I found Dave's comments about the new Hong Kong Disneyland and its relationship with globalisation to be very interesting, as this is a topic that I myself have been looking at for quite some time now - only I have concentrated on the mainland's various Disney-type theme parks, particularly those to be found here in Shenzhen, where I live and work.

Those who are interesting in the topic of "hypereality" might also be interested in reading my own thoughts about China's new plethora of theme parks. Below is a piece I wrote about Shenzhen's Diwang Building, which is billed as the "first high-rise theme sightseeing and entertainment scenic spot in Asia." Your critical comments will be much appreciated!

KITSCH CITY III

In recognition of her hard work and loyalty, Gao Ying’s employer provided her with two free tickets to visit the Meridian View Centre, located on the 69th floor of the green-coloured Diwang Commercial Building, which towers up to 384 metres off Shenzhen’s main thoroughfare of Shennan Lu; the city’s most easily recognisable building, its main architectural symbol.

Our tickets were torn, and as we passed through the turnstile we were each handed a promotional brochure, bilingual, and which I wasted no time in reading. “Standing at the Meridian View Centre,” it said, “which is the first high-rise theme sightseeing and entertainment scenic spot in Asia, you can easily see just about any sight within Shenzhen city and parts of Hong Kong.”

“With the unique location and amazing view,” it continued, “it is the best place to witness the epoch-making policy one country-two systems and the great change of Shenzhen city from a small fishing village of late twenty years.”

I was quite keen to view the city from these heights, but before Gao Ying and I were able to make it to a window we were briskly ushered into a small cinema, where we were shown to a seat, and asked to wait patiently. Decked out like a ship’s cabin, the cinema resembled the sort a set one might expect to find at a Warner Bros. Movie World theme park. Within minutes the cinema was full, the lights turned down, and the show begun: the Pirate’s Legend, it was called.

Based on an old legend about a pirate named Zhang Baozai, who thrived in this area during the 19th century, this multi-media show was an attempt at simulacra, with its combination of video footage and holographic images all shown in synchronicity with the sounds of wind and rain and lashing waves that, when combined with the hidden high-powered fans that blew hurling gusts of wind onto the audience, were meant to simulate conditions out at sea. At one stage during the show, images of cute fury rats were shown scrambling about the ship’s lower decks, whilst my calf muscles were tickled by a moving “rat’s tail” hidden somewhere beneath my seat.

According to the Window of Shenzhen website, Zheng Baozai was not only a Robin Hood type character who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but he also “successfully drove away the foreign invaders” from the Pearl River delta area, making him an ideal patriot; a folk hero to celebrate.

Of course, the reality of Zheng Baozai’s life wasn’t half as glamorous as it was made out to be by this kitschy presentation, with all of its treasure chests and shining swords and Disney-type imagery. For starters, Zheng didn’t succeed in “driving away” any foreign invaders at all – though the pirate Confederacy did inflict significant damage on the Qing navy. Piracy in fact was so out of control at the time, that the Chinese authorities actually sought the help of foreign fleets to help tackle the problem. Six Portuguese ships were hired for six months to work on pirate control, and it was with the help of a Portuguese official from Macau, Miguel de Arriaga, that Zheng was able to negotiate his surrender in 1810 to the Qing navy. Not only this, but pirate ships, including those of Zheng Baozai’s Red Fleet, seldom even attacked European ships except when known that they were very weak or poorly manned. He wasn’t quite the brave, fearless swashbuckling repeller of foreign invaders that he has so often been made out to be.

Zheng Baozai was certainly no Robin Hood either. Mr Glasspoole, an officer with the East India Company ship, Marquis of Ely, was actually captured with seven other men by Zheng’s fleet in 1809, and was held captive for eleven weeks until eventually being exchanged for a ransom of over $7,500, as well as for two chests of opium, two casks of gunpowder, and a telescope. After his release, Glasspoole wrote a report describing the activities of Zheng and his pirates, noting that they spent most of their energies plundering small coastal villages, and that in doing so, they behaved very barbarously. They regularly collected protection money, and villagers were often kidnapped and then ransomed for either food or for money. Many entire villages were burnt to the ground, and female captives were often forced into sexual slavery, usually sold for around $40 each, and those prisoners who attempted to escape were normally tortured or killed. A favourite method of torture, said Glasspoole, was to nail the feet to the deck for several hours.

