Chain-tweeting over the GFW
John Pasden at Sinosplice explains how to connect a Zuosa account to its blocked Twitter counterpart by hopping through a Taiwan-based microblog service.
« August 16, 2009 - August 22, 2009 | Main | August 30, 2009 - September 5, 2009 »
August 29, 2009
Keso discusses microblogging and his Twitter suspension
At CNReviews, Elliot Ng talks to tech blogger Keso, whose account on Twitter (currently blocked in China) was suspended by the operators, about microblogging in China:
Sina has successfully invited China’s celebrity bloggers to set up on their blog platform, and I expect that Sina Micro-Blog will adopt the same operating strategy, focused on the development of the relationship between celebrities and fans. I was invited to try the product by Sina. As long as my Twitter account restored, I will still use Twitter, because Twitter is an important channel for me to access more information.
August 28, 2009
Role of the Paramilitary defined in legislation
Reuters and the New York Times report on the legislation announced yesterday concerning Paramilitary Armed Police (PAP) and their role in quelling unrests. From Chris Buckley at Reuters:
Chinese lawmakers on Thursday passed legislation bolstering central control of paramilitary police and spelling out their role in quelling riots and protests, less then two months after deadly unrest in Xinjiang.
The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, approved a law governing the People's Armed Police (PAP), the security force used to quell domestic unrest, as well as guarding officials and key installations, the China News Service said.
Thousands pour into Yunnan from Myanmar
A clash in the Kokang region of Myanmar has resulted in thousands of refugees crossing the border, according to the China Daily. Bloomberg reports today on the clash:
Myanmar’s army seized control of a rebel-held town on its border with China, raising concern a 20- year ceasefire accord could collapse, threatening planned oil and gas projects in the region.
Rebels attacked Myanmar police patrolling a border gate in the Kokang-controlled area of northeastern Shan state, killing at least one, the Washington-based U.S. Campaign for Burma said in a statement late yesterday. Businesses are closed and more than 10,000 Kokang refugees have fled across the border into China on concern fighting will break out, the group said.
Guangdong political advisor Chen Shaoji dismissed
Xinhua, via the People's Daily Communist Party news portal, reports that former Guangdong CPPCC chair Chen Shaoji has been dismissed from the party and from public office. "Chen lived a corrupt life," the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said. Chen had previously been placed under party discipline.
August 27, 2009
Netizen detained for "spreading rumor"
At Global Voices Advocacy, Oiwan Lam describes how Xiong Zhongjun has been detained by Hebei police for suggesting that Hu Bin, a wealthy young man whose reckless driving ended up killing another man, had found an impersonator to take his place in court and serve his three-year sentence.
Taiwan may allow Dalai Lama visit
Reports the New York Times, in order to help earthquake victims find relief, and apparently to embarrass President Ma Ying-jeou
The invitation to the Dalai Lama was extended by several government leaders in the south and was seen by analysts in Taiwan as a political maneuver aimed to embarrass President Ma Ying-jeou. His approval ratings have plummeted over what is widely seen as a slow response to the devastating typhoon.
Burmese refugees flee Myanmar army, flood into China
Reuters:
Tension between Myanmar government troops and an armed ethnic group has sparked an exodus of thousands of people into China from northeastern Myanmar, activists and witnesses said on Wednesday.
Large groups crossed the border on Tuesday from Kokang in Myanmar's Shan State, said a Reuters witness in Nansan, a town in China's southern Yunnan province. About 10,000 people have fled Kokang since August 8, China's Chongqing Evening News reported.
Four and a half years for ProState stabber
The Black and White Cat summarizes the sentencing of ProState In Flames' stabber:
This news is now three weeks old, but I only just noticed it and no one else seems to have mentioned it in English. The man who stabbed the blogger ProState in Flames (journalist and writer Xu Lai) at a book signing on Valentines Day was sentenced to four and a half years in prison early this month.
The attacker, Yang Chun, was arrested in Suzhou less than a week after the stabbing and a court in Beijing accepted the case in June.
More on editor sacked for Net addiction camp death
The China Daily has run a story about the Liu Yan, the editor of a Nanning newspaper who was sacked because of a story about a teenager who died as a result of abuses at an Internet addiction boot camp that ends with this quote:
"The media's supervision of government has met many difficulties because the government that oversees them still has many institutional problems," said Chi Fulin, a political advisor and president of the China Institute for Reform and Development.
"There's still a long way to go to improve the government's disclosure of information and social supervision," he said.
New fat data cable between India and China
From Telceomasia.net
Reliance Communications and China Telecom have opened the first direct terrestrial optical cable between China and India.The new cable, initially lit at 20Gbps, runs through the mountainous terrain of the Nathula Pass between Yadong, Tibet, and Siliguri in northeast India.
The new cable will support enterprise connectivity and also extend broadband services to more rural regions in China and India, Reliance said in a statement.
Yadong is the bit of Tibet bordering Bhutan and Sikkim.
August 26, 2009
The Story of the Stone translator David Hawkes dies
For The Guardian, John Gittings writes an appreciation of Sinologist and translator David Hawkes:
Returning to Oxford in 1945, Hawkes switched from classics to Chinese and was, for a time, the only student in a department with only one teacher, the ex-missionary ER Hughes.
It was Hughes who persuaded the university to offer an honours degree in Chinese, but according to Hawkes he had "to make Chinese look as much as possible like Latin and Greek", with the syllabus limited to the study of Confucius and other classical texts.
Returning again to Oxford from China in 1951, Hawkes joined a small but growing department under the new professor – also ex-missionary – Homer Dubs. The syllabus edged forward with relatively more modern texts taught by Hawkes and by a new Chinese colleague, the talented Wu Shichang.
By the end of the 1950s, the set texts for undergraduates included popular fiction from the Ming dynasty and short stories by the famous 20th-century writer Lu Xun (though the study of Chinese history stopped firmly at 1911, at the end of the last imperial dynasty).
...Encouraged by Wu, who became a lifelong friend, Hawkes was always conscious of the greater challenge of the Dream.
via Bruce Humes.
The death of the Internet addict
ESWN summarizes and translates reports about the death in the Internet addiction training camp, including one report that got its editor fired:
A deputy editor of a Guangxi newspaper was dismissed by provincial propaganda authorities after the paper had published a series of stories about a teenage boy who was beaten to death at an internet addiction camp. Liu Yuan, the deputy editor of the Nanning -based Nanguo Morning Post and the chief editor of its website, was stood down on Monday and would be sacked soon, Guangxi and Guangdong journalists familiar with the issue confirmed yesterday.
Getting to shake hands with a giant walking Haibao
Micah Sittig writes about appearing on a variety talent show on SMG:
Mediocre TV show directors, like mediocre reporters, will tell the story that they want and not the one that reflects reality. I think that a good TV show director would work with the guests to bring out their strong points and tell the special stories that everyone has to tell. In our case though the director was stuck on telling the story of a foreigner who came to China fated to marry the spicy Hunanese girl, and who tries ineptly to burrow into the local culture; I was willing to go along with a little of it (ask me in person why much of that story is fiction), but they were lucky they didn't ask me to dress in a Tang jacket or sing Beijing opera. I might have gone off at them.
City of swifts, no longer
Why are swifts (apus apus), the little migratory birds that summer in Beijing before flying as far as South Africa when winter sets in, disappearing from the capital?
August 25, 2009
No trial set for Urumqi rioters
The Global Times reports that suspects arrested in connection with the July rioting in Urumqi will not go to trial this week, contrary to an article that ran in yesterday's China Daily. The English-language upstart gets in a dig at its established rival:
A story in a State-owned English-language newspaper, published yesterday and citing an unnamed Urumqi procuratorate official, gave the new number of arrests and the trial time, adding that the charges include vandalizing public property, robbery, murder, arson and organizing crowds to disrupt public order and traffic.
However, Hou Hanmin, the spokeswoman for the Xinjiang Uygur Autonmous Region, denied any truth in the report, saying there will be no trial starting this week, and that the figure of more than 200 arrested is inaccurate.
Berlin Wall art project goes unreported
DPA via Monsters and Critics reports that an event organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall ran afoul of press censors:
The 'wall bricks' of the event in Beijing are four of 1,000 polystyrene reproductions of Berlin Wall segments; 970 of these were distributed to artists in Germany for them to decorate.... Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Bing and Huang Rui recently revealed their artistically enhanced segments to about a dozen Chinese journalists in the garden of the German ambassador's residence.
...But then censorship officials apparently intervened. Editorial departments immediately received a notice barring them from reporting on this unusual example of Chinese-German cooperation.
The [Beijing News] article was swiftly deleted from the newspaper's website.
The article appears on the page image (2009.08.12, C10), but the text version is nowhere to be found on the website. However, it has been preserved in copies republished on a number of other websites. (via Free More News.)
