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).

China vs California by train: Luke Mines of Sexy Beijing compares similar rail journeys in California and China.

Qingdao to Beijing is 830 km and takes 5+ hours. Los Angeles to San Francisco is 559 km and takes 11+ hours. Shandong province (home of Qingdao) has a per capita income of $3,250. California has a per capita income of $38,956. What is wrong with this picture?

See the full post for details of California's Third World train system and how poorly it compares to China's expanding rail network.

China Mobile: no Apple iPhone: Forbes.com reports that China Mobile has walked away from talks with Apple to launch the iPhone in China, apparently because Apple's demands for a 20-30% cut of revenues were considered excessive by the Chinese cell phone giant.

Manipulating the market: Gady Epstein of Forbes reports on a common market manipulation racket in China:

'Buy a certain stock before they do, because usually if a publicly run fund would buy certain shares, the price would go up,' Lin [Rongshi, a rpivate fund manager] says. 'They notify us first, and they would buy a few days later [for the fund], then they would come back to us to split the profit I make from buying at a lower price.'

This front-running scheme would net an almost guaranteed haul for Lin and for the state-sector employees. Some others, -- insiders all, would profit, too. The only outsiders in the transaction would be the mutual funds' customers, average Chinese investors who have little idea how routinely their money is abused on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges.