Ivan has gone back to America

A while ago we lost touch with our American friend and co-blogger, Ivan.    And for some years we have known him to be secretive about his work.

Over the past two years or so, he told us he had moved back to America.    But now he has told us the whole truth, that for the past several years he has been working as a journalist for North Korea’s internet journal,  “Happy News For Foreigner Who Love Dear Leader”.

We take our friend Ivan at his word, at face value, when he tells us that for the past several years he has occasionally visited America for conjugal visits with his fiancee the exotic dancer Hypatia De La Pink – who, Ivan tells us, was released from prison in 2007 and is now on probation  – and we take him at his word, at face value, when he now tells us that the reason why he has finally left North Korea and his extraordinary position as a Western journalist in North Korea, striving to “reform North Korean journalism from within”, is because of his love for his fiancee, Hypatia De La Pink (exotic dancer at the Kit Kat Klub somewhere in Idaho, USA,  in booth number 10).

And Ivan assures us that he remains on good terms with his former employers, the Propaganda Department of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), and Ivan remains proud that he did his bit to help North Korean journalism to become more open and more progressive.

Therefore, in closing, Ivan dedicates this song to all of his friends in North Korea’s Department of Propaganda, and he promises that he will continue to write about North Korea even after he moves back to America, in ways of which his North Korean friends will approve, because now his credibility as a journalist or PR man depends, and will always depend – in all countries – on his keeping good relations with his most recent employer of the past several years, North Korea’s Department of Propaganda:

(Disclaimer:   This is satire; Ivan is a fictional character.    But this satire is based loosely on some real-life events.)

Technical Problems

This Blog is experiencing some technical problems.  In short, our modem died at around midday yesterday.  I tried every trick in the book as the technologically less savvy members of our family (I’m referring to Ned Kelly and Sam the half poodle) watched in despair.  It’s good to be surrounded by the whole family in times of crisis.  Their kindness did a lot of good to my morale but didn’t help revive the modem.  So, in a nutshell, we are out of Internet connections at home and I have to resort to blogging from a nearby Internet Cafe.  The replacement modem will not arrive till some time tomorrow, if we are lucky.  Otherwise, we’ll have to wait till next Monday before we can update our Blog.

In the meantime, I’m referring you to an exclusive report from RFA about a leaked document issued by the CCP Propaganda Department.  The document warns local officals against possible outbreak of mass incidents in Fujian Province.  The important part of this report is that CCP’s propaganda machine is finally caught admitting that China’s state security department regularly blocks overseas websites so that netizens in China, in normal circumstances, will not be able to access them.  The implied message is that the blockage is becoming less and less effective, as technologically better equipped Internet communities are growing at exponential speed in China.

Here is the LINK to the original report at RFA Mandarin Service.  Thanks to Xiao Qiang at CDT for the tips.

Zhang Ziyi’s Ass and Chinese Netizens’ Mouths

Has anyone noticed that the anti-vulgarity campaign actually started with Zhang Ziyi’s ass? We thought we’d seen it all: Zhang Ziyi’s ass in the settings of serious art movies, on the cover of trendy magazines, on the laps of sleazy boy friends … and the list goes on and on … Even Ivan wants to have a tattoo of Zhang Ziyi’s ass on his ass. No one in his wildest dream would foresee Zhang Ziyi’s ass finally being placed as a gag on Chinese netizens’ months. What did you just say about Zhang Ziyi’s new role in the CCP Propaganda Publicity Department?

Chinese blogger Yuci says it all.

Propaganda Works in Anhui Province

Anhui Province Communist Party General Secretary Wang Jinshan gave the following speech after he had received a report on propaganda and ideological works at a recent Provincial Party Committee’s standing committee meeting.  The title of his speech was “To get a grip on public opinion in order to gain developmental initiatives”.  The speech appeared later at the Chinaelections.org website.  It was met with some really harsh criticisms.  Do you think General Secretary Wang deserves to be chastised over his speech?

Here is my translation and you can decide for yourselves:

Uncle Screwtape on Balance and Cowardice

In a recent thread about the East Turkestan (Xinjiang) dissident Rebiya Kadeer, Catherine mentioned with approbation some earlier words by her interviewer,  Australian journalist George Negus, on the widely supposed need for a journalist to be “fair and balanced.”  Negus dismissed that popular supposition as twaddle.  Good on him!

C.S. Lewis, one of Tolkien’s inner circle, wrote about the critical role of moral cowardice – often masquerading as “balance” – in the effectuation of actual evil.  It is explained by the demon, “Uncle Screwtape” in “The Screwtape Letters” (1942), a fictional, often satirical series of letters by a Master Demon advising his apprentice nephew on the techniques of leading Human souls to damnation – techniques more subtle and less dramatic than are popularly imagined.  In letter 29, Screwtape writes: 

Ren and Stimpy Work For China’s Central Propaganda Department. Unhappy Muslims Will Be Shot!

After you watch enough CCTV (China Central Television) or read enough Xinhua “news” agency press releases (one of the principal sources of Chinese information for Western journalists in China – go figure), you begin to recognise a handful of mass-produced phrases as the essential ingredients of every product churned out by China’s Propaganda Department, now euphemistically called in English the “Publicity Department”. They changed the English translation from “Propaganda” to “Publicity” because they finally figured out that in the West there is – or at least used to be – a widespread belief that propaganda makes people stupid. Just like advertising and “public relations”. In a way, it’s true that the name change is a distinction without a difference.