Must-read China news by Danwei

I do this for two reasons. First, it happens to be true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Secondly, I want to demystify China and make it more approachable for everyone. For too long, individuals who have studied China and have devoted the considerable amount of time it takes to learn the language have tended to make the country seem so mysterious, so complicated and so difficult, that it becomes an impediment for any person or company that wants to do business here.

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And the newest expression sweeping the Chinese internet: 'I don't give a $@*&; I'm just here to buy soy sauce.' (关我鸟事，我出来打酱油的)

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The government has finally announced the broad strokes of the long-anticipated plan for the restructuring of the telecoms industry, and a quasi-definitive time frame for the government to finally issue the coveted 3G censes. The business and industry media are having a field day with it, arguing about what it will mean for everyone in the industry, from China Mobile to Cisco to Nokia and, yes, even to Apple.

Here is what it really means:

Nothing.

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Standing atop an enormous pile of rubble that was once a three-story building, Mao Hong Lin meticulously searched for the dull glint of metal. Spotting a pointed tip, he pulled out a twisted length of steel.

"It takes money to buy anything and everything. Now our house is collapsed and I have nothing. I need the money for basics, to buy salt and cooking oil," said Mao, 37, a short, wiry man in orange shorts and soiled white gloves.

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I think that it's clear that within the world of Chinese internet companies, lying limits growth, but stealing intellectual property doesn't.

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While the country's highly militarized rescue model is effective, we should not overlook its deficiencies. It would be wrong to equate strong government with 'big government,' or to wax nostalgically about the supposed superiority of a command economy.

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The quake has severely taxed China's medical resources. Many quake victims have been given free treatment, a departure from China's medical system, which usually requires cash upfront for treatment. But some patients say hospitals are now pressuring them to leave or transfer elsewhere before they are fully treated. Hospital officials say healthy patients are taking up room needed for others.

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Established in 1922, Makerere University is one of the oldest and most prestigious Universities in Africa. In April May of this year, the Business School of Makerere University started a new program to teach Chinese language to business students. It has set up a small class as an example group with twelve to fifteen students.

Ruth Taoli, who is the only Chinese teacher at the program, said that Chinese has become a required course for the business students since the program began, and that their learning programs are attuned to their specific areas of study. For example, students who are majoring in traveling business need to learn Chinese for travel and students who are majoring in accounting need to learn Chinese accounting terms.

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A few points:

1. Some of this probably language-related.

2. Seems like no one bothered to try and grasp the meaning behind a lot of that language and whether it was well-intentioned or not.

3. Most Westerners don't even know what is/is not acceptable speech these days from a politically correct point of view. Do we really expect people from another country, particularly one that is developing and was completely closed off to the world only a few decades ago, to follow all those rules?

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As common people like us know, when you pay respect to the dead or visit the sick, you should dress plainly and solemnly. It is advisable not to wear sunglasses. But Party Secretary Lu appears to be an important local official taking a leisure stroll during this emergency. Not only did he stroll before the camera, he also made idiotic remarks to the disaster victims such as: "An earthquake is really not such a bad thing. We can build new houses that are definitely better than the old ones ..." I would like to ask Party Secretary Lu: "Houses can be rebuilt, but what about the dead people? If this occurred at your home, would you comfort your family members with those words?"

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The heart of his idea--easy to describe, tricky to implement--is capturing the enormous amount of heat normally wasted in cement making and using it to run turbines that generate electric power. This power can then be fed back into the factory, doing work that would otherwise require burning even more coal. The reduction of dust is a visible indicator of the more fundamental reduction of waste. Over the course of a long day, I heard about the many, many refinements Tang had made to this "co-generation" system since he first started working on it, in the mid-1980s. The punch line is that it now works well enough to cut the energy (mainly from coal) required to make clinker by 60 percent, and the overall power demands of the cement production line by 30 percent.

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The chairman of Taiwan's Nationalist Party left Monday for Beijing, the latest in a series of moves by officials on both sides of the Taiwan Straits to forge closer relations.

The official, Wu Poh-hsiung, is the first serving chairman of his party to visit the mainland, although Lien Chan, the party's honorary chairman and unsuccessful presidential candidate in 2004, has also made the trip.

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Now, one might reasonably ask: why does China need machines to collect bottles and can when there are tens of millions of hard-working scrap peddlers who'll do the work for less than the cost of the new machine? Well, according to Shanghai's city fathers, as reported in the Shanghai Daily, the idea is to put the scrap peddlers out of business because, quoting Shanghai Daily, "they have a negative impact on the city's image."

