China (was Mike Hawash)

[Tyler Durden]

Sunder wrote...

"Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an 
almosttotalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not 
possible."

Your information is almost staggeringly out of date. Even in the late 1980s 
when I lived in China it was easy to move about freely (well, easy isn't 
quite the right word when you couldn't book any rail tickets remotely or in 
advance!).

Now of course, things are even more "free". As for "totalitarian communist 
state", there's not much communist left about it, except for the name of the 
ruling party. Right now, most of mainland China is about as capitalist as 
you can get, with the Army one of the biggest capitalist enterprises around 
(in the early 90s the central government informed the army they were going 
to have to find a way to raise money to pay a lot of their own bills!).

As for the totalitarianism part,as long as you don't complain too loudly 
about the government, you're fine for the most part (particularly if you 
have lots of $$$). (Although every now and then Jong Nan Hai will decide to 
crack down on something and you may come under fire.)

If you want to call it "totalitarian", fine. But like all western terms 
applied to China, its relevance only has a very limited meaning.

-TD





>From: Sunder <sunder at sunder.net>
>To: Neil Johnson <njohnsn at njohnsn.com>
>CC: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Mike Hawash
>Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:58:01 -0400 (edt)
>
>Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an almost
>totalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not possible.  In
>all likelyhood the hotel he stayed at is one where all westerners
>stay.  It's also possible that airline schedules being what they are
>provided reasons for the same day arrival departure coincidences.
>
>As for the hotel not having a record of him, it could be they misplaced
>it, or more likely misspelled his name, etc, or he didn't want to be
>tracked so he used Mike Smith...
>
>Many things are possible, not all have to be true.
>
>----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
>  + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\
>   \|/  :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\
><--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you   \/|\/
>   /|\  :their failures, we  |don't email them, or put them on a web  \|/
>  + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often.
>--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
>
>On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:
>
> > Hawash flew to China and returned to the US on exactly the same dates as 
>the
> > other guys.
> >
> > Hawash appears to have stayed in the same building as the other guys.
> > His and the other guy's lodging was in the same building, but different
> > hotels, and the hotel that Hawash had reservations to stay at doesn't 
>have a
> > record of him being there.


_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail