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More than a decade on, Wang Xiaobo still manages to irritate China's nationalist-leaning pundits. In Unhappy China, Wang Xiaodong lets fly at what he identifies as "Wang Xiaobo worship," but his criticisms are actually aimed at the author himself. Transliterationisms translates this short, angry essay.
From China Daily:
China will introduce specialized training courses for about 140,000 prosecutors nationwide in a bid to "strengthen their supervisory skills as well as their ability to handle cases", the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said Monday.
The move is aimed at "plugging any inadequacies that prosecutors may face in their comprehensive and specialization duties", the SPP guidelines on procuratorial education and training up to 2012, released Monday, said.
"There is still some way to go for strict, fair and civilized legal enforcement," it said.
ESWN points to an interesting cartoon from the Southern Metropolis Daily based on Wen Jiabao's quote that officials should declare how their wealth is spent. Seagull Reference also posted about this.
Barbara Demick reports for the Los Angeles Times: Kashgar has two time zones.
"So I say to the Chinese guy, come at 4 o'clock, and to the Uighur guy, come at 2 o'clock, and then everybody will be there the same time. No problem."
Veteran China reporter for The Guardian John Gittings takes a look at recent events and makes some predictions, at The Guardian's Comment is Free.
New Graphic magazine talks to Zhang Facai, whose blog is a collection of visual puns, dirty jokes, and clever fake advertisements that push the boundaries of political and social sensitivity.
Chow Yun-Fat will star in a new biography of the sage. The question on everyone's mind is: Did Confucius know kung-fu?
An excerpt of Zachary Mexico's China Underground. The author writes, "I wanted to read about the crazy people I'd met in China and the even crazier people they'd introduced me to. I wanted to read about the streets that hum with the energy of constant change, and how that change affects the young Chinese of my generation."
Dylan, who has been reading through discussions on the Utopia BBS, translates a dialogue between Liu Guoguang, a special advisor to CASS, and Yang Chengxun, a professor of finance and former vice-director of Henan's provincial academy of social science:
What's been the result of neo-liberal policies globally? NYU's William K. Tabb summarized it nicely: "The first thing to recognize is that neo-liberalism is widely understood, even by many mainstream economists and policy wonks, to have failed in terms of its announced goals. It has not brought more rapid economic growth, reduced poverty, or made economies more stable. In fact, over the years of neoliberal hegemony, growth has slowed, poverty has increased, and economic and financial crises have been epidemic."
Now, the flames of the global financial crisis have burned the West, and the rest of the world will suffer in its wake.
Part 2 is here.
Western media such as the VOA, The Guardian and The Financial Times have all reported on a Chinese spy ring that is stealing documents from government all over the world. From The Financial Times:
University of Toronto experts found 1,295 infected computers around the world and observed the operation stealing documents and watching and listening to users through webcams and microphones.
Oak Pacific, an Internet company that produces the horror of Mop.com, is now claiming that their new social networking site is leaping ahead. Mobinode.com reports:
Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, the owner of Xiaonei which is the leading SNS and the most successful Facebook clone in China said in the iResearch VIP dinner, its Kaixin.com is now bigger than the super hot Kaixin001.com. I am not sure what metric Joe is referring to, but at least Alexa says it is not true.
Oak Pacific, with no apparent shame, launched their new site at Kaixin.com specifically to lure search traffic away from the more established Kaixin001.com.
Furthermore, Alexa rankings are considered easily gamed by Chinese Internet companies: if Kaixin.com does not even do well on Alexa, you can be fairly sure that Mr Chen's statements should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
This week, Sinosplice profiles five Chinese to English translators now working in China today. How do translators get started, and how have new technologies changed how the work is done?
Brendan O'Kane is the subject of the first interview. He talks about his background in Chinese language, how he started out, and what challenges he faces today.
From Xinhua:
China's Health Minister Chen Zhu urged grassroots level medical staff Saturday to fan out across the countryside to detect and prevent cases of hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD), which has killed at least 19 children this year...
...The ministry said 41,846 cases of HFMD had been detected by March 27 in 30 provinces and regions, except Tibet. Most cases were in rural areas.
Jason Weinberg at The Foreign Expert translates part of a New Weekly feature on rural issues over the past three decades:
In this way, the majority of today's city people have come from the countryside during the past 60 years. They majority of people in cities wearing bright clothes, their predecessors were all peasants.
The interesting thing is that most of them do not recognize or purposefully forget this ancestry. This causes people to remember the story of "changes" in the early days of liberation. What was the first problem of individualism cadres entering cities wanted to address? It was "change," country girls becoming city girls. A Passionate Life is the television version, the real life version's Shi Guanrong should have a country wife. Most cadres did not date, their parents already arranged marriage in the countryside. This country girl does not wear makeup, is not highly cultured, but can have children to honor her parents. She cannot seem like the city girl type and is easily cynical toward her impoverished marital situation.
China's Net Nanny unblocked Youtube, but is it blocked again?
From the BBC:
Chinese officials say that potentially deadly radioactive material lost in north-western Shaanxi province may have been found at a steel mill.
The Telegraph's previous Beijing correspondent answers questions about the news that plagued him (and China) last year.
A-Link Technologies, with an initial investment worth $0.5 million, will increase its output in the East Africa region:
Management predicted that a laptop, which will be christened 'A-Link' like other products assembled, will cost about $400 (Rwf 226,960). This is $216 (Rwf113,480) less than the current price.
