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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
 Reference News image from Xinhua China still a small player in Africa: From Pambazuka News: What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to … raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa, starting with slavery and continuing to the present day with exploitation and cheating.
China should go forth, write and conquer: China Machete gives the Chinese press a dressing-down in the wake of whinging about western media bias:
China is doing a great job perpetuating the domination of the Western media. Two of its most popular newspapers, the Global Times and Information Reference, derive most of their content from foreign media reports. How can you complain about Western media bias when it is one of your main sources of information? I think Chinese journalists spend most of their time hiding behind the words of the Western media, e.g. so and so said this about the PLA and this US professor said that China has many economic problems. The problem with the Chinese media is that hardly anybody voices their own personal opinion about anything, so the whole world relies on foreign reports.
Google ads on Beijing tricycles: Photos from the Go Too Far East blog: Is Google advertising on the sides of Beijing tricycles (三轮车)?
Tîbet and the environment: Alex Pasternack has posted an article on Treehugger that rounds up a good variety of sources about problems in Tîbet, including environmental issues.
Defeating the Nanny: blog hosting: Thomas Crampton has a post titled 'Best blog hosting service to sidestep China’s Great Firewall?' that has also elicited some useful feedback in the comments.
Idiot-proof: At the That's Beijing website, Kaiser Kuo reviews China for Dummies: Making the Inscrutable Chinese more Scrutable, a guide to China written by the late Harry O. Chestnut:
With an historian’s subtle grasp of China’s 5,000-year history (the author holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Southwestern Kentucky), Mr. Chestnut gives us a clear understanding of those timeless cultural forces that continue to shape the Chinese way in business. "Business is warfare," he says, "and the Chinese literally wrote the book." In just six chapters, Chestnut succeeds in distilling the ancient wisdom of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and the classic works of just about every other notable Tzu not into nebulous platitudes, but rather into actionable insights that you can put to work at the negotiating table, in your marketing plan, or in managing your Chinese staff.
Returning home, remembering: The bezdomny ex patria blog translates a poignant blog post about catching up with old friends.
Fallen Shanghai mayor in the dock: From the International Herald Tribune:
The trial of Shanghai's former Communist Party chief, who was ousted in a sweeping corruption cleanup that began nearly two years ago, has begun in the northeastern city of Tianjin, reports said Thursday.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Chen Liangyu, the highest party official to be ousted in more than a decade, is being tried in the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court.
Weather engineering in China: MIT's Technology Review looks at how China is preparing to guarantee good weather for the Olympic Games:
The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
'Dia' a new English word?: From FEER's blog: We’re not sure whether to treat this as credible, but Sina.com and Xinhuanet are reporting that the Oxford English Dictionary has added one of our favorite Chinese words, 嗲 or dia, as an import to the English language.
Maybe The First (the Xinhuanet link) got hoaxed: see this blog post from April, 2007.
Cult Rev vocabulary and Tîbet: Channel 4's Lydsey Hilsum looks at the government's use of hoary old words with Cultural Revolution associations to talk about Tîbet.
See also: Private argot in the public sphere, a previous Danwei post on the currency of CR language.
The heavier hammer: Jim Gourley addresses recent stories out of Tibet and bordering regions:
One story that is not being reported, though it is one with a great deal of tooth, is that Tibetan boarding schools – from middle schools to universities – have been under lockdown for the last two weeks....Tibetan students are not allowed outside the gates of their schools, and their families are not allowed in to see them. Parents who visit the school must stay outside the iron-barred gate, and their interactions are monitored. In at least one school students are not allowed to be alone in a classroom without a teacher present from 6 AM to 9:30 PM, and the campus dorms are patrolled by teachers throughout the night. That there are plainclothes police around the perimeter is understood.
Bush and Hu have late night chat: Xinhua reports:
Chinese President Hu Jintao expressed his views on the Taiwan and Tibet issues to his U.S. counterpart George W. Bush during talks over the telephone held Wednesday...
"National moral model" passes away: Xinhua reports on the death of Fang Yonggang, a professor of politics from Dalian who was named a "national moral model" last year:
Fang, who had been treated in hospital for colon cancer since 2006, had been visited by a number of senior leaders, including Hu Jintao...who praised him for his "significant contribution to the Party, the Army and the People."
Hu urged all people in China to learn from Fang, who kept studying and publicizing his innovative political theories and displayed the firm faith, staunch will and lofty spirit of a Communist.
Those unfamiliar with Fang's exploits can read a Washington Post profile from May, 2007.
