Jim Fallows mentions “the influential China Beat” in his Atlantic Monthly post on 30 December. I had never come across the China Beat. It “examines media coverage of China, providing context and criticism from China scholars and writers.” I will look more closely soon, but it will be interesting to see what The China Beat has to say about the Western media coverage of the Olympics in China.

In August, on the China Beat, Haiyan Lee writes: “So is not the motto for the Beijing Olympics, “One world, one dream,” a tad naive? It’s a beautiful ideal, but it ill prepares one for the inconvenient fact of human plurality and the inevitable clashes of desires and interests. Might not “Many dreams, a single planet” better serve China as well as the rest of the world?” This message also implicitly holds ideas about environmental sustainability and conservation, because if we have many dreams but only one planet, we each have to fit the dreams together seamlessly without too many conflicts.

The Media Watch column on the China Beat is of particular interest.

In the Beijing Delgation section of Policy Innovations, a publication of the Carnegie Council, it is suggested that democracy is about satisfaction. The satisfaction level of the citizenry is an interesting way to gauge democracy–actually, if democracy is a representative system of government, and citizens in theory vote in a way to encourage and increase happiness for themselves and their families, this doesn’t seem entirely implausible as a system for gauging democracy.

The first chapter of Forging Environmentalism is called “The Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China”. The forward is by Judith Shapiro and outlines the development of environmentalism in China, beginning BEFORE Mao’s death, with the country’s participation in the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.