China more popular than sex

On The New York Times website, ‘china’ is now the most popular search term, beating out ’sex’–a close second.

Also, today’s print edition of The New York Times is carrying a rather interesting, albeit annoying, OP-Ed piece on the CCP’s obsession with China’s image during the ‘08 Olympics. The OP-Ed talks about the CCP seeing the Olympics and Beijing’s meeting international standards (of civility, language mastery, cleanliness, etc.) as symbols of the regime’s validity—its prior validity being maintained by the supposed, and now lacking, communist ideology.

I think most people familiar with western commentary on China’s economic, political, and cultural transformation will immediately see what’s annoying about the article–the NYTimes editors were kind enough to offset the offending line and put it in bold: the trite, ‘what would Mao think if he could see this!?’ line that journalists have yet to tire of.