Monday 21 July 2008

Brendan in Beijing

beijingdiary_listingmasthead While we were hunkering down with a martini in Grahamstown, Thames, Brendan O'Neill from
Sp!ked Online "has been reporting from just about the most exciting city on the planet right now: Beijing. Read the truth about the city as the Chinese prepare for two weeks of unadulterated showing off to the world" - including news about the biggest building on Earth, why Beijing is the new New York, the "People's Republic of PR," and "the battle between Blue Sky Days and Grey Sky Days, and why it's time we tackled the many myths of the Tiananmen Square massacre."

Sounds like a series worth reading.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't remember of the popular bars in Beijing, but I am pretty much sure that I pub-crawled most of those bars when I was there about 2 year ago. It was fun.

Anonymous said...

I couldn't remember of the popular bars

meant to say:

I couldn't remember of the names of the popular bars

Anonymous said...

Brendan O'Neill blames free market reforms in China for the Beijing massacre in 1989, saying that the trauma caused by deregulation led people to protest against the pace of change, rather than against communism itself.

Sounds like he's trying to blame capitalism for the massacre, by implying that shooting protestors would be the actions of a pro-market government.

He also claims that the protests weren't peaceful, because some policemen got lynched after the massacre. That's hardly fair.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Luke H said...

That's not quite how I read the article, Richard. He was talking about the variety of myths that Westerners talked about, and suggested that the truth was more complicated and didn't fit into preconceived molds.