There were a few reasons why I was never really into group blogs. I was blogging for myself first, and when push came to shove I didn’t like being someone else’s unpaid content monkey. (I was totally happy to be a paid content monkey.) As for contributing to amateur group blogs, I didn’t want to have to worry either about treading on other peoples’ sensibilities or about how co-authors’ posts might reflect on me. I was quite capable of getting myself in trouble all on my own, without needing help from others.

Well, so much for all that. I’m now one of the co-authors of Rectified.name, a new China blog that also features Jeremiah Jenne of Jottings from the Granite Studio, Dave Lyons (once of Mutant Palm fame, now known on the tubes as Davesgonechina), Brendan O’Kane of Bokane.org, and YJ.

So, you ask, what’s different?

Glad you asked. For one thing, scientists conducting rigorous experiments with the Large Hadron Collider, the most sensitive scientific instrument in the world, have determined to a high degree of statistical confidence that I don’t blog much anymore. Therefore, rather than having my dwindling reader base lurking mournfully around the increasingly desolate Imagethief for my quarterly I-hate-ICBC rant, I thought I might make sense to be part of a more regularly updated and diverse blog. Also, I cannot think of a better group of contributors than the Rectified.name lineup. I know them all personally, all are longtime China residents and readers and speakers of Chinese (especially YJ, who is, ahem, actually Chinese). And, importantly, all are talented writers with styles that fit together well. You didn’t hear it from me, but there is a suspiciously high wiseass quotient across the board.

My first post for Rectified.name is already up. I’ll be cross-posting opening paragraphs on Imagethief, butI expect most of my upcoming work will be on Rectified.name with this blog reserved for things that are personal, weird or trivial enough that that they’re better off not going on a group blog. If you subscribe to Imagethief’s feed, please subscribe to Rectified.name.

This is an experiment for all of us. We’re not sure that it’s going to work, but we’re excited about it. These are pretty lean days for China blogging, with much of the fun and banter now on Facebook and Twitter. Those are great platforms, but for those of us who like to write, blogging still has its charms. Someone has to save China blogging, dammit. And we think we’re the people to do it.

Stay tuned.

PS: If you don’t get “Rectified.name,” read up on your Confucian history.

But among the dreck were 100 or so posts that were particularly meaningful to me, had been important in establishing Imagethief, or that documented important events that happened during my years in China. I had offline archives of everything, and for a year and I half I had a loose plan to restore the best bits of the archives. The extent of that plan was something like this: “One of these days, I should really restore those archives. But now I’m going to watch 30 Rock.”

Last month another crash, involving the WordPress template I’ve been using for the past year and a half, gave me a reason to redesign the site again. A redesign begged for some new content. And, frankly, combing through the archives and restoring old posts just seemed easier than the hard slog of actually writing something original. So I’ve gone through and cherry-picked about 100 of the best posts from before the meltdown of the old server and re-posted them with their original date stamps. Unfortunately, all the old comments and inbound links are lost. Or maybe it’s not so unfortunate since that consigns a lot of troll droppings to oblivion. But everything else is there, filed under the “Best of Imagethief” tab, above. I’ve also annotated the links to all the posts to make them easy to browse.  ”Best of Imagethief” sounds a little presumptuous, but it fits into the available space better than, “Slightly better than what we all agree is the worst of Imagethief.” If anyone wants the worst of Imagethief, e-mail me and I’ll send you everything in a PDF. It’s about 1200 pages, so keep a weekend free.

Below are the categories I sorted the archives into. This is the same as what’s on the top-level “best-of” page. Enjoy! Or don’t, but at least it gives Google something to crawl.

If you read just one…
These are my twenty most essential posts, representing the most condensed possible digest of Imagethief since 2004 across all the categories but travelogue. These are chosen largely because they’re my personal favorites, but all were also popular. If you’re going to read just one or two, read one of these.

Humor, Rants and Memoirs
These are posts about the idiosyncrasies and frustrations of life in China, raising a family, and other random things that I experienced or noticed and was compelled to write or rant about. I was compelled to write about a lot. There are more posts here than in any other category.

Travelogue
Travels in China and the region, mostly rendered as video travelogues shot on various low-rent devices and edited with at least some care, but also some written.

Public Relations, Business and Technology
This is one portion of my “professional” posts, covering the business and challenges of PR and communication in China, and analyzing major crises and events such as the dairy industry’s melamine catastrophe. This also includes much of my discussion of the woes of American Internet firms in China, as well as technology and Internet censorship. Posts that tilt more toward government affairs than business are filed under “Propaganda, Politics and Public Affairs,” below.

