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).

Cashing in on China's thirst for university training: At the Globe and Mail blogs, Marcus Gee writes about foriegn educational institutions who see a gold mine in China:

Vancouver-based CIBT has 3,500 students in China learning everything from business management to auto mechanics to how to work in a casino. Mr. Chu said enrolment is growing at 30 to 40 per cent a year. He is opening new sites at a rate of one every three weeks. And that, he believes, is just scratching the surface of the market. By 2020, he said 600 million Chinese will be middle class, with the money and the ambition to get an education with foreign-label cachet.

Universities and colleges around the world are starting to recognize that potential, stepping up their efforts to lure Chinese students to study abroad while offering degrees in China in association with Chinese institutions.

Exploding Olympic outhouses: The Tiger Temple blogger reports on fires in portable toilets near the Bird's Nest; John Kennedy translates for Global Voices Online:

Firefighters arrived twenty minutes after it was reported because traffic was heavy at the time and getting stuck in traffic couldn't be avoided, but with the Olympics soon to be here, I'm afraid it's going to be hard for people to forgive this kind of emergency response speed. The fire squad had to struggle, just seeing them jumping back and forth over that newly-locked steel fence, feeding the hose through (see photos), you honestly wouldn't have known whether to laugh or to cry!

Gas prices may rise after the Olympics: The LA Times speculates that the price of gasoline in China may jump following the Olympics:

While consumers in much of the world have been reeling from spiraling fuel costs, China has kept the retail price of gasoline at about $2.60 a gallon, up just 9 percent from January 2007.

During that same period, average U.S. gas prices surged nearly 80 percent, to about $4 a gallon.

But Chinese consumers are bracing for a big jump in pump prices after the Summer Olympics in Beijing end in late August.

Chinese bank reserve ratios up: stocks nosedive: From The China Daily:

China's equities suffered their biggest fall in a year on Tuesday, after the central bank raised the commercial banks' reserve ratio for the 15th time since January 2007.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 7.73 percent to close at 3,072.33 points, the biggest loss in percentage points since June 4, 2007 when the gauge lost 8.26 percent.

The meltdown came after the People's Bank of China (PBOC) ordered banks during the weekend to set aside 17.5 percent of their deposits as reserves, up from the initial record 16.5 percent. The hike was unusual as the PBOC usually increased the ratio by 0.5 percentage points each time.

Yao Ming targeted by crooked NBA refs?: From ESPN:

Jeff Van Gundy, then the coach of the Rockets, said that an NBA official had told him about the league's plan to closely monitor moving screens by Yao Ming, and Van Gundy was ultimately fined $100,000 for his comments regarding the situation. Van Gundy later backed off his comments.

Tragic result in Tianjin: A Modern Lei Feng recaps China's 1-0 loss to Qatar:

Qatar, simply needing a draw from this result, played their part perfectly after getting the goal. They sat back, put their men in the box so that even when a Chinese player beat his man on the wing, the cross could be innocently parried away, and then played the counter attack perfectly, coming up with a few quality chances. They also used the Chinese players urgency and frustration against them. The Chinese team tallied up yellow cards with sometime stupid, sometimes iffy fouls, but this forced them to play more reserved. Li Weifeng, a veteran playing in what is perhaps his last World Cup qualifying campaign, led the way for juvenile play, often arguing with the refs and resorting to a number of questionable actions (including an outright push) that probably should have earned him a second yellow card.

Is it against Chinese law to be callous and pigheaded?: David Bandurski at China Media Project:

China's latest case of the 'human flesh search engine' (人肉引掣) at work has landed a 17-year-old girl in police detention, and that has some Chinese asking: is this really a matter of broad social concern, and is there any legal basis for police intervention?

Image from wpclipart.