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).

A one-edged double-edged sword: Black and White Cat compares a Christian Science Monitor report on Olympics preparations with Xinhua's edited translation:

When one newspaper or agency reports on something published elsewhere, it’s quite natural for it to be shortened, modified or added to provided these changes are sourced and not presented as a true representation of the original text. Readers in different countries will often want to know different things and focus on different aspects of a story. But how much of that story can be cut before the meaning is completely lost?

Earlier on Danwei: Bruce Humes looks at Cankao Xiaoxi's view of the foreign press.

TV dramas shed light on ideal values: Josie Liu looks at how some recent TV shows reflect mainstream values:

Watching TV is a major form of entertainment for tens of millions of Chinese people and they love TV dramas, which sometimes satisfy viewers’ psychological need for an ideal world and maybe give them hope that living by ideal values could bring happiness and success. It is interesting to see how the Chinese public buys into such idealism, which, on the other hand, indicates people’s disappointment and dissatisfaction with reality. These blog discussions also reveal people’s awareness of the value change associated with China’s social transition, and that they are willing to uphold traditional, or main values like true love, honesty and hard work. At the same time, they also accept some new values represented by the younger generation, such as pursuit of personal dreams and fulfillment of one’s individuality.

Hu Jia's family become human “state secrets”: At Global Voices Online, John Kennedy reviews some blogger responses to Hu Jia's detention and Zeng Jinyan's house arrest, and finishes with a comprehensive list of all of Hu Jia's blog posts in 2007.

Cutting out the waffle in speeches: Raymond Zhou writes for the China Daily in support of greater spontaneity in official speeches:

At a recent meeting in Chongqing municipality, deputy mayor Huang Qifan cut short a lower official who was reading from a prepared document: "There's no need to use these bureaucratic clichs on this occasion. It's totally unnecessary." After that, the others skipped at least half of their speeches.

I wish I had the good fortune to be a witness to such a dramatic moment. It was tense, reported a local newspaper, as all those officials who were to report to Huang must have gone through a lightening fast process to readjust their speaking style - to be concise and to the point.

It would be great if the whole bureaucracy in the nation could be infused with a strong incentive to "cut the waffle".

Baby under house arrest: how to ruin your Olympic image: From Rebecca MacKinnon:

What Olympics host city or country hasn't had critics? A quick Google search turns up plenty of information about dissent and protests surrounding previous games. Do any of us remember hearing much about these things in the international media at the time? I don't. Why? Because the host governments treated dissent as a normal thing and didn't go around throwing everybody in jail or suppressing their publications. And guess what? The international media didn't pay too much attention to the dissenters and protestors anyway...

...Why can't China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country? Why behave in such an insecure manner that violates international human rights norms, damages China's international image, and distracts media attention away from the Chinese people's genuine accomplishments over the past 30 years - as well as from the excitement of the sports competition itself?

Ms MacKinnon is also quoted in a New York Times story about jailed activist Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan and her 2-month old baby Hu Qianci, 'probably the youngest political prisoner in China.'