From The Guardian in Rome:
Altogether, 28 people were found to have been sleeping under the street, or in a windowless space on the ground floor. But there was bedding for up 60 people.
Kevin Rudd in the news. From The Courier-Mail via News.com.au:
The Courier-Mail can confirm that China is a significant investor in Australian government bonds -- used by Canberra to fund billions of dollars in emergency spending.
Market insiders believe China is buying 15 to 20 per cent of the $2 billion in Treasury securities being issued every week.
This would make China the single biggest lender to Australia, although details of who owns the bonds are cloaked in secrecy.
Tim Johnson at China Rises blog also posted about Aussie prime minister Kevid Rudd's interview on Washington on the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (PBS), where he discussed China.
After the U. S. Defense Department came up with a report to suggest that China is developing arms technologies, Chris Buckley at Reuters today reports:
Hu Changming, spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense, has said his government's anger over the report could have real implications for plans to improve military contacts, which took a dive last year over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
"At present, there are still a great many obstacles to the development of ties between the two militaries that have not been overcome," Hu said in a statement issued by the official Xinhua news agency late on Thursday.
"In these circumstances, the U.S. publication of the report on Chinese military power can only add new negative factors to the restoration and development of those military ties."
Dave at the Mutant Palm looks at some reasons China can't have an Al Jazeera:
1. Size matters: Al Jazeera is based in Qatar, which is about 11,000 square kilometers (4,400 square miles). To put this in perspective, all of Beijing is 16,807 kilometers. But their primary Arabic business covers the entire Arab world. Al Jazeera offices have been closed or raided because of negative reporting in the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain. It's not beholden to the governments of 99% of its regional viewers. That's one of the reasons Al Jazeera was so successful.
2. Nobody wants to hear about Qatar
Seeking the cause of the recent block of Youtube in mainland China, an AFP reporter dug up a blog entry from October 2007 and quoted it as if it was a current posting.
Ryan at Lost Laowai explains:
Only problem is, that "Tuesday message on his website" was actually from a Thursday, not a Tuesday - oh, and October 2007, not March 2009.
From there it's turned into some 21st Century journalistic version of Chinese Whispers, with Jane Macartney of The Times scooping the exact same quote off the exact same 2007 post. And while the AFP, having seen Marc's post about their mistake, has re-issued the article with a correction announcement, several other media outlets are still running the story as-was.
More on the story at Shanghaiist, and notes on similar journalistic malfeasance at Absurdity, Allegory and China.
Beijing or Bust describes an experience looking for illegal unemployment as a foreign student in Miami.
In Bagou town (芭沟镇), Sichuan, the miners' first house was in "British style" housing...
Fauna at ChinaSMACK writes about Shaanxi monks decision to close the doors of the temple to visitors in order to protest a wall that is being built around it by the government:
In 1981, the only Buddhist finger bone relic in China was found at Famen. Recently, the monks of Famen Temple have announced that they will close their gates to visitors and worshipers to protest the local government that was building walls around the temple so they can charge people high priced tickets to visit the Famen Temple scenic area.
Not only so, the monks have also decided to physically push down the walls themselves.
The U. S. Defense Department says that China is still developing cyber and anti-satellite technologies, as well as other 'disruptive' military capabilities. From Bloomberg:
"China's ability to sustain military power at a distance remains limited, but its armed forces continue to develop and field disruptive military technologies" such as missiles that would hinder adversaries from entering a battle zone, the Defense Department said in the annual report, released yesterday.
Richard Burger at The Peking Duck blog wonders if media controls on Chinese publications such as The China Daily are loosening, from a report that he encountered when logging onto The China Daily website. Below is the story that he saw:
Inmates in China's 2,700 pretrial detention centers suffer bullying and torture at the hands of fellow prisoners and police officers, and some experts want a neutral body to take the centers out of police control to curb the abuses, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Tuesday.
The comments on his post are interesting, too.
It has been confirmed that Youtube is now blocked in China, from the Associated Press:
"We are looking into it and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible," spokesman Scott Rubin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Reuters reports that Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Qin Gang: "Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet". For more on Qin Gang's question and answer session, see the Chinese transcript.
The New York Times also reported on the block.
The Kansas Star, via McClatchy Newspapers (and The Guardian) reports that almost 300 American jobs will be lost as the U.S. government plans to switch to cheaper condoms, including some made in China:
"Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move," said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped "buy American language" in a recent appropriations bill.
Bruce Humes illustrates the edits made to Cankao Xiaoxi's translation of Issac Stone Fish's review of the new English translation of Yu Hua's Brothers.
Danwei has published a number of pieces by Bruce that look at Cankao Xiaoxi's editing decisions.
Jake Newby at Shanghaiist reports on the uncertain status of this year's MIDI music festival.
David at Silk Road International describes visiting a number of under-capacity factories over the past week:
By far the weirdest comment I heard last week was from one manager who claims that the US will soon start a war with China so that it doesn't have to pay back any of the debt that China has purchased over the last two decades. He told me wars were generally good for the economy and a war with China would be doubly good (for the US) since the US could stimulate the economy and write of billions of dollars in debt at the same time. He was serious about it too.
From The Economist, a report about Dongtan, a planned eco-city near Shanghai, designed by Arup and then "quietly dropped":
The reason lies not in the spluttering global economy but in the political corridors of Shanghai, the powerful city to which Chongming island belongs. A prime mover behind Dongtan was a former Shanghai Communist Party chief, Chen Liangyu.
