As with most articles by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the rest is soft-headed philosophical musing.  But his current editorial, <a href="http://nytimes.com/2004/06/20/opinion/20FRIE.html?pagewanted=print" title="New York Times: Thomas Friedman" class="article title">Love Our Technology, Love Us</a>, has a great story about Chinese students and their strategies for getting American visas that made me laugh, at the least.

<quote>If anti-Americanism is on the rise around the world, no one told the kids in the student visa line at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The quest among Chinese students for visas to study in America, say U.S. Embassy officials, has become so intense that it has spawned Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swap stories about which arguments work best with which U.S. consular officials and even give them names like "Amazon Goddess," "Too Tall Baldy" and "Handsome Guy."

Just how closely Chinese students strategize over the Internet on how to get visas to America—at a time when fewer are being given for security reasons—was revealed to the embassy recently when on one day one consular officer had scores of students come through with the same line, which some chat room had suggested would work: "I want to go to America to become a famous professor." After hearing this all day, he was surprised to get one student who came before him and pronounced, "My mom has an artificial limb and I want to build a better artificial leg for my mom and that is why I want to study in the U.S." The consular officer was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man: "You know, this is the best story I've heard this morning. I really salute you. I'm going to give you a visa."

You guessed it. The next day every other student who showed up at the embassy said he or she wanted to go to America to learn how to build "a better artificial limb for my mother." Said one U.S. official: "We have to be so careful what we say, because it gets into the chat rooms right away."
</quote>

--Laowiseass/lalaoshi got <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/lalaoshi/17359.html" title="Lalaoshi:  Little brother is watching you">up close and personal</a> with the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office on his trip to cover the Shanghai <a class="conference name" href="http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/" title="The World Bank">Scaling Up Poverty Reduction</a> conference that took place in late May.  He takes a somewhat jaded view of these conferences.  So do I.