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From the aforementioned paper:
5. The Sichuan earthquake in May caused heartache, and sent professional writers into the disaster zone. They wanted to be part of this collective consciousness, contributing to it with depth and unconventional angles. Investigative reports and poetry are two of the main genres they take an interest in.
A weekly general-interest newspaper, a scholarly review, a monthly journal of opinion, and a women's magazine are challenging fate by launching amid an economic slowdown.
From the China Rhyming blog:
...in mid-1938 as the Japanese were driving up the Yangtze to Hankou Time Magazine reported that in Shanghai the Japanese Army were ordered to seize pro-Chinese books by US authors including Carl Crow, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, two issues of the New York Times, one issue of Time. They were all deemed too pro-Chinese...
The biggest ice Santa, and now China finds the 'largest dinosaur fossil site' in the world; Reuters reports:
Scientists in China say they have discovered the world's largest dinosaur fossil site in the eastern province of Shandong, state media reported on Tuesday.
Scientists had recovered some 7,600 fossils from a 300 metre (980 ft) long pit near Zhucheng city over the past seven months, Xinhua news agency said.
A Nanjing district government hands out the "correct answers" that citizens are supposed to use when a provincial government agency asks them how well-off they are.
Window of the South names its 'people of the year.' Also, a review of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone.
A woman named Ma Cheng tells of the trouble her rare given name has gotten her into.
Again at the WSJ China Journal, Bao Tong, an ex-high official in house arrest, recaps his memories of the reforms instigator, Deng Xiaoping:
One minute he wanted reforms, the next he was resolutely upholding the four basic principles of socialism: One minute he wanted to escape from a political dead end, the next he had returned to it.
WSJ's China Journal rounds up and translates Xinhua's very own top ten stories of 2008 (in Xinhua's own unique language):
-Lhasa is struck by the '3.14' (March 14) violent criminal incident of beating, smashing, looting and burning.
-An especially severe 8.0-magnitude earthquake hits Wenzhou, Sichuan.
-Beijing successfully holds the Olympics and Paralympics.
-The Sanlu melamine milk powder incident turns society's attention to increasing the level of food safety.
Is the title of James Fallows' book about his time in China, since 2006, as a reporter for The Atlantic, which is on release today. The China Beat does an e-mail interview with the author and reporter:
Ahah! You have cruelly revealed the trademarked secret of everything I've ever written for the magazine!
James Fallows has a blog at The Atlantic website.
From China Daily:
China Eastern Airlines, a key air carrier in China, announced on Monday it will get a total capital injection of 7 billion yuan through issuing more A and H shares to its holding company China Eastern Air Holding Company.
For The Guardian, science correspondent James Randerson writes:
The new find, from the Linxia basin in China's Gansu province, suggests that Asia was the evolutionary cradle for the fleet felines. The nearly complete skull is among the oldest cheetah fossils yet found. It is around the same age as a 2.5m year-old related species discovered in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1997.
For The National, Michael Donohue writes about professional baseball in China, and why no one's looking for 'the baseball Yao Ming' anymore:
Technically, they're wrong. But there are only 20 baseball fields in the entire country, according to Shen Wei, the secretary general of the China Baseball Association, a tiny department within the state sports ministry. About 400 Chinese make a living playing baseball, affiliated with the state sports system. Another several thousand play on loosely organised school and university clubs, usually setting up their bases on soccer fields. Exact figures are a state secret, but it's possible that the number of people executed annually in China only recently dropped below the number of people who play organised baseball.
The bezdomny ex patria blog translates an article from The Beijing News which reports that the city's use of recycled water is set to surpass what it takes from the Miyun Reservoir.
Xinhua via People's Daily Online:
Auditors across the country initiated investigation in more than 104,000 enterprises and agencies in the period, Liu said at a national year-end auditing conference here.
Adam Minter, of Shanghai Scrap, and David Kang, professor at the University of Southern California, talk on Minnesota Public Radio about the 'ghost towns' in the south of China, amongst other things.
From China Daily:
The China Dairy Industry Association, a coalition of about 600 dairy manufacturers nationwide, said on Saturday that 22 Chinese producers will provide one-time compensation payments to victims' families,
From Reuters:
Fears of a prolonged recession in China have triggered a sharp increase in divorce inquiries addressed to lawyers and financial advisers, state media reported on Monday, with timing a key issue.
At Global Voices Online, Portnoy translates some reactions by Taiwan-based bloggers to the death of AV actress Ai Iijima (饭岛爱).
ESWN translates a Southern Weekend article on the cases of journalist arrests this year:
Our investigation showed that the many cases of journalists being arrested all involved other cases behind them, and the informants were arrested as well.
Over at the Washington Post, Maureen Fan interviews Du Daozheng, an 85-year-old party loyalist and director of the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which got into trouble recently with the authorities. The article also touches on the other issues to do with Chinese media today.
And yet Du was able to challenge the propaganda officials by reminding them that a group of retired senior leaders had elected him to run the magazine.
For more on Yanhuang Chunqiu and the propaganda officials, China Media Project has a summary.
Black and White Cat translates the lyrics to a rousing anthem currently being learned by the crew of three warships headed to combat pirates off the coast of Somalia.
For the China Daily, Raymond Zhou picks ten enjoyable films of 2008.
We know big news events that keep audiences glued to the tube are not good for the cinema, but we cannot be certain whether an economic downturn will do more good or harm.
Judging by the year-end crowds at the nation's multiplexes, however, people are unfazed by bad news, or perhaps, any news can be turned into a good excuse for spending two hours in a dark hall with hundreds of others.
City Weekend's interview of Will Moss about the life of a 'modest' blogger:
Actually reading my own blog, particularly the older posts, can be the source of a little bit of embarrassment. One of the wonderful things about the China blogging community is how much it has grown over the last few years. Some of the blogs that I read regularly are David Wolf's Silcon Hutong. David is an ex-colleague of mine and a very astute analyst of business in China...
For US-China Today, Robson Morgan looks at the relationship between China's economic performance and surveys of public satisfaction.
The Los Angeles Times reports that melamine, previously found in pet food and milk products, is showing up in farm-raised seafood:
...industry experts and businesspeople in China say that melamine has been routinely added to fish and animal feed to artificially boost protein readings. And new research suggests that, unlike in cows and pigs, the edible flesh in fish that have been fed melamine contains residues of the nitrogen-rich substance.
...
More than 15 feed suppliers in various parts of China were contacted for this story. Most of them declined to comment or said they didn't add melamine. But some of them said the practice of spiking feed with it had been going on for at least the last six years, with inspectors checking some types of feed products more tightly than others.