The International Herald Tribune has an article by David Barboza about the artist's recent online publication of children who'd died in the earthquake:
"I'm really tired of this bull," Mr. Ai said in a telephone interview Thursday from Beijing, where he runs a large studio. "I went there and I saw the school building collapsed, and next to it is a building that is fine."
Adam Schokora at 56minus1 provides links to Parkour forums throughout China as well as a whole pile of videos featuring free-running and Parkour stunts.
From AP / Wall Street Journal:
The mastermind behind Beijing's biggest pyramid scheme to date was sentenced to 15 years in prison Monday for bilking thousands of investors out of 1.68 billion yuan ($246 million), state media said.
Zhao Pengyun was sentenced by Beijing's No. 2 Intermediate Court and ordered to pay 300 million yuan in fines, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Reuters reports:
South Africa has barred Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama from entering the country to take part in a peace conference, media reports and a lobby group said on Sunday.
uln at Chinayouren reviews Zachary Mexico's China Underground.
Over the weekend I spoke with a few friends about the book and I could feel some resistance. Some China hands clearly disapproved of the cover's pop approach to a grave subject like the Middle Kingdom - a friend of mine from New York even warned me against what looked like "an East Village poser". All this probably explains why the few who had actually read the book were so excited about it: they weren't expecting it to be readable in the first place.
See also: Jeff Wasserstrom's review at The China Beat: A Book I Didn't Want to Like (But Did)
From The Times:
Nearly 100 monks have been detained in northwestern China after an angry crowd attacked a police station following the disappearance of a fellow lama, marking the first major outburst of Tibetan unrest since last year.
At the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Ford looks at the discussion about plagiarism and academic fraud that is taking place in the wake of the He Haibo scandal, in which a pharmacology professor admitted to copying and faking data in research papers.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education published a circular last week urging universities to crack down on academic misconduct and to report all the cases they uncover. The ministry recommended punishments ranging from warnings to legal action, and suggested that research funds should be withdrawn from plagiarists and academic awards revoked....
Fang [Shimin] is dubious about the value of such efforts. The Ministry of Science and Technology set up an Office of Scientific Research Integrity two years ago, he points out, but it has not handled a single case.
Chinese media reports that Wolfgang Kubin, the Sinologist everyone loves to hate, absolutely loves thriller writer Cai Jun, who coincidentally has a new book out.
Professor Kubin says he hasn't read Cai's books. Could this be a hoax set up by his publisher?
A real estate company explains the deep reasons behind its decision to change its English name from Junyao to Juneyao.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Korean businesses are closing in Beijing and Shanghai, and Korean nationals are leaving the country. CBNweekly looks at what they've left behind.
C. Custer at ChinaGeeks discusses some of the responses Internet commenters have had to a cartoon poking fun at the "ascent of man" in different countries.
Hecaitou, one of the bloggers who reposted the cartoon, responds.
From Xinhua:
North China's Hebei Province, the major water supplier to Beijing, has overexploited its groundwater which caused subsidence and formed "20 hopper areas" of more than 40,000 square km, said a local water conservancy official on Saturday.
From the JLM Pacific Epoch blog:
But when and how did 8 percent become sacrosanct?
In all questions of faith, look first to one's creator. In this case, that means Deng Xiaoping. At the 12th Party Congress in September 1982, Deng determined that the national economic goal would be to quadruple the annual industrial and agricultural output of the entire country by the end of the century.
At the China Daily, Raymond Zhou looks at a letter about college romance that has sparked considerable controversy online:
Now, let me try to get into the mind of the letter writer. He obviously can't see what is going on behind closed doors, but he notices public display of affection, like kissing and hugging and that upsets him because it helps him visualize what is happening out of sight. If the students are discreet and enter the rooms separately - they've watched enough spy thrillers to know how to avoid undesirable attention - few will notice them.
At Global Voices Advocacy, Oiwan Lam notes that "Grass Mud Horse" (草泥马) has been filtered from Yahoo.cn and Google.cn searches. A Baidu search now returns just 9,080 results, along with a note explaining that additional results were filtered for violating relevant laws and regulations.
This is probably a response to a notice that started circulating a few days ago instructing forum moderators not to promote conversation on the topic.
From The China Daily:
The Chinese military is ready to call an end to the standoff with the United States in the South China Sea after diplomatic efforts have reduced tensions, defense sources said on condition of anonymity.
Xinhua has not issued a similar report.
At China Dialogue, Ma Jun writes about uneven enforcement of pollution laws:
The Chinese central government is aware of the imbalance regarding economic development and environmental protection. The "scientific view of development" was developed in order to achieve balanced and sustainable growth. "It is better to be poisoned than poor" does not fit with the scientific view of development.
Forbes ranks the clout of China's celebrities:
The list, compiled by Forbes China, surveys the popularity and income of leaders in movies, sports, media and music in mainland China. Celebrities from Hong Kong and Taiwan, like Jackie Chan and Jay Zhou, aren't included. Although the list reflects the clout of China's top celebrities at home, the country's top stars are increasingly finding success abroad.
via Shanghaiist.
