Must-read China news by Danwei

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:

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:00 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:16 PM | Permalink

Alex Hofford has photos of a trip to Guiyu.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:14 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 1:08 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:37 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:52 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:50 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:41 PM | Permalink

Nick Fischer at Bloomberg walks through "Little Pyongyang" in Beijing.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:34 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:17 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:14 AM | Permalink

Fili visits the Liousi Film Studios in Tainan.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:30 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:27 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:33 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:15 AM | Permalink

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).

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:01 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:55 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:13 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:49 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:27 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:23 AM | Permalink

Greenpeace China has a piece on visiting wind-farms.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 5:43 PM | Permalink

Phoenix TV's Rose Luqiu and commentator Leung Man-tao write essays about racism in Hong Kong and the mainland.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:35 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:23 PM | Permalink

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.

Read full article

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 12:19 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:40 AM | Permalink