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Kai Pan at CNReviews speaks with The Guardian's Tania Branigan about blogging and on-the-ground reporting, and offers reasons why the quantity and duration of coverage of the riots in Urumqi and Lhasa differed.
From Beijing Sky Canaves travels to Tonghua in order to investigate the murder at Tonghua Iron & Steel Group. From the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Zhang and his colleagues at the plant had received bonuses of 200 yuan a month as the company returned to profitability. Mr. Zhang says he feared that Jianlong would suspend the bonus scheme if it took over the company. Even worse, he says, there were rumors that Jianlong planned to lay off all workers who had been with Tonghua for more than 25 years, replacing them with outsiders. There are few other job prospects in this remote, hilly corner of the nation, 35 miles from the North Korean border.
China Daily reports on the release of photos for suspects on the run as well as the trial details for the "small proportion" of detainees who will be tried:
Zhang said a detailed security plan -- including how to secure the court during the trials and how to escort the suspects - has been formulated.
It remains unknown whether the trials will be made public. But in previous riot cases, only designated personnel were allowed to attend the hearings, according to another source with the justice system.
The source said the Uygur language is likely to be used at the trials of Uygur suspects.
With everyone looking at the sky on the morning of July 22, the day of the solar eclipse, someone was bound to notice a UFO. Shanghai Eye is amused.
From The Wall Street Journal:
European Union trade officials approved pre-emptive penalties on imports of steel pipe from China, a precedent-setting move that suggests the trading bloc is growing more protectionist in the face of the economic downturn.
Bloomberg reports on the “memorandum of understanding” signed yesterday by the US and China:
China and the U.S. agreed to redouble efforts to craft a new climate change treaty, adding pressure on the two largest polluters to break a stalemate over how to curb global warming.
The nations made their pledge yesterday by signing a “memorandum of understanding,” which also calls for deeper cooperation on clean-energy technology. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the accord, saying it gives the countries “direction as we work together to support international climate negotiations.”
The U.S. and China are among almost 200 countries facing a December deadline to reach agreement in Copenhagen on a global accord to slow greenhouse-gas emissions and shift the world to low-carbon energy sources. Industrialized and developing nations are at odds over issues such as how much financial and technological aid emerging economies should get from developed countries.
From the Financial Times:
A week before Wednesday’s repeat parliamentary elections in Moldova, China signed an agreement to loan $1bn (£600m, €700m) to this cash-strapped, resource-poor country, nearly tripling Moldova’s external debt and issuing a direct challenge to the US and Russia for economic and political influence in this last outpost of elected Communist rule in the former Soviet Union.
The Shanghai Daily reports:
Construction of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, which will cut traveling time between two cities from 12 hours to four, will be completed by the end of next year.
It will open in 2012 and will be the most profitable railway in the world, the Ministry of Railways said yesterday, National Business Daily reported today.
Officials with the ministry said yesterday that high-speed railways are always profitable, based on the experience of some other countries.
CNN conducted a video interview with a school supervisor whose student tested positive for H1N1 in China. The group will only spend only three days out of three weeks not in quarantine. This time they're in Henan.
Zhang Hanzhi and Hong Junyan had a high-profile divorce and different ideas about how it ended. As Mao's one-time English teacher, Zhang's version has been widely publicized. After her death Hong has published a memoir called Unbearable to Recall: My Divorce with Zhang Hanzhi. The Global Times reports.
Qiushi has always been a propaganda magazine for the CPC, and now it's getting an English makeover like other State-owned media. Malcolm Moore reports for The Telegraph:
Qiushi, or Seeking Truth, was launched in 1958 as an important forum for Communist Party thought and ideology. Mao Tse-tung used the magazine in the 1960s to push the principles of the Cultural Revolution, and it was also used by Deng Xiaoping to encourage China to "open up" and reform in 1978.
China Digital Times gives a rundown to the Guo Baofeng (amoiist) postcards.
Seagull Reference writes about the incident of a woman who was knocked down by a bus about 100m from Peking Union Hospital in Beijing, and the length of time it took (over half an hour) for the ambulance to show up:
At 10:10 am July 23, 2009, 300 feet away from the Beijing Union Hospital, a young woman was stuck by a bus. It is on a crowded heavy traffic street right at downtown Beijing. Police came within minutes, but ambulance never came.
The original Youku footage is here.
Workers and police clashed at a steel mill in Jilin on Friday evening, where the threat of a mass layoff resulted in at least two deaths: Reuters has a good summary, via the New York Times:
China’s state-run press confirmed Monday that a riot broke out at a steel mill in north China Friday evening, leaving the executive of another steel mill dead.
The report, in the English-language China Daily, provided few details on the mayhem, but a report on Saturday by a Hong Kong-based group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which broke the story on the riot, said that at least 30,000 workers were involved and that about 100 people were wounded.
