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 Peninsula Metropolis Daily
August 6, 2008 Today's Peninsula Metropolis Daily, a daily newspaper whose distribution is limited to Qingdao, a coastal city in Shandong Province, ran a big headline celebrating the newspaper's recent ascent to "the 55th strongest newspaper of the world".
The headline ("strongest") is a little misleading because the ranking mentioned is based only on circulation number which gives the papers in populous countries like India and China an edge and enables the boring and unread People's Daily to easily beat any American newspaper.
The ranking is allegedly from a report recently released by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). Previously, Danwei reported on the WAN ranking of 2005: Reference News (参考消息) was ranked eighth newspaper worldwide in terms of circulation, while the People's Daily came in ninth.
The statistics quoted by the Peninsula Metropolis shows that the Reference News has moved ahead to the fifth place, while The People's Daily is still number nine.
Beijing's newspapers fared badly in the rankings. Despite the city's constant boast that it has a more educated population than any other city, the only Beijing newspaper on the list is Beijing Evening News, which ranked 72, behind many other Chinese regional newspapers.
According to the list, the top Chinese regional newspaper in term of circulation is the Nanjing basedYangze Evening News ranking 21th, followed by three Guangzhou-based newspapers: Guangzhou Daily, Information Times, and New Express.
Although Danwei could not confirm the authenticity of the ranking, several blunders make the article seem less than trustworthy: There is no way that one newspaper the New York Times could appear on the same list twice, but it does, at 45th and 93th place.
Southern Metropolis Daily, ranked 29th in 2005, has totally disappeared from this year's top 100 as reported in the Peninsula Metropolis article.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Keeping a legal pet dog can be an expensive proposition in Guangzhou; a license to own a dog costs 10,000 yuan and each year a dog owner must pay an additional 6,000 yuan for a medical "check". The government passed these laws in 1997 in hopes of reducing the number of dogs in the city. However, the plan hasn't worked out the way lawmakers had hoped. According to today's New Express, only 842 of the 100,000 dogs in Guangzhou are legal.
Some lawmakers are trying to address this problem; according to the New Express, a draft of a bill to replace the old pet-policy was recently presented to Guangzhou's People's Congress. If the bill is passed, the fee for a dog will drop to 700 yuan for the original license and 300 yuan a year after that. Dogs used as guides for the blind people will be exempt from the fee.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 Better than fishwrap This woven basket, purchased a few months ago for US$9.99 at The Container Store, a US housewares chain, is constructed out of old, rolled-up mainland Chinese newspapers.
In a few cases, the snippets of text visible on the rolled-up strips make it possible to identify general location or date of the newspapers. Pictured above are a couple of phone numbers in Shandong Province; on the opposite side of the basket is a fragment of an article about the Lifan 520 automobile that first ran in Guangdong's Information Times in 2006. This article is from Danwei.org
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Not long after the, er, reshuffling of several English language magazines in Beijing, this news comes out of Shanghai:
About a week ago, a source sent us the following email:
Since you carried a news item on the new Shanghai Star publications early this year when they were launched you might be interested in hearing the latest in this sad saga.
The following note is being sent to freelancers who wrote for Shanghai Star Weekend and Shanghai Star Business Journal by a representative of Bridgehead Media, the company that had subcontracted some of the production and advertising work of the new look publications from China Daily the owner of the titles:
"I am sure you have already heard that Bridgehead Media is closed and out of business, (former CEO) Greg Burnard has been misrepresenting a false investor as well as a false attorney, additionally he committed fraud and embezzlement of company funds. He is currently being sought by the police and it is our understanding he has already vacated his flat and is on the move, please let us know if you hear or see him as this will be passed to the authorities. Additionally in regards to freelance payments, as the company is out of business there will be no freelance payments available."
All of Bridgehead's employees have been laid off (around 30 to 40 people), and the Shanghai Star writers and editors have been told their May salaries, due to be paid on June 1, won't be paid until the end of the month.
Apparently Bridgehead, or what is left of it, is now telling freelancers they will eventually get paid, but not for awhile. Staff paychecks will be about a month late.
