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Don't miss James Fallows' superb story in Atlantic Monthly on China's national communication woes. Fallows gets into all the things that China does to undermine its own attempts to improve its international image. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested China and communication:Such self-inflicted damage occurs routinely, without the pressure ...

Imagethief, being an arrogant son of a bitch and a bona-fide member of the Ivory Tower Elite, is seldom interested in what the common man has to say. Nothing gets me to change the channel faster than an ''iReport'' segment on CNN, or the BBC equivalent. Of course, most professional pundits are equally useless, so in a sense, my contempt is ...

Via the China Digital Times, this outstanding excerpt from the transcript of Wednesday's IOC/BOCOG press conference (the ninth in a wretched series, we are informed). I've excised some back and forth between the question and response: South China Morning Post: Mr. Wang and Giselle, we did get to know there were 77 applicants to the protest. ...

The latest incident report from the Foreign Correspondents Club of China is out. It doesn't make for pretty reading:BEIJING: OFFICERS ROUGH UP AP PHOTOGRAPHERS, SEIZE MEMORY CARDS August 20, 2008: Two Associated Press photographers attempting to cover an Olympics-timed protest were ...

''Babygate'' being the best sounding label I can come up with for this controversy. First, interesting posts from the Stryde Hax blog on ''Google hacking'' information about He Kexin. Essentially this involves using Google's advanced search features to target very specific kinds of information. His queries on Google.cn and Baidu lead him to ...

This New York Times article is a few days old, but I didn't have time to get to it when it first came out. Apparently some of the press conferences got a little scratchy as journalists got frustrated with BOCOG's oblique responses to any question not focusing on China's immense medal haul, and the IOCs equally vapid responses. In this case, the ...

Or so you would start to believe from the press reports over the last day. Some have dwelt upon the lip-synched singing of hyper-precious Lin Miaoke, the impossibly apple-cheeked munchkin girl who ''sang'' the laudatory and self-referentially titled ''I sing for my motherland'' without toppling over in shock at the thought of being watched live by ...

The downside of scanning something like thirty Google alerts a day is that you lose productivity and fill your head with random crap. The upside is that you sometimes notice strange juxtapositions of news. For example, the following two Reuters stories: One (filed in ''odd news'' I note) on the government's attempts to rein in vulgar advertising ...

Accompanying the Wall Street Journal's article about the special Olympic protest zones are seven pages of scans of the notorious English phrasebook issued to Beijing police. It is well worth a look just so you can see what constitute typical Olympic scenarios as envisioned by the Public Security Bureau. Among them are ''Interrogating a Foreign ...

Cliff Coonan has a story in showbiz trade Variety that examines the broadcasting problems I posted about last week. The article is something of an omnibus piece on current Olympic issues. Among other things, it gets into the organizers' efforts to develop and promote an official cheer. This part is worth highlighting: While Beijing is on the ...