The riot, at the Tonghua Iron and Steel Works in Jilin Province in northern China, broke out after a visiting steel executive from a related company threatened mass layoffs at the Tonghua steel mills as part of a major restructuring of the state-owned company, China Daily said.
From Xinhua:
Chui Sai On won the third-term chief executive election of Macao Special Administrative Region on Sunday, of which he was the only candidate.
An opinion piece from Australian politics and media website Crikey examining Rio Tinto's unsavory record.
Relations between Africa and China are warming still. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The China-Africa Development Fund, which was founded by state-owned lender China Development Bank Corp., plans to raise $2 billion by November to help expand business links between Africa and China, CDB Vice Governor Li Jiping said.
Hu Bin was the race-car driver who knocked down and killed a pedestrian in Hangzhou. On July 20 he was sentenced to three years in prison. Below ESWN translates a post by Xiao Chuan at the My1510 blog talking about fears that the defendant wasn't actually Hu himself:
As expected, the Internet broiled with discussion about the identity of the defendant at the trial. First of all, I believe that most netizens saw the photo of Hu Bin in the form of the one where he sat in the far with his hand over the face. He does not seem to have any other photo. At the trial, the defendant was a small chubby man. Therefore, the doubts are reasonable. Secondly, for a long certain period of time, Baidu and Google had many other photos of Hu Bin. But if you look now, there is only the one in the car and the one in the courtroom.
Sinopop reports that Fan Meizhong, the teacher infamous for running outside ahead of his class when the earthquake struck Sichuan, and Wu Ping, the Chongqing nail-house owner, will be featured at the 798 Biennale in August and September.
From the Associated Press:
Baidu Inc., which operates China's leading Internet search engine, said Friday its quarterly profit rose 44.6 percent from a year earlier on strong growth in revenue and numbers of advertisers.
Net income for the three months ending June 30 was 383.3 million yuan ($56.1 million), or 11.02 yuan ($1.61) per share, the Beijing-based company said. Revenue rose 36.7 percent from a year earlier to just under 1.1 billion yuan ($160.7 million).
The Times has a report on 27 small mice cloned from adult mice's skin cells:
The results demonstrate for the first time that it is possible for adult tissue to develop into the full range of the body’s different cell types, in a manner similar to embryonic stem cells.
If the technique were to be repeated in humans, it could offer the prospect of a limitless supply of an individual’s own stem cells and be used to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, paralysis and diabetes.
The first mouse pup born in the study, conducted by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been named Tiny, or “Xiao Xiao” in Mandarin.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen are investigating the suicide of an employee of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which assembles the popular iPhone for Apple Inc., in an episode that has put the Taiwanese company under a spotlight...
..The attention underscores the secrecy and speculation that surrounds Apple's development of its newest products, particularly the bestselling iPhone and its iPod digital music player.
In the New York Times, Andrew Jacobs describes visiting Kashgar, which has been less welcoming to foreign journalists than Urumqi.
The men continued on for a while, speaking animatedly as the tour guide’s face registered a kaleidoscope of troubled expressions. Their ranting done, the guide, a graduate student best left unidentified, paused before declining to render their words into English.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s better for everyone if I just pretend I didn’t hear that.”
cfensi presents some of the character designs for two new historical dramas currently in production. They're a nice change from the usual production stills.
Adam Minter describes watching the July 22 solar eclipse from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in Sheshan for the Atlantic:
Despite the rain clouds and ominous portents, roughly a hundred tourists crowded atop a balcony that wraps around one of the Observatory’s old telescopes. With their backs to the basilica, they turned toward the East, and a rising sun which, at 8:30 AM, broke through the clouds to reveal the moon’s disc just beginning to cross the sun’s. Most in the crowd rushed to put on the disposable eye-protecting “eclipse glasses” of the sort that had been on sale in Shanghai for weeks.
Petitions, education, wildcat coal mines, and government malfeasance: ingredients for a hard-hitting piece of muckracking journalism.
Digu, Zuosa, and now Jiwai follow Fanfou and Twitter onto the black list.
Bruce Lui (Lui Ping-Kuen) is Hong Kong Cable TV's China correspondent and was on the scene at the early July ethnic clash in Xinjiang. Danwei asks him about the reaction of Hong Kong media as well as other views.
More than 150 steel furnaces from the Great Leap Forward have been discovered on a hillside in Gansu. They'll be protected as cultural relics. Wu Zuolai explains why.
From the BBC:
A Chinese cyclist has been forced to put the brakes on a 12-year world tour, after officials in Somalia deported him for not having the right documents.
Lee Yuezhong, who says he has visited 114 countries since setting off on his tour in 1997, arrived in the semi-autonomous Puntland region last week.
But he had no visa and Somali police arrested him before deporting him to neighbouring Djibouti.
Xinhua has published an album of photos and articles about the July 22 solar eclipse observable in many parts of China.
