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).

Western media on China in Africa: Pambazuka News has published an article by Emma Mawdsley examining coverage of China's relations with Africa in the Western media. She identifies five common tropes:

• a tendency to refer to ‘the Chinese’ or ‘China’, as if the various Chinese actors all shared the same interests;
• a tendency to focus excessively on China’s interests in oil over other commodities;
• a decided preference for focussing on China’s negative impacts on the continent, and within that, on issues and places of violence, disorder and corruption (e.g. Zimbabwe, Sudan, Angola) over other negative issues (e.g. trade imbalances, undermining domestic manufacturing sectors);
• a tendency to portray Africans as victims or villains; and
• a frequently complacent account of the role and interest of different western actors in Africa.

Wartime Shanghai radio: Radioheritage.net has published a list of radio stations broadcasting out of Shanghai in 1941, and an article about an American radio host in wartime Shanghai

Monday July 29, 1940

On Japan's crowded list of public enemies, few rate higher than burly, tousled, tough-tongued, 39-year-old Carroll Duard Alcott, who broadcasts thrice daily from Shanghai bold news & views on matters Asiatic. A veteran American newshawk from Des Moines, who has covered a China beat for the past 13 years, Alcott took to the air at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities.

Tokyo has lost face almost every time he has opened his mouth. Last week he was one of the six Americans whom Japan's puppet Chinese Government 'ordered' expelled from China. Last week, in a bulletproof vest that fitted snugly around his 220-lb. frame, Alcott was still holding forth over Station XMHA, on Race Course Road.

The 'Hat' of Neo-Colonialism!: At Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter reacts to a line in a SCMP report on Chinese emigrants to Sengal:

It’s a great piece, in that it not only covers the tensions between the Senegalese locals and the roughly 1000 Chinese in Dakar, but also the considerable and occasionally violent tensions that flare between the Chinese themselves. Still, to my eye, the most interesting news in the Fitzsimmons article comes down to a single sentence:

Many shopkeepers in Centenaire came from Hunan province and say they received funding from the Chinese authorities to move to Senegal.

Focus Media & Dentsu form Internet ad agency: From a press release from Focus Media, the people who operate screens displaying advertising in shopping malls and office buildings all over Chinese cities:

Focus Media Holding Limited, China's largest digital media group, today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hua Kuang Advertising Company has entered into a joint venture agreement with Dentsu to form a new Internet advertising company in China.

The newly established company will focus on providing Internet advertising related services to clients of the Dentsu Group companies in China and will work closely with Focus Media's Internet advertising division...