I was reading a Marie Claire article from my Twitter stream entitled "The New Trophy Wives: Asian Women" that was mentioning a lot of ladies I've never heard of marrying some very famous people. I decided to Google these ladies just to see if I was alone or if I was just that much out of touch (probably more the latter than the former). On the third search, I got something I've come to be quite used to while using the net in China:
So, I figured this is happening either because I was searching for women (Google searches usually provide pictures) or because I was searching for Asian women who had married Western men. A touchy subject for some since, it is projected that by 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women in China due, in part, to the preference of boys over girls and the one-child policy. So, I tried searching men, the fourth time I clicked "Google Search" I got this:
My conclusion, and it's probably as warped as my Twitter name says I am, is that China thinks pictures are bad, especially pictures that come from Google. How did I come to this conclusion? First, the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." I would bet this society wouldn't be nearly as "harmonious" if even 1/100th of the protests (there's about 80,000 a year according to a 2005/6 report) that occur here every year were captured on film. Second, when doing a Baidu search for the same people, I get pictures of flowers, floral patterns, and, when searching for Nicholas Cage's wife, some guy. So, maybe my conclusion is flawed. Maybe China doesn't see pictures as bad, but there's pretty strong evidence that they see uncensored pictures as bad.
