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).

Coin of the realm, revisited: At Ogilvy's Digital Watch blog, Kaiser Kuo takes another look at the significance of Tencent's virtual currency, "QQ," in the marketplace and for Tencent itself:

But the story purports to reveal some of the darker secrets of how Tencent keeps its users buying QQ coins — especially if the company doesn’t look like it’ll hit its quarterly numbers....As promised, this time around the meat of the story centers on allegations that Tencent is manipulating its virtual currency so as to impact not the RMB, but rather its stock price.

Dharma Bummin': Into the Void: Jonathan Ansfield writes on Newsweek's "Countdown Beijing" blog of his experiences following the Tibet story from Lanzhou:

Now the security presence in town was steadily mounting. Still, eight foreign reporters together at one Tongren hotel was far too many to bother hiding. So after breakfast we all decided to take a cab over to the monastery, if we still could get in. It turned out we could, though it was obvious we were being watched. Under a photo of the Dalai Lama, a plump acolyte in the central prayer sanctuary did not stop lighting candles and tidying altars as he spoke, swiveling his gaze to and fro over our shoulders. He described to me and another journalist a cresting wave of tensions and controls. "Too many things to explain just like that," he said. "It just gets to the point where you just can't control yourself anymore."

It continues in Part II.

China confirms protest in Xinjiang: The AP reports that China's foreign ministry has confirmed that a protest, previously reported by RFA, took place on 23 March in Hotan:

Fu Chao, an official with the Hotan Regional Administrative Office, said the protest had nothing to do with the head scarf ban.

"The rioters were mainly Uighurs. The riot was nothing to do with the ban on head scarves, but about responding to the riots in Tibet. We will announce further information shortly," Fu said.

The Hotan government report said a small number of people — including "terrorists," "separatists" and "religious extremists" — "stirred" things up but were stopped by police.

Water woes in Kazakhstan: On China Dialogue, Jack Carino looks at how policy in Beijing is affecting the lives of the inhabitants of Kazakhstan:

On the upstream side is Beijing, an economic behemoth committed to shrinking its growing wealth gap by developing the country's interior. The plan, sometimes known as the Go West policy, hinges in part on access to water for drinking, energy generation, agriculture and industry, especially in arid areas such as Xinjiang.

Downstream are Kazakhstan and Siberian Russia, developing in their own right but a far cry from China's breakneck growth. Rivers that originate in China – mainly the Irtysh, which crosses the Kazakh northeast before entering Russia, and the Ili, which ends in Kazakhstan – are essential to the two states, for the same reasons that Beijing needs them.

There's also a slideshow.

Are direct democratic elections unsuitable for China?: China Elections presents an article by Huang Wenxue, translated by Heather Saul, that examines the lessons the mainland ought to learn from the recent elections in Taiwan:

I was interested in the direct and democratic election of the Taiwanese regional leadership this year for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to get a real picture of the Taiwanese popular election and its political manifestations. Secondly, I felt that the direction of Taiwan’s future depended on which party leader was elected president. Therefore, on the day of March 22, 2008 I paid very close attention to news stories concerning Taiwan’s presidential election. On some websites there were play-by-play updates and pictures depicting the Taiwanese voters at the polls. On portal websites and main media outlets, however, the content and analysis concerning the election were markedly dull. The reporting of the election was watered down and even trivialized.