Must-read China news by Danwei

Watching TV is a major form of entertainment for tens of millions of Chinese people and they love TV dramas, which sometimes satisfy viewers’ psychological need for an ideal world and maybe give them hope that living by ideal values could bring happiness and success. It is interesting to see how the Chinese public buys into such idealism, which, on the other hand, indicates people’s disappointment and dissatisfaction with reality. These blog discussions also reveal people’s awareness of the value change associated with China’s social transition, and that they are willing to uphold traditional, or main values like true love, honesty and hard work. At the same time, they also accept some new values represented by the younger generation, such as pursuit of personal dreams and fulfillment of one’s individuality.

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At a recent meeting in Chongqing municipality, deputy mayor Huang Qifan cut short a lower official who was reading from a prepared document: "There's no need to use these bureaucratic clichs on this occasion. It's totally unnecessary." After that, the others skipped at least half of their speeches.

I wish I had the good fortune to be a witness to such a dramatic moment. It was tense, reported a local newspaper, as all those officials who were to report to Huang must have gone through a lightening fast process to readjust their speaking style - to be concise and to the point.

It would be great if the whole bureaucracy in the nation could be infused with a strong incentive to "cut the waffle".

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When one newspaper or agency reports on something published elsewhere, it’s quite natural for it to be shortened, modified or added to provided these changes are sourced and not presented as a true representation of the original text. Readers in different countries will often want to know different things and focus on different aspects of a story. But how much of that story can be cut before the meaning is completely lost?

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What Olympics host city or country hasn't had critics? A quick Google search turns up plenty of information about dissent and protests surrounding previous games. Do any of us remember hearing much about these things in the international media at the time? I don't. Why? Because the host governments treated dissent as a normal thing and didn't go around throwing everybody in jail or suppressing their publications. And guess what? The international media didn't pay too much attention to the dissenters and protestors anyway...

...Why can't China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country? Why behave in such an insecure manner that violates international human rights norms, damages China's international image, and distracts media attention away from the Chinese people's genuine accomplishments over the past 30 years - as well as from the excitement of the sports competition itself?

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Ding Zhenkuan, deputy head of the Beijing Bureau of Work Safety, grudgingly revealed the toll only after he came under pressure during a rare early evening news conference. Mr Ding at first dismissed the report in The Sunday Times. But then said: "There were two deaths at the Bird’s Nest, one in 2006 and one in 2007. We have properly compensated the families, reported the accidents to the construction community and seriously punished those responsible."

But it was only amid confusion over the total number of dead and injured that Mr Ding finally revealed that another four people had died during construction of the other Olympic venues, bringing the total to six. He declined to give details of how or where they died and virtually scampered out of the media spotlight.

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China's worst winter weather in five decades will continue over the next three days, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) told a news conference Wednesday.

The heavy snow and sleet has paralyzed transport and coal shipments, and led to travelers cramming railways stations and airports and power supply reductions in almost half of the 31 provinces and regions on the Chinese mainland.

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Earlier this week, the Indian government bestowed one of its greatest honors, the Padma Bushan award, on the 97-year-old Ji, in honor of his contributions to cross-cultural understanding. In the realpolitik of Chinese-Indian diplomacy, the move was immediately interpreted as as indicating a positive direction in the relationship between the two countries.

Symbolically speaking, the theory has some merit. Ji has long been a believer in the transformative virtue of translation. When he received a lifetime achievement award in China in 2006 for his contributions to the field of translation, he observed that "The reason our Chinese culture has been able to remain consistent and rich throughout its 5,000 years of history is closely linked to translation. Translations from other cultures have helped infuse new blood into our culture."

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U.S. based Web site About.com, which offers users advice from specialists on topics ranging from body building to horticulture, has been quietly expanding in China. Last year, without public announcement, the company opened its About.com China office in Beijing. In November, testing of a Chinese version of the site, called Abang.com, started.

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Please Vote for Me, an award-winning documentary directed by Weijun Chen, takes a closer look at an interesting social experiment with democracy in China.

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This has nothing to do, really, with the censors. This is because of pressure from the top – from a very high level. That’s why it has happened before the Summer Olympics, the Chinese government wants to have so-called "clean air." In their language, LOST IN BEIJING has created a very negative image of society. On the internet someone released a pirated copy of the film containing sexual imagery that was cut from the movie and that’s why the situation is so severe. The Propaganda Department became concerned about this and the pressure is probably coming from the Political Bureau.

The censors say that this is something they don’t want to do, but it is something no one can stop. This is the first time they have suspended an individual for something posted on the internet. Previously, when a director or producer has been banned they will call you into SARFT and have a conversation with you and notify you of the situation. They didn’t do that this time. According to my inside information, they were told that they have three days to deal with this.