Religious buildings in Taiwan: At Global Voices Online, I-fan Lin presents a photo essay on religious structures in Taiwan.
Six new Chinese ambassadors: Xinhua reports that Hu Jintao appointed new ambassadors India, Italy, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and the Bahamas, as well as a new United Nations envoy.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
The trouble with Chinese cinema: Kaiju Shakedown returns from Hong Kong Filmart with some notions about problems in the Chinese film industry, from money to SARFT to distribution: It's interesting to compare China to Bollywood, since both film industries have a lot of similarities - government regulation of the import market, restricted content, demographically similar audience - but whereas Bollywood has become the only country capable of competing with Hollywood on the world stage, China seems to be binding the feet of its industry in the cradle.
Chinese SF writers remember Arthur C. Clarke: Translations of a few blog and forum posts from Chinese science fiction authors and fans who have written in commemoration of the SF master.
The Olympics were already political: Richard Spencer argues that politicization of the Olympics was an inevitable consequence of China's political structure: the head of BOCOG, for example, is Liu Qi, the municipal party secretary for Beijing, "the capital's number one man, if you like."
Xinhua top story: US deaths in Iraq reach 4,000: Xinhua's top story today:
Four U.S. soldiers died Sunday night in a roadside bombing in Iraq, bringing the American toll in the five-year war to 4,000...
...The grim milestone comes less than a week after the fifth anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq...
...Estimates of the Iraqi death toll since the war began range from about 80,000 to hundreds of thousands.
Ma Ying-jeou wins Taiwan election, smiles at China: From Bloomberg:
Ma Ying-jeou won Taiwan's presidential election, vowing to improve ties with China after eight years of pro-independence rule by Chen Shui-bian.
Ma, of the opposition Kuomintang, beat the Democratic Progressive Party's Frank Hsieh 58 percent to 42 percent, according to the Central Election Commission. About 75 percent of Taiwan's eligible voters cast ballots.
Xinhua on the other protests: 5 years of Iraq war: The top story and photo on Xinhua's English website today is about anti Iraq war protests marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion.
Old Shanghai synagogue opens for Purim: From Shanghaiist:
Every once in a blue moon the local government is kind enough to open the doors of the Ohel Rachel synagogue and let Shanghai's ever-growing (or, more accurately, re-emerging) Jewish community celebrate their holidays in a proper temple. Tomorrow Shanghai residents will once again have the chance to step inside the more elegant of the city's two remaining synagogues and celebrate the Purim holiday.
Wen Jiabao deeply worried about U.S. economy: From The China Daily:
'I am closely watching and feel deeply worried about the global economic situation, especially the US economy,' Wen said. 'What concerns me is the continuous depreciation of the US dollar and when the dollar will hit bottom.'
Happy old Tîbetans: Time to bring out the happy people: this just in from Xinhua:
The oldest person in Tibet celebrated her 117th birthday in Lhåsa on Sunday...
...With economic development and improved medical care in Tibet, the lifespan becomes longer. Linzhou County has four centenarians. The average age in Tibet has risen from 35.5 in 1969 to 67, according to official statistics.
Letter from The Guardian to Chinese Ambassador: Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, has sent a letter to the Chinese Ambassador in London:
I am writing to express my deep concern over the apparent blocking by Chinese authorities of international news websites, including that of the Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
 Watch what you eat? AIDS kebabs: The Liuzhou Laowai receives a strange warning about kebabs that give you AIDS, from China Mobile.
SchizoOlympics: From Mutant Palm: news about Tibet on microblogging services like Twitter and its Chinese clones, and the SchizOlympics.
China Daily: Dalai-backed violence scars Lhasa: The China Daily reports:
The outbreak of violence died down in Lhasa Friday night, after a tumultuous day that saw windows smashed, shops robbed, mosque burnt down and reportedly many casualties.
Witnesses said the unrest started around 1:10 pm on Friday, several people clashed with and stoned the local police around the Ramogia Monastery in downtown Lhasa.
You might want to check some other sources for more information.
Lhasa in flames: From Lindsay Beck and Benjamin Kang Lim of Reuters:
Shops were set on fire in violence in Tibet's capital of Lhasa on Friday, China's Xinhua news agency reported after days of rare street protests in the contested region.
Witnesses said a number of shops were burnt, the report said.
Sexy Photogate: banking version: From ESWN:
Early yesterday morning, a two-minute-long video clip began to be circulated on the Internet. The clip is divided into three segments. The first clip was taken inside a Heng Seng bank branch office with female workers dressed in uniforms. This served to identify the principal female character as a worker there. The second clip was taken in a hourly-rate motel room, in which the principal female character appeared in a nurse's uniform. The third clip was an act of sexual intercourse in a bedroom.
