Cocky video pirates
James Fallows finds a funny face in a DVD.
« August 19, 2007 - August 25, 2007 | Main | September 2, 2007 - September 8, 2007 »
Western sections of the Great Wall of China are being reduced to 'mounds of dirt' by sandstorms and may disappear entirely in 20 years, a report said Wednesday.
The reasons for the deterioration are entirely manmade, the official Xinhua News Agency said, pointing to destructive farming methods in the 1950s that desertified areas of northern China, causing sandstorms.
'Frequent storms not only eroded the mud, but also cracked the wall and caused it to collapse or break down,' Xinhua quoted archaeologist Zhou Shengrui as saying.
The most threatened sections of the wall are in Gansu Province, where it's made of packed earth rather than the bricks that make up the sections around Beijing.There are good security guards and then there are bad ones. Based upon my experience in gathering news, most security guards are good people (or else Shenzhen would be in total chaos). There were several stories in which I came into close contact with security guards. The first case was the security guards who were assaulted in Nanshui. They were the victims. The second case was on November 1, when a security guard was squeezed twice in the testicles by a woman, resulting in a painfully swollen injury. The security guard was also a victim. The third case was the Gangxia security guards. They were very bad people. The fourth case was the security guards at Shexia who were very good at maintaining security at the village. The reporter played the role of a passerby and chatted with the security guards to obtain the information. Sometimes, one gets more lively material when one does not reveal oneself as a reporter.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
China's finance minister resigned in an unusually abrupt change ahead of a major Communist Party conclave in October, but his departure is unlikely to result in any significant shift in the government's economic program.
Finance Minister Jin Renqing asked to resign for 'personal reasons' and the government has approved the resignation, the State Council, China's cabinet, said Thursday. Mr. Jin will become deputy chief of the State Council's Development Research Center, a think tank, a statement issued by the State Council Information Office said. That is a far less senior position than finance minister, although the Information Office said Mr. Jin would also keep his ministerial rank in the government bureaucracy.
China generally avoids making a public display of its media control ideology and tactics, which have scant popular support. As the 17th National Congress nears, however, party leaders are cranking up the volume and urging media not to forget their duty to public opinion guidance.
One of the most notable examples to appear in recent weeks was a speech, disseminated on August 22 through the Central Propaganda Department's Guangming Daily and a number of major Websites, by Yuan Zhifa (袁志发), a former Guangming Daily editor with a long resume of propaganda postings.
Yuan, who is now - for lack of a better phrase - a journalism educator, talks about how journalists in China can gain a better grasp of "cadence" (韵律).
I've heard more complaints than praise about arranged tours, both from entire tour groups and individual travelers. Too often we hear tourists say they have been taken to places other than the Badaling Wall, such as the Wildlife Park or playgrounds in the neighborhood.
An American friend who visited the Wall with a group in late April was taken to a pharmacy and forced to take a physical exam there. He was told that he had problems with his kidney and that the medications offered at the pharmacy just happened to be the best treatment available.
On August 25, the website declared that it had been subjected to bandit-style law enforcement as 13 computers and 1 server were hauled away by the authorities. This caused some netizens to remark that the website had finally been subjected to retaliation for that famous series of reports and notices.
The enforcement team leader said that Fan Bin was running an illegal Internet cafe. He said that Fan had set up his Internet cafe inside his own home. "We asked him to stop, but he refuses to pay heed. There is a steel door and a surveillance camera at the place. When we knock on the door, he does not open it. We couldn't get in." He also said that the raid had nothing to do with Hangzhou Information Net.
I talked to two journalists who did master’s degree courses in London. Both work for the state-owned English-language media. One was rather apologetic about his work. Because his audience is mainly foreign, he is not as constrained as colleagues in the domestic media. But nor is he free of censorship. Yet he also thinks that in many ways he does a better job of reporting China than the foreign press does. It is not that the foreign press is too 'negative' about China; it is that it lacks context. It misses the trends.
China's Communist party will open a critical meeting on October 15, state media said on Tuesday, announcing a congress at which president and party chief Hu Jintao is expected to consolidate power with a leadership reshuffle...
...One key test of his growing confidence will be whether he succeeds in ousting Jiang loyalists such as Jia Qinglin, head of an advisory body to parliament, from the standing committee, which currently has only eight members.
Legislators are discussing a draft amendment to the Law on Science and Technology Progress that states: "Scientists and technicians, who have initiated research with a high risk of failure will still have their expenses covered if they can provide evidence that they have tried their best when they failed to achieve their goals."
The high pressure has been blamed for contributing to the rampant academic frauds in China, scientists say. Xu Jialu, vice-chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, said on Monday that when a project failed, the technicians were always under heavy pressure. They might be afraid that their reputations would be affected and it would be harder to apply for research funds.
Car owners argued that smoother traffic comes at the expense of individuals' convenience.
"Does being a car owner mean you have limited rights? That would be cruel and inhuman," Wang Hongsheng, head of the Volkswagen Polo club in Beijing, said. Fifty-seven percent of car owners shared his opinion.
Among non-drivers, 21.9 percent did not think the even-odd plate exercise was a reasonable, scientific way to gauge air quality.
Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, today won China's top science-fiction award, the Galaxy Award, in the category "Most Popular Foreign Author of the Year." The award, voted on by Chinese readers, was presented at the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the largest science-fiction conference ever held in China. (The last international SF&F conference in China was held ten years ago, in 1997.)
Chinese translations of Sawyer's novels are published by Science Fiction World, headquartered in Chengdu, and his short stories have appeared in Science Fiction World magazine, the world's largest-circulation SF publication; Sawyer is also a past columnist for that magazine.
The booklet is a report, personally commissioned by Governor Youngdahl, to assess "discrimination practiced against the Chinese, the Filipinos, and the Japanese who reside in Minnesota." It is divided into three sections concerning each group, respectively, and ends with a brief conclusion on what steps should be taken to assure that the three groups can continue to live in Minnesota, unmolested by discriminatory people and practices.
This is a laudable stuff, and much of it seems just as relevant today as it was in 1949. But for my money (admittedly, very little: I paid US$4 for the book), the most interesting passages concern the history and daily life of the 550-member Chinese community living in Minnesota in 1949.
From John Kennedy at Global Voices Online:
Calling himself Tiger Temple, Zhang set off earlier this month on a bicycle blogging tour to look for his own news that will take him through Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, four impoverished provinces in north central China's hinterland, posting photos, video and reports of who and what he encounters along the way, the next step it seems from his usual blogging of things like street-level crime and natural disruptions to construction work on 2008 Olympic venues.