Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

“Are you still single and bitter?”
- the question posed by the match-making website set up by China’s central government to help thousands of busy but lonely government workers find love at work.   The official government website for the “Central Government Unions Magpie Bridge” — featuring a young man and woman peering at each other around [...]

It is a haunting picture, given that this man has now been executed by the Chinese government.  What I find hard to escape, though, is the painful reality that this case presented to both the Chinese authorities and the UK government regarding Akmal Shaikh’s ‘mental illness’.
Akmal Shaikh was executed after being convicted of drug smuggling [...]

“strong sense of colour and different sense of distance”
- the attributes possessed by women according to Wang Zheng, an official at the Wanxiang Tiancheng shopping centre in China, to explain why they have opened a car park that offers women drivers bigger-than-normal parking spaces to accommodate what it sees as their special needs.  The spaces are [...]

“It must have been terrifying for the customers but those things would only have gone off if you’d kept them past their sell by date.”
- one of the bomb squad officers who was part of an hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber in China, only to find the man was armed with sausages.  Police believed [...]

“Public spending on eating and drinking is a waste of social assets.  We need to criminalise this by law, so I proposed amending the criminal law and introducing the ‘crime of wantonly squandering public funds’.”
- Zhao Linzhong, a delegate to the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament.  Having become fed up with lavish banquets and official wining [...]

“construct a green, healthy and harmonious internet environment, and prevent harmful information on the internet from influencing and poisoning young people”
- a notice from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, issued to personal computer-makers instructing them that every machine sold from July 1st must be preloaded with software aimed at restricting online pornography but which could also [...]

“I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish.”
- Lai Jiansheng, 66, who was so fed up with a man threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a Chinese bridge that he shoved him over the edge, local Chinese media said.   Chen Fuchao fell 26 feet on to an air cushion and is recovering in [...]

“The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax.”
- Chen Nianzu, a member of the Gong’an cigarette market supervision team in the Hubei province of central China.  Government officials in Gong’an have been told to smoke 230,000 packs of locally made cigarettes annually, state media reported.  Departments that fail to meet their targets will [...]

“increasingly aggressive”
- how the US described the recent acts by Chinese ships in the South China sea.  The latest incident came on Sunday when five Chinese ships manoeuvred very close to an unarmed US navy surveillance vessel.  The aggression was clearly evident as the Chinese crew of one of their ships stripped to their underwear as [...]

16 years old?  Yer, right.

Dear Gerard Baker,
This week has been a watershed in terms of hostility towards China’s actions in Tibet, but you have rightly gone beyond the issue of street protests and identified the terrifying reality of the situation: democracy is starting to lose its grip.
As you described, historically speaking the ‘enemies’ of democracy and freedom have always [...]

Dear David Miliband,
I simply cannot believe what I’m seeing.  Actually, let me rephrase that - I can believe it because your track record of hiding away from anything remotely serious is now verging on legendary, but your complete absence from the headlines as China kills another eight Tibetan protestors is unacceptable.
When things got tough in Palestine, or [...]