Mr Burnard's whereabouts are unknown. This article is from Danwei.org
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 New Travel Weekly
May 19, 2008 New Travel Weekly (旅游新报), a Chongqing-based newspaper was suspended from publishing for using bikini-clad women on the front page of its May 19 issue. The newspaper was accused of "violating journalistic ethics" in its earthquake reporting.
The president and the chief editor were both dismissed from office despite the fact that the newspaper had issued an apology on the Internet.
The controversial issue was published during the sensitive time of the three-day national mourning for the quake victims. Most newspapers nationwide were printed in black and white and advertisements were cut down to a minimum.
The New Travel Weekly was not alone being insensitive in earthquake reporting. Sichuan TV was also accused of playing down the severity of the earthquake and kept broadcasting entertainment after the quake happened.
More pictures of the "earthquake girls" can be found on this blog (Chinese language).
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This article is from Danwei.org
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The China Daily published a Xinhua report today:
Hu Jia sentenced to 3.5 years in jail
Hu Jia was sentenced Thursday by the Beijing First Intermediate People's Court to three and half years imprisonment, with one year deprivation of political rights, for subverting the state.
The verdict said Hu, a married father aged 34 and the holder of a college degree, libeled the Chinese political and social systems, and instigated subversion of the state, which is a crime under Chinese law.
Considering Hu's confession of crime and acceptance of punishment, the court decided the ruling with leniency and announced a less harsh prison sentence.
The court heard that from August 2006 to October 2007, Hu published articles on overseas-run websites, made comments in interviews with foreign media, and repeatedly instigated other people to subvert the Chinese political and socialist systems.
In his two website articles, 'China Political Law-enforcement Organs Create Large-scale Horror ahead of CPC National Congress', and 'One Country Doesn't Need Two Systems', Hu spread malicious rumors, libel and instigation, in an attempt to subvert the state's political and socialist systems, the court said in the verdict.
The articles written by Hu and his interviews were widely relayed by overseas-run websites, the court said.
The news has also been covered, in a somewhat different way, by Chris Buckley of Reuters (filed misleadingly by The Guardian as a sport story, by John Kennedy at Global Voices, and by Simon Elegant at the Time blog, and soon in the magazine after the traditional media gears grind their way to it.
Interestingly, the Xinhua report that ran in the China Daily was published on Xinhua's English website this morning, but has since been deleted. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Health section from The Beijing News, March 4, 2008 This week's health section from The Beijing News features a cover story on abortion and birth control, titled "Reject Abortion, Seek Out the Best Birth Control Methods."
In the introduction, reporter Qiu Jionghua contrasts the advertisements for "painless abortions" that frequently appear in Beijing's newspapers, billboards, and public transport, with figures that suggest that 10% of gynecological conditions are related to improper abortions, and one third of infertility in women is abortion-related.
Inside, the feature is divided into two parts: one page of information about the abortion techniques and their associated risks, and another page containing basic knowledge about other birth control methods.
 Fruit of the womb The cover image, an evocative papaya, bears the following caption:
Medical experts say that health problems abortion causes in Chinese women have become increasingly apparent.
Wang Yuanzheng, the reporter who created the image, was originally going for something a bit darker (see the photo at right, taken from Wang's blog).
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 Detail of Taizhou Evening News for 20 February This clip from the front page of the Taizhou Evening News comes from the blog of Zan Aizong, who noticed that the lead article, discussing the Zhejiang city's import/export economy, contained the line "For imports, the top five countries were Japan, the USA, Korea, the Netherlands, and Taiwan." Obviously, the presence of Taiwan on the list means that "countries" ought to be "countries and regions."
Whose fault is it? Zan traces it back to a report from the Hangzhou Customs Office that was posted on 24 December, 2007 (here's a screenshot of the page before it was edited). The Taizhou Evening News report was basically a verbatim copy of that report.
Zan also remarks:
Taizhou Evening News is a tabloid run by the Taizhou Daily, the official organ of the Taizhou Municipal Party Committee. It has no publication license, so according to current Chinese law it is an "illegal publication." It has published 2,768 issues to date, every one as a normal, illegal publication.
At the bottom of the front page is the line 刊号：浙字第024号, indicating that the paper is registered under the license number "Zhejiang #24" rather than a standard national number issued by GAPP. It's apparently able to do this by virtue of its affiliation with the local party newspaper. Calling Taiwan a country is just one unfortunate expression of a larger problem facing the Taizhou Evening News and other local newspapers that are caught between the party and the marketplace. Here's how one Taizhou resident described the newspaper in 2006:
Taizhou Evening News has been publishing for quite a while now, and a few reporters and departments displayed some forward progress. But my overall impression is that it is content poor and not as readable as one would like. When my workplace was putting in this year's paper subscriptions, the majority of my colleagues said that the Evening News wasn't interesting, but the Taizhou Commercial Daily was OK. So the work unit subscribed to a copy of the Commercial Daily for practically every office—dozens of subscriptions—but only signed up a couple of Evening News subscriptions, just for appearances.
The Evening News is stingy in its format and even stingier in its content. It lays out news stories like advertisements, and the rare bit of local news is always about fights and theft, most of it turned in by a correspondent at the police department. This makes for good after-dinner conversation, but it's also great propaganda for the public security system. And the majority of the international, domestic, sports, and entertainment stories actually come from Xinhua or some newspaper or other. Sometimes the source isn't even noted, and the byline is a name that may or may not be real—who knows if the author got paid. Regardless, it's all stuff copied off the Internet and no one's going to go after you for it....
They say that the world is a global village. Essentially, this is because the development of the Internet and other modern communications technology means that any single place can be closely connected to the entire world. In Taizhou, we can learn about the world without going out of the house, and we can obtain huge amounts of information quickly and cheaply. In this age, newspapers—particularly local newspapers—need to be smart if they want to survive and win readers.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 People's Daily, November 27, 1975 Geremie R. Barmé is an academic, filmmaker, and author of the recently published Forbidden City.
In September 1999, the weekly magazine Beijing Scene (of which your correspondent was managing editor) published an article by Barmé about Chinese newspapers, comparing the press at the end of the Twentieth Century to the newspapers that Barmé was reading in Shenyang in 1976, the final year of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Rereading that article in 2008 on the first day of the Year of the Rat, I am struck by how much changed in the Chinese press between 1976 and the 1990s, but how little the serious newspapers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have changed since then. While Beijing has succeeded in remaking itself as a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis, its newspapers are, in some ways, fossilized relics subject to the same levels of interference and intimidation from the central government as a decade ago. It's both laughable and tragic.
Thankfully, the Internet has made possible an unprecedented diversity of information and opinion to the China. On that note, below is the article, republished with permission from the author.
Paper Tigers
by Geremie R. Barmé
China's State-run press has become dramatically more dynamic since the dark days of the (1966-76) Cultural Revolution, when Chinese newspaper editors did everything they could to keep readers from knowing too much.
At major intersections throughout Beijing, in newsstands on the crowded shopping streets of Shanghai, and in all of China's hundreds of towns and cities, newspapers, magazines and journals vie for the attention of passersby from those on bikes and fresh off the subway, to pedestrians and commuters caught in peak hour gridlock. The average stall carries dozens of newspapers of all descriptions. There are the local dailies and evening news (though you rarely find the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily there-most subscriptions go to government offices), weekend broadsheets, and the specialist press with titles like Shanghai Securities News, Soccer, Computer Weekly, Movie and Drama Weekly, China Business, The New Family Press, Shoppers Guide, Democracy and Rule by Law Pictorial, Health Press, and any number of news digests with articles gleaned from the nearly 2,000 papers produced in the People's Republic today. If your Chinese isn't up to speed, there is always the China Daily, a rather stodgy official English-language newspaper; though in hotels and cafes frequented by foreigners you can pick up a copy of one of the edgy semi-official weeklies like the Beijing Scene you're holding, run by Anglophone expats.
A typical edition of the Beijing Evening News, the capital's afternoon paper, might contain headlines on the 'breaking news' about the latest political campaign; a major antique smuggling scam; the latest info about a favorite soccer team; a report on a national anti-drug campaign exhibition; a story on exhaust levels of cars fresh off the assembly line; and a story about how a local worker saved a drowning child.
The precious print space that is left over is crammed with advertisements for electronic goods, deodorants, computers, a news hotline, and of course a weather forecast. Even the fold between the front and back page is utilized with half-inch slabs of information going down the spine of the paper, movie and theater listings included. Then there are promos for colleges that teach everything from English and accountancy to computing and cooking. The other 15 pages of the paper are similarly packed with hard and soft news, ads and commentaries.
Southern Weekend, produced in the city of Guangzhou near Hong Kong, is one of the most popular weeklies in the country. It advertises its 20-page round-up of news, gossip and investigative journalism with the slogan: "Everything we do is aimed at letting you know even more." Once, not all that long ago, Chinese newspaper editors did everything they could to keep readers from knowing too much. When I first started reading mainland Chinese newspapers in earnest, I was equipped with both the leisure and the obsessive need to acquire the newspaper-analyzing habits of those inured to the official press by a lifetime of exposure. It was the early 1970s, the dying years of the Cultural Revolution, and I was an exchange student studying in Shenyang (formerly Mukden), capital of the northeastern province of Liaoning, hundreds of miles from Beijing. When the newspapers arrived in the morning, the first thing you did was take note of the "Highest Directive" (zuigao zhishi) from Chairman Mao, printed in bold type within a box in the top right-hand corner of the front page of every newspaper. But then there were not that many newspapers to worry about. Since the local press was strictly off-limits to foreigners-as it was believed that regional news could provide the inimical imperialist powers which we represented with state secrets and dangerous information-our reading was generally limited to the People's Daily, the official Communist Party organ, and Guangming Daily, a paper supposedly aimed at the educated.
I had spent time in Beijing and Shanghai, but only in Shenyang did a quizzical Chinese roommate finally induct me into the elusive art of decoding the daily press. For literate people of his generation—he was a former Red Guard who had done a stint in the countryside before being made a cadre and subsequently sent to university-learning to interpret the oracular pronouncements of Mao and read between the lines of the newspapers was not another academic subject, but vital for both political survival and peace of mind.
Soon I too learned the subtle significance of choice of font size and bold and italics, the complex relevance of choice of typefaces (from "Imitation Song" to "Wei Inscription"), the import of vertical versus horizontal typesetting, the endless intimations of headlines as well as the exegesis of cryptic quotations from classical texts. Above all, I gradually acquired a fledgling skill in deciphering photographs; and, mind you, not just the crudely airbrushed now-you-see-it and now-you-don't news pictures that instantly rewrite history, those lacunae on the page that leave in their wake gaping holes that everyone can fill in mentally.
I had to learn to "read" (I use the term not as a tired post-structuralist buzz word but as a translation of the Chinese verb du) the light and shade of each image in the People's Daily and its local clones. The hieratic significance of who stood where, near or in front of whom, required a trained eye and a mind attuned to the twists and turns of Party Central politics. It was significant, for example, that Mao's wife Jiang Qing appeared in news photographs with her head covered at the state-organized leave-taking of the corpse of the recently-deceased Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976. To readers it indicated that she regarded the widely-mourned leader with contempt, and it was further proof that she was plotting to overturn his policies. But sometimes you literally had to see through the paper to get the point.
A notorious incident involving the People's Daily in 1966 illustrates the dangers of cheap paper. On page two, after the de rigueur bloated image of Chairman Mao, was a headline that read "Overthrow Imperialism and the Reactionaries in Every Country!" Held up to the light the word "Reactionaries" was branded squarely on the Great Helmsman's forehead. The editor responsible was severely reprimanded for his serious political error. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the gnomic Highest Directive from the Chairman that warned people which way the political winds were blowing. These quotations appeared in a privileged position at the top right-hand corner of page one, a spot once reserved for international news stories or headlines, in a box that was known as the baoyan'r, literally 'the eye of the paper.' While hacks and humorists during this past century have staked out the back page of Chinese dailies, the baopigu (or 'paper's bum') for their short casual essays and cultural commentary, the baoyan'r served as a the real focus for a paper, a veritable darkened glass through which to observe the machinations of the engineers of the human soul in Party Central.
Elliptical utterances were issued from on high and were aimed at cajoling and guiding the hearts and minds of the nation. One of my favorites appeared in the press and on mammoth slogan boards in the cities—I recall it set up on a huge billboard, white-on-red, at the main entrance to Fudan University in Shanghai where I studied for a year in 1974-75: "Class struggle is like a net. Cast it wide and all is ensnared (jieji douzheng shi gang, gang ju mu zhang)." A political thought for the day to help comrades engaged in their life-and-death struggle with the recalcitrant and omnipresent bourgeoisie, one that sounded the alarm about the 'latest shifts in class struggle.'
