One of the problems in relations with communist countries like China is they close off communications to a large part of the world. Even though China is changing, I believe you'll agree that there's still a problem getting information and establishing communications. The concept of a penpal program is good for peace; it gets average people to think that maybe the people on the other side of the line are a lot like them. Unfortunately, an official penpal program is difficult to authorize and run, and requires such cumbersome things as agreements between governments. It seems a guerrilla penpal program would be more effective. Somehow acquire a large number of e-mail addresses of Chinese citizens, by probing their ISP's, or buying mailing lists or something. I don't know; I don't have a clue how to get that. Then, get some mailing lists of people here in the states and Europe and "free" countries. Give each person in set B an address in set A and say, "This person wants to be your penpal. Send them an e-mail and say hello!" Language barriers and apathy would make the effectiveness ratio very low, but using a Great Database of many hundreds of thousands of randomly selected penpals, we might see a substantial communication occur. It would be useful because communications between the two countries would bypass heads of state, politicians, business elite and those who have the power to restrict "official" communications. It could work for other countries besides China, too. Eventually, it's going to happen anyway. People in every country will interact in chat rooms and message boards and through e-mail with other people because of common interest, not because of geographic location. To me, it seems like speeding up the process with particular countries might be very useful. -hedges-
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:05:28 PDT