"On the mainland, a person who wears pajamas is a rich person."

This image comes from a quiz show called "Guess"; bbs commentors mock the contestants for their ignorance of important facts in Chinese history ("How many lions are there on Marco Polo Bridge?" "Marco Polo Bridge has lions?"), as well as their idiotic ideas about the mainland (see the caption to the photo above). One contestant concluded, "You shouldn't ever go to the mainland. You don't know how vulgar the people are there."

Also circulating lately is a set of stills from the talk show "Horny," in which guests spout off about the state of love and relationships on the mainland. Speaking to the topic "How to prevent men from going after mistresses," one woman makes the claim that all mainland girls are interested in is money. Another guest on the show says that the PRC is a "lawless country," that "rape isn't a crime," and that "this follows what Mao Zedong preached back then, communal property and communal wives."

All of this discussion is made possible by the widespread practice of subtitling television shows - even without the audio track, Internet users can follow the dialogue from a series of screen captures.

Pull my joysticks comrades

From CRI's website:

A new game, "Learning from Comrade Lei Feng," claims that its most distinguishing departure from its peers lies in a theme which encourages players to live a thrifty life and offer help when needed, rather than promoting sheer killing and bloodshed...

...Pedestrians may say dirty words, trample upon grass, spit or litter on the road or break traffic rules and the players' tasks are to stop these bad habits or deeds while helping old men cross the street...

Michael Rank, a contributor to North Korea Zone sent in the link, commenting "Will knock Auto Theft out of the water for sure".

From today's Financial Times:

When Mark Kitto received a draft contract late last year from Wiley, the US-listed publishing house, he had every reason to feel confident that his book about doing business in China would soon be released for sale.

With China’s rise gripping global business, the British entrepreneur had a topical tale to tell about his battle with the country’s print media regulator for control of a successful listings magazine empire...

...Wiley initially embraced Mr Kitto’s story about how the General Administrationof Press and Publishing had taken control of the listings magazines he had managed in China’s three richest cities. The publisher had the book edited, held detailed negotiations over contract clauses with Mr Kitto, with the publisher agreeing to changes, and even commissioned covers.

Ms Hwu wrote another e-mail in November to a Hong Kong newspaper editor promoting Mr Kitto, saying the book was “quite a page-turner and we are planning to publish it”. By December, however, the deal was dead, tipping Mr Kitto into another dispute, this time with Wiley itself. Mr Kitto charges that Wiley backed off because the publisher was concerned about the book’s impact on its business in China and specifically on the safety of its staff based there. Wiley disputes this account.

The article also quotes Tim Clissold, author of Mr China:

Mr Clissold, who read Mr Kitto’s manuscript and enjoyed it, said Wiley’s publishers would have been “absolute patsies” to drop the project on political grounds. “The fact that [my book] was published in China is important, because it tells you the Chinese are rather more self-confident about accepting criticism than the average foreign publisher might think,” he said. “The whole thing comes down to the tone – it’s how you write, not what you write.”

Read the whole thing at the FT link below — subscription not necessary.

寻找一位热爱成语的作者帮我们完成一个有趣的、有报酬的小项目。
Email: comments@oneaday.org.

Read October issue.

It was around time last year that Danwei had to apologize for prematurely announcing the death of Read magazine (书城), a New Yorker aspirant. Read had stopped printing at the end of 2004, and though its editor and publishers swore that they were preparing to continue with a retooled design after the Spring Festival, no one much believed them. It came back, however, and continued throughout last year.

But we're struck with a strange sense of deja-vu: Read's last issue on newsstands was December, 2005, and though the editor and publishers swear that the next issue is just around the corner, there's quite a bit of suspicion that the magazine can't keep it up much longer.

