On Friday 29 November 2002 17:06, you wrote:

In the Chinese papers over the last few days they've been reporting an incident that happened to a Chinese UC Berkeley college student, who was using her cell phone to discuss playing some sort of videogame. The videogame involves placing "explosives" in various places in the game.

Apparently, whithin minutes after completing the call, police (or other) officers showed up at her room and brought her in for questioning. She apparently brought the officers over to the friend's house to show them the videogame, "proving" that she was indeed talking about a videogame.

Has anyone heard of this in the "regular" (ie, non-Chinese) press? The Chinese folks are of course up in arms about the apparent "profiling" this would imply, apparently ignoring the deeper implications. (For instance, did they actually get a wire tap for this monitoring? If so, why? If not, well...)

News in a country where newspapers full of the following headlines are published are not to be taken by face value: - The eiffel tower was buit by a chinese - Edison stole the electric light from a chinese blah, blah, blah... A friend of mine (who is married to a singapurean and speaks fluent mandarin and cantonese) when in her first trip to china, found these newspapers with this prepostorous claims. She bought several of them to shown to her husband... In the chinese customs she had them confiscated... Cultural propaganda against western values and achievements. Andri Esteves