Must-read China news by Danwei

China Digital Times translates a blog post by Guizhou-based blogger Deng Jian that recaps ten years of online life:

Over the past ten years of my Internet experience, I could hardly imagine that now I would be addicted to writing blog pieces and commenting on democracy and constitutional politics from time to time. It is not a transition that happened as my age increased, but rather it was brought on by the hard reality of life. I couldn't have done otherwise. When privileged groups and interest groups relentlessly trample on the miserable citizens and use leftover food to reward sycophants, who shamelessly thank their masters, it is natural for me to say something and it is reasonable for me to judge.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:12 PM | Permalink

From The Shanghaiist:

It didn't take long for Chinese netizens to get on the case of the brutal Virginia Tech murder. Almost immediately, forum members human flesh searched the killer, Zhu Haiyang, and sussed out his university scores, his QQ number and - most importantly - his blog.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:30 PM | Permalink

Following the closure of blog host Bullog, proprietor Luo Yonghao has re-opened his overseas website Bullogger: "Hosted on machines in an American imperialist server room, the exile website Bullog International is now open." Invited bloggers are present, but blogs from other registered users are unavailable at the moment, and comments have been turned off.

Update (2009.02.01): And, it's been harmonized.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:46 AM | Permalink

Froog posts a review of Ma Jian's Beijing Coma to the BookBook blog.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:12 PM | Permalink

Liang Yusheng got his start writing wuxia fiction in 1954, when a Hong Kong newspaper wanted to capitalize on the public's interest in an epic challenge between two martial arts masters.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:58 PM | Permalink

The Beijing Evening News finds that one city supermarket sold 2,500 kg of ground meat, for making jiaozi filling, in the space of two hours this morning.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:56 PM | Permalink

At Frog in a Well, Alan Baumler writes about Graham Peck's Two Kinds of Time, a book about one American's experience in China during the War of Resistance:

Peck is deeply critical of the American government's decision to bind themselves hand and foot to whatever Chiang Kai-shek's government wanted to do, and to our general and continuing ignorance about China. He is a bit more charitable about American attempts to explain themselves to the Chinese.

He also spends a lot of time talking about what might be called the American Green Zone in China, which he is much less impressed with, either in its old missionary form or its new military form.

Peck's analysis of the geopolitical situation in China is interesting, even if I don't always agree with it. What is striking me most at present, however, are his accounts of ordinary Americans encountering "China".

Robert A. Kapp wrote the forward for the reissue, and posted excerpt of it on The China Beat.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:05 PM | Permalink

Maureen Fan at the Washington Post writes about one solution to the college graduate employment problem:

Chinese officials, spurred by the global financial crisis that has slowed economic growth and nervous about the prospects of more than 1.5 million unemployed college graduates, have stepped up spending and bolstered programs to help graduates get jobs, including a two-year-old plan to send people like Liu to work as rural village officials.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:48 AM | Permalink

Samuel Y. Liang writes for the China Beat about "the building where an early meeting of the Communist Party was held in 1921, which stands near the recently built shopping and entertainment district known as Xintiandi":

Seeking to recreate the original form of the Congress venue, the restoration project in fact produced a monument free from any traces of the lively lilong neighborhood of mixed functions and inclusive spaces. It was a purification process against the locale's combined commercial and residential contents. The result was a uniform façade and dead (or monumental) space rather than the original unassuming neighborhood where the secret meeting took place.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:22 AM | Permalink

The New York Times reports on plans by Hong Kong-based Media Chinese International Limited to halt publication of the New York edition of Ming Pao:

According to several current and former Ming Pao staff members, the paper has always struggled to find a niche for itself in the rough-and-tumble market of Chinese-language dailies.

Ming Pao was founded in 1997 as an offshoot of a well-respected daily in Hong Kong that also publishes iterations in San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver. It has tried to cast itself as the most intellectual of the four Chinese-language dailies in New York, mirroring the reputation of the Hong Kong paper. But it has not been able to cut deeply enough into their market share, industry experts say.

The company will continue to publish the MP (NY) Free Daily, a six-day-a-week free newspaper launched more than a year ago that takes most of its content from the Ming Pao.

See also: Newspaper War, Waged a Character at a Time, a look at New York's four Chinese dailies in 2003:

Just as in any good newspaper war, each of the Chinese newspapers is dismissed by the others. The World Journal is called an apologist for Taiwan, The China Press a mouthpiece for mainland China, Sing Tao Daily a tabloid-like scandal sheet, and Ming Pao a small nonthreat.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Brendan O'Kane picks apart the a recent New York Times article on Chinese hip-hop.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:41 AM | Permalink

Rather than agonize about ways to get the Chinese government to enforce Western copyrights, China should really be considered a test lab for new media models. The West can learn a great deal from the way the Chinese media players make money.

People these days increasingly seem to want to actually be in the movies themselves, which is really what online role playing games are all about...The way forward once again is to recreate the live-movie experience but in cyberspace -- something the counterfeiters cannot replicate.

The Hollywood Reporter reports on analyst Jeffrey Lindsay's recommendations on how the US movie industry can combat the effects of piracy in China.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:29 AM | Permalink

China Daily has screen shots of the Gala debut of a model of Tiangong I, a "space laboratory module," to be launched in 2010 or 2011, that will form the basis of a space station.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:11 PM | Permalink

The Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala, a grass-roots competitor to CCTV's annual event, was only carried by the Macao Asia Satellite TV station and website, making it unwatchable by the vast majority of Chinese viewers, Xinhua reports:

Most families in the country cannot get satellite TV channels, and the MASTV website page could not be opened from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., when the show was on.

Lao Meng told Xinhua he did not know why, "maybe too many people were logging on to the website."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:34 AM | Permalink

Should carbon credits be available to trade from a dam that would have been built anyway? The AP reports on the case of the Xiaoxi Dam, near Changsha.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:27 AM | Permalink

Victor Shih explains why the children of former Chinese leaders may be offering their New Year's greetings to the public:

Now all of these ties are bandied about casually and endorsed officially in the press as "red descendants." Even Bo Xicheng, Bo Xilai's elusive brother, makes an appearance. Look, this looks suspiciously like the princelings' play at building up more legitimacy for themselves in preparation of Xi Jinping's takeover.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:21 AM | Permalink