Must-read China news by Danwei

When Pierre Fuller went to Kinkos in Beijing to photocopy some CD jacket art from a punk show, the reaction from the staff was "political"; when he tried in California, the reaction was "illegal":

The attendant lifted the thing to her face and, yes, things got uncomfortable. There was no mistaking the message on the graphic's palace backdrop to the Chairman: fanzui xiangfa, pohuai (criminals minds, destroy). And I felt a bit awkward walking in as an American with this suggestive graphic...

Thanks Paul for the tip.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 4:40 PM | Permalink

From China Daily's round-up of news from the north (China Scene: North):

Seven bar and cafe bosses from Beijing's famous Sanlitun bar street got 12 or 36 months in prison for allowing drug use on their premises.

Liu Hailiang and six other managers of the bars were found guilty of turning their bars into drug-use places for patrons, including foreigners, for about a year.

Acting on a tip, the police raided the bars where more than 2,400 grams of heroin and marijuana were seized, along with 36 drug users, including some foreigners suspected of drug trafficking and other related crimes.

The original Chinese article, from China News, ran with the headline "Seven managers sentenced after allowing Westerners to take drugs".

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 4:11 PM | Permalink

Reuters and the International Herald Tribune reports that Chery Automobile has debuted a new plug-in hybrid model, the S18, the second hybrid launched in China. From the IHT:

The state-run newspaper Shanghai Daily cited an unnamed company official as saying that Chery will first supply the vehicles to government agencies for trial use and then introduce them to the retail market within a year.

The Reuters report, Chery Auto unveils first self-made electric car, can be found here.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 3:42 PM | Permalink

Forbes discusses Baidu's woes:

Baidu is slowing down, dogged by a loss of unlicensed advertisers and China's rapid economic deceleration. Coming down from its meteoric profit growth, the Chinese search giant will now likely cast a more stringent eye on costs as it pursues global ambitions beyond traditional search, extending its purview to online gaming and shopping.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:09 PM | Permalink

John Chan at the Fourth International's World Socialist Web Site discusses recent military and economic moves made by the Chinese government:

The state unions, which police workers on behalf of the government, once loudly proclaimed that they would enforce the new labour law. Now the unions have changed their tune. In November, Kong Xianghong, the vice chairman of the Guangdong branch of the All China Federation of Trade Unions declared: "Since most companies are having a tough time at present, we will temporarily stop collective bargaining. It will be resumed depending on the economic situation." In other words, when it is most needed, the unions have declared their willingness to abandon any legal restriction on capitalist exploitation.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:06 PM | Permalink

Southern Weekly interviews notorious fugitive Lai Changxing, who has just been granted a work permit in Canada. Dylan at the China Student Blog translates:

He can say that for his continued existance, it was hard work every step of the way. This perhaps is what his lawyer has taught him. No one suspected that Lai Changxing's could make it to this point, except for his money. But China has not been able to get past his formidable lawyer, David Mateas, known in Canadian legal circles as perhaps one of Canada's number one human rights lawyers, recently decorated by the Governor General, receiving the highest honor a Canadian resident can be granted -- the Order of Canada.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:58 AM | Permalink

From China Daily:

Seven Chinese sailors are missing after a Chinese cargo ship sank in Russian waters near Japan on Saturday, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday...

The Global Times, a Chinese language newspaper based in Beijing, said yesterday the ship was fired on by the Russian navy before it sank, citing a Russian newspaper.

The Xinhua report of the story details that it was a Sierra Leone flagged ship, and the report from Global Times (Chinese) which says that "the warship shot at least 500 rounds onto the ship and forced it to sail back toward the port in force 6 winds."

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Oiwan Lam at Global Voices Online summarizes lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan's activities over the past two days in relation to the Justice Bureau of Haidian district:

Beijing blogger-lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan has been harassed by authority due to his involvement in the call for direct election of the Beijing Lawyer Association...

According to Liu's blogpost yesterday (17 of Feb): two days ago, 16 of February, the Justice Bureau of Haidian District issued a notice to Liu's Law Firm, stating that there are "personnel who haven't required lawyer's license providing service".

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:16 PM | Permalink

The Edge of the American West, which has been running a series of posts about the Boxer Rebellion, comments on the looting of Chinese treasures by western forces, in light of the upcoming auction of two bronzes taken from the Old Summer Palace in 1860:

Interestingly, the Chinese today may be on firmer legal ground demanding the return of looted objects from 1900 than from 1859-60. There was, as far as I know, no international prohibition against looting in the earlier war, while the Hague Convention of 1899 (to which all the western powers in China were signatories) had outlawed the practice.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:02 PM | Permalink

The chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission reportedly revealed in a recent interview that the RMB may weaken against the dollar. However, that interview apparently did not actually take place. China Law Blog comments:

There are a number of very basic lessons to be learned from all this:

1. Tell the truth.
2. If you are going to report on a conversation with a Chinese government official, make sure you have permission to do so; if you do not have permission, do not make any attributions to a particular person and keep the statements at least somewhat vague.
3. If you are going to issue a story with such clear potential to move markets, make sure you have your facts straight before doing so.
4. If you are going to issue a story with so much potential to move markets and then your facts get questioned, hire a top level PR agency.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:21 AM | Permalink

On the Reuters China blog, Emma Graham-Harrison describes some encounters with Tibetan traditions.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:54 PM | Permalink

ProState in Flames, a widely-followed blogger who reposts fascinating articles, was stabbed after a February 14 book talk. Bloggers react.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:51 PM | Permalink

Under a new GAPP system for assigning book numbers, Guangdong starts the year unable to legally publish books.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:50 PM | Permalink

An interview with Telegraph journalist Malcolm Moore, who is travelling through Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 7:48 PM | Permalink

Reuters summarizes a report on ACFTU vice-chairman's Sun Chunlan's remarks during a teleconference:

Sun Chunlan, vice-chairman of the state-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions, said that police taskforces had been "rushed" to all regions to "understand the situation with regional social stability," the Beijing News paraphrased him as saying during a teleconference with officials.

Authorities needed to rigorously guard against "hostile forces within and outside China using the difficulties of some enterprises to infiltrate and bring trouble to rural migrant workers," Sun said. He did not elaborate.

Blogger Lian Yue posted a link to the Chinese-language article, pairing it with a recent report accusing major IT companies of using sweatshop labor in Dongguan (related article in English).

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:19 PM | Permalink

A prisoner dies after playing hide and seek, or "eluding the cat." ESWN translates the police explanation and the ensuing online meme.

Earlier on Danwei: Let's play hide the cat

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:26 AM | Permalink

China brings its culture to Mauritius as President Hu Jintao visits:

Janice Adelaide, 22, has been learning Chinese dance there for three years. The marketing salesperson with Emcar Co loves the art more than local dances.

"Chinese dances are more graceful, and the teachers are nice," she said.

A Chinese couple from the China National Dance Troupe has been teaching since 2005. The pair went back to China six months ago, but found they missed Mauritius.

"My wife missed the girls so we came back," Geng Jun said.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:19 PM | Permalink

From the Associated Press:

Hong Kong director Derek Yee... considered toning down the violence in "Shinjuku Incident" so it could pass censorship in China, but decided not to because he thought it would hurt the integrity of the movie...

"We tried to cut the violent scenes to meet the requirements of the Chinese market, but producers I invited to watch that version thought it was incomplete," he said.

Yee said Chan, who invested in the movie, agreed with his decision.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 6:15 PM | Permalink

Michael Rank writes for The Guardian about the Dunhuang Project, a large computer database that collects Buddhism-related materials:

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), based at the British Library in London, is an ever-growing digital assemblage that makes it possible to study online around 160,000 images of 80,000 objects dug up in the deserts of Chinese central Asia and now in institutions across Europe, Asia and North America.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:49 PM | Permalink

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Sino-Vietnamese War. Jeremiah Jenne at Granite Studio notes this, quoting also from The Guardian:

On this date in 1979, the PLA launched a massive invasion of Vietnam with 200,000 troops supported by artillery, and armor.* The assault was an attempt by Beijing to punish that country for toppling the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia, developing closer ties with the Soviet union, and the treatment of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 1:42 PM | Permalink

Sinosplice introduces a traditional iteration mark and an interesting contemporary variation.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:46 PM | Permalink

Xinhua reports that a Shanghai court has handed down jail terms for twenty people involved in a "1-billion U.S.-dollar online soccer gambling case":

"This is possibly the country's biggest online gambling case," said Zhang Minxian, spokesman for the court.

The gang started its business in the summer of 2006, when the soccer World Cup was held in Germany.

The trio of Qian, Zou and Liu opened accounts on several overseas gambling websites and began to develop a network of agents and gamblers.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:47 PM | Permalink

For McClatchy Newspapers, Tim Johnson writes about the status of low-level democracy in China, which can be spun in a number of different ways:

"Nowhere else have people in China tasted or tried electoral competition except at this level," said Liu Yawei, director of the China Program at the Carter Center, the nonprofit Atlanta-based group founded by former President Jimmy Carter.

Even reports of vote buying hold a measure of encouragement, Liu said.

"If you look at the ferocity of campaigning - even candidates paying 50 yuan (roughly $7) per vote - you see this intensity of participation," Liu said.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 1:10 PM | Permalink

Jeff Keller, a freelance Chinese translator living in the US, writes about working at a seasonal store selling Chinese-made products:

I also liked the store because the owner spends a lot of time getting to know his customers and what they want. At first when I was unpacking the boxes I thought "oh no, more cheap Chinese crap that nobody here really needs." Now it's true that nobody here really needs most of the stuff, but I was completely blown away when during the first week everyone kept talking about how beautiful everything was and how great the store was.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Following a book lecture at the One Way Street bookstore yesterday, Xu Lai, a journalist for The Beijing News who keeps a popular links blog under the name ProState in Flames, was stabbed by two unknown assailants. Black and White Cat translates a report from Southern Metropolis Daily:

Xu Lai's wife later told Guo that after the talk, two men forced Xu Lai into the mens toilet. She felt something was wrong so she pushed her way in to see what was going on and discovered the two men were attacking him. One was holding a vegetable knife, the other holding a dagger. One of them was preparing to hack Xu Lai's hand with the vegetable knife. Having been discovered, the two men rushed out of the shop and ran in the direction of Chang'an Avenue. They were chased, but they got away. Someone at the scene took a blurred picture of the attackers and there's a cctv camera on the street so it should be possible to obtain a true likeness of the attackers.

Xu's life is not in danger. There's a lot of discussion among netizens about whether the attack could have been motivated by something he posted on his blog.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:23 PM | Permalink

The Carter Center's China Elections website translates a complaint by a senior high student (by Zhang Rui, originally published in Southern Weekly, translation by Heather Saul):

One day I brought in a book, The Collected Stories of Guy Maupassant, and it was confiscated. The head teacher said this book was useless in improving my grades and that these kinds of books only lead students into decadence and depravation. The next day after class I was flipping through a book of short essays and it too was confiscated. The head teacher would not even let me write small articles on my own because she believes that it is a waste of time to write anything unless it is required by the literature teacher.

The head teacher called my parents and told them to come to the school. She told them that the headaches were because I read too many books.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:42 AM | Permalink