Being a pirate in Zheng’s fleet was hardly glamorous. As Glasspoole noted, the ships were infested with rats, which were sometimes added to the human diet – a diet which normally consisted of little more than coarse red rice and fish. According to Glasspoole, at one time during his captivity they lived on only rice and caterpillars for three weeks. “Feast or famine,” he said, “was the normal lot on pirate ships.”

The Meridian View Centre’s entertainment certainly did distort the city’s past and present, in the way that it presented a nationalist cause centred on economic development and the country’s One-China Policy, and by its glorification of past anti-imperialist struggles, pitted against successive waves of foreign invaders by hero-pirates. It masked reality, with its claim that “the cultures, the style and features of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong have merged here beautifully,” and that both Shenzhen and Hong Kong share histories as “one continuous line, nurtured by the long Shenzhen River” whose “people have grown up on both sides” – whose common cause and whose shared destinies had been interrupted only briefly, by the colonial exploits of a foreign power. The fact that the Qing navy’s ability to resist foreign fleets had been seriously weakened by their own struggles with homegrown pirates, whose numbers are thought to have exceeded forty thousand, had simply been left out of the picture, omitted from the entertainment. The ambivalence that most of today’s Hong Kong residents feel towards Beijing’s political leadership was likewise, ignored.

What I also found interesting about the Pirate’s Legend show was the way that it distorted China’s sexual history, by presenting the past as though everybody had, in the 19th century, cherished the same sexual practices and morals that are now espoused by China’s mainstream today. The show made a big deal of the fact that Zheng Baozai married, that he was therefore not too far removed from society’s conventions. The fact that the woman he married was his boss, that it was a female pirate who led the entire Confederation, was simply left out of the presentation. The idea that a woman could be a leader, could wield so much power, just doesn’t sit very comfortably with the patriarchal attitudes of today’s business and financial leaders.

The inherent bisexuality of all human beings, if we accept Freud’s view, was also, perhaps not surprisingly, denied by the View Centre’s pirate legend. In ancient China, homosexuality was never regarded as a sin, and bisexuality was considered almost a norm. One thing which is rarely ever discussed by the Chinese today, is the fact that even the founder of the Chinese nation, China’s first Emperor, Qin Shihuang-di, had young male lovers. The scholar Pan Guangdan has even reached the conclusion that almost every emperor during the Han Dynasty had at least one male lover - a practice which was also common throughout the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties.

Early Western observers in China, such as the Jesuit Matthew Ricci for example, noted the acceptance of homosexuality in China, but could do little to change it. One British official, writing in 1806, reported that among the Chinese “the commission of this detestable and unnatural act is attended with so little sense of shame, or feelings of delicacy that many of the first officers of the state seemed to make no hesitation in publicly avowing it. Each of these officers is constantly attended by his pipe-bearer, who is generally a handsome boy, from fourteen to eighteen years of age, and is always well dressed.”

J.L. Turner, a British captive of Zheng Baozai’s Red Fleet in 1807, said that each pirate vessel carried eight to ten kidnapped women who were “intended to please all the society indiscriminately and to do the work of their sex,” yet it seemed to him that the “greater part of the crew were satisfied without them” because they instead were in the habit of committing “almost publicly crimes against nature.” Glasspoole, during his captivity, also noted that the most prized captives of the pirates were young boys.

The fact that Zheng Baozai himself was kidnapped by pirates at the age of fourteen was also omitted from the entertainment. Cheng I, the infamous leader of the pirate Confederacy, owed much of his success to the organisational and diplomatic skills of his wife, Cheng I Sao. It was they who kidnapped Zheng Baozai, whom they adopted as their son. Cheng I and Zheng Baozai soon became lovers, though Cheng I’s wife didn’t seem to resent this relationship. Indeed, Cheng I also maintained numerous other male lovers, including the commander of the Black Fleet, Kuo Po-o-Tai. When Cheng I died during a battle in Vietnam in 1807, aged 42, his wife, Cheng I Sao took over the command of the Confederacy, and appointed Zheng Baozai (her husband’s favourite) as her chief lieutenant – putting him in charge of the Red Fleet. Zheng himself was said to be a flamboyant young rogue, who often dressed in a purple silk robe and a black turban.

