The daily ironies of living in China have got to be one of the top reasons I find life here so enjoyable, and any expat who claims otherwise probably doesn’t have their eyes open. Or perhaps they’re just too fixated on the ladies here to recognize.

Where can you order a “grilled cheese” and literally find yourself face to face with a slab of melted cheese on a plate? *Cough, cough,* in a city that rhymes with Nanjing.

Then there are the seemingly inexplicable moves by the government when it comes to blocking websites, as just recently Wikipedia and BBC in English were released to the online world, while at the same time Blogspot.com sites, which include a lot of blogs, are blocked again.

Perhaps the government feels blogs aren’t useful enough to the masses to cause mass protests when shut down. China Law Blog believes Wikipedia’s broad utility ultimately is what got it back online - and is why it will stay online indefinitely, according to that blog’s estimation.

But the latest ironic twist in China business news was the discovery that the flags representing independence for that pesky far-flung western province are produced in a factory near Guangdong.

BBC reports that factory workers became suspicious after seeing the flags in protests shown on the news. They subsequently went home and researched on – gasp - the Internet to discover their true meaning, and tipped off police.

Indeed, when searching (in English at least) “Tibet independence flag” on Google, the first result is in Wikipedia.

Could that have forced the Chinese government to wake up and realize that encyclopedias – especially ones with easy access to “sensitive” information – are good for all of mankind?

Nah, that would be too ironic.

    Channel: What's Spicy     |