For the World Vision Report, Paul Mooney talks HIV and blood banks in rural Henan, where the Aids cases caused by blood transfusions happened. There is also an article on the topic by Mooney in The National.
At Youku buzz, Steven Lin dissects pop band The Flowers' downfall, as well as some disturbing interview behavior.
The Onion gets bought out by a Chinese industrial conglomerate and has a slate of spot-on state media spoofs, and other related mischief.
The New York Times Business takes a look at China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa by Serge Michel and Michel Beuret:
The authors contend that China’s ambitions in Africa are grandly geopolitical as well as economic. As Jacob Wood, a Shanghai-born housing developer based in Africa for more than 30 years, tells them: “I’m going to be honest with you, China is using Africa to get wherethe United States is now, and surpass it.”
According to one report cited by the authors, there are now about 750,000 Chinese living and working in Africa, in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Sudan, Algeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Gabon, Guinea, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt and Chad.
So far, China’s ventures in Africa have produced decidedly bittersweet results.
MSNBC reports that 65 American and 52 British students visiting have been put in quarantine after some tested positive for H1N1. And the BBC describes the British students in detail:
"What was quite worrying was how the Chinese team collected the children. They turned up armed in contamination suits, put them on an ambulance and took them away.
"The children were very frightened at the beginning. Now they're fine and they're being well looked after in the hotel, although they're having swabs taken every day.
This holiday of a lifetime has just been destroyed.
The MSNBC report highlighted a student from Oregon who tested positive.
China Daily reports the decease of boozy officials after one died from a banquet in Wuhan last week:
They added some officials even hire secretaries who are heavy drinkers so they can be their "drinking assistant" and help consume the necessary alcohol.
"To ganbei each other, or make a toast, is a Chinese way of communication, it is a part of the culture," explained Li. "Officials are used to sealing deals and making decisions at dinner tables."
The culture is also wasting taxpayers' money, he said, adding that on average officials spend about 500 billion yuan ($73 billion) a year in public funds on banquets, almost a third of the nation's spending on dining out.
"It will be extremely difficult to change the drinking culture among Chinese officials unless the government clearly legislates against such behavior," said Li.
Mitch Moxley for Time:
In the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator, "Shoot the Chinese" is spray-painted on a brick wall near a movie theater. A pair of swastikas and the words "Killer Boys ...! Danger!" can be read on a fence in an outlying neighborhood of yurt dwellings. Graffiti like this, which can be found all over the city, is the work of Mongolia's neo-Nazis, an admittedly implausible but often intimidating, and occasionally violent, movement.
At the WSJ, Jonathan Cheng examines the market for sensitive political books in Hong Kong:
"My bookstore could only thrive in a place like Hong Kong," says Paul Tang, founder of People's Recreation Community, a bookstore cafe in downtown Hong Kong with a Mao-themed decor and a focus on political books, including a wealth of titles published in the simplified Chinese script of mainland China -- but banned there. Mr. Tang, a 34-year-old former Starbucks shop manager who started his business -- then mainly a cafe -- in 2002, says mainland Chinese visitors account for 70% of his sales.
See also: Publishing a "PRC historical library" in Hong Kong, an interview with Mirror Books publisher Ho Pin from Phoenix Weekly, August 2008.
Adam Cathcart pulls some materials from the archives:
And I love learning about China in the 1980s for lots of reasons: trying to discern the continuities from the total ruptures, for one. But here, with Hu Jintao, we have a case of pure continuity.
To the excerpts from Hu Jintao, circa 1984! The context is a hard-hitting interview with reporters from the Xinhua News Agency on the subject of a reading campaign Hu was heading up. I think you will appreciate how little his attitude has changed since that time, a quarter century ago:
At ChinaGeeks, K. Drinhausen translates an article by He Weifang on online justice:
Let’s suppose a judge decides a case according to the law but the outcome is not in accordance with the public opinion. Then what should be thoroughly discussed is how the legislative body can revise the law itself to ensure that it represents the interest of the citizens. But if you let the judge abandon the law in favor of the popular will in his decisions, this will inevitably lead to a state of confusion in the dispensation of justice.
Alex Hofford has photos of a trip to Guiyu.
Global Voices Online reports about the arrest of Peter Guo, or amoiist:
His arrest was believed to be related to a gang rape scandal which the Fujian authorities have been trying to cover up. The sex scandal, titled as “Yan Xiaoling （嚴曉玲）much more miserable than Deng Yujiao（鄧玉嬌）”, was first posted in Kaidi forum in late June in re-posted in many major online forums. It tells the story of 25-year-old Yan Xiaoling who had been gang raped and killed by local triad, owner of a KTV, in Feb this year. The post also said that the KTV owner was connected with local authorities in Minxin province.