When I first studied in the daily Party press 'capitulationists' (touxiangpai) were the most talked about bêtes noires. The aged Chairman (then 82 and only one year from death) shepherded the campaign against these shadowy figures who would betray the victories of his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His directives printed in "the eye of the paper" and peppered throughout editorials and articles enjoined the nation to re-read the 17th-century novel The Water Margin, a tale of a group of rebels eventually betrayed by Song Jiang, a former martial hero who capitulates to the imperial court and then sets about destroying his fellow peasant insurgents.
I too learned what was meant when, on September 4, 1975, the People's Daily published a quotation from Mao Zedong which in turn quoted the early 20th century writer Lu Xun's criticism of the novel. Lu Xun got it right, Mao remarked, for he said: "The Water Margin is quite explicit: because the rebels didn't directly oppose the Emperor, the moment the imperial forces arrive they give in and are pacified. Then they help the Court attack other brigands, rebels who didn't want to accord with 'the way of Heaven.'"
Everyone soon understood Song Jiang to be the code name for Deng Xiaoping, a modern-day capitulationist denounced in the mid-1970s as an Unrepentant Capitalist Roader for introducing educational and industrial reforms to a country becalmed by the squalls of lunatic politics. Deng's support for privatization and economic liberalization in the early 1960s led, during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, to his banishment to the countryside. Brought back to Beijing in 1972 to serve as Mao's lieutenant, now a few years later he was threatening to "reverse the verdict" (fan'an) on his past crimes and return to his heinous bourgeois ways.
And so the second purge of Deng Xiaoping in 1975-76 unfolded in the pages of the nation's press, not at first through direct attacks on his policies, but in oblique references to a classical novel and the treacherous acts of the fictional turncoat Song Jiang. As Mao said: "This was a peasant rebellion that had bad leaders: they capitulated." Everyone knew that capitulation meant reneging on the Cultural Revolution and surrendering to the bourgeoisie. Whispers intimated what was happening in Beijing, but Deng was not denounced by name in the media until his ouster many months later.
For a 20 year-old foreign student this was all a delightfully esoteric and bizarre thrill. While our sibling middle-class hippies jetted off to tune in, turn on, and drop out in exotic climes in North Africa, India and
Southeast Asia, we western foreign students in China were playing political and cultural tourists. We could afford the luxury of debating Maoist arcana; though we wanted to believe everything we saw and heard would influence the world revolution, in reality what was really going on hardly impinged on us. Veiled literary references and court intrigue over rice gruel and salted vegetables in the morning appealed to the cultural voyeur in me, but for a population whose political and personal fate hinged on these auguries, reading the daily newspaper was a dispiriting and, more often than not, baffling chore.
Apart from the Highest Directive in the paper's eye, a mote in the medium so to speak, virtually all articles and news items were strewn with quotations from Mao, invariably printed in bold type. Everything from prolix theoretical screeds to statistics on pig-iron production had to be sanctified by a print-bite by Mao or one of the approved socialist worthies: Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin. Even when we wrote essays in class about classical Chinese literature, our teachers expected us to quote the Marxist-Leninist classics. Just as devotees of what in mainland China is dubbed 'post-studies' (houxue) today will pay homage to the secular saints of theory whether they be Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha or Jacques Deleuze in lengthy prefatory quotes, or tireless cap-doffing as they identify the modish loci classici for their ideas, so everyone made impotent tributes to the Great Proletarian Revolutionaries in Cultural Revolution China.
But just as suddenly as the bold quote became a journalistic standard in the 1960s, it faded from public view. I remember well the precipitate disappearance-first of bold type and then of the ubiquitous Mao quote—in early 1978. (Note: See the Communist Party Department of Propaganda 'Circular on Not Using Bold Type to Print Quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao in Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Documents in the Future [23 March 1978],' in Barme, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, pp.128-29.)
