Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Zheng Yuanjie, this year's highest-earning author

Professional list-maker Wu Huaiyao (吴怀尧) is back with the latest edition of China's top 25 authors as ranked by royalty income.

On Wu's list, which appears in the Changjiang Times this year, children's author Zheng Yuanjie seizes the top spot from YA writer and magazine publisher Guo Jingming.

Not much has changed on this year's list. Wu and his team tweaked their methodology this year, expanding their range to include business writers like Wu Xiaobo (#5) for the first time (see below).

As in years past, CCTV's Lecture Room program continues to make money for its lecturers. This year, Qian Wenzhong joins Yu Dan and Yi Zhongtian on the list.

The Rankings
With last year's rank, and change in income (in millions)

1. (2) Zheng Yuanjie (郑渊洁) - children's fairy tales: 20 million (+9)
2. (1) Guo Jingming (郭敬明) - YA books and magazines: 17 million yuan (+4)
3. (3) Yang Hongying (杨红樱) - children's lit: 12 million (+2.2)
4. (15) Dangnian Mingyue (当年明月) - popular history about the Ming Dynasty: 10 million (+7.7)
5. (-) Wu Xiaobo (吴晓波) - chronicler of Chinese entrepreneurial history: 7.6 million
6. (4) Sharon (饶雪漫) - YA books for girls: 6 million (-2)
7. (-) Qian Wenzhong (钱文忠) - explicated the Three Character Classic for CCTV's Lecture Room: 5 million
8. (18) Han Han (韩寒) - YA fiction and essays; the author has a high-profile blog: 3.8 million (+2.1)
9. (-) Li Ke (李可) - The Story of Du Lala's Promotion and its TV, film, and stage adaptations: 3.5 million
10. (9) Shi Kang (石康) - novelist and screenwriter: 3 million (-0.6)
11. (12) Wang Xiaofang (王晓方) - Secretary to the Mayor and other novels of political corruption: 2.8 million (--)
12. (23) Yi Zhongtian (易中天) - Lecture Room author: 2.7 million (+1.5)
13. (13) Yu Qiuyu (余秋雨) - essays on culture and history: 2.4 million (-0.25)
14. (16) Cai Jun (祭骏) - thrillers, the Mysterious Messages (天机) series, 19th Level of Hell, and Who Am I?: 2.15 million (+0.15)
15. (5) Ma Weidu (马未都) - Collector and Lecture Room author: 2 million (-5.45)
16. (-) Liu Zhenyun (刘震云) - popular novelist who moved 400,000 copies of his latest book, A Sentence Worth Ten Thousand Words (一句顶一万句): 1.8 million
17. (-) Cui Manli (崔曼莉) - Ups and Downs (浮沉), the "hidden rules for surviving life in a foreign enterprise": 1.75 million
18. (-) An Yiru (安意如) - poetry, fiction, and most recently an appreciation of kunqu: 1.6 million
19. (-) Wang Meng (王蒙) - the venerable novelist has a new book out on Laozi: 1.5 million
20. (-) Yan Lianke (阎连科) - Elegy and Academe, a satire about higher education: 1.35 million
21. (-) Alai (阿来) - stories about Tibetan culture, most recently a Chinese-language adaptation of the epic of King Gesar: 1.3 million
22. (17) Mai Jia (麦家) - literary spy thrillers with sales driven by a popular TV adaptation and now the ultra-violent movie The Message (风声); Mao Dun Prize winner: 1.25 million (-5.5)
23. (-) Ye Yonglie (叶永烈) - biographer and travel writer. This year he published a mammoth history of the Gang of Four: 1.2 million
24. (-) Kong Ergou (孔二狗) - A popular series about the underworld in the northeast: 1.15 million
25. (7) Yu Dan (于丹) - Lessons from Zhuangzi: 1 million (-4)

Because the list was only released today, there has not been much response from the writers themselves, but it's likely that it will draw the same complaints as in years past: it's imprecise, it ignores everything but royalties on top-selling books, it's based on crude estimations of sales numbers, and to top it off, the whole list is meaningless.

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申请工作，请把您的简历和信息发到sliu@tudou.com

Hu's head is the biggest

Foreign Policy magazine has compiled a list of 'top 100 global thinkers'. They got 63 of them to participate in a survey, blurbed thusly:

Want to know what former President Bill Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, three Nobel Prize-winners, best-selling authors such as Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, and thought leaders from China and Canada to India and Indonesia think about the world's most pressing problems?