Air cheap bastards: Chris Waugh at the bezdomny ex patria blog examines one flight attendant's complaint against Air New Zealand:
So far their response is, "Well, our contract is with Fasco who hires the staff according to Chinese terms." That is pathetic.
And at least one of the attendants was a New Zealand resident hired from New Zealand under the impression she would be working for Air New Zealand but suddenly found herself signing a contract with this Fasco outfit earning a mere fraction of what her Kiwi colleagues got.
Models, delegates, and the latest spin on PX: Jonathan Ansfield reports on some interesting treats for the press at this year's legislative sessions:
Fujian officials have been caught in a bind: between, on the one hand, continued external pressures to allay public fears and, on the other, sources contend, internal criticism for bungling the blowback there and helping spur a rash of protests over other projects elsewhere. As such they hedged conservatively. They sounded shifty and abrasive. They made it seem only natural and self-evident that while the project was sound, its present location in Xiamen no longer was. They soft-pedaled on the media and popular dissent that forced them to adopt that posture and skipped entirely over the misguided planning in the area that played into the controversy to start. And most ominously, they defended the Gulei site in practically the same passive-aggressive manner they once had Xiamen.
See also: PX protests in Dongshan
Parliament hears corporate pain: At Newsweek's Why It Matters blog, Mary Hennock reviews how the heads of major companies are expressing their dissatisfaction with the new labor law at this year's CPPCC and NPC sessions:
What's more, added protection means "workers are no longer acting as obedient as they were before", says the chairman of Jiangsu Huarui, a garment-maker with 8,000 staff. One reason is better protection from dismissal; another is that companies can no longer ask new hires to pay a fee that's forfeited if they leave.
Tudou out for the day: The message on Tudou's main page Friday morning read:
Potatoes:
To provide you all with better service, we are migrating and expanding Tudou's central servers.
Our service will be suspended from 0:00 to 24:00 on 14 March.
At 0:00 on 15 March, our migration will be complete and Tudou will promptly return home.
There's no mention of the rumored SARFT inquiry, but you wouldn't really expect that, would you? Service resumed promptly at midnight. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
Avoid tall buildings: From Adam Minter:
So I must say I was more than a little surprised when my beloved Shanghai Daily ran a story - this morning - containing this jaw-dropping revelation:
HALF the steel material sold at wholesale markets and now being used in construction has failed quality tests.
Beijing construction ban: July to September: Details of the pre-Olympic construction ban from The People's Daily:
Four government departments... announc[ed] that they will suspend construction in bad weather such as strong gales and sandstorms between March 20 and July 20 to prevent dust pollution, and a complete construction ban between July 21 and September 20.
The municipal meteorological observatory forecast earlier this month that the capital city is likely to see about 10 days of sandy weather this spring, close to the annual average but six more than last spring, citing the reason of warm and dry weather in sandy areas in the north China region.
Liberation, mystery in Henan and irony-loving foreign ministers: Beijing Newspeak addresses a few recent stories, including the AFP claim (later retracted) of a staged Wen Jiabao interview that was rebutted by a 3-month-old Xinhua story:
However, every story involving Wen Jiabao has to be approved directly by the Premier’s office and the journalist was told by the secretary that he couldn’t write his new story, even if it did reflect favourably on the government. Much better to stick to the November visit he was told. Safer. There was much annoyance in Xinhua of course as no news agency, albeit a highly dodgy one, likes to report three-month-old news, particularly if there is new information. Clearly another case of govermental stubbornness making everyone look stupid.
Talk about anything...except the South China Tiger!: ESWN translates a Southern Metropolis Daily report that reveals how BBS commenters at major online forums are being barred from talking about the South China Tiger case.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
Is 'super-ministry reform' really worth all the fuss?: from David Bandurski at the China Media Project:
Military spending, inflation and terrorist conspiracies may be dominating the China headlines in the West, but the big news on the home court this week is China’s push for reform of its numerous government ministries to create more streamlined super-ministries — a process known in Chinese as da bu zhi gaige (大部制改革). And as the National People’s Congress proposal for widespread ministry reform tops the official agenda, one of the most pleasant surprises is the way a number of mainland commentators are either downplaying or analyzing seriously what others are simply ballyhooing as a grand vision for change.