While relatively easy for the authorities to order an end to bold quotes, or to repudiate one style of Cultural Revolution journalism as "fake, overblown and vacuous" (jia da kong), official attempts to transform the mainland print media into a source of useful information, entertainment and even hard news was (and in many cases still is) a slow and arduous process. As in other socialist countries under draconian media control, only in fiction and in the pages of literary journals could a vision of society not completely at odds with people's lived experience be expressed.
Newspapers have literally taken decades to catch up. Today, mainland Chinese news publishing still exists within (sometimes fairly lax) guidelines determined by the Communist Party leadership, and they basically want to hear good news. Indeed, Hu Yaobang, the most enlightened Party General Secretary (who was purged in late 1986) declared that although 20 percent of paper reports could cover negative stories, 80 percent had to be positive and uplifting.
Under Jiang Zemin the percentage may be fluid, but for the moment the heyday of Chinese journalism when bold writers constantly pushed the limits of permissibility is often replaced by a cozy relationship between propagandists and commercial media pragmatists. It is little wonder then that Rupert Murdoch has his gimlet eye set on China. And this is where a new, globalizing pressure for change may come from.
To comply with conditions for entry to the World Trade Organization, China is allowing foreign media conglomerates to expand their businesses on the mainland. Over the past few years local Chinese media corporations have been formed to prepare for the competition, with many of the smaller, special-interest papers that appeared in the early 1990s being closed down or taken over by big brother companies.
As global capital and Chinese socialism get into bed with each other, there is little doubt among my comrades in the Chinese media that these two forces already speak the same language; both long ago learned to whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears.
People's Daily cover from Enorth.com.cn This article is from Danwei.org
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The Jinan-based Qilu Evening News, like most evening papers in China, mixes newsier items with ludicrously-overwritten "news of the weird"-style reports. This one's a dramatic re-enactment of a short item from the police blotter:
Busy line on a buried phone spooks filial son
Grave-robbing villager nicked cell-phone
12 December: Villager Mr. Chen never imagined that a month after his mother's death, the cell phone that had been buried with her would still be in use.
The story begins one months ago, with the tragic death of Chen's mother, who lived in certain village in Anzhuang, Feicheng [Shandong Province]. The entire family was distraught, and as a filial son, Chen bought a monoblock Nokia to bury with her. He made sure the phone was charged, and he installed the phone chip his mother had used while she was alive. This symbolized that he could contact his mother in heaven any time he wished.
But just a few days ago, Chen accidentally dialed his mother's phone number, which was still stored in his own mobile phone. He heard a busy signal. Thinking he had mis-dialed, he called again, and the line was still busy. But the phone had clearly been buried—at this thought, Chen broke out into a cold sweat. That evening, he lay awake tossing and turning. The more he thought about it the queerer it seemed, so he finally told his wife. After talking it over, the two decided to make an inquiry at the mobile company the following day. They had just asked their question when, to their surprise, something even stranger turned up: the computer showed that the mobile phone had racked up a month's worth of charges after his mother had died. Man and wife stared speechless at each other and fright seized their hearts. Wracking their brains, they decided to report the matter to the police, and have them figure it out.
After they made a report to the Anzhuang station of the Feicheng PSB, an investigation started immediately. From the mobile company they obtained the phone's call record, which ultimately showed that a certain Mr. Sun, a 62-year-old villager, was the prime suspect in the case. In the face of iron-clad evidence, Sun bowed his head and admitted his guilt. He confessed to the following facts: on the afternoon of 1 November, when Chen was busy with his mother's funeral, he discovered a monoblock Nokia among the burial effects. Greed was kindled in his heart, and at 11 pm on 14 November, he dug up the grave, stole the mobile phone, and made use of it.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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The Beijing News (新京报) has always tried to be a serious newspaper, even though many of the editors who actually dared to be serious all got sacked at the end of 2005.
Nonetheless, one feature of the paper that has been seriously uninterrupted is the Beijing Babes (北京宝贝) column, which started in November 2003. Last week, The Beijing News published an entire supplement of Beijing Babes — a beauty competition in which all the contestants wear clothing made from copies of The Beijing News. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Subway [bicycle] parking to start offering monthly passes. A headline from this evening's Mirror substitutes a picture of a bicycle for the word itself. The web version plays it straight.
