I'm being censored in China: how cool!

My parents are traveling through China right now, a whirlwind twenty day trip through the highlights of an amazing country.  And today, in my Dad's travelogue about their stay in Tibet, amid reflections on buddhist debating practice in the Sera Monastery and the amount of gold in the burial stupa for the fifth Dalai Lama (10,000 lbs), he also mentions that:

Kurt, the Chinese internet filters have blocked your blog and your mom (and me) are eager to see your latest postings. Perhaps you could cut and paste them to an email.

Though I sometimes felt that my phone had a strange echo in the Bush administration, this is the first time I've ever been important enough to censor.  Very flattering.  I wonder what these innocuous ramblings about babies might be doing to destabilize the Chinese state? (I remember meeting an old leftist when I was in my early teens, who crowed about finding his name on Nixon's enemies list.  We take some of our importance from who seems to hate us...)

Now, I know that the Chinese censorship filters are mostly mechanical: I doubt that there is a real person behind the decision.  I'm not quite sure, however, what I did to trip off their system.  A couple of months ago, when we were visiting my parents, my Dad and I went to a lecture at the University of Denver about the current intellectual climate in China, and one of the clearest lessons I got from the talk was that in today's China, intellectuals should be technicians.  In the same way that an engineer gets an idea from his bosses and tries to make it happen, academics in China have a directed role, moving ideas around in order to serve the interests of the state.

Though one can blame this on communism, it's actually a long Chinese tradition.  François Julien's work, for instance, shows the way that the imperial bureaucracy did an excellent job of co-opting any independent thinker, simply by paying more for working in the tax office than they could get doing anything else.  But the basic premise of this blog is that thinking (and, by extension, what we teach children) has exactly the opposite role: to challenge, to think about new goals, to become an autonomous person.

Is that why the Chinese censor this insignificant blog?  Probably not.  I probably just used a prohibited word at some point.  But I'd like to think that these little talks with Helena Iara are, in some little way, subversive.