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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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".
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?
See also: Part II, Part III.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.
Mr. Andrews also talked to Jim Yardley of the New York Times. Additionally, the Beijing Air blog reveals that additional downtown air monitoring stations were dropped for 2008.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.
This is part 7 of 9; the post has links to earlier installments.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.
For more about this case, see this summary of Chinese media reports by David Bandurski China Media Project.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.
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.
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?
See also Frog in a Well for more on Zhou.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...
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.
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'.''