Last week, the Shanghai Joint Publishing Company revealed that its publishing partner, the 21st Century Business Herald had pulled out of the magazine at the end of 2005, leading to the hiatus that was announced in the December issue. The Jiefang Daily Group, which took control of Joint Publishing last year, will take over, bringing its considerable resources to a publication that by all accounts is hemorrhaging money. Hangzhou Daily has these calculations by editor-in-chief Wu Shiyu:

Read usually pays authors 100-150 yuan per thousand characters, with a small number of special pieces getting up to 300 yuan per 1000. Each issue is roughly 150,000 to 160,000 characters long, so author fees are between 20,000 and 30,000 yuan. The editing department has five editors who represent monthly labor fees of more than 10,000 yuan. Add in printing costs and circulation costs, and Read ends up spending 100,000 yuan on every issue. Retail sales can only make up a portion of this, and 40% of the income from the several thousand subscription sales has to go to service fees according to postal regulations.

Some readers couldn't view Danwei TV's first episode: Big Buildings of Beijing.

Here is is again, in a different format, thanks to Youtube. If the video below does not play, you can also try the version on Youtube's website, and there is another one on Revver.com.

The short program shows the current state of four of Beijing's new mega buildings:

- Rem Koolhaas' new CCTV building
- Paul Andreu's National Theater
- The National Swimming Center or 'Water Cube' designed by PTW
- The Olympic Stadium designed Herzog & de Meuron

The program was produced by Goldmines Film.

Comments and criticism are more than welcome: jeremy -at- danwei.org. Please let me know about technical problems.

Below is another version of the video, hosted on Revver.com.

Two people involved in "sensitive matters" in China have recently disappeared.

One of them is AIDS activist Hu Jia. His wife Zeng Jinyan has started a blog, mostly in Chinese, called Looking for Hu Jia. Yesterday she published a post called Hu Jia has been missing for 36 days, in which she describes her attempts to get information from the police.

The second is filmmaker Wu Hao, who was shooting a documentary about Christians who belong to or gather at unofficial churches. Wu also has an English language blog called Beijing or Bust. There is more information about the case on Rebecca MacKinnon's blog: Free Hao Wu

Your correspondent has no first hand information about either of these cases, but I do have an observation: Both of the blogs linked to above are accessible in China. This means that whatever is happening to these two people, it is unlikely that either of them are in trouble because of blogging or Internet activities. Furthermore, it is evidence of a disconnect between the Net Nanny and the authorities that seem to have detained them, apparently the police.

Finally, I have my doubts that publicity will help either of these two people. The case of detained New York Times researcher Zhao Yan has been raised time and time again in that newspaper's editorial pages and reportage, as you can see from a search on NY Times.com for Zhao Yan. Zhao remains in detention.

All content on China Digital Times, the essential aggregator that tracks China news, is accessible in China using this RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinadigitaltimes/Xavk

Rolling Stone gathers some gloss

Here is a rough translation of a recent post on his blog about Rolling Stone (滚石) magazine's China edition, launched at the beginning of this month:

I saw the cover of [Rolling Stone China's] first issue on SXX's blog, but I still haven't seen the magazine itself.

This magazine is the first battle cry of One Media (which also owns Ming Pao newspaper). Their previous attempt to enter the Chinese market with the general interest magazine Ming Kan met with great difficulties. So instead, this music magazine has become their first venture.

Entertainment magazines are still much easier to produce in China.

Ming Pao has been amassing its troupes in Beijing for more than a year, because as Ming Kan makes clear, they want to snatch the market from Modern Weekly (周末画报)...



...So does old Rolling Stone magazine still have any appeal for Chinese youth?

At least for old youth like me, I stopped reading [the American edition of] the magazine a long time ago. For this new Chinese version to survive will require a lot of effort -- at the very minimum, it will have to be localized and made more appealling to young people.




From the comments section on Ou Ning's post:


I think that old Rolling Stone was most appealing. From the mid 90s to the present, I lost interest. Maybe because the magazine has just been going too long, it has lost its drive and is no longer cutting edge. Furthermore, this Chinese edition seems to be rather a compromise.

