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).

Parents of Juyuan students (SW)

Why Juyuan Middle School collapsed: Peijin Chen translates a Southern Weekly investigation into the collapse of Juyuan Middle School:

A later principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, had filed a report regarding the dangerous situation of the building to Dujiangyan education officials in 1998, saying that this building, constructed in 1986, had serious flaws. Officials told Lin to use some steel wires to hold up the part of the roof that was about to collapse rather than add anything to really buttress it. These few wires wrapped together are what held the building together until the day that it collapsed.

There's also a translation of an interview with Lin Qiang, an education official in Sichuan and a former torchbearer.

Carrying the torch: Kaiser Kuo takes part in the Olympic Torch Relay in Hubei Province.

Vantone to lease space in Freedom Tower: Chinese real estate company Vantone will lease space in the Freedom Tower, currently under construction on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York, the New York Times reports:

The Beijing Vantone Real Estate Company plans to build the China Center, a combination chamber of commerce and cultural center, on floors 64 through 69 of the Freedom Tower, at the southeast corner of West and Vesey Streets. Although Vantone has been close to deals at two other sites downtown in recent years, a company executive and officials from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey expressed confidence that it had finally found a home.

"The China Center will be a gateway for Chinese corporations doing business in the U.S. or U.S. companies that want to understand the Chinese culture and do business there," said Xue Ya, project director for the China Center.

When corruption works: From the blog of Richard Spencer, Beijing correspondent of The Daily Telegraph:

But China has many good points so sometimes when the news is bad, you have to draw attention to the other side of the coin.

Put most bluntly, the other side of the coin is simply this: one reason a lot of schools collapsed was that there were a lot of schools.

Quake death toll nearly 70,000 - 15 million relocated - 18,000 missing: From The China Daily:

The death toll from the devastating 8.0-magnitude earthquake three weeks ago in Sichuan Province increased by three to 69,019 as of Monday noon, the Information Office of the State Council said.

It said 373,573 people were injured and 18,627 others were still missing.

The office said that 45.55 million people were affected by the quake, of whom 15.15 million had been relocated.

How to crash a market: Shanghai Scrap comments on a South China Morning Post article that reports that the government might punish mutual funds that destablize the market by selling off falling stocks:

Presumably, the invited fund managers won't sell their holdings into the declining market. But, at the same time, with their cash flow limited, they will be restricted in their ability to buy into the declining market. After all, who wants to buy an investment that can't be sold?

Which is to say that - by eliminating sell pressures - the authorities have succeeded in eliminating any and all incentives to buy into the declining market. Way to go. Down.