as banned in china

I was sent a link to a website that tests whether sites are available across the great firewall of China (see bottom of post), and found that, apart from in Hong Kong, mine is banned.

Only a little time was wasted wondering if the ban was due to blogs about celebrity diets, bacheloroid recipes or the vicissitudes of a pair of pigs.

As it happens, it seems you don't need to do much more than get up in the morning to be blocked in China - which makes their admission of failure in the face of pornography all the stranger - but I would like to thank everybody who gave this Happy Yellow Dog of the Fens a bark loud enough to unsettle the Dragon.



Possibly related posts (manually selected):

Why is an English village's birthrate outstripping China's?

Christians in Xinjiang are suffering too

Fatal Misconception - the struggle to control world population



(NB the test above can time out - click here for the full version.)

enhancement: changing the meaning of disability

The victory of Oscar Pistorius in the 100 metres at the Paralympic Games in Beijing yesterday was a triumphal performance by an athlete at the top of his game. It is raising a lot of questions about enhancement in sport that have implications for the meaning of disability as a whole.

Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated as a baby because he was born without fibulas, originally applied to represent South Africa in the Olympics, but the "cheetah blades" he uses to run put him at the unusual disadvantage of being, as the New York Times put it, not disabled but too-abled. After a long legal battle to prove that his blades did not confer an unfair advantage upon him - which all but obliterated his 2007 winter training schedule - he was allowed to compete but, perhaps because of the time spent in court, just failed to make South Africa's Olympic team.

The question of enhancement in sports is a fraught one. Steroids have definitely turned what should have been a level playing field into a quagmire, one in which arguably athletes need to be protected from their own ambition, which is so necessary to make it towards the finishing tape.

But then there's erythropoietin, a hormone which prevents breakdown of red blood cells, increasing their number and therefore their ability to carry oxygen to the muscles. If better technology is developed to detect its use, which is illegal, do athletes switch to hypoxic training in an "altitude chamber", which would have the same effect? And if this is banned, what of athletes from countries such as Bolivia, Columbia and Ecuador, who may have no choice but to train at high altitude - do they then have an unfair advantage against which athletes from lower countries are not allowed to compete?

That's just one train of thought, based on the volume of oxygen-bearing haemoglobin contained in the body's red blood cells. Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland considers another scenario:

A swimmer, impossibly long arms swinging at his side, takes to the starting block. He has trained for this moment for months. Keeping up with the latest developments, he has endured surgical enhancements to enlarge the webbing in his fingers and toes. He's wearing the ultimate in sharkskin swimsuit technology. He inhales deeply through nasal passages surgically widened to optimize his breathing efficiency -- and dives in.

This may seem an unlikely situation, but surgical enhancement is already upon us. In 1974, US baseball pitcher Tommy John damaged an elbow ligament in his pitching arm, an injury that until then was the death-knell for a professional career. After revolutionary surgery grafting part of the corresponding ligament from the opposite elbow to replace the injured one, he returned to baseball following a long recovery. The operation, now called "Tommy John surgery", is popular now, with pitchers (and also American football players) saying that the best performances in their careers occur after the surgery. At what point do authorities decide that surgery is required, or that no surgery-requiring injury exists, meaning that the procedure would be an enhancement bestowing unfair advantage?

Alternatively, Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, was not sure if letting Pistorius run for the Olympics might be the right decision, comparing his blades with Tiger Woods' corrective eye surgery - without which, Caplan admits, the golfer was "almost legally blind" - which has left him with better than 20/20 vision.

Miah continues:

another vision [exists] at sports' highest levels. It is rooted in the democratization of technology -- in a world where high-tech training regimens exist even at the junior-varsity level -- and is part of a broader transition we are all making: using technology to improve everything, at every level.

This may be true as regards "able-bodied" athletes - whatever that means whenever enhancements are a possibility - but where disability is concerned any democracy depends largely upon the willingness of the state to empower and enfranchise disabled individuals, including willingness to listen to us, or even recognise our existence.

For example, in China, the country hosting the Paralympics, Townhall News quotes Chinese President Hu Jintao as saying on his country's state TV that "China's people and government have always attached great importance to the cause of the disabled...We insist on putting people first, carrying forward a humanitarian spirit and advocating equality and opposing discrimination." The Telegraph, however, reports the discrimination that disabled people have in accessing education, jobs and healthcare, and Townhall goes on to note that:

The government has long advocated sterilizing mentally handicapped people. In the early 1990s, a draft law was presented to the legislature to reduce the number of disabled through abortion and sterilization, a move that unleashed international criticism...In 1994, China ratified a law calling for the abortion of fetuses carrying hereditary diseases and restrictions on marriages among people suffering mental problems or contagious diseases.

