a) The departments at MSFT are largely independent fiefdom, so the "isn't too busy" comment is specious. It's not an either/or thing.
b) You have no idea what the process is for identifying, reproducing, developing, testing and then distributing a security patch is, so stick to politics, please. Having a fix for something of this magnitude within a week, with the number of moving parts that MSFT has, is a minor miracle.
c) The google OS thing is the very definiton of a rumor. Spend 5 minutes surfing the sites of the industry trades, blogs and pundits and you'd know that.

I'm an 11-year veteran in the trenches of the evil empire, as a tester, manager and program manager, so I know whereof I speak.

On New Year's Eve, Richard Burger of The Peking Duck blog reported on "China's closure" of Michael Anti's blog on MSN Spaces. "It makes me too sick," he wrote. "China's making progress in some ways, but in others it's still in the dark ages, and is just as bad as any police state."

Police state? The overwhelming majority of mainland China's citizens hardly consider their country to be a police state, but of course their opinion doesn't matter to those ethnocentric bloggers intent on thinking otherwise. In fact, the charge seems a little rich coming from an American, from somebody who continually praises his own country's democracy and rule of law, given that America's latest Bureau of Justice Statistics show the US prison population to be the largest in the world, with one in every 138 residents of the country now behind bars.

Russia, Belarus, Palau and the United Kingdom all have incarceration rates much higher than China's too, which imprisons its citizens at a comparable rate to France.

So much for China being a police state then. And so much for objectivity, fairness and balance - sober qualities that were once valued as measurements of morality. And Michael Anti's blog on MSN Spaces wasn't blocked by Chinese authorities either; it was blocked by Microsoft's MSN Spaces, as The Peking Duck later, to Richard Burger's credit, acknowledged - though he qualified his correction of fact by insisting that Microsoft's MSN Spaces was merely acting in cooperation with Chinese authorities – a claim made, incidentally, without the backing of any evidence of course.

So welcome, dear Readers, to the age of infinite information, where bloggers like Richard Burger can report to you on all of China's crimes and misdemeanors as they happen - updates at the speed of light, for the internet allows anyone anywhere to access information that might be true, might be false, but you can find whatever information you need to prosecute any argument you want. Conspiracy theories abound, and history can be written any way you wish.

"In the past information bound culture," as John Doyle so rightly pointed out in his Andrew Olle Lecture. "There was a shared sense of a gradually expanding library of sensible and responsible scholarship whereas now information is serving more to fracture culture." The future of information, Doyle warned, "is with bloggers, and who knows what the blogging implications might be of a generation aching for the steely coldness of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and other games involving cyber murder, cyber torture and on line sex and anonymous chat rooms and bomb-making instructions and clubs dedicated to nihilism and terrorism and all manner of misguided madnesses designed to accelerate Rapture." We can add to this list the unarticulated ethnocentrism of most English-language China blogs, for their world – cyberspace – is also awash with opinion. Newspapers too of course, are full of it, are full of opinion. These days it seems as though any half-baked writer who can string a few sentences together is given a go, particularly if the opinion is inflammatory or somehow ratchets up the climate of fear or loathing – simply and obviously because it sells more newspapers.

The same applies to bloggers, out to maximise their number of hits, and therefore the value of their site as an advertising space. Most bloggers simply copy and paste other peoples' articles, often with the corporate media as the source, in order to generate discussion. Here, one can draw upon Foucault's theory of power and knowledge: the US government only has to feed information into a giant international mass media machine like Reuters to put its own views over to the Western world, and when it comes to managing foreign relations, information is always carefully selected and propagated in order to justify the government policies of the day.

Colin Mackerras, in his book Western Images of China, believes that the dominant images the West has had of China, both past and present, "accord with, rather than oppose, the interests of the main Western authorities or governments of the day." Mackerras' study shows quite clearly that there has indeed been a "regime of truth" concerning China, which has effected and raised "the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true" about that country. Having carried out both thorough qualitative and quantitative research, Mackerras reaches the conclusion that the period from the late 1980s to the present represents the most complicated period since Roman times in terms of Western images of China:

"What is striking about this period is that the preoccupation of Western images with matters concerned with human rights and dissidents gained an added emphasis at just the same time that the general standard of livelihood of the Chinese people rose to an extent unprecedented in China's history. This is not to deny the existence of human rights issues, but the focus they received in the Western media was both ironic and unwarranted by comparison with the improvements."

My argument here is that many blog hosts, like Richard the host of The Peking Duck for example, merely help to further reinforce such dominant images, negative images of China that reflect a political discourse, because it is he who normally does all of the selecting – it is he who decides which China-related articles are introduced to his readers for critical discussion. And when it comes to choosing, Richard to date has proven to be rather selective, in that over 80 percent of all of his China-related articles view China through negative eyes, with most of them having been selected from US corporate media sources. He has every right to choose which articles he wants to introduce to his readers of course, after all, it is his site. But thanks to his biased selection, the relationship between the "knowledge" he presents and the realities of China dwindles in importance when compared to the "knowledge" he presents and the exercising of corporate power, since it is predominantly the "knowledge" produced by corporate power that he draws most heavily from when making his selections.

The Peking Duck is the most popular English-language China blog, which is indicative of the fact that many of those who inhabit cyberspace are in need of such public spaces into which to pour their pent-up feelings of self-hatred and aggression. Indeed, China-bashing seems to be a cathartic exercise for many bloggers, though the release of such aggression signifies, arguably, failures on their part to attain sublimated forms of enjoyment in a foreign country that does not always, depending on where exactly they reside, provide them with the same levels of immediate gratification that they may have been accustomed to in their home countries. Release then, I would argue, for some at least, often takes the form of an unarticulated ethnocentrism. For blog owners who are out to profit from their sites as advertising spaces, China-bashers represent a market sizable enough to make catering to their needs a worthwhile endeavour.

Advice then, to those more sober among you? Simple. Read these blogs with the same caution one might use when reading a cheap British tabloid. Or better still, avoid them altogether.

Mark Anthony Jones

Thanks for the lecture. The reference to Foucault is about as persuasive as the insinuation that I'm "ethnocentric."

But I do thank you for not calling me a hate site!

http://blog.bcchinese.net/bingfeng/archive/2005/07/21/29484.aspx

As to Peking Duck, this blog is neither run by nor in any way connected to Peking Duck. (In fact, I don't even blogroll them.) Much as I appreciate your concerns, I see you've covered this before.

http://blog.bcchinese.net/bingfeng/archive/2005/07/18/29096.aspx

Unless they're the subject of the post, I'd appreciate it if you'd kindly refrain from attacking other bloggers here in the future.

Chris, all I know is that I downloaded the Guilfanov patch, and I don't see why Microsoft can't make the same thing available. You're correct in pointing out my ignorance of the "process for identifying, reproducing, developing, testing and then distributing a security patch," but your description makes me suspect it's compounded by bureaucracy. Are you saying a hands-on executive like Gates couldn't cut through his own bureaucracy if he really wanted to? If that's the case, I repeat my conclusion.

Mark Anthony Jones: wow, what an interesting jumble of vaguely accusatory non-sequiturs! It almost makes me yearn for the intellectual coherence of a Cleopatra Jones movie...or, at least, Beyonce in a wet T-shirt...

Waitaminnit...

Pointing out that Microsoft closed down a blog is "ethnocentrism"?

(laff, laff, laff)

That whole post looked like a half a bag of nickels tumbling down the stairs.

Dear Readers,

Above is a comment by Mark Anthony Jones that should be removed. He is trying to "out" the anonymous Peking Duck blogger and he is spreading duplicates of this post all over the blogosphere looking for attention. There is a fascinating story behind this, albeit somewhat sad. For the background, please read this post - especially the comments, where Mr. Jones reveals in his own words what he is trying to do. Thank you, and if you don't remove the entire post, at least remove the Peking Duck blogger's last name - this is a terrible thing Jones is doing and it is hardly a tribute to classical values to keep PD's surname in his comment. :-)

Thanks so much, and this is one of my favorite blogs.

"The overwhelming majority of mainland China's citizens hardly consider their country to be a police state"

MAJ, the overwhelming bulk of Chinese society does not know the meaning of 'police state', or that there is any other way to live.

When you were raised on one way of life and you don't kow any different, then you are hardly going to moan about it.

Currently, many Chinese encounter more facites of a 'police state' than much of the free world. With the exception of Britain (which has more CCTV cameras per head than any other country on the planet), China moniters its population more than the west, it has visa controls that are marginely more relaxed tha the soviet Union's, and it has more censorship than anywhere else I can think of right now.

Yuo try

A) starting up a newspaper
B) setting up an alternative faith church/temple etc
C) walking across the border between hong Kong and the Mainland (which shouldn't by rights exist at all)
D) waiving a pro democracy banner in T1@n@nmen squ@re

let's see what happens.

A man and woman in China can't even book into a the same motel room for a night in many hotels unless they have their marriage papers.

Infinitum est numerus stultorum, sed 'Mark Anthony Jones' primum est. Neque interea quietus erat, sed omnibus mobis insidius parabat pekingduck quod etiam legit et scribet!

yao ding: thanks for the link. By all the Gods that live, this MAJ guy is one sick puppy! His repeated apologies, made meaningless by his repeated lame excuses and justifications ("gosh, it's ONLY a blog post!"), are only the beginning of what I can only call a "pathology."

He repeatedly pastes other people's words into his comments, and lets his readers believe they're his own words, because he's posting this drivel during work hours and has lots of email to sift through and thus can't find the time to admit which words aren't his own? If he's too busy to get it right, he's too busy to do it at all. QED. (That's Latin for DUH.) Can't he just...post in his spare time?

Then there's the bit where he (sorta) changes his name and pretends to be a different person. Then he says he's an IDEA, not a person, so the name's changeable. Or something. The blithering went from ridiculous to just plain sad, and got too painful to read.

Wow, I've just realized I've rather overused the word "only" in my second sentence. Sorry about that. I guess that's not as bad as overusing words like "utilize" or "paradigm," but still...