Grrr.... damn the creeping censors...

Ok now it's just starting to really annoy me. Over the past week, the censors have really started to creep out in terms of what they're not letting people in China read. They've started to selectively block a number of other blogs that aren't either Typepad or Blogspot. Blogspot is blocked entirely (though not blogger.com - hence my ability to post but not see what I've posted). Fortunately, I've discovered RSS feeds and readers :) (but if anyone knows a good proxy from China, please feel free to post in the comments that get mailed to me). The real annoying part though is that they're not doing it all at once but they're adding to the list of blocked sites - and ones that I read no less, pretty quickly.

Perhaps the worst part at the moment is that they've blocked my pop3 mail server for work. I've known about this issue in the past but it had been getting better (i.e. I was able to use it increasingly more before it got cut off in the past).

I may decide to keep posting anyway though my real excuse is that I've been swamped with work lately. I do however dread - absolutely dread - the day when they cut off my access to www.opinionjournal.com and www.wsj.com - it's not like I can read those on RSS.

I've been thinking about a few posts to make - e.g. the jaw dropping costs of social security taxes in China, crossing the road like a giggling school girl every morning, and an ode to McDonald's. I might just post or wait until I get back to Hong Kong next week. And in testament to the wild East, someone tried to stab the HR director to death with a knife at a company I know over an HR dispute - there's almost no comparison between the comfort level that I have here versus where our office was before in the outskirts of Shenzhen (ie. for the comfort of the parental units, I have some now - not that I ever really told them that I didn't have that before).

In the meantime, I would recommend Shenzhen Undercover - someone who has been posting more frequently and consistently than me but is a better writer (though he may be a bit left of center). He's posted a bit on what he seems to infer to be corruption but of all the stories I've heard, this one seems pretty light by comparison to some of the crazy things I've heard and seen.