The China Daily reports:
The Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) revealed yesterday that more than 9,000 officials were found guilty of corruption in the first six months of the year and said it had investigated 6,277 industrial bribery cases.
Qiu Xueqiang, SPP deputy procurator general, told a conference of procuratorate chiefs that the industrial bribery cases involved 6,842 people.
In the second half of the year, he said, prosecutors plan to crack down on commercial bribery, dereliction of duty in large, national and local investment projects, and target misconduct that damages energy resources and the environment.
Qiu said the 9,158 corrupt officials were found guilty of offences including embezzlement, bribery, dereliction of duty and rights violations in the first half of the year.
They were among more than 24,000 officials investigated by the SPP in connection with 20,000 cases.
At the New Left Review, Kenneth Pomeranz writes about the Great Himalayan Watershed, and various issues involving the technology, the environment, and water rights in China, India, and neighboring countries:
However, while everybody is looking to dam the rivers descending from the Himalayas, China’s position is unique. It is not only that most of the rivers in question start on China’s side of the border, so that Beijing’s claims cannot be pre-empted by actions further upstream. A second crucial difference is that the PRC alone, of all the countries involved, can finance any project it chooses without recourse to international lenders. While the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and big private banks are not among the world’s most ardent environmentalists, they have—either for their own reasons or because of pressures from third parties—refused to support some particularly controversial projects. China’s domestic dam-building industry is also increasingly technically sophisticated, and is now exporting its engineering know-how in this area.
Yao Ming is buying his former team, the Shanghai Sharks, which have not been very successful lately. China Sports Review looks at what Yao might get out of the deal.
From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:
China's economic growth accelerated in the second quarter of this year as a massive stimulus package kicked in, lifting hopes that it could drive the rest of the world towards recovery.
Annual gross domestic product growth in the world's third largest economy rose from 6.1% in the first quarter of the year to 7.9% – well above predictions – the National Bureau of Statistics reported today.
The latest rise indicated that the country was on course to achieve its growth target of 8% for the year, said Jing Ulrich, JP Morgan's chairwoman for China equities.
Nick Fischer at Bloomberg walks through "Little Pyongyang" in Beijing.
Xinhua reports on a group of more than one hundred African residents of Guangzhou, most from Nigeria, who surrounded a police station after one man fell from a building while escaping from police conducting visa checks.
Reuters has a report, as does the China Daily; ESWN reprints an article from the South China Morning Post with more details and context.
Feng37 has a few photos of the incident on Twitpic.
The China Daily covers the possible problems with a long-term Internet blackout in Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang government said it terminated Internet access to prevent the spread of the violence. Up to now, the only known public venue where the Internet could be found was the Hoi Tak Hotel, which was used as a base by reporters covering the riot's aftermath.
...
The government has not yet given a date when the services will be resumed....Internet experts are now concerned that an extended "indistinctive Internet lockdown" may create new dilemmas for the government.
Fili visits the Liousi Film Studios in Tainan.
The Edge of the American West presents some stab-in-the-dark Western journalism from the time of the Boxer Rebellion:
The next day, the news was worse, or so it seemed, kind of. A giant headline announced “ALL HOPE LOST FOR PEKING FOREIGNERS” and was sub-headed “Even State Department Now Believes They Are Dead.” After these dramatic headlines, with the surety of disaster and tragedy, the story itself was a bit of a let down. “Positive information that the foreigners in Peking have been murdered,” the piece led off, “is still not forthcoming, but each addition report received seems to make their fate more certain.” We don’t know anything new, the Times seemed to be saying, but we’ve lost all hope.
At the New York Times, Holland Cotter looks at an installation at MoMA by Song Dong, who turned the contents of his mother's house into "Waste Not":
Then, in an exhibition space in Beijing, they sorted its contents into the kinds of meticulous piles and groupings seen at MoMA: stacks of neatly folded shirts, clusters of bottles and cans, groupings of stuffed animals and so forth, arranged in and around a dismantled section of the original wood house. As a finishing touch, Mr. Song created a neon sign reading, “Dad, don’t worry, Mum and we are fine,” and hung it over the installation.
Bloomberg reports that China will support imposing a travel ban on North Korea and other propsed sactions:
China agreed for the first time to punish senior North Korean government officials for defying United Nations resolutions barring nuclear and missile tests, China’s deputy ambassador said.
Ambassador Liu Zhenmin said his government would support imposing a travel ban and asset freeze on a “large percentage” of 15 North Korean officials proposed by the U.S. and other Western nations as targets for UN sanctions.
Evan Osnos remarks on the contrast Chinese state media is drawing between the international response to the Urumqi riots and the supposed lack of condemnation of how France handled its own ethnic violence last year:
Since the foreign-ministry spokesman Qin Gang made the same assertion in a briefing last Thursday, I thought I’d check it out with Jean-Philippe Béja, the veteran China scholar at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris. He told me:
Le Monde was very critical of the government’s policy, especially the suppression of the neighborhood police (police de proximité) by Chirac, and its replacement by police forces not used to the neighborhood, who harassed the youths…The international press wrote a lot about the social crisis in France (and so did the French press).
