Must-read China news by Danwei

For Xinhua to report the situation properly, the task would have to be given to the international department, which could make full use of its bureau in Manila. But handing the task over to the international department would be implying that this part of the islands was not under Chinese control. So nothing was written until the next day, when three of the fishermen were reported to have been found.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:55 PM | Permalink

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:13 PM | Permalink

Despite the surgical hand of Southern Weekend's editorial committee, Zhai Minglei received hundreds of letters praising the paper's coverage of the issue. Soon after, CCTV's "Eastern Horizon", a news talk show, ran an interview with Xu Yongguang, the top official at Project Hope. Xu acknowledged there had been a few hiccups at the Project, but said the Communist Youth Development Foundation was looking at nationwide changes to the program. The news program had also interviewed Zhai Minglei, who spoke about endemic institutional problems at Project Hope. This part of the interview was removed before the segment aired, meeting the same fate as similar comments in Zhai's article. China's media minders were not interested in casting the story as anything more than an isolated case of corruption. The local official Tang Chunxu would remain the scapegoat.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:48 PM | Permalink

For the Chinese government, every visitor, even the casual tourist, represents an opportunity to make a positive impression—to let the world know of China's progress under the sage guidance of the Communist party. But American journalists fresh off the plane are potential troublemakers and have to be handled with special care. Predisposed to criticize government policy and to distrust official pronouncements, they have to be brought around gently to the desired image of a dynamic, prudently modernizing China. There are several ways to try to shape the experience of "media friends" so as to bring about this result: through flattery and bonhomie, with creature comforts and small luxuries, and, most of all, by regulating the sort of contacts they make during their short stay.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:08 AM | Permalink

"It's a new medium," says Director John Xiao Qi. A film with strong elements of a commercial isn't a compromise, he reasons, as "It's easier for the audience to accept the message because of the setting."

We've seen this "film" several times, and there's nothing subtle about it—most of the scenes take place in Starbucks, with the logo ever present. Furthermore, where do you get off saying that "the audience can accept it more because of the setting."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:49 AM | Permalink

The atmospherics of hard sleeper have not changed much in the past decade. Except what once was considered pure passé now seemed unintended kitsch, as it is when you return to Grandma's house after a long-time absence. Embroidery embedded in mayonaisse green. Rounded windows with lace curtains, showing silhoutted scenes of bare-bellied goddesses at river's edge. Aisle carpeting in a jazzy piano theme, all keys and notes. Over the loudspeaker, breathy Chinese pop played longer and louder than I had ever remembered.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:28 AM | Permalink

In case any readers are not familiar with Chao (1892-1982), he was the finest linguist ever to come out of China. He was also a supporter of romanization; he was even the lead creator of an ingenious if somewhat complicated romanization system for Mandarin: Gwoyeu Romatzyh. But there's no way a few short sentences could do justice to the depth and breadth of Chao's learning. To get a better idea of the man, read the introduction to the work - and then read the rest!

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:12 PM | Permalink

The Pentagon's formal protest was lodged by a senior Defense official, David Sedney, who called Beijing's defense attache in Washington to the Pentagon to accept the objection. The complaint focused on the Chinese refusal to allow the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and several accompanying vessels to make a scheduled stop in Hong Kong on Thanksgiving.

Two top Navy admirals on Tuesday sharply criticized the Chinese refusal to accommodate the Kitty Hawk as well as, earlier, two minesweepers, the Patriot and the Guardian, which had sought refuge in Hong Kong on Nov. 20 to refuel and to escape an approaching storm. Navy officials said refusing any ship safe harbor in a storm is a breach of maritime traditions.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:40 PM | Permalink

On November 23, I was trying to confirm whether Zhou Zhenglong filed a police report. I was near mental collapse. At first, Zhou Zhenglong denied that he filed a police report. Then he admitted it. I went to the public security bureau and they swore in the name of the heavens that there was no police complaint. Then I obtained internal information from within the public security bureau that Zhou Zhenglong filed a police report. I went to the public security bureau and I sought out the police officer who received Zhou Zhenglong. He denied that Zhou Zhenglong filed a police report and he sounded so sincere that I almost believed that he was telling the truth. At this time, the Shaanxi province Forestry Department official Guan Ke learned that the public security bureau had issued a denial, and so he told the reporters that "he can help them to coordinate (that is, to verify that there was a police report)." I was going crazy. Guan Ke said that there was a police report but Zhou Zhenglong denied it. When Zhou Zhenglong admitted it, the public security bureau denied it. And they are all supposed to be on the same side. The attitude of Guan Ke clearly showed that he was using us and we were being manipulated. So we decided to return to Xi'an that day.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:07 PM | Permalink

Three of them produced identification, two did not, and they proceeded to search through every room and every corner of my house. Even the paper in my printer was confiscated, along with my last remaining copies of the forty-one issues of Minjian. At the same time, they demanded to search my home computer. They searched through files on the computer, and even removed the hard drive which they took with them. The reason they gave was my involvement in work on the illegal publication Minjian.

