China's Internet Censorship: more hemmorroid than horror

Recently I wrote with contempt of this claim that "China remains brutally authoritarian," which is partially buttressed by misconceptions Americans harbor about Chinese internet censorship.

Social media blogger, Shel Israel, recently made his first visit to China. And all it took was a brief visit for him to get a very accurate view on the realities of Chinese censorship and its role in the lives of actual Chinese:

Censorship in China "is just about like what happens when you work for a company in the US. There are certain things you simply cannot say." When Robert and I collaborated on Naked Conversations, he was working at Microsoft. When I emailed him there, I had to write "N*ked Conversations to get through the corporate spam/porn filters." The point is that we both knew what we were talking about and it was easy to work around the problem.

The person who believes China is a threat to the United States might have a hard time admitting that the voices of Americans are routinely censored at home. With full understanding granted to the difference between government and employment restrictions, it still stands that the lives of most Americans are impacted more greatly by the censors at their jobs than they would be impacted if the government was suddenly as authoritarian. How frequently does the average American protest? Have you ever voiced your dissent in a public manor? Held a sign in front of a courthouse? Filed a legal suit against your government? How much does the average American really make use of all the freedom she is afforded?

Then consider the controls on your expression at work. Employees have little problem swallowing their pride in the face of dictates from higher-ups, they perceive no violation of human rights when they are made to smile and nod at their bosses’ terrible ideas, and not a single sticker is stuck to the bumper of a car, in a foreign country, calling for the downfall of Bed, Bath, and Beyond because of their cultural genocide. Why not?

I think we’re more oppressed than we realize because of how we frame the issue. Our historical identity, one transmitted to us in mandatory education, is a nation of rebels united against tyranny and the promotion of individual rights. No k-12 student is ever asked to conceive of the term “freedom” in anything but the terms of US government; despite it having a much broader philosophical value, including one that applies to our work lives. As an unfortunate result it is outside our purview to see how Chinese citizens are no more oppressed than we are in daily life, because the Chinese government fails our constitutional standard, which is the only one that applies to our concept of freedom.

In China, in rare cases, where a blogger persisted in testing the government's will, there have been imprisonments. But such reaction is not an everyday occurrence and social media people do not live in constant fear of their doors being kicked down in the night. It just doesn't happen that way.

This is the point I tried to demonstrate with my April fools prank, where two thirds of Americans believed I was actually being deported from China for something I wrote on this blog. Exciting though it would it be, it just doesn’t happen that way.

In fact, for a small minority of bloggers, there is some status in pushing the envelope. I talked with two bloggers who boasted about how many times they had been blocked. One told me it would be "cool" if he actually got arrested.

Sounds unmistakably like the sentiments of troublemaking Americans school children. And if the way a Chinese person feels about internet censorship the same way American children feel about schools, American schools must brutally authoritarian threats to the globe. That, or internet censorship in China is a benign obstacle. Take your pick.

I concur with Israel, "censorship can be a major hemorrhoid to the China tech community, but it is not the Orwellian horror that so many Westerners seem to think it is."

I'm not defending penis eating, but Chinese food is delicious

I have been following the Bizcult blog since I found out Kyle Long was writing for it around December 2007. I never disagreed too strongly with the opinions it expressed because I don’t run a business in China. Moreover, my knowledge of Chinese culture is the flawed product of Western academic institutions mashed with experience from living in Beijing...as a product of Western institutions. But this post is about something I can disagree confidently about. Chinese food is delicious. It's better than American food. And although there were many aspects of American food I missed in Beijing, after returning I say with confidence the preponderance of great food lies in China.

Matt at Bizcult offers his translations of Mr. Paul, a Westerner writing about the many ways Chinese food is superlative:

Mr. Paul suggests there is “endless variety,” as if every animal body part made edible were a good thing. He says he has “sampled as much as possible.” Translation: he really did try to eat it, up until the point he knew he would gag if he took a bite of the penis meat.

I'm not here to defend penis eating. Nary a single time was a privileged enough to partake in such an expensive luxury, not even when dining with Chinese Communist Party officials in Yuncheng. But the following "translation" is far-and-away wrong, and I cannot fathom how a fellow Beijinger writes these things.

Though the Thai and Indian foods in America are pretty good versions of the real thing, the Chinese cuisine is most often an abomination,” Mr. Paul writes. Translation: Thai and Indian foods are pretty good versions of the real thing because they’re naturally tasty to Westerners. Chinese cuisine is most often an abomination to the Western palette, and must be altered drastically.

My views, in short:
Americanized Chinese food is delicious, though a sodium hazard.
Beijing Chinese food is delicious, though a sanitation hazard.
American food is sometimes good, though its goodness is hazardously tied to its saturated fat content.

Readjusting back to an American diet took much longer than adjusting to a Chinese one when I lived in Beijing. Sure, there are flavors in Chinese food that make you question the entire country, like tripe, but those are rare, and the majority of what you eat is very similar to the flavors you find in the United States. Breads, meats, sweet things...the specifics change, like your meat has bones all over, and yes, there is probably glass somewhere in one of your dishes, but all and all it's very delicious food.

The solution for tastes which your “Western palette” (whatever that is) rejects? Just don't order them. Instead of thousand year old eggs order orange chicken instead, it's on the same menu. And, since Chinese custom has multiple people sharing dishes over their individual bowls of rice, you can pick whatever you like the most and leave what you don't like for someone else.

Contrast that to American custom where you frequently order an entree which consists of a whole lot of some vegetable, a whole lot of some starch, and a huge hunk of meat. This hoggish approach is no better demonstrated than the American solution to vegetabls: salad, plate full of vegetables, often laden with a bunch of saturated fats. This unintegrated way of eating is boring and probably poses much more of a health problem than unsanitary Chinese kitchens. It is unlikely the Chinese government publishes any statistics on the number of people taken ill from food poisoning each year, but I'd wager it has a smaller financial cost than the clinical obesity of Americans.

Chinese cuisine integrates different food groups into a single dish, which offers a more interesting variety and means you can eat lots of vegetables in rich and tasty sauces without a ranch dressing fat infusion. It makes nutrition much more of a no-brainer and accounts for the lower levels of obesity experienced in East Asian countries relative to North American and Europe.

The only thing that I desperately missed in Beijing was tex-mex. Or more accurately, anything with cheese or tomato sauce on it. Now that I'm back, I eat a quesadilla with salsa everyday, preparing for the eventual return to Beijing where the only cheese I get to eat is on pizza at the Kro's Nest.