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Zhang Qianfan: making China's schools safer means building local democratic mechanisms

One of the most persistent issues to emerge in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake is of course the question of shoddy school construction. In a column running in The Beijing News just before the weekend, Peking University professor Zhang Qianfan (张千帆) argued that the building of local 'democratic mechanisms' was necessary if China wished to avoid repetition of the tragedies of Wenchuan.

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I'm back in Beijing with a bit of time to think back on the earthquake and the way I covered it.

A couple of questions have been going through my mind: Did I show too much/too little? Did I intrude too far into people's grief?

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A giant panda which went missing from a major panda base in southwest China's Sichuan Province after the May 12 earthquake was spotted alive about 5:20 p.m. on Sunday by a group of road workers.

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The China Red Cross has come again under scrutiny of China's internet users. Initially it was accused for lack of transparency, because it did not want to explain what was happening with the funds it received for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake.

Now the vice-chairman of the Sanya Red Cross Society China has been attached.

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China is usually short of genuinely free blood donations, creating a market for illegal blood selling. But Tiger Temple reports that on Sunday the blood collecting buses in Beijing had temporarily stopped accepting donations because so much has been given since the earthquake. Commenters report the same in other cities around the country.

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As of late Sunday evening, at least one had died and 359 injured after a 6.4-magnitude aftershock hit Sichuan's Qingchuan county that afternoon, according to Chinese state media.

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If China's reform and opening up was a result of the 1968 restructuring of interstate relations, what implications might the clashes between Chinese and Western values, as seen in recent events, have for China's future? Does it signal a new reconstruction of the world order?

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Google China's blog (in Chinese) mentions a Google search query log which graphically shows the moment of silence and mourning on 2:28PM on May 19, which displays the moment of silence throughout China for the victims of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan.

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The quake death toll has risen to 55,239 in Sichuan alone as of 7 pm, Thursday, said Li Chengyun, vice governor of Sichuan on Friday in Beijing.

About 83,988 people were rescued. The quake also injured 281,066, while 24,949 are still missing, said Li.

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The Chinese government is grappling with the next urgent task in the aftermath of last week's 8.0-magnitude deadly earthquake -- how to shelter up to 5 million residents in Sichuan Province who are now homeless.

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China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) has issued two new 'black lists' -- one of eight Internet audio-video companies ordered to shut down, and another listing 20 companies given warnings over objectionable content.

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The Chinese government needs to understand that in response to the western media, an independent and free Chinese press would be much more credible than a government spokesperson. The truth lies not in one voice, but slowly becomes apparent amidst a diverse range of voices. An understanding of this underlies the effective deployment of soft power.

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What surprises many Uighur Online users is that the website was even properly licensed, the excuse most often used by authorities to shut blogs and BBS websites down. Indeed, the 'Crowd of Spectators Out of Control' blogger, who writes about Xinjiang culture, mentions in a post late last month a conversation s/he had with the Uighur Online webmasters, retelling the absurdities the staff there went through recently in trying to report one UO user for inflaming racial hatred within the forums, and being kicked around like a football from police department to police department in Beijing and then back to the local internet supervision office, with none of them willing to address the situation.

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We have all been drenched in tears over the loss of so many brothers and sisters. The wailing of mothers and fathers, the sight of dust-covered bodies of teenagers, cold and pale, pulled from the debris, haunt us day and night. The chilly rain, which exacerbated the misery, serves as a manifestation of our collective mourning.

This week, we are all Sichuanese, living in the fear of aftershocks, and in fading hopes of finding more survivors. Whenever one more survivor was extracted from a flattened building, it was an occasion for joy.

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Earlier in the day, police had handed a group of us surgical masks and ordered us to wear them as we looked through the town. In fact, they asked us to wear two, one over the other. I didn't quite get the meaning of the masks. Certainly, the smell of death lingers over cities like Beichuan. But I don't think the smell is toxic.

I walked up a slope of rubble trying to get a better view. But first I had to wait as relief workers came down, bringing body after body in bags slung from metal poles.

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Chinese citizens are to be allowed to apply for U.S.-destined travel in groups starting from June 17, announced China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) and the U.S. Department of Commerce here on Thursday.

