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).

China's most grateful peasant: At the China Media Project, David Bandurski tells how a blogger discovered how one Anhui peasant has many reasons to be grateful to the party leadership, from the local level all the way up to Hu Jintao:

What followed was a sublimely human moment. President Hu leaned over, cupped his hands, and drank from Zheng Jichao's faucet. It was this dramatic scene that captured the particular attention of Chinese blogger "Zuo You Yi Guo Hui" (左右一锅烩).

"I saw the news today of President Hu Jintao’s visit to the home of that peasant, where he takes a drink of cold tap water, and naturally I was moved," the blogger wrote on January 18. "So I made note of the peasant's name."

Putting "Zheng Jichao" through a search engine, Zuo You Yi Guo Hui found that the villager had had at least seven visits from party leaders within a period of just two months. The blogger's post included the key graphs of officials news stories going back to November 2007, with working links to official news sites on which the stories appeared.

When Hu Jia wasn't an 'enemy of the state': Black and White Cat translates a profile of detained activist Hu Jia that ran in China Youth Daily's Freezing Point supplement in 2001:

When I heard about Hu Jia, I was full of admiration. I even felt he should be a model for young people to follow. A 27-year-old young man who sought neither fame nor fortune, doing countless things to protect the environment and wearing himself out until he got hepatitis. He had just left the hospital, but often worked until two or three o’clock in the morning. Every day my colleague’s email inbox would contain a large quantity of messages about the work he was doing. The things he cared about and dealt with were extremely diverse and even trivial, but he was extremely passionate about all of them. Full of doubt, I asked my colleague if he was sick. My colleague said yes, he’s got hepatitis. No, I said. I mean sick in the head.

Final letter from the propaganda palace: Chris O'Brien of Beijing Newspeak looks back over his Xinhua career on the eve of his departure:

There are many benefits to being a Xinhua employee: prestige domestically, opportunity to travel, comprehensive insurance, access to information and job security (you have to be a spy to get sacked round here). But watching some hugely talented, creative people donning shackles every day is not particularly pleasant viewing. Some may argue: "What do they expect? Their role is to spread governmental love." But I have met numerous graduates (Xinhua only employs fresh-faced university students so they have no time to develop any style other than "Xinhua-style"), who have joined Xinhua and, after a few months work, almost all have admitted the job is very different to what they anticipated - and not in a positive way.

China Eastern snubs Air China: From Bloomberg:

Air China Ltd., the nation's largest carrier by market value, fell the most in three years in Hong Kong trading after China Eastern Airlines Corp. snubbed a bid to buy a stake.

The airline dropped 15 percent to HK$8.38, after China Eastern said it 'doubted the sincerity' of an offer from an Air China affiliate to buy as much as 30 percent for at least HK$14.9 billion ($1.9 billion).

China Eastern's opposition may frustrate Beijing-based Air China's attempts to establish a hub in Shanghai and a dominant position in Asia's biggest aviation market. China Eastern's management aims to revive an alliance with Singapore Airlines Ltd. that was vetoed by minority shareholders earlier this month.

China and Hong Kong: Bloggers who eat river crabs: At Interlocals, Oiwan Lam recaps the "Noise amidst of the Politics of Harmony" discussion held by Hong Kong In-Media and featuring bloggers Roland Soong and Beifeng.