China Law Blog discusses why US companies are hesitant to talk about the issue, and what may have led one US seafood distributor to go on the record.
Soho, Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi's high-profile Beijing real estate development company, has stumbled over its redevelopment of historic Qianmen. The Wall Street Journal explains.
Soho's difficulties with a project in one of Beijing's oldest districts illustrates how even one of China's savviest Western-oriented companies can fall victim to the opacity of the country's real-estate market. Soho said it went into the project hoping to save the old district, known as Qianmen; instead, swaths of historic buildings have been leveled and Soho remains locked out of revenue.
Chinayouren reflects on the implications of "Chаrter 08" now that the media has largely moved on to other topics:
One important difference from past actions is the positive nature of the movement. The Chаrter is not merely a reaction or complaint; it is a statement that stands in its own right. Note, however, one important difference between the line quoted above and those in the classic American and French Declarations: this one is formulated in the negative, "Human Rights are not bestowed by a State". There is still an important element of reaction which will have consequences on the future of the Charter.
Egoyan Zheng, a Taiwan-based writer whose novel Fleeting Light (流光) was on the long-list for the 2007 Man Asia Prize, has posted an English translation of a short story, "Infants" (嬰孩), to his blog. The translation is by Laura Jane Wey, who also translated Fleeting Light.
At Time China blog, Austin Ramzy notes the latest development on the 08 Charter, with a link to the open letter in question:
A group of writers, scholars and Nobel laureates have signed an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo.
From Bloomberg:
After months of rejection from Beijing banks, Wang Fei got the money to start a dried-fruit business by pledging his apartment to a pawnbroker.
The 25-year-old law-school graduate is following a path taken by a growing number of Chinese entrepreneurs and small businesses. Within days of offering his 90 square meter flat as security, Wang got 400,000 yuan from Baoruitong Pawnshop Co., the nation's biggest pawnbroker.
The Washington Post does an in-depth report on the death penalty in China, with special mention to Wo Weihan, executed for espionage, and Du Yimin, the owner of a beauty salon in Zhejing, who is appealing against her sentence:
Wo told his family he still had confidence in the Chinese justice system. He was executed the next morning, despite a promised second family visit. He died a convicted spy, even though he said he had signed a confession only because security officials promised he would not be prosecuted if he did so.
Earlier this month Danwei translated the Global Times article, Wo Weihan convicted of espionage, executed.
From Xinhua:
China donated 500,000 U.S. dollars to Zimbabwe on Tuesday to boost the country's efforts to arrest cholera epidemic which has killed more than 1,000 people since the first outbreak in August.
Speaking at the donation ceremony at the Health Ministry office building in Harare, He Meng, Charge d'Affair of the Chinese Embassy in Harare, said as a long-term friend of Zimbabwe, China shares the concerns of international community over the current cholera situation, and sympathies with Zimbabwean people in their sufferings.
From the Telegraph: a gas leak in Hebei on Wednesday has already killed 17.
Two workers died instantly from the leak at a blast furnace in Zunhua city, about 93 miles (150 kilometres) east of Beijing in Hebei province, Xinhua said.
Twenty-seven people were also injured but are in stable condition.
The accident occurred at the Ganglu Iron and Steel Co Ltd, Xinhua said, which has 7,000 employees.
Q&A with CNN's Beijing bureau chief, who came to China in 1971 from the Philippines, starting his China career as a laborer on farms and fishing boats.
From The Economist, 'a personal account of an exhilarating hunt for the Chinese crested tern, possibly the world's rarest bird'.
From the Granite Studio:
Around 8:00 p.m. on December 24, 1946, a group of American marines including 23-year old Corporal William Pierson and Private William Pritchard snatched Beijing University student Shen Chong off the streets near Dongdan in Beijing, dragged her to the adjacent Polo Grounds (what is today the Dongdan basketball courts) and raped her.
The Beijinger blog tells the story of No. 81 Chaonei Dajie.
One of his concubines couldn't stand the heartache of losing the official from her life and as a tragic result she hung herself in that very building. Since this day, weird and abnormal things keep occurring; apparently people can still hear someone crying during storms or nights that coincided with a full moon.
ESWN translates the latest developments in the Zhou Zhenlong fake South China tiger photo case. Zhou has since declared that 'the photos are real' in a hand-written note:
On December 20, Zhou Zhenglong to ask Peking Normal University associate professor Liu Liyuan, who is one of his leading supporters, to issue a statement to the media that he is recanting his court confession.
From GoKunming.com:
This morning at 10:30 the bustle of Wenhua Xiang's cafes and restaurants was violently interrupted by an explosion at Salvador's Coffee House.
We have spoken with Salvador's co-owner Colin Flahive several times since the explosion and he has confirmed that the explosion was set off by a man who had entered the restaurant with an explosive device.
Flahive said that none of the staff or customers present at Salvador's this morning were seriously injured and that the man with the explosive device had suffered serious injuries.
At China Rhyming, 'Old China Hand' John W Powell is remembered. JW Powell was the son of JB Powell, who ran the China Weekly Review in the inter-war period. JW Powell restarted the journal, but was more famous for fighting McCarthyism:
One story not noted is that he was actually born in a rickshaw racing through Shanghai taking his mother to hospital - they were late and JW popped out mid-ride...
chinaSMACK translates a Mop thread about Guangdong citizens in search of cats that are prey to the dinner table (mostly photos):
While working this afternoon (20 December 2008), I received a telephone call saying that a batch of cats were going to be shipped to Guangzhou, asking everyone to bring cat food, water, etc. and go rescue the cats. Even though we are Guangdong people (Cantonese), we long ago despised those heartless Guangdong people who eat cats, these people having made all of us lose face.
See Danwei's previous post on 'Where do Nanjing's stray cats end up?'
Fang Zhouzi, an anti-fraud crusader who frequently faces lawsuits over his take-no-prisoners approach to combating pseudoscience and chicanery, beat back a lawsuit from CEB Rice, whose specially-engineered, super-expensive rice was branded a fraud by Fang. Eddie Cheng at China's Scientific & Academic Integrity Watch blog summarizes the outcome.
From Bloomberg:
Sanlu Group Co., the Chinese dairy company closed in September after it sold contaminated infant formula, has been declared bankrupt by a court in the city of Shijiazhuang, partner Fonterra Cooperative Group Ltd. said.
A receiver will take over management of the company and has six months to sell its assets and pay creditors, Auckland-based Fonterra said today in a statement. Shijiazhuang is the capital of Hebei province in northeast China where Sanlu is based.
At Paper Republic, Eric Abrahamsen describes the deliberations over this year's Dangdai Literary Prize, which awarded the "Expert's Book of the Year" prize to Bi Feiyu's Tui Na. Yan Geling's Auntie Duohe, also published this year, was voted as the top novel of the last five years, beating out Wang Gang's Yinglish and Fan Wen's Land of Water and Milk.
At China Dialogue, Li Siqi shows how the ban on flimsy shopping bags has led to the proliferation of low quality garbage bags:
At least bin bags are not free, unlike the plastic shopping bags of the past. But for an increasingly wealthy urban population, the low cost involved does nothing to reduce the bags' use, and to a certain extent they have become a daily necessity. There is no chance they will disappear of their own accord. Sanitation workers are even using them to line public litter bins. In comparison with small shopping bags - which can be supplanted by reusable sacks or baskets -- the use of household rubbish bags is relatively inflexible. And unlike shopping bags, bin bags are only ever used once.
Malaysian National News Agency reports:
China said Tuesday it is seriously considering building its first aircraft carrier as it prepares to send two warships and a supply vessel to protect Chinese commercial ships in the pirate-infested waters off Somalia...
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National Defence Ministry spokesman Senior Colonel Huang Xueping said at the same media briefing that the Chinese government would seriously consider the relevant issues when asked on having an aircraft carrier.
Not exactly a confirmation, but as close to an admission of intent as you could get from the Ministry of Defence.
A round up of hot forum topics from China.
CCTV turned 50 last Saturday. Morning Sun provides a retrospective.
An error by the International Herald Tribune, judging by their definition of the 'human flesh search engine.'
56minus1 talks about (and films) a 93-year-old living in Shanghai, possibly the oldest Chinese teacher to foreign students in China:
Teacher Gui talks about her experiences with customer service in the times of government-assigned jobs and the 'big rice pot,' a cousin of the 'iron rice bowl.' ... Teacher Gui is 93 years old and has been a resident of Shanghai since she was a late teenager.
From The People's Daily:
China's top legislature might add mental distress to conditions covered by the Tort Law to improve civil rights protection, under legislation submitted on Monday.
The long-awaited draft Tort Law, designed to provide compensation for those whose rights are violated, was tabled at the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee for a second reading.
China Digital Times published an extensive interview with Qi Hanting, the founder of Anti-CNN.com, who is no longer with the website:
AC's current readers have decreased a lot. Before I left at the end of April, I was always rethinking one problem; was AC named correctly? The fact that AC had such a great influence was first because 'Anti-CNN' at that time was what many people wanted to say in their minds; the second reason was that the name 'Anti-CNN' was able to get the attention of the western media. However, a website cannot build on the foundation of simply opposing somebody.
From Xinhua:
The draft said China would establish a standard social security number system across the nation by using each citizen's current identification card number.
...
Currently, China's social insurance fund is managed by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and its branches in provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.
An editorial in The Guardian talks about internet censorship and the importance of trading words as well as goods in China:
China's web community is quite vibrant and inventive, often re-posting content when censors remove it, using technology to view banned sites, or employing analogies or homonymic characters. But they are countered by China's army of technology-savvy censors and spin doctors.
Newspaper headlines from President Hu Jintao's speech on December 18 celebrating three decades of China's reform era anticipate next year's popular slogans.
At his blog China Rhyming, Paul French highlights some pictures showing the CLC participating in World War I.
The government released details of a real estate stimulus package. From Xinhua:
The document... will solve the housing problem for 7.47 million low-income urban families and 2.4 million households in shantytowns in the next three years. Rural homes in dangerous condition will also be renovated.
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To boost home buying, the government also allows people with 'smaller-than-average' apartments to buy a second apartment under favorable loan terms. Size limits are different in every city.
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This is the latest in government efforts to prop up the real estate sector.
ESWN translates an interview of Hu Yong (胡泳), associate professor of Peking University, School of Journalism and Communication, and ex-Lifeweek journalist, who keeps a blog on Sohu and Sina:
At the time, I felt that I could affect many things, I could affect society and I could affect many people through doing this. Today, people may think that I was naive. But whether it was due to the atmosphere at the time or my personal quest, I was certainly moved by this and chose to go into media. After 1989, the whole country went through a huge change and my personal career went through a huge change as well.
Hu Yong (胡泳) blogs on Sohu (more recently updated), and Sina.
China Daily reports on the popular 'Kappa girl,' who has been detained by the police for spreading online pornography:
The 12-minute video first appeared on the Internet at the end of October under the title 'Kappa girl at Shanghai No 1 Department Store's east building,' in reference to the sportswear shop in which Huang worked.
It soon became one of the most popular downloads on the mainland, with thousands of people downloading it last month...
The Shanghaiist has more on the history of the 'Kappa girl' incident.
China Law Blog suggests that the economic downturn is making it harder for foreign companies operating "off the grid" to go legit:
Over the last few years, we have registered countless companies in China that had been operating quite openly without registration for years. We registered one company that purchased more than $300 million in Chinese goods a year and employed more than 3000 people. We registered another company that had been operating for more than 15 years. But only after the economic crisis has begun have we ever been in the process of bringing a company within the law only to have that company thrown out.
The Under the Bridge blog translates Chаrter 08 signer Guаn Dаngsheng's account of a visit to a teahouse at the invitation of the local police.
James Fallows tracks down the technical reasons behind difficulties accessing the New York Times website from the mainland.
At the New Republic, Mara Hvistendahl profiles Guo Quan, a popular online nationalist writer who's been detained for starting his own democracy party:
Guo's politics remained nationalistic at that point, but he had become a strong leader with a solid base, triggering Chinese government fears that he could harness his power for other causes. Local authorities brought him in for routine questioning. When Shinzo Abe, then prime minister of Japan, passed through Nanjing that September, Guo said public security officers detained him for several hours. The surveillance had made him paranoid, seeing spooks everywhere.
New information may answer questions about Yi Jianlian's age: Sports Illustrated China reporter Li Zhigang looked up the Nets forward's elementary school records, which lists his date of birth as 1984, or three years earlier than he's told the NBA. China Sports Review translates.
The new issue of China Heritage Quarterly is water-themed. It also features fly-over photos of Beijing in 1959 that accompany an article about the capitals princely mansions.
From Jaime FlorCruz, CNN Beijing's bureau chief, who arrived in China in 1971:
Consumers in the late seventies coveted the so-called 'four big things' - a radio, a bicycle, a sewing machine and a washing machine. And they were available only in special shops, like the Friendship Store. Now the new 'big things' would include a Mercedes Benz, an apartment and a week-long vacation in Bali or Hawaii.
All this would have been inconceivable 30 years ago.
But Deng Xiaoping did...
Reuters reports on the closing of the Xinhua Finance News (XFN) newswire by Xinhua News Limited (XNL) by the end of the month:
Xinhua Finance News, which has operations in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore, will be shut down. It has a staff of about 40 people, a company spokeswoman said.
'With the impact of the global financial crisis on the underlying economy, we reluctantly have to discontinue our news operations and focus on core businesses, namely, index, ratings and financial solutions,' chief executive Jae Lie said in a statement.
China Herald says a little bit more about the closure.
Seagull Reference records and analyzes the verdict of the first-ever 'human flesh search engine' court case in China:
On Dec 29th last year, Jiang Yan jumped from 24th floor of her apartment building in Beijing, exhausted and desperate from her husband Wang Fei's extramarital affair with a co-worker Dong Fang.
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A 'network mob' was summoned out of anger and websites were set up to curse the husband and his lover. Soon the two were fired, and the husband was diagnosed with depression.
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The case went to trail in Chaoyang Court of Beijing. The man sued websites and won a verdict of RMB Yuan 3,000 ($500) and 5,000 ($800) from two sites...
Two men have been sentenced to death for attacks that took place in Kashgar on August 4, resulting in 17 deaths. The New Dominion compares the official Xinhua report of the incident with eyewitness accounts from tourists, as carried in the New York Times:
Quite interestingly I found that the terse yet nonetheless descriptive version of events put forward by Xinhua just yesterday meshes quite well with eyewitness testimony, which I believe is in one sense more reliable given the source (a bunch of tourists over a state run propaganda mouthpiece) but in a different way is more unreliable given the circumstances of the observation (unexpected, sudden eyewitness and reliance on human memory).
At China Media Project, David Bandurski translates an article by Yang Min in Yanhuang Chunqiu that credits "universal values" for China's reform era, as well as an attack by a Utopia writer on Yang's "mythologizing":
These bourgeois intellectuals in our country, including Yang Min, are for the revival of capitalism, for a reversion to capitalism, for a joining up with global capitalism, and they speak with the same accents as the reactionaries of America and Japan, welcoming attacks on Chinese socialism.
Not only this, but they carry out irrational attacks against those of us comrades who have not forgotten the class struggle and who continue to uphold Marxism . . .
Raymond Zhou looks at the last three decades of fashion: clothing, music, food, and entertainment:
That gave rise to fake collars. Presumably in fashion-conscious Shanghai, where people could not stand to wear the same clothes weeks at a time, some genius invented a "fake collar". This was a misnomer because the collar was the only part of the shirt that was real. The rest of the shirt was non-existent. Since people wore it in winter, with a sweater over it, they could give the impression of more wardrobe changes without stealing their neighbors' ration coupons.
The collar went out of existence as soon as we crossed the threshold into material sufficiency. It's now become a collector's item. People born in the age of abundance can't imagine an invention like that, let alone as a "fashion item".
Lost Laowai interviews John Pasden of Sinosplice about language learning, life in China, and blogging.
The co-founder of Tudou.com Marc van de Chijs writes about the 'online gaming indicator' of China's economic recession (specifically office workers worried about getting the sack):
This week we were analyzing the traffic figures on our Chinese online game sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com, when we noted a strange effect. During weekdays there was hardly any growth on our portals, but on weekends the growth was similar to what we were used to. We looked a bit deeper into this and may have found a reason for this: staff in companies play less online games during working hours (normally we see a spike in traffic around 11:30 AM and from 4 PM onwards).
At China Beat, K.E. Brashier of Reed College presents views of Qin Shi Huang that have appeared in pop culture and high culture:
In contrast, modern culture highlights the First Emperor as the glue that brought Chinese culture together in terms of territory, currency, measures, roadways, written language and more. Books and documentaries routinely dub him "the man who made China," elevating him to creator status. Images of his cruelty may persist, but the warfare, the quest for immortality and the exacting laws that extended down to mere mouse holes are now often treated as necessary evils and personal quirks leading to the much greater prize of unification, of fusing 'all under heaven' or tianxia 天下.
Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well discusses the PowerPoint slides of Yang Shiqun, the professor who may have be accused of being a counter-revolutionary.
Yang wants students to "analyze in-depth the cultural genes of the Chinese society" This actually -is- counter-revolutionary, in that he thinks there is a timeless essence of Chinese society that can't be changed, which is in direct opposition to what the Communist revolution was all about and, for that matter, the May 4th movement. He is I think, in a Western sense, anti-liberal, in that Liberalism is built around the idea that politics and culture are made by people and can be changed by them more or less at will. (When in the course of human events, etc.) He certainly does not see culture as constructed.
Black and White Cat memorializes Francoise Grenot-Wang, a French woman who lived in Danian township, Rongshui County, Guangxi Province. She founded Couleurs de Chine, an organization that has helped send thousands of girls to school.
Francoise was passionate about the work she did and the people she whose lives she shared. She was fiercely proud of their culture, their strength, their history. And she was proud that they were her friends. She was determined that they should develop and escape grinding poverty, but equally determined that they should not lose the culture that had evolved over thousands of years, only to become sellers of trinkets for tourists.
President Hu Jintao declared the official anniversary of the opening up and reform policies at a ceremony this morning in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Xinhua takes a retrospective and speculates about the future amid global financial turmoil:
On this date 30 years ago, the Communist Party of China (CPC) made a landmark policy shift, known as the reform and opening up drive, which gave the then poverty-stricken nation hope of a better life through economic change.
Also, The Economist writes (partly) about the lack of a specific dating system for when opening up and reform actually began.
As part of a series on free expression, the Christian Science Monitor profiles Prof. Hu Xingdou:
But Hu says he feels confident commenting on, and criticizing, pretty much any other aspect of Chinese life, at least on his website, to which other blogs link, and from which newspapers often lift articles.
"I got tired of submitting articles to editors that they found too politically risky," he says. "Now I just post them on my website, and if editors like them they can publish them."
From J.O.P. Bland's 1910 classic Houseboat Days in China, an excerpt about missionaries: 'He is one of the peculiar products of Western morals applied, on misguided principles, to the Far East.'
At China Rhyming, Paul French writes about the enigmatic, dope-selling Brilliant Chang from 1920s London's Chinatown:
One of the interesting bits to fall out from this period was the case of Brilliant Chang, a Chinese guy who had pitched up in Limehouse (then London's Chinatown) as a sailor like so many others. He moved into the restaurant trade and opened a place called 'Shanghai' but also sold dope to the flappers.
Chang was then implicated in the overdose and death of a young nightclub singer in 1922...
You can purchase condoms from automatic machines that look like LCD TV screens near bars, restaurants, clubs, public bath houses, and major construction sites in urban Beijing using the public transit 'One Card' from December 17.