Within six months from then, the travel agencies in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Hubei, Hunan, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong provincial areas would be able to organize local residents for group travel to the United States.

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When the Shanghai Animation Film Studio came to East China Normal University in the summer of 1987 looking for laowai 'talent,' we answered the call of show business ... The result was an English-language version of 'Gourd Brothers', a classic of the animation genre. TT voiced the pangolin, as well as a few other minor characters.

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Day four and the people of Chengdu are starting to return to their normal lives. The palpable sense of fear that gripped the city for three days now seems to be largely gone. Many have switched gears entirely: an individual sense of self-preservation has turned into a city-wide sense of urgency to help the victims, many of whom are located just an hour's drive north.

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It's always been our pride that we are a nation that respects the old and love the young. It's also been many officials' mottos that children and education always come first, however hard the situation is. Yet our schools are still so fragile.

Hopefully, we have learnt our lessons during this disastrous year. We call for more stringent standards to be set to enforce public infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals and bus terminals. Safety guidelines, especially those on quake and fire prevention, for public buildings must be strictly adhered to.

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Chinese rescue teams have reached the epicentre of Monday's devastating earthquake, Wenchuan county, where an estimated 60,000 people remain missing.

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It wasn't long before, within the community of Twitterati watching the horrors of the quake unfold, self-congratulatory messages talking about how Twitter was so much faster than the mainstream media, and how Twitter had proven itself indispensable. At first I was caught up in that feeling, too. But really, thinking back now on what happened, there was a little too much hubris in the rush to pronounce that Twitter's moment had arrived.

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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ordered to remove barriers and open up roads to epicenter before 12 p.m. Tuesday after a strong earthquake jolted southwest China's Sichuan Province Monday afternoon.

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In a bombshell for the Chinese diving team, one of China's biggest sports stars, two-time gold medal-winning diver Guo Jingjing, is pregnant and leaving the national team.

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When the earthquake struck, the first instinct of one college student in Sichuan province, not far from the epicenter, was to duck for cover in his dormitory room. The second: record the upheaval, and post it online.

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[O]n the whole, Li Ji-Hong tends to avoid the approach used by Hosseini when he wrote "Kite Runner." Rather than citing the foreign term using English letters or transliterating it into Chinese, the translator uses easily grasped - even run-of-the-mill spoken Chinese - to convey quintessentially Afghan traits and customs. At times, the result is so mundane that one wonders if the reader might not get the impression that Afghan life, or at least the speech of its inhabitants, is rather similar to "ours," i.e., we Chinese.

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Wendi Deng has told Vogue that she will be collaborating with her pals Zhang Ziyi and Florence Sloan to establish a new film production company based on the DreamWorks model. The first project of the unnamed venture is apparently an adaptation of Shan Sa's novel The Empress, and Ms. Deng dropped the name of Ridley Scott as a possible director.

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Beijing, with 5,174 public toilets, has outpaced New York, London and Tokyo and become the world's No. 1 metropolis as far as public toilets are concerned.

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Police in Chengdu recently detained six local residents for posting Internet articles and demonstrating against a major petrochemical project, according to Sichuan News Online.

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Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.

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China's first ever jumbo passenger aircraft company, which was a major part of the nation's large jet program, was officially inaugurated in Shanghai on Sunday.

Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang said at the inauguration ceremony that the large jet program was of significance to improve China's independent innovation capabilities and to meet the rapidly expanding civil aviation market at home...

...The newly established company, named Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China Ltd. (CACC), will be responsible for researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing the homegrown large passenger aircraft.

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A spokesman for the government of Cross River state, where the Chinese workers, one of them CCECC's finance manager, were kidnapped, said the trio reappeared at the company's site at Ikono in neighbouring Akwa Ibom state.

"We don't really know how they were released, we were just surprised to see them at the company's gate in Ikono around 7-8 p.m. (1800-1900 GMT). They were unhurt and no ransom was paid," Patrick Ugbe told Reuters.

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None of the Chinese commentators mentioned any of the four book reviews. Through endless copying and reposting, which is the pillar of Chinese website management, the point has been hammered home that Americans, for whatever unfathomable reason, favor China's most ridiculed literary pretender as their favorite Chinese writer.