Chinese citizens who took part, include erstwhile editor of Caijing magazine Hu Shuli, governor of the People's Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan and legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong

China related findings from the survey:

A majority ... (79 percent) [think] that China China is the inevitable next global power...

... The most influential world leaders outside the United States are Chinese President Hu Jintao (by a large margin), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva...

...Asked what one person we should listen to in order to make the world a better place, our thinkers produced no fewer than 34 nominees, including everyone from the Dalai Lama to James Hansen, Samuel Huntington, Angela Merkel, and Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Predictions for 2010 include: a possible collapse of the Pakistani state, a dollar crisis or Asian asset bubble-burst, civil unrest in China, biological terrorism, and a global pandemic.

The whole report is titled titled The wisdom of the smart crowd, which is even more cringe-inducing than the tired "Hu' pun in my photo caption above.

Despite the title, it's well worth a read, and it comes with charts and illustrations. In the age of Twitter, even sober-minded publications like Foreign Policy need eye candy.

Tiananmen at night

Online magazine Slate's Daniel Gross, currently traveling through China, introduces a short post on Marxism in contemporary Chinese society with a surprising historical claim:

When you stand in Tiananmen Square and look toward the Forbidden City, you see a huge portrait of Mao flanked by slogans. The slogans used to say things like "Long Live Marxism-Leninism." Today, they're simply nationalistic: "Long Live the People's Republic of China!"

Gross must have a particularly lousy tour guide. First he can't manage to find a chocolate bar anywhere in China, and now he's suggesting that explicit mentions of Marx and Lenin once adorned Tiananmen Gate.

The slogans have actually changed very little during the PRC's first six decades. At the ceremony to announce the founding of the republic on October 1, 1949, a portrait of Mao Zedong was hung in the center of the gate and slogans reading "Long Live the People's Republic of China" (中華人民共和國萬歲) and "Long Live the Central People's Government" (中央人民政府萬歲) were placed on either side.

The following year, the eastern side (bearing the "government" slogan) was replaced with "Long Live the Unity of the World's Peoples" (世界人民大團結萬歲). An expression of solidarity and internationalism, this slogan had the added benefit of containing the same number of characters as its counterpart on the other side.

The National Day parade, 1949

The slogans in a more traditional era

The first simplified writing scheme was promulgated in 1956, and just ahead of Labor Day, 1964, the slogans were converted to simplified characters. Although the display has been renovated with updated materials over the last four decades, the text itself has not changed.

Morning Post. November 27, 2009

The top headline on today's Morning Post (北京晨报) concerns neighborhood volunteer teams that are going to go around this weekend and "fine" people using their computers to go on the Internet. Their reasoning? Trying to promote the "moderate use of the Internet." Journalist Dong Zheng (董正) reports:

From 6 o'clock tonight, an alliance made up of many website administrators will make their websites go blank, some will have advertising banners and others creative ideas to remind people to shut down their computers over the weekend. They are also calling the websites of different communities to add the slogan: "No computers over the weekend" and "Use the Internet moderately" at the bottom of their sites. At the same time, web users who responded to the event will change their QQ and MSN status as "No computers over the weekend for 63 hours."

The instigator of the event, Mr. Guan Shaobo (关少波) of Mosh.cn (魔时网) said, "Blank Screen Weekend" will be held over three days, community websites such as Tiantongyuan (天通苑) community website, and Bato.cn (八通网) have already joined us. People who "break the rules" have to be careful over the weekend: "Apart from being 'blank screened,' 'NC63' will also carry out mysterious offline activities." From what Shaobo revealed to us, this weekend there be a "NC63 search team with invisible police dogs." Therefore anyone who wants to use the Internet should be careful this weekend, because when the time comes there will be dozens of people who have responded to the event, and the NC63 volunteers, who have dramatic skills and dare of play, will use invisible "police dogs" on invisible dog leashes to go inside the city's cafes "in search" of computer users in groups of seven.

Once they discover that some web users are using their computers over the weekend, they will give then a "NC63 fine slip," and will, for evidence, take a picture of the computer with the slip on it. The slip itself will be an introduction to NC63, and they will use good intentions influence Internet usage.