Tim Hathaway translates Guo Guangdong's op-ed from this week's Southern Weekly:
A reporter from New Express revealed that employees gave a copy of a list of interview questions to reporters whom they were familiar with before the open question portion of the press conference with the Yunnan delegation on March 7. They also reminded reporters to ask the questions in the order they were given. During the 40 minute press conference, there was not one question regarding the "elude the cat" case, which was the most pressing issue for Yunnan at the moment. The questions merely touched on topics such as cooperation with ASEAN, education reform, and the environment, and those who answered were all well prepared. They even buried their faces in their notes as they read, making it very clear that each question and answer had been scripted.
David Wolf "explore[s] (with the full benefit of hindsight) why this deal may have been killed, in the fervent hope we can learn something at Coke's expense."
The story of a young Tibetan mastiff who forms a rock band in an underground canine empire outside of Beijing and does battle against the evil agents of hip-hop.
Bloomberg reports on the Ministry of Commerce decision:
"After the merger, Coca-Cola may use its dominant position" to limit competition in China's juice market, the agency said in a statement on its Web site today. The purchase would have been the biggest foreign takeover of a Chinese company.
The decision will cost Coca-Cola, the world's biggest soft- drinks maker, the opportunity to boost its share of China's juice market to more than 20 percent. China's fruit- and vegetable-juice sales may rise 20 percent to 97.1 billion yuan ($14 billion) this year, almost double the rate for carbonated drinks, according to Euromonitor International.
Investigative journalist Wang Keqin attempts to visit the family of imprisoned rights activist Chen Guangcheng. ESWN translates.
The Financial Times reports that Coca-Cola may abandon its bid to takeover the Huiyuan Juice company:
Beijing regulators have been examining Coca-Cola's proposed $2.4bn takeover of China Huiyuan Juice, China's leading juice company, since the deal was announced in September.
According to people familiar with the matter, the regulators recently told the US company that approval depended on a number of conditions and signalled that one of these could force Coca-Cola to give up the China Huiyuan Juice brand after the acquisition....The demand has been regarded by some as a potential deal breaker because Coke offered to pay a huge premium partly on the basis of Huiyuan's strong brand image.
See also: Bloomberg's report; earlier in the week Reuters reported that Coke was "expected to get OK for China Huiyuan deal."
sinopop reviews China: Museums by Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande and Antony White:
As a Beijing resident and museum fan, I recommend "China: Museums" for its authors' thorough background research, factually abundant descriptions that truly guide, instead of merely editorializing, us across this often rough landscape. Using minimum snark, readers are brought a little closer to informed cultural tourism in China, even if you don't plan on being in Lushan, or Zigong anytime soon, it is rewarding to know that one can visit Pearl S. Buck's villa, or that Zigong was a center of salt production whose technology affected the entire global economy, or that in the flooded Three Gorges Dam valley, an underwater museum is being built that preserves rock carvings dating to the Tang Dynasty... it stirs the arm-chair traveler in anyone to get a ticket.
More boom boom boosting in The China Daily:
Hoping to avoid the "skyscraper curse," China's cities continue to reach for the sky.
While most of the world's major construction projects have been put on hold, new skyscrapers are under construction in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and several smaller cities, defying the global economic slowdown.
From Xinhua:
Fire-fighters had extinguished a fire in the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing by noon Monday.
Thick smoke and flames in a two-story, sheet-metal dormitory building that accommodated security guards, students and some staff were reported to the police at 10:10 a.m.
More than 140 fire-fighters with 24 fire appliances managed to extinguish the fire after two hours...
...Police are investigating into cause of the fire. Their findings are expected to come out in about three days...
The stimulated China Daily:
China's Ministry of Railways signed a deal with state-owned vehicle producer CNR Corporation Limited here Monday to purchase 100 high-speed CRH trains for 39.2 billion yuan (US$5.74 billion)...
...With a designed speed of 350km/h, the new CRH trains will travel between Beijing and Shanghai in 2011...
..."The contract does not include any foreign parties, as Chinese companies possess core technologies for the high-speed trains..." said Zhang Shuguang, director of the transport department under the Ministry of Railways.
From the Far West China blog:
Last Friday officials from various government bureaus in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi organized a campaign to destroy fake and low-quality products. I gotta give them some credit, though, cause they didn't just destroy the goods, they had some fun doing it...I'm talking about gasoline, flame throwers, and steamrollers here! Not a bad way to celebrate World Consumer Rights Day last March 15th.
Emma Graham-Harrison of Reuters gets to write a tabloid journalist's dream opening:
Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death.
From The Los Angeles Times:
Iran announced a $3.2-billion natural gas deal with China on Saturday, a move that underscored the difficulty of using economic sanctions to pressure Tehran to bow to Washington's demands on its nuclear program.
USA Today reviews Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World's Biggest Online Marketplace by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery:
It is difficult to discern from the book whether Ma cooperated with the co-authors a little bit, a great deal or somewhere in between. At times, Shiying and Avery practice hagiography. At other times, they seem mildly critical of Ma. The phrasing of the book, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, adds to the lack of clarity about the authors' relationships to Ma, because the English constructions range from stilted to bizarre.
Still, for readers willing to battle through the book's shortcomings, Ma's rise is worth digesting.
David Barboza at the New York Times profiles CCTV financial journalist Rui Chenggang:
But Mr. Rui,....who drives a Jaguar to work and wears Zegna suits, says his goals reach beyond media stardom. He wants to use his celebrity to build bridges with the West and help change world opinion about China, which he says suffers because of biased foreign media coverage and the country's poor training in communication.
"China has a really bad image problem," Mr. Rui says after a broadcast one evening, while lounging at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. "I'm gathering a group of people and we hope to do something about that."
Reflecting on the aftermath of the TVCC fire, Alex Pasternack writes for Tree Hugger about Rem Koolhaas's urban vision and the future of Chinese cities:
Owing to its sheer size and its owner, China's TV propaganda maker, the CCTV headquarters is an easy target in discussions about the health of Beijing's development. But this building is only one of thousands rising across China that turn their backs on good ideas like the hutong in favor of sensational steel and glass. No matter how cool object buildings can be, their relevance to the city at large in China is dubious at best. Whether the CCTV building will be able to make good on its commitment to openness, to public space, to an improvement of the urban fabric around it, will be determined when it opens late this year.
Via Absurdity, Allegory and China: Wreckage
other lisa at the Paper Tiger Tail blog writes about a train journey to Xinjiang, and compares it to one she took decades ago.
Baumkuchen at the Chaile blog translates a roundup from the Guangzhou Daily about some odd proposals to come out of this year's legislative sessions.
See also Chinayouren on NPC and the internet Thunders: Browsing Tour.
After Antiwave: 51minus1 introduces some podcast resources in China.
Josh at Cup of Cha presents some strategies that the Chinese government could have taken to deal with Oasis, rather than simply denying them a performance permit:
1. Quietly pressure the promoters to price the tickets low so that the average Chinese Oasis fan could attend, and then buy most of the tickets, forcing them to play in front of empty stadiums.
2. Allow them to come to China, but only grant them visas through CITS and them force them to spend an hour in a ceramics factory while local hawkers try to sell them crap every time they go to a restaurant, hotel or stadium.
Marx's magnum opus is being adapted using elements of manga, Broadway musicals, and Las Vegas stage shows. But don't worry: the creators have expert consultants on hand to ensure the project stays true to Marx's theories.
From Premier Wen Jiabao's annual press conference this morning, the Wall Street Journal reports:
The generally mild-mannered Mr. Wen [...] spoke in an unusually forceful tone [...]
He said China hasn't pushed down the value of the yuan, and repeated the government's commitment to currency stability "at a reasonable and balanced level." The yuan has hovered around 6.84 to the dollar since July 2008. Mr. Wen said China alone would decide where it goes from there. "No country can pressure us to appreciate or depreciate" the currency, he said.
Brian Handwerk reports for National Geographic:
The new dates would also place Peking man in a more hospitable, cooler time period in China's Zhoukoudian region, which today is the world's foremost source of Homo erectus fossils.
Obtained by measuring the decay of isotopes in buried quartz grains, the data suggest Peking man lived at Zhoukoudian about 750,000 years ago--200,000 years earlier than prior estimates, according to the study, led by Guanjun Shen of China's Nanjing Normal University.
See also the LiveScience story by Andrea Thompson.
China Geeks translates an essay by Zhang Wen:
In the normal course of domestic reporting, the domestic media has a natural superiority in terms of "firsthand" coverage, but when a lot of important/significant things occur suddenly we can't even report "secondhand", and can only choose silence when faced with prohibitions [on reporting]. We watch with open eyes as foreign media struggles to be the first to report, and we cannot even correct the inaccuracies in their reports.
In the course of reporting international events, our media is even more powerless to compete with the international media...
The Economic Observer has an interactive map showing how NPC delegates "break down along gender, ethnic, education level, and party lines."
Narrated by Quentin Somerville, a BBC video about high medical fees and peasants' inability to cope, as well as why they'll find it hard to return to the land.
Asia Environment Correspondent for The Guardian Jon Watts reports:
If the plan is completed as scheduled in 2050, trees will cover over 400m hectares or 42% of China's landmass, creating arguably the biggest man-made carbon sponge on the planet. China overtook the US as the largest carbon emitter in 2007, although its greenhouse gas emissions per capita are still much lower.
But the mind-boggling statistics mask a calamitous decline of China's forest quality, diminishing biodiversity and extra pressure on woodland overseas to satisfy an appetite for timber that has - until the economic crisis - grown enormously in the past 10 years.
With an accompanying video on The Guardian by Chen Shi.
From City Weekend blog:
When news came that a large new logistics facility was to be built partially occupying land of Beijing's Xiaozhuang village, word of Xinan Logistics Company's reimbursement policy for trees and buildings on claimed land spread quickly through the village.
AOL is closing its R&D base in China, its second failed attempt to expand on the Chinese mainland after an ill-fated joint venture with Lenovo folded in 2004. Owen Fletcher reports for IDG news
The Beijing office, which opened in 2007 and has 56 staff, will be shut down by midyear given poor economic circumstances and reorganization plans, an AOL spokeswoman in the U.S. said via e-mail.
But AOL's Web portal for mainland China, launched last year, will continue to operate from the company's Hong Kong regional base, the spokeswoman said. So will AOL sites that are separate from the portal, such as the Chinese version of technology blog engadget.com. AOL also launched Web portals in Taiwan and Hong Kong last year, both of which will keep going.
From Xinhua, which announces today the end of the Two Sessions (两会), the NPC and CPPCC, with some details about the overall proposals made, and not much else. No mention that news coverage will return to normal.
