I’ve done a very unscientific survey about Chinese places and people to see what kind of presence they have on the internet in the English language.

I used Google and a virtual private network so the results are not skewed by Chinese censorship and filters. I put the search term in quotations. I searched the names of China’s most recent political leaders, including Great Helmsman Mao Zedong. Then I threw in names of popular basketball star Yao Ming, and Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan.

Then for good measure, I threw in the Dalai Lama, who hasn’t been in China in five decades but who is considered Chinese by Beijing because he is from Tibet.
 
Again, these results are just for English, not Chinese, which would be an entirely different matter.

1) “Forbidden City” – 2.02 million hits
2) “Jackie Chan” – 7.71 million hits
3) “Mao Zedong” – 1.81 million hits
4) “Mao Tse-tung” – 1.87 million hits (trying to measure whether the old form spelling would draw larger numbers.)
5) “Great Wall of China” – 1.67 million hits
6) “Hu Jintao” – 2.65 million hits
7) “Jiang Zemin” – 763,000 hits
8) “Deng Xiaoping” – 1.48 million hits
9) “Dalai Lama” – 10.9 million hits
10) “Tiananmen Square” – 1.27 million hits
11) “Yao Ming” – 2.2 million hits

This shows what a challenge faces China as it tries to get its point of view out to the world in what arguably is the dominant language of the globe.

Jackie Chan produces four times more hits than the iconic founder of modern China. And the Dalai Lama is by far the best known “Chinese” person out there.

I can’t help but wonder if a researcher were to do a survey on the streets of four major world cities – let’s just say New York, Berlin, Johannesburg and Bangkok for the sake of argument – and ask passersby to identify by at least one name Mao Zedong, Jackie Chan and the Dalai Lama, which would come out ahead? Would it vary in regions of the world?

These two videos are of the two Chinese candidates now among the 50 finalists for the so-called best job in the world.

The job pays about $96,000 for half a year to serve as caretaker on Hamilton Island along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as part of a tourism promotion drive.

The winner has to make a few videos, post on a weekly blog, sunbathe, swim, snorkel and sail. And probably drink some pina coladas along the way. So meet Yao Yi, 30, and Yu Ying, 25, in their promotional videos. Go to www.islandreefjob.com to vote on your favorite candidate.

Here’s a China Daily story from today about the two mainland candidates.

Macau has barred entry in recent days to a number of Hong Kong residents, including a university dean, several politicians and a photojournalist for the South China Morning Post.

Now a lawmaker in Hong Kong is suggesting the port city should reciprocally bar entry to some Macau residents.

The right foot and left foot are angry with each other.

It is a strange spat. Until recently, Macau was a rather sleepy place, a former Portuguese colony that reverted back to the mainland’s control in 1999. It’s a 45-minute ocean ferry ride away from Hong Kong, the throbbing global trade center. For all of Hong Kong’s worldliness, Macau is a great little place, with wonderful Portuguese food and lots of colonial-era architecture. Both cities are former colonial appendages now under Chinese supervision.

Money has poured into Macau. Several big U.S. gaming companies have moved in, letting Macau surpass Las Vegas in gaming revenues. Lots of the gamblers are from Hong Kong.

An election battle is under way to succeed Edmond Ho as Macau’s chief executive, the post that is the nominal governor of the autonomous region.

The speculation is that politics has something to do with why Macau border officials are turning away prominent Hong Kongers – three of them in the past week. Maybe some security people are trying to embarrass Ho and his favored candidate, or maybe Macau is trying to curry favor with hard-line honchos in Beijing.

Last Friday, Macau rejected the entry of Johannes Chan, dean of the law faculty at the University of Hong Kong. Chan, a former head of the Hong Kong bar association, was to give a lecture at the University of Macau.

On Tuesday, they turned back pro-Democracy activist Bruce Liu Sing-lee. A few days earlier, they barred Frederick Fung Kin-kee, also a democracy activist. Late last month, South China Morning Post photographer Felix Wong was turned away.

Chan told reporters he suspects his opposition in 2002 to a rather Draconian security law in Hong Kong was what led to the action. Hong Kong rejected the proposal but Macau passed a nearly identical proposal last week, and it went into effect Tuesday. The law prohibits treason, secession, sedition, the theft of state secrets and subversion against the Beijing government.

Hong Kong's security chief, Ambrose Lee, said Thursday he would seek an explanation from Macau about the travel bans. He said he was “concerned.”

Stanley Ho, the Macau gambling tycoon, who is close to both Chinese and U.S. security officials, and has operations in North Korea, lauded Macau border guards, saying the Hong Kong residents denied entry were all “troublemakers.”

