and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Following up on yesterday's China talk, more on the east-asian technology front (trust me, this has something to do with the previous stuff, it's not just computer scifi guy talking here). First, Google (remember, that don't be evil search company that is nevertheless going right along with the chinese gov'ment's censorship policy) has themselves quite the champion in Kai-Fu Lee, Google's head of China operations guy:

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.

Important key phrase: "once .. small villages are connected" - this is still the future he's talking about. This fact is amplified by Lee's cute and admirable equation of Google: "youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google." Specifically the "freedom" and "equality" parts, which don't seem to necessarily jive with the current plight of the "rural underclass" in China. I wonder if they'll be allowed to teach themselves such classic MIT & Harvard offerings as "Comparative Politics and China" and "The Rise and Fall of Democracy/ Regime Change". Heck, I wonder if they'll even be able to see MIT's OpenCourseWare Political Science page, what with it prominently featuring a picture of - *gasp* - a man standing in front of a line of tanks.. my my, does that look familiar? Probably to you and me but apparently not to most of China's students.

Second thing to note is that Yahoo is bending over for the Reds as well. Yahoo! implicated in third cyberdissident trial:

Reporters Without Borders has obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles, showing that Yahoo! helped Chinese police to identify him

From Slashdot's post:

This latest incident occurs about 2 months after Yahoo testified, under oath in front of Congress, that the company regrets being'forced' to help Beijing [previously].