Propaganda, Politics and Public Affairs
This is one portion of my “professional” posts, covering government affairs, public opinion, media, censorship, propaganda and related issued. This includes many of my Olympic post as well as soft-power issues. Posts that tilt more toward straight business or technology issues are filed under “Public relations, business and technology,” above, although it’s a blurry line in China.

Miscellany
These are posts that didn’t obviously fit into any other category. After 2007 I had a clearer idea of the blog’s voice and most things I wrote fit into one of the other categories. But between 2004 and 2007 I generated a few urchin posts, some of which were nevertheless worth keeping alive.

If you want to find out what I am reading, follow me on Twitter. I’m @imagethief, surprisingly enough. That’s a much more engaging way to get an idea of what I’m spending my time on.

Still, I do think there is some value in sharing the list of other blogs and sites that I regularly read. On the “What I’m Reading” page I keep a list of links to all the blogs and sites I subscribe to in Google Reader, organized by topic area. This is automatically updated as I subscribe and unsubscribe to things, so it’s always current. And it’s always real, because if I find myself not reading something or discover that a site has gone dark, I tend to unsubscribe as a matter of course. I’ve done this for a while, but I thought it was worth mentioning again now that the blogroll is officially kaput.

As always, please don’t write asking for link exchanges. I didn’t do them before, and it’s simply not possible with the current system. Got a cool site? Point me at the RSS feed. If it’s good I’ll subscribe and it will appear in the appropriate category. Link exchanges aren’t doing you any good these days, anyway. Especially if they’re coming from low-Google-wattage sites like mine. You should be aiming for Twitter (or Weibo) follows and retweets.

And that is an entirely different topic for another time.

Will

Update: We seem to be functional again. If your RSS is still dead, or you’re only getting excerpts, let me know. It’s touch and go at Imagethief towers.

Update 2: Or not. We’ll see.

Update 3: I dunno. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Don’t look a gift horse etc. At any rate, for those not in China or with working VPNs, here’s a Feedburner feed as a backup.

Kaiser, Gady, Jeremy and I recorded a nice, tight show on a range of topics –Korea, crazybad, the Shanghai apartment fire, and the woman who was sentenced to a labor camp for a tweet– and spent an unreasonable amount of time after the show congratulating ourselves on a job well done.

Hubris is, as always, shadowed by Nemesis, even in trivial matters. The audio file didn’t upload properly to the Great Cloud, and the original file was apparently deleted by someone before the upload was verified. So off into the abyss it went, resisting all attempts at restoration, undeleting and what have you.

We’ll reboot some of the topics this week, and Kaiser is looking at breaking out a separate show on the Korea issue with some real experts on the situation (a category that includes Gady, but emphatically excludes yours truly, who is much more at home talking about crazybad and other lightweight stuff).

Apologies and stay tuned for version 2.0.

Anyway, will try not to make that particular goof again.

Oops.

What I will be doing, however, is republishing old posts in this blog under their original dates as I feel the need to cite them in new posts. I’ll also be trying to republish the posts listed in my annual “best of” reviews and the five-year retrospective I did last year. Hopefully this means the “Best of Imagethief” won’t continue to be one a collection of obnoxious links-to-nowhere that are probably bottoming out my search engine juice and getting me included on blacklists of weird link-spam sites or who knows what. These archival posts may cause some weirdness in the RSS stream, however, so if you see the occasional 2005 post cross your feed as new, now you’ll know why.

Cheers

Will

A couple of days ago I moaned about the loss of my 2009 posts, the only year that I didn’t archive before the server hosting the old Imagethief blog blew up. A reader named Abhishek sent me a message to point out that every post back through the birth of Imagethief in 2004 is in Google Reader’s archive. But the fact that his message came to me on Facebook reminded me of something else: Every Imagethief post is automatically imported into my Facebook notes. Sure enough, all of 2009 and a good chunk of 2008 (presumably when I started importing) is all there, ready for me to copy into my offline archives. They’re probably on my LinkedIn profile, too. (Comments posted on the blog, alas, will not have made the transition.)

Sometimes the Internet’s propensity is annoying. On the other hand, sometimes it’s a life-saver.

Thanks, Abhishek!