Actually, "NC63" activities has been in the past more "radical." Some volunteers decided to rush into a cafe, Internet cafe, and randomly shut off someone's PC or laptop computer. When they considered that these actions might risk Internet user's own "radical" reactions, and that they shouldn't let publicity for a public welfare event affect other people's normal lives and work, they changed to using the "fine slip" instead.

Guan Shaobo has said that the activity is to use egao to tell people that "'virtual' reality can be more fun that being virtual on the Internet!" As for whether this would upset people using the Internet, he explained that he will worry a little, but he will try to take charge of the situation as much as possible, so that no-one is made unhappy. "I will try my best to convince web users, and let them know my good intentions about how they can use the Internet moderately. I believe that I will earn their understanding and support."

On Wednesday this week the same paper reported that 800 stray cats had been found in Tianjin (天津). As a result, cat lovers and volunteers had gotten into a scrabble with the "cat dealer." In today's Morning Post, there is a follow-up report on the fates of the now estimated 690 cats. The article concentrates on the legal battle between the "friends of cats" and the police and the dealer: the police seem to be allied with the dealer, and knows what's going on with the "cat dealing."

Penguin recently published a new translation of Lu Xun's works, The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China. The famous Chinese author's grandson, Zhou Lingfei (周令飞) was in Beijing for the launch of the book. Also on Tudou. Earlier on Danwei: Q&A with translator Julia Lovell. Buy the book on Amazon.

A dorm room in Beijing

Ralph Jennings is a journalist and long time resident of China. He currently lives in Taipei. From mid-2000 to 2006, he had an advice column in the 21st Century weekly newspaper in which he answered letters from thousands of students and young professionals. Below is a letter from the archive, with an introduction by Jennings.

The typical low-rise Chinese dormitory looks like a factory block with brick walls and square windows in perfect rows and columns. Three to four wooden bunk beds lie head to foot in each room. Each student gets a bunk and another slab of wood for a desk. Roommates share a phone, a phone line and at better schools an Internet connection for whoever brings a private computer, inevitably sharing it to avoid looking elitist. Windows leak icy air in the winter. Air conditioning is rare. Public restrooms along the cement-floored halls smell like students seldom aim and the staff seldom cleans. Dormitories may face campus construction sites where workers hammer into the night under stadium lights that go off only at sunrise. Through these walls, twice a year, pour 18-year-olds from all over China, lugging cartoon-decorated toiletry bags, clothes for all occasions, celebrity posters, the shock of leaving young beaux behind in distant hometowns and parents trailing along with second thoughts about whether they should have splurged for an off-campus apartment. The results?

Dear Ralph,

Jerry, via e-mail
Autumn 2003

The Beijing News
November 26, 2009

Today's Beijing News' top story and large graphic is about the arrest of at least four men suspected by police on suspicion of football (soccer) match fixing and arranging illegal gambling.

From Xinhua:

The Ministry of Public Security told Xinhua on Wednesday in the capital city of Liaoning province that they had detained a number of former players, soccer officials and club officials, including Wang Xin, Wang Po, Ding Zhe and Yang Xu, on suspicion of "manipulating domestic soccer matches through commercial bribery."

Some of them were also suspected of gambling through foreign websites, said the Ministry, which heads up the unprecedented large-scale investigation.

Blogger and PR executive Will Moss on social media, online video and PR in China.

Chengguan stopping a vegetable seller on the street. Image source

The Beijing Youth Daily recently reported that the chengguan (the para-police force who are responsible for "cleaning" the streets in cities) in Hefei, Anhui province, are recruiting university-degree level employees.

Commentaries about this appeared in The Beijing News and Beijing Youth Daily: both writers were from ordinary non-media backgrounds, describing themselves as "Employees" (职员) rather than "Editor" (编辑) or "Media worker" (媒体人).

The writer of the editorial from the Beijing Youth Daily, like in the The Beijing News remains skeptical that a change in the education requirements will signal a change in the improvement of chengguan activities. The Beijing Youth Daily comment is translated below.