The Daily Telegraph was hoaxed by Chinese blogger Hecaitou's joke post, and wrote a 'messy' article because of it.
Today's New York Times reported at length about China's naval vessels potentially going to fight against hijackers in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden:
About 60 percent of China's imported oil comes from the Middle East, and the bulk of that passes through the gulf, along with huge shipments of raw materials out of Africa. Last month, two Chinese ships were hijacked there, a fishing trawler and a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship carrying wheat.
Does the tonal nature of Chinese have any bearing on a science journal's misidentification of a brothel advertisement as a classical Chinese poem? Language Log parses a report in the Independent.
From China Daily:
China is all set to send a naval fleet on a mission to fight pirates in Somali waters, a military source told China Daily on Tuesday.
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China will tell a United Nations Security Council meeting this morning (Beijing time) that "we wish to work with others to reach a positive outcome", a Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday, without confirming the status of the mission.
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A local newspaper provided some details of the planned mission."The fleet will leave the South China Sea and head to the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters," the Global Times reported yesterday.
The China Beat tracks the history of horse racing in Shanghai, linking to an Associated Press article about the return of the sport in Wuhan earlier this year:
A few weeks ago, it was reported that horseracing had returned to China for the first time since 1949. Though this time, the horses are running in Wuhan, horseracing in China was for a long time almost synonymous with Shanghai. In case that history is new to you, here are a few places to go for more on Shanghai's racing history...
China Sports Review also wrote about and interviewed horse lottery participants in Wuhan, link here.
In Guangdong markets, according to a Southern Metropolis Daily investigation.
At Beijing Boyce, Kaiser Kuo names the five all-time best places for live music in Beijing (not all of them are around anymore):
Keep in Touch: The biggest myth about the old Keep in Touch, which was across the street from the Kempinski Hotel and was in business between 1998 and 2001, was that it was owned by ex-Cui Jian keyboardist Wang Yong. To set the record straight the owners were Wang Yong's (late) sister Wang Ling and her then-boyfriend Liang Jun in 1997, and as far as I know it never officially changed ownership, though Wang Yong certainly behaved as though it were his. Between its opening and closing, there weren't really many other decent venues.
From China Daily:
Rising unemployment and a widening income gap are the two issues of most concern to Chinese people, an annual report released on Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) said.
The document, entitled The Analysis of and Forecasts for Social Development (or the Blue Book on Chinese Society), said 38.4 percent of the 7,000 families interviewed had been affected by the unstable employment situation.
The figure is 8.4 percentage points higher than in 2006.
In urban areas, the unemployment rate is now 9.4 percent, twice the registered rate of 4.5 percent released by the Human Resources and Society Security Ministry, the report said.
Guan Jian, the Network News reporter that went missing for two weeks in Shanxi, turned up in police custody. ESWN translates a blog post that asks some critical questions: Why was Guan's family not notified? What crime is he being charged with? Since local police would need authorization from higher-level departments, why did those departments plead ignorance in interviews with journalists?
Steve at Fool's Mountain describes an exciting oceanic voyage:
The 54 foot, 35 ton Fujian style warship, built and launched from Xiamen using the same materials as their ancestors, is following the conjectured route of 15th century Chinese admiral Zheng He who, according to some theories, may have arrived on the North American West Coast long before Cabrillo.
Lian Yue, a well-known civic-minded blogger and a popular advice columnist, and Luo Yonghao, an educator and the founder of blog host Bullog, interview each other about a wide variety of topics for Esquire's end-of-year roundup.
ESWN translates China Economic Net's round-up of this year's naughty and not-so-nice sex-related topics, including sexy photo gate, the Lust, Caution saga, the chastity class incident and the first sexual harassment case in China:
7. Women commit suicide after marriage failures
Incident: In October, Beijing Sports Weekly female editor Li Ying killed herself by jumping into the river. Shortly afterwards, Guizhou television host Yu Jing also committed suicide. Both women reportedly killed themselves as a result of emotional problems with their husbands.
The New Criterion publishes an essay which for the main part discusses Chinese performance art. But at its focus are the exploitative and money-grabbing painters and artists supporting the consumption craze of the west:
While the handful of Chinese painters who have emerged as celebrities may be less repellent--but perhaps more pernicious--than the performers, they share the same exploitative nature. The painter Wang Guangyi is openly dismissive of artists who fail to game the system. Zhou Tiehai has advocated "exploiting the international art market as a means of personal and collective self-defense." The top-selling Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Xiaogang have created an iconography of laughing men, bald thugs, and expressionless portraits, which they endlessly reproduce. In China, common artistic practice includes "blatant imitation of other artists' works, willingness to pay for art criticism and museum exposure, refusal to adhere to dealer-artist exclusivity, an elastic notion of 'limited' editions, and mass replication of the artists' own most successful motifs."
Reuters report via IHT about another disappearance of a Chinese journalist following CCTV's Li Min. Guan Jian from Network News (网络报) was taken from a hotel lobby whilst investigating a suspicious real estate deal in Shanxi:
Guan's disappearance highlights the danger to reporters probing corruption in a country where officials are often close to business while also wielding power over police and courts. Killings of reporters are virtually unheard of, but beatings, detentions and arrests are a risk for those who take on the powerful.
Guan's case follows the controversial arrest of a reporter from powerful state broadcaster China Central Television who was seized from her home in Beijing earlier this month by Shanxi prosecutors who claimed she took bribes.
The Beijing News (新京报) reported on the incident today, link here (Chinese).
At Culture Wars, Nathan Coombs reviews Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past.
Gao's portrait is of a country increasingly riven by elitism and contempt for the poor. As a recent visitor from China also told me, 'the rich are paranoid and convinced the poor hate them, they avoid them the best they can'. This is obviously a dangerous situation for a country with a history of revolutionary violence. The possibility of the repetition of large-scale social action means that history and historical consciousness are a major site of contention. The Battle for China's Past takes on a contemporary political significance.
The article also links to an interesting "extremely positive/over-the-top take on the Cultural Revolution" prepared in eight parts by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group: Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future.
A less than reassuring story in The China Daily:
'Most' feed free of melamine
After examining 22,700 batches of animal feed in the country, only 2.39 percent were found with excessive melamine content, the National Feed Office, under the Ministry of Agriculture, said on Saturday.
Juliana Barbassa reports for the AP on a historic ship that sailed from Taiwan to the US in an effort to join a race from the US to Sweden:
Half a century ago, six men with no sailing experience climbed aboard an aging Chinese junk in Taiwan and survived a typhoon that nearly wrecked the little ship. But after sailing nearly 7,000 miles across the Pacific, they were greeted by cheering crowds as they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Now that turn-of-the-century junk, which experts say may be last salvageable vessel of its type, could be destroyed if it does not find a permanent home by the end of December.
