The Chinese class that I’ve been attending has an interesting diversity of people. Nearly everyone is here for six months or a year. People are mostly Thai and South Korean, with a few Westerners, one Vietnamese and one (I think) Japanese. Many of those from Thailand and Korea are young university students, often majoring in […]

I finally found some more useful SARS information from the UK government other than the FCO’s China travel advice. Two places to go are Department of Health emerging travel advice and Public Health Laboratory Service (they handily protects the population from infection). These sources are all reassuringly calm, basically saying travel anywhere, but watch for […]

I love Chinese characters. They’re great fun, so much more interesting than rather dull alphabets. I know at first they seem like a really stupid idea – surely it is better to have a phonetic representation in writing, rather than arbitary and innumerable pictures? One way to look at it is that they are at […]

To go completely against my non-linking byline, and to fuel the misinformation fire, here’s some stuff about SARS. Here’s an article in a Japanese newspaper, describing how irresponsible the Chinese government has been in their handling of the case. This certainly fits with my suspicions the other day based on how WHO is having to […]

Today the Chinese government allowed a small expat anti-war protest in Beijing. Even the English language China Daily has reported on it, albeit it in an alternate reality way with regard to the stopped Chinese student protestors. Some delicate balancing going on here between the government criticising the US, stroking the US to make sure […]

I’ve been in Kunming for three weeks now, and it’s a pleasant place to live. I’m studying at the Center of Chinese for Foreign Students Yunnan University. The university is very eminent for a place so remote from Beijing. This is because during the Cultural Revolution lots of academics either fled or were exiled here. […]

I finally got round to finding a computer I can plug my digital camera into, so I’ve added a few photos. Go to the March archive page and scroll down. You can find a photo of the terraces at Bac Ha in Vietnam, and one of the pig on the back of a moto. By […]

With that provocative title, you might expect that the Chinese government have clamped down in a purge on me, or perhaps the Vietnamese secret police have chased me across electronic borders. Not quite, this is self-censorship. And, no, I don’t mean the unconscious “censor” from psychology, or the very conscious way that I select which […]

It’s slightly unnerving being in a foreign land when your country is going to war. There isn’t much fuss about the war here, it doesn’t affect China that much, only some potential economic damage relating to oil prices. A couple of people today talked to me about it. The main concern, presumably one that comes […]

This week I was tidying up my notebook, and found the notes from a conversation I had with a monk in a monastry in Burma. I promised at the start of January that I’d write about it, and now I’ve got round to it. So we go both back in time to the end of […]