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Propaganda Department Minister:

My pen is pointed; the brush is round,

I've written hundreds of thousands of articles,

I've published thousands of hundreds of articles

Was a single sentence true? No!

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Bruce Dover, an Australian, was Mr Murdoch's man in Beijing until 1998. He has written a rare insider's account of how the Chinese got the better of a businessman who usually gets what he wants.

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The venture, Baosteel Victoria Iron & Steel Co Ltd in the southern Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, will be Baosteel's first steel mill outside China, the report said.

Construction on the first phase of the project will begin in 2009 and production will start in 2011.

Baosteel holds 60 pct of the venture with CVRD holding the remainder.

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Major League Baseball will play its first games in China in March and hopes to broadcast them on local television in a push to internationalize America's pastime, league executives said here Thursday.

MLB, which earned $6 billion in revenue in 2007, is huge in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, but so far China has contributed little due to minimal TV coverage. Moreover, the game is due to make its last appearance as an Olympic sport for the foreseeable future in August in Beijing.

"We are here to show that baseball is truly a world game and worthy of being in the Olympics," said Paul Archey, MLB senior vp international business operations. "The potential to grow the sport in China is tremendous."

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Uniformed workers fanned out and blocked the front gates of city hall, said a woman who watched the protest unfold while manning a door at the People’s Hall across the street. Then the group sat on the ground. They did not shout any slogans or carry any banners, she said, so she had no inkling of what they were on about. "Who were they?" she asked blankly. Public security and military police vehicles soon showed up and officers secured the scene.

Company officials were not aware of the sit-in until it was in-progress, the contact recounted. The Dragon Aromatics general manager, Lin Yingzong, got to the scene from the plant in Haicang district in the late morning. He and other company supervisors met with city officials to discuss the matter and helped persuade the employees to move along. "They still abide by what our company says." The firm sent buses to transport the demonstrators back to the Xianglu campus. They were dispersed within a short period of time without any incident or detentions, a military police official told one local journalist.

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The most interesting thing to me about Gan's films are that they're coming from a point of view that's less concerned with dogma and theology and more with the role of spirituality in everyday life, something that's almost totally absent from most modern Chinese films. And he can sound downright dangerous at times.

"The most important thing is whether a person has something to hope for inside. I think a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam or others, has a major role because it tells us that in the eye of God, we are very precious."

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An article in this morning's Metro Express commuter paper reported that a Yum Enterprises spokesperson has confirmed the closing of Shanghai's two Taco Bell Grandes, at People's Square and in Gubei, as well as the chain's single Shenzhen location. Instead of pushing Americanized Mexican food in a tough market, the owners of KFC and Pizza Hut have chosen to concentrate on expanding their new Chinese 'quick service' venture East Dawning (东方既白)

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Heilan first came into being in 1996, as a traditional paper literary magazine. It was started by Chen Wei (the other site administrator) in Nanjing, and only put out one issue before being closed down. "You know that period of time," says Zhao, "the authorities were very anxious then. It was an unofficial publication, and even though there was no sensitive content, the fact that it was unlicensed was enough to get it shut down."

Six years later, Heilan found its next incarnation as a website. It began life as a BBS forum, and within a year had added most of its present elements: the monthly magazine, digital publications, and the literary prize. The forum currently boasts 14,000+ members, though Zhao cautions that fake IP addresses probably mean the real number is about half that – respectable for a highbrow literary site, but nothing compared to the likes of Qidian. The monthly 'publication' (网刊, wǎngkān) draws its content from the site members, and gets anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand readers every month.

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if it’s not worth mourning on a scientific basis, it is worth mourning on a historical basis: That telescope and observatory is one of Shanghai’s last links to the great Jesuit scientists responsible for many of the city’s most important institutions, including many of its universities (including, indirectly, Fudan), hospitals, museums (including the much-maligned Natural History Museum), and public laboratories. In contemporary Shanghai, these origins are mostly unknown and increasingly irrelevant; but sixty years ago they were not only relevant, but pertinent: the Jesuits were the key piece in the city’s scientific establishment.

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EO: In the coming years, what will be the biggest challenge for or sticking point in China's administrative management system reform?

Shi: First, we must affirm the positive role of the system. If we deny this, then the great achievements it has made during the past 30 years would be unimaginable. At the same time, we must admit that the current system has many problems, and limits the governments’ ability to perform their duty accordingly. If we don't change it, and continue economic, education, medical, cultural, scientific, and social reforms, all of them will encounter numerous difficulties.

