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).

Homeowners' protests in Shanghai: The China Beat interviews Benjamin L. Read, from the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa, about homeowners movements in China:

The homeowner groups in China's new private housing estates (xiaoqu) are a complicated mosaic. Some of them can be seen as a manifestation of civil society, while others are something else. For instance, a lot of them are not actually controlled by the homeowners themselves but instead are dominated by the property developers and their management companies. Sometimes the homeowners themselves become factionalized and get bogged down in internal conflict, so that there's no functioning organization. In some places the government has blocked the formation of a formal yeweihui, although there can be informal activity regardless. In other neighborhoods, the homeowner group functions well, holding regular meetings and elections and representing the residents' interests much as, say, a healthy condo association might in the United States.

M&A: What foreigners can buy in China: The China Law Blog explains the basic principles behind Chinese government decisions on what types of acquisitions foreign firms make in China.

My favourite wife: The Guardian has published a spoof 'digested read' that tells the whole story of British author Tony Parson's new novel My Favourite Wife, about a British businessman in Shanghai who embodies all the stereotypes of Western men in Shanghai, and plenty of China clichés to boot.

Beijing denies manipulating pollution data: Nick Mulvenney of Reuters reports:

An op ed in the Wall Street Journal last month said the Beijing authorities had closed three monitoring stations in the centre of the city and opened two more in less-polluted areas, thus bringing down the average pollution levels recorded.

'This phenomenon does not exist,' Du Shaozhong, Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau spokesman, told a news conference.

Is Huawei cursed?: From John Kennedy at Global Voices Online, an assortment of netizen responses to the recent suicide of a Huawei employee.

Popular movies playing to empty houses: Sun Bin looks at the most recent statistics from China's film industry, which work out to a paltry number of tickets sold for each screening, on average:

3,527 screens worth 5.1 billion RMB

What does this mean? 3.327bn/3527 = 943k/screen = 2584 /screen/night

In Beijing, e.g., the movie ticket cost 50-70 Yuan (!!! yes, that is right, almost as much as that in HK). But it is cheaper in other cities and other cinemas (eg, 20-30 for Kunming). Therefore 2584/day means 100 people/screen per day (assuming 25/ticket), which is very small considering there are more than one show per day on average.