Shanghai Eye has published a translated transcript of a conversation between artists Ai Weiwei and Jiang Kewen, about Jiang's early childhood Cultural Revolution experiences, art, family, Qinghai and Shaanxi.
From The China Daily:
A new era in cross-Straits relations begins today with the launch of daily direct air, shipping and postal services.
The end of a nearly six-decade ban on direct links imposed by Taipei is widely expected to strengthen growing economic ties and benefit millions of people across the Straits.
Prominent politicians, including Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou and Kuomintang (KMT) honorary chairman Lien Chan, will attend inauguration ceremonies in Taiwan and on the mainland to mark the historic occasion.
Cankao Xiaoxi (or Reference News), a digest of international media in translation, ran with a spoof story about poor migrant bankers in China and misattributed it to a reputable German media outlet.
Samantha Deng is a Harvard student studying abroad in Beijing. Inside-Out China posts her look at Destination, a popular gay nightclub in the city.
bezdomny ex patria picks up the story of an unusual train ticket.
At China Dialogue, Tang Hao examines the housing situation in quake-affected areas as winter weather approaches:
Two months later, the rows of white tents had disappeared. It first appeared like everyone had been provided with better housing, but the locals told a different story. In order to keep a promise that everyone in Yingxiu would be provided with prefabricated homes, officials had simply moved the tents and their residents into the mountains. Sure enough, I saw the tents off in the mountains: the area was not safe, with mudslides during heavy rain. Residents and relief workers wore helmets as they walked around. The temperatures up there were even lower, and it will be even worse in winter.
From The China Daily:
Chinese military strategists and international relations experts are debating whether China should dispatch its navy to the troubled waters off Somalia.
The debate was first kicked off by Major-General Jin Yinan of the National Defense University, when he told a radio station last week that 'nobody should be shocked' if the Chinese government one day decides to send navy ships to deal with the pirates.
51minus1 features five recent viral brand videos. Bruce Lee! Fake Liu Xiang! An illegally-parked Chevy Captiva drives off pulling the tow truck behind it!
Tim Johnson posts part of an email conversation he had with Sidney Rittenberg about life in Yan'an:
Yanan is now a grungy commercial city of two million, and the historic sites are shoved behind and under the shadow of everything else. They should have made the whole district a museum park, and put their commercial center outside of that. Not only that -- the two caves where Mao lived are labeled all wrong, the historical incidents they mentioned and even the times during which he lived there are wrong. And the one building standing when I got to Yanan in 1946 -- the Party Meeting Hall has been totally redesigned and rebuilt, in spite of which they swear that it remains unchanged.
France has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. How many other countries have done so over the past few decades? Chinese bloggers investigate.
ESWN translates Hecaitou's comments on the top ten search terms of 2008 (he doesn't indicate where the list comes from):
In 2008, we searched for "Beijing Olympics." All the sorrows and hardship of the year seems to be waiting for the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At 8:08pm that evening, we received the long-awaited answer. Will the world admire us? Will our efforts over several decades finally be realized? Does this mean that we can finally say to the world: We can do it too! It took only one minute for the footsteps created by the fireworks to traverse Beijing. But we had already walked many years just for this moment. Beijing is a city with 10 million residents. But it is still far too small for the Olympics. Thus, we needed the power of the Internet to witness this historical moment, to learn to sing the Olympic theme song and to figure out why Liu Xiang withdrew from his race.
Also, China Journal comments on Google's year-end roundup of Chinese search terms.
Ten months ahead of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, Beijing has already started preparations. The Zhongnanhai blog translates an article from the Beijing Evening News:
While the parade is still ten months away, an official with the Ministry of Defense confirms preparations have already started. According to other sources, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China will be the largest-scale ceremony since the founding itself. It will apparently showcase the military and economic power of China.
At the Echoes of Manchu blog, Randy Alexander describes a visit to a school in Sanjiazi, where he spoke with a Manchu teacher.
China Herald writes about a La Tribune report on how the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) is urging state-owned airlines not to purchase foreign-made airplanes in 2009, echoing recent concerns about the financial crisis in China's aviation sector:
Both Airbus and Boeing will suffer from the effort that should reduce China's foreign debt (although the country still a a bit of a trade deficit).
Today Xinhua via China.org.cn announced the plan to halt or cancel plane purchase from abroad, link here.
Also, earlier Danwei linked to China's first domestically produced jetliner, the ARJ-21.
From The China Daily:
Exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) both fell in November because of shrinking demand overseas, sending fresh signs of economic weakness and prompting calls for more measures to bolster the economy.
Exports dropped 2.2 percent to $114.99 billion last month, the first monthly decline in seven years, Customs authorities said Wednesday. And FDI fell 36.52 percent year-on-year to $5.3 billion, the Ministry of Commerce said.
But the country's trade surplus soared to a record $40.09 billion in November despite a fall in exports because imports fell, too, by 17.9 percent year-on-year after having risen 15.6 percent in October.
The man who found a sack of documents detailing a costly "government inspection tour" to Las Vegas and other entertainment spots explains why he, as a taxpayer, felt compelled to release the information online. ESWN translates the Information Times interview.
Boycott French goods? Global Voices translates a number of online reactions, include a snarky response from Han Han.
For the upcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Perry Link translates the 08 Charter, a document signed by 303 Chinese intellectuals that "offers a strong critique of the government's 'disastrous' denigration of values such as freedom, equality, and human rights" (via China Journal).
From the WSJ China Journal: on International Human Rights Day protesters gather outside the foreign ministry in Beijing.
Ministry officials handed out forms to the protesters and asked them to fill in details of their grievances. But the forms weren't returned to the ministry later. Instead, many protesters handed them over to reporters at the scene thinking that would be a better bet for getting some attention.
At the USC US-China Institute, Lelise Gobena discusses a lecture by William Callahan that examines CASS professor Zhao Tingyang's "Tianxia system":
Geographically, Zhao argues that tianxia is more than a physical place, but a way to think of the world which does not automatically begin from a national perspective. Psychologically, Zhao links the concept of tianxia as pertaining to "all the people" in which there is no such thing as an "outsider" because China's process of thought does not reject the "other." According to Callahan, Zhao says Chinese cultural unity is the opposite of the Western approaches which divide the world's peoples by race. Ultimately, Zhao contends that tianxia is about transformation: transforming enemies into friends and many into one.
Scott Dreyer, an American high-school teacher in Roanoke, Virginia, hit the bestseller charts in Taiwan with a guide to better English writing:
Back home, Dreyer spent the next few months writing. Liao, who became his co-author, would e-mail him student essays, and Dreyer would correct the grammar and give advice about writing effectively in English. Liao would then translate that advice into Mandarin for the bilingual textbook.
...
Today, the book is a sleek 256 pages, with a photo of Dreyer's oversized smiling face on the cover, making him look like a bobble-head doll.
Police from Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, arrested a CCTV reporter for accepting bribes. The reporter had been investigating allegations of abuse of power on the part of a district prosecutor's office in Taiyuan, the same office that dispatched the police to arrest her.
At the Asia Times, Alex Merk has some advice for China amid current global economic uncertainties:
China can learn from these mistakes, but has no time to lose. Demand destruction in China is working its way through the economy there as well. The window for Chinese policy makers to lift the spirit of workers is closing fast: the holiday based on the Lunar New Year, falling in 2009 on January 26, is an opportunity for workers to reunite with their family and friends; during those days, the mood of the country will be set for the year. Right now, stagnating wages, job losses and the bleak US economy will dominate the dinner-table discussions. Consumer spending in China has continued to hold up year over year, but there is a seriously accelerating slowdown under way. Far more effective than a spending program on infrastructure is a program to lift the spirit of Chinese consumers.
Doing this is not best done by providing access to credit, but by giving the country a vision.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that former executives of Warner Brothers' failed cinema venture have formed a new company to build more theaters in China:
The deal has APEX, which has offices in Beijing, and EPT -- owner of 80 North American megplexes -- planning luxury movie theaters in China's major cities "in conjunction with their joint venture with the largest entertainment company in China," the companies said.
...
APEX and EPT said their China cinemas would boast wall-to-wall screens, improved sightlines, outstanding sound and projection systems, modern decor and "unparalleled customer service."
At Fool's Mountain, DJ translates an op-ed by Liao Baoping that ran in the China Youth Daily and has been featured in online opinion round-ups.
More on the response generated by Liao's article is at ESWN.
At The China Beat Zhang Lijia writes about the execution of Yang Jia and Wo Weihan:
'The real problem with China's legal system is that it's under the Communist party's control,' said Danny Gittings, an academic who specializes in the Chinese legal system at the University of Hong Kong. 'The procuratorate, public security and judiciary are separate organizations but all under the control of the same arm of the Party - the political-legal committees which exist at every level of the state. And there's still no sign of any willingness to address the fundamental problem - the lack of a legal system independent from the state.'
From the genYchina blog:
[S]ince 2000, all Asians have been slowly acclimating to cross-cultural, continually-subtitled entertainment products ... you will notice a growing proportion of popular Asian entertainment products whether music, film etc. is produced from concept with cross-border appeal as the main focus.
China's publishing industry is at the forefront of making sure that books are free from dust and germs. Even lowly mass-market paperbacks are now coming wrapped in plastic.
From AP:
China wants to loan Brazil's state oil company $10 billion to help develop massive new oil fields in deep water off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's top energy official said in comments published Monday.
Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao also told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that the United Arab Emirates has offered to finance field development, but he did not specify a price tag.
At Time China Blog, Austin Ramzy summarizes and links to a Global Voices Online translation about social mobility in China. Over 90% of billionaires are the kids of high-level cadres:
The original blogger was savvy enough to put the rich princelings tidbit in the headline, not the last graph like Xinhua. Some commenters were upset that 2,932 of the 3,220 superwealthy were children of officials, but for some the only surprise was that a government mouthpiece would admit the fact.
Chinese Business View reports on the spread of an urban legend about kidney theft.
The government has announced a 'four-month nationwide campaign ... to ensure all food products are free of non-edible substances and excessive levels of additives'.
The campaign seems to be organized a little like the frequent 'strike hard' police campaigns against theft, prostitution, drug dealing etc. From The China Daily:
From tomorrow to Jan 10, companies will be asked to conduct self-examination and correction.
From January 11 to March 10, law enforcement officers will raid high-risk food producers or regions, and intensify random checks on markets.
From March 11 to April 10, the focus will be on illegal food-additive producers and cutting off the supply of high-risk non-food substances.
Meat, dairy, brewery and other products rich in protein are high-risk food products, Pu Changcheng, deputy director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), said at the conference.
Southern Metropolis Weekly names twenty blogger-pundits. CDT translates the feature's intro:
A whole new world of expression and influencing public opinion has come to China with the spread of the Internet. The Internet provides people in China an unprecedented platform to express themselves, a place that's boundless and centerless, and has brought about an explosion of personal expression.
Traditional elites in the Chinese society can no longer monopolize the power to shape public opinion, as ordinary citizens and anonymous bloggers are becoming more and more influential in online forums and blogs.
One can no longer ignore the boisterous opinions posted on the Internet, because they are powerful enough to bring significant change to the real world.
China Media Project comments on the changing role of the commentary page in Chinese newspapers:
But press controls have arguably grown stronger in China since 2004, and this is a factor in the development of the commentary too. That may seem counter-intuitive at first, but as the space for news has diminished at China's more dynamic commercial media (and information is increasingly monopolized by "authoritative" state media), the editorial pages have become the refugee camps of professional journalism in China.
From Xinhua:
China on Saturday gave further explanation on the proposed reform of fuel tax and pricing in a bid to dispel misunderstanding that a higher consumption tax will mean higher pump prices.
The plan, scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, will abolish six fees now charged for road or waterway maintenance and management.
But drivers will pay higher fuel consumption taxes. Gasoline taxes will be raised from 0.2 yuan (about 3 U.S. cents) per liter to 1 yuan and diesel taxes from 0.1 yuan per liter to 0.8 yuan.
The government reiterated its Friday's statement that the pump prices, which include the higher tax, won't be raised and the reform won't increase costs for fuel consumers.
China Fubar is a blog subtitled 'Life and times on the world's factory floor; random observations from an American expat living in Dongguan'. From a recent post:
... lets just say I was at the Dark Side of Shoemaking...
...Despite the lip service given to human rights, codes of conduct and such, in reality, the main thing Major Customer cares about is getting the shoes in the shortest time possible, and if it means working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so be it. I've seen this now working with 2 companies, so I suspect this is not an isolated deal.
And some new things I've learned from the experience...
...When the boss puts his car up for collateral for a working capital loan, update the resume.
Star hurdler Liu Xiang, who underwent a three-hour operation on Friday, could resume training in May, Reuters reports:
"The doctor said the rehabilitation needs some six months and we are not trying to rush him back to training," said Liu's long-time coach and mentor Sun Haiping, adding that the 25 year old would remain in Houston to recuperate.
Liu had four pieces of bone removed from the Achilles tendon, including a bone spur between the tendon and the ankle bone which was the cause of his withdrawl before his first-round heat at the Bird's Nest in August.