At the end of February this year, on every big portal website in the city of Hefei appeared an examination application notice: the Hefei chengguan department had released their recruitment notice. After the initial selection process, over 3,000 people were awarded with a chance at a written examination. The rejected applicants, rejected because they did not have a college degree, left in a huff. In the end, 100 people with a degree were lucky enough to enter the gate of the Hefei chengguan department. There were 11 postgraduates. Their academic professions were mainly from the fields of Law, Computer Science, Advertising, Municipal Engineering etc. (November 23, China Youth Daily)

The highly educated members of the chengguan have become a focal point in the city, they've caused a wide spread debate. There are two types of questioning, one is based on the depreciation of learning, they think that "getting postgraduates to be chengguan on duty on the street is akin to using a 'bull knife to slaughter a chicken, it's a typical waste of talent'; the other is a debate about their realistic ability, "the highly educated chengguan's work ability at the lower levels might be no better than the ability of the neighborhood committee auntie." We can't say that these queries don't have their own reasoning, from an objective point of view, there is definitely the suspicion that they are only taking a part to make the whole.

Metropolis Express
November 25, 2009

Amid the wall-of-text on the front page of today's Metropolis Express was this curious headline: "Zhu Deyong invites Yu Hua over for barbecue."

Zhu, a best-selling comic strip artist from Taiwan, and Yu, a novelist from the mainland, are involved in a "creative industries garden" that occupies a square kilometer carved out of Hangzhou's Xixi National Wetland Park:

To date, fourteen celebrities, including TV host Yang Lan, cartoonist Zhu Deyong, authors Liu Heng, Yu Hua, and Mai Jia, painters Pan Gongkai and Wu Shanming, artist Cui Wei, and "father of the creative economy" John Howkins, have signed on to reside in the garden.

Confucian scholar Tu Weiming, Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, Hollywood director Pitof (The Messenger, Mermaid Island [and Catwoman!]), and French Association of Sculpture and Art chairman Georges Saulterre are currently in talks to move into the garden.

Most of the three-page puff piece was devoted to describing the studios the creative types will occupy in the garden:

Heading west, the first studio in the western section belongs to Zhu Deyong.

The sitting room of the 400-square-meter, two-and-a-half-storey building is enclosed on all sides by glass, and a porch jutting out overlooks the waters of the Xixi.

Yesterday afternoon, Zhu Deyong took his wife and friends, including Yu Hua, to visit his new home. Yu Hua's own home faces Zhu's across the water.

"The interior design for this house is going to be strange," said Zhu. Deliberately mysterious, he refused to disclose the style of the renovations.

"Come and see it when I'm finished remodeling."

The one thing he would say was that he was thinking of putting cartoons directly onto the walls, because he advocated a life rich in humor.

Standing on the porch, Zhu had a sudden inspiration. He turned to Yu Hua: "Why don't I put a large stove here? Then I can invite you over for barbecue."

Yu waved him aside. "No, that's not any good. There are so many beautiful trees outside, so what would happen when you smoked them all out? The stove should go indoors, and then you can bring out the meat once it's done cooking."

Taobao user Lee Hawk is offering reserved tickets on one of the 2012 arks.

One billion euro gets you safe passage through the global cataclysm:

2012 Ark Ticket

Buy now price: 10,000,000 yuan
Shipping: Seller pays shipping fees

Product description

Reservations for ark ticket for the year 2012 (blue; no other class available for the time being) are in full swing. Reserve now for a discounted price.
Ticket price: 1,000,000,000 euro. If you pay using some other currency, this will be calculated using an exchange rate set by our company.
This ticket is used for boarding the ark at the Cho Ming landing. Tickets for sale on Taobao for any other landing are all fake.

Disclaimers

1. Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable;
2. The ticket price is for the passenger's transit aboard the ark and does not include transportation to and from the landing or food, entertainment, communication, and any other expenses on board;
3. Children between the ages of 2 and 12 may purchase half-price tickets. Tickets for infants under the age of 2 are 10% of an adult fare, but they are not given a seat of their own. Each adult passenger can have no more than one accompanying infant ticket;
4. Tickets utilize matrix code technology that records identifying information specific to each passenger. Do not fold or smudge the code section of the ticket to ensure that the information is not lost.

Prospective buyers have posed some questions to the seller:

Q: The official price is 1 billion euro, but you're selling them for just 10 million RMB. Are yours real?
A: The price here is also 1 billion euro. I've clearly noted in the product description that the RMB price issue is because of Taobao's restrictions on prices. Such a substantial deal will have to be conducted offline.

