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Comment by runn1ng | Hacker News Reader

There was an olympics in Beijing. So holding the olympics committee to some democratic standard probably won't work.

China doesn't have civil rights laws to protect homosexuals, but it has made it explicitly legal (1997), and removed it from lists of "mental illnesses" (2001)[1].

I'm aware it isn't a democracy, but it doesn't appear to sanction official discrimination in the same way as Russia on this issue. If you look at the rest of [1], you'll see it also has a long history of (debatable) tolerance for homosexuality.

(I am aware that is has a significantly different attitude to race than the UK and US, and I'm not sure I'm happy with it, but again I haven't heard of examples of official persecution, or police turning blind eyes to attacks on such minority groups.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China#People.2...

Russia made it explicitly legal around 1992, after the fall of USSR.

In 1993, 10 years before US.

    Beijing sometimes romanized as Peking

I didn't know that...

Sorry, it is written like that in my language and I didn't realize it's wrong in English; I corrected that

Both names have been correct at some point in history. In some areas, both are still used, depending on whom one asks and who is doing the naming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Postal_Map_Romanization

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/11/chinese_trans...

The only time I've heard it used in English recently is at Chinese restaurants, where the popular dish is still called "Peking Duck".

Beijing is much closer to the Mandarin pronouciation, bei3 jing1, meaning "north capital." (there is also a Nanjing, "south capital.")

Similar to Beijing, Nanjing was once pronounced as "Nanking" in the West. Some historical events, such as the Nanking Incident[1], still reference that pronunciation to avoid confusion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Incident

No need to apologise! I learnt something

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