Peter Neville-Hadley writes in the Wall Street Journal about the historical complexities behind the standard narrative of the theft of the bronze animal heads from the torched Old Summer Palace:
The official Chinese view loves to quote the French literary giant Victor Hugo, as if a foreign voice carries more weight than a Chinese one. In a letter to a military man who had enquired about his opinion, Hugo rightly condemns the destruction of the palaces. But his turgid description of the Chinese as supermen and the palace as like something from the moon reveals that he was suffering from a bad case of Orientalism. He had never visited China.
Peter Neville-Hadley wrote about the bronze heads in a controversial article for City Weekend magazine. He tells some of the story here.
The New Dominion covers some of the sunny news that has come out about Xinjiang:
And so, in sum, Xinjiang's a pretty nice place, right? Days after Nur Bekri invokes the specter of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism as bearing down indomitably on Xinjiang's stability, state media mobilizes to emphasize for English language speakers how open religious life is and how content Muslims in Xinjiang are. To be completely fair, the picture of Xinjiang painted on March 10th wasn't entirely flowers and kittens, as part of this China Daily article on increased measures against drug trafficking admitted candidly that Xinjiang is facing the worst drug and HIV situations within China. Nonetheless, the rapid succession of "happy Muslim articles" that occurred yesterday leads me to suspect that the state media wasn't quite prepared for the degree that Bekri's foreboding would be covered internationally.
From James Fallows' Atlantic blog, thoughts about CNN and BBC's unfettered broadcast, and about China Daily's own light touch.
China Law Blog discusses four areas where foreign businesses may encounter increasing problems as the economic situation worsens. Informative analysis, but also a good opportunity for schadenfreude:
Him: It just strikes me as ridiculous that I could have paid these people for so long and China won't protect me at all.
Me: Yeah, I think they just feel that if someone does everything illegally they cannot use the Chinese system for protection.
Him: But it was one of their own people who tricked me.
Me: Yeah, but I think the government would probably say that you should not have relied on him and that you should have been there legally,
A Caijing reporter writes about a conversation with an official who suggested that full financial disclosure should apply to everyone, not just people in power. Translated by Crane Wang.
Danwei interviews Sky Canaves, a Wall Street Journal reporter stationed in Hong Kong and one of the writers behind the paper's China Journal blog.
Nanyang Daily meets subscription quotas by pressuring teachers to buy copies they don't need. China Newsweek reports.
From the Time China blog, Simon Elegant posts the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China's statement about the harassment of China journalists on the job around Tibet.
Can you read this character? Suining County, Jiangsu Province, is afraid that potential investors can't, so the government has bought ads in newspapers across the country to educate the public.
The Economist reports that Cai Mingchao, the hero who won the auction for two bronzes looted from the Old Summer Palace and later refused to pay for them, may have inadvertently blocked other bidders from buying them and returning them to China:
Now The Economist has discovered that a London-based Chinese businessman who bid up to €12m ($15.1m) on both pieces was attempting to buy one of them as a gift for China. With Mr Cai's pirate move, however, the controversy has escalated and the bronzes have become too hot to touch.
The report made the Chinese online media today and Beijing papers this afternoon.
From The New York Times, an assessment of China's anniversaries, especially yesterday's, which is the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising in 1959. The article quotes experts on dates' significance to Chinese people:
While the government more or less ignores the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, its rubber-stamp Tibetan Parliament this year declared March 28 to be Serfs Emancipation Day, a celebration of Tibet's liberation from the Dalai Lama's control.
In that and other respects, Professor Perry wrote, the government's elevation of anniversaries into politically freighted events runs the risk of backfiring. The bigger the celebration, or the more galling to dissidents, the greater the likelihood of a reaction.
For more on what insiders are saying about Tibet and this anniversary, see The Guardian's article Explosives and anger on eve of 50th anniversary of Dalai Lama's exile which quotes Prof Robert Barnett of Columbia University, and a post by Granite Studio who was in Zhongdian, Yunnan, last week.
And of course, here's Xinhua's take.
Fauna from ChinaSMACK translates a post on the Mop forum about an encounter between a Chinese girl and some French people － which diverges into the realm of the bronze heads, Victor Hugo, and Sarkozy in the comments. The conversation itself is interesting, too.
The debate over simplified vs. traditional characters goes to the CPPCC. Also, the Ministry of Education releases a new character categorization standard and mulls future standards for character composition and mnemonic devices.
Black and White Cat translates a Xinhua article on the "double blessing" of International Women's Day and election day in the DPRK:
Malcolm Moore writes at his Telegraph blog about the opening of the store in Shanghai:
The women we spoke to were hugely excited about the arrival of Barbie as a high-fashion brand. "This is going to be the next big thing in Shanghai," said 24-year-old Zhu Jiayin, who had just bought a 140 yuan (Pounds14) stick of Barbie eyeliner.
The Los Angeles Times also had their own take on the tattooed (Barbie) lady.
Fang Kecheng looks back at six years of People's Daily front pages for opening day of the NPC session. Surprise, surprise: little variation at all.
The Associated Press reports on the three canals that will bring water to Beijing and other parched cities in the north:
For many in Zhangyigang, a village of 942 people in brick and mud houses in central China, it will be their second uprooting. They moved to higher ground in the late 1950s and 1960s when a dam was built on the Han River to create the Danjiangkou reservoir, submerging homes and temples. Now their next stop is to be Dengzhou, a busy market city 30 miles to the east, as the dam is raised.
