“Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!” – William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Sunday afternoon saw Auckland subjected to a mass display of ugly Chinese nationalism. Thousands of Chinese gathered in Aotea Square for what was billed as a ‘celebration’ to ‘support the Beijing Olympics’ and promote ‘peace and harmony’. In reality the event was clearly a political rally. Olympic references were drowned out by nationalistic flag waving and chanting. The chauvinistic demeanor of the majority, coupled with a lack of policing, encouraged a large and hostile minority to indulge in physical intimidation and random violence. Within a few minutes of arriving at the event I was assaulted and abused, getting rescued from the hostile crowd by a protest marshal. The marshal then politely asked me to leave, because the event was, in his own words, “not safe for New Zealanders”.

So what exactly happened here? (more…)

There is nothing about cocktails here, so skip this post unless you are having trouble sleeping. . .

Following up on my earlier post on the Chinese protests in relation to Tibet, there have been some further developments in the whole Chinese protesters and Chinese online media saga. (more…)

Anyone who has been following the recent Tibet riots will be familiar with the story. Peaceful protests in Tibet somehow become violent riots. China closes Tibet to the foreign media and issues hard-line statements about “splittists” and the “Dalai Lama clique”. The Chinese media report the story by dutifully repeating the government line. The foreign media report the story using the limited information and material available to them from both the Chinese and Tibetan sides. Chinese citizens are unhappy with the foreign media’s reporting of the story (or more specifically they have a gripe with the “western media”). A series of several cropped and incorrectly captioned photos and segments of news footage assumes enormous importance as a demonstration of western media bias. This material becomes “proof” that the western media is attempting to “paint China black”. Chinese students around the world protest. Exciting days indeed!

Gentle readers, it was at that point that your good narrator became involved, with ironic and entertaining results. (more…)

I should probably have written Whisky Live, but the extra ‘e’ somehow seems to add something to the word.

On Saturday I attended Whiskey Live in Auckland. Whiskey Live is a whiskey event that creeps around the globe dousing various cities in whiskey for the day. The Auckland event was mostly about Scotch, with a single lonely ‘Bourbon’ producer, a little whiskey from Tasmania and New Zealand, and I think some Irish whiskey floating around somewhere. In the U.S. there is probably a little more American whiskey. Maybe the Auckland event could have done with some more American whiskey, but perhaps that might have distracted the focus.

At any rate there was a huge range of Scotch whiskey. All the Scotch distilleries I knew of were represented, plus plenty that were new to me. The range of whiskey was impressive enough, but the venue provided the finishing touch. The Civic Theater is a truly amazing piece of art deco architecture and filling a grand old building like that with fine whiskeys and a crowd gathered specially to sample them made for a somewhat magical occasion.

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I get so fed up with the abysmal quality of reporting on Taiwan. Your typical Taiwan story is generally barely researched and hugely biased. Dev Nadkarni (who seems to be a Journalism lecturer from Fiji) served up a recent example in the New Zealand Herald. You can read the story here.

I am sick of reading this garbage so on Friday I shot a letter off to the editor of the New Zealand Herald. (more…)

Sir Edmund Hillary died yesterday morning.

For the past 24 hours the New Zealand media has been full of tributes, summaries of his achievements, reactions from around the world, various miscellaneous interest stories. Some might call it overdone, but it isn’t like he’s done this before, so lets let the media go to town. If talk-back radio is anything to go by the interest is out there. Since he passed away there has been little else on the airwaves besides people ringing in and sharing stories and thoughts. OK, there has been a little bit of silly stuff (replacing Waitangi Day with Hillary Day can only seem a good idea if harmonious race relations bore you), but mostly it’s been a feel-good media fest.

So far the New Zealand Chinese media is a glaring exception though. (more…)