Manufactured Controversy?

The strange case of Chinabounder has turned up again. This was an anonymous blogger who purported to be an English language teacher in Shanghai describing his amorous conquests. Because these involved Chinese women and he said he was English, once his posts were highlighted there was a (predictable?) storm of nationalist vitriol on the web and his blog closed. Now he’s back in a provocative post about the murder of a 12 year old girl in Hunan. Essentially, this carefully crafted rant is a reply to all his Chinese critics, asking them why they aren’t paying attention to the murder of this girl, where is the outrage they vented on his scribblings etc. I may be overly cycnical, but to me it all is a little too deliberate and smacks of an attempt to rile up the brittle nationalism that recalls the Starbucks in the Forbidden City affair. At one point at the height of the Chinabounder controversy, someone claimed that the blog was actually an invention by some performance artists. This latest post makes me think that might be correct. Stay tuned for the inevitable (?) reaction.