Osnos also has a fascinating profile of Caijing editor Hu Shuli in the latest issue of the New Yorker (registration is required, unfortunately).
cFensi looks at a badly-produced album of classic patriotic songs sung by eeMedia pop stars.
As you all may or may not know, or might not care about, this year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC…and 60 is an important landmark number in Chinese culture, so there’s been a lot more of this type of stuff released than usual. The first one was Anson Hu’s EP, Red Songs, which I thought sounded great. And now eeMedia just released this 2 CD set with some of their favorite company members singing a variety of Red Songs, with Zhang Yadong producing. And since most eeMedia people can really sing, there should have been no reason for it to turn bad.
But everything was so boring, so flat. With none of the passion that the songs should have been sung by.
Hecaitou reposts a Paowang thread comparing scenes from the Chinese-made cartoon Big Mouth Dudu with the hit Japanese series Crayon Shin-chan. Suspicious similarities emerge.
At the China Daily, Raymond Zhou decries the gentrification of parts of Beijing:
Case in point: the historical Qianmen Street south of Tian'anmen Square. It has all the trappings of a white elephant. By upgrading to a level unaffordable to old Beijingers, its core clientele, it aims to reap profits with margins so wide the whole Qing army could have marched through.
David Barboza reports for the New York Times that following the detention of four Rio Tinto employees on suspicion of espionage, Chinese authorities "have detained or questioned at least seven Chinese steel industry executives in a broadening corruption investigation." Ironically,
An editor at one of the newspapers that has published details of the case said by telephone on Monday that he could not talk about where he got the information because the government says it is a state secret.
Via AsiaMedia, a Taipei Times article on the suspension of China Daily's distribution license in Taiwan because of united-front work, as evidenced by scare quotes around terms related to Taiwan's sovereignty:
Dennis Peng, director of the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University, said the measures were out-of-date and did not constitute sufficient grounds for cancellation of the paper's publication license.
"The rules are outmoded. If the China Daily is blamed for being a propaganda tool of the Chinese authority, there are other parties that should be considered as such -- government officials, individuals and some local media that praise China all the time," Peng said.
Greenpeace China has a piece on visiting wind-farms.
Phoenix TV's Rose Luqiu and commentator Leung Man-tao write essays about racism in Hong Kong and the mainland.
The New York Times rounds up reactions from the steel industry, financial analysts, lawyers, the government, and the Chinese media to the arrests of four Rio Tinto employees on suspicion of espionage:
Australian officials have complained about the detentions (three of those held are Chinese citizens), and the lack of formal charges. Over the weekend, Australia’s minister of foreign affairs, Stephen Smith, asked for more details on the case.
Analysts now say they believe the detentions are tied to an increasingly contentious business quarrel over the price of iron ore, an essential steelmaking ingredient and therefore crucial in China’s rapidly ascendant economy, affecting everything from housing costs to auto prices.
Legal experts say that may be why Beijing says the case involves state secrets.
Xinhua reports on the share swap deal between the two airlines:
This is a major step to promote the consolidation of regional airlines and to facilitate building Shanghai into an international air and shipping hub, he said.
The merger will give China Eastern, one of China's three State-owned airlines, about 50 percent market share in Shanghai.
See the Wall Street Journal's report for more.
Dylan translates some left-wing views on the Xinjiang riots.
Rely on good relations with the masses and their co-operation in turning in and exposing suspicious people and groups. Local propaganda departments and residents committees must be strengthened to combat the influence of Xinjiang and Tibetan splittists, and expose the ugly nature of these running dogs of imperialist powers. Let the masses increase their alertness, so that they can protect the interests of the masses. I personally think that the source of some problems in Xinjiang and Tibet is an issue of students and young people not being firmly indoctrinated with the facts. Xinjiang Autonomous Region Communist Party committee secretary Wang Lequan has said that our young people are simply unaware of the truth. Those of us with firmer ideological footing must provide guidance to these young people, who are simply ignorant of key facts.
China Dialogue talks with various experts about China's restrictions on plastic bags, which went into effect on July 1, 2008.
Shanghai Scrap gives the latest updates behind the long-delayed US pavilion for Shanghai's World Expo in 2010:
The July 1 appointment of Jose Villarreal as Commissioner General to the US pavilion effort seems to have changed the equation. A lawyer with ties to the Clintons, Secretary of State Clinton empowered him to oversee the US effort. He didn’t waste any time, either, arriving in Shanghai on Monday, and managing to pull of the signing on Friday. One person familiar with Villarreal’s role described it as the arrival of an “adult” to a chaotic situation that badly needed one. Indeed, if there’s one telling detail to the handful of official and press accounts of yesterday’s signing, it’s the total absence of the Shanghai Expo, Inc. members from the official comments and photos
China's latest official figures say that 184 people died in the Urumqi riots, the New York Times reports:
Friday was the first time that the government had given an ethnic breakdown of the dead. According to Xinhua, the state news agency, 137 of those killed were Han, 46 were Uighur and 1 was from the Hui ethnic group.
For much of the past week, the official death toll from the initial rioting last Sunday was put at 156, and Uighurs and Han had both claimed that the toll was much higher, and that deaths from each of their groups predominated.
The Times also has a profile of Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan.
The Global Post reports on current conditions for Uighur workers at the Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong, where a brawl late last month set the stage for this month's violence in Xinjiang.
The Golden Rock doesn't like the new Aaron Kwok horror film Murderer (杀人犯):
As a Chinese person, if I sat down in a movie theater and saw a movie with Caucasian actors taping their eyes to appear slanted speaking fake “ching-chong” Chinese and making each other eat “fried lice” for 120 minutes, I would only have half the anger and shock I did coming out of Roy Chow’s Murderer.
Kozo at LoveHKFilm has a longer review that largely concurs, but reveals little more of the plot. Guess we'll just all have to sit through it.
Go Kunming reports on an earthquake:
A 6.0 magnitude tremor rattled Yao'an County (姚安) in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture yesterday, with damage reports only just beginning to be released to local media. As of 12:00 am today, more than 620,000 people have been affected by the quake, with 56 seriously injured and 28 lightly injured.
More details at China Daily and Bloomberg.
The New Dominion posts a letter from a foreign traveller currently in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
Fu Dezhi wants to recruit Deng Yujiao, the waitress who stabbed an official to death, to study for a degree in botany.
Twelve families in rural Jilin Province were nabbed in a huge drug bust that involved a large-scale marijuana growing, processing, and distribution operation stretching from Jilin to Xinjiang.
Netizens in China are once again on the case of what they perceive as biased reporting from the Western media about ethnic incidents in China. From the China Daily via Xinhua:
"The whole news structure shows that CNN is like the propaganda machine for the World Uyghur Congress, other Chinese are completely silenced, and how can the world learn about the whole truth in this way?" a netizen said.
In using the videos provided by Chinese media, the Western media coupled them with biased commendatory that the Chinese government is suppressing ethnic minority groups and transferring huge numbers of Han Chinese into Xinjiang to dilute the Uyghur culture .
The Shanghaiist reports on some wily cat-snatchers going around with cages and sparrows.
The New York Times Edward Wong interviews a family from Henan who lost their son during Sunday's riots in Xinjiang:
She cried for three hours until she dared go out to look for him.
“I thought, if I don't find a body, then maybe he’s in hiding and still alive,” she said. “But I quickly found the body.”
Mr. Lu's father identified his son on Wednesday from a photograph at a police station.
"After we cremate the body, we’ll go home with the ashes," Ms. Zhang said. The father stared at cigarette butts strewn across the floor. "We'll never come back," he said.
A lengthy essay by critic Liu Zaifu on Eileen Chang's fiction, its appraisal by C.T. Hsia, and the distinction Hsia draws between communist and non-communist writers, appears in a translation by Yunzhong Shu at the MCLC Resource Center:
Isn't it a tragedy that a writer who had remained intent on writing about eternal human nature and achieved her success by resisting the dominant political trend of her time ended up using her fiction as political propaganda? It can be said that as she wrote Love in Redland Eileen Chang had lost her aesthetic, artistic direction, because what she wrote by order was precisely what she had been opposed to ten years earlier. So Love in Redland marks an unfortunate deviation in her career as a literary genius.
Four employees of Australian mining company Rio Tinto, three Chinese and one Australian, have been detained on suspicion of espionage, CNN reports. This comes after the company broke off a proposed deal with Chinalco, but Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith played down suggestions of a connection:
Smith brushed aside speculation that the detentions are linked to the deal.
"I've seen no evidence and I have no basis for any such speculation," he said. "But I do underline that when our officials were advised of the reasons for the detention, that came as a surprise to us, as it came as a surprise to Rio Tinto, Mr. Hu's employer."
DJ at Fool's Mountain translates an article by an ethnic Han who grew up in Xinjiang's Production and Construction Corps that describes how minority policy backfires.
Malcolm Moore of the Daily Telegraph writes about Chinese Internet reactions on the Xinjiang conflict.
Moore is also updating his Twitter feed with the latest from Xinjiang.
Public security minister Meng Jianzhu spoke about the need to prevent gangster groups from infiltrating the political sector, Xinhua reports:
Police authorities should target on major gangster groups and root out the "protective umbrella" behind them, the police chief said.
Police forces should prevent Communist Party and government officials from being corrupted by those underworld organizations, and also prevent those organizations from manipulating grassroots elections and other political issues by violence, threats and bribery, Meng said.