Stories from Jiabiangou
For the New York Times, Howard French reviews Woman From Shanghai, an English translation of Yang Xianhui's stories of starvation in a rightist camp:
Mr. Yang’s stories, which he painstakingly collected over a three-year period a decade ago, are those of people branded by the Chinese state as “rightists” in the late 1950s and sent to Jiabiangou, a notorious camp for “re-education through labor” in the northwestern desert wastelands of Gansu Province. In his introduction the translator, Wen Huang, explains that the camp, which was originally built to hold 40 or 50 criminals, came to hold roughly 3,000 political prisoners between 1957 and 1961. All but 500 of them would perish there, mostly of starvation.
August 24, 2009
Lead poisoning haunts smelter communities
From Reuters via the New York Times:
The problem dogs heavy metals bases in Hunan, Henan, Yunnan and Guangdong provinces. Closing polluting plants has pushed the industry to poorer areas where any investment is welcome.
After contaminated drinking water led Hunan province to shut dozens of metals plants in the cities of Zhuzhou and Xiangtan in 2006, the industry moved to the south and west of the province.
One of the new frontiers was Wugang, where authorities detained two manganese smelter executives this month after 1,350 children were found to have excessive levels of lead in their blood. The general manager is still on the run.
Pulling back from outsourcing
The Wall Street Journal profiles Farouk Systems, a US-based company that has moved manufacturing from China to America:
"I think you're starting to see more manufacturers rethinking outsourcing," says Daniel Meckstroth, an economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a public policy and research group based in Arlington, Va., calling a June speech by General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt, where he said that overseas outsourcing had gone too far and that U.S. companies needed to expand domestic production, a "bellwether of what's happening in manufacturing."
Chinese business in the Telegraph
This week The Telegraph has a feature on doing business in China, starting with an article by Michael Pettis and interviews with leading businesswoman Dong Mingzhu and the head of China Construction Bank Zhang Jianguo.
New US ambassador: Obama to visit in November
From Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama will make his first official visit to China in November, seeking to foster collaboration on the environment, renewable energy and regional security, the new U.S. ambassador to China said.
“If we can tackle all of these, we will be able to take U.S.-China relations to new heights,” Jon Huntsman said today in Beijing at his first press meeting since arriving in the Chinese capital yesterday.
Billionaires of Beijing and Shanghai
From The China Daily:
The latest Hurun Report on China's wealthiest people highlights how the super-rich of Beijing want to live their lives.
Beijing has the largest number of wealthy people in China, according to the report.
It said there are 143,000 multimillionaires and 8,800 billionaires in Beijing.
There are 116,000 multimillionaires and 7,000 billionaires in Shanghai.
John Smith, Beijinger
Sibuxiang, a blingual American blogger who has been doing business in China since the 1970s writes about doing business in China before name cards were de rigeur, and a Beijinger named "John Smith".
RELEASED:
Activist lawyer Xu Zhiyong,
Uighur webmaster Ilham Tohti
From The New York Times:
Chinese authorities unexpectedly released three political activists from detention on Sunday, including one whose case had drawn global attention...
...The government did not say whether it had also suspended criminal tax-evasion charges made last week against the most prominent of the freed men, Xu Zhiyong, a public-interest lawyer...
...In a separate case, Beijing authorities also released Ilham Tohti, an economist, Internet activist and ethnic Uighur detained after deadly riots erupted in the western Xinjiang region in early July.
Sky Canaves at the Wall Street Journal interviews Xu Zhiyong's lawyer Li Fangping and blogger Wen Yunchao (North Wind) for an article on Xu's release.
August 23, 2009
Activist lawyer Xu Zhiyong released
From the Associated Press:
An activist Chinese lawyer who was detained in a possible crackdown on dissent ahead of October's 60th anniversary of Communist rule was released Sunday, but he said authorities were investigating possible tax charges against him.
Xu Zhiyong co-founded a Beijing legal aid group that has tackled some of China's most politically sensitive cases, most recently representing parents of children sickened last year by chemical-tainted milk. Xu was detained July 29 and formally arrested Aug. 12 on charges of evading taxes.
Xu has been at the forefront of legal reform and public interest law in China, and has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School in the United States several times.
"I think animation should be simple and fun"
NeochaEDGE interviews Sun Haipeng, the CG animator who created the popular Super Baozi short.
The mysterious village surveillance cameras
ESWN translates a report from the Southern Metropolis Daily on a village in Shandong that has five security cameras, two of which are pointed at the door to the home of one petitioner.