Zheng Baozai and Cheng I Sao did eventually marry one another, sometime after their surrender in 1810. The Governor-General of Canton had offered them both an amnesty in exchange for giving up their piracy, allowing Cheng I Sao to set up a very profitable gambling house and brothel in Canton, while Zheng Baozai went on to become a colonel in the Qing army.

Zheng is remembered and celebrated more than his superior though, simply because his leader was a woman, and women aren’t supposed to be leaders, let alone pirates - though his relationship with the “Queen of Pirates” has certainly been retained, packaged as a romantic Hollywood-type love story that had blossomed amidst all of the swashbuckling drama of the high seas. Disney films are now even making a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean, starring the popular Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat as Zheng Baozai. It will be interesting to see whether or not Cheng I Sao will also be featured as a character in the film, and if so, how. One thing that we can all be sure of though is this: Zheng’s bisexuality will be completely omitted from the script.

As Jean Baudrillard has argued, the postmodern world is a world whose signs have made a fundamental break from referring to "reality." In The Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard wrote that simulation “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance,” but rather “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” It is, he asserted, “no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody” but instead the substituting of “the signs of the real for the real." Primary examples he said, include psychosomatic illness, Disneyland, and Watergate. Fredric Jameson provided a similar definition: the simulacrum's "peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealisation of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality."
Even human sexuality it would seem, our own nature as human beings, has been derealised – substituted instead by a discourse that “naturalises” monogamous heterosexual relationships bound legally by marriage as the only “normal” practice of sexual behaviour and instinct – a discourse which is purely ideological and historical, but which is instead presented as being fundamentally inherent to our collective natures, and therefore unbroken by time. The simulacrum functions not only to entertain, but also to create and to maintain societal amnesia.

The imagery used to describe the various scenes one can enjoy from the View Centre’s windows provide yet another example of how the real is replaced by the beyond real, for they were clearly designed to give the impression that all of Shenzhen’s economic development had somehow been preordained by nature, that both Shenzhen and Hong Kong had been “nurtured” by the one mother. I wandered over to the viewing area, to one of the windows facing north, where I noticed a placard telling me that all of the “modern high-storey residences” that I could see had “grown up with plenty of vigour like the Wutong Mountain.”

So here in Shenzhen, towers of concrete and glass rise up out of the landscape as naturally as mountains do, “revealing the new look of the Shenzhen Economic Special Zone” for locals and visitors alike.

I turned again to my brochure, which, rather interestingly I thought, advised me that it was here that I could enjoy “a panoramic view of the real metropolitan scenes of Shenzhen and Hong Kong.” The word “real” is what aroused my curiosity, is what provoked me into ploughing deeper into analysis, for it seemed to me to be an admission that everything else here was merely fake. On offer were “life-like simulated flights in the air, a splendid high altitude web site, a robot guide, some colourful shopping space, a quiet and romantic café and so on.”

The café itself, facing south, not only offered its patrons a view, but also the “charm of old Hong Kong”, decorated as it was with a few street lamps and sign posts, faked in a 60s style, all there to give the café a look reminiscent of the type of scenes depicted in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

In his Travels in Hyperreality, the Italian writer and literary critic Umberto Eco, described a tour he once made of America, where he travelled to in order to gain a firsthand look at the imitations and replicas that were on display in that nation's many wax museums and theme parks. He found in them a metaphor for what he regarded as the “inauthenticity of American society.” The same, I believe, can be said about Shenzhen, as well as for many other parts of China, and indeed, the world.

The Meridian View Centre, like Shenzhen’s various theme parks as well as Hong Kong’s new Disneyland, offers little more than a simulated “paradise”, a distraction from the bleakness or blandness of everyday life, and of course, all for a price. Gao Ying and I may have had our tickets given to us for free, but printed on those tickets was an entry fee of 60 RMB.

Behind the façade, as always, there lurked a sales pitch. We had merely been sold something billed as being better than real – something which, in actuality, was little more than a fake reality, a conceptual and mythologised model of reality, but with no connection to reality, and with no origin in reality - marketable precisely because it was able to claim itself as being something more exciting and pleasant than reality. The panoramic view overlooking the “real” Shenzhen that one is able to enjoy from this building’s great height is simply not inspiring enough in itself, it would seem. The reality of Shenzhen’s cityscape is that it looks no different from all other Chinese cities of similar size. It is nothing special, nothing most people would be willing to pay 60 RMB to catch a glimpse of. The view from the Meridian View Centre is only marketable if the city’s history of economic development itself is mythologised, and if it is packaged together with other “attractions” – a “high-rise theme sightseeing and entertainment scenic spot,” as my brochure proclaimed.

