China -- love-hate?

Gone to China for a few days and finally managed to get out today. It's very frustrating because you cannot blog in China. No matter how hard you try, there was no way to go around it and make it work. You also cannot read any blog too! I wonder how some of my readers manage to do that.

They really control information in China. During my last trip, I took out a copy of WSJ and started to read while we were entering China immigration. My business friend told me to keep my paper, reading foreign materials is insulting and disrespecting their rules and regulations. But the thing that drove me nut was, I can turned on to satellite TV in the hotel watching Bloomberg or CNBC or CNN. A very strange country indeed. The moral of the story, when they close one eye, please do the same and do not challenge their inconsistencies, don't make them lose face unless you want to invite troubles.

After travelled from Southern to Northern China, you can hardly feel there is any slowing down in the economy. Cars filled up all the five-lane highway. Restaurants are full. Planes are full and etc. Do you remember the story of those toy factories shut down and 20 million people out of job in Southern China. Yeah, absolute numbers will frighten a lot of people but if you use percentage -- it's really a non-issue. In one small town in Southern city alone already has proximately 800 - 1000 toy factories. I felt a bit embarrassed in front of my friends when I started to quote what I read and shut up almost immediately when I saw the way the smiled (ai-yah you know what kind of smile is that-lah, Malaysian coming out of tempurong-lah).However, proactive steps taken by the Chinese government as a prevention was very useful. Most feel 8-9% GDP growth is not an issue for 2009. Got to go now. Just a few more words, though we Malaysians have been "kuat complain kaki", we still need to be thankful for the kind of freedom that we have.