January 1st has quietly passed and regrettably our parole officers in Urumqi (or Beijing?) don’t think we’re quite rehabilitated. The buzz that once filled the offices around our city has been replaced by a very quiet but noticeable feeling of discontent. They told us our release was imminent and somehow they thought we’d be appeased if they opened up two measly Chinese news sites.

The internet authorities are sending other mixed signals as well. If you look on the recently restored Xinhua site (www.xinhuanet.com) you’ll notice that they offer their content translated into English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. Out of all these, can you guess which one language is blocked from viewing? English. The same goes for the People’s Daily (www.people.com.cn), whose English equivalent also can’t be accessed.

Talk about a slap in the face to all the native English speakers out here: out of the millions of websites that are being blocked at the moment only two are restored in a “gradual” effort to open the web, and even these can’t be viewed in English.

I decided to look up the world gradual in my Chinese dictionary today and this is what I found:

grad⋅u⋅al / `grædςυәl / adj taking place, changing, moving, etc., by small degrees or little by little: slang – a Chinese equivalent to the English phrase “over my dead body”