Massage Milk also wrote a long post about Rolling Stone, translated on Danwei by Brendan O'Kane: How far can Rolling Stone roll? Massage Milk points out a number of problems with the magazine: not enough real rockers in China, the fact that print media is struggling, especially when it comes to younger readers, and other concerns.

A short exceprt:

America as a country enjoys reading periodicals; that's why Rolling Stone has sales in the millions there. What's the Chinese edition, facing the continuous development of online media, a scarcity of musical resources, a small rock scene, and a public not in the habit of reading, going to do?

On the other hand, the South China Morning Post published a story about Rolling Stone's launch, quoting Robert Yung, the chief strategy officer of One Media:

"The magazine, with the branding of Rolling Stone and high-quality journalism and photography, has no competitor in its class in the mainland magazine market"...

Mr Yung says the magazine will be positioned as the leading pop-culture, entertainment and music magazine in China targeting "trend-setting" readers aged below 40...

...He adds the title has been well received by advertisers in the luxury goods, fashion and vehicle sectors.

"Our target is to attract fast-moving consumer goods, such as soft drinks, to advertise with us," Mr Yung says

So is Rolling Stone China going to succeed or fail?

Despite the fact that Rolling Stone China is trying to use a counter-cultural icon to sell luxury brands and soft drinks, despite the fact that there are probably fewer real rockers in China than you can find in one day on New York's subway, and despite the fact that all the criticisms voiced above by Chinese bloggers are true, Rolling Stone China might still make some money.

Why?

Because the magazine business in China is very strange:

- As a business, glossy magazines are not dependent on circulation figures. China's population is huge, but a glossy magazine with a circulation of 100,000 is considered very strong in China. That number is laughable in the U.S.A.

- Glossy magazines in China make their money from advertising, not from circulation.

- The people who make media buying decisions in China for many Western brands are often Taiwanese and Westerners who work for media buying companies. Because it is almost impossible to get real circulation figures for Chinese print media, media buyers will often make their decisions based on what media brands they know.

The Taiwanese and Westerners who do a lot of the media buying for multinational companies in China know Rolling Stone magazine, and will consider it a safe choice for their media budgets.

- Hate mail from a Chinese guy who called me something like an imperialist pig;
- A rebuke, from Chinese blogger Bingfeng, suggesting that Danwei has lost the plot by writing too much about censorship;
- A sympathetic telling of the whole story from Rebecca MacKinnon.

Now, this is the last word on the affair on this website; it's a message to the Western journalists who fell victim to the hoax, and to those Chinese journalists who jeered:

When Massage Milk appeared to be shut down, I tried to call the the blogger himself — no answer.

After it was revealed that the whole thing was some kind of hoax, I had an SMS conversation with Massage Milk, confirmed the hoax, and then called the guy who runs Yculblog.com, the Shanghai-based service that hosts Massage Milk's blog. The guy said "no comment".

But judging from the mainstream media reports that mentioned the Massage Milk closure, none of the professional journalists covering this matter even bothered to check on these original sources. This includes the self-righteous Chinese journalists who dumped on the Western media about the hoax, who didn't even check that Milk Pig was a woman, as reported in Danwei's first mention of the affair. See ESWN post Blog Incidents Blindsided Chinese Media

All of which is really lame. Despite greater aspirations, Danwei is still a wholly amateur project, produced by people who have other jobs. In my own case, I have a job that regularly requires 16-hour work days.

Professional journalists are actually paid money to research and write news. Research used to mean more than reading blogs and Googling.

Finally, more from Bingfeng on Danwei's increased coverage of censorship issues, and Two priority lists for China:

In many aspects, china is still in the early stage of the learning curve, and you need to move upwards step by step.

 censorship is relevant, democracy is relevant, but there are many other issues more relevant and more urgent. and the priority list made by chinese people is quite different from the one made by some overseas "china observers".

i am not suggesting that the second list is totally bullshit, actually we could learn a lot from it, but without doubt, the first one is mostly more founded.

the great value of westerners like Jeremy is that he could contribute a lot to reveal the chinese priority list to those outsiders and help them gain better understandings of china's reality, it would be a loss if danwei degrades to the level of "mainstream media" and become a propaganda tool of lecturing chinese how important democracy and free press are to china.