You can pretty much blame it on the day job. While I started my new gig last May, in the last couple of months it has really accelerated. This is a good thing in one way: There is a lot of extremely cool stuff happening at Motorola right now, and plenty to be done. The down side, however, is that after work and parental responsibilities, I’ve had very little mental energy left over for recreational writing. (On that note, the parental thing has really switched into high gear. Z very recently figured out how to climb out of his crib and last night, for the first time, appeared in our bedroom doorway at three AM wanting to cuddle up with mom and dad. This was novel and cute for ten seconds, and annoying for the next hour as I tried to get him to go back to sleep in his own bed while staring down the barrel of my 6:30AM wakeup. )

The result is that many times, including over the recent holiday, I’ve sat down at the computer all prepared to write the wittiest post ever, and then thought to myself, aw, screw it, I’m going to read a book/watch TV/go for a run/play with my boy/etc. Sorry about that. It’s not that you, the reader, aren’t important to me. It’s just that I wanted to give the six or eight neurons I have left a bit of a break.

The other thing that happened recently was that the server that hosted the old Imagethief site, which had all the posts from 2004 through 2009, blew up. There is a backup somewhere, apparently, but it is not easily accessible and may or may not ever come to light. I have my own offline backup of all the posts from 2004 through 2008, which includes most of the classics, but 2009 may be gone for good. This is not a walloping catastrophe, as I was on blog sabbatical for half of 2009 (and rumor has it that I may still be on that sabbatical). But it nevertheless was a bit of a downer for a variety of reasons. Maybe someday I’ll re-enter all 1,300 old posts into this newer blog. And maybe I’ll carve a perfect copy of Michaelangelo’s “David” out of a twelve foot tall block of Velveeta and express-mail it to the Pope.

Much more likely I will dig out particular posts as I cite them and repost them, and leave the vast majority in the vault.

Before anyone posts comments condemning my blog hosting company, my blog is not hosted by a company. It’s hosted on the servers of a very good friend of mine in the US. He has hosted all my websites, blogs and e-mail for free for sixteen years, while running a variety of tech startups and raising two daughters on the side, and I am nothing but grateful for all his help and free support over the years. I the main, I have nothing to complain about on that front. He has much, much bigger fish to fry at the moment than rescuing a bunch of old blog posts about Mao statues and tainted donkey meat. That was part of the bargain. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

Work promises to continue being crazy, but I’m hoping to at least emerge from the foxhole and cast forth the odd word or two. We’ll see how it goes.

Will

Will

Since Guilt took down its shingle there has been plenty of institutional high end patisserie to be found, but not so much of the craft stuff. But this week I ordered cupcakes from Carol Chow’s CCSweets for a regional meeting I convened. They were awesome. She reduced the sugar a bit to make them more appealing to my Chinese colleagues, and she delivered them to our office which, if you read this blog regularly, you will recall is in the back-of-beyond’s back yard. If you need cakes, cupcakes or cookies for an event, give CCSweets a try. Everything you need to know is on the website.

Now the disclosures: First: Carol is the wife of a friend of mine whom you may know as ultra-high-value twitterer and blogger Niubi. I paid retail for these cupcakes and would cheerfully do it again. I don’t do many endorsements on this site, and I never do paid ones. But if you’re going to endorse something, seriously, why not cupcakes?

Second: I have a raving sweet tooth. I think it’s because my father is English.

Oh, mama!

The job is a big deal, at least by my standards. I’m going to be running North Asia PR for Motorola’s mobile device division. “North Asia” in this case means mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan plus South Korea. The mobile device industry is in one of the most exciting periods in its history, and greater China and Korea are fascinating and influential markets. Motorola is also at a great stage right now, so I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. The office is in Wangjing, which means some commute re-engineering, but that seems a pretty small price to pay for what looks like being a very interesting gig.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I’ve named my employer on the blog, something that I never did in my old job. The reason I never named my old employer was simply that I wanted to keep my opinions on this personal blog as separate from them as possible. Anybody with a mastery of Google or a LinkedIn or Facebook connection with me could see who my employer was, so it’s no big secret. For the record, it was Burson-Marsteller, and I’d like to thank them for six great years, all the support they gave me while I worked there, and for indulging of my idiosyncrasies. It’s a great company and I’ll always be proud of my time there. I’m very glad to have left on friendly terms.

I felt that with the change of employers it was a good opportunity to take a more transparent approach with the blog. So Motorola is named in the short introduction in the right-side column as well as in the “About Imagethief” page. This remains a personal blog and the opinions expressed here remain my own and are not necessarily those of my employer. If you want to attribute something from Imagethief to me in a mainstream article, you should contact me for attribution details.