Before leaving this hyperreality, Gao Ying and I paused to examine the wax replicas of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom were seated in discussion on red armchairs, in simulation of their historic 1982 meeting in Beijing to discuss the eventual handover of Hong Kong.

“Look at his watch,” observed Gao Ying. “It’s still ticking!”

Indeed it was ticking, and it even kept an accurate time. But of course, it was never Deng’s watch in the first place, not in actuality.

“What do you mean, it’s still ticking?” I smiled. “It was never actually worn by Deng, I’m sure.”

Gao Ying, suddenly realising her naivety, smiled with embarrassment. She had been momentarily fooled, seduced into this world of hyperreality, unable to recognise the difference between the real, and the beyond real. For her, this watch looked like the real watch that Deng had actually worn during his 1982 meeting with Thatcher, and so for her, it therefore was real, and its link to the real Deng Xiaoping it seemed, had remained unbroken by the years that had passed, with its hands still ticking, still keeping an accurate time. The authenticity claimed by this watch was not historical, but visual.

For me though, all of these “attractions,” including the wax models, were just far too kitsch to be convincing, to be capable of being construed in any way as reality.

Kitsch is more than just bad taste. It is bad taste precisely because it is false, because it is cheaply faked. It is, essentially, a commodity aesthetic, which is why kitsch is the new face of China - and nowhere perhaps is it more evident on the mainland than here in Shenzhen, where plastic coconut palm trees grow ubiquitously from street corners, and where many shops and schools and even some homes are designed to look like Disney castles, its massage parlours like Roman temples.

All of this hyperreality of course, imploded the moment we stepped back out onto the busy streets below, where we were confronted by the true reality of Shenzhen’s economic development, by all the inequalities it had produced, by the sight of the city’s nouve riche strolling along with shopping bags in hand, their clothes labelled with “brands” that signified their new power as consumers, elevating them to ever greater heights in social status. Wandering about from store to store, from “attraction” to “attraction”, these middle class slaves to fashion, with gods now reified as either money or things, inadvertently rubbed shoulders with the city’s beggars, with the city’s underclass – with people living out of rubbish bins, with people whose reality denied them access to such entertainment for distraction or denial, whose pockets were too empty to consume art for consolation, and whose life’s struggles they played out against the surreal backdrop that is Shenzhen kitsch.

Mark Anthony Jones
Shenzhen, 2005

Mr. Jones,

This, although very long, was well worth me reading. Your analysis is both insightful and thought-provoking, and I think that your structuralist argument works better here than in your other article on blogs sites, mainly because you have grounded your argument historically, and therefore empirically, this time.

I especially enjoyed learning about Chinese pirates, and the homosexual history of China.

As an American myself, I appreciate just how embarrassing the Disneyfication of the world really is. The entire world, as you say, is painting itself in kitsch.

"Stan" writes:

Mr. Jones,
Your analysis is both insightful and thought-provoking, and I think that your structuralist argument works better here than in your other article on blogs sites, mainly because you have grounded your argument historically, and therefore empirically, this time.

Then, in the Sept. 7 linklet comments, "Helen" writes:

Mr Jones,
A truly thorough and fascinating structuralist critique of China blogs. I'll never be able to read sites like TPD and this one again, without baring your analysis in mind.

Simon, how does it feel to be used like this? Are you proud of yourself, providing a platform for squatters who use your space to harass and stalk others? I really hope this happens to you one day. No, I can't actually say that because I like you and respect your intelligence. But I do hope that one day you know, at least for a moment, the kind of grief and harm someone like this can cause. And it cheapens your site and calls into question your integrity. Hiding behind your "Comments Policy" won't fly, because the issue transcends such artificial creations and boils down to what is right and what is wrong. And I know you know this.

By the way, Jones posted the exact same tedious comment on Flying Chair, always fishing for attention for himself at the expense of others.

