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).

Is 'super-ministry reform' really worth all the fuss?: from David Bandurski at the China Media Project:

Military spending, inflation and terrorist conspiracies may be dominating the China headlines in the West, but the big news on the home court this week is China’s push for reform of its numerous government ministries to create more streamlined super-ministries — a process known in Chinese as da bu zhi gaige (大部制改革). And as the National People’s Congress proposal for widespread ministry reform tops the official agenda, one of the most pleasant surprises is the way a number of mainland commentators are either downplaying or analyzing seriously what others are simply ballyhooing as a grand vision for change.

School memos and a responsible press: Jim Gourley, at the Absurdity, Allegory and China blog, looks at the "Uighur-in-the-plane" incident in light of a number of previous episodes where the whole story got overshadowed by spin and fabrication:

It’s not easy to develop a responsible press, but it’s better to make the attempt to have one than not. It all eventually comes down to this: if you’re going to be stuck in a small room, better that it’d be with few frenzied Chihuahuas covering their turf than a hungry bear sitting in the corner. You can bat a few dogs away, but that bear’s in a whole different league, and, like it or not, he gets to make all the rules. And, like it or not, you’re probably going to let him. When the bear’s in charge, equality in any form is never part of the relationship. You either dance the dance or you get eaten. It’s pretty simple. Simpler than it ought to be. So much simpler than it ought to be that it can only be considered, at best, as low-browed.

Melinda Liu on foreign correspondence in China: On TheBeijinger.com from an interview with Newsweek China Bureau Chief Melinda Liu by Alice Xin Liu

tbjblog: Is being a journalist in China as frightening and dangerous as it is made out to be?

ML: Being a foreign correspondent in China isn't that dangerous. My experience witnessing the 'shock and awe' bombing of Baghdad, from the inside, was dangerous. Getting shot in the leg in Manila was dangerous. Guns and other weapons aren't prevalent at the grassroots in China, so some of the 'normal' things that make a story dangerous aren't here. What's dangerous here is driving...

Beijing and the baby milk of human kindness: By Mure Dickie in The Financial Times:

This week I tried to visit Zeng Jinyan, Chinese blogger, wife of the detained dissident Hu Jia and mother of an infant daughter. I did not get far.

Near the door of Ms Zeng’s apartment block in the paradoxically named Bobo Freedom City compound near Beijing, I was stopped by a police officer and half a dozen plain-clothes security agents. The officer politely explained that I could not meet Ms Zeng without her prior permission. He was unmoved by my objection that authorities had made such permission difficult to obtain by cutting off Ms Zeng’s home telephone line and her access to the internet.

No super ministry for media: From the China Daily:

China will set up five new 'super ministries'... the ministry of industry and information, the ministry of human resources and social security, the ministry of environmental protection, the ministry of housing and urban-rural construction, and the ministry of transport.

It seems this will have little or no effect on the way media and culture are regulated: the Internet will still fall under the souped up ministry of industry and information, but GAPP, SARFT, the State Council Information Office and other organs of State meddling in media have held on to their fiefdoms.