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As recently as two decades ago, such broad-scale immorality had been considered only an American patent. When I, as a graduate student in the Chengdu Branch of Chinese Academy of Sciences, married an American man in 1988, the director of the Education Department of the institute advised me to leave him.

"American men are notoriously unfaithful. He will abandon you in no time," the director had said. He would be disappointed to learn that my marriage is still intact today, while I hear an increasing number of extramarital scandals from my Chinese acquaintances.

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In a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Bank of China said: 'In line with our initial, unaudited 2007 operational data and taking into consideration ... provisions for possible subprime losses, our bank's post-tax profit will still rise in 2007 against the previous year.

'Our bank believes the SCMP report is completely groundless and we don't know its sources,' the statement said.

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• a tendency to refer to ‘the Chinese’ or ‘China’, as if the various Chinese actors all shared the same interests;

• a tendency to focus excessively on China’s interests in oil over other commodities;

• a decided preference for focussing on China’s negative impacts on the continent, and within that, on issues and places of violence, disorder and corruption (e.g. Zimbabwe, Sudan, Angola) over other negative issues (e.g. trade imbalances, undermining domestic manufacturing sectors);

• a tendency to portray Africans as victims or villains; and

• a frequently complacent account of the role and interest of different western actors in Africa.

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Monday July 29, 1940

On Japan's crowded list of public enemies, few rate higher than burly, tousled, tough-tongued, 39-year-old Carroll Duard Alcott, who broadcasts thrice daily from Shanghai bold news & views on matters Asiatic. A veteran American newshawk from Des Moines, who has covered a China beat for the past 13 years, Alcott took to the air at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities.

Tokyo has lost face almost every time he has opened his mouth. Last week he was one of the six Americans whom Japan's puppet Chinese Government 'ordered' expelled from China. Last week, in a bulletproof vest that fitted snugly around his 220-lb. frame, Alcott was still holding forth over Station XMHA, on Race Course Road.

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It’s a great piece, in that it not only covers the tensions between the Senegalese locals and the roughly 1000 Chinese in Dakar, but also the considerable and occasionally violent tensions that flare between the Chinese themselves. Still, to my eye, the most interesting news in the Fitzsimmons article comes down to a single sentence:

Many shopkeepers in Centenaire came from Hunan province and say they received funding from the Chinese authorities to move to Senegal.

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Focus Media Holding Limited , China's largest digital media group, today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hua Kuang Advertising Company has entered into a joint venture agreement with Dentsu to form a new Internet advertising company in China.

The newly established company will focus on providing Internet advertising related services to clients of the Dentsu Group companies in China and will work closely with Focus Media's Internet advertising division...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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When Fang Yibo was dispatched to Africa in April 2003, he expected some surprises - but the biggest of all was being made a tribal chieftain.

On a November day in 2007, under the scorching sun of Nigeria, Fang was formally crowned chieftain by the Akam Oba (king) in Ogun State.

Along with the title came 33 hectares of land, which Fang, 44, can bequeath to his offspring.

'The title is not nominal. It is inheritable. But I won't participate in local affairs. After all, I'm a foreigner here in Africa...

Fang is a project manager with Shandong Third Electric Power Company. When he was sent to Nigeria to build a joint venture power station, the biggest of its kind in the country, he didn't know what to expect.

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As a major popularizer of social Darwinist thought, Liang applied it to various subjects. According to Barry Sautman, he wrote that since Hungary was founded by the Huns, it was "established by the yellow race on the territory of the whites." The ideas colored everything he wrote: when writing on education, he combined the idea of foetal education, a traditional belief that the mothers of great men, such as Mencius, had sat up straight and spoke no evil, thus contributing to the moral character of the foetus, with a micro-level view of Darwinism. If the child evolved right, then the nation would too. Women's education was necessary, he argued, because without it they could only teach their children to be materialistic and shallow, and the nation would suffer. Rote memorization would block the development of the brain, and the nation would suffer. Competitive sports were necessary, for both men and women, as he wrote in On Martial Spirit, because without every "new citizen" engaging in physical competition, the nation would be weak... and yes, suffer.

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Is China proving that developing countries are better off under an authoritarian regime that focuses on developing the economy, rather than under a democratic regime that gives emphasis to political participation? And if the enjoyment of human rights improves with economic prosperity, isn’t it wiser to restrict them in the short term and allow them only once income levels take off?

According to Randall Peerenboom, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of China programs for the Oxford Foundation of Law, Justice and Society, the answer is a resounding “yes” on both counts.

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China has ended more than a century of South African dominance of the gold mining industry to become the world’s biggest producer of the ore.

