Must-read China news by Danwei

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:58 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:47 PM | Permalink

James Fallows tracks down the technical reasons behind difficulties accessing the New York Times website from the mainland.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:24 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:28 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:18 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:58 PM | Permalink

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...

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:58 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:05 PM | Permalink

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.
...
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...

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 10:55 AM | Permalink

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).

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:42 AM | Permalink

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 . . .

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:10 AM | Permalink

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".

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:06 AM | Permalink

Lost Laowai interviews John Pasden of Sinosplice about language learning, life in China, and blogging.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:20 PM | Permalink

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).

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 4:13 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:21 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:14 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:07 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:37 PM | Permalink

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."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:49 AM | Permalink

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.'

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 7:13 PM | Permalink

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...

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:42 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:05 PM | Permalink

The Daily Telegraph was hoaxed by Chinese blogger Hecaitou's joke post, and wrote a 'messy' article because of it.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:00 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 4:34 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:26 PM | Permalink

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.
...
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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 11:57 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 9:34 AM | Permalink

In Guangdong markets, according to a Southern Metropolis Daily investigation.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:48 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:47 PM | Permalink

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?

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:43 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:56 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:35 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 4:57 PM | Permalink

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."

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 3:48 PM | Permalink

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).

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:17 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:28 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:19 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:13 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:59 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:13 AM | Permalink