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).

Inside China Central TV: Philip J. Cunningham has published an article on the Informed Comment group blog titled 'Inside China's State TV'. Excerpt:

In the decade since I was hired by [Japanese TV station] NHK to help CCTV, the latter has indeed learned much about "real" television news, while NHK, if anything, has been in a retrograde pattern. The controversial "ethnic cleansing" of foreign employees at NHK after a change in station leadership and more recently political pressures from right-wing politicians such as Abe Shinzo, who instructed NHK to cut stories on things like comfort women while jacking up the volume on reports with an anti-communist slant, has taken a visible toll on the product and morale at Japan's erstwhile number one broadcaster.

Pulling the strings of China's Internet: In The Far Eastern Economic Review David Bandurski looks at the Beijing Association of Online Media, ostensibly a trade association of foreign and Chinese Internet companies, but which is apparently becoming increasingly active as an Internet censorship society.

More than a Chinese fit of pique: At the Asia Sentinel, Richard Komaiko of the Power and Interest News Report assesses the implications of the USS Kitty Hawk incident:

Regarding the balance of power, the events of the last week are a clear indication that a change is occurring in East Asia. Expressed in the simplest terms, the US Navy is losing the ability to dock in Chinese controlled territories while the Chinese navy is gaining the ability to dock in Japanese territories. The frontier of the American sphere of influence is regressing, while the frontier of the Chinese sphere of influence is growing outward.

What to make of Edwin Maher?: Imagethief examines the criticism of Edwin Maher, CCTV anchor:

Maher is different. He is very visible and in the LA Times piece he is unapologetic. I believe that's what leads those of us who don't know him personally to dismiss him. We observers of China's state-owned media have perfected our airs of cynical dismissal. We know how it works. We know the agenda. We can read between the big and clumsily drawn lines. We're always happy to ridicule its amateurism and censorship. Armed with our prejudices, when confronted with someone who publicly buys into the mission of China's English language media we are forced to see them as either dupe or collaborator.

Juiced up China: In The Financial Times, Richard McGegror reports on some more mind boggling figures about China's thirst for electricity:

The surge in Chinese power demand continued unabated this year, with the country adding capacity equivalent to that of the UK's entire electricity grid.

About 85 per cent of the new generating capacity of 90GW is coal-fired, highlighting the significant pressure on China at the talks in Bali this week over a global agreement to cut greenhouse emissions...

...The official figure for new generating capacity for 2007 has not been announced but calculations by consultancies based on announcements this year put the figure at about 90GWs.