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June 23, 2007

China Star Sells NW Cherries in Music Video

Austin Jenkins at KUOW reports on how Washington State cherry growers are advertising in China:

"I thought it was just going to be like the fruit commission coming out and taking out and taking some pictures for the China market or something. I didn't know it was MTV."

Well, not exactly MTV. It's a Chinese production crew that's about to shoot a music video that will air on MTV in China. Wingerter's orchard near Yakima, Washington, is the backdrop....sometimes, the best way to market an American product in China is with a Chinese star....In this case, that star is Jing Tian, age nineteen. She wears a simple red dress for this video shoot. As the music plays, she lip syncs and strolls through the fruit-laden trees stopping to admire the cherries. During a break in shooting, she's on-message with a reporter. Tian: "Cherry is delicious."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:32 PM |

More Evil Than Evil Itself

ESWN translates a column by Lian Yue in Southern Metropolis Daily:

When "kiln slavery" becomes only "illegal employment," then what can possibly break the law? Has our nation become a zero-crime nation? It is very hard to accept that utopia has arrived so quickly....If the state still only wants to call this "illegal employment," then our entire society may collapse because that definition is simply too far removed from humanity - it creates the impression that there is nothing one won't do in order to protect the interests of the criminals. When the Internet exposed the "kiln slaves" affair to the world, those government officials who don't like public opinion monitoring as well as those who have interests involved in the case obviously tried to cover up. They even said that these were "lies intended to mislead the people" and that it was too severe to even consider the case to be "illegal employment."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:06 PM |

From Wenhua to Wenhua Chanye

Hai Ren reviews the collection Culture in the Contemporary PRC (Michel Hockx and Julia Straus, eds) for MCLC:

In sum, the politics of making wenhua an enterprise is key to understanding the problem of contemporary Chinese culture. In this politics, the future of wenhua is encoded through historical narratives of entrepreneurialism. In other words, the contours of Chinese history are reshaped by economic discourses--in the cases of fashion, museums and theme parks, and personal memories of economically successful people--to legitimize the ruling ideology of the Chinese state. Moreover, creativity and aesthetics in cultural production can hardly be said to have evinced political committment (despite appearances to the contrary) since the early 1990s. Collusion between aesthetics and commerce has become a dominant practice in cultural production (in cases of film, music, and poetry).

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:52 AM |

June 22, 2007

How the reporter found the Shanxi brick kiln slaves

ESWN translates a YWeekend piece in which journalist Fu Zhenyong describes how he followed up on tips from parents to hunt down the children that were enslaved in Shanxi brick kilns.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:48 AM |

June 21, 2007

Spiked in Sydney and London, published in Beijing

JDM070620wendirupert.jpg
Australia's Good Weekend commissioned a story about Rupert Murdoch's Chinese wife then killed it. The Guardian agreed to publish the article, then killed it. In Beijing New Century Weekly has published the profile of Ms Wendi Deng that made UK and Aussie editors cower.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 3:33 PM |

Ebay's China joint venture to waste money

Ad industry blogger Madison Boom says Ebay's joint venture Tom-Eachnet has hired TBWA to do a big ad campaign, but for what?

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 3:26 PM |

China and . . . Sweden

Black and White Cat discusses rural poverty and translates a Southern Weekly article on democratic socialism in Sweden.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:00 PM |

A business approach to piracy

In BusinessWeek Shuan Rein calls on multinational companies to take 'a business, not a moral, approach' to piracy by 'adding value to legitimate products so consumers will want to reject counterfeits'.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:03 AM |

Baseball: Yankees sign two Chinese players

The New York Yankees have signed two Chinese players: catcher Zhang Zhenwang and pitcher Liu Kai.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:55 AM |

June 20, 2007

Yankees hire Chinese pitcher and catcher

The New York Yankees have hired two Chinese baseball players who will play in the minor leagues and work their way up to the majors.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:41 PM |

Missionaries

Is it an 'art student' scam? Is it English corner? None of the above: Blogger Brendan O'Kane has an encounter with new Beijing.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:22 AM |

Highway for Mount Everest

Xinhua reports:

China will begin Monday building a 'highway' on Mount Qomolangma [aka Everest]... so as to ease the path of those bearing the Olympic torch.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:26 AM |

"Please Vote for Me" wins Silverdocs award

From Monica Hesse at the Washington Post:

The top prize of this year's Silverdocs documentary film festival went to a nail-biting political drama . . . about 7-year-olds.

