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 (sort of) learns how to drive: Teaser from Robin Moroney of the WSJ about a new article by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker:

The mandated 58 hours of training involve drilling students to perfect hard tasks such as driving on planks barely wider than the car's wheels. Students have little training on the roads themselves.

Mr. Hessler says the written test's emphasis on bizarre driving conundrums shows China fitting its road rules to its neophyte drivers and traffic, rather than the other way around. The questions in the study book - which cover topics such as what to do if a car breaks down on a train track and the appropriate behavior when passing an elderly person - "didn't teach people how to drive, it taught you how people drove."

Via Ben Casnocha; Hessler's article is in the 26 November print edition.

Bullog International: The irreverent blog service provider returns on an overseas server one month after operations were suspended in the wake of the 17th Party Congress. Here's Luo Yonghao's note:

As of yesterday, Bullog had been closed for a full month (more than two weeks ago we submitted all the required materials to the relevant departments, but it appears that getting a formal ICP certificate may take a bit more time). For a website that has 600,000 daily page-views, and which has started to host commercial advertising, this was a catastrophic blow. Today, urgency has driven us to give an early launch to "Bullog International," which we had originally planned as branch geared toward overseas users (this site will become a multi-lingual version in the near future).

For the time being, the overseas-hosted Bullog International will close all comment functionality (any feedback will be visible to the author only when logged-in), and at the moment there is no new blog registration for new users. We apologize for this and ask for your understanding.

Backups of all articles posted by Bullog bloggers have been saved on our servers; you can be assured that once the ICP certificate is obtained for Bullog's domestic website, they will all be restored.

"Non-BBS" Bullog International URL: http://www.bullogger.com

2007.11.20

Three Gorges officials terrified by critical thinking: Beijing Newspeak shows how things are back to normal following a 25 September Xinhua report on the environmental risks of the Three Gorges project:

The raft of foreign media reports, mostly from correspondents who had travelled around the Three Gorges area, spurred Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, into action to save his face from being lost in the murky depths of the Yangtze. He contacted Xinhua to supply them with "an exclusive interview". The story was written in English with no reference to the gloom and doom that surfaced at the September 25 forum, presumably in the hope a freak memory loss disease would cripple the globe and also tamper with the Xinhua database.

Earlier: Jianqiang Liu writes on the Three Gorges at China Dialogue.