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...This time around, Yunnan is expected to receive far fewer visitors than usual for the celebration. Chinese travel agencies report that hotel bookings in Dai-populated areas have tapered off. Candy Wei, a travel adviser at China Highlights, which offers customized tours and cruises in the region, says that she has had relatively few inquiries about participating in the event. "We suspect that the drought has severely affected our customers' itineraries in Yunnan." Those places accustomed to welcoming hordes of tourists, like Xishuangbanna's capital city of Jinghong, have previously been characterized by the most boisterous water-splashing celebrations; there...
...festival is organized in a shallow pool every day at 3:30 p.m. Cable describes the spectacle as a "large-scale wet-T-shirt contest." For $5, tourists can rent plastic basins for splashing each other and scantily-clad Dai women. "Authenticity is much less important than entertainment in China," says Cable. "Tourists don't come to see authentic rituals. They come to see outrageous ones." The park, which is run by a management company owned by Han Chinese, the country's ethnic majority, still anticipates over 1,000 visitors to the water-splashing pavilion over the three days...
...tens of thousands of censors employed by the government, blocking access to restricted information both at home and abroad is an ongoing struggle. Their work is mirrored by employees of large Web portals who ensure content conforms with official directives. With what is called the "Great Firewall of China," authorities block access to overseas Web pages deemed objectionable and shutter domestic sites that repeatedly stray into restricted territory. Search engines are prevented from linking to sensitive content. Mainland media, which face a host of regulations that limit how they can report the news, are often forced to take down controversial...
...world's most influential people, Chinese author Han Han wrote a blog post announcing, "Other Chinese nominees include sensitive word, sensitive word and sensitive word." It was something of an inside joke, but one that Han's huge fan base would immediately get. "Sensitive word" was a jab at China's Web censors' habit of sometimes blocking even commonplace names from display in blog posts and Web searches. Within days, his post had generated more than 20,000 comments, most in support of the writer, a few in opposition and many grumbling about the state of online freedom in China...
Critics of China's censorship regime have often predicted that information will inevitably circumvent efforts to restrict it. But so far China has managed, through a variety of means, to restrict the discussion of topics the government finds objectionable, such as independence drives in the regions of Tibet and Xinjiang and the banned religious movement Falun Gong...