How many bizarre incidents occur in China daily?

Hyperlink to source text in Chinese: 每天有多少荒唐的事情在中国上演？   
Translated by @krizcpec

In my earlier blog I ran a few editions of “Common Sense Weekly”, which had had to be discontinued because the objective I set to answer ten questions in each new issue was too difficult to achieve. Shielded from China are the many common knowledge which, despite higher learning is not needed to understand, many people just can't figure out.

And a lot of people blindly believe in the many deliberately misleading opinions which are not only popular, but also get publicized by the all forms of media repeatedly. What is worse, these people not just believe in these false information, they also help spreading them further across. These actions harm not only their own interests but also that of others.

How should citizens treat the government

Hyperlink to the source text in Chinese: 公民应该怎样对待政府
Translated by @Michae1S, proofread by @krizcpec   

Some people said I am unreasonable as I often criticize the government, I wrote in response an article “Who Exactly Is Unreasonable?”, hoping the public could see that our government is many times more unreasonable than the masses. They use all sorts of propaganda that go every extreme to instill in the public ideas that are in their favor, and suppress any criticism and questions. There is nothing more unreasonable than muzzling dissent voices. Apart from this, I must keep pointing out that criticizing, instead of praising the government is the bounden duty of every citizen. This is more true in China, where the government is not under any real oversight and restrictions. Just like the disaster relief works following the snow storm this year, I couldn't say the government hasn't done anything, yet what it did was far from a job well done. Moreover, officials have evaded issues of human errors in the disaster, and those who neglected their duty have not been duly punished; these are serious disrespect to the dead and the rights of the victims, and a government like this should be criticized nonstop. However, it appears to some individuals that the government is aggrieved, and that the masses have wrongly accused the government of its decades of bad governance. In fact, there is no other race in the world that is more obedient than the Chinese people.

The government is not to be enshrined

Hyperlink to the source text in Chinese: 政府不是拿来供着的

Translated and proofread by @krizcpec

Thomas Paine is remembered for the booklet he authored, Common Sense, from which many draw ideas to deliberate on Western Democracies, liberty, and government's legitimacy. Many of the common sense that we are going to cover are but a continuation of wisdom of human and reinterpretation of it. Some of the common sense had quickly become consensus, and for many reasons, a view that is almost universally agreed on fails to get approval on another land. Some common sense may have become a consensus rather quickly. Yet a consensus that is almost universally agreed upon has, for many reasons, not been approved on another land. It has even been smeared by the many interest groups and those have voice in their control, with the purpose to exploit interests of others and pocket the benefits themselves. I will today give a few examples to illustrate why government is not to be enshrined, so as to make things clear to those readers who ask me to put myself into the government’s shoes, these people are mostly civil servants, one of them leaves comments on my blog using the name “a rank-and-file bureaucrat”, and of course there are also those who have been brainwashed, become out of touch with real life and use “conditions of the country” as an excuse to shrink from their responsibilities. “Government is not to be enshrined” could be written into a booklet like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, serving the purpose of revealing [the nature of government] to humankind, and to alert them. As I get to know more and become more experienced, maybe I should perhaps give this task a try. What's covered in today's article serves only as a beginning of this project, it may not be comprehensive, but there's time to develop it further in future.

Quotations from Ran Yunfei (Part Three)

As at the date this translation project started, twitterer @wuxinkuaiyu had tweeted 65 quotations from the detained dissident writer. Here are the third batch of the quotations translated into English.

Translated by @sikoalice
Proofread and modified by @krizcpec , @gaodawei

36. 不要把自己的权利改善，寄托在没有真正监督与制约的政府善心大发上，这无异于缘木求鱼。在较完善的民主自由制度未建立以前，每个人自身权利无不是自己争取来的，每个人都可以在衡度自身安全的情形下，做力所能及的推动社会进步的好事，这并不需要你危及己身的大智大勇。
Translation: Do not place your hopes of greater respect for your rights on the good heartedness of a government that is not subject to genuine oversight and checks on its powers. This is like fishing in thin air. Until a free and democratic system of government is in place, every individual will be on their own -- they will have to fight for their own rights. Every individual can do whatever they can to promote social progress after weighing how their efforts might affect their own security. Everyone can do this. This is not something only for those with tremendous courage and wisdom needed for actions that might endanger their lives.

Quotations from Ran Yunfei (Part Two)

As at the date this translation project started, twitterer @wuxinkuaiyu had tweeted 65 quotations from the detained dissident writer. Here are the second batch of the quotations translated into English.

Translated by @sikoalice
Proofread and modified by @krizcpec @gaodawei

21. 打着国家的旗号，干着恶浊的勾当，这是我们生活中常见的例子。国家只是为所有个人服务的工具，舍此国家没有任何作用，或者国家的存在意义将化为乌有。也就是说，我们不能用神化国家来损害个人利益。
Translation: Dirty business done in the name of the state is no rarity in China's national life. A state is just a tool for serving all the individuals in it; it has no other function, or it has no reason for being. In other words, we should not harm the the interests of individuals merely for the sake of deifying the state.

Quotations from Ran Yunfei (Part One)

As at the date this translation project started, twitterer @wuxinkuaiyu had tweeted 65 quotations from the detained dissident writer. Here are the first batch of the quotations translated into English.

Translated by @sikoalice
Proofread and modified by @krizcpec

1. 我读书、写作、做研究的目的，是为了求真，为了求自由，是为了求得自己体面而有尊严的生活。当然我知道我远远没有得到这一切，因为没有谁会将尊严和体面奉送到我的面前，我得自己来争取。如果每个人都为自己的体面和尊严而斗争，当然这个社会可能就会变得更好一点。
Translation： I write, read and research to pursue truth, freedom, to pursue a life with glory and dignity. Surely I know there is still a long way to go, no one would present these two things in front of me and I must fight for them myself. Of course this society may change for the better if everyone gets to fight for glory and dignity.

Why is China being demonized so easily?

Hyperlink to the source text in Chinese:  中国为什么容易被妖魔化？

translated by @krizcpec

proofread by Michelle Adams @Michelle9647

I do not agree that China is being demonized. Then why am I writing about this topic? It is because occasionally, there may be some inaccurate reports by the West; and whenever our official media and people with strong nationalist sentiment see such reports, they would say that this is a collective, intentional distortion of China. English writer Joseph Rudyard Kipling once said, “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”