On 29 November, 2007, the an enforcement team from the Shanghai Ministry of Culture raided the home of Minjian editor Zhai Minglei on the pretext that "someone had reported illegal publications." They seized the 41 copies of Minjian that remained at his home and removed his computer hard drive.

Minjian magazine is attached to Sun Yatsen University's Center for Citizens and Development; in story-telling form it narrates the growth of civic society in China. Its simple, warm style gained domestic admirers both inside and outside of the system. The print edition of Minjian was halted on 6 July, 2007, and its web edition was closed on 20 August.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:54 PM | Permalink

We have been preparing for a relaunch since May, 2006. Last week, we signed a framework agreement with Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corp. Ltd., with which we have jointly set up a company to sell ads in the paper. Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corp. will distribute the newspaper in the subway.

The relaunch came about due to severe competition in Beijing's print media industry. Currently, Beijing has 10 large local comprehensive newspapers, and they don't differ much from each other. When readers buy one of the papers, they have no need to purchase another one.

Beijing Daily Messenger belongs to Beijing Daily Newspaper Group, which also owns Beijing Evening News, Beijing Morning Post, Beijing Daily and The First. Beijing Daily Newspaper Group has been trying to make the titles different from each other, with our newspaper set to focus on entertainment and sports news over the past few years. However, such specialization didn't make us competitive. After looking at the metro newspapers in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing, we decided to relaunch as a free subway newspaper in Beijing.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:52 PM | Permalink

...since 2006, most of the interesting and dissenting news is coming from chat rooms. 2004 and 2005, he tells us, were the "golden years" for the Chinese blogosphere....and they're over now.... the Chinese internet has gone "back to the old years", and chat rooms have returned to importance. Chatrooms have existed in China since 1998, and they're popular venues for spreading "sharp news".... "We're making social change using web 1.0, not using web 2.0."

Web 2.0 is associated with democratization and decentralization in the US and Europe. These tools make it possible for people to have a voice, and for online voices to become powerful in an offline space. "But this can only happen in democratic countries," he argues. In China, the problem with these tools is that they're centralized, living on a single server. Block wordpress.com and you block millions of voices; blog twitter.com and you block the entire service. They're easy to control via firewalls and government centralized control.

But email and chatrooms aren't as centralized. There are chatrooms on thousands of servers, and it's hard for the government to block every chatroom overseas. It's easy to blog webmail, but people who use POP mail are difficult to block and prevent from talking about sensitive topics. Oddly enough, GMail remains unblocked in China - Anti believes it's because so many government officials and businessmen use it, and it would be difficult to block it without negative implications for powerful people.

"We don't need new media theory to explain blogs in China: blogs are old media," Anti argues. "We had no media before 1996 - we had propoganda." In propoganda, the party speaks to you - it's exclusively one-way communication. The internet introduces the idea of bi-directional media, and creates media as we understand it for the first time in China in 1996.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:20 PM | Permalink

The September ordinations of Papally-approved bishops for Beijing and Guiyang was widely assumed to mark an improvement in the ongoing rapprochement between the Vatican and Beijing. And, to an extent, that interpretation was correct. Not only had the Pope approved the ordinations, but so had the government-run Chinese Catholic Bishops Conference. But all was not well, either. Faithful in both dioceses were upset by the attendance of Ma Yinglin, the illicitly ordained (in 2006, without Papal approval) bishop of Kunming. Though nobody was saying so publicly, many interpreted Ma's presence as a not-so-subtle signal that the Chinese religious authorities were not yet so willing to loosen their control over Chinese Catholic life and - at the same time - a direct signal that the new bishops would be loyal to Beijing before Rome.

Then, last week, came news that three additional bishops had received approval from the Chinese Bishops Conference to be ordained in Guangzhou, Yichang, and Ningxia, respectively.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:58 PM | Permalink

Chef Liu is a mild-natured migrant worker who is tortured by his broken marriage. The chef tries every means to safeguard his own interests. He is smart but powerless.

In his search for his lost bag of money, Liu Yuejin breaks promises, playing a deadly game with dangerous enemies, including a real estate tycoon, corrupted officials, the mafia, vendors, prostitutes, private eyes, and subcontractors.

"Life looks smooth and perfect. However, when looking underneath, one may find holes, cracks and misfit joints. I intend to do a justice to the incongruity of life in my stories," explains Liu who prefers to call all his novels "comedies" instead of "tragedies or tragic-comedies".

"For centuries, playwrights, writers, and scriptwriters are fond of writing about tragedies. But in my eyes, all tragedies are comedies," says Liu.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:33 PM | Permalink

China needs to look into its heart, and its soul, and forgive American debt. For too long the US has been held hostage to foreign debt collectors, and quite frankly, it's weighing the country down. At this point it seems petty for China even to ask for its money back. What's 900 billion dollars among strategic allies?

