The problem with these sites is that they not only attract anti-CCP rants, but also vomit loads of puerile China-bashing. Just take one of today's threads from the Peking Duck for example: one contributor, a guy by the name of Gordon (who also happens to run the Horse's Mouth site), posted a passage from John Mandeville's "Travels" which he described as "humorous" even though it is blatantly insulting to Chinese culture.
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The other thing that these sites all share in common of course is that they reserve all of their most stinging attacks for the Chinese Communist Party, and when doing so, they almost always fail to acknowledge any of the positive legacies of the Party. They prefer instead to view the CCP as monolithic and "evil". Richard Burger, who runs Peking Duck, outlines the "purpose" of his site in his rant titled "Looking back at China, the purpose of this blog": The CCP is a "destructive" force he claims, "like an elephant brushing up against a sapling and crushing it....I also have understood for a long time that the current CCP is amazingly similar to the ancient emperors' regimes, in which government was to be used not for the benefits and protection of its subjects, but for ensuring the survival of its leaders."
Peking Duck is written by Richard Burger, an American who no longer lives in China.
Angry Chinese Blogger, who is not American, says he writes in English to reach a wider audience.
One thing I love about blogging, and reading blogs, is the chance it gives me to connect with people all over the world without the intermediary of official news sources. Thanks to blogs, I have seen the situation in Iraq through the eyes of Iraqis, in addition to reading blogs from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. I urge you to check out these Chinese bloggers, too.
To get you started here's an interesting post on Miss Tibet, who refused to compete in a Malaysian beauty pageant after China insisted that her title be changed to Miss Tibet-China. Here's a pageant with more at stake than the contestants' measurements.
UPDATE: I have changed the paragraph on Angry Chinese Blogger. For some reason, I thought he didn't live in China. He does. Also check out his comment about the blog-city block.
Fortunately I can still access my blog through server outside of China, but I know other's who can't and are now having to abandon blog-city and start again. Many of the peope who are being forced to move aren't radical bloggers, a lot are just Chinese students who wanted to blog about anything from sports to movies without having to register with the government, and now they can't.
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