Forbes reports that Chinese oil companies are moving quickly for follow-up bids following a license granted to China to develop an oilfield in Iraq:
The consortium formed by CNPC and BP ( BP - news - people ) won a contract to develop the Rumaila oilfield in southeast Iraq, the largest known oilfield in Iraq, discovered in 1950s. According to CNPC’s announcement, the alliance was granted a 20-year technical service contract, with a possible 5-year extension thereafter.
The New Dominion discusses the "woman vs. armed police" photograph from Urumqi.
Imagethief looks at the narratives of the riots in Xinjiang:
...to summarize, in the broad Western media narrative, Uighurs ground down by decades of colonial oppression and incited by racism have erupted in rebellion. In the one told by Chinese media, "splittists" let by the Uighur exile Rebiyаh Kаdeer have engineered an outbreak of groundless violence (中) directed largely at innocent ethnic Han.
Condensing as they must a long and complicated history from different political points of view, both narratives are hobbled. The Western narrative is hobbled by a reflexive sympathy for any group arrayed in opposition to a Chinese state that is well established in the role of bogeyman.... The Chinese narrative is hobbled by a national myth-making apparatus that allows no room whatsoever for the acnowledgment of Uighur grievances.
From The Guardian, both in audio and text:
Chinese armed police and Uighurs clashed in extraordinary scenes in the capital of the north-western region of Xinjiang this morning – two days after at least 156 people were killed in vicious ethnic violence.
Uighur residents erupted into protests during an official media tour of the riot zone in the face of hundreds of officers. Thousands of riot and armed paramilitary police have flooded the southern part of the capital.
Women in the market place burst into wailing and chanting as foreign reporters arrived, complaining that police had taken away Uighur men. Authorities have arrested 1,434 people in connection with Sunday's unrest.
Also from The New York Times: New Protests in Western China After Deadly Clashes and Daily Telegraph: Han Chinese mob takes to the streets in Urumqi in hunt for Uighur Muslims.
The BBC's James Reynolds recaps the major stories he's covered during his three years reporting from China.
Adam Minter at Shanghai Scrap compares two New York Times articles and their treatment of Uighurs and Tibetans.
Danwei's blocked status in mainland China, and a look at the DDOS attack on Academic Criticism Online.
From Adrianne Mong, for MSNBC:
"There’s just more opportunity, not just to make a name for yourself, but to make a difference," said Edgar, another former New Yorker who enjoys teaching her staff about the fine wines they collect and serve to guests. "I can do so much more here in regards to being creative or training some other people."
The flip side to this desire for new things, however, is the erosion of old traditions.
"[Chinese] cooking is a big cultural identity that is on the brink of being lost," said Lillian Chou, a former writer for Gourmet magazine who moved to Beijing from New Jersey four months ago to study the language and the food.
From AFP:
At least 20 people have died and more than 670,000 had to be evacuated in China after torrential rain and floods destroyed houses, damaged roads and caused rivers to overflow, state media said Sunday.
China Daily reports on a new biography of Michael Jackson, Moonwalk in Paradise, that was prepared in two days. What's even scarier:
More than 10 Chinese publishing houses are also planning to launch instant books about Jackson.
Update: Xinhua now reports 129 killed and 816 injured.
Both state and foreign media had been reporting that three Han civilians were killed in Sunday's riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang. The regional government said that "the unrest was masterminded by the World Uyghur Congress led by Rebiyа Kаdeer." Chairman Nur Bekri referred to recent ethnic violence in Guangdong:
Two Uygur workers were killed during the factory brawl, which was triggered by a sex assault by a Uygur worker toward a Han female worker. A total of 120 others of both Han and Uygur ethnic groups were injured.
Nur Bekri said the brawl was used by some overseas opposition forces to instigate Sunday's unrest and undermine the ethnic unity and social stability in the autonomous region, with an aim to split the country.
The Xinhua article neglects to mention that it previously reported that the "sex assault" that sparked the Guangdong riot was nothing but a rumor.
More news at the AFP.
The New York Times reports that the death toll as it stands on the afternoon of Monday July 6 is 140.
Also: Videos and photos at The New Dominion.
Liuzhou Laowai has photos of the flooding in Liuzhou, which reached 7 meters above the danger level.
Earlier photos here.
David Hechler at the Columbia Law School Magazine looks at Professor Benjamin L. Liebman's research into China's judiciary:
The fascination for Liebman is in watching Chinese courts advance—or lurch—in one direction or the other. Recently, he tracked the influence of the internet and the media on the judiciary. In some ways, he found, those entities further the rule of law; in others, they reinforce the primacy of the Party and popular opinion. “Part of the uniqueness of China,” he says, “is that it’s a single-party state in which the courts are playing a very important role. There are very few comparable examples.”
