Grrrr!! (1)

One of the familiar hassles of the Chinese holidays (such as the week-long one we've just endured in celebration of National Day) is that huge numbers of urban youngsters have nothing else to do with their time than go online...... and the Internet - always painfully slow and unreliable here - stutters almost to a complete halt at times.

So, if any of you have been waiting to receive an e-mail from me, that is at least part of the reason for my unaccustomed silence. My connection has been crawling so badly of late that I just couldn't be bothered to go online very much this past week.

Of course, one can't help but suspect that some of the dysfunction is planned mischief from the government's Net censors, those meddlesome Kafka Boys. Blogger has been strangely unaffected, but high-traffic overseas sites - Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Yahoo Mail, etc. - tend to be hardest hit. But then again, perhaps it's just an inevitable consequence of their high traffic. It may be a welcome side-effect as far as the Kafka Boys are concerned, perhaps not a deliberate policy. (Some students I was teaching earlier this year at the Communications University observed that the government didn't really have to worry about blocking YouTube in China because it was just too darned SLOW to use most of the time! I'm not sure I believed them, though. I rather think the vast majority of Chinese can't be bothered with sites like YouTube anyway if their interfaces are in English; they prefer the domestic YouTube clones because they can use their own language. Even Chinese people with extremely good English tend to be hugely unmotivated about actually using it.)

Ah well, here's hoping things are going to be better again from today on......