Randy Cassingham vs. Big Brother

If you’re soon to be traveling to adopt a young Chinese person – or if you’re just the type to be interested in other people’s trips – you could do worse than to cast your eyes over Randy Cassingham’s travel blog.

If you haven’t heard of Cassingham, he’s one of the godfathers of internet publishing. He’s been running a for-profit e-mail newsletter, This is True, since the mid-90s. It collects news stories from the world press – focusing on the bizarre, idiotic and just plain unbelievable – and presents them in a snappy little digest with just a little bit of wry editorializing. There’s a free version that’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. Anyway, he and a bunch of subscribers recently got a package deal on a trip to China, and he chronicles it on his blog with his characteristic keen eye for the absurd and the remarkable.

Adoptive parents (since we spend times with large crowds of children in institutional settings) might be most interested in his observations on China’s public health concerns, particularly what they’re doing about avian flu. But I was also curious about what he was saying about Tibet, especially since his group was there at the same time as those recent tensions I’ve been referring to over the past couple of weeks. And his group was followed around by secret policemen.

He had some trouble with China’s internet blackout of sites that deal with Tibetan news (like, quite possibly, this very blog here). But there’s been quite a bit of chatter on electronic channels about what life is like behind the Great Firewall – the censored version of the internet available inside China. That link goes to a Wired article describing how some high-profile bloggers – and Western reporters – run into problems with the police. And how some of those same bloggers (and, quite probably, the cleverer Western reporters) get around online police surveillance. There’s a network of tunnels beneath the Great Firewall of China, for those that know how to find them.

_{Photo credit: The Great Wall, photographed by Herbert Ponting in 1907, public domain image from Wikimedia Commons}

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