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).

Skin-deep translation may mislead: Does Guo Jingming deserve to be hailed as "the most successful writer in China"? Raymond Zhou clears up a misunderstanding in Chinese reports on a recent New York Times feature that offered four other book reviews alongside a profile of Guo:

None of the Chinese commentators mentioned any of the four book reviews. Through endless copying and reposting, which is the pillar of Chinese website management, the point has been hammered home that Americans, for whatever unfathomable reason, favor China's most ridiculed literary pretender as their favorite Chinese writer.

Earthquakes hit Chengdu, Beijing: Xinhua reports that an earthquake measuring 7.8 (revised from 7.6) on the Richter scale occurred 100km outside of Chengdu at 2:28, while another earthquake, measuring 3.9, hit a Beijing suburb shortly afterward.

Wendi Deng's new China plans: From the blog of David Wolf, who knows a thing or three about News Corp:

Wendi Deng has told Vogue that she will be collaborating with her pals Zhang Ziyi and Florence Sloan to establish a new film production company based on the DreamWorks model. The first project of the unnamed venture is apparently an adaptation of Shan Sa's novel The Empress, and Ms. Deng dropped the name of Ridley Scott as a possible director.

Beijing is world's No. 1 toilet metropolis: From Xinhua:

Beijing, with 5,174 public toilets, has outpaced New York, London and Tokyo and become the world's No. 1 metropolis as far as public toilets are concerned.

See also Beijing WC, illustrated for one writer's take on the toilets of Beijing.

6 arrested for part in Chengdu stroll protests: From China Digital Times:

Police in Chengdu recently detained six local residents for posting Internet articles and demonstrating against a major petrochemical project, according to Sichuan News Online.

Being Chinese: Black and White Cat translates a reader's letter to Southern Weekly in which a girl describes a crowd giving her a hard time for taking photos that might make China look bad.

Thunder from Tibet: The New York Review of Books has published a review by Robert Barnett ofThe Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer:

Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.

Google and Kingsoft launch free Chinese dictionary: China Snippets reports that Google and Kingsoft have launched a free, downloadable Chinese dictionary.

Chinese jumbo jet company established: From Xinhua:

China's first ever jumbo passenger aircraft company, which was a major part of the nation's large jet program, was officially inaugurated in Shanghai on Sunday.

Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang said at the inauguration ceremony that the large jet program was of significance to improve China's independent innovation capabilities and to meet the rapidly expanding civil aviation market at home...

...The newly established company, named Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China Ltd. (CACC), will be responsible for researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing the homegrown large passenger aircraft.

Chinese workers abducted in Nigeria released: Reuters quotes government officials who say that the three Chinese workers abducted by their driver in Nigeria on Thursday have been released:

A spokesman for the government of Cross River state, where the Chinese workers, one of them CCECC's finance manager, were kidnapped, said the trio reappeared at the company's site at Ikono in neighbouring Akwa Ibom state.

"We don't really know how they were released, we were just surprised to see them at the company's gate in Ikono around 7-8 p.m. (1800-1900 GMT). They were unhurt and no ransom was paid," Patrick Ugbe told Reuters.