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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.