Currently circulating on WeChat news that apparently on May 20, 2015 China blocked Chinese Wikipedia, begging question du jour: just what triggered the block? (This is a serious question, if you know, please share). To date, 16 of the top 30 English language websites have been blocked. Continue reading
While in Beijing, I have been reading David Campbell’s Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War. I am grateful that Campbell has made a pdf of this important work available online not least because as an unaffiliated intellectual who happens to be based in Shenzhen, internet access structures my encounters to academic work. One would think that US institutions would be working to make more research available to more people, but alas this is not the case. University libraries and the virtual services they subscribe to continue to function as if they had limited paper copies of books and journals –with no lending privileges extended beyond their hedges. Continue reading
Ironies of the great firewall continue: We can now access information about Tian’anmen, but still can not directly get onto wordpress. Does this mean that whatever else he has done with or without Jiang Zemin’s blessing, Wen Jiabao looks good in Tian’anmen press? Or perhaps Tibet and Hu Jintao’s role in the March 5 Lhasa crackdown (also in 1989) remains more sensitive than Jiang Zemin’s role in the June 4 crackdown because so many leaders and members of the Han public continue to refuse to discuss 1959?
That said, nevertheless, today I’m feeling hopeful: we can baidu 六四!
Shenzhen Noted 