School memos and a responsible press: Jim Gourley, at the Absurdity, Allegory and China blog, looks at the "Uighur-in-the-plane" incident in light of a number of previous episodes where the whole story got overshadowed by spin and fabrication:
It’s not easy to develop a responsible press, but it’s better to make the attempt to have one than not. It all eventually comes down to this: if you’re going to be stuck in a small room, better that it’d be with few frenzied Chihuahuas covering their turf than a hungry bear sitting in the corner. You can bat a few dogs away, but that bear’s in a whole different league, and, like it or not, he gets to make all the rules. And, like it or not, you’re probably going to let him. When the bear’s in charge, equality in any form is never part of the relationship. You either dance the dance or you get eaten. It’s pretty simple. Simpler than it ought to be. So much simpler than it ought to be that it can only be considered, at best, as low-browed.
Melinda Liu on foreign correspondence in China: On TheBeijinger.com from an interview with Newsweek China Bureau Chief Melinda Liu by Alice Xin Liu
tbjblog: Is being a journalist in China as frightening and dangerous as it is made out to be?
ML: Being a foreign correspondent in China isn't that dangerous. My experience witnessing the 'shock and awe' bombing of Baghdad, from the inside, was dangerous. Getting shot in the leg in Manila was dangerous. Guns and other weapons aren't prevalent at the grassroots in China, so some of the 'normal' things that make a story dangerous aren't here. What's dangerous here is driving...
Beijing and the baby milk of human kindness: By Mure Dickie in The Financial Times:
This week I tried to visit Zeng Jinyan, Chinese blogger, wife of the detained dissident Hu Jia and mother of an infant daughter. I did not get far.
Near the door of Ms Zeng’s apartment block in the paradoxically named Bobo Freedom City compound near Beijing, I was stopped by a police officer and half a dozen plain-clothes security agents. The officer politely explained that I could not meet Ms Zeng without her prior permission. He was unmoved by my objection that authorities had made such permission difficult to obtain by cutting off Ms Zeng’s home telephone line and her access to the internet.
No super ministry for media: From the China Daily:
China will set up five new 'super ministries'... the ministry of industry and information, the ministry of human resources and social security, the ministry of environmental protection, the ministry of housing and urban-rural construction, and the ministry of transport.
It seems this will have little or no effect on the way media and culture are regulated: the Internet will still fall under the souped up ministry of industry and information, but GAPP, SARFT, the State Council Information Office and other organs of State meddling in media have held on to their fiefdoms. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
The strange case of the disappearing news story: Richard Spencer blogs about the difficulties he faced in reporting on the Chinese government's changing story about the "incident" on a flight from Urumqi to Beijing: There is little way of garnering independent evidence, so you put in a balance.
But my story today was more difficult. I thought it was pretty weird that the claims about the Olympics terror attack just disappeared overnight. The China Daily version had the terror claims but nothing about the Olympics; the story that carried them originally - a Xinhua English-language report - was taken down from the website; and there was no mention in Beijing Chinese-language state media at all. (There was some in provincial newspapers).
Related article in The Telegraph.
Is China the key to Africa's development?: Western media coverage of China's relationship with Africa continues to grow, as the title of this Slate.com article shows. The piece has some information about 'Africa Town' in Guangzhou, and trade in timber between China and Tanzania.
Louise Blouin against Spielberg: From The Huffington Post, by wealthy philanthropist and former media mogul Louise Blouin MacBain:
We have to stop pointing fingers at other nations, making symbolic and hurtful gestures, while not looking first at our own governments, our own policies and our own national ethos. We cannot continue to judge without the expectation of being judged back, or in this case, to further alienate China from engagement in meaningful multilateral peace talks for the region.
Ang Lee protests Tang Wei ban: By Richard Spencer in The Daily Telegraph:
The Oscar-winning film director Ang Lee has written a letter of protest after a young protégé, whose sexually explicit scenes in his last movie turned her into a star, was deemed a 'non-person' by China's state censor.
But it might not be a ban after all.
Hu Jintao in olive: Wearing an olive green Mao suit (中山装) instead of his usual suit and tie, Hu Jintao spoke yesterday at the NPC about the need to further develop China's military. From Xinhua:
'We must aim at improving the capability to win high-tech regional wars and keep enhancing the ability of the military to respond to security threats and accomplish a diverse array of military tasks,' the president said. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
NPC special: transparency, obfuscation and the Dianchi Lake: ME OLD CHINA visits the legislative sessions and ends up getting an audience with Yunnan officials eager to present their spin on the water issue: COVERING the latest session of the National People's Congress this week, your correspondent has been assailed and buttonholed and generally inconvenienced by countless Chinese journalists anxious to hear us confirm how "open and transparent" the "media environment" had become in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, thereby bolstering the uplifting narrative of progress, enrichment and enlightenment that the central government has sought to foist on the local press.
