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Could a mainland paper run a satirical opinion piece saying that Hu Jintao was doing a bad job? "No, because it would be untrue," he said. "But what if the article was all factually true? There were no false statistics, no misspelled names, no wrong dates. But an opinion that Hu was handling things badly?" "But he IS doing a good job," my Chinese friend said. The point was not whether he or I personally thought Hu was doing a good job; but whether someone could express the opinion that he wasn't. "No," my Chinese friend said. "If, hypothetically, Hu really did something factually, provably wrong -- like he was being tried for corruption -- that could be reported."

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

How can official China possibly do such a clumsy and self-defeating job of presenting itself to the world? China, like any big, complex country, is a mixture of goods and bads. But I have rarely seen a governing and “communications” structure as consistent in hiding the good sides and highlighting the bad.

A new piece of information that I have to add at what I have already seen at the other sites, that no one else has covered, is that I recently was sitting in a clients office when their HR person gave us some bad news Anyone born after 1983 can no longer get a Z visa. What struck me about this was that if true this would represent the first real change in policy. After all, working on an F visa was always outside the rules, and even extending a Z visa to rep office employees was a poorly enforced rule… but but restricting Z visas to those older than 25… THAT IS NEW Surely, if true, we are going to see a bunc of China bashing, but where I would like to frame this is that when there were economic downturns in Asia circa 1997 and the US circa 2000, there was almost an immediate visa restriction that came along with it. Leadership looked to save jobs for citizens, and those firms who wanted to import labor had to jump a lot of hurdles to prove that doing so was a last report… .that they could not find someone locally.

Here was a report that really delivered a blow to the BBC’s solar plexus. Peacock began to foresee the possibility of digital diversity on an unimagined scale, it also put forward the ideas of a consumer-led, market driven broadcasting world, one in which the very principles of a licence fee funded public service broadcasting system would naturally be seen as obsolete. This suited the tenor of the times: deregulation, privatisation and a rigorous dismantling of the frontiers of the state – it was happening in the city and in industry and the utilities, why not broadcasting? The BBC, long seen as harbouring tendencies and personnel that were socialistic at best, Marxist at worst, was suddenly no longer a secure and unassailable acropolis. It was no secret that Norman Tebbit and some of the more fundamentalist free-marketeers and red-baiters of the administration would have been very happy indeed to dismantle the entire structure of the BBC. Peacock prevaricated and the charter appeared safe, but at a great price. Nothing would ever be the same again, the old certainties were dead and the harsh realities of capitalism arrived at Wood Lane and Portland Place. Whole departments were razed and working practices abolished, and something called an internal market was put in place. Radio Times was outsourced, the permanent make-up staff went, engineers, editors and set-designers were suddenly out of a job. Twenty-five percent of the BBC’s output was commanded to be produced from outside sources and a whole new independent sector was born. Companies like Hat Trick and Talk Back achieved almost instant success.