Chinese gold output jumped to a record high of 276 tonnes last year, a 12 per cent increase over 2006, while South Africa produced 272 tonnes, the London-based precious metal consultancy, GFMS, said on Thursday.

Mark Bristow, the South African chief executive of London-listed Randgold Resources, said: 'China is not overtaking South Africa, South Africa is shrinking below China.' South Africa has been the world’s largest gold producer since 1905....

...The scale of the industry has been steadily diminishing since 1970 when it produced 1,000 tonnes a year, about three quarters of the world’s supply at that time.

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Shao Longtu, creator of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo mascot, has had a tough few weeks since the unveiling of his 'Haibao' character in December. The blue animation was mocked, ridiculed and compared to everything from toothpaste swirls to Durex condoms. And now, it’s been accused of being stolen from an episode of one of America's finest 80's sitcoms, Growing Pains, staring Alan Thicke, Kirk Cameron, Tracy Gold, and later on of course Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Winter is here! But the sky is gray. Help Fuwa fight the clouds and bring back the blue sky.

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The China National Tourism Administration will pilot a project this year to select joint venture tour operators to handle some outbound business.

It is the first time that the administration has decided to open its outbound business to joint ventures and foreign investors.

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the "Getting to Know" session is a huge improvement on the BOCOG press conferences I attended when I first arrived in Beijing to cover the Games’ preparations back in February 2006.

Then, two or three officials would give speeches, often verbatim readings of a handout everybody received when they walked through the door, leaving time for only two or three questions in the allocated hour.

Since then, the BOCOG media department has solicited and been receptive to suggested improvements and the result is shorter "introductions", more questions and the "Getting to Know" sessions.

What they can’t change, however, is the mindset of Chinese officialdom — traditionally suspicious of foreign media and reluctant to deviate from the lecturing style.

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Images showed the Boeing 777 -- BA flight 38 -- grounded on tarmac after touching down several hundred meters short of the airport's south runway, close to a perimeter road, with its emergency chutes deployed.

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For reasons that were unexplained, (discussion surrounding the border dispute in the state media was allowed before his arrival) the Foreign Ministry issued an edict for the media not to focus on the border dispute issue in reports during Dr. Singh's time here. The reason was obviously to try to keep the focus on the economic issues, and an attempt by the government to help soften ties with India. And while it does make for better political ties, I find the Chinese government's move a bit curious.

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When I was nine, my mother was accused of being an escaped landowner and living in the city without a permit. Members of the public security bureau took her away one night for detention and interrogation. Since then, this special Chinese terminology, "Hei-ren-hei-hu" or "Person and a family without a residential permit" has been engraved forever on my mind, becoming my second teacher in life. Perhaps in order to cleanse my inward shame at this status, I have allowed myself to sink deeper into this muddy hole of disgrace and have become acquainted with other "persons without permits." Nowadays, scholars refer to us as "the silent majority."

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The president of Danone Asia Pacific, Emmanuel Faber, one of the key persons in the French food and beverage maker's estranged dispute with Hangzhou Wahaha Group, has resigned his position in their Chinese ventures.

The move is widely considered by analysts as one in which the French food and dairy maker hopes will settle the row with its Chinese partner as soon as possible as the dispute has hurt sales and reputation of Danone.

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The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads "tsujiura senbei" and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.

The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.

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But the Xifeng case is all the more disturbing when you understand just how commonplace it really is. The truncheon of "defamation" has come down hard on ordinary Chinese citizens in recent years -- the Chongqing Pengshui (彭水诗案) SMS case, the Shanxi Jishan (山西稷山) Open Letter Case, the Henan Mengzhou (河南孟州) Case.

Aside from charges of "defamation," all of these cases have one thing in common. They involve the abuse of public power by county officials to silence dissent, cover up their tracks and attack political enemies. They are what columnist Xiong Peiyun (熊培云) termed the use of "public power to vent personal anger" (挟公权泄私愤).

In fact, the story of China's capricious county cadres is as old as the hills.

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Shen's idea is that the web is hospitable to certain types of writing, ill-suited to others. It's just the thing for avant-garde poetry: short pieces, a small but rabid fanbase, and no hope of publication via traditional channels. "Everything that needs to happen in the world of poetry can happen online," he says. "We can write, publish, read and discuss each others' poems. Reputations rise and fall, schools of poetry form and disperse. This all happens online, independent of the traditional publishing industry or government interference."

Long genre novels are also successful, as their fast pace and easy digestibility make up for the awkwardness of online reading. More literary short stories and novels, however, fall through the cracks – too challenging to keep the average reader interested, and not targeted enough to attract a loyal core following.

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Still several months to go until the Olympics, yet just the past few days have seen a number of unrelated mass incidents take place around the country, from the large protest at the Tianmen Party headquarters and a taxi driver strike in solidarity following the the recent beating to death of a local business leader, to the anti-Maglev neighborhood protests that have taken place in downtown Shanghai over the past few days, videos of which have been posted on YouTube by users ubuoo3, qsommerville and tooodou.

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I am curious to learn more of these misunderstandings, for the reasons given above and also because western journalists are especially criticised for misunderstanding China. I am perfectly prepared to accept that I misunderstand China, but rarely do the people who accuse us of misunderstanding China say how we do so: misrepresenting, yes - such critics say we focus too much on the negative, and not enough on positive changes that are undoubtedly occurring, in parts; of being generally ignorant and inadequate in our language skills too, though this is often harder to substantiate, requiring hard evidence. But rarely is it explained what exactly the great mystery we are misunderstanding is, when we are told off for attacking China's human rights record or whatever.

Sadly, the article, and Zhao's lectures, seemed to concentrate entirely on cultural clashes and did not help here.

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Qingdao to Beijing is 830 km and takes 5+ hours. Los Angeles to San Francisco is 559 km and takes 11+ hours. Shandong province (home of Qingdao) has a per capita income of $3,250. California has a per capita income of $38,956. What is wrong with this picture?

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'Buy a certain stock before they do, because usually if a publicly run fund would buy certain shares, the price would go up,' Lin [Rongshi, a rpivate fund manager] says. 'They notify us first, and they would buy a few days later [for the fund], then they would come back to us to split the profit I make from buying at a lower price.'

This front-running scheme would net an almost guaranteed haul for Lin and for the state-sector employees. Some others, --insiders all, would profit, too. The only outsiders in the transaction would be the mutual funds' customers, average Chinese investors who have little idea how routinely their money is abused on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges.

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Micro numbers like this are hard to get excited about, but if the devil is in the detail, then the angel is in the scale. Music and the booming Chinese nation are at the start of a wonderful relationship on a scale that will dwarf any other territory in the world. It’s just that no one is making any money out of it—certainly not with conventional, western business models.

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The press release concerns the Weidenhamer and Clement papers — even though the papers were quite explicit in their acknowledgment that the source of the leaded material was unknown. In fact, the papers didn’t even try, because - as Weidenhamer and Clement surely know - there’s absolutely no way to distinguish lead solder imported into Taizhou from the United States, from lead solder that was trucked down to Zhejiang after being purchased in front of my Shanghai apartment building. That is, there is no way to tell without tracing the lead from the Yiwu workshop, to the e-scrap recycling shop where it was processed, and then - finally - back to the shipper, and the shipper’s source. Without doing that - without tracing the source - the only possible conclusion is a geographically non-specific one.

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Yesterday, we were tipped off on our Contribute page that an anti-maglev protest was going to take place today 2pm at People's Square. Apparently that has been derailed by the police.

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What began as a protest against a planned urban trash dump encroaching on a residential area held by the villagers there in Tianmen, Hubei province became a murder story after the city management officers moved from beating the residents to attacking passerby Wei Wenhua, the would-be citizen journalist filming the violence from his car with his cellphone, who they then quickly killed.

Chengguan operations are most often limited to cracking down on unlicensed business operations in urban areas, most visibly in chasing away streetside vendors and smashing or confiscating their goods, but as netizens have noted in their outrage at Wei's death, chengguan abuse of authority has escalated in recent years. Qin Liwen, writing at the widely-read media industry blog MindMeters, was one of many to see the specter of Sun Zhigang in Wei's death, which is already looking to be one of the bigger stories of 2008.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:04 PM | Permalink

For years, these HIV-infected villagers have relied on continuous infusions for their survival. Like hundreds of villages elsewhere in Henan province, Donghu was stricken by AIDS when villagers sold blood in droves to illegal blood banks back in the mid-1990s. Donors didn’t realize they were infected until some years later, when batches of them fell suddenly and seriously ill.

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What prompted the idea for this film and how did it evolve?

I first traveled to the Yangtze river in 2002 as a tourist with my parents and grandfather when I went on one of the Farewell cruises, a kind-of "disaster eco-tour" where the aim is to offer tourists the chance to visit the area before it is flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. The idea for "Up The Yangtze" was inspired by a surreal moment. We arrived to the southern Chinese city of Chongqing (Chungking), the largest municipality in the world. The city reminds me of a scene from Blade Runner.