...After a while, of course, cordoned off from the delegates by the organizers and surrounded by sweating deadline-wary hacks anxious to be let loose, I began to tire of all the attention, and told at least one local journalist that things were much better when the proceedings were held behind closed doors, because at least in that case we wouldn't be expected to report on them. But then I received an unexpected phone call.
Yunnan still hopes to dam Nu River: From GoKunming.com:
Little more than two months after the announcement that Tiger Leaping Gorge will not be dammed, plans for damming the Nu River (怒江) in western Yunnan near the border with Myanmar may become the focus of the next battle between Yunnan officials and environmentalists and scientists.
A plan to dam the upper reaches of the Nu, known as the Salween River after flowing out of Yunnan into Myanmar, was originally suspended in 2004 by Premier Wen Jiabao.
The heroic Englishman China will never forget: James MacManus profiles George Aylwin Hogg in Ocean Devil: The Life and Legend of George Hogg; an excerpt appears in The Sunday Times:
[I]n 1942 he became headmaster of a CIC school in the remote mountain town of Shuang-shipu.
Here, at the crossroads of the Tsin-gling mountains in Shanxi province, he found his destiny.
At 27, Hogg was the head of a school that, even by the chaotic standards of China at that time, presented huge problems. Three brick classrooms stood on a steep and bleak hillside. There had been seven headmasters in 18 months. There were no books or writing materials. The kitchen was bare. There were no beds. The boys were covered in scabies, malnourished and lice-infested.
"A film inspired by the story, The Children of Huang Shi, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chow Yun Fat,...and Michelle Yeoh...will be released in the UK later following a US opening in May."
Solar energy firms leave waste behind in China: Is additional pollution the price China pays for green technology? Ariana Eunjung Cha reports for the Washington Post:
Because of the environmental hazard, polysilicon companies in the developed world recycle the compound, putting it back into the production process. But the high investment costs and time, not to mention the enormous energy consumption required for heating the substance to more than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for the recycling, have discouraged many factories in China from doing the same. Like Luoyang Zhonggui, other solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, industry sources say.
Wahaha rejects Danone proposal: Wahaha, the Chinese beverage company that has been engaged in an unpleasantly public dispute with French joint-venture partner Danone, has rejected that company's latest proposal for mending the rift. The People's Daily reports:
Chinese beverage giant Wahaha Group has rejected a new cooperation plan put forward by French food group Danone, saying the ongoing peace negotiation is hard to continue, Wahaha said on Sunday.
Danone proposed the two companies merge all their businesses toform a new company that will eventually be listed on the A-share market. Danone and Wahaha will each hold 40 percent of shares in the new company, leaving the remaining 20 percent as public shares.
Danone wants to ensure at least 50 billion yuan (6.9 billion U.S. dollars) in market value if its shares in the new company are lower than 40 percent, said Zong Qinghou, board chairman of the Hangzhou-based Wahaha Group.
'But those proposals and conditions are groundless, and we cannot possibly accept them,' he said on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's parliament. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
 Sohu has fast hands The Olympics stole my game: The Sohu-developed, BOCOG-hosted flash game Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds is an unauthorized re-skin of a game written in 2006 by Cadin Batrack: Flash game theft is nothing new. I’m actually quite used to having my games taken without my permission, and without receiving compensation. The difference here is that this is not some crappy no-name portal. This is The Olympics.
...they downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).
via trevelyan at adsotrans.
Thoughts on bankruptcy of the last ‘Animal Farm’: At Global Voices Online, George Sun translates an Oriental Morning Post column by Xiong Peiyun on the fate of Nanjiecun, a famed communist model village:
Nanjie Village, the last “Animal Farm” in China, has been known by the Chinese as the ‘red billionaire village’ and ‘communism village’ until the recent revealment by newspapers that it has arrears around 1 billion yuan although it gradually changed its economic system years ago in light of some ‘capitalistic elements’. In a relevant review, Blogger Xiong Peiyun thought it indicates the failure of ‘communism myth’.
