Big Brother has a place for you

In China some Chinese community party veterans, spread a letter in which they challenged to stop the censorship, and to promote freedom of speech. In their letter they said "This false democracy of formal avowal and concrete denial has become a scandalous mark on the history of world democracy". This was raised in addition to the petition of releasing to Xie Chaoping, who is a writer imprisoned by denouncing corruption. In addition, they expressed their repudiation against the government decision of denying bringing the 2010’s Nobel Prize to Liu Xiaobo, who was arrested after he wrote a document calling for freedom of expression and political reforms.
The Central Propaganda Department removed the letter from the website, and veterans said that tomorrow they will present a more formal letter, with 500 signatures.

Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, considered that this action expressed the dissatisfaction towards the party’s hardliner politics. However, he emphasized about that this was not a political dispute between conservatives and reformers, but between some pragmatic positions and hardliners.

Xiao Mo said that promoting the freedom of speech by the government doesn’t represent an expensive policy. He said that China had experienced some changes since Mao Zedong’s times, when nobody could express publicly their disagreement without being at risk of being killed and persecuted. However, he recognized that the censorship was being stricter last years. He criticized the idea of the government of censoring to the dissident's opinions , using the “maintaining stability” idea as an excuse and ignoring some aspects of their own constitution.

"Such dreams I have dreamed"

Well, sincerely I’ve been trying to remember some movies that I really loved, but I forgot some things of them, so I will talk about one of the last films that I have seen and that I liked. It’s “Dreams”, a 1990 film directed by Akira Kurosawa. There appears actors like Akira Terao, Mitsuko Baisho and also the director Martin Scorsese. This film is divided into eight separated short films, which are dreams that Kurosawa had through his life, and that has some overlaps in terms of characters and themes (it raises up the relation between man and the environment and the relation between traditions and the modern age).

The short films are: “Sunshine through the rain”, which tells the story of a child whose mother forbids him to go out because outside there’s a foxes’ wedding ceremony, and If they manage to see it, this would cause problems. “The Peach Orchard”, where the same boy find the spirits of the peach trees that have been cut down by humans. “The Blizzard”, which takes place in a mountain and where some mountaineers fight against the death and are saved from a blizzard by Yuki-Onna, a mythical spirit. “The Tunnel”, where a soldier finds to spirits of their army, and whose deaths he was responsible for. “Crows”, which shows the encounter between an art student and Vincent Van Gogh. “Mount Fuji in Red”, which shows the devastations because of a nuclear shipwreck. “The weeping demon”, which shows the terrible life of some nuclear catastroph’s survivors. Finally it’s “Village of the Watermills”, which shows the peaceful lifestyle of a little town.

My favorite part of the movie was “Village of the Watermills”, because it shows a particular way of thinking. People in that town decided to live far from the modern cities, and seem to be freer than them. I liked a scene of a funeral, where people laughs, celebrates and recognize death as a natural fact and as “the right final for a good life”.

I liked it because it’s way of criticizing the modern life and showing the fragility of human condition in opposition to the omnipotence that man seeks through the modern life and that affects to their own living and nature.