This is an example of the eugenic madness that gripped the West from the end of the 19th century until the Holocaust forced eugenic organisations to change names and tactics. Or, at least, some of them: when Maxima was expecting Minora, a chart planted square on the centre of the examination-room wall laid out the increasing chance of having a baby with Down's syndrome as maternal age increased.

Pistorius, thankfully, receives the support of his country in sending him to the Paralympics. Cambodia is another proposition entirely. It is a country that has allowed the UNFPA - United Nations Family Planning Association - which cooperated with China's forced sterilization programme aimed at, but not limited to, drastically reducing the number of disabled people, to push reproductive health services, including abortion, in collaboration with the EU.

So Cambodia's contender, Vanna Kim, received no help from his country, having got to Beijing through the largesse of private donors, North Korea and the Games organisers; I don't deny the possibility of philanthropy on the part of Beijing, but they are also desperate to show a good image to the world, in a land where image is almost totally divorced from reality.

For all that, Pistorius' victory displays an example of a "disabled" person outperforming the "able-bodied" to a degree that may require renegotiation of the two terms' significance. Everybody has the same right to hope, to aspire, and to be all they can be regardless of the establishment's prescriptions of what their abilities will be.

Modern technology has an ability to equalise many of the odds that can affect the differently-abled: all that is required is the will and the humility to empower talented people who are "different" to do as well, and sometimes better, than the crowd. The problem for our rulers is that this would prompt swathes of their populations beyond the realm of knowledge, and into that of realisation, of what is being done in their name.

at the close of the Olympics

It's all over now; two weeks of fevered sporting madness, during which some of our acquaintances appear to have forgotten resolutions not to watch the Olympics. Personally I kept to mine, but am now wondering if I did the right thing; instead of Minora watching events behind my back as a form of rebellion, it might have been educational for both of us to see, as the Telegraph's Peter Foster reports, the the Chinese Communist Party thumbing its nose "spectacularly" at the International Olympics Committee and getting away with it.

The subterfuge started at the opening ceremony, where a girl was rejected for having uneven teeth, yet her voice was used for the opening song, "Ode to the Motherland", which was lip-synched by a girl judged to be "prettier", whatever that means when grown men use it in relation to pre-pubescent girls. Chen Qigang, music producer for the ceremony, justified this as being "in the national interest".

Using children in the national interest doesns't stop there. Again the Telegraph reports:

the training regimes are still reminiscent of those used in East Germany in the Soviet era. Promising children are hothoused from as young as six in elite, sports-focused boarding schools, where their access to their families is often limited. Only last week, Joseph Capousek, a successful German kayak coach who was recently sacked as trainer of the Chinese national team, said his former employers ran a military-style training regime where athletes were worked "like horses". Chinese officials have denied his claims.

In fact, there is an enquiry ongoing as to whether a Chinese gold-medal athlete, He Kexin, is actually 16, as it says on her passport, or is really 14, which would invalidate her entry (there are fears that practicing gymnastics can stunt the growth of young people). this does not seem to bother the Chinese - on a visit to an athletics hothouse in 2005, rower Sir Matthew Pinsent "saw a seven-year-old girl crying while being made to do handstands, and a boy with marks on his back" (click picture above for story).

Towards the other end of the mortal coil, two women in their 70's were interrogated for 10 hours and then, without a trial, sentenced to a year's re-education through labour. Their crime? The Chinese Government had set up "protest pens", so they applied to stand in one of them to protest. Peter Foster compares the protest-pens to the "‘Hundred Flowers' campaign of 1956-57 when intellectuals were invited to be frank about matters of public policy and then promptly purged for their honesty".

Although all the tickets for this Olympiad were sold out, all 6.8 million of them, there have been many empty seats in the Olympics. These were filled by students and volunteers, who were instructed to sit in the vacant seats whether or not they were interested in the individual contest being played out. I would've liked to have pointed this out to Minora, but the chance is lost now.

Anyway, the Chinese government decided that there would be much more visitors than turned up, and so set up procedures to divert water supplies to the capital from outlying farming areas. You don't have to be a genius like Professor Calculus to figure out what happened next: wells dried up; the price of water in the parched areas rose 300%; farmers got in hock to moneylenders and, in order to escape notification that payment was due, killed themselves by drinking pesticide. The biting irony of the situation is that, due to the poor turnout at the "sellout" Olympics, not a single drop of water was diverted from these regions to Beijing. The official reaction was that "the entire population was overjoyed to be making a sacrifice for the national good".

So despite the neglect of its own people, harrassment of the vulnerable and ideological certainty that it need not be troubled by doubt, a veritable army of the world's quangocrats has descended upon Beijing to present their countries in surrender mode. I said in an earlier post that "unless the International Olympic Committee stands up for itself, China will use it as a doormat." The IOC hasn't, and China has done so, and is taking its place as king of the castle.