Q: After the reconstruction following the disaster, will we receive residence permits? If I purchase two tickets, will I receive a mayorship?
A: Hello. The boat ticket is only good for transit and has no other function, not even expenses while on board.

Q: Will the door be unable to open before we board the boat?
A: You must have faith in the ability of our country to organize massive events. At the very least, there will be no problems with the Chinese ark during the boarding process.

Q: Are there discounts for group purchases?
A: Yes, for group purchases of 1,000 tickets or more. There are additional incentives if you do not need a tax receipt.

Q: Will you accept cash on delivery?
A: I'm sorry, that's not possible. However, it's normal to have misgivings over such a large sum, so the deal can be conducted through a third-party guarantor.

The sale started on 22 November and lasts until the 29th.

Additionally, the same seller is offering a Microsoft Sidewinder FFB2 joystick for 1,200 yuan:

You'll find out after watching 2012 that it's pretty useful to know how to fly a plane!

This winter, stay at home to practice flying!

Yangtse Evening Post
November 24, 2009

For twenty-seven minutes yesterday, the afternoon sun tracked a path across the head of a Buddha statue in a temple on Qixia Mountain.

The Yangtse Evening Post, acting on a tip from a local Nanjinger, arrived at the Hall of the Three Sages, where over one hundred onlookers had assembled by 3 pm.

At 3:17, a ray of light hit the statue in the right eye and gradually moved upward to the middle of the forehead before disappearing. Amazing!

Despite the promise of supernatural speculation extended by the front-page photo and headline ("Marvelous, mysterious light!"), the full-page report goes on to reveal that the light strikes the face of the Buddha statue every year; last year it was observed from November 24 to 27.

The paper was unable to determine whether the phenomenon was intentional.

The statues inside the hall were installed during the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589), but the outer wall was only constructed later. It was renovated into its present form during the reign of the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

Architecture experts told the paper that although the light could possibly be intentional, it may very well be merely a coincidence.

A recent photo of Yang Xianyi (People's Daily)

Sina, citing a microblogger and a publishing industry editor, reports that well-known translator Yang Xianyi (杨宪益) has passed away at the age of 94.

November 23: Sina Book Channel learned that noted translator, scholar of foreign literature, and poet Yang Xianyi passed away today at the age of 95 [Chinese reckoning].

At roughly 4pm on November 23, Xiao Sanlang, a senior Beijing-based journalist, posted an update to his Sina microblog reading, "Yang Xianyi has passed away." Jiang Xiaohu, a reporter and managing editor for the China Book Business Report website, confirmed the news. Jiang said, "Mr. Yang Xianyi passed away this morning. Sorrow."

Yang was born in Tianjin in 1915. He went abroad to study at Oxford, where he met his wife Gladys, with whom he later translated classic works of Chinese literature for the Foreign Languages Press.

Their translations included Selected Works of Lu Xun and a complete English version of A Dream of Red Mansions, which the two began in the early sixties and finished in the following decade after a spell in prison during the Cultural Revolution.

Yang published his autobiography in English as White Tiger.

Southern People Weekly spoke to Yang this year and published a lengthy profile and short interview in the August 3 issue. An excerpt concerning his philosophy of translation:

SPW: Talk a little about Red Mansions: was it like the question of whether Lisao could be translated? Was there any special difficulty in rendering Red Mansions into another language? Foreshadowing through homophones, allusions, metaphors...
Yang: There were those that could be solved, and counterparts could be found in English. Those that could be translated, we translated, and for the others, we added a footnote. Of course, the ones that were solvable were in the minority. Chairman Mao was of the opinion that the Li Sao couldn't be translated. I think that everything can be translated.

The profile explained his encounter with Mao over Qu Yuan's famous poem:

In 1953, as a special CPPCC member, Yang Xianyi met Chairman Mao with a group of scientists and artists. "He had already begun to put on weight, but he looked very healthy. He walked over and shook hands with each of us. Zhou Enlai was beside him and introduced each of us to him." Zhou said to Mao: This is a translator who has rendered the Li Sao into English.

"Chairman Mao loved classical Chinese poetry, and the Li Sao was one of his favorite works. As he extended a sweaty palm to shake my hand, he said, 'So you think that the Li Sao can be translated, hmm?' 'Chairman, surely all works of literature can be translated?'"

