Sinosphere Friday

As the lunar new year beckons...

Beijing isn’t just banning sexting. It’s encouraging everyone to send each other uplifting and constructive text messages:

These messages have a dual purpose: taking the place of the dirty jokes and mocking attacks on the establishment that are the focus of the latest mobile content clean-up campaign is only one half of their role. Officials from the government and major industry players are also talking about using positive SMS to build up "the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age," a sort of soft power against the encroachment of vulgar American pop culture.

Xie Zhenhua, the China Mobile Communications Association official who is the public face of the project, says they're the modern equivalent of Tang poetry or the Three Character Classic. One example cited by most articles was forwarded more than 150,000 times the year it was created: "China's rise and the people's prosperity: we work hand in hand toward that glorious day."

Meanwhile, Gansu Province is hiring 650 online commentators to put the government’s point of view on the issues of the day. Global Times outlines a number of official do’s and don’t’s for wumaodang, including:

<

p>Don't use an authoritarian tone and talk crap

Indeed. They should put that on a banner and hang it outside the Home Office. Anyway, the Year of the Tiger starts Sunday. Here are some Feng Shui investing tips. To mark the year, the government is planning to re-introduce wild tigers to Jiangxi province. The local peasants will be pleased.

Guangdong recently announced through a survey it had performed on the sexual habits and reproductive health of migrant workers that 36 percent hadn’t had sex in a very long time. Meanwhile, another 30% hire prostitutes, while yet another third said they have many sexual partners.

The provincial government is apparently going to be handing out 100 million condoms to migrant workers.

In order to prevent hacking of their databases, Google will now make the details of would be dissidents publicly available.

Mini MGI watch: 300 angry farmers storm a government building in Yingde, Guangdong Province, over a water diversion scheme

Not completely Sinospherical, but the date of the meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama has been fixed. I was interested because the usual protocol for this is for the Dalai to show up in the Vice President’s Office while the President “just happens” to be there. This time, the two are meeting in the map room. I don’t know whether this is an upgrade or downgrade or what.

And lastly, this is one of those profound and deeply significant China posts that I insist everybody pays attention to. Lyrics over here.

Comments

[Alex]

Regarding Google, the failure mode has already happened - it's "my abusive ex-husband is my third most frequent e-mail target and now he can see all my GReader stuff".

The SMS stuff seems to be just as bad as Jack Straw's idea of the public space. Quite reassuring.

[Richard J]

I'm starting to think that Google's motto should have been 'don't be f-ing stupid', not 'don't be evil'.