Philobiblon

It might be a small thing really, but it is democracy in action: Starbucks is set to be banned from the Forbidden City after a huge web campaign.

The trigger was a blog entry posted on Monday by Rui Chenggang, a TV anchorman, who called for a web campaign against the outlet that, he wrote in his blog, “tramples over over Chinese culture”.
According to local media, half a million people have signed his online petition and dozens of newspapers have carried prominent stories about the controversy.

It has been there, utterly incongruous in the midst of an otherwise nearly perfectly preserved historic site, for 16 years – I remember doing a double-take when I saw it there in the early 1990s.