Should CCTV follow the American model and retire its anchors?

Or rather, we can thank the 1892 who bothered to show up. A total of 388 members were absent from the sessions, and only 220 of these had asked for a leave of absence, leaving 168 members who just skipped out on their sacred duties to the state. Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, off engineering China's next Oscar win, were the most public of these absences (they asked for permission, however).

Despite all of the clamor over major issues like condemning Taiwan, strengthening rural education, or reforming the property tax system, many of the the members who attend the annual sessions end up turning their attention to smaller issues. Last year, for example, the breakout proposal resulted in regulations prohibiting lip-synching in live concerts.

This year, prize for the strangest proposal goes to a recommendation to legislate gold-digging. OK, it's really an a show of concern by sixteen delegates for Chinese women who find themselves married to foreign men who can no longer provide for them, and who have no financial means to return to China. The proposal would add provisions to current marriage law that would require foreign men to prove that they have a certain level of assets and income before being allowed to marry Chinese women.

Several more proposals of interest (some of these may be among the rejected 3%):

• "Chinese Yuan" proposal: Replace Mao's image on Chinese banknotes with Sun Yatsen and Deng Xiaoping. The official name of the money could be changed to "Chinese Yuan" from "Renminbi."
  Related: "Small Change" proposal: Eliminate small denominations of money.
• "Urban Shower" proposal: Promote the construction of low-cost bathhouses in cities to serve the people.
• "CCTV Anchor" proposal: Swap the current Evening News anchors, who are getting along in years, with younger, fresher faces.
• "Official Weight" proposal: To cut down on government officials wasting public money on lavish banquets, create an Administrative Ethical Code that includes a weight limit for public servants.
• "Peasant TV" proposal: Zhao Benshan thinks that the current national rural TV channel is not enough to satisfy the entertainment needs of China's non-urban population.
• "College Admission" proposal: Sure, there's good reason to reform the college entrance exam system. But Yin Hongfu has very specific suggestions: 60-70% from the exam, 20% from social service, 5-10% from creativity (which under special circumstances - champions, inventors, and such - may weigh as much as 50%).
• "Child Actor" proposal: Ban children from acting in commercials.
• "Beauty Economy" proposal: Regulate beauty contests to limit the value society places on outward appearance.

Citations follow.

Bingfeng Cafe is an English blog written by a Chinese guy who works in media in Shanghai. He had this to say about the Massage Milk hoax:

one interesting aspect of the whole "massage milk hoax" incident is who swallowed the bait first. as i know, danwei was the first one to report the shut down of massage milk blog and, Jeremy Goldkorn, the host of danwei blog, was the first one to link the closedown of massage milk blog with the chinese censors. the great irony here, is that jeremy is one of the few western media people who lived in china long enough and agaisnt attaching too much importance to the censorship issue than it should be, and is supposed to be the last one to link the close down with censorship.

he wrote two related posts shortly afterwards, one to explain why Mr. Wang closed his blog by himself and tried to mitigate the embarrassment brought by his first post about the clsoe down of massage milk blog, the other to report the China Digital Times block and tried to try to justify his perspectives to interpret the massage milk blog close down in the first place.

danwei is a blog about the dynamics of chinese media and advertising, although critical and cynical of chinse state media, danwei is not an active members of western media that keep close attention to chinese censorship issues. but recently danwei becomes more and more involved into the reporting on censorship issues, which is a little incomprehensible to me. i know there are more cases of censorship in recent months, but at the same time i just wonder if it's the "peer pressure" that gradually changed danwei's reporting focus.

It's not peer pressure.