At the city's port, considered the Gateway to the Yangtze, we walk down a steep embankment to get to the waiting ship. Coolies grab our luggage and sling them on their bamboo poles. I arrived at night. Everything was in silhouette lit by neon lights. As we approached the gangway, a marching band began to play "You Are My Sunshine" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy." At that moment, I decided to make a film about this surreal journey: The Love Boat meets Apocalypse Now.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:02 PM | Permalink

He then adds that Tony Leung has projected aspects of Lee's own character into Yee. A curious remark, certainly, given that Yee isn't a remotely sympathetic character. He is a quisling, collaborating with the Japanese and overseeing the torture and killing of Chinese rebels. Then again, it is Yee's personal and sexual life that intrigues Lee. "I desire it but I cannot do it. I make it into a movie. He projects a lot of that part of myself. It is a romance I never really experienced that I was longing for. It is almost like a dream."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:45 PM | Permalink

Most of the cases in China in which Western businesses have been cheated comes down to trusting sole sources of information gathering and dissemination: the Chinese who successfully convinces the Western party that for cultural reasons the Westerner will never be able to succeed in China. The Westerner needs someone who knows "The Chinese Way."

The problem with hiring a guide/agent/translator of The Chinese Way is that there is no "Chinese Way".

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Because of this increasing dependence, many analysts have worried that the US is most vulnerable to asymmetric attacks against its space assets; in their view US satellites are "sitting ducks" without any sort of defense and their destruction would cripple the US military. China’s test of a sophisticated anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon a year ago, Friday -- 11 January 2007, when it shot down its own obsolete weather satellite -- has only increased these concerns. But is this true? Could a country—even a powerful country like China that has demonstrated a very sophisticated, if nascent, ability to shoot down satellites at all altitudes—inflict anything close to a knock-out blow against the US in space? And if it was anything less than a knock-out, how seriously would it affect US war fighting capabilities?

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:16 AM | Permalink

From 1998 to 2005, the same seven stations -- located in the city center -- were used to measure air quality. These stations monitored areas with different characteristics, including high traffic areas, plus residential, commercial and industrial districts. In 2006, however, just as international scrutiny on China's air quality was increasing, two stations monitoring traffic were dropped from the city API calculations, while three additional stations in less polluted areas were added.

Calculating the average daily Beijing API values for 2006 and 2007 using data from the original monitoring stations changes the outcome considerably; in fact, 38 of Beijing's 241 so-called "blue sky" days in 2006 would not have qualified as "blue sky" under the old methodology. The number is even less for 2007: 55 fewer days would have attained the "blue sky" standard, out of 246 reported "blue sky" days.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:01 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 2:55 PM | Permalink

You have to look at this from two sides. In 1999 when I was working on Ourgame.com our traffic reached the top spot very quickly. Simultaneous users reached 10,000 quickly, and at the time Tencent was actually smaller than we were. Were we mainstream? We simply had more features than the others. Everyone loved it because there just wasn’t any alternative. This is a sort of self-affirmation. Real society isn’t like that. With nothing else to do they just start playing. Everyone had to go through life, but without services on the Web that could satisfy them. The demand was generated off-line. The process of transition from off-line to online isn’t complete, and you can’t generalize about Netizens that way.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:34 PM | Permalink

A man who used his mobile phone to film a violent clash between villagers and officials in rural China was beaten to death by public order 'enforcers', Chinese state media reported yesterday, bringing more unwanted attention to the country's unruly hinterlands.

The People's Daily reported that 24 residents of Tianmen, a city in central China's Hubei province, have been detained after Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a company owned by the local water resources bureau, was pulled out of his car and savagely beaten.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:40 PM | Permalink

But saying that China has a high savings rate describes the situation without explaining it. Why should the Communist Party of China countenance a policy that takes so much wealth from the world’s poor, in their own country, and gives it to the United States? To add to the mystery, why should China be content to put so many of its holdings into dollars, knowing that the dollar is virtually guaranteed to keep losing value against the RMB? And how long can its people tolerate being denied so much of their earnings, when they and their country need so much? The Chinese government did not explicitly set out to tighten the belt on its population while offering cheap money to American homeowners. But the fact that it does results directly from explicit choices it has made.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:58 AM | Permalink

That gives the impression that we get these instructions every day. We don't. True, pop-ups do greet us when we log on. But the vast majority of them have nothing at all to do with what can or cannot be reported, or how to report it. They're just notices to directors and producers saying that such-and-such a promo is ready for use, or messages from the IT department warning that the system might be unstable during an upgrade. Banalities that are of interest to practically no one. And if there is some instruction on how to report a story, it usually consists of nothing more than "be objective, don't sensationalize." Not very exciting at all.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:25 AM | Permalink

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:40 PM | Permalink

Is our lasting image of Zhou Enlai to be the smooth, urbane diplomat showing up for talks in Geneva in a tailored-suit, silk tie, and fedora? Or will it be the Zhou Enlai standing on top of Tiananmen with a red armband and a little red book, screeching in a high-pitched hysterical frenzy, "Long Live Chairman Mao!" as hordes of fanatical teenagers chant in the square and the Chairman looks on in approval?

