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).

Finding winners in Hong Kong's newspaper market: Interlocals presents an overview of developments in Hong Kong's competitive newspaper marketplace:

In terms of capital and ownership structures, the biggest change is about Ming Pao. Ming Pao Ltd is going to merge with two listed companies in Malaysia, Sinchew and Nanyang. But the plan is not yet implemented. According to this plan, Sinchew and Nanyang, no longer listed in Malaysia, will be owned by Ming Pao. Ming Pao might be listed in the stock markets of Hong Kong and Malaysia.

This is the media empire of Tiong Hiew King. As the biggest shareholder of Sinchew, he acquired 20.02% of Nanyang from Malaysian Chinese Association in October. Now the biggest Chinese newspapers are already owned by him. Now with his ownership of Ming Pao, he further integrates the two media groups in Malaysia into it. His business widely covers the Chinese communities in Malaysia, Hong Kong, US and Canada. But Ming Pao does not make much improvement in revenue and profit. Perhaps, after merger and acquisition, Tiong will make something news.

Dungan language radio: The Pinyin News blog links to online broadcasts of Kyrgyzstan state radio in Dungan, a "spin-off of northwestern Mandarin with lots of loan words from Persian, Arabic, and Russian" that is written using a Cyrillic-like alphabet rather than Chinese characters.

The tussle for China Eastern: Reuters reports:

The parent of Air China plans a HK$5-per-share counter offer for rival China Eastern, representing a 32 percent premium above Singapore Airlines' proposal of HK$3.8 per share, Mingpao Daily reported on Thursday.

China National Aviation Corp (Group) Ltd (CNAC), parent of Air China, the world's biggest airline by stock market value, had said Singapore Airlines and its parent Temasek's offer to buy a combined 24 percent stake in China Eastern for US$920 million was too low.

Alternative e-guide to Beijing: David Feng has published a small ebook about the alternative attractions of Beijing -- buildings and highways not on any tourist map. Click this link to download the PDF.

Tiger Leaping Gorge: not damned: GoKunming.com reports:

[T]he controversial plan to dam Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) has been scrapped.

The sparing of the gorge and its 100,000 inhabitants – who would have been forced to relocate to much less hospitable terrain – may be the biggest win to date for mainland environmentalists. The victory may only be a pyrrhic one, as other portions of the Yangtze River's upper reaches, known in Yunnan as the Jinsha River (金沙江) are under consideration for hydropower projects.

Resisting Manchukuo: At MCLC, Heng hsing Liu reviews Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation, by Norman Smith:

Chinese-language literature in Manchuria (known then as Manchukuo 滿洲國) during the Japanese occupation (1931-1945) has proved perplexing to those working in the areas of colonialism, national identity, and modernism. In recent years, it has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but the difficulty of locating original publications, which were rare to begin with and are now widely scattered, combined with negative views of the Japanese invasion and subsequent rule, have prevented both domestic and foreign scholars from a genuine restoration of the subject's history and a creative, integrated interpretation of the works. The study of Chinese-language Manchukuo literature has thus been dominated by the following discourse of resistance: the contemporary sociopolitical environment faced by Chinese-language writers in Northeast China was extremely difficult; not only did they suffer economic deprivation, but their ambition to be spokesmen of the colonized natives was threatened by draconian literary regulations and severe censorship; young writers, especially those who chose to stay after the establishment of Manchukuo, resisted government-sponsored, conservative, Confucian wangdao 王道 (kingly way) ideas.

More lethal injections, fewer bullets: The China Daily reports:

The use of lethal injection will be expanded to replace gunshot executions, a senior judicial official has said.

Jiang Xingchang, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), said half of the country's 404 intermediate people's courts - which carry most of the executions - use lethal injections.

'It is considered more humane and will eventually be used in all intermediate people's courts,' Jiang told China Daily without revealing a timetable...

...Xiao said abolishing the capital punishment or strictly limiting the use of the death sentence are a global trend and 'China is also working toward that direction.' He, however, stressed that the goal cannot be achieved overnight.

Reporting on the Yancheng explosion: ESWN translates two documents on the Yancheng explosion: a reporter's blog entry about how the government worked to keep the press occupied and away from the accident site, and the internal memo from the goverment detailing its successes:

On the afternoon of December 4, we were attending the fifth anniversary event for the Jiangsu bureau of Jiangsu Legal System News and we learned from a media friend that the CCTV program Focus Interview intends to come to Xiangshu to cover the November 27 incident. We took a high degree of attention. On one hand, we reported to the relevant leaders to make sure that the preparations were made. On the other hand, we quickly found out the name, mobile telephone number and background of the informant and applied pressure through the department that employs him. At the same time, we quickly made contact with the informant and met with him directly in Quanyun. We discussed with him rationally and we appealed to his feelings. We asked him to contact the CCTV reporter and said that the information was inaccurate. This stopped the CCTV team from coming and therefore prevented what could be a major news story just in time.