Censorship and restriction of information flow are becoming key issues for media everywhere, not just in China. The cowardice of the Western media in the face of the Mohammed cartoon riots — when major British and American newspapers and TV stations declined to reproduce the cartoons that caused all the fuss — is an example of the importance of this issue and it has nothing to do with China.

When it comes to China itself, this writer has often commented that the censorship issue is less important than many other problems in China. Nonetheless, I believe that Bingfeng himself would agree that as long as there are significant restrictions on public debate in China, censorship will remain a hot button issue.

While most Chinese people may not care about these things, Westerners will generally see such restrictions as evidence of a political and intellectual culture that is still, at some level, driven by fear.

Are we wrong Bingfeng?

Needed: Angota ho ne njumata in Chinese.

Translators in Demand

Good news for translators, not so good news for people who need translation done: China's translation sector is reportedly running a 90% human resource shortage. The sector was worth 21 billion yuan last year, and is expected to reach 30 billion this year.

Of course, like many other industries, translation in China is a scattered, uneven business. Shanghai alone has 1000 companies, but translation quality is often less than ideal, to put it politely. The increasing international presence in China that demands quality translation has made things lucrative for the decent companies.

How lucrative is it? Profit rates of 35%-45%, if figures from Shanghai Business are to be believed. YesMeaning, a Shanghai-based company with franchises scattered throughout the country, says that an office translates an average of 20,000 to 40,000 characters per day (English to Chinese), which at a rate of 150 yuan per 1000 characters, works out to 90,000 to 180,000 yuan per month. After accounting for employee salaries and fixed costs, the company clears 35% in profit each month. Special services such as express translations or translations in obscure fields can add between 30% and 100% to the base price.

But that's if you hustle bits and pieces. There was apparently a deal last year between a Shaanxi steel mill and a California bridge project that required 2 to 3 million yuan worth of translation. A Shanghai company reportedly took on 1/3 of the project and cleared 300,000 yuan in profit.

Richard Spencer, the Beijing correspondent of Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper has a blog: Richard Spencer. Unfortunately, the URL is viciously anti-mnemonic so bookmark it if you like it.

The blog was found via the Danwei referral log. In his post, China's internauts find the kitten killer, Spencer acknowledges and links to Danwei. That's a nice gesture: it's becoming quite common to find, in mainstream media reports, translated phrases and information that could only have come from Danwei (and other China blogs); the source is rarely acknowledged.

One of a series of Narnia titles.

This week we look at Narnia novels and movie tie-ins, Lei Feng and his champion, and how Brokeback Mountain is sneaking into the libraries of mainland readers.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe opened 8 March on the Chinese mainland, but Narnia fever has been going on for several months. The seven novels appeared in December in a 99-yuan set (a relative bargain next to the 166 yuan the five Harry Potter novels would run you), which tops the children's list this week. The books occupied a high position on the children's bestseller list in an environment where C.S. Lewis is little-known. Put out by Yilin Press in 2001, they sold fewer than 10,000 complete sets in five years. The new editions have sold 20,000 sets in just two months. Yilin should probably be commended on its astute judgment of the demand created by the market for pirate DVDs.

But Yilin's version is not the only one out there. Disney, in association with Lijiang Publishing House, released a novelization of the film as well as a series of episode-specific movie photo-books. The tie-ins are notable in that the text is accompanied by pinyin transcription for younger readers. Disney has published such books before; its classic fairy-tales have been annotated much in the same way that its classic cartoons are repurposed as English instructional materials. But it is still fairly rare for pinyin to accompany something more up-to-date than Sima Guang Breaks the Jar or Cao Chong Weighs the Elephant.

New this week is a biography of Lei Feng. At #6 on the list, Lei Feng Spirit (the title translates as Lei Feng 1940-1962) benefits from last week's observance of Lei Feng Day as well as a promised cache of 200 previously unpublished photos of the hero. Text on the cover reads, "Everyone is searching for their own Lei Feng. The country is searching for its own Lei Feng."