Certain subway stations in Beijing are offering a limited number of monthly parking passes. Bicyclists who don't want to carry two jiao every day, or who are tired of fighting to wedge their bike into an overcrowded lot, can get VIP access to a special parking area reserved for monthly pass holders. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Don't mess with Henan cops Netease picks up a photo story that most of today's newspapers have run with: a demonstration of force by the police in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province. The image reproduced here shows a police officer with a 'net gun' used to catch dogs, and protective armor.
In addition to the scary Robocop outfit, Zhengzhou's police have also recently demonstrated the gun skills of their plain clothes officers. This article has photos of police officers with guns, and the explanation that "when there is a serious public security case, the police officers can protect the citizens by wounding or killing the criminals". This article is from Danwei.org
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In the letters section of this week's Southern Weekly, a reader expresses displeasure at the paper's practice of printing taboo words in full rather than replacing them with substitute characters or avoiding them altogether. (You may want to reference this post for background on the proper usage and interpretation of Beijing slang.)
The letter was drawn from the SW online forums. Netizen Ye Feng writes:
In the 9 August issue of Southern Weekly there was an article on "Chinese-style English." The end of the piece was marred by the word 牛逼 [lit. "cow vagina", meaning "cool" or "stubborn"]. It was no isolated incident. On 20 September, Lu Minghe's report on the Mazda 6 incident had the word 歪日滴 ["***" as an expression of surprise]. Shortly after, in the 27 September arts section, Yuan Lei quoted a line from an SMS sent by director Jiang Wen: 不要吹牛逼 ["don't boast"]. That article also had 丢你老母嘿 [Cantonese, "*** your mother"] and even the standard "national curse" 操你妈 ["*** your mother"].
I feel that the language used in Southern Weekly is getting more and more vulgar and frivolous. People might have very direct personalities, but some of the things that they say should not be recorded verbatim. Gutter-talk like 牛逼 and 操你妈, regardless of whether or not the characters are correct, should not be written if at all possible. If avoidance is impossible, then a compromise could be made: replace them with 牛× and ×你妈. This technique is used by some people, and it doesn't influence the readers' ability to understand.
"Regardless of whether or not the characters are correct" refers to the fact that in the examples brought up by Ye Feng, the offending characters 逼 and 操 are themselve substitutes, for 屄 and 肏 respectively.
The editor replies:
"Popular but refined" has always been our goal in running this newspaper. However, when certain articles and certain words are vulgar to such a degree that it causes people to break out into a sweat, we should be vigilant and self-disciplined. Another netizen, Pre-Qin Hermit, believes that the line "Screw the Discipline Commission!" [中纪委算个球!, lit. "worth a ball," see this], uttered by one of Pang Jiayu's subordinates, was the highlight of the 20 September front-page article, "First account of a ten year grudge: 'Deep Throat' emerges in the Pang Jiayu case." How to express language in its original form is something that we will have to consider further, and we also await further suggestions from our readers.
Pre-Qin Hermit's full comment suggests that newspapers have the duty to provide an unaltered transcript as part of their commitment to reporting the facts:
I don't agree with Ye Feng's viewpoint. If it were television, we'd say that the bloody scenes of terrorism ought to be blurred a bit, but there at least that's part of the process to get it out, to show the facts of the news as accurately as possible. Newspapers today, as part of the print media, have to edit or omit "*** your mother" in the name of avoiding frivolous language. Heh, in the 60s or 70s this would have been called the pedantry of the stinking ninth class.
News is supposed be as true to fact as possible. Whether the interviewee says "*** your mother" or "Damn it," they should be reported straight. This lets gives the readers a complete understanding of the focus of the news.
I remember one issue, the one with the report on the emergence of Deep Throat, in which an official said something to the person in question, a line that you could say is the highlight of the whole report. That line was "Screw the Discipline Commission!"
Right there you can get the sense of how much was contained in that news item!
In your suggestion, this line should be changed to "#￥% the Discipline Commission!" Compare the two; I have just one question: is it still news?
So in sum, my personal opinion is that the idea that "the truthfulness of news is not manifested in quoting someone's dirty language" is a statement rife with problems!
For a look at the different ways western media handles this problem, see Language Log.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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