An original account by Steve Cotner, reconstructed from eyewitness testimony.

“The policeman asks questions for a long time about her intentions, about the nature of her organization, until the British woman asks, smiling, ‘Can you loosen the chair?’

Watching the young man as he translates, the policeman says hao and goes through the door in the wall.”

What it’s like to be arrested by the Chinese government:

“The Chinese government was ruthlessly effective in quashing dissent during the Summer Olympics, but few noticed until a group of scruffy American activists were arrested, jailed, and deported for flying the Tibetan flag outside the Bird’s Nest stadium. In an exclusive interview, John Watterberg and Jeremy Wells describe their ordeal at the hands of a repressive regime. …
‘I realized that they, the interrogators, could not comprehend a student branch of an organization; that a group could act independently. We had to explain the concept of peaceful protest. They thought we were all part of a huge conspiracy to destroy the Chinese government.’”

“At ten in the morning I received a phone call from a sponsor of the Olympics who invited me to go see the Olympic opening ceremony. I hastened to ask my leader for permission, and after approval I began preparing.”

American pro-Tibet activists have been deported:

“BEIJING (AFP) - China has deported eight Americans who were detained in Beijing last week after a wave of pro-Tibet protests coinciding with the Olympics, the US embassy here said Monday.

Two other detained foreigners, a Briton and a Tibetan-German, were also reported to have been put on planes out of China, although there was no immediate official confirmation that this had happened.

‘Chinese authorities informed us last night that the eight individuals, detained August 20 and 21 respectively, were deported by Chinese authorities,’ a US embassy spokeswoman told AFP…”

“Of course, he needs to pay taxes, and in lieu of the taxes American citizens pay, he’ll need to pay lots of taxes with Chinese characteristics.”

Rebecca MacKinnon explains that most foreigners — including journalists — don’t understand the extent of Chinese censorship:

“Beijing’s Internet censorship hit global headlines recently, when foreign journalists in town to cover the Olympics discovered their access to well-known overseas Web sites was blocked. Yet while the government has now unblocked some of those sites, those journalists shouldn’t think the broader problem is solved. Censorship of ordinary Chinese people’s electronic communications within China has changed little. Visiting reporters just aren’t noticing because these forms of censorship relate to Chinese-language content they’re not familiar with, hosted on Web sites and services located on computer servers inside China, which foreigners generally don’t use…”

HKU’s Rebecca MacKinnon writes a very informative post on the forms of censorship most foreigners miss:

“Repeat after me: ‘The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship.’

My Op-ed in today’s Asian Wall Street Journal, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don’t See, is an effort to get people to get beyond what Internet scholar Lokman Tsui describes as a Western fixation on ‘Iron Curtain 2.0’ which blinds most Western observers to the realities of the Chinese Internet - and to China more generally, for that matter.

Back in June I wrote a post explaining how we need to get beyond the “wall” metaphor in order to understand Chinese Internet censorship properly. People at this year’s Chinese Internet Research Conference suggested “Net Nanny” or even “Hydroelectric Management” are better metaphors for how speech is controlled on the Chinese Internet. But they’re just not as sexy-sounding somehow, and lack the same nifty Soviet-era-with-Chinese-flavor overtones.”

Will at Imagethief reads about a new Guangzhou traffic law for foreigners, and makes some interesting points:

“‘Like local residents, any foreigner who crosses against a red light or jumps over a road divider will be fined between 20 yuan ($2.90) and 50 yuan.

Those not able to afford the fine or are reluctant to pay the fine will be forced to watch a video on traffic safety,’ Lu Zhengguang, a bureau official, said yesterday. …

…a few thoughts:
1. Foreigners may be choosing to watch the video because they think it will be a riot.
2. Foreigners’ employers by-and-large won’t care if they are jaywalking. …”

Orville Schell goes into more depth on the subject of China’s humiliations:

“In the early twentieth century, a new literature, with a new historical narrative to match, arose around the idea of bainian guochi, ‘100 years of national humiliation.“‘By taking up its own victimization as a theme and making it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity, China ensured that certain traits would express themselves again and again as it responded under stress to the outside world. Highlighting their country’s history as a victim of foreign aggression led Chinese leaders to rely on what Gries calls ‘the moral authority of their past suffering.’ Indeed, China’s suffering at the hands of foreigners became a badge of distinction, especially during the period in the 1960s in which non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most ‘oppressed’ by imperialism, and thus the most incipiently revolutionary.”

Jeremiah at Granite Studio brings readers up to date with some of the stranger developments in Beijing:

“Apart from everything else, the way this advice (and the previous set of instructions on what not to ask foreigners) is conceived betrays a fatuously anachronistic view of the world as being divided by nei/wai, Chinese/foreign, as if ‘foreign’ was an actual category of humanity. Other commentators have noted that the ‘foreign manners’ presented by the book as the definitive guide for Beijingers’ interactions with the other five billion people on the planet seem to be based primarily on somebody’s interpretation of northern European or even specifically Anglo-American sensibilities. God only knows where it comes from.”