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).

Chinese netizens get a party: At Global Voices Online, John Kennedy translates the founding documents of the China Netizen Party, along with some critical responses:

From forcing the rescue of hundreds of brick kiln slave laborers last year and seeing it through long after local bodies gave up to being analytical piranhas when dealt obvious official lies, and numerous examples in between, it seems some netizens have realized their comparative advantage over local government authorities and this hubris now brings us the China Netizen Party. These are its founding bylaws:

Highlights from the CCTV Spring Festival Gala: Jottings from the Granite Studio reviews the hotly-anticipated program.

"The Connection Has Been Reset": In The Atlantic, James Fallows provides a concise run-down of the structure and implictions of China's Golden Shield Project for online content and access:

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.

The Pickle King of Islamistan: Michael at The Other End of China reproduces some news reports about Dr. Khalid Sheldrake:

Long since having established his reputation as a complete weirdo and occasional jack-ass, in 1934 Dr. Khalid Sheldrake somehow came to the attention of the Uyghur government of the short-lived Khotan Emirate established alongside - but separate from - the equally brief East Turkestan Republic. There are some unverified suggestions that Sheldrake was an agent for the British foreign intelligence service, and that his appointment was arranged in an attempt to extend British influence in Xinjiang and Tibet.

Spring Festival power cuts: Xinhua reports:

The world's most populous nation began its week-long Lunar New Year holiday on Wednesday, but hundreds of thousands of -- perhaps millions of -- people will probably spend the biggest festival of the year in the cold and dark...

...Radio, in particular, is now one of the most popular commodities as the city has endured 12 consecutive days of power blackouts and water cuts as of Wednesday...

'We cannot watch TV, so my family will sit together and listen to the CCTV evening gala for Spring Festival aired by radio tonight,' said a local resident Xiaotan.

High-end milk: Micah Sittig reports from the front lines of the milk wars in Shanghai:

In early 2006, Mengniu developed a new milk based on "OMP research" that claimed to contain certain proteins that are helpful towards calcium retention and bone formation. This milk was sterilized through the UHT process and priced at about RMB 16 per liter. In response, in September of 2006 Guangming released a new product called Youbei, or Ubest, basing the product's claim to superiority on three factors: a slight price advantage over Mengniu, that the milk cows are high-quality imported Holsteins raised on special eco-ranches, and that the milk is sterilized through pasteurization, a process that preserves more of the milk's nutrients.

This was just the beginning. Guangming soon realized that demand for Youbei was strong even though it cost around twice as much as normal UHT milk, and also faced new pressure from Mengniu. When the Mongolian competitor developed a new, pasteurized version of its premium milk solely targeted at discriminating consumers in the Shanghai market, Guangming had to react.

Hu tightens grip over Shanghai faction: At Asia Times, Willy Lam of the Jamestown Foundation looks the shift away from Jiang Zemin:

In Hu's calculus, reining in Shanghai's notorious centrifugalism will go a long way toward establishing the party-and-state headquarters' authority over the nation's "warlords", a reference to recalcitrant regional cadres who refuse to heed Beijing's edicts.

This is despite that many outside the CYL cabal are disturbed by the fact that Hu has planted his underlings in more than half of China's 31 provinces and directly administered cities. Hu, also CCP general secretary and chairman of its Central Military Commission (CMC), has entrusted the job of taming Shanghai to Politburo member Yu Zhengsheng, who took over from "Fifth-Generation" rising star Xi Jinping as party boss of the super-rich city three months ago.

Yu Huafeng: Yet another journalist released: Yu Huafeng, the Southern Metropolis Daily general manager who was given a twelve-year sentence in the wake of the Sun Zhigang scandal, has been released from prison, the AP reports:

Yu Huafeng left a prison in the southern city of Panyu on Friday and immediately returned to his nearby home, according to a receptionist at the Southern Metropolitan Daily and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders. The operator refused to give her name and said she had no details.

Yu was the third prominent journalist detained in China to gain release this month, following Li Changqing, the former editor of Fuzhou Daily, and Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Singapore's The Straits Times newspaper.

Reporters Without Borders said the releases showed Beijing was responding to pressure and urged campaigners to step-up efforts ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games in August.

See also: Washington Post: Chinese editor freed after four years