Related: A few weeks ago, Reuters had a series of articles on the South-to-North Water Transfer Project.
At Global Voices Online, Bob Chen translates some blog posts by "Fat Xing," whose life resembles that of Lai Changxing, the Fujian businessman who fled to Canada after being hit with smuggling charges.
The Financial Times does a series of videos on petitioners, as well as an accompanying article.
China Sports Review reports that China Soccer has announced that March 10 will be its last issue before a "temporary" halt in publishing.
ESWN translates a Southern Metropolis Weekly article that describes how the editors of online forums are able to rocket a post to fame, or bury it in the archives pages.
Liuzhou Laowai describes how people observe March 8, Women's Day:
Yesterday, somewhat bizarrely, I was invited to join one such group to help them celebrate. I didn't know anyone there and I aint a woman, but hey... The workmates, male and female, had gathered together on a basketball court next to their housing blocks, and were playing games. Real home made entertainment. On a rare lovely March day.
With photos!
James Fallows finds that Postcards from Tomorrow Square, named after a building in Shanghai, is sensitive this year due to the title's resonance with another square.
uln at Chinayouren moves beyond Chinglish signs to discuss the peculiarities of Chinese-language public signage.
Excerpt of Linda Jaivin's new historical novel about George "Chinese" Morrison and his romance with Mae Perkins.
The New Yorker's Evan Osnos answers Danwei's questions about journalism, writing from China, and his feelings concerning this year's anniversaries.
Bao Tong addresses a letter to the NPC in which he makes three suggestions: to work to channel funds to rural residents, to disclose the details of the stimulus plan, and to repeal the Resolution on 1989. (Translated by AsiaNews.)
The China Beat reposts a short story by Jonathan Tel from the forthcoming The Beijing of Possibilities:
It's been a while since the Monkey King set out on his Journey to the West. With his Fiery-Gazing Golden-Eyes he infallibly recognized Evil, and vowed to combat it in every form. He changed shape at will and leaped from cloud to cloud. It was in the spring of 2008 that the Gorillagram appeared in mainland China. (One of those fads, we believe, that sneaked in from America or Europe.) A Taiwanese-owned company introduced the concept; they were in the business of couriering documents around Beijing, and they diversified, or call it a promotional gimmick.
From The Guardian:
Prime minister Wen Jiabao's announcement of an extra 121 billion yuan (£13bn) to boost farm yields and raise rural incomes was a central part of his annual budget speech at the Great Hall of the People...
The short-term aim is to ease the impact of the economic crisis on rural dwellers, who account for more than half of the 1.3bn population. This group is considered a potential source of social instability because the average rural income is just a third that of the city.
March 5 is Lei Feng Day! A legislator wants to apply for Intangible Cultural Heritage status for the Lei Feng Spirit. We wonder what the Fengster would think of that?
Tania Branigan summarizes for The Guardian's China bureau what the figures given by Li Zhaoxing on planned military spending really mean:
A Japanese foreign ministry deputy spokesman, Takeshi Akamatsu, said there were "untransparent points" in the defence budget. Last year a Pentagon report suggested China's true budget was two to three times the official figure.
At China Elections & Governance, Heather Saul translates Xiao Shu's reaction to Premier Wen Jiabao's online chat:
There is obviously no need for everyone to become a policeman, but rather for people to adopt common sense when it comes to safety. Likewise, since we have the National People's Congress and People's representatives, there is no harm in letting our representatives pose questions to the Premier. Of course, there must be preparations and this means People's representatives that are fully competent and committed. This in turn requires that the People's representatives follow the necessary principle of protecting popular choice and accepting public oversight. Also, they must be replaceable by the people at any time, as [Marx] said. Only in this way can one faithfully entrust responsibility to the People's representatives so that they may carry out their duties effectively.
Leigh at China Crossroads introduces and translates an interview with professor Zhao Jun about sex workers in China:
China Newsweek: Why are xiaojies more likely to become the target group of violence and crimes?
Zhao Jun: First of all, women are physically disadvantaged and are less capable of protecting themselves; secondly, their nature of work makes them more easily approachable while their customer group is highly mobile and unspecific; thirdly, sex workers or their bosses, compared to common migrant workers, earn more financial resources; fourthly, sex workers never work in groups; fifthly, they won't call the police after being assaulted.
The Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog describes some of the more interesting proposals that CPPCC and NPC representatives have come up with for this year's sessions:
Moving a China step closer to France, CPPCC delegate Zhang Xiaomei would like to see a four and a half day work week to improve efficiency on the job and encourage more consumption by giving people more free time to shop.
Danwei looked at interesting proposals from Beijing's municipal 2009 sessions, and the national sessions in 2005 and 2006.
An article from Slate Magazine about China's philatelists.
For The New York Times, Jonathan Ansfield reports on a letter sent to the top leadership from "a cluster of liberal Communist Party elders" concerning the perhaps sketchy stimulus package:
"We very much endorse the central authorities' investment of 4 trillion renminbi" -- $584 billion -- "to drive the economy," they explained in the letter, dated Jan. 20, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
"At the same time, we are extremely worried that the privileged and the corrupt will seize this opportunity to fatten themselves, damage the relationship between the party and the people, and intensify social conflict."
