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May 15, 2008

"If we work together we can do anything"

Barking at the Sun reports on the relief effort underway in Chengdu:

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:15 PM |

Why are schools crumbling like sand houses?

At The Economic Observer, Zhang Jinghua asks why so many of the earthquake victims were children:

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:14 PM |

May 14, 2008

Peter Hessler's former students after Sichuan quake

A piece in the New Yorker: author Peter Hessler who taught English in rural Sichuan in the 1990s hears from his former students in the earthquake zone.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 7:23 PM |

State TV on Speed

On the Newsweek blog, Jonathan Ansfield writes about the pressure on CCTV to keep up with their colleagues in other Chinese media organizations and the unprecedented transparency of the government's handling of media during this earthquake crisis.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 2:34 PM |

Qian Gang: 3 crucial days

From the China Media Project: The China Media Project has been inundated with phone calls from journalists trying to reach our director, Qian Gang, author of The Great Tangshan Earthquake (唐山大地震). Unable to answer all interview requests, Qian Gang has issued [a] response to the Wenchuan earthquake, published in today's edition of Southern Metropolis Daily.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 2:31 PM |

CCTV International brings new lows in top priorities

CCTV International still follows protocol in its nightly news-cast, leading with a bizarre phone call between Hu Jintao and US President Bush, reports Hugh Jorgen at the Zhongnanhai blog.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:52 PM |

Rescue teams at epicenter, 60,000 missing

From the BBC:

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

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 8:13 AM |

May 13, 2008

Remembering the Tangshan Earthquake

tangshan_hotel_s.jpg
In 1983, foreign journalists were allowed to see Tangshan for the first time since its devastation by an earthquake in 1976. This is a report from that visit. Times have changed.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:31 PM |

The quake and Twitter hubris

Kaiser Kuo:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 2:04 PM |

Wen Jiabao: get to epicenter by noon today

Xinhua reports from Dujiangyan in Sichuan:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:52 PM |

Chinese diving star pregnant, out of Olympics

From China Sports Today:

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.

However, this CCTV report quotes a National Diving Team spokesperson who denies the rumors.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:04 PM |

Twitter vs Xinhua

Mei Fong on the Wall Street Journal's China blog:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:51 PM |

Chang Ping: tolerate public information sharing during quake

At the China Media Project, David Bandurski translates a new piece by Chang Ping in the Southern Metropolis Daily urging the authorities to tolerate open information sharing during the earthquake crisis.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:47 PM |

Interview: China translator of 'Kite Runner'

At Paper Republic, Bruce Humes interviews Li Jihong, the mainland translator of Kite Runner:

[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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:55 AM |

Portents (listen to the suckhole)

Earthquakes are often seen as heralding major changes. Bokane notes another natural phenomenon that has been remarkably prescient over the past century.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:12 AM |

May 12, 2008

Earthquakes hit Chengdu, Beijing

Xinhua reports that an earthquake measuring 7.8 (revised from 7.6) on the Richter scale occurred 100km outside of Chengdu at 2:28, while another earthquake, measuring 3.9, hit a Beijing suburb shortly afterward.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:48 PM |

Wendi Deng's new China plans

From the blog of David Wolf, who knows a thing or three about News Corp:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:06 AM |

Beijing is world's No. 1 toilet metropolis

From Xinhua:

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.

See also Beijing WC, illustrated for one writer's take on the toilets of Beijing.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:02 AM |

6 arrested for part in Chengdu stroll protests

From China Digital Times:

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

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:58 AM |

Being Chinese

Black and White Cat translates a reader's letter to Southern Weekly in which a girl describes a crowd giving her a hard time for taking photos that might make China look bad.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:54 AM |

Thunder from Tibet

The New York Review of Books has published a review by Robert Barnett ofThe Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:50 AM |

Google and Kingsoft launch free Chinese dictionary

China Snippets reports that Google and Kingsoft have launched a free, downloadable Chinese dictionary.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:45 AM |

Chinese jumbo jet company established

From Xinhua:

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:40 AM |

May 11, 2008

Chinese workers abducted in Nigeria released

Reuters quotes government officials who say that the three Chinese workers abducted by their driver in Nigeria on Thursday have been released:

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:15 PM |