Yang believed the poem was a fake and approached it in that spirit. David Hawkes, a friend of Yang's who did his own translation of the Li Sao (as well as another complete edition of Red Mansions, as The Story of The Stone, with John Minford), made the comment that the resulting translation "bears as much resemblance to the original as a chocolate Easter egg to an omelette," an observation that amused Yang.

Update (2009.11.25): Read John Gitting's obituary at The Guardian.

Additionally, a number of bloggers have noted a passage that was deleted from Yang's autobiography for the mainland Chinese edition:

I was full of helpless rage and grief. At midday the BBC office rang me up from London and asked me what I thought of the massacre. I was still in a towering rage and through the phone I denounced the people responsible for the crime, calling them fascists. I said that there were a few die-hards in the top échelon of the Party who could not represent the whole Party. I repeated what I had just heard in the morning and I said that these people were worse than the northern warlords in the early days of the Republic, and worse than the Japanese invaders. Even those earlier fascists had not committed such a heinous crime like this, though this group called themselves Communists. Some days later I heard from friends that they had heard my denunciations through the BBC loud and clear. Many people even made copies of my outbursts. It had made quite a strong impact abroad and I was glad.

One of the first photojournalists in the world, John Thomson, traveled to China and took photographs of Chinese people in the late 19th century. His photographs have been widely circulated, collected by the Wellcome Gallery in England and by National Library of Scotland.

A recent coffee table book presents digitally remastered photographs that Thomson took in China － which includes Manchu noblewomen, and ordinary boatspeople. Examples and extracts can be found at the Levenger Press website.

Thomson's photos have been cataloged before in digital format, for example at the BBC website, and Flickr.

Michael Meyer, author of Last Days of Old Beijing gives permission for an extract from the introduction, which he wrote. The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873 can be bought on the Levenger Press website.

For his art, John Thomson was born at precisely the right time. The Edinburgh photographer’s 1837 birth coincided with a year of events which would shape his life’s work: Victoria ascended to the British throne, Oliver Twist became a serial success, and the continued perfection of the daguerreotype process captured images on silver plates. With Britain’s colonial empire stretching to the Far East, a public accustomed to reading about society’s underbelly, and the invention of photography, Thomson’s travels and documentary portraits of commoners, their homes, and possessions help lay the foundations of photojournalism, which makes this volume of Chinese portraits both historically and artistically unprecedented. The prints that follow also show us how much China has transformed itself, and also how in many ways it remains the “Great Middle Kingdom” of Thomson’s visits during imperial times.

As his contemporary Matthew Brady captured the horrors of American Civil War battlefields, Thomson sailed in 1862 to Singapore to see his older brother, also a photographer. The sojourn in Asia extended to a decade. Thomson journeyed throughout Malaya, Sumatra and India, taking pictures of village life. In Siam and Cambodia, kings sat for portraits before the lanky Scotsman, whose bushy sideburns stretched to his chin. In 1866, Thomson made the first photographic expedition to Angkor Wat. After that, he was hooked. A brief return – to public and court acclaim – to England ended with a short stay in Saigon, then a home and studio in Britain’s newest Asian colony, Hong Kong.

The island (“Fragrant Harbor” in Chinese) was wrested by the United Kingdom after the first Opium War (1839-42), which forcibly opened China’s markets – drug trade included - and the establishment of “treaty ports,” cities where Western merchants and missionaries were free to operate. This cataclysmic humiliation to the Chinese throne was followed by the Second Opium War (1856-1860), when Anglo-French forces sacked numerous cities, including the imperial capital of Beijing, where the two ornate Summer Palaces were ordered looted and burned.

Beijing Youth Daily
November 23, 2009

Le Qian, vice editor-in-chief of the Hebei Youth Daily, was beaten on Saturday night while waiting for an elevator in her apartment building in Shijiazhuang.

The assailant fled after a neighbor opened a door, and Le was rushed to the hospital.

From the newspaper's own report, which was reprinted in today's Beijing Youth Daily, where Le worked until moving to the Hebei paper in 2006:

Le Qian recalls that during the episode, an assailant repeatedly struck at her head with a brick but did not attempt to seize her money or personal belongings.

Afterward, a reporter for this paper who returned to the scene found water and food that Le had purchased lying scattered on the ground outside the elevator. When she was beaten, Le's phone was not stolen, and the assailant had not taken the wallet from the pocket of her coat.