I'm sure Boris Johnston, London's Mayor, is getting so much advice about the 2012 Olympics due to be held in London that he doesn't know whether he's coming or going. But if I may add my own straw to the camel's back, I would suggest: hold another austerity olympics. Let sport and the human spirit share the gold.


Related posts:
Sport isn't worth that much - Yamiti's Olympic struggle
As the Olympics begin

As the Olympics begin

Retaining an interest anabolic steroids as a former drugs-worker, I felt an alarm ringing in my noggin as I read a First Post report on things that could go wrong with the Beijing Olympics. It concludes:

Last year a caterer working for the United States Olympic Committee visited China and was shocked to discover why portions of chicken being sold in supermarkets were so huge: "We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes," he said. "They all would have tested positive."

This could create some confusion should Olympians fail "dope" tests by testing positive for anabolic steroids, which are all artificial - and strong - versions of testosterone. Add concerns that testing for banned substances is tainted by the "prosecutor's fallacy" (which is an assumption that - in this context - producing a false positive for a dope test is unlikely, therefore innocence is unlikely), and it looks like the process of moving an investigation forward from a failed banned substance test could be fraught with counter-accusations and even litigation.

There are, of course, many other considerations surrounding the Olympics which arise merely from the fact that they are being held in China. It's a famously polluted city, even by the standards of China's measurement of clean air being up to an Air Pollution Index of 100 - twice World Health Organisation's measurement. The API has been pushed down to 95 by the closure of 100 factories and 56 power-plants in the city, the capital of a country whose average hourly wage is $0.57 (29 pence). I don't know if the workers will be paid for their enforced holiday - perhaps one of the 600-plus British public servants who will be attending at a cost of £7m to the taxpayer will think to pose the question. One lives in hope. Sometimes.

The thorny issue of human rights is a thistle that seems not to be getting grasped with any alacrity by any the major TV stations covering the Olympics despitethe demonstrations that greeted the Olympic Torch - first carried in Adolph Hitler's 1936 Olympics in another totalitarian nation - as it was carried, surrounded by Chinese élite police, through the nation's capitals. In our own capital, the Chinese officers clashed at points with British bobbies. Take, for just one of many examples, the case of Alimujiang Yimiti, who is currently detained for the crime of being a Christian. Not that visiting journalists in Beijing are guaranteed to find it easy to get details about Yamiti or others on the internet - despite promises to the contrary, which helped Beijing secure the games, the Chinese are now cracking down on freedom to access international websites reporting human rights abuses there by reinstating the great firewall of China. (As it happens, access to Amnesty International has at present been restored to China, but using the verification tool at the bottom of this post confirms that many Falun Gong sites are still banned. I should note, however, that another site has stopped verifiying sites as the increasing complexity of censorship measures make it difficult to give a definite result.)



Possibly the most egregious abuse of human rights in China is their government's throwaway - literally - attittude to children. The one child rule doesn't just lead to enforced abortions and infanticide in maternity hospitals, but an undesirable child - often so for merely being a girl - will often end up in an orphanage so that the parents can try for a boy and still be within the one-child rule. One report states:

Child-care workers reportedly selected unwanted infants and children for death by intentional deprivation of food and water a process known among the workers as the “summary resolution” of childrens’ alleged medical problems. When an orphan chosen in this manner was visibly on the point of death from starvation or medical neglect, orphanage doctors were then asked to perform medical “consultations” which served as a ritual marking the child for subsequent termination of care, nutrition, and other life-saving intervention. Deaths from acute malnutrition were then, in many cases, falsely recorded as having resulted from other causes, often entirely spurious or irrelevant conditions such as “mental deficiency” and “cleft palate.”

I remember at school I was once a member of a chess club. One boy, known for cheating, tried to get onto the "game ladder" without much success until one day somebody felt sorry for him. The teacher supervising watched the game closely but was inevitably called away, at which point the boy "accidentally" knocked over a piece and replaced it in a more advantageous position. He won the game and got onto the match ladder, which gave him the right to demand a game with anybody three places or less above him. he never lost, and soon the chess club had fallen apart.

If China decides that objective necessity dictate a good showing on the gold medal front to show the superiority of the Chinese way, then it will have a good showing on the gold medal front, and the Olympic games will slowly fade into irrelevance because any use of banned substances discovered will be justified by "it didn't stop the Chinese athlete so and so..." Unless the International Olympic Committee stands up for itself, China will use it as a doormat. And the resulting humble pie won't taste like chicken, with or without added steroids.



Related posts:

Sport isn't worth that much - Yimiti's olympic struggle
at the close of the Olympics