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).

Confessions Of A Propagandist: Chris O'Brian, familiar to Danwei readers as the man behind the Beijing Newspeak blog, has a piece in Forbes about his time working as an English polisher at the state-owned Xinhua news agency.

"Cornerstone" of a Mystery: In a review of The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang, Xujun Eberlein comments on the novel's portayal of Chinese society:

This conversation is so real, I can almost see those people's lips moving and hear their voices, as if they spoke in Chinese, as if I were among them....

The intimate reflection on everyday life of contemporary China is a great quality of this novel. For a reader who knows about China, this quality is engaging. Too often I can't finish a novel set in China written by non-Chinese, because it turns me off when the author gets obvious things wrong.

For readers who are less familiar with China, The Eye of Jade provides a real lens into Chinese society. The author picked a good starting time for the story. Between 1980 and 1997 there were amazing changes that took place, almost as amazing as the changes between 1997 and now.

Chinese stem cell breakthrough?: The People's Daily reports:

A Chinese biomedical firm has achieved unprecedented capacity to develop large-scale, lifesaving stem cell production with stocks of umbilical cord stem cells hitting nearly 5,000 samples, the Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday.

The Tianjin Angsai Cell and Genome Project Company is the country's first bank for umbilical-cord-blood-derived mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) samples.

Against Farrow: Philip J. Cunningham has written an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune about 'the narcissistic edge' and 'subliminal racism' of Mia Farrow's campaign against the Beijing Olympics.