Five things that didn't happen (but might have): At Frog in a Well, C. W. Hayford looks at possible alternate histories:
[W]hat if the Manchu unification had been successfully challenged? In the 1770s and 1780s, the Tay Son brothers led a great rebellion which destroyed the old regimes in the north and south of what is now Vietnam by mobilizing the populace into mass armies. The Qian Long Emperor dispatched troops to support the old regime, which had been loyal to Beijing, but in the "First Tet offensive of 1789" the Vietnamese sent them packing. Tay Son dynamic rule replaced Chinese model government with a more indigenous style. Vietnamese brag that the Quang Trung Emperor thought seriously of incorporating the south of present day China, which had been ruled by Vietnamese towards the end of the Han Dynasty. There were to be two capitals, one Hanoi, the other Guangzhou.
Xinhua: China to probe Bjork concert: Xinhua has published an official response to Bjork's 'Tibet!' cry at the end of the song 'Independence' at her recent Shanghai concert:
China's Ministry of Culture said Friday it will investigate into Icelandic singer Bjork's Shanghai concert during which she shouted 'Tibet' at the end of an unapproved song, 'Declare Independence'.
Bjork's 'political show has not only broken Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feeling of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist,' the ministry said on its website.
...It said it will tighten the scrutiny of foreign artistic groups coming for performance in China to prevent similar incidents from happening again. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
"We have to get the television ratings!": A Hunan TV program secretly followed Zhang Chen, a Changsha civil servant, and edited footage to suggest that she was a home-wrecker. Zhang ultimately forced the program to apologize and pay compensation. ESWN translates the Southern Weekly investigation: "Wang Yan said that there was no time to do any more interviews, because the show had already been edited. It is now in the production process and there was no way to withdraw it. She also said that if your department leader had not come, you people would not even be allowed to step inside the Hunan Broadcasting office building!" Zhang Chen told the Southern Weekend reporter.
NIMBY protests stop Shanghai maglev: Geoff Dyer of The Financial Times reports:
Shanghai’s local government has backed off construction work on an electromagnetic train line until at least next year after the plan triggered mass protests.
Han Zheng, Shanghai’s mayor, said on Thursday the new line, which has prompted protests from residents whose flats are near the planned track, was not on the list of major projects that would be started this year.
No forbidden zone in reading?: At the New Left Review, Zhang Yongle reviews a six-volume collection of articles from Duzhu magazine:
From 1996, however, when Wang *** and then Huang Ping were invited to join the journal—initially on a temporary basis—after Shen’s retirement, Dushu was orientated along more critical and scholarly lines. The pair strengthened the social-science coverage of the journal and encouraged an open engagement with contemporary political and economic issues. They were also more interested in interacting with the international intellectual community than their predecessors had been. It was under Wang and Huang that Dushu emerged as a socially critical journal; uncongenial to some, but nevertheless posing questions that indubitably had a wider resonance.
Central Bank: strong yuan not way to fight inflation: From an article by Andrew Batson and Jason Leow in The Wall Street Journal:
China's central bank governor said a stronger currency isn't the best or only way to fight inflation, in statements that appear to counter widespread market expectations that the yuan's gains will accelerate as the nation's prices rise at their fastest pace in a decade.
'Faster currency appreciation helps to rein in inflation, but not a lot,' Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, told reporters Thursday. 'To curb inflation, we will rely more on domestic policies. … There is no need to use exchange-rate reforms as a way to fight inflation.' This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
Ramadan in China: As part of Slate's "Dispatches" series, Joshua Kucera writes about his trip to Xinjiang: After lunch, Ali and I went to a government-run factory where Uighurs mass-produced their traditional hats, clothes, and musical instruments to sell to tourists. We stopped in the rug showroom, where the friendly Chinese assistants offered us chrysanthemum tea. I had some, but Ali declined. They insisted, and he had to explain that he couldn't drink anything until sundown. Although they lived in a city that was 90 percent Muslim, they didn't know that Ramadan had started.
If at first you don’t succeed … get subsidized: At Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter discusses the implications of future rules that will regulate the scrap collection sector:
In other words - licensed e-scrap recyclers are going to be armed with subsidies in the battle for China’s growing supply of domestic e-scrap. Though bad for the peddlers (and I have a serious soft spot for them), this is unabashedly good news for China’s environment. And, in the end, it may be good for the peddlers, too: according to sources close to the drafting of the directive, it will include provisions that encourage - and subsidize - the employment of scrap peddlers and former illegal e-scrap workshops.
Movie ratings will put China on the express train to pornoville: GAPP chief Liu Binjie explains how a film ratings system will lead to unbridled debauchery. Imagethief snarks:
And while I'm on that, how are film ratings "too sensitive" for the general public? The same general public that stampeded out for pirate copies of the uncensored version of Lust, Caution? If I walk down the street talking about film ratings, will women faint and strong men weep? Will grannies cover their children's ears? Will people's heads explode like in Scanners? Cool! How is it that the same general public that isn't ready for a discussion of film ratings somehow survives unfettered access to the entire tawdry Hollywood oeuvre via the pirate DVD market completely unscathed? Somebody should look into that.
