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).

Lawyers denied visit to detained blogger Hu Jia: From John Kennedy at Global Voices Online, some online reactions to Hu Jia's detention:

For house-arrested Hu Jia in Beijing, it was his firsthand news last week that Guangzhou-based Zhang Qing, wife of imprisoned lawyer Guo Feixiong, had on Dec. 26 discovered that the roughly USD 1,000 left in her bank account had disappeared. No time like the present, Hu Jia was arrested the next day in the middle of a Skype chat while his wife Zeng Jinyan was in the bathroom giving their month-old baby a bath. Ten or more police had forced their way in, disconnected all communications in the house, and left, placing 24 year-old Zeng and baby under house arrest, where they most likely still remain today.

See also: Richard Spencer's comments on the foreign ministry's response to reporter inquiries.

The "thieves" of China's digital TV rollout: David Bandurski at the China Media Project looks at how public opinion is being shaped in the debate over digital TV:

According to a CMP source, the Central Propaganda Department issued a ban early last month on all coverage criticizing the rollout of DTV services in the country. Censors, the source said, singled out a December 7 editorial from the official Xinhua News Agency’s Xinhua Daily Telegraph. The article was called, "Overbearing ‘digital TV’ harms our self-respect."

The Xinhua Daily Telegraph article was still available on the Xinhua News Agency website this month, but the propaganda department ban expressly directed all national and local media against excerpting the article or attempting their own coverage of the issue.

Chinese State investor nibbles at Australian banks: The Financial Times reports:

A secretive Hong Kong-based subsidiary of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, manager of the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, has bought stakes in three of Australia’s largest banks, raising fresh questions about transparency of China’s sovereign wealth investments in international markets.

Australia and New Zealand Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia said Hong Kong-registered SAFE Investment Company had bought stakes of less than one per cent in each of the banks. An entity with the same name has taken a stake of about one-third of a per cent in National Australia Bank , people inside NAB reckon.

The SAFE Investment Company? Kinda like Acme Inc.

Crushed beneath the hooves of the green, Olympic PR stampede: Imagethief has some advice for companies that want to hook their wagons to the "green Olympics" train:

What I mean is that corporations often behave like livestock when it comes to public relations. They herd. Every company likes to think of itself as the hard-charging alpha-bull leading that herd into pristine new pastures, but in fact most are just ambling along with the crowd and dreaming of having the biggest horns. Our job, as PR cowboys, is to pry our particular cow far enough from the herd that it can be spotted from a distance, but not so far out that it is devoured by wolves.

This herding is the product of two ingrained things: similar approaches to risk management in many PR departments, especially in Asia; and a tendency for those PR departments to all grab onto the same big ideas at the same time. It's the latter that's bugging me now. 2008 is on the way and virtually every company that Imagethief has helped with its 2008 China PR planning has asked for the same two things: Make us Olympic and make us green.