Richard - what the hell is your problem? There is nothing wrong with this comment, and if you are accusing me of being Stan and/or Helen, then where the hell is your proof? Put up, or shut up! It is ironic that you are always accusing me of being a "stalker" (which is hyperbolic nonsense) when it is you and your Thought Police (like Martyn) who continually stalk me!

Mark Anthony Jones

And Richard - if I post my comments on other peoples' blogs so what? Please tell me what is fundamentally wrong with that? Nothing! Another blogger (a regular reader of Simon World) has even emailed me wanting my permission to "publish" both my previous and my latest China Daily articles on his own blog. So is thnere anything wrong with that - that my writings my appear on multiple blogs? Grow up will you!

Well, in keeping with Simon's open comments policy where anything goes no matter how destructive or deranged, let me put up my own post so people here can see exactly what's going on. Then decide who's believable. I would usually never do this, but Simon feels whoever wants to use his comments for whatver ends is free to do so. Thus, I need to defend myself from everyone's favorite stalker.

This is from my own blog, posted July 11, 2005:
THE FANTABULIST

I will let readers draw their own conclusions about this rather intriguing bit of research started by commenter KLS about fellow commenter MAJ in the last open thread:

MAJ why are you just copying and pasting other people's work?

for example, your really long comment above, starting "Dear Simon and Conrad, The value of the dollar vs the euro is directly related to..."

this is word-for-word copied from elsewhere.

I took a random line and googled it. the line was:
"the US effectively controls the world oil-market as the"

via google I discovered two websites where a long essay has been posted about euros and dollars and oil.
you copied and pasted over 700 words direct from that!

-see www.thirdworldtraveler.com/ Iraq/Iraq_dollar_vs_euro.html

the only thing you changed was to insert intros such as "Simon, Conrad - also remember that..." at the beginning of one or two of the paragraphs.

or take your next long comment, starting:
"Dear Conrad,
The other argument put forward by political analysists"

you directly copied and pasted 500 words that appear on this website:
see http://tinyurl.com/6ywnq

wouldn't it have been good manners to acknowledge that these words are not your own? and, rather than filling up a thread, to have provided links to these websites instead?

Posted by KLS at July 11, 2005 11:54 AM .

Oh dear, this is an intriguing development indeed. I was so impressed, I started doing my own investigation.

Here's what our feckless Marxist said yesterday (scroll to comment placed at 2:19):

More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all the world exports are denominated in dollars and US currency accounts for about two-thirds of all official exchange reserves. The fact that billions of dollars worth of oil is priced in dollars ensures the world domination of the dollar. It allows the US to act as the world's central bank, printing currency acceptable everywhere. The dollar has become an oil-backed, not gold-backed, currency.

Well said. Even brilliant. Only, here's what Z Magazine had to say on the subject back in February 2004:

More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all the world exports are denominated in dollars and U.S. currency accounts for about two-thirds of all official exchange reserves. The fact that billions of dollars worth of oil is priced in dollars ensures the world domination of the dollar. It allows the U.S. to act as the world’s central bank, printing currency acceptable everywhere. The dollar has become an oil-backed, not gold-backed, currency.

Well, well. What are the odds of that being a pure coincidence? And what would the good Dr. Anne Meyers have to say about someone so insecure and eager for attention and approval that he would resort to such nasty tricks, a la Jayson Blair?

A few days earlier, our friend was caught doing the same thing and, as usual, had a sorta-kinda excuse akin to a dog eating one's homework; that excuse, where he said he had made reference to his source and was rapidly cutting and pasting and blah blah blah - that excuse won't fly this time because there's no attribution. Zero. It is literally an act of deception, in which MAJ consciously and consistently led us all to believe he himself was the author. And that is a very serious offense.

Again, I like MAJ. But when you blog, what you write is there for everyone to see, and if you get caught BS'ing, your crediblity is gone for good. This is a matter of lying. Deception. Fraud. And he's a repeat offender. And not even the good "Dr." Anne Myers can get him out of this mess. Sorry if this causes you a tad of embarrassment, Mark, but you left yourself wide open. I invite readers to comb the archives and find other instances of MAJ's creative cut & paste capabilities. There's a lot more where these few examples came from.

Oh, and I can already visualize Mark's reaction: [Click here, and scroll down to the photo.]