Albert Ho, a Democratic Party representative to the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, said he favored Hong Kong taking reprisal action and barring some Macau officials entry.

From what I hear, Beijing is a bit worried about Macau. The gaming industry has been slammed by the global downturn, and unrest among the growing jobless ranks could grow. Beijing is stonewalling a U.S. request to open a consulate there to look after U.S. interests, worried that U.S. diplomats would actually stir up trouble.

But with Macau’s sweeping new security law, I don’t see why they’d be worried. The law provides for the arrest of anybody its leaders view as troublemakers.

The British rock band Oasis won’t be playing gigs in Beijing and Shanghai next month after all. They’ve been Bjorked, which is a way of saying one of their members didn’t pass ideological muster.

Bjork is the Icelandic singer who was banned from China after she sung the anthem “Declare Independence” at a concert in Shanghai March 2, 2008, finishing it with rousing shouts of “Tibet! Tibet!”

China toughened its rules for visiting musicians following that episode. Those who get the Bjork treatment can’t enter the country. That’s what’s happened to Oasis.

Here is their press release, which needs no further explanation:

"Oasis were informed Saturday (February 28) by their Chinese promoters, (Emma Entertainment/Ticketmaster China) that representatives from the Chinese government have revoked the performance licenses already issued for the band and ordered their shows in both Beijing and Shanghai to be immediately cancelled. The government have instructed the ticket agencies to stop selling tickets and to reimburse the thousands of fans who have already purchased tickets for these inaugural Oasis shows in the People's Republic of China.

"The licensing and immigration process for the two shows had been fully and successfully complied with well before the shows went on sale. The Chinese authorities action in cancelling these shows marks a reversal of their decision regarding the band, which has left both Oasis and the promoters bewildered.

"According to the show's promoters, officials within the Chinese Ministry of Culture only recently discovered that Noel Gallagher appeared at a Free Tibet Benefit Concert on Randall's Island in New York in 1997, and have now deemed that the band are consequently unsuitable to perform to their fans in the Chinese Republic on 3rd and 5th of April, during its 60th anniversary year.

"Oasis are extremely disappointed that they are now being prevented from undertaking their planned tour of mainland China and hope that the powers that be within China will reconsider their decision and allow the band to perform to their Chinese fans at some stage in the future.

"The rest of the South East Asian leg of the band's tour, including the Hong Kong show, will go ahead as planned."

The French writer Victor Hugo has become very fashionable in China rather suddenly.

That’s because of what Hugo had to say about the sacking of the Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War. At that time in 1860, French and British troops spent days looting, burning and ransacking the Summer Palace, which is in Beijing’s northwest corner.

The Summer Palace is in the news these days because Christie’s auction house last week put under the hammer two bronze animal heads taken from a water clock fountain in the gardens.

The bronze heads together fetched $40 million – until a surprising turn of events a few hours ago in which the mystery buyer identified himself as a Chinese and said he wouldn’t fork over the money. He just wanted to throw a wrench into the auction. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

In any case, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is all over the internet. His name even came up at a press conference this afternoon when Zhao Qizheng, a spokesman for the CPPCC, a Chinese rubber-stamp consultative body, was asked about the auctioning of the looted animal heads.

“The literary giant Victor Hugo once said that two bandits had entered the Old Summer Palace of China. One is Great Britain and the other is France,” Zhao said. “He said that he hoped one day France would . . . cleanse herself and return the looted goods back to China.”

Perhaps it’s fitting that the Chinese should refer to Victor Hugo because what he had to say about the pillaging of the Old Summer Palace is extraordinarily elegant, even in translation from the French. He made his comments in a letter to a French captain, first describing the beauty of the Old Summer Palace and later detailing what a wretched deed it was to leave it in smoking ruins.

Here are some excerpts:

 “You ask my opinion, Sir, about the China expedition. You consider this expedition to be honorable and glorious, and you have the kindness to attach some consideration to my feelings; according to you, the China expedition, carried out jointly under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon, is a glory to be shared between France and England, and you wish to know how much approval I feel I can give to this English and French victory.

Since you wish to know my opinion, here it is:
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace. Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human people was there. It was not a single, unique work like the Parthenon. It was a kind of enormous model of the chimera, if the chimera can have a model. Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building. The slow work of generations had been necessary to create it. This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries, for whom? For the peoples. For the work of time belongs to man. Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it. It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.

This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left. All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.

We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.

Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. But I protest, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity! the crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace. I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.

Meanwhile, there is a theft and two thieves.
I take note.
This, Sir, is how much approval I give to the China expedition.”

Signed,
Victor Hugo