From the Web

Danwei Picks: Homeowners organize to protect their interests

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.

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The Eurasian Face : Blacksmith Books, a publishing house in Hong Kong, is behind The Eurasian Face, a collection of photographs by Kirsteen Zimmern. Below is an excerpt from the series:
Big in China: An adapted excerpt from Big In China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising A Family, Playing The Blues and Becoming A Star in China, just published this month. Author Alan Paul tells the story of arriving in Beijing as a trailing spouse, starting a blues band, raising kids and trying to make sense of China.
Pallavi Aiyar's Chinese Whiskers: Pallavi Aiyar's first novel, Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in contemporary Beijing, will be published in January 2011. Aiyar currently lives in Brussels where she writes about Europe for the Business Standard. Below she gives permissions for an excerpt.
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+ Korean history doesn't fly on Chinese TV screens (2007.09): SARFT puts the kibbosh on Korean historical dramas.
+ Religion and government in an uneasy mix (2008.03): Phoenix Weekly (凤凰周刊) article from October, 2007, on government influence on religious practice in Tibet.
+ David Moser on Mao impersonators (2004.10): I first became aware of this phenomenon in 1992 when I turned on a Beijing TV variety show and was jolted by the sight of "Mao Zedong" and "Zhou Enlai" playing a game of ping pong. They both gave short, rousing speeches, and then were reverently interviewed by the emcee, who thanked them profusely for taking time off from their governmental duties to appear on the show.
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