Despite the usual disclaimers, I will have to change the blog a bit. Consultants have a certain license to–how shall I put this?– shoot off their mouths. In-house people need to be a bit more cautious, especially when it comes to sensitive issues, which I’ve historically been willing to embrace. So I intend to keep writing Imagethief, but I’ll be feeling my way for a while. Drop me a line and let me know how it’s going.

Will

At any rate, the sudden hawk-a-thon brought to mind the many contrasts between China and Japan, including this sign, posted over a water fountain at Kansai Airport, in kind of near Osaka:

This made me wonder, what happens if you do gargle there? A polite warning? A ticket? A beating? I wasn’t courageous enough to try.

Something else I noticed at Kansai: In the departure lounge they were playing the documentary show “Air-Crash Investigations” over the big LCD TVs. I’m not a nervous flyer, but this struck me as an odd choice of programming for an airport departure lounge. The topic was United 232 which, you may recall, ended in a fireball in Sioux City that was caught on video. They showed this video. I was reminded of the old Leslie Nielsen comedy “Airplane”, which is probably not what your average airport administrator wants to evoke. But, hey, maybe the Japanese are different. Gargling prohibited, air crash videos allowed. It takes all kinds.

In other news, the NewsMorphosis conference yesterday morning went well. I met some really cool people, including a bevy of Hawaii based entrepreneurs and journalists, TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy, and Michael Freedman, the Executive Director of George Washington University’s Global Media Institute and a longtime CBS newsman. There was some great discussion. Sorry that I wasn’t in a position to live-tweet it or blog it. However there should be video available soon, and I’ll post a link or embedded video as soon as I can.

Also, I’m running the WP mobile theme, so if you’re on the road and not using a mobile RSS client (although I’m not sure why you’d do such a thing), the blog will be much more usable.

The old Imagethief will stay live for the time being, while we look into migrating old content without breaking the permalinks, but all new posts will go here.

Feedback is welcome.

Will

Imagethief spent the weekend writing two posts about current PR issues (well, one of them was only relatively current). However, after some reflection I’ve decided to kill them both. While they don’t touch directly on work I or my firm is doing in China, they’re both close enough to some areas we are involved in that I felt they risked violating my prohibition on writing about my firm’s clients in this blog.

So why mention this here, other than burnishing my halo and reassuring my boss that I still think about these things?

Because I know I’ve been pretty scarce following the big Google post of a month or so ago, and I wanted to reassure readers that I am, in fact, writing again. In future I’ll try to direct this energy toward writing things I can actually publish. Meanwhile, your continued patience is, as always, appreciated.

-Will

On Sunday Imagethief arrived in Beijing from two well-earned holiday weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flying with Zachary), now 22 months, is always an adventure. He’s a well traveled kid, but a well-traveled two year old is like a well-traveled troglodyte. Even at their best, social habits are wanting. I’m not especially superstitious, but I knew we were headed for trouble on the return flight when, at about the International Date Line, the woman seated across the aisle from me said, “He seems very well behaved.” Thus jinxed, the last three hours consisted of full-on, bawling meltdown as we became one of those families that other people on airplanes dream of pushing out an open door 35,000 feet above the trackless, ice-clad wastes of Siberia. During one particularly tantrumy spell I even dreamed of pushing myself out.

The definition of “hell on earth” is touching down in Beijing during the blizzard of the century after a twelve-hour flight in steerage with a sleepless toddler who is entering the hallucinatory/psychotic stage of fatigue. Beijing’s taxi drivers had collectively decided to wait the whole deep-freeze out, so the taxi queues looked like round-the-block Depression-era breadlines with luggage carts. This is when something unprecedented happened: We were invited to the front of a queue by Chinese people. Say what you will about Beijing, but it’s a great town to have a kid in, even if that kid is in twelve-gauge, double-barrel meltdown.

The drive home took another hour as we slo-mo fishtailed our way along the No. 2 airport express way, which resembled a snowed-in version of Iraq’s famous “highway of death” from the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we made it home just as the last of the twilight slid away. Three boiled dumplings later, the kid went to bed. As I lowered him into his crib, he flashed me a huge and utterly sincere grin (as opposed to his normal, cheesy and exaggerated one), as if to say, “Father, from the bottom of my heart bless you for putting my tired ass to bed.” The last time I was that happy to go to bed myself I had just watched the sun rise after a poor-man’s bender of Red Horse ’40s and Taco Bell while still in college. This I do not recommend for anyone over the age of 22.

