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).

Shandong project manager becomes Nigerian cheiftan: From The China Daily:

When Fang Yibo was dispatched to Africa in April 2003, he expected some surprises - but the biggest of all was being made a tribal chieftain.

On a November day in 2007, under the scorching sun of Nigeria, Fang was formally crowned chieftain by the Akam Oba (king) in Ogun State. Along with the title came 33 hectares of land, which Fang, 44, can bequeath to his offspring. 'The title is not nominal. It is inheritable. But I won't participate in local affairs. After all, I'm a foreigner here in Africa...'

Fang is a project manager with Shandong Third Electric Power Company. When he was sent to Nigeria to build a joint venture power station, the biggest of its kind in the country, he didn't know what to expect.

Liang Qichao: "The Strife of Human Races": Dave at the Mutant Palm discusses Liang Qichao's role in bringing the "survival of the fittest" into a Chinese context:

As a major popularizer of social Darwinist thought, Liang applied it to various subjects. According to Barry Sautman, he wrote that since Hungary was founded by the Huns, it was "established by the yellow race on the territory of the whites." The ideas colored everything he wrote: when writing on education, he combined the idea of foetal education, a traditional belief that the mothers of great men, such as Mencius, had sat up straight and spoke no evil, thus contributing to the moral character of the foetus, with a micro-level view of Darwinism. If the child evolved right, then the nation would too. Women's education was necessary, he argued, because without it they could only teach their children to be materialistic and shallow, and the nation would suffer. Rote memorization would block the development of the brain, and the nation would suffer. Competitive sports were necessary, for both men and women, as he wrote in On Martial Spirit, because without every "new citizen" engaging in physical competition, the nation would be weak... and yes, suffer.

A review of 'China Modernizes': On FEER, Nicholas Bequelin reviews, rather critically, a book called China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest? by Randall Peerenboom.

Is China proving that developing countries are better off under an authoritarian regime that focuses on developing the economy, rather than under a democratic regime that gives emphasis to political participation? And if the enjoyment of human rights improves with economic prosperity, isn’t it wiser to restrict them in the short term and allow them only once income levels take off?

According to Randall Peerenboom, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of China programs for the Oxford Foundation of Law, Justice and Society, the answer is a resounding “yes” on both counts.

China mines more gold than South Africa: The Financial Times reports:

China has ended more than a century of South African dominance of the gold mining industry to become the world’s biggest producer of the ore. Chinese gold output jumped to a record high of 276 tonnes last year, a 12 per cent increase over 2006, while South Africa produced 272 tonnes, the London-based precious metal consultancy, GFMS, said on Thursday.

Mark Bristow, the South African chief executive of London-listed Randgold Resources, said: 'China is not overtaking South Africa, South Africa is shrinking below China.' South Africa has been the world’s largest gold producer since 1905....The scale of the industry has been steadily diminishing since 1970 when it produced 1,000 tonnes a year, about three quarters of the world’s supply at that time.

Shanghai Expo mascot scandal: Me Old China reports:

Shao Longtu, creator of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo mascot, has had a tough few weeks since the unveiling of his 'Haibao' character in December. The blue animation was mocked, ridiculed and compared to everything from toothpaste swirls to Durex condoms. And now, it’s been accused of being stolen from an episode of one of America's finest 80's sitcoms, Growing Pains, staring Alan Thicke, Kirk Cameron, Tracy Gold, and later on of course Leonardo DiCaprio.

Fuwa fights the winter clouds: Sick and tired of grey skies over Beijing? Here's your chance to do something about it, in this simulation of Beijing's cloud-seeding program:

Winter is here! But the sky is gray. Help Fuwa fight the clouds and bring back the blue sky.

Dissident reality TV: This links to a Youtube video produced by AIDS and human rights activists Zeng Jinyan and her husband Hu Jia. It shows their living conditions while under a form of house arrest by the Chinese security goons.

Zeng and her months old baby are currently still under house arrest, and without telephone or Internet access, while Hu has been detained in an unknown location and has no communication with the outside world. Somehow, a documentary the activist couple made in the last year has been let loose on the Internet, and is now uploaded to Youtube.

A new fact of the digital video age: Chinese secret police vehicle registration plates are now on Youtube, for all the world to see and note down.

Mia Farrow circles around Beijing: Mia Farrow is in Cambodia, protesting because the screwed-up Southeast Asian nation has close ties with China and the Olympics are coming and China has good relations with Sudan.

Earthtimes.org—no kidding—has the story.

Outbound Chinese tourism market opens, a little: The China Daily reports:

The China National Tourism Administration will pilot a project this year to select joint venture tour operators to handle some outbound business.

It is the first time that the administration has decided to open its outbound business to joint ventures and foreign investors.

A profile of Ai Weiwei: The Age has published a profile of Ai Weiwei, the grand old man of Chinese avant-gard art, and one of the few people in China who can publicly curse the Olympics without getting a visit from the men in dark glasses.

Bourgeois protests in China: In The Nation, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom writes about protests in China that he describes as 'NIMBY' or Not In My Back Yard. He compares the recent protests against the maglev high speed train's route through a respectable quarter of the city to other protests in Shanghai from strikes in the early 1900s, to the protests of 1986 and 1989.