One should not be fooled by the fact that many U.S. companies (e.g. McDonald's) are flourishing in the People Republic of China (PRC) these days in terms of the liberalization of Chinese political freedoms. Business is business and politics is politics and nowhere is the separation more apparent and marked than in the PRC.
For the past two weeks yours truly and spouse were guests of daughter Kasi's in-laws family (the in-laws themselves live in Louisiana).
Kasi(the youngest of three Olson daughters) graduated from Lake High School in 1996. She went on to participate in the Northeast Ohio College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) accelerated BS/MD (Bachelor of Science/Medical Doctor) degree program on a full United States Air Force (USAF) scholarship. She served a residency in pediatric medicine at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) located in Dayton, Ohio.
While at WPAFB she met and married Chinese-American and U.S. Citizen William Chu who, as of July 1 of this year, will be a flight surgeon with the USAF. An interesting sidenote on Kasi's husband is the fact that he came to the U.S. as a 9 year old not knowing a word of English but nevertheless was enrolled in an American public school (New Orleans, Louisiana) immediately where he excelled academically and led to his achieving a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas (at Austin) and a medical degree from Texas Tech University.
After completing a fellowship at the Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) located in San Antonio, Texas in adolescent medicine, Kasi was assigned to the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA - Academy) as one of a number of physicians providing medical care to the USAF's future officer corps. Pictured above receiving an "Above and Beyond Award" from USAFA commanders, she will become the medical director of the medical clinic as USAFA.
The foregoing is the background of how yours truly and spouse were afforded to opportunity to accompany the Chus, their two children Austin and Aspen and Williams parents to China for the last to weeks of this month.
The SCPR has been published for over three years without missing a single day posting a blog. The hope was that continuity could be sustained from China. However, such was not to be the case. A blog was prepared and ready for publication on May 15. But on attempting to log onto the Blogger dashboard to publish, access to the publishing platform was denied.
The Report has included at the end of this blog a list of subject of Chinese Communist government censorship as compiled by Wikipedia.
On this Memorial Day, 2011, yours truly has a fresh and renewed appreciation of those who have fallen in battle to preserve the very freedoms we Americans enjoy because of their ultimate sacrifice.
All one has to do is to spend time in Shanghai, Hangthou, Tianjin and Bejing as leading centers of the PRC as yours truly did to be reminded that there are those who very much want to stomp out the like of our Constitutional freedoms.
Frustrated at not being able to publish a daily blog which, of course, does not typically deal with the PRC, yours truly focused on capturing family footage like the one which follows which features Kasi, her husband and her children eating a traditional Chinese meal.
Here is a list of the Internet gags instituted by the Peoples Republic of China as set out by Wikipedia in its footnotes:
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