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).

Image from Free Patents Online

Mobile phones and music: Music industry insider Ed Peto has published a stats-rich blog post about the way Chinese consumers get and listen to music. Excerpt:

According to M:Metrics an astounding 34.8% of the 530 million mobile subscribers in China use their phones to listen to music, compared to 5.7% in the US. China's networks, infrastructure and data capabilities might need to improve but the mobile juggernaut is well on its way.

Video website 56.com shut down?: Kaiser Kuo:

Guangzhou-based video sharing site 56.com, one of China's triumvirate of 'YouTube clones,' has been temporarily shut down by the Guangdong provincial branch of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), acting on orders from SARFT's national leadership, according to a highly-placed industry insider who declined to be named. The closure seems to have been in effect since 6pm on June 3.

Safety inspections and rules for post quake reconstruction: From Xinhua:

The State Council, China's Cabinet, passed a draft regulation on post-quake restoration and reconstruction at an executive meeting here on Wednesday.

The regulation put forward special requirements on earthquake-resistance levels of infrastructure construction in the quake-hit regions, including schools and hospitals...

...Local governments must organize personnel to conduct safety appraisals of all school buildings as soon as possible to ensure the safety of students as they return to school, according to the statement.

China on track to democratize?: Bruce Gilley, author of China's Democratic Future in The Wall Street Journal:

The beginning of the end

... In recent years there has emerged a consensus that the CCP is here to stay. Talk of democratization in China is dismissed as a 'fantasy' by journalist James Mann ... Fellow writer Ian Buruma ... says the Chinese model represents 'the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s.'...

...These writers have espied a central truth about contemporary China. It is a relatively legitimate state that is not under immediate pressure to introduce democratic reforms. But does this imply democracy is not in the offing? Absolutely not, and for two related reasons.

First, the CCP today is a 'responsive' or 'legitimacy-driven' regime...

A profile of Wen Jiabao: A profile in The Jamestown Foundation's China Brief by Yu Maochun of Premier Wen Jiabao: 'From Tiananmen to the Sichuan Quake'.

China's grieving parents: Rebecca MacKinnon:

Thousands of Sichuan parents are grief stricken.

They want answers: why did their children die in the Sichuan earthquake when many other people in surrounding, better-constructed buildings, lived? What are the facts?

...Unknown hundreds of other Chinese have been grieving for 19 years, unacknowledged.

Civil society in China: NGOs and volunteer activities: At China Elections & Governance, Jens Kolhammar rounds up some perspectives on the future of Chinese NGOs and volunteer activities in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake:

The advancement of civil society in China in recent weeks has not only been initiated by compassionate citizens and NGOs but also, if a new anti-corruption experiment will pan out, by the Sichuan government. NPR reports that there is a rare opportunity for the Chinese people to supervise government officials. In an effort to prevent local government officials from embezzling part of the aid money that is streaming into Sichuan, the local government is planning to use citizens to supervise the aid process. So far the state has started to take down the contact information of interested citizens. Hundreds of volunteers have already signed up. If this process moves forward it will create a unique public participation experiment in the fight against corruption in China.