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:44 AM | Permalink

A tentative agreement for China to buy Airbus jetliners valued at $15 billion topped about $30 billion of contract signings for French companies overseen by President Nicolas Sarkozy during his first state visit to the country, but the raft of deals barely papered over widening currency-policy differences between the powers.

Mr. Sarkozy yesterday urged Beijing to let the yuan rise against the euro as tension grows in Europe over the euro's strength against the Chinese currency. The European Union is China's top trading partner.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 6:09 PM | Permalink

For Sunday's race, the weather in Shanghai was, thankfully, clear (although blue skies aren't an indication that air in China is safe to breathe). But because of the route organizers chose, the race was more unbearable than it needed to be. We wound through industrial areas and alongside highways thick with mid-morning traffic. For a quarter mile, I trailed a slow-moving bus, breathing in exhaust as workers watched from the windows (check out a similar scene here). Runners of the full marathon had it even worse - for the final 13 miles, they snaked back and forth through dirty Minhang district.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:46 PM | Permalink

Props to ESWN for this great translation of a Phoenix article on the dismal state of literary translation in China. Basically, the article describes a cycle of low pay and poor quality translation that rewards quantity over quality. Kenneth Tan at Shanghaiist continues the discussion here with his personal accounts of working with translating companies in China. While he is right to some extent that many of the bargain basement tranlsation 'companies' are little more than poorly run offices that crank out low quality translations, I think that for business-oriented translating companies, the picture is much more complex.

I have had contact with a few different translating companies in Beijing, and each was different. One of them who I worked with invited me to their 'office' for an interview. From the office it was immediately evident what kind of place it was. The name on the door was different from their official name, the only staff in the office consisted of a manager and his assistant, and there was a line of eager college students waiting in the hallway to interview for jobs. I had done a translation test for them 6 months prior, but they had changed staff, and didn't know where it was anymore. Needless to say, I wasn't optimistic, but in the end I did a medium size job for them, and they actually paid decently and on-time.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:41 PM | Permalink

On 20 of November, the victim, Huang Xing-nan, was stabbed by two criminals on her back, waist and leg when she left the center to visit another injured colleague in the hospital. The cuts were up to 10cm in length. Her left leg suffered the most serious injury, bones and tendons, blood vessels, tendons and nerves all been cut off. She was sent to the intensive care unit and now transferred to the orthopedic ward. It is very unlikely that Huang can recover from the injury as she has once suffered from serious burnt from an industrial fire and such medical record makes the treatment more difficult.

After the incident, the labour center issued an appeal letter to Hong Kong groups asking for support. Organizations such as Labour force, China Labour Watch, Asia monitor, SACOMM, Globalization monitor reacted immediately with a press conference. In their joint statement, they pointed out that if the incident is not dealt with properly, the violence will spread to other civic organization and threaten the life of other NGOs organizers and activists.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:38 PM | Permalink

The leaders of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region tried to imbue their capital with Mongol characteristics. Key buildings, including the Inner Mongolia Museum and Theatre, incorporated Mongol motifs. From the late 1960s, however, the Cultural Revolution swept over Inner Mongolia. Apart from destroying old customs and ideas as elsewhere in China, the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia targeted what was portrayed as Mongol ethnic separatism. Emphasising Mongol characteristics was equated with separatist sentiment, and in the following two decades, the cityscape of Hohhot presented the same concrete block monotone. In the late 1990s, however, the pace of change in the urban landscape of Hohhot began to accelerate: green spaces were created, high-rise buildings went up, better lighting was installed. Most striking, ethnic identity became a prominent element in Hohhot's cityscape. The leaders of the city and of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region worked closely with commercial and tourism interests to highlight the multicultural character of Hohhot and especially Mongol historical and cultural aspects in order to distinguish it from other Chinese cities. By making Hohhot distinctive they aimed to restore the dynamic character of the city that had historically been a major trading town on the route to Russia and Central Asia and to give it a global context. In other words, the newly rediscovered ethnic characteristics of Hohhot became a means of locating and branding the city in a global culture.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:16 PM | Permalink

Vouchers from the supermarket chain Trust-Mart (好又多) have become a favored currency of petty corruption in Fujian, says a local entrepreneur who carries a stack on him. In the course of a recent interview about unrelated topics, by way of demonstrating how he greases the palms of tax, commerce, customs and other officials, he opened his glove compartment and whipped out the bills. Each was worth 100 yuan. "That right there is 3,000 kuai."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:53 AM | Permalink

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 4:08 AM | Permalink

Xinhua seemed to have deemed the case closed despite the vague warning coming in the last paragraph that the airspace controls would last for days resulting in continued disruption. An awareness of an audience other than its own "leaders" has never been the agency's strong point. In addition, the initial report only referred to delays in Guangzhou yet there were hundreds of flights affected all over eastern China. There was barely any coverage in the Chinese-language press and only a nib in Shanghai Daily.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:09 PM | Permalink