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's air quality and the Olympics: At WorldChanging, Mara Hvistendahl writes about her experience running in the Shanghai Marathon on 25 November:

For Sunday's race, the weather in Shanghai was, thankfully, clear (although blue skies aren't an indication that air in China is safe to breathe). But because of the route organizers chose, the race was more unbearable than it needed to be. We wound through industrial areas and alongside highways thick with mid-morning traffic. For a quarter mile, I trailed a slow-moving bus, breathing in exhaust as workers watched from the windows (check out a similar scene here). Runners of the full marathon had it even worse - for the final 13 miles, they snaked back and forth through dirty Minhang district.

via Shanghai Scrap.

The translation picture might not be so bleak: Jeff Keller of the Chinese Stories blog presents another side to the translation quality debate:

Props to ESWN for this great translation of a Phoenix article on the dismal state of literary translation in China. Basically, the article describes a cycle of low pay and poor quality translation that rewards quantity over quality. Kenneth Tan at Shanghaiist continues the discussion here with his personal accounts of working with translating companies in China. While he is right to some extent that many of the bargain basement translation 'companies' are little more than poorly run offices that crank out low quality translations, I think that for business-oriented translating companies, the picture is much more complex.

I have had contact with a few different translating companies in Beijing, and each was different. One of them who I worked with invited me to their 'office' for an interview. From the office it was immediately evident what kind of place it was. The name on the door was different from their official name, the only staff in the office consisted of a manager and his assistant, and there was a line of eager college students waiting in the hallway to interview for jobs. I had done a translation test for them 6 months prior, but they had changed staff, and didn't know where it was anymore. Needless to say, I wasn't optimistic, but in the end I did a medium size job for them, and they actually paid decently and on-time.

Labour activist assaulted for promoting labour contract law: Interlocals tells the story of an activist with Shenzhen's Dagong People Center, an organization that has been promoting awareness of the new Labor Contract Law:

On 20 of November, the victim, Huang Xing-nan, was stabbed by two criminals on her back, waist and leg when she left the center to visit another injured colleague in the hospital. The cuts were up to 10cm in length. Her left leg suffered the most serious injury, bones and tendons, blood vessels, tendons and nerves all been cut off. She was sent to the intensive care unit and now transferred to the orthopedic ward. It is very unlikely that Huang can recover from the injury as she has once suffered from serious burnt from an industrial fire and such medical record makes the treatment more difficult.

After the incident, the labour center issued an appeal letter to Hong Kong groups asking for support. Organizations such as Labour force, China Labour Watch, Asia monitor, SACOMM, Globalization monitor reacted immediately with a press conference. In their joint statement, they pointed out that if the incident is not dealt with properly, the violence will spread to other civic organization and threaten the life of other NGOs organizers and activists.

The commercialization of a tamed ethnicity: Japan Probe presents an article by Li Narangoa on nationalization and globalization on the Inner Mongolia frontier.

The leaders of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region tried to imbue their capital with Mongol characteristics. Key buildings, including the Inner Mongolia Museum and Theatre, incorporated Mongol motifs. From the late 1960s, however, the Cultural Revolution swept over Inner Mongolia. Apart from destroying old customs and ideas as elsewhere in China, the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia targeted what was portrayed as Mongol ethnic separatism. Emphasising Mongol characteristics was equated with separatist sentiment, and in the following two decades, the cityscape of Hohhot presented the same concrete block monotone. In the late 1990s, however, the pace of change in the urban landscape of Hohhot began to accelerate: green spaces were created, high-rise buildings went up, better lighting was installed. Most striking, ethnic identity became a prominent element in Hohhot's cityscape. The leaders of the city and of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region worked closely with commercial and tourism interests to highlight the multicultural character of Hohhot and especially Mongol historical and cultural aspects in order to distinguish it from other Chinese cities. By making Hohhot distinctive they aimed to restore the dynamic character of the city that had historically been a major trading town on the route to Russia and Central Asia and to give it a global context. In other words, the newly rediscovered ethnic characteristics of Hohhot became a means of locating and branding the city in a global culture.

via the MCLC list.