Tibet: Transformation and tradition: Peter Firstbrook, producer of the BBC special A Year In Tibet, writes about the clashes between traditions and modern life in Tibet's towns and cities.
Police kill man who hijacked Australian tourists: From an article by Lydia Chen in The Shanghai Daily:
Police in the capital city of Shaanxi Province shot a man dead after he allegedly hijacked a travel bus with explosives and took a foreign tourist and an interpreter hostage today, Xinhua news agency reported.
Police pulled the trigger after negotiations failed, the report said.
But The Associated Press said the man took 10 Australians as hostages. The hostages were not hurt during the process, the Xinhua report added.
Do you believe in God?: This links to an Internet poll with that simple question.
Internet polls are notoriously unreliable, nonetheless it's interesting that the current ratio for the U.S., a notoriously religious country, is 58% atheist vs. 42% theist. China's numbers are currently 50% vs. 50% This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
45 Years of Lei Feng: Jeremiah at the Granite Studio is not a believer: Anyway, in case you missed it, Lei Feng was a young soldier in the PLA whose selfless devotion to his brother troops, to the people, and especially to Mao Zedong and his country made him a role model for young Chinese. If you want to think of him as a cross between a boy scout, GI Joe, and "Opie" from the old Andy Griffith Show, go ahead I won’t stop you.
Also: previous stories about Lei Feng on Danwei.
Protests against new PX factory location: From Edward Cody in the Washington Post:
Violent protests erupted in several southern Chinese fishing towns after residents heard that a chemical factory rejected as environmentally dangerous by the nearby city of Xiamen would be built in their area instead, witnesses and other residents said Monday.
The protesters, who began their uprising peacefully Thursday, clashed repeatedly with baton-wielding police Friday and Saturday in several towns near the Gulei Peninsula, about 50 miles southwest of Xiamen on the Taiwan Strait, they said. A dozen people were injured and carried away for treatment in local hospitals, and about 15 were arrested, according to demonstrators and their family members.
ICBC seals deal with South African bank: South Africa's Business Day has details of ICBC's $5,6bn in Standard Bank. The deal has been completed, giving ICBC a 20% stake in Africa’s largest lender.
Super ministries!: In the The Financial Times Richard McGregor, who probably has the best Party sources of any Western journalist currently working in Beijing, reports:
China to launch revamp with merged ministries
China will launch a shake-up of government at the annual session of its top legislative body, with the formation of 'super-ministries' intended to streamline administration and reduce meddling by minor bureaucrats in state businesses.
The long-term structural reform of government will be discussed alongside more urgent tasks facing China’s leadership – in particular, the battle against inflation, now at an 11-year high.
Journal wins, then denied, media award: ESWN translates an account of Publicity Department intereference in an award that the newspaper Southern Weekly was to have presented to Yanhuang Chunqiu, a journal of history and politics:
Since the summer of 1989, when certain leaders of the Central Publicity Department went after certain units, they never issue official documents. They only make a notice by telephone. When you ask him who he is, he never says so. He gives the impression of stealthiness (maybe he is afraid, but what is he afraid of?). Usually, he only says that he is from a certain department within the Central Publicity Department.
Should Yanhuang Chunqiu have received this particular award? When this writer called Du Daozheng, he said that he did not care because the people know the truth and he does not want to argue over this. This particular award was based upon a popular vote with at least half of the official media persons voting for Yanhuang Chunqiu. Should public opinion be ignored and overridden so easily?
Can Chinese thinkers change the world?: Prospect magazine has published an article by Mark Leonard described thusly:
Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony
An excerpt:
Chinese thinkers argue that all developed democracies are facing a political crisis: turnout in elections is falling, faith in political leaders has declined, parties are losing members and populism is on the rise. They study the ways that western leaders are going over the heads of political parties and pioneering new techniques to reach the people such as referendums, opinion surveys or 'citizens' juries.' The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
Hack into Freedom City: A blogger infiltrates the residential complex where Zeng Jinyan is under house arrest to deliver milk powder for her baby. John Kennedy translates the gripping tale of "A Professionally Executed Milk Powder Delivery".
Star athlete skips out on political duties: Richard Spencer of The Daily Telegraph has a post on his blog about China's star hurdler Liu Xiang.
Along with actress Gong Li and director Zhang Yimou, Liu is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference or CPPCC, the government body often compared to the House of Lords. Liu is missing this year's CPPCC meetings because of an athletic meet in Spain, and some people are displeased.
Nigeria should copy, not beg from China: Issa Aremu of the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust has published an opinion piece about Sino-Nigerian relations and what Nigeria can learn from China. He has an interesting perspective but also a few illusions about China.
News agency restrictions: US and EU file suit: From The Times:
Concerns about Chinese restrictions on foreign financial news providers escalated into a trade dispute yesterday when the European Union and the United States filed a joint formal complaint at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The row centres on Beijing's decision two years ago to require companies such as Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg to distribute their information through a branch of Xinhua, the state news agency, rather than deal directly with their clients, such as banks.
"He is unsatisfied with China": Josh at Cup of Cha gets appraised by the PSB.
Rob Gifford on The Daily Show: A video: Long time China correspondent and author of The China Road Rob Gifford faces Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
Next stop on Line 10: Guanghua Lu...I mean Jintaixizhao: The tbjblog investigates a strangely-named subway stop:
Let’s say you’re opening a subway station smack dab in the middle of the CBD, within the shadow of the iconic CCTV Tower and the soon-to-be-tallest building in Beijing. Next door is the well-known Kerry Centre and the nearest intersection is Guanghua Road and the Third Ring Road.
What would you name it?
How about Jintaixizhao, rehashing a reference to a centuries-old scenic vista long lost to the sands of time that few modern day residents have any clue about? This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
Pre-Olympics Xinjiang terrorism media blitz: Dave at the Mutant Palm blog gives a run-down of the various angles the state media has brought to the issue of Xinjiang security: The third week of February was awfully busy for Xinjiang terrorism news.
First, there were reports of a Uyghur terrorist cell being raided by the police in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. The initial report appears to have been in Singtao Daily, the Hong Kong-based international Chinese language newspaper chain, on February 14th. It said that 18 were killed on February 4th in a huge police assault on an apartment in the Happy Gardens (幸福花园) complex, and two security officers were also killed in the full-scale gun battle. The report was subsequently carried over in smaller web publications on the Mainland like Zaobao, but officials would only confirm that there was an incident, nothing more.
Annual legislature meetings begin in Beijing: Jason Leow in The Wall Street Journal reports:
China's legislature starts its annual session this week and is expected to focus on a slate of senior cabinet appointments and proposals for what could become the biggest government restructuring in at least a decade.
The meetings, currently called 'NPC and CPPCC Annual Session' in government literature, will last for the next 11 days. The China Daily has a large special section on the meetings.
All about the new airport: David Feng has posted a huge gallery of captioned images of Beijing's massive new airport.
No more free lunch, even here?: At Global Voices Online, Bob Chen shows some netizen reactions to a copyright-infringemet lawsuit launched against P2P platform Xunlei, and explains how the case is different from the one that Baidu beat back.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).
A cup of tea for dissidents: From Mure Dickie in The Financial Times: China’s foreign minister on Thursday scornfully waved aside criticism of his country’s human rights record, suggesting local police would be more likely to give dissidents a cup of tea than to arrest them.
The comments by Yang Jiechi come amid what human rights groups have called a crackdown on ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August, including the recent detention of several high-profile social activists.
Lijiang's war on "white pollution": Do new regulations actually have a chance of eradicating plastic grocery bags? At China Dialogue, Xuedong Ke looks at Lijiang's five-year experience with a plastic bag ban:
on April 1, 2003, Gucheng district announced its ban on "production, sale and use of disposable, non-biodegradable polystyrene and plastic packaging." A small group was established to monitor the ban, and the first battle in Lijiang’s war on white pollution had begun. Soon environmental workers and volunteers were distributing leaflets about "white pollution". There were announcements on the local television station every hour.
The ban came into formal effect on July 1. At the time, Zhang was deputy head of group behind the huge political offensive, which saw posters put up across the city explaining the ban. "Using plastic bags is extremely convenient; it was an ingrained habit," he said. "Without pressure no one would change. So we had to get everybody involved, and make sure the message was spread into every single household."
One child policy to be amended?: From Mure Duckie of The Financial Times:
China is considering a gradual raising of its limits on the number of children a couple can have, according to a senior of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
The comments by Zhao Baige, family planning vice-minister, highlight growing concern about the demographic implications of the strict and sometimes harshly enforced population control rules that are a cornerstone of Chinese social policy. This article is from Danwei.org
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