I returned on 24 May 2002 from a 17 day trip to mainland China (7 May - 24 May.) I hooked up with my awesome Brother-in-law Li Bin and his wife Jun. Li Bin showed me Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Xi'an (my wife's hometown.) I met many friendly and generous people along the way, especially in Shanghai. In Xi'an, I met up with my wife and daughters (who had gone to China 2 weeks before me) and finally met my Father-in-law, as well as numerous other friends, teachers, and acquaintences of my wife and her family. I'll be writing more about the trip in the future.
a couple of links:
"CNN" has an in-depth special in which they revisit the Tiananmen Square incident
"Frontline" did an excellent program in 1992 - China After Tiananmen. There was a great website companion to the show, but it looks like it is gone now. Key point to take away from that program was that the student leadership should not be idealized. They practiced the same kind of authoritarian tactics against dissenters in the student ranks as the government practices on its own dissenters. It is quite possible that while asking for "democracy" they may not have really understood what they were asking for. This in no way legitimizes the government crackdown that took place. My Brother-in-law asked me if the Chinese government was correct to crackdown on the students. The very idea that such a question could be asked by a young man from China was surprising...
Taiwan to develop free software
"Taiwan will start a national plan to jump-start the development and use of Free (libre) Software, according to this report by the Central News Agency, the government news agency of Taiwan, Rep. of China. Due to high Microsoft license fees and also to improve the levels of software technology in Taiwan, this plan includes the creation of a totally Chinese free software environment for Taiwan users, free software application development, and training of 120,000 people for free software skills, as well as efforts at schools to provide diverse information technology environments to ensure the freedom of information.
In my opinion, Taiwan has to develop a future economic strategy as the mainland begins to steal away some of the business that was formerly exclusive to Taiwan (like electronics & semiconductor manufacturing) - but I don't quite see how free software fits in - perhaps the hope is to develop software development expertise and a widely used platform, into which they can later generate and sell commercial products?
6:50:09 PM 
|
|
