Wow, China Daily allows reader comments....

I usually manage to scan the web sites for China Daily and Xinhua every couple of days for info related to China....just to see what's going on. Today I stumbled across something that really surprised me...the China Daily web site allows readers to publish comments relating to articles. So the skeptic in me had a look, thinking I'd only see party line stuff (hey, even the BBC edits reader comments).

But no, comments appear to be from all ends of the spectrum, admittedly with a nationalistic hue.

Responses to this article (scroll down to the bottom and click on comments) on pollution by foreign multinationals quite rightly question the spin of the article. The forum hosted on the China Daily website even has a thread on multi-party governance and talk of problems facing China. Granted the discussions are fairly shallow and in fractured Engrish, but they're there nonetheless.