If It's December, It Must Be China Blog Award Season.

Chinalyst.net is doing their annual China Blog Awards and China Law Blog is not in this year's competition.

"If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve."

I have nothing but the greatest respect for Chinalyst, the people behind it, and for the competition itself and I truly was honored last year when you, our readers, voted us the Best China Blog in the Business/Law category. Our choosing not to compete this year had nothing to do with any of those things. We will continue to "wear" our winning badge from last year with pride (look right).

The reason for our choosing not to participate this year is that last year's competition brought out a whole slew of really malicious comments about co-blogger Steve Dickinson and me, on the Chinalyst site, on this site, and via email. I firmly believe (though cannot prove) that all or nearly all of them came from one person (which person had his own blog in the competition and does again this year). This person is fairly well known in the blogosphere for using aliases ("Fidel" immediately comes to mind) and he has done so countless times with comments on our blog (but I delete them EVERY single time thanks to someone having given me his various IP addresses). For reasons about which I can only privately speculate, winning the competition means far more to this person than it should and far more than it means to either Steve or me. We are just not willing to go through the same thing this year. We have worked for many years to build up our reputations and, yes, it is quite troubling when someone seeks to destroy it over what is supposed to be a friendly competition designed to benefit the China blogosphere as a whole.

But like the scam emails that start out talking about dying some horrible death, I conclude this post by letting you know I do not seek your pity and I actually take great comfort from this decision. It frees me up to follow the elections as a pure fan, without my competitive juices kicking in. Having said this, however, I do fully intend to participate in the various races by telling everyone else how they should vote and then campaigning via this blog and twitter for those I believe deserve to win. And yes, I will also do whatever I can to ensure that the person whom I believe dissed me so vehemently and often last year does not prevail this year either.

Let the voting begin.

UPDATE: This person had the good sense to not participate this year so please don't anyone think it was any of this year's participants to which I am referring.