And whatever you do, don't miss the comments to that post, where Jones admits to impersonating an elderly female doctor and requesting photos pf the penises of male readers of Peking Duck. And he says Martyn and I should be ashamed.

OK, time out.

Richard - I know the issues you have with MAJ. However it is wrong to characterise my comments as a place "where anything goes no matter how destructive or deranged". As I've stated previously, MAJ has done nothing on these pages to breach the rules of decency or respect that I expect people to abide by. You are within your rights to reply as you have, pointing out MAJ's past. But keep this civil.

MAJ - this applies to you as well.

Richard - all I can say is that I really do hope that readers take the time to carefully read through the Fantabulist thread, so that they can see for themselves (a) how entertaining that entire episode was, (b) how malicious you are being in claiming that I was after photos of other peoples' penises because as I said in my comment above, that is a serious distortion of the truth.

At any rate, nothing in the Fantabulist thread invalidates any of the arguments I have presented above, does it?

Your behaviour on this site says more about you than it does about me Richard.

Have a nice day!

Mark Anthony Jones

From Ting bu Dong on China Daily:

We need to keep the perspective. It is important to remember this starts with this on Peking Duck Blog, if you read all comments thenyou will know all the story of Mr Jones:
http://pekingduck.org/archives/002656.php

Let's go on a walk to take a look in these comments. Here is what Mr Jones wrote on Peking Duck:

"This is just one last confirmation for you that my creator (the writer formally known as Mark Anthony Jones, Dr Myers, Bryce, Steve.L, etc, and who is now temporarily writing as me, Mark Anthony James, has decided to put to rest all of the above mentioned cyber characters, including me, Mark Anthony James. None of the above mentioned cyber characters will be contributing to Peking Duck from this moment on. Their email addresses have all been closed, and my email address, this one that I am using now, will also be closed a little later in the day - as I too am about to be put to death.

My creator wishes to assure you that he/she bares little and in most cases no resemblance to any of the above cyber characters, though he/she does take full responsibility for his/her creations, and apologises to you and to all of your readers for any loss of face, humiliation or offense caused by their appearances on your site.

My creator's use of your Peking Duck site for his/her experiments into the way people interact with one another on blog sites has now formally reached its conclusion, and so he/she wishes to assure you that he/she has no intentions of ever introducing other cyber characters onto your site at any time in the foreseeable future.

My creator often makes up stories to test his creativty, so I apologize for the fabrications and what some may see as "lies" I wrote on Peking Duck. Rest assured these "lies" were written with the best of intentions and helped me to carry put important research on the blogging behaviour of my fellow netizens. And really, why shouldnt I lie? Isn't the Intenet full of lies? I like to role play. It is fun to do at the university where I often get paid only to sit around. Lying is easy and it fills the time.

My creator has indeed, through his/her careful observations, been able to detect various patterns and regularities in behaviour, thus enabling him/her to formulate some tentative hypotheses, which he/she will need to further explore at a later date, but this, my creator would like to assure you, will be carried out using new cyber characters, and on a different blog site. My lies and false identities were the tools that made this possible.

Finally, my creator would like to assure you his experiements are over and we plan to gop into hibernation for severalmonths. You will not be seeing us anymore, and that is one promise I can assure you I will stand behind.

Respectfully yours,
Mark Anthony James
(writing on behalf of the writer formally known as Mark Anthony Jones, Dr. Myers, Bryce, Steven L., etc.)"

Everyone now know your mental illnesses and you say you are not real, but invention of a "creator." And this is the man complains about other people, if you really are a man, you said you were a woman in earlier posts. No one knows. Remember you also ask men rteaders to sen you pictures of their private parts when you pretend to be an old woman doctor. And people here listen to you as serious thinker. Ha ha ha.

I meant to blockquote the comment from China Daily. I didn't write it. Sorry. I would never say "Ha ha ha." Not my style.

Dear Simon,

I wouldn't normally mind the type of comment above (I'm thick skinned) but the problem here, as with the comment on the September 7 linklet that Richard just posted, is that I did not write it. It paraphrases me in places, yes, but I did not produce this comment. Somebody posted it in the comments section of the China Daily under my name - rather vindictive!

Mark Anthony Jones

I'm closing this thread as it largely repeats the Sep 7th linklets. Let's move it all to there thanks.