I’d been counting down to this Christmas holiday since roughly August, when I went on blog hiatus and commenced five months of particularly grueling work. In my head, I constructed all these fantasies of two weeks of complete indolence and gluttony. These plans were duly torpedoed by my son, who had diarrhea on the plane. This turned out to be caused by a stomach flu that infected me, both my parents and my sister-in-law. After spending our third day in Palo Alto sponging up toddler-vomit (from the rug, the hallway, the dog) and with me paralyzed with fever on the couch, we took Patient Zero (formerly Zachary) to a local clinic in Palo Alto. There the doctor said there was nothing much to do but wait it out, and asked us if we’d had direct contact with his vomit or feces. I had a flashback to changing runny, poop-sodden diapers in the matchbox-bathroom of United steerage three days before. In such a confined space perhaps Iron Man or a trained doctor in one of those plague movie bunny suits could have avoided direct contact with fecal matter. I, however, could not. (Also, thanks to the American health system, I still have no idea how much I’m being charged for this consult.)

The upshot was that I spent the whole first week of the holiday with no appetite whatsoever, which means I probably gained a little less holiday weight than usual. But I also had to apologize to everyone else who was laid up, including my mother, who spent an un-festive Christmas day in bed with a fever (on top of wrestling with an automotive soap opera too complicated and depressing to recount here). My sister-in-law paid us back, however, as she and my brother traded their infant daughter’s cold for our stomach flu. Zachary had the pleasure of being sick in both directions, but with completely different secretions. You gotta love parenthood.

Nevertheless, Imagethief made the best of his vacation under the circumstances. With an heroic effort in week two, I’m pretty sure that I compensated for most of the first week’s caloric deficit. You can accomplish splendid things with egg nog if you put your mind to it. Plus, Elliott Ng of CNReviews, whom I also saw recently in Beijing, was kind enough to treat me to a burrito the size of a Pres-To-Log over an extensive conversation about China blogging. That alone probably put a pound back on.

This brings me to two announcements. First: The great Imagethief blog hiatus is officially over. I’m not sure what kind of pace I’ll maintain, but I intend to get back to regular blogging and it won’t be hard to top the average of two posts a month since last August. Thanks to any remaining readers who have stuck around for five months of relative inactivity. Your Imagethief decoder rings are in the mail.

Second: One reason why I have the time to blog again is that I have started a six-month sabbatical from work in order to return to my languishing Chinese studies. In fact, it’s only a partial sabbatical as I will still be working a couple of days a week so I don’t have to dip into my savings and can keep my family’s visas and health insurance in good order (the insurance thing is looking pretty key after Christmas). But three days a week will be spent with my tutor and my nose in the textbooks and Chinese newspapers. A hat tip to my employers, who have been spectacularly cooperative about the whole thing. This is pretty experimental, and we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m excited.

Finally, I’d like to wish all readers a belated by sincere happy new year. Here’s hoping 2010 is better than 2009, and that the teens are an improvement on the naughties.

Happy new year from patient zero!

Do you think much about where the “line in the sand” is for you personally? Just how far can you take criticism of China in your Blog before you potentially attract unwanted attention? While I doubt you would be subject to arrest, being a Caucasian American citizen and thus capable of evoking American political and media attention if such were to happen, you could theoretically be “invited” to leave the country and not return. Do you already impose limits on your rhetoric and subject matter as you write?

Well, first, let’s not over-estimate the amount of righteous fury that would be provoked by the incarceration of one loudmouthed PR flack. Nevertheless, despite recent post topics, I like to think that my criticism of China is leavened by wonder, appreciation and affection as well. No one is forcing me to stay here, and I wouldn’t be in China if I wasn’t enjoying it. But dewy sentimentality won’t jerk any tears from the apparatchiks down at the Ministry of Information. So, the short answer is, yes, I do impose limits on my rhetoric and on the subject matters that I broach, although perhaps less than I should.

I don’t worry about being thrown in jail (when that happens it’ll be because the apocalypse has come and all spin-doctors are being put against the wall). I certainly worry about having my website blocked, which is probably the most likely result of transgression. The worst-case would probably be finding my residency and employment permits cancelled. I have not heard of anyone being expelled for blogging. If anyone is aware of confirmed cases, please comment.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am going to explain my self-censorship policy. There are three reasons why I self-censor:

First, I don’t blog anonymously. Maybe this is a mistake. Many people do blog anonymously, including many of the China bloggers that I follow. And some of them aren’t even in China. (For those who want to know how to blog anonymously, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide here.) But as long as I’ve had a website (twelve years now) my name has been on it. And I’ve always felt I ought to be willing to take responsibility for what I wrote. Perhaps I’ll regret that someday.