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It should be pointed out that the CCTV case has not been widely affirmed on the Internet, but instead has met with much suspicion. This is because CCTV, as a state media organization, is invested with government authority. [This raises the question of whether] the core of the case is about media reporting on matters of public interest, or about government authority in a standoff with private interests. More importantly, in many cases concerning government authority and incidents [or matters] of public interest, not even a drop of the spirit of the Sullivan decision is evident. In the April 28 railway disaster, for example, a Web user from Shandong province was detained by police for five days for posting inaccurate information (exaggerating the number of dead).

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Song Qing Ling Memorial (宋庆龄陵园), a little known cemetery in western Shanghai home to the remains of Song Qing Ling, numerous other Chinese personalities -- and scores of foreigners who came to Shanghai mostly during its early boom years in the mid-1800s and early 1900s, some identified by simple gravestones, and some anonymous.

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The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences ... has been notified by the Chinese organizers of the 16th IUAES World Congress that the event, originally scheduled to be held July 15-23 in Kunming, had been postponed.

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The conventional wisdom in recent years is that Beijing's internet police have been more successful than anyone could have imagined in controlling the spread of political ideas in cyberspace. Bill Clinton's famous remark in the late 1990s, that such efforts were doomed and akin to 'nailing jello to a wall', is now considered wide of the mark.

It turns out that the former US president was right, but not in the way that he thought.

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Three Chinese workers were abducted by unidentified kidnappers on Tuesday in Calabar, the capital city of Nigeria's southern Cross River State, company sources told Xinhua here on Thursday.

The workers, all employees of China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, were seized near the company's compound in Calabar, according to a company official.

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Chinese authorities have arrested three accomplices involved in the January hacker attack on popular Korean auction site 'Auction,' the Korean subsidiary of eBay.

Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean authorities have identified the actual hackers, a Korean and a Chinese, and are looking for them now, an unnamed Korean police official said.

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A cloud has been hanging over Beijing's market for undeveloped land since the beginning of the year. Statistics from the Beijing Land Arrangement and Reserve Center shows the Chinese capital has closed deals on only six plots of land for industrial use since February. And only one plot successfully traded hands in April.

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Shanghai-based user-generated video site Tudou.com has been ordered to pay RMB 50,000 to Beijing-based Xin Chuan Advertising Company for hosting links to the film 'Crazy Stone', reports Chinacourt.com...

...Xin Chuan began its case against Tudou asking for RMB 150,000 last summer. Xin Chuan purchased its online broadcasting rights for 'Crazy Stone' from China Film Warner Hengdian Media Group.

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According to Min Yiren, vice head of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, authorities hope to get rid of online maps that wrongly depict China's borders or that reveal military secrets, the People's Daily said.

No fewer than eight ministries and bureaus are to examine online maps to see whether they breach laws or undermine the country's "territorial integrity".

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I have maintained a healthy dose of loathing for Jingwei and her co-host Miaomiao for a long time, mostly because of the lightweight content that their show offers. The show pretty much provides blanket positive reviews for any blockbuster Chinese film, and the two hosts never fail to suck up to the big names. Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li are all readily adored. I will never forgive the show for not preparing me for the wreckage that was Chen Kaige's Wu Ji - Jingwei and Miaomiao's constant praise failed to mention that it was the worst movie of all time.

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1. Emancipate our minds

2. Earnestly advance government system reform

...we must earnestly make the legislature and judiciary independent...

3. Guarantee free speech and set up community oversight

...The issue lies in choosing to expose weakness and resolving contradictions or choosing to shut the lid, allowing problems to intensify and moving towards corruption and break down.

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Dunlop, now a food writer and twice-published author on Chinese cuisine, began her 15-year culinary adventure during a visit to China in 1992. Later, while a foreign student at Sichuan University, Dunlop found herself bored by government restrictions that limited her research on China's ethnic minorities. So she instead spent her days haunting street markets and befriending cooks.

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I thought of holding out for something in a bigger city, like Shanghai. I spoke to my recruiter, who discouraged that idea. "If you go to Shanghai, all you'll end up doing is getting drunk with other foreigners. Go to the smaller place, you'll have a more authentic experience."

These words elicited a romantic series of imaginations, and I excitedly saw myself tilling rice fields while listening to old men swap stories from the war. This would be great. I said "what the hell" and agreed.

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China employs sing-song diplomacy

It may sound more highbrow than ping-pong diplomacy, but China hopes that an orchestral performance at the Vatican tomorrow will be as effective in thawing frosty relations.

