[RedCloudWulf]

OK ive been quiet long enough about Chinese repression of freedom of speech.
http://entertainment.timesonli.....992685.ece

Chinese dragon?More like Freedom of Speech Dragon is raising its head to challenge self appointed Chinese leadership.

[Bugs]

Hey, if they don't care, why do we?

In a lot of ways, they have more freedom that we do.

[SFrank85]

[RedCloudWulf]

[Bugs]

I heard the Dean of an Ivy league Architecture School interviewed on NPR, or CBC or something ... very interesting. All the big architecture has been in places like Dubai in the last decade, and it doesn't look like that trend will change. As a result, this Dean ... a very clever Chinese gent whose English wasn't so great, but whose professed expertise was in fitting buildings into their cultural and physical environments.

He had a lot of interesting things to say about how cultures fit in differently in different cultures, from his own experience. He pointed out that, so far as the internet was concerned, the Chinese were oppressive. You can't talk about Tiannamen Square on the Internet, for example. They are still a totalitarian state, and they can act fast. But, on the other hand, for the ordinary Chinese, China has a lot of freedom. They can smoke where they want, and organize dog fights to gamble on, for example. They can say what they want in their hangouts. They can chase girls and blow their money, it's OK in China.

In Ontario, you can be arrested for driving someone under 18 in a car while smoking a cigarette! While the cop has stopped you, she might look at your kid's car seat to see if it's properly mounted. None of them are. That's a violation.

Your local farmer can hardly grow what he wants, and sell it to you without dealing with a cartel, and a bunch of pesticide requirements, etc. Look in any direction, reels of red tape spin out ... regulations upon regulation ... so many of them that it's hard to remember that there ever was a time when people could walk a farmer's fields without the farmer worrying about his liabilities ...

For architects, China, and Asia in general, is far far far more free of all these regulations than Europe and North America.