Amazingly enough, Blogspot is still working in Beijing. Here's another Blogspot blog worth checking out: Shenzhen Zen. It's written by a seasoned journalist who lives in Hong Kong and spends a lot of time in Shezhen.

This is currently at the top of the blog:

Living dangerously with dwarfs, Angela Lansbury, Lin Piao and Zhou En Lai

There are moments more and more when I wonder what and why the hell I'm still here, but it took a small gathering tonight in a Shenzhen nightclub, restaurant and bar area to keep me hanging on.

The occasion was a gathering of Brit and New Zealand business types as well as Chinese Christians and a couple of covert missionaries - a mostly mixed batch - and I was there to try to make more contacts regarding a never-ending story I'm attempting to research on underground Chinese Christians

In the course of it, I wound up meeting two people of minor note, an older British woman who resembled Angela Lansbury and who has been in China, Hong Kong and Macau since the early '70s. She said she was originally attached covertly to the British secret service in the 70s in Beijing as a "business secretary" (kind of a Miss Moneypenny on steroids) who offhandedly added that as part of her duties she'd met the compiler of The Little Red Book and China's first prime minister, Zhou Enlai at an official reception in 1973.

"He was a lovely man," she said. "Very gracious."

The gathering also included a photographer connected with the Christians, a Chinese hunchback dwarf who looked and sounded alarmingly like Linda Hunt's role as a male photog dwarf in a 1982 Mel Gibson movie in which a pre-antiSemite/delusionary Christ figure Gibson played a foreign correspondent in SE Asia, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Not on Blogspot but also worth checking out: Positive Solutions, a new blog by a foreign editor at the China Daily.

The last time the China Daily had a blogging foreign editor the result was the now defunct Leaking State Secrets. It's on Blogspot, and was accessible the first time I tried it, but the second time it wouldn't load. The Nanny's filtering techniques are becoming more sophisticated.