Rebecca MacKinnon summarizes some of the issues under discussion at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers of interest to China: ICANN's relationship with the US government, generic top level domains, and "internationalized" TLDs written in extended character sets.
Chris at cdrum sells his motorbike at the Beijing Vehicle Management Center.
The Taipei Times (via AsiaMedia) reports that the China Daily has appealed General Information Office's recovation of its publication license. The GIO felt that the paper was part of a "united front tactic" against the island:
The newspaper's agent, CF Books Co, received permission from the GIO on July 1 last year to introduce the Hong Kong edition to Taiwan for a year, and sent an average of 1,000 newspapers free of charge to colleges, academic institutions, local officials and government institutions. The permission was revoked by the commission on May 19 after a review.
...
Among the reasons used to revoke the permission was that reports continually referred to President Ma Ying-jeou as "Taiwan leader," put in brackets the terminologies representing Taiwan's sovereignty, place news about Taiwan and Hong Kong on the same page, and its weather information showed Taiwan was part of China, Cheng said.
ESWN translates an essay that ran in the China Youth Daily that reads the Transformer movies as tools to burnish the image of the American military:
At the beginning of the movie, the American military and the Autobots were fighting the Decepticons in the streets of Shanghai. The Egyptian air force and the American military attacked the Decepticons on the pyramid together. Actually, we observe the typical thinking of the American military: no matter whether it is the yet-to-happen alien invasion of Earth, or the regional conflicts or human wars on Earth, the best guarantee for world security and defending human civilization is to unite politically with America at the core and to have the American military as the command center.
From AP:
Air China will begin offering direct flights from Beijing to Tibet this month, shaving two hours off the current travel time in a bid to boost tourism, state media said Wednesday.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the new service to Tibet's capital of Lhasa will depart Beijing daily from July 10. Currently, all flights to Lhasa are routed through Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern China's Sichuan province.
Xinhua said the new service was designed to boost tourism in the Himalayan region. The industry took a major hit following the riots in March 2008 when Tibetans protesting Beijing's rule attacked Chinese migrants and torched much of Lhasa's commercial district.
Quake fears, anxiety over ethnic unrest, and a hunger for development have spurred authorities in Kashgar to launch plans to demolish and redevelop 85% of the Old City. Phoenix Weekly takes a look back.
Danwei interviews Li Xin, an editor at the English and international desk of Caijing magazine.
If you've got a grievance against local officials, here's another reason not to take your case to the national petition system: you may end up derailing your child's dreams of studying law enforcement in college.
Hong Kong University asks applicants for their views on the Green Dam controversy.
A student in Sichuan answered the essay question on the college entrance exam in ancient characters. Another student wrote a long classical poem. A middle school student wrote in English.
With Yao Ming's career on the brink, Austin Ramzy at Time gives his career and his fans a once-over:
Granted, Yao's star has faded slightly in China, his jersey being outsold in recent years by other NBA stars like Kobe Bryant. But he is still closely followed. "I'm so bummed out about his injury," says Yan Xin, 27, a Yao fan who never misses a Rockets game when they are televised in China. "In hindsight, he should have just focused on the NBA, and not be forced to play for the Chinese national team. I can't imagine how anyone can deal with such overwhelming pressure and intense schedules."
The Shanghaiist aggregates news about Hong Kong's protest today:
"Through this event, we hope to encourage the people of Hong Kong to commemorate the 12 years since reunification and at the same time look forward to the future," Cheng said.
Asked if the July 1 pro-democracy march would counteract the spirit of unity generated by the parade, Cheng said: "Hong Kong is a city of free expression...it is normal for people to express their opinions and differences."
The New York Times reports that Morgan Tsvangirai, prime minister of Zimbabwe and political rival to president Robert Mugabe, has obtained a package of loans worth US$950 million from China:
Mr. Tsvangirai said Tuesday that the finance minister he had appointed, Tendai Biti, had negotiated the loan package with China. Details of the deal were scant, and Chinese officials could not be reached to confirm the deal or to comment on it.
Officials close to Mr. Tsvangirai said they believed that at least some of the financing would be provided on the condition that the money was spent on Chinese goods, like fertilizer.
bezdomny ex patria looks at a post by blogger Yang Hengjun that describes a car accident in Xi'an:
A very weak-looking local woman, a clearly visible white BMW from another province, a group of locals looking on, the situation did not look very favourable for that BMW driver. But what surprised me was most of the onlookers stayed silent and the few locals who did speak were not speaking up for the woman.
Despite its complete confidence in the product, a claimed 90% filter rate against porn, total respect for intellectual property, dismissal of WTO concerns, and discussions with computer manufacturers stretching back to March, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has declared that today's deadline for installation of the Green Dam-Youth Escort content filter is postponed, with no new deadline given. Reuters reports.
China Daily has more.
China Law Blog says I told you so.