A police officer investigating the scene told the reporter that according to the area and witness descriptions, the suspect was indeed only interested in causing harm, rather than carrying out a robbery.

Le Qian speculated on the attacker's motive:

I don't have family in Shijiazhuang, and I don't have any social contacts apart from the news. The person kept saying "This is for your report, this is for your report," when beating me. I'm thinking that it could be that one of Hebei Youth Daily's watchdog pieces that made someone angry. Hebei Youth Daily frequently runs watchdog journalism and rights-protection reports, and those have probably made some people unhappy. But those reports are based on reason and evidence, and they're speaking for ordinary people.

American comedy show Saturday Night Live's take on Obama's visit to China.

A demonstration against a waste dump in Panyu district (番禺区), Guangzhou, is happening right now. For updates please view hashtag #pylj on Twitter. Photos by @lemoned of the protest are here.

A Google document has been set up collating tweets, a Southern Metropolis Daily article has been taken down and Tianya has been following the events.

Update (2009.11.25): The Daily Telegraph has a good summary of the affair by Malcolm Moore.

Beijing Morning Post
November 20, 2009

The Beijing Morning Post, a daily published by the Beijing Daily Group, underwent a major redesign this week, switching from broadsheet to tabloid format and thoroughly overhauling its content.

Established on July 20, 1998, the Beijing Morning Post was the capital's first commercial morning paper and became the first to print in full color. But in today's newspaper landscape, it has to contend with the much more visible and influential Beijing Youth Daily and The Beijing News without the security of an exclusive distribution deal like the one the Beijing Daily Messenger has with the subway system.

The switch to a smaller format is reportedly intended to make the paper easier for commuters to read.

On today's front page is a photo of Zhang Hui greeting the public after winning his lawsuit against a traffic law enforcement squad in Shanghai's Minhang District Court.

On September 8, Zhang thought he was doing a good deed by giving a ride to a man complaining of stomach pains who flagged him down at the side of the road, but he ended up being slapped with a 10,000 yuan fine for operating an unregistered taxi. Zhang's ordeal turned the attention of the online and offline media onto the local squads' practice of offering rewards to civilians who turned in illegal cabs. Many critics found that the techniques used constituted entrapment.

Although the authorities retracted the fine on October 26, Zhang pressed on with his lawsuit to help other victims gain justice.

Zhang's victory means that the Minhang district traffic enforcement squad will pay his 50-yuan filing fee.

Southern Weekly
November 19, 2009

The Southern Weekly, one of China's more aggressively investigative newspapers, was the only print media outlet to get an interview with Obama. Central government controlled Xinhua and CCTV did not get one-on-one interviews with the American president.

The interview was published in this week's issue which came out today.

You can read a translation into English of the interview on Daily Telegraph Shanghai correspondent Malcolm's Moore's blog.

This afternoon, several journalists and news assistants at foreign media organizations reported on Twitter that their copies of the paper arrived today without the front page, on the back of which was the Obama interview. As Malcolm Moore points out, the interview "appears to have been carefully checked by the Propaganda ministry. Nothing controversial was published."

So who removed the front pages from the news bureaux' subscription copies, and why?

Who knows, but well-known Chinese journalist and blogger Michael Anti noted "Media, if you wanna understand complexity of Southern Weekend's Obama interview, pls translate this tweet"

Obama interview

Rendered into English (with some help from Anti), the tweet in question by shifeike is:

Analysis of the results of Southern Weekly's intimate contact with Obama: The Central Publicity (neé Propaganda) Department is furious, state media is jealous, Southern Weekly is wild with joy, the Guangdong Party secretary is nervous, Southern Weekly editor Xiang Xi cried hard to get a new big chance, [former editor of Caijing Hu] Shuli is depressed. 



The front page is also notable for the large in-house advertisement at the bottom that reads:

"It's not every issue we have an exclusive interview, but you can come here every week to understand China".

Update: The Wall Street Journal's Jason Dean has more about the missing front page.

Update (2009.11.20): Obama wrote a short note to the newspaper:

To the Southern Weekly and its readers ——

I look forward to continuing the ties between our two countries, and congratulate you for contributing to the analysis and flow of vital policy information. An educated citizenry is the key to an effective government, and a free press contributes to that well-informed citizenry.

Was it intended to be printed alongside the interview, in one of the spots occupied by a bottom-page ad? (JM)