...In Which rbrooku Calls Me Out On China

I wrote a post a few weeks back, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, that originally began as an expose-style rant on something I had read about in the financial blogosphere, but ended up in a statement of sincere goodwill for the Olympics to go well. Upon re-reading, it made sense to me (hell, it was mapped to my train of thought so that's not surprising) so I clicked "post" and thought no more of it. However, I was just looking through my threads, and saw that one of our more astute and frequent commenters had taken me to task on the disconnect between where the piece was headed, and where it eventually ended up.

I know that controversial titles brings more readers, but this time the pursuit of that resulted in an unfortunate phrase that tarred an entire ethnic population.

Just to quickly respond, I'll just say that if you'd have known where I was going with the original post, you'd be impressed that I scaled back the criticism of what was -- in addition to many other acts of censorship in China -- actually a fairly consequential find in the financial news.

Believe me, restraining myself on that one was an Olympian feat all its own.

(As an aside, I wonder why I'm so strangely drawn to the financial press these days? Morbid curiosity, perhaps? Like the information superhighway equivalent of rubbernecking?)

Just to clarify, though, that when I was talking about "Chinese characteristics," I was using this phrase as it is commonly used to describe the Chinese semi-market-based economy -- "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics." So my title was meant to describe the Chinese version of market capitalism, not to describe the Chinese ethnic population.

However, the overall point of this post is that rbrooku correctly pointed out that I wasn't being sufficiently clear. Being a member of the press is a more rewarding and interesting experience these days because we have a forum for back-and-forth dialogue that we never had previously. You can call us out if you think we're wrong, and we can respond if called for, either publicly or privately. It's more work, but the work that does get done is better for it.

So I look at the comments on my posts, however critical they may be, as a kind of Andon cord -- if the line of thought gets stopped, it's my responsibility to figure out why -- and isn't continuous improvement the reason we're all here anyway?