This is a new experiment: Danwei TV, hosted by yours truly, and shot and edited by Luke Mines. Click on the play button to watch. You need to have Quicktime installed. You can also watch the video on Youtube.com: Big Buildings of Beijing

The short program shows the current state of four of Beijing's new mega buildings:

- Rem Koolhaas' new CCTV building
- Paul Andreu's National Theater
- The National Swimming Center or 'Water Cube' designed by PTW
- The Olympic Stadium designed Herzog & de Meuron

The program was produced by Goldmines Film.

Comments and criticism are more than welcome: jeremy -at- danwei.org. Please let me know about technical problems.

Mitamins, a California-based nutraceutical e-commerce company is seeking motivated individuals to assist with website development and online marketing to the North American market.

Ideal candidates for the following positions are university graduates with relevant experience and possess excellent command of spoken and written English, plus proficiency in using computers. Background in medicine, supplement, or nutrition preferred. Supplements or health-related industry experience, and knowledge of the U.S. supplement market are a strong plus.

Please send resumes to hr@mitamins.net. For company info, please visit our website at www.mitamins.com.

The positions are:

Technology Director
Web UI Designer
Nutritionist (营养师)
Business Development Specialist
Project Assistant

Please continue reading below the junp for details.

Ge You asks about cults in a scene from The Year That Was.

We start with Lenin in October, the classic 1937 tale of the Russian revolution. The "Steamed Bun" parody of Chen Kaige's The Promise and the surrounding legal controversy has led many commentators to bring up Lenin in October in connection with it. Massage Milk wrote this (in a translation by ESWN):

Logically, Mikhail Romm should have sued CCTV's News Commentary Department led by Cui Yongyuan for butchering a great film such as "Lenin in October." It was disrespectful towards Lenin and it was disrespectful towards socialism. Do you Chen Kaige think that you are greater than Lenin?

In 2001, Lenin in October joined 1939's Lenin in 1918 as the target of satiric barbs from CCTV's news division. In the short film Splitting Up In October (分家在十月), the two classics are recast as the story of the retooling of the program Oriental Horizon and the establishment of a separate CCTV news department, as drawn from the memoirs of Chenhongnov, A TV Scoundrel in His Own Words.

Indeed

In which light it is worth comparing recent cover stories of the Asian editions of Time and Newsweek.

The Newsweek cover story about bloggers, by Sarah Schafer, is not bad: Blogger Nation: A proliferation of voices is slowly dismantling the status quo in China.

The cover is reproduced above; note the cover lines: Beijing vs. bloggers.

It's a shame that whoever wrote and designed that cover decided to go for such sensationalistism.

When you consider that Massage Milk, the star blogger of the piece, continues to says that the recent shutdown of his blog was a joke directed against Western media, you realize that it's not exactly Beijing vs. bloggers here.

It seems that very, very few people are blogging for revolution or radical change in China.

The real revolution?

The basic premise is stated in the last line:

"The entire village is doomed anyway. We have no money, no job, no land. There's nothing left to be scared of." If angry farmers truly lose their sense of fear, it may ultimately be Beijing that is running scared.

There's plenty more on rural problems in the links below.

The Beijing News reports that the man in question, Li Yuejun, received 1000 yuan for recruiting the performer in the video. The woman in the video, a Ms. Wang, worked in hospital in Luobei County in Heilongjiang. The county government said that she was divorced, and a little not right in the head.

Li did not shoot the video, however. Two employees of a Hangzhou Internet company were the producers of the film, and sent one to Heilongjiang to shoot it.

As for punishment, the county government issued a statement saying, "We have fully investigated the details of the cat torturing video, but we can only condemn the producers of the cat torturing video on moral grounds."

So that's probably the end of this sad episode, unless it spurs delegates to take action and pass an anti-cruelty law that would give an outlet for all the outrage.

Included below is a translation of Li's letter. We've used the version printed in TBN; there's another version printed in Huashang Morning Post that has slight differences - additional phrases in some places, deletions in others.