The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Sounds familiar, no? Couch’s reasoning is different, but this sounds awfully familiar to China’s old Real Name Registration rule for bloggers.

China, at least, could get away with trying blunt-instrument regulation of online speech. But Kentucky? Bit of a problem with the First Amendment there. Not to mention the problem of enforcing such a rule. As Mashable notes, much of this stems from suicides supposedly linked to MySpace, which is starting to sound like a newer and less bat-hungry version of Ozzy Osbourne.

This time around, in response to recent suicides on MySpace and other events taking place online that resulted supposedly from online, US lawmakers are willing to suspend the right to speak freely to apply a bandaid to the problems of American young ones’ self esteem. Understandably, when the irresponsible actions of a few lead to the death of a family member, immediate and decisive action is wanted to rectify the issue legally. Unfortunately, banning all anonymous commentary online is about like banning all gossip publications because Britney Spears became a bad mother due to overzealous paparazzi, or banning everything from pocket knives to nuclear arms because someone was mugged at the corner store.

As I mentioned, this debate has happened already. China toyed with it, then gave up. Maybe Couch would benefit from revisiting what Wang Xiaofeng wrote two years ago:

Insults and swearing did not start because of the Internet or blogs; libel started when people first started writing. Fraud and confidence tricks are ancient crimes, you can’t just blame them on the Internet. Is it possible that the real name system will solve all these problems? It’s like that old joke: if the eighth steamed bun is the one that makes you full, why bother eating the first seven?

The text of House Bill 775 is available here.

But let’s see Xiao Bushi, or most any world leader, do this:

That’s Kevin Rudd, or 陆克文, as we’ll likely hear a lot in the future. Australia just elected him prime minister, and while he’s no Dashan (thankfully) the Chinese seem to be going gaga over him. Global Voices rounds up some of the gushing.

An interesting corollary to the 我们爱陆克文 line is an old question: Will Rudd’s longstanding ties to the Middle Kingdom bring Australia closer to China?

Most bloggers seem to be strongly affirmative. Huang Xiaoyu called Rudd’s election “a sweet dream for Sino-Australian relations.” There’s a strong case to be made. Many note that Rudd’s son is studying at Fudan University, his daughter is married to a Chinese-Australian. The new PM served as a diplomat in Beijing in the 1980s and received a personal invite from Hu Jintao to attend the Olympics next year. So the guy is down with the Zhong.

But Gong Xuezhong, a Sina blogger, calls the whole discussion “infantile:”

I was looking through some Chinese websites, they’re all cheering; the way they all see it, now that Australia has a Sinophile as head of state, this just indicates how much more to China’s advantage Australia will be from now on.

I laughed and laughed, so hard I couldn’t speak, all I could get out was—”childish!”

What kind of country is Singapore? It’s an ethnic Chinese country. Is it pro-China?

Israel’s Prime Minister grew up in Harbin, his father’s grave is in Harbin. Is Israel pro-China?

When Bush was young he followed his dad (who was director the the liaison office in Beijing) to Beijing for a few years. Is he pro-China?

Korea, from race to culture, has roots in China. Is Korea pro-China?

Japan, from race to culture, has roots in China. Is Japan pro-China?

Taiwan…shall I stop now?

(Translated by Global Voices)

“Love doesn’t just come without a reason,” he goes on to say. But Rudd seems to have found something to love about China, and the Chinese, for the most part, look like they’re reciprocating.

Isn’t love all we really need?

But a lot of friends, both online and off, told me I couldn’t let the year pass without telling her to change her name, and they’re right. So, with the semester ending next week, I decided it was time to have that little talk:

Me: I think you should change your English name.

Nazi: But my Chinese name is ….娜 (that’s all I’ll include here)

Me: You know what the word means?

Nazi: (saying it in Chinese): It was Hitler’s party.

Me: What do you think of Hitler?

Nazi: I think he was a very cruel person, but also a person of great ability.

Me: He killed 11 million people.

Nazi: Yes, a lot of…Youtairen.

Me: Six million Jews. Five million others, disabled people, gays, intellectuals.

Nazi: What do you think of Hitler?

Me: Pretty much the worst person in history.

And then she changed the subject to KTV. Killing Jews to KTV without a moment’s pause. “I like to sing,” she said.

“Do you sing about killing Jews?” I was asking in my head. I didn’t say it though. That was about the end of our conversation, actually.

Maybe Hitler gets off easy here because, well, what’s another murderous despot when you live under a dynasty founded by Mao, with Pol Pot just down the continent, the Rape of Nanking shoved in your face all throughout school and Stalin as an early model of good governance. Who knows.

I don’t expect to see “Nancy” or “Natasha” or “the Class Monitor Formerly Known as Nazi” on my role next week, but we’ll see.

