On News Coverage and China

Growing up in a conservative home and area, still dedicated to Cold War rhetoric, I always thought China was more red than yellow, filled with little books by and big pictures of Mao. Going off to school and being around and befriending many Asians and Asian-Americans taught me that Chinese Communism was a much more nuanced and negotiated concept than I had thought--free marketing but still fairly restricted, as far as free speech was concerned.

But, looking at this google news search about the Bush Twins suggests a far less censorious society than I thought. Out of the four news search results (one of the results is a blog), two were from China! Fifty percent of the news produced and archived on the web, then, occurred in that country that still seems to take a pretty hard stance on freedom of speech. Apparantly, editorial standards, at least, have loosened up!