So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Printable Version
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So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Leftcoast - 06-28-2013
I spent most of this week in Shenzhen visiting some factories in China including Foxconn Longhua which has a certain notoriety in Silicon Valley. Visiting China is a must for anyone who worries that nothing in the world will change. My natural optimism about post-Iron Curtain history was surging .... Until I tried to check up on the Cardboard.
On Tuesday I was drinking German beer in a casual restaurant in the courtyard of a modern Shenzhen shopping mall. Across from me was a full-size ad for luxury condominums and my table was surrounded by 20-something young Chinese professionals. This definitely wasn't my father's Communist China. Most my fellow barflys were dressed in casual chic, T-shirts and denim jeans without a dark suit among them. The bar scene wouldn't have been out of place in Hong Kong or .... Mountain View. I watched China's new urban office workers flirt, use their smart phones to contact friends, gossip freely like 20 somethings everywhere do while I thought about how far the world has come since I watched President Nixon drive through the Mao suit filled streets of Beijing 40 years ago.  Heck, forget 40 years ago - the street scenes even a short ten years back were more stodgy, businessy, reserved and definitely a generation older.
The evening and my Bitburger fogged mind was headed for a soft edged glow that East and West were being drawn together and that the speed of the convergence was quickening. Or it was until I tried to call up the Cardboard from my hotel room before turning in for the evening.
I couldn't get this board from my hotel - and started to wonder about that Chinese firewall. I got the same result from the local sales office and from the factories I visited. Sometimes I would get to our front page but when I clicked through to the discussion board the internet would just hang, timeout and return error messages. But why might that be? An evil Beijing/Berkeley conspiracy? Some minor Bureaucrat took Garvin's screed on the People's Collective of the upper east bay too literally? Or maybe they just don't like our shade of red? Whatever, until this is resolved I've put a permanent hold on singing Kumbaya at the Hong Kong/China border.
Has anyone had better luck at bringing up the Cardboard in China than I had this week?
(By the way Yvonne, my not terribly informed theory about the hold-up is that our Twitter links are the culprit. Usually the last status line I see before my computer hangs is a call our board makes to Twitter as it is loading the board index page.)
By, By the way Foxconn Longhua is brobdingnagian. Imagine a factory town with stores, government ran (well, now they are) dormitories and row after row of five story factory buildings. At their peak this place employed close to 500,000. Now they employ somewhere around 250,000. Now think of the pain involved in getting from the first number to the second.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Bruce Wang - 06-28-2013
It's probably because I'm posting here. All four of my daughter's great-grandfathers were cold warriors on the losing side of the Chinese Civil war of various sorts (Propagandist, Sailor, Soldier, Spy).
The Communists really need to chill about me. The only evil empires I'm interested in seeing destroyed reside in South Central LA, the southern end of the Willamette Valley, and the one near the armpit of the Midwest.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Kathy - 06-28-2013
(06-28-2013, 05:14 PM)Publius link Wrote:The only evil empires I'm interested in seeing destroyed reside in South Central LA, the southern end of the Willamette Valley, and the one near the armpit of the Midwest.
You forgot the evil weenie empire across the bay.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - washingtonismoney - 06-28-2013
(06-28-2013, 05:46 PM)Kathy link Wrote:You forgot the evil weenie empire across the bay.
They're an empire in the same sense Kim Jong Il was a god.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Bruce Wang - 06-28-2013
(06-28-2013, 05:55 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:[quote author=Kathy link=topic=8058.msg63783#msg63783 date=1372466814]
You forgot the evil weenie empire across the bay.
They're an empire in the same sense Kim Jong Il was a god.
[/quote]
They aren't evil either. Just hypocritical. And jealous. Oh and now they are broke. To be pitied. Not hated.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - yvonne - 06-28-2013
Recently, on the 59er Insider, someone started a thread asking which conference teams others respected. One person posted that he "hated Stanford and all it stands for" and respected us the most.
Um yeah. OK.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - Leftcoast - 06-29-2013
Those double agents are SO slippery!
(Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia or I'd be stumped by that one.)
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - george - 06-30-2013
(06-28-2013, 03:53 PM)Leftcoast link Wrote:Has anyone had better luck at bringing up the Cardboard in China than I had this week?[i]
A reliable VPN outside the great firewall is the only way to reliably connect to the cardboard while travelling in China. Until Yvonne and the powers that be set up a cardboard proxy server with one of China's 2 ISPs (an impossible task for a non-chinese entity) access will always be spotty at best, and most likely non-existent from inside mainland China.
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - washingtonismoney - 06-30-2013
So we need sports discussions with Chinese characteristics?
Re: So .... What did Yvonne SAY to the Chinese? - socalstanfan1 - 06-30-2013
(06-30-2013, 05:37 PM)george link Wrote:[quote author=Leftcoast link=topic=8058.msg63778#msg63778 date=1372460021]
Has anyone had better luck at bringing up the Cardboard in China than I had this week?[i]
A reliable VPN outside the great firewall is the only way to reliably connect to the cardboard while travelling in China. Until Yvonne and the powers that be set up a cardboard proxy server with one of China's 2 ISPs (an impossible task for a non-chinese entity) access will always be spotty at best, and most likely non-existent from inside mainland China.
[/quote]
This is not my experience in China. I'm living in Nanjing, and have been for the past year and a half (since Spring Festival, 2012). I've had not trouble logging on to the Cardboard. I have just recently begun using a VPN, but even before that, I haven't had any troubles at all with this particular website.
I will say that accessing the internet in China can be a very fickle process. Often there are difficulties accessing the internet, or particular sites, and one is uncertain whether it is the work of the firewall, or just really crappy connections (though if you were able to get everything else, but not the Cardboard, that is pretty strange). I was here also in the Spring of 2011, during the Arab Spring (and about the time the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Anniversary), and the service was awful. You couldn't stay on for more than about 3 or 4 minutes before losing your connection. The authorities said that it had to do with the impact of the tsunami that struck Japan (quite an eventful season), but we all assumed it had much more to do with the confluence of political issues that had freaked out the authorities. It has never been that bad since.