"Please Vote for Me," which chronicles the battle of three Chinese students to become class monitor, beat out 99 other films to win the Sterling Award for feature film on Sunday, capping off six days of screenings, conference panels and workshops. "It's a film about the idea of democracy, and a window into modern China," says Patricia Finneran, the festival's director. "It's also about the shady politicking that goes on with third-graders."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:15 AM |

Social ecology or biopower?

husunzi at the China Study Group picks apart a dashed-off China Daily editorial by Tsinghua sociologist Sun Liping:

...there is a ubiquitous ideology or discourse that treats "China" as an organism whose spontaneous biological functioning needs to be tweaked by the party-state-brain (ideally at a distance, through people's internalization of the brain's will, or the nation's collective best interests - that is, through governmentality...), and that this ideology regards the peasants as particularly prone to canceration, and which justifies all kinds of injustice with the logic of intellectualization of the economy (an inexorable aspect of national development, i.e. the maturation of the national organism so that it can "stand up" to and compete with the most highly evolved species of nation).

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:07 AM |

Chen Guangcheng beaten, on hunger strike

John Kennedy at GVO translates a blog post by Hu Jia on blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng's first year in prison:

[Chen Guangcheng's wife] Yuan Weijing asked why Guangcheng had been moved to 'restricted security' and was told that all inmates having done less than a year are kept in 'restricted security'. "We were surprised to see prison staff twist the law at will and speak nonsense." The prison then immediately gave another explanation, saying that Guangcheng often filed complaints against the prison, bringing them to the police, and that this why he had been put in 'restricted security'. This statement proves that the Linyi, Shandong political and legal departments are using illegal tactics to strike and get revenge in response to civil supervision and complaints filed against a judicial department.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:39 AM |

June 19, 2007

Public Insecurity in Beijing: The Ubiquitous Bao'an

Jeremiah at the Granite Studio writes about double-standards in gate-keeping at the "Concession Area/Treaty Port known as the Beijing CBD":

When YJ - crusading journalist and peeved Chinese patriot - confronted the bao'an about the double standard, the guard simply replied that they were "under orders not to stop foreigners, only Chinese." Wrong answer. Right now she's organizing some kind of "bao'an boycott" among the other staffers at the compound. Every day at noon I check CNN Asia to make sure the lead story is not some crazy lady burning her laminated identification badge in front of the foreign diplomats compound.

[blocked in China]

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:29 PM |

Comments on the Shanxi Brick Kiln Case

Shanxi media is forbidden from doing its own reporting on the illegal brick kilns in Hongdong County, for fear that it could misdirect public opinion against local authorities. Local media can run Xinhua reports, however; ESWN translates a Xinhua article that directs public opinion against local authorities.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:52 AM |

The changing Chinese family

The Washington Post has published a series of web videos titled 'Redefining Chinese Families' including episodes on women, migrant workers, and the elderly.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:26 AM |

June 18, 2007

Microsoft buys shares in Changhong TV

Xinhua reports:

Microsoft China is buying 15 million shares of China's Sichuan Changhong Electric, one of the mainland's largest television makers.

Microsoft will pay 94.05 million yuan for the shares at a price of 6.27 yuan each and they will not be tradable for 36 months from the end of Changhong's non-public offering of 400 million shares, a statement from Changhong said.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:47 PM |

Where's the disaster relief blogging?

John Kennedy at GVO rounds up some video and image content concerning natural disasters in China and the subsequent humanitarian efforts, but then wonders why coverage is so scarce.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:13 AM |

Government astroturfing

Astroturfing is a PR industry term referring to word of mouth PR campaigns that are paid for, i.e. fake.

ESWN has translated a short notice from the Taizhou city government looking for Internet astroturfers to 'make positive commentary and articulate main themes consistent with the work and plans of the city party and government'.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:11 AM |

Vice crackdown: photos

ESWN has posted a series of photos showing police raids on establishments of ill repute.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:09 AM |

An ad the size of a cigarette

ESWN has translated an opinion piece by a 'veteran Chengdu Evening News worker' discussing the fallout from the classified ad placed in the newspaper to commemorate the mothers of June victims.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:07 AM |

China gaining ground in Africa

correspondent Howard French returns from an African trip to China on Ethiopian Airlines and ponders China's growing 'footprint' in Africa:

Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade ... [was quoted] urging G-8 nations to invest in Africa 'like India and China.'

Implicit in his remarks is the widespread feeling that Western promises typically amount to little more than lip service and that it is Africa's new partners, led by China, that are showing the kind of decisiveness that can change the landscape.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:04 AM |

June 17, 2007

The first honest apartment advertising in China

Lauren from Notes from Ningnan explains why Beijing's Muma has the perfect name for an upscale apartment complex.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:48 PM |

F.D.A. Tracked Tainted Drugs, but Trail Went Cold in China

The New York Times continues its reporting on how the investigation into fake glycerin persisted over the course of a decade.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:01 AM |