Second, China is a good place for a little paranoia. It seems like arrogance to think anyone official would care what I write in this space. But, as I wrote recently, I’ve met journalists here who have been hassled by the authorities. Other bloggers have simply decided that its too dangerous to have an opinion here, and have thrown in the towel. One blogger believes (with some cause) that the Ministry of Information has been lurking about his site. The foreign journalists I know take it as a matter of course that they are under surveillance. And I am a foreigner who deals regularly with both the Chinese and foreign media in the course of my work. That is probably grounds for some caution. On the other hand, searching Technorati for “China” yields 411,780 posts, so what is the chance that I am attracting particular attention? If it is true that China has 30,000 Internet content weasels, I guess the chance is measurable. (The post cited for that widely disputed number is an excellent precis on China’s Internet policies.)

Third, speaking of my work, it is an issue as well. Since I am not blogging anonymously, I have to consider what will happen if someone from my company stumbles across my blog. Sooner or later, it will happen (if it hasn’t already). This is fraught for a variety of reasons, especially considering my line of work. As one of the company experts on blogging and online media, I wouldn’t have much credibility if I wasn’t blogging myself. But I won’t write anything about my company’s clients unless it is in the most general terms. If I puff them, I destroy my own credibility. If I denigrate them, I betray my obligations as their consultant. It also, to an extent, limits what I can say about PR in China in general. This is a shame, because there are some things that beg to be written about. The only  post I have ever written to completion and then decided against publishing was not a China government or policy post. It was a China PR post.

I’ve always self-censored to some degree, usually for purely pragmatic reasons. Back in my angry youth, in 1995/6,  I wrote some inflammatory things in the Report from Singapore, my proto-blog on the rise and fall of Games Online. In tiny Singapore, where everybody in a given business knows everyone else and you bump into the same people throughout your career, this could have really haunted me. You never know when someone you scorch will have the influence to ensure that your permanent residency or employment pass doesn’t get renewed. Or simply be interviewing you for your next job. When I republished Report from Singapore on my website, in 1999, I scrubbed the most incendiary material, removed a few real names and softened some ill-considered rhetoric written in the heat of emotional trauma.

In China, the issue is less one of scorching individuals and more one of irritating the State. So where is my line in the sand? (Or dust, as it is in Beijing.)

Well, like many blogs, most of mine is either my own opinion or my opinion combined with information freely available on websites not blocked in China (since I can see them). I don’t usually re-publish stuff blocked in China, although there have been occasional exceptions, such as Reporters Sans Frontieres’ statement on Ching Cheong.

I don’t spend much time on arch-taboo subjects. I don’t generally talk about Tiananmen Square in the 1989 context both because that is a lightning-rod issue and because there are people much better able to comment on it than I am. I don’t talk about certain quasi-religious movements that China has banned (and, as you can see, I have not even mentioned them by name). Sometimes I wish I could, but that seems like a fast road to exile behind the Great Firewall.

When I first got to China, I published the same assortment of expat-blogger, hayseed abroad “gawrsh!” stories written by every other foreigner who has come to China. (Written, I hope, in my own inimitable style.) That was fine in its time, but the longer I live here, the less of that there is likely to be. Instead I now find myself writing more of the kind of posts you would expect from someone who has been a media professional for nearly fifteen years. I didn’t plan it that way. My interests simply shifted, as did what was happening around me. That has put me pretty squarely on sensitive territory, and I try to respect that. But, as a media pro, how can you ignore the role of propaganda in the recent wave of anti-Japanese nationalism? How can you ignore the arrest of Ching Cheong? How can you ignore the way China represents itself to the world, or to its own people? How can you ignore any of it?

Unless you are in a coma, to live in China is to wonder, why are things this way? What to the Chinese want? Where is it all going? What are the forces driving it? What the hell am I doing here? I don’t know about you, but I process what I see around me every day by talking about and, especially, by writing about it. If I stopped, I would have to wind iron bands around my head or my skull would explode.

So will keep posting. And when I feel paranoid, I will remind myself that there are things being written in un-blocked mainstream media that are far more influential and powerful than anything I will lay before my tiny handful of readers. But I will also be mindful that I and my wife live in a society that doesn’t work the same as the USA does. There is no right to freedom of speech here. There is no right to freely access what much of the rest of the world takes for granted. There are taboos. Like a game of digital hopscotch, I must be mindful of how I step around the lines that have been drawn.

I suspect many of us here do the same.