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Many Chinese writing on the net, or who I have encountered since March (I was in Beijing during the original Lhasa disturbances, and have travelled to a number of cities in China since then on a second trip--for reasons unrelated to these issues) also point out that they feel that China is not given due credit for the extraordinary changes that have swept the nation in recent decades that have seen the mass alleviation of poverty and the rapid modernization of the largest nation on earth. However, while conspiracy theories make for good copy, they don't help us understand the situation, or the long-term causes of the present rhetorical extremes both in China and elsewhere. Indeed, I would hasten to point out that media paranoia and hysteria is hardly something limited to China, and it would appear that many commentators and opinion-makers internationally have joined in the fray with enthusiasm.

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"Zang-du" (藏毒) is uncannily similar to "Tıbetan Independence". ("Conceal" shares the same character as "Tıbet", while "dangerous drug" shares the same pronunciation as "independence".)

And did i mention you get a "certificate of patriotism" for killing one?

This time, QQ Huaxia stands up!...We're supporting the Olympics with our unique anti-Tıbetan Independence online game content

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In recent weeks, shrill voices of Chinese youth criticizing the West have dominated headlines. But more moderate, thoughtful young Chinese are beginning to speak up. Here are some insights into a number of quieter -- but arguably just as important -- conversations with Chinese students, from Zhong Menglu who teaches at a prestigious Beijing university:

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Let me just say: if you want a quick but thorough immersion in the prevailing Chinese view of this issue, you could do far worse than to spend an hour or two here.

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On a program built upon the concept of "one dream, one Olympics" and in front of the Grand Temple where 2,000 young people were assembled to pay tribute to their ancestors, I implemented out a specific order: No close-ups of Happy Boy Su Xing or Super Girls Zhou Bichang, Li Yuchun, Zhang Liangying and Ji Minjia. You can hear their voices, but they are invisible!

What is more shameful than this public boycott in the name of the harmonious spirit of the Olympics? Do they want to become an even bigger laughing stock in the world?

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Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a press conference on April 8: "The Dalai Lama is the head representative of the serf system, which integrated religion with politics in old Tibet. The 'middle way' approach that the Dalai Lama is pursuing is aimed at restoring his own 'paradise in the past', which will throw millions of liberated serfs back into a dark cage." So do you seek theocratic serfdom? He answered, smiling: "I think since many years, as everybody knows, that we never aim to restore the old system, and even the Dalai Lama institution, as early as 69, I made clear that this institution should continue or not is up to people."

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The Dalai Lama's special envoy, Lodi Gyari, a veteran of previous talks with the Chinese government, travelled with his assistant to Shenzhen in south China on Saturday.

He will meet senior officials from the ruling Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department, which has a vague but wide-ranging remit to "contain separatist forces".

"This is an informal meeting," said Mr Chhoekyapa [a spokesman for the Dalai Lama]. "The main thing is to calm down the situation in Tibet and Tibetan areas and to release those arrested, or give them a fair trial or fair treatment."

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Reviewing Hong Kong's torch relay coverage should also lay to rest the hollow conflict that has been created in the minds of China's restless fenqing: that it's the world vs. China, and the Chinese people need to rally together to protect their pride and fend off the hypocritical foreign barbarians. The fact that Chinese people on Chinese territory in the Chinese media also have problems with Beijing's policies speaks volumes. At the very least, one hopes this will make the patriotic Carrefour-boycotting masses wonder if they're getting the full story in the mainland press.

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Even as we protest against the western cultural hegemony and resist the possible political plots, we need to examine ourselves humbly. The Olympics is like the WTO. It helps the Chinese people to share in the universal culture and it also expresses what the international community wants from China. This does not reflect solely the will of China. There is no free ride in the international system of relationships. The Olympic spirit emphasizes the tolerance and surpassing of cultural divides. Everybody is supposed to act as world citizens to see and understand different cultural backgrounds and values, and learn to live harmoniously together in a diversified environment.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:54 PM | Permalink

There are connections between all of the boycott debates currently in play. But it is a mistake to treat the boycott of Carrefour and the criticism of CNN as simply a tit-for-tat phenomenon, a case of angry Chinese taking a purely reactive "if you take aim at our games, we'll take aim at your profits" attitude. China has a long tradition of using anti-foreign boycotts to counter everything from invasions to perceived insults to the nation's honor.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:48 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 3:44 PM | Permalink

When it took on the games, China promised heroic efforts for change. But the torch debacle has left it snarling in a corner.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:35 AM | Permalink

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:46 PM | Permalink