I watched the election results come in yesterday morning at work (and yes, I was also proudly wearing a sticker). I don’t know if the stuffy office environment, in which I’m the only American, subdued the atmosphere, or if I was just feeling calm from a strange feeling of confidence. I watched as multiple news sites changed their calls for Ohio and Florida, as results from Western parts of the country came in and votes for Obama marched steadily on. Then, I stepped out briefly for lunch, and that seems to be when all the news networks called it for Obama. It was all Obamarama for me, but unfortunately no one in Costa Coffee seemed to care.

On the bus to work this morning, I was still feeling the effects of Obamarama while everyone else was still stoic. But even stranger, China’s own political theater had just kicked off, and the bus was showing Hu Jintao’s speech to the Congress. There were no viewing parties, no excitement, no emotion — and the Chinese are emotional creatures! To be fair, though, official speeches are snoozefests and aren’t really designed to say anything important. They literally just read off a several pages of paper and only look up every once in a while. And unlike the suspense of an almost equally divided country trying to choose between two polar candidates, the CPC Congress elections are supposed to be predictable (even though events leading up to it this year have been anything but). No, Chinese leaders don’t like sparking the emotions of their emotional subjects.

Unfortunately, this damned 18th National Congress of the CPC will last eight days, with most of the action (if any) taking place behind closed doors. So there is zero excitement and zero suspense, but lots and lots of security. This article is a great illustration of the government’s paranoia and willingness to intrude on people’s lives to protect itself. Among the security measures are:

• Removing window handles from taxis (so passengers can’t roll down windows to throw water balloons and ping pong balls with seditious messages on them, duh)
• Blocking online searches of “18th Party Congress” and any similar sounding words, like Sparta (“18th Party Congress” is pronounced shi ba da in Chinese, and of course Party leaders don’t want regular people to know what their rulers are up to)
• Banning sales of knives and pencil sharpeners (so people can’t sharpen their corrupt leaders until all that is left of them is a stub)
• Banning sales of toy planes and kites, and pigeons from going outside.

It’s actually quite nice of China that they didn’t just turn off the Internet completely, and only just slowed it down a lot and rendered most of it impossible to access. Imagine a life without Internet! Now imagine a life with Internet, but one that gives you false hope of working and then makes you tear your hair out while you try to watch a 10-minute video (say, of Obama’s victory speech), but it takes probably an hour to load and then your VPN goes out midway, so you have to start all over.

So I guess the question is: Would you rather have a year of negative political ads bombarding you every time you turn on the TV or a month (or perhaps even longer? — they’ll put an end to this when the Congress is over, right???) of weird little things that infringe on your daily life in ways you never thought possible but can actually be quite annoying?