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:32 PM | Permalink

China launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags on Tuesday, banning production of ultra-thin bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free carriers from June 1...

...In addition the manufacture, sale and use of bags under 0.025 mm thick is banned from the same date, with fines and confiscation of goods and profits for firms that flout the rules.

...Chinese people use up to 3 billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 5 million tons (37 million barrels) of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging...

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:52 AM | Permalink

High-density, single-species forests are a source of almost never-ending problems. Some even call them "green deserts" since they are very poor at retaining soil or water, unproductive and monocultural. China has the largest area of artificial forests in the world, but ranks last in terms of these forests' productivity. These single-species require the constant use of fertilisers and other chemicals. They are weak ecosystems that are vulnerable to disease and pests, which can devastate large areas. They are also unattractive; artificial forests in scenic areas and along roads and railways are nothing to look at.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:45 AM | Permalink

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Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:09 AM | Permalink

Qin argues China's phenomenal market success lies in stripping its peasants and workers of their rights to associate and bargain.

''Apart from the traditional advantages of low wages and welfare, China artificially lowers the prices of the four prime factors of production (human capital, land, financial and non-renewable resources) with its 'advantage' in 'low human rights'.''

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 5:58 PM | Permalink

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China's Shougang Corp., parent of the only publicly traded steelmaker based in Beijing, will cut its production by 4 million metric tons this year to improve the environment as the capital city hosts the summer Olympic Games.

...Beijing Shougang is China's second-biggest producer of construction-grade steel.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 6:42 PM | Permalink

For house-arrested Hu Jia in Beijing, it was his firsthand news last week that Guangzhou-based Zhang Qing, wife of imprisoned lawyer Guo Feixiong, had on Dec. 26 discovered that the roughly USD 1,000 left in her bank account had disappeared. No time like the present, Hu Jia was arrested the next day in the middle of a Skype chat while his wife Zeng Jinyan was in the bathroom giving their month-old baby a bath. Ten or more police had forced their way in, disconnected all communications in the house, and left, placing 24 year-old Zeng and baby under house arrest, where they most likely still remain today.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:05 AM | Permalink

According to a CMP source, the Central Propaganda Department issued a ban early last month on all coverage criticizing the rollout of DTV services in the country. Censors, the source said, singled out a December 7 editorial from the official Xinhua News Agency’s Xinhua Daily Telegraph. The article was called, "Overbearing ‘digital TV’ harms our self-respect."

The Xinhua Daily Telegraph article was still available on the Xinhua News Agency website this month, but the propaganda department ban expressly directed all national and local media against excerpting the article or attempting their own coverage of the issue.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:10 PM | Permalink

A secretive Hong Kong-based subsidiary of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, manager of the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, has bought stakes in three of Australia’s largest banks, raising fresh questions about transparency of China’s sovereign wealth investments in international markets.

Australia and New Zealand Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia said Hong Kong-registered SAFE Investment Company had bought stakes of less than one per cent in each of the banks. An entity with the same name has taken a stake of about one-third of a per cent in National Australia Bank , people inside NAB reckon.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:13 AM | Permalink

What I mean is that corporations often behave like livestock when it comes to public relations. They herd. Every company likes to think of itself as the hard-charging alpha-bull leading that herd into pristine new pastures, but in fact most are just ambling along with the crowd and dreaming of having the biggest horns. Our job, as PR cowboys, is to pry our particular cow far enough from the herd that it can be spotted from a distance, but not so far out that it is devoured by wolves.

This herding is the product of two ingrained things: similar approaches to risk management in many PR departments, especially in Asia; and a tendency for those PR departments to all grab onto the same big ideas at the same time. It's the latter that's bugging me now. 2008 is on the way and virtually every company that Imagethief has helped with its 2008 China PR planning has asked for the same two things: Make us Olympic and make us green.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:55 AM | Permalink

In terms of capital and ownership structures, the biggest change is about Ming Pao. Ming Pao Ltd is going to merge with two listed companies in Malaysia, Sinchew and Nanyang. But the plan is not yet implemented. According to this plan, Sinchew and Nanyang, no longer listed in Malaysia, will be owned by Ming Pao. Ming Pao might be listed in the stock markets of Hong Kong and Malaysia.

