Guess who hated Obama’s inaugural address more than American Reaganists

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The East is Read
President Barack Obama has drawn basically positive reviews for his second inaugural address yesterday, but at least one person was not impressed. (Note: probably tens of millions were not impressed, but you can read the comments section to Hot Air and other sites devoted to the corpse of Ronald Reagan if you’re interested.) We’re talking... Read more »

The Schmidts write about their North Korea trip

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Via SCMP
Like most visitors of North Korea, Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, thought the country “weird.” It’s her that everyone is quoting today, specifically this write-up on Google Sites: It’s impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like.  Our trip... Read more »

Top-of-the-Week Links: Japan threatens to fire at Chinese aircraft, Southern Weekly honors censored stories, and Liao Yiwu’s book about prison

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Ai Weiwei overlooks parade route
President Barack Obama's public inauguration begins soon, and lookey who overlooks his parade route (above, via The Atlantic). If you're in Beijing and would like to watch, the place to go is Brussels (or so TimeOut tells us), which also showed live coverage of the US presidential election. For everyone else, links.

Beijing’s 2 million “propaganda workers” will be flooding social media. You heard right: 2 million

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The East is Read
Two amazing facts come out of John Kennedy’s post this morning on SCMP, and I’m not sure which should be presented first. We’ll just excerpt from the top: According to the Beijing News, a meeting of propaganda department heads was held yesterday to unveil the city’s latest plans to control online content, plans which place microblogs firmly at... Read more »