From Xinhua via China.org:
Xu Ximei, a resident of the Mazhan Village in the Dengfang Township of Nanxiong City, committed the killings with a kitchen knife between 1:45 p.m. and 1:55 p.m. at the village's stackyard, at the gate of the village primary school and inside the school, respectively, a police spokesman said, citing witnesses.
From the Silk Road International blog:
I've seen fights, I've seen people get robbed and beaten, I've seen a woman and child get run over by large dump trucks, I've even seen a dead body on the street (at least I think it was dead), I've had family tell me about kidnappings they've seen, I've had family robbed at knife point and I've been pick-pocketed numerous times myself.
that's Shanghai's interview with Noel and Liam Gallagher of Brit rock band Oasis, whose April performances in Beijing and Shanghai have just been canceled.
Sexy Beijing's blog posts some photos of a quick demolition project going on in Dongcheng District, Beijing. Part of the economic stimulus plan?
The Economic Observer Online publishes an article by Wei Liping about "the commander of migrant workers":
At present, Zhang said he preferred to recruit female workers around aged 18 and 19, as they were more popular among employers.
At Shanghaiist, Ada Fredelius reviews Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Susan Jane Gilman's memoir of a 1986 trip to China.
djod.co.uk notices that the BBC's report on the cancelled Oasis concert contains the lines
Last year, Icelandic star Bjork shouted "Free Tıbet!" after a song about independence performed during a Shanghai concert, which went unreported in the state-controlled Chinese media.
when in fact the state-controlled Chinese media was all over the story.
Update: It's been changed.
A man named Zhao C agrees to change his name after 22 years of use when the PSB complains that the letter "C" won't work in their new computer system.
Jonathan Watts writes for The Guardian's environment section about Xinjiang's melting glacier, together with video:
The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet's highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.
Michael Rank writes about a strange animal attack in Beigou Village. People suspect a leopard as the culprit.
From the China Daily, in the wake of the successful lunar probe:
China's future space station will comprise a core module, two experimental modules, a manned spaceship and a cargo spaceship, a top scientist said Monday.
Two journalists with the Economic Information Daily have been targeted by the "human flesh search engine," a crowd-sourced technique that Chinese netizens use to dig up enough personal information to locate someone offline.
Xujun Eberlein translates an essay by sociology professor Sun Liping which argues that China is threatened by societal breakdown more than social unrest:
Crying over Shenyang's big fire, people felt "our own" buildings had burned. In the CCTV big fire, some said, even if tens of billions of yuan were not burned, they would be eaten anyway. Here the eating and drinking of course means using public money. Others worried how much water would be used to put out the fire when there was a drought going on. Behind those talks is psychological distance, that is, those things are "theirs," not "ours." Psychological distance is reflection of structural distance.
Part 2 is here.
Peijin Chen translated an earlier essay by Sun Liping for Shanghaiist, as well as a critique of his argument by Fan Gui.
The China Media Project translates a Southern Metropolis Daily editorial that wishes to see real, tangible democracy underpinning the flashy "online democracy" represented by Premier Wen Jiabao's online Q&A and the recent Internet investigation of a prisoner's death:
Take for example the recent "hide and seek" affair. While the investigation conducted by Web users was unable to reveal the truth, we are confident that online opinion led in this case to the greater efficiency and transparency of the investigation by law enforcement. But what is regrettable is that the victories of Web users in cases like this one always stop with the particular event itself. It is always difficult to ensure that they promote institutional improvements.
Tom Spender is correspondent for The National. He writes about the town of Yiwu, which is becoming the center for Arabs in China:
"Yiwu has everything - good, medium and cheap quality," said Mr Shqerat, who travels here six times a year.
Said Mohammed, 23, from Addis Ababa, said he could make profits of about 40 per cent by finding goods in Yiwu. "Some items are twice as cheap here than places like Dubai; that's why I come."
From Financial Times, available to subscribers:
Richard Li, chairman of Hong Kong's PCCW telecoms group, and Caijing, the authoritative Chinese magazine, are planning to launch an online business information service possibly by end of this year.
The news provider, which will be in English, intends to focus on business information in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to people close to the situation. Mr Li could invest "substantial resources" in the business, they said.
Imagethief critiques the Yunnan Internet investigation PR stunt:
In fairness, everyone cherry picks media, bloggers and other influencers to engage with when possible, selecting people who are influential, supportive or, ideally, both. But if you're going to position something as an unprecedented step toward openness, you'd better make sure it isn't arranged in a way that will bite you on the ass. One of the things a few tens-of-thousands of Internet users can be really good at is ferreting out the real story behind something.
uln at Chinayouren muses on some of the points made in Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics by Huang Yasheng.
The book opens with a statement that is sure to catch the eye of many living in China: there is something wrong with Shanghai.
Yes, no less than Shanghai, the city that has been fooling us for years with its aura of dynamism and openness. Huang Yasheng arguments, with precise data in hand, that entrepreneurship has long been eliminated from the city. Shanghai's wealth is made of SOEs, FDIs and transfer of resources from other parts of China. It is in fact a city of CPC members and risk averse "iron bowls".
But will he pay? From the AFP:
Cai Mingchao, a well-known antique collector, identified himself as the mystery bidder in a statement released in Beijing by the National Treasures Fund...
"I believe that any Chinese person would stand up at this time... I am making an effort to fulfill my own responsibilities," Cai said.
"But I must stress that this money I cannot pay."
The statement did not specify whether Cai could not pay for the relics because he did not have the money, or whether his inability to pay was for other reasons...