This is the media empire of Tiong Hiew King. As the biggest shareholder of Sinchew, he acquired 20.02% of Nanyang from Malaysian Chinese Association in October. Now the biggest Chinese newspapers are already owned by him. Now with his ownership of Ming Pao, he further integrates the two media groups in Malaysia into it. His business widely covers the Chinese communities in Malaysia, Hong Kong, US and Canada. But Ming Pao does not make much improvement in revenue and profit. Perhaps, after merger and acquisition, Tiong will make something news.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:06 PM | Permalink

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The parent of Air China plans a HK$5-per-share counter offer for rival China Eastern, representing a 32 percent premium above Singapore Airlines' proposal of HK$3.8 per share, Mingpao Daily reported on Thursday.

China National Aviation Corp (Group) Ltd (CNAC), parent of Air China, the world's biggest airline by stock market value, had said Singapore Airlines and its parent Temasek's offer to buy a combined 24 percent stake in China Eastern for US$920 million was too low.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:33 AM | Permalink

[T]he controversial plan to dam Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) has been scrapped.

The sparing of the gorge and its 100,000 inhabitants – who would have been forced to relocate to much less hospitable terrain – may be the biggest win to date for mainland environmentalists. The victory may only be a pyrrhic one, as other portions of the Yangtze River's upper reaches, known in Yunnan as the Jinsha River (金沙江) are under consideration for hydropower projects.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Chinese-language literature in Manchuria (known then as Manchukuo 滿洲國) during the Japanese occupation (1931-1945) has proved perplexing to those working in the areas of colonialism, national identity, and modernism. In recent years, it has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but the difficulty of locating original publications, which were rare to begin with and are now widely scattered, combined with negative views of the Japanese invasion and subsequent rule, have prevented both domestic and foreign scholars from a genuine restoration of the subject's history and a creative, integrated interpretation of the works. The study of Chinese-language Manchukuo literature has thus been dominated by the following discourse of resistance: the contemporary sociopolitical environment faced by Chinese-language writers in Northeast China was extremely difficult; not only did they suffer economic deprivation, but their ambition to be spokesmen of the colonized natives was threatened by draconian literary regulations and severe censorship; young writers, especially those who chose to stay after the establishment of Manchukuo, resisted government-sponsored, conservative, Confucian wangdao 王道 (kingly way) ideas.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:24 AM | Permalink

The use of lethal injection will be expanded to replace gunshot executions, a senior judicial official has said.

Jiang Xingchang, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), said half of the country's 404 intermediate people's courts - which carry most of the executions - use lethal injections.

'It is considered more humane and will eventually be used in all intermediate people's courts,' Jiang told China Daily without revealing a timetable...

...Xiao said abolishing the capital punishment or strictly limiting the use of the death sentence are a global trend and 'China is also working toward that direction.'

He, however, stressed that the goal cannot be achieved overnight.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:45 AM | Permalink

On the afternoon of December 4, we were attending the fifth anniversary event for the Jiangsu bureau of Jiangsu Legal System News and we learned from a media friend that the CCTV program Focus Interview intends to come to Xiangshu to cover the November 27 incident. We took a high degree of attention. On one hand, we reported to the relevant leaders to make sure that the preparations were made. On the other hand, we quickly found out the name, mobile telephone number and background of the informant and applied pressure through the department that employs him. At the same time, we quickly made contact with the informant and met with him directly in Quanyun. We discussed with him rationally and we appealed to his feelings. We asked him to contact the CCTV reporter and said that the information was inaccurate. This stopped the CCTV team from coming and therefore prevented what could be a major news story just in time.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:34 PM | Permalink

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I cannot forget the look of terror in the eyes of one of the middle-aged billionaires. As he looked at me, he grabbed my hand hysterically and screamed: "You are asking me why I need to run so far away before I dare to speak to you? You ask me why I am afraid? That's because he has guns. Do you know how many guns he owns?"

This middle-aged man was an iron mine owner in Tangshan city (Hebei province) with about 1 billion yuan in wealth. The local gangsters Yang Shukuan held a gun to his head and forced him to sign a contract to provide 60 million yuan in "aid." Afterwards, Yang drugged the man's wife and raped her. The wife took 30 million yuan from her husband and vanished without a trace. "Yang must have killed my wife. What is the use of my money? My family is broken." He was crying as he spoke. It was very sad.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:00 PM | Permalink

Gibbons says she now hopes to teach children in China and will take a new teddy bear, called Barnaby, for her new pupils.

"I've been to China on holiday before and loved it," Gibbons told Hello! magazine.

"Besides which, I know I'm the most notorious teacher in the world at the moment but I'm hoping that perhaps no one has heard of me there."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:49 AM | Permalink