A big thank you to all our schoolfriends from the Tianya forum (one of the most popular in China and the site that started off the investigation of the Brick Kiln Slavery Scandal; it is also where the instructions on how to harass foreign media offices mentioned in a post below were posted) for their extensive, lively comments on this blog over the weekend. And to Zhangsan for his heroic translation work.
I notice, incidentally, that the latest comments have moved on to the issue of supposedly faked photos, specifically one showing Chinese soldiers apparently getting ready to dress up in monks robes, which is fairly obviously false, as the comments point out. For those interested in this issue, Roland Soong over at EastSouthWestNorth is something of an authority on scams and fakes on the Chinese net. He has a post about that picture but also has another post about a photograph of what appears to be a Tibetan man wielding a knife that it is now being claimed was in fact a Han Chinese policeman dressed in Tibetan clothes. With Photoshop and similar programs so widely available and easy to use, trying to sort out fact from fiction on something like would take a full scale investigation, which probably won’t be forthcoming and might prove a wild goose chase. In any case, in the pithy phrasing of Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill, we need more jaw jaw and less war war. If my previous post proves correct we maybe headed in that direction. Let’s hope so.
(Roland also has a lengthy post looking at Chinese netizens’ allegations of bias by the foreign press that is eminently sensible).