Home -> Law Blog Directory -> International Law Blogs -> China Law Blog

International Law

: China Law Blog

Blogging On China Law And Business In Difficult Times

By Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson

I have been feeling somewhat irrelevant lately. Really big things are happening in China and I clearly see the incongruity (absurdity?) of my continuing to chug away on posts relating to joint ventures, intellectual property, and how the rule of law is rising in China. Trust me, I am not blind to what is going on out West. But how should I react online? I have been reading superlative coverage of the situation on sites like Shanghaiist, EWNS, Peking Duck, The Opposite End of China, China Digital Times, Mutant Palm, Beijing Newspeak, and Zhongnanhai and that coverage reinforces my thinking that there is little place for me in this debate. I am a lawyer, not an observer. I am a lawyer with a little l, meaning my focus is on how to get things done, not on how things should be done. This blog's focus is law and business. This blog has a very large Chinese readership (including a shocking number of Chinese lawyers and law students) and I do not want them to be cut off from this blog. I do not have any inside knowledge. I am not terribly well versed on the either the history or the politics of the region. I do not read Chinese and my Chinese reading half (Steve Dickinson) is on the road. It would be be presumptuous for me even to try to compete with these other blogs and so please view my silence as common sense not a lack of caring. I urge everyone interested in this topic (and who is not interested?) to check out the sites above. With people like this on the job, the China blogosphere will deservedly continue to thrive. Being a lawyer however, I cannot depart without a last word. Not sure why I never thought of this before (I think I did, but only in inchoate form), but in reading this excellent post on the Left Flank blog, I had a quasi-revelation: what we read in the Chinese press is from the Chinese press. It is what the government wants us to believe; it is not necessarily what the government itself believes. Now I know that this is obvious, but it does bear remembering in times like these. UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that Kaiser Kuo did a somewhat similar post on the Ogilvy China Digital Watch blog, at least as to the strange feeling of blogging as though nothing has changed:

You?ll pardon me I hope if weltschmertz is preventing me from blogging about anything related to digital marketing. Watching things melt down on Wall Street and, more urgently from where I sit, tracking the fallout cloud from this whole fuster cluck up on the Roof of the World, I can?t help thinking I woke up this morning to witness the beginning of The Great Unraveling. Hopefully the Asian markets won?t react too badly to the Bear Stearns debacle, and (this I hope in vain!) opinion leaders won?t leap to their usual blithe condemnations of Beijing. Believe it or not, the situation?s not black and white.

Full post as published by China Law Blog on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).