Ma Yansong, an award-winning urban planner, says the grey concrete symbol of China’s red politics should be given a green makeover. To heighten awareness about the environment, he believes the Beijing square should be transformed into a park and forest. In his model, the vast expanse of paving slabs outside the Forbidden City are replaced by trees and grass. There are lush thickets around the mausoleum containing Mao Zedong’s embalmed body and a verdant entrance to the Great Hall of the People.

“We want to transform this empty political square into something that can be enjoyed,” Mr Ma said. “Our aim is to propose not to criticise, to raise the issue of public space. The way we do our architecture is to show that we can come up with our own solutions. We don’t just take orders. That is why we want to show this project to the public first.”

Ma tells the Guardian that there’s nothing sacred about Tiananmen. It’s not traditional, and it’s not really Chinese. Rather, it’s an homage to Moscow’s Red Square, built for military parades and grandstanding. As a symbol, it represents the past much more than the future.

The idea is more than a little controversial, though, so much that Chinese media can’t report on it, the Guardian says in a video report.

Environmental benefit aside, it would certainly give the place a new image, maybe one with fewer blood stains and more grass stains. I wonder what the people who were there 18 years ago would think about the idea.

I have a new class on Mondays; it was thrust upon me last week by the mysterious administrators who run my English Department. I think I met some of them at a banquet in December, but they were plastered on baijiu and singing, while I was gorging on free food and avoiding the too-friendly gropes and toasts of an office manager. These new students are freshmen, non-English majors, supposedly the best from their respective classes. That’s all I’ve been told.

A new class means I’m a novelty again. I forgot about the gasps that come out of 32 Chinese teenagers who are put face-to-face with a white dude for the first time, the pesky, basic questions I no longer get from students I’ve had for eight months in my other classes, and the utterly ridiculous English names.

I have another Christ in my class, and my “class assistant” calls herself Nazi.

“That’s an interesting name,” I told her. “How did you get it?”

She said it sounds like her Chinese name, which includes the character 娜.

“Do you know what it means?”

“It was Hitler’s party,” she said. Well then….

I threw them all into groups and set them interviewing imaginary celebrities. It’s a simple game, one of many cover strategies I’ve pulled off Dave’s ESL Cafe lately. You get imaginative when you have to create a curriculum out of thin air.

This is how my university teaches English. It puts a foreigner in front of 30 or 40 dumbfounded teens and 20-somethings and says, “Go teach.”

My friend Molly teaches herself English. After three years studying on her own, she speaks as well as many of my students, and better than a few (she’s also fluent in Japanese). I spend a lot of time in the coffee shop she owns, where she sits most mornings catching up on accounting and listening to VOA’s Special English program. While my students are memorizing pages of the dictionary and reciting passages in mindless choral fashion, this is what Molly is hearing:

“Yooo skroo dup. You screwed up.”
“Yooo messs tup. You messed up.”
“Itsss yerrr fault. It’s your fault.”

And later…

“Sheeez a bimm-boh. She’s a bimbo.”
“Sheee likes tooo goooh from mantaman. She likes to go from man to man.”

Molly is ambitious. She runs a business, travels frequently, studies whenever she can in ways she enjoys. It’s no surprise that she can get by in English with little formal language training. If she were the only self-taught Chinese friend I had, I’d write it off as an exception.

But she’s one of many. I often get students from other departments sitting in on my class, wanting to brush up. They study English on their own, too, and most are functional enough to hold a conversation with me after class.

I mused on all this for a while tonight as my students chose famous people to interview and began their role-play. Nazi’s group pulled me out of my daze.

They were deciding who to be: Steven Spielberg or Stephen Hawking.

A Jewish filmmaker, the director of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan; or Stephen Hawking, a disabled intellectual. Who would Hitler choose?

Nazi doesn’t seem at all fascist, though, no more than any other class monitor. Christ pretty much blended into the background. Of all the students I’ve met, one of the few who resembles his nickname is Crazy Moving, who attends another university. He’s a wild kid, according to my friends who teach him, but he’s sharp, too.

These are throw-away names. Few of my students can tell me their best friend’s English handle, and some don’t respond to their own. Few non-majors see English as anything but another exam subject, and the university gives little incentive to take it seriously. If any of them should land a job requiring an English name on one side of a business card, my hope is that someone will pull them aside before they go to the printer to say, “Maybe Nazi isn’t a good name to use if you’re dealing with Westerners. How ’bout Nancy?”

That’s how I’d like to believe the world works. Then again, there are plenty of assholes like me who will name a kid Waldo, just for the pleasure of looking out over the gaping masses and asking: “Where’s Waldo?”