentleman from Henan Province who claimed to be an English teacher who sells antiques in his spare time and really wanted to practice his English on us. We also found a Buddhist artifact that we really liked and wanted a closer look—I asked how old it was and they paused, and then said, “Tang Dynasty.” Well, that would make it anywhere from 1100 to 1400 years old—Jim started laughing out loud. I then asked what they wanted for it and was told “san wan.” I had to ask again and was told, for a second time, “san wan.” Well, that is 30,000 yuan, about $4000! We walked away very fast, with them hot on our tail. If I’d wanted to bother, I would have said that “Starting at 30,000 yuan for an item of dubious origins and authenticity didn’t really give us much negotiating room, did it?!” Usually when bargaining for a price, I feel comfortable offering about one-third of the original asking price, or at the very least one-fourth, so we really had nowhere to go with this one!

On a mostly unrelated note, I have been unable to access my own blog from here (Chinese word of the day: blog=bo’ke). This has led me to go to the Blogger help page (which I can access) to find, almost immediately, a query from someone with the heading “Cannot access my blog in China.” Apparently the Chinese government’s internet censors (sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall of China) periodically block Blogspot. After all, people might use their blogs to write inflammatory things, like noting that the National People’s Congress is really just a rubber stamp legislature or that Beijing opera sounds like cats screeching, and that these facts might actually be shocking news to people in China, things that they had never heard before or would be incapable of thinking of themselves. Chairman Mao himself wrote that “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written,” as a way of justifying his various schemes for social engineering.

The rumor in the foreign media and among human rights groups is that the Chinese government employs 30,000 censors to monitor internet content and block sites. Interestingly, they don’t usually block The New York Times or some other western news sites—they are more concerned about sites in Chinese, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, there are ways of getting around the censorship, notably through what are called proxy servers. Within minutes of beginning my search I was directed to this sort of server, the home page of which reads at the top “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran, or China?” I’m not sure why India wants to be in such illustrious company, given its status as the only real democracy in this list (see, that’s the sort of statement that gets blogs censored here), but apparently all of these countries block Blogspot.

My guess is that, following the conclusion of the two-week-long lianghui, the government feels that foreign media scrutiny will be lessened and so they can revert to a higher level of censorship. This actually reminds me of a common phenomenon here—the often wide gap between concept and execution, in which what seem to be good ideas (to someone, in this case the regime) often fall short in their implementation. In the case of the heightened censorship, perhaps the regime feels that no one will notice--I often observe that they might benefit from having a really good p.r. firm on retainer, who would tell them that the benefits of censoring sites like Blogspot might be outweighed by the costs, like the fact that people are actually going to notice that this is occurring. The "good idea-bad execution" paradigm is a topic about which I have so much to say that it will have to wait till the next entry.