In Beijing: V.I.P.'s

In Beijing: V.I.P.'s

It's been an eventful ten days in the Chinese capital.

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahadinejad was in town when we arrived. He and Chinese President Hu Jintao were meeting to put their bets down in a friendly wager on the exact date that the U.S. would begin bombing Iran back into nuclear incapacity. The two leaders were photographed smiling and shaking hands on the front page of China Today.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai then arrived. He was interviewed on CCTV-9, China's official English language news station, which Lonely Planet warned was stupefyingly boring. The interviewer asked about current economic conditions in Afghanistan, prefacing the question with the helpful info that China had given $150 million to help the reconstruction. I heard President Karzai answer in a satisfying tone that since 2001 per capita GDP had risen from something like two cents to something like three cents in 2006. That's all I remember. After that either I fell asleep or President Karzai did, I don't remember.

Stephen Hawking was next in town and was greeted with rock star-like enthusiasm. He addressed on overflow crowd in The Great Hall of the People, China's equivalent of the U.S. Congress building. The Great Hall was available since no legislators were in session at the time. One didn't get the impression there would ever be a conflict with use of the building by Chinese legislators.

But the big news out of Beijing, according to The New York Times, was the cracking of Chinese internet censorship by a clever American computer geek. This agent provocateur created a blog and then posted some known buzzwords on it to get the attention of the censors. The blog got through! Then 007 created another blog and this time was more bold, writing something deliberately insulting to the Chinese like "Hu Jintao eats boogers. HA, HA, HA."

Our ingenious code-cracker's day job is as an op-ed writer for the Times who operates under the nom de crayon of "Nicholas D. Kristof." Mr. Kristof had been sent to China to report on a serious matter actually, the show-trial of a Chinese researcher who worked for the Times. But after filing his dispatch on that event and seeing as how he still had money left on his expense account Mr. Kristof decided to spend the next day blogging and thank god for the freedom of journalism he did. In the column he wrote on his success as a code-cracker he even posted the web addresses of his blogs so that the rest of us could share in his revolutionary fruits.

Don't know how much longer Mr. Kristof plans on spending in Beijing but if you see a big spitball on Chairman Mao's chin mole on his huge portrait in front of The Forbidden City you'll know who to credit. This is Public Occurrences.