That is correct. It so happens that this blog is, indeed, blocked by the Chinese government. This is not a surprise, though. Don't worry, Mom, I didn't do anything to make the Big Chairman mad at me. All of this site is blocked in China (i.e. any and all blogs from blogspot.com).
It is comforting on one hand (I can't get kicked out of the country), yet what about the other side of this matter? What about media controls in China? As insignificant as this blog is in the grand scheme of the world, isn't it everyone's right to read my petty thoughts if they want to?
Here's a small explanation of the media controls present in China now:
Social Networking: The average person cannot access YouTube, Facebook, Blogspot. What does that mean exactly? For a lot of us younger people, that's basically the equivalent of living in a room with no windows where you're allowed to call 2 people per day but only allowed to talk for 5 mins each. Not exactly inconvenient as it is frightening.
News & Information: Everything from the New York Times, Wikipedia, Wall Street Journal, CNN, etc are all censored. That means that everything you see on those sights have been checked, sent to 'the boss', then rechecked to make sure there is not a single iota of information that might incite worry among the 1.3 billion people who live in China. That's quite a big force you don't want to upset.
This was the issue that Google had with China. They refused to censor the sites that showed up when someone searched the internet. Thus, they were kicked out of China for a bit, pulled their www.google.cn site off the Chinese market. Yet, for some reason right now the google.cn is up and running in China again. Did they reach an agreement? I dont know. Then again of course we wouldn't hear about it over here.
Well, haha, that's all I have patience to explain now. Media controls in China: a lot of people know they exist, but are not sure of what media veins are affected or what it means for us on the ground.
In all honesty, we aren't affected by these laws too much on the ground. There are no officers standing behind our laptops, wondering what we're accessing. These come into play when we turn on the foreign news, CCP (Chinese Communist Party) News, or look at a newspaper.
It's then that we think about what is real, what is not, what is being said to assuage the public, and what we're missing from home.
30 March 2010
Welcome to your new Life, Rarefied.
Hey Everyone!
Welcome to my blog, entitled The Life Rarefied. I will try to be brief on here but keep it interesting. As of right now, I'm in graduate school in China and am happy to say I've been making a lot of changes to make my life more healthy day by day. This was my 2010 new years resolution and I am determined to stand by it!
China is a very interesting place to live, by the way. There are new happenings every day. Just for flavor: I saw a man accusing a woman of being a prostitute in front of the Shanghai train station and to prove her point, she took off her shirt (red underwear) and started yelling that she was a prostitute all around the square in front of the station. I even think she did a cartwheel. Welcome to Shanghai, guests.
At any rate, my professor recently made a good point: You can live in a place for years and not understand anything about that place if you don't go out and let things happen to you or find your own excitement. I agree. You have to do things to get a feel for what that place is, exactly. From randomly having tea with old men in the park to being on a Chinese game show, I'm trying to go out there and be exposed to this country, learn from mistakes, and ultimately understand what life means on my own and away from home.
Now for a little boring stuff: I am currently looking for jobs I'm excited about the new prospect of teaching Chinese instead of going out and finding a cubicle job. The job market is especially tough for us, new graduates! It's one thing if our resumes aren't stacked enough ... but it's just not fair if we have great looking resumes and the only thing holding us back is that we just aren't old enough to have a Masters and 1-3 years of work experience. Woof! That get's me heated! Yet, never fear.
I have faith that the US and the world will come out of the financial crisis. I believe this will happen sooner rather than later. That doesn't mean that all the corruption and health care issues will be solved, neat and pretty ... it means that we will survive and live to tell the story, because that's what we, as humans, do. We survive.
To end this, I will leave you with Chinese Story Time. These won't come every blog, but they will be posted here and again to show snippets of what funny things happen when you live abroad.
Love to all!
Natalie
CHINESE STORY TIME:
Last weekend we went to a bar to chat with friends. Afterwards, we found ourselves in McDonald's. As my friend Paul asked me to order for him, I noticed something... The guy at the register looked exactly like Wang Leehom (for those of you who don't know who Wang Leehom is, he's an American-ethnically Taiwanese pop singer. In short, I love him.) I got very excited!!
So, I tell him this (that he looks like a pop star. I think I made his day.) and then I realize that his surname is "Zhang" (pronounced Jang, in English) and in a rare moment of unadulturated wit, I realize that Zhang rhymes with Wang and proceed to say to him, "You're last name is Zhang! We can now call you Zhang Leehom!" -->For those of you who are unamused, this is actually quite a silly exchange. Apologies if you don't 'get it'.
All of his co-workers start calling him Zhang Leehom and we, at our table, also call him by that name. In a fit of sheer silliness, I write "Zhang Leehom, I love you. <3 <3 Nathalie +my phone number" on a napkin and my awesome friend, Paul, grabs it from me and tells him I was too shy to give it to him myself. A bit later, we left, and the night was chalked up as a WIN.
Two days later, Zhang Leehom called my phone.
Some photos for your enjoyment!
Panda, of course:
We must be quiet around the pandas:
Getting my ears cleaned in Chengdu, Sichuan Province:
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