I was amused the other night to watch a Newsnight reporter try to demonstrate the iniquity of the Chinese government by trying to access Facebook, YouTube and Twitter from an internet cafe in the Peoples' Republic and failing. He could have carried out the same exercise in many of this country's further education colleges, with the same results. Site-blocking is on the rise, on arbitrary criteria, depriving students of the ability to learn how to use social media, and services like library and learning resource centres of the ability to use these platforms to promote and deliver services.
But, apart from the big story about Google and China, I came across, in the pages of Le Monde, a different aspect of the relationship between these two titans. A Chinese author, one Mian Mian, is suing Google in the Chinese courts for scanning one of her books and adding it to Google Books. Ms Mian does not write in the high-minded Leavisian traditions of the novel. One of her works bears the title Panda Sex.