The Christian Science Monitor reports on vacancies in Shanghai, using the Shanghai World Financial Center as an example:
The SWFC opened in August, having signed up a slate of clients willing to pay for the most prestigious address in Shanghai. A Park Hyatt hotel - the world's tallest - begins at the building's 79th floor with rooms starting from $400.
Among those must-have clients was Lehman Brothers, just weeks away from bankruptcy. Several other international companies have also broken their leases, say property agents. Estimates of the SWFC's occupancy rate range from 20 percent to 40 percent.
As part of Neojaponisme's year-end roundup, Matt Treyvaud looks at Yang Yi's Akutagawa Prize-winning novel, Toki ga nijumu asa:
The hype at the time claimed that Toki dared to explore the soul of modern China: Patriotism! Tiananmen! Diaspora! Mixed emotions regarding Japan! As a Chinese citizen who writes in Japanese, despite it not being her native language, Yang was positioned as naturally hip to such topics and uniquely placed to explain them to a Japanese audience.
By Geoff Dyer in The Financial Times:
Chinese bargain hunters are preparing to descend on American cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where homeowners have suffered some of the steepest price falls in the US.
SouFun, the biggest real estate website in China, is organising a trip next month to look at properties in California and possibly Nevada. Liu Jian, the company's chief operating officer, said about 300 people had expressed interest in the idea in the three days since it was advertised, though the company would take only a small group on the first trip.
ESWN translates an op-ed by Guo Guangdong in the Southern Weekly:
We might as well as characterize these government websites as "Internet eight-legged essays." These websites claimed to be running an open government, but they are actually making sure that government affairs are being hidden.
The Chinese and Indian military forces will hold a joint anti-terror military training from Dec. 6 to 14 in India, the Chinese Defense Ministry said on Thursday.
The two armies will each dispatch an infantry company to take part in the joint training, code-named 'Hand in Hand 2008', in south India's Belgaum District, said the ministry spokesman Huang Xueping...
...The two countries held their first joint anti-terrorism military training in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province last year.
'Sheng Shicai 盛世才 (pictured above), Xinjiang's warlord governor from 1933 to 1944. Some of you may remember him for chasing the Pickle King of Islamistan back to Britain ten years earlier. Others may remember him as Stalin's hand pick for Communist Party membership... who then flipped to the Kuomintang in 1942 and executed Chairman Mao's little brother.
For the last decade or so, scrap metal has been the largest volume export from the United States to China. But with the economy in a tailspin, unclaimed scrap metal is starting to pile up at China's ports.
Central government directives and local laws exist to control the pollution from the manganese mines, but in reality local and county officials have done little or nothing to prevent the mining from wreaking environmental havoc. In recent years, 41 manganese mines were given permits to operate in Xiushan. But a local newspaper reported that as many as 230 additional mines were operating illegally in the county, using an estimated 700,000 kilograms of explosives to blast holes in the mountains, after which workers hacked out the manganese using picks, their hands, and some mechanised equipment.
On one level, Baidu is a victim of its own success. Search engines are really mapmakers: they show what's in the neighborhood. In its early days, before Baidu became pervasive, it may have been alright to take money for businesses to show up on the map without caring too much about the reputation of the business. After all, search was a comparatively new thing, and Baidu, not yet public, wanted to grow as fast as possible, both in terms of its indexes and database, and in financial terms. But now, everyone knows what a search engine does and expects it to basically tell the truth. And if it doesn't, they are shocked and outraged.
See also: Speak, Baidu, Speak at the Silicon Hutong, and AdTech, AdGate and Blue Collar Blogging at One Man Bandwidth.The Sichuan Reproductive Faculty Hospital in Chengdu has performed more than 30 procedures to reverse tubal ligations and vasectomies for quake parents, including Mr. Zhu. More than 110 couples have visited the hospital for consultation since the earthquake. About half have been given some form of fertility treatment or counseling, although the hospital turned away 18 couples because they were believed to be too old to benefit from treatment.
The chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday that China had no plans for further investments in Western financial institutions, nor did it have any plans to 'save' the world through economic policies.
The comments by Lou Jiwei, the chairman and chief executive of the China Investment Corporation, are the clearest signal yet that after taking heavy losses on initial investments in the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley and Barclays, state-run Chinese institutions have no appetite for further purchases in this sector.
Nevertheless, it is a pity that every medal has two sides and the disadvantages of 主题 can't be ignored. To begin with, there will be a danger of (缺点1) spending too much time on it therefore ignoring what you should concentrate on. To make matters worse, (缺点2)主题 is most likely to add to your daily expenses. Worst of all, (缺点3)主题 may plunge you into an unexpected trouble.
Chinese economy is forecast to grow by more than 9 percent next year, according to an annual blue paper released by the Chinese Academy of Social Science on Tuesday.
Despite the huge uncertainty in 2009, China could still achieve a 9-percent growth as long as it unveils timely and suitable macro-economic control measures to boost domestic demand, said the blue paper.
As the December 18 anniversary of 30 years of economic reform in China approaches, there is no better time to reflect back on changes in China's media. In an interview that appeared in yesterday's edition of the Economic Observer, journalism professor Chen Lidan (陈力丹), of Renmin University, discusses his personal experiences as a press worker and researcher....
...I'm no longer interested in guidance of public opinion as an expert question. Guidance of public opinion is not a serious academic question, but rather a political demand ... Uniformity of opinion is abnormal. Only diversity of opinion is a normal thing.
"The masses have the right to understand the truth, so the appearance of situations where the masses 'don't know the truth' is truly a dereliction of duty by local powers."
A full translation by David Kelly is on China Digital Times.General Secretary Hu Jintao inspects AIDS treatment work at Ditan Hospital in Beijing and emphasizes:
Let every citizen understand AIDS prevention and let every patient have timely access to treatment
'I wasn't sacred until seeing the war-like scene at the hotel lobby,' Shi Xilin, survivor of the Mumbai attack, said Sunday afternoon.
Shi works as a chef for the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant of Taj Mahal Hotel which had been captured by terrorists during the disastrous attack that lasted almost 60 hours starting from Wednesday night.
Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.
The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China...
...'To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,' says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo...
...Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
The education sector's resistance to recession and its potential for growth are luring funds from private equities and venture capitalists.
The private equity firm Carlyle Group announced that it plans to invest US$ 50 million into Haoyue Group, a Beijing-based private education service. The venture is part of Carlyle Group's new effort to shift its assets to sectors that are relatively immune to economic cycles.
Haoyue will use the money to expand its campus, to acquire other private vocational schools over the next three years, and to launch short-term training programs, Carlyle Asia Growth Partners Group (CAGP) said Thursday.