Must-read China news by Danwei

China Law Blog looks that the consequences of China's new self image as the world economy's savior:

With China being hailed as the world economy's savior, its government has concludedthis is its century. The West is irrelevant and China will lead a vanguard of new players -- and the game will be played by Beijing’s rules. Particularly in the area of trade and investment, China hopes to jettison the constraints of world trade law for a return to the policy of national interest and raw power. In this new world order, Beijing sees little need for foreign economic or technical assistance.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:05 PM | Permalink

Earthtimes.org reports:

China on Friday appointed a Tibetan who served 17 years in the People's Liberation Army as the chairman of its Tibet Autonomous Region. The regional parliament approved Padma Choling's appointment after the previous chairman, Qiangba Puncog, resigned, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The agency said Padma Choling was born in 1951 in the Dengqen district of Tibet's Qamdo prefecture.

"He served 17 years in the People's Liberation Army between 1969 and 1986, before he became an official in Tibet's regional government," it said.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:53 PM | Permalink

China Daily reports:

He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, told METRO the identification means the house can't be demolished under law.

"Liang and Lin spent their most important years in the house. They made a huge contribution to Chinese architectural history and helped protect ancient buildings in cities like Beijing during this period," he said.

Liang's former home is located at No 24 courtyard house in Beizongbu Hutong, Dongcheng district. The famous couple rented and lived in the house from 1931 to 1937.

During the six years, Liang and his wife, with their team of workers, investigated 1,823 ancient constructions in 137 towns and cities around China. They also drew up 1,898 architectural diagrams, according to the Beijing News.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:47 PM | Permalink

Shanda Interactive has acquired and relaunched Banyan Tree, one of China's first major net-lit sites. Unlike the fantasy epics and genre fiction that populates Shanda's other literary websites, Banyan will offer mainstream literature tailored for possible print publication. Paper Republic interviewed Wang Xiaoshan and Yang Yong, Editor in Chief and Managing Editor of Banyan, about the site and its strengths.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:45 PM | Permalink

Asia Times Online carries a story about China's "ant clan:"

BEIJING - Every day, Yang Hongwei takes the bus home from work, staring silently at the European-style villas, luxury sedans and twinkling lights from the plazas he sees through the window.

The 25-year-old from northeast China's Heilongjiang province dreams of such a life away from poverty, and that hope has kept him in Beijing for the three years since he graduated from university.

Soon, Yang squeezes his way off the bus to the reality of his life: a collection of ramshackle buildings clustered on garbage-littered lanes at Tangjialing village in northern Beijing. He scoots home - a 10-square-meter room that costs 550 yuan (US$81), or about one-fifth of his salary, in rent every month.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 2:42 PM | Permalink

Tania Branigan at The Guardian has compiled a timeline of Internet censorship in China during 2009, from the "crackdown on "vulgarity" to a white list of approved websites".

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:40 AM | Permalink

Teng Biao, who lectures on law at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing and is involved in human rights issues in China, blogged today about unexpected settings on his Gmail account.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 6:16 PM | Permalink

dGenerate films presents the results of their poll on the top Chinese films of the past decade:

In the Mood for Love outpaced a field dominated by mainland Chinese titles, led by Wang Bing’s seven-hour documentary West of the Tracks and Jia Zhangke’s historical epic Platform. The two mainland titles are both independent productions made outside the official Chinese state system and have never officially screened in China. Yi Yi, by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang finished fourth.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 1:01 PM | Permalink

Reuters reports:

In a statement posted on the State Council Information Office website, cabinet spokesman Wang Chen warned against pornography, cyber-attacks, online fraud and "rumors," saying that government and Internet media have a responsibility to shape public opinion.

The statement said China itself was a victim of hacker attacks, and that Beijing resolutely opposed hacking.

Wang's comments, Beijing's first official reaction after Google threatened to quit China over cyber-attacks, gave no indication that China -- which has the world's biggest number of Internet users at 360 million -- would give ground.

The statement made no direct mention of Google.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Reuters reports:

Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, which is representing Cybersitter in a $2.2 billion piracy suit filed against China and seven major computer manufacturers, said in a statement that its attorneys were sent customized Trojan emails aimed at retrieving data from the company's computers and servers.

It said the specific source of the attacks had not been determined, but they appeared to have been initiated in China.

Cybersitter has accused the makers of China's controversial Green Dam Internet filtering software of illegally copying over 3,000 lines of code from its own filtering program.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Hu Di, a former cop, directed traffic during a snowstorm.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:42 PM | Permalink

Hu Shuli, China's "most formidable editor," took over New Century Weekly (新世纪周刊), publishing her first issue on January 4, 2009.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Kit Gillet writes about China's domestic aircraft industry in Foreign Policy magazine:

It has been more than a decade since China started its concerted drive toward manufacturing its own commercial aircraft, but only in the last 18 months has there been much to show for it. Last summer, two small Chinese-made aircraft made test flights, events that were of course heavily lauded by the Chinese media. Chinese experts are now hopeful that a 150-plus-seat jumbo jet under development will also be ready to take to the skies for testing within the next few years, in time for full release by 2016.

Still, many questions remain unanswered about both jets, and doubts persist as to whether China will be able to produce anything in the next decade that will cut into the market of the more established Western aircraft manufacturers.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 11:45 AM | Permalink

Tania Branigan reports for The Guardian (with video):

t would be easy to overstate progress since then. Few of the participants are willing to give their full names and several complain about the stereotyping of gay men as weak or HIV-carriers. Strikingly, all are white collar workers and most have studied or worked abroad.

Zhang acknowledges that life is tougher outside the big cities, but says that is why the event is needed: "If this gets seen by some country boy in Ningxia, maybe he will realise 'It's not horrible to be gay and I'm not alone.'"

The homepage for Mr Gay China is here.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 11:24 AM | Permalink

From Google's blog:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google...

...[W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists...

...We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 7:38 AM | Permalink

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports:

The U.S. Internet operator will “respect the wishes of any Chinese author who hasn’t authorized their books to be scanned,” it said in a Jan. 9 letter to the China Writers Association, which was posted on the group’s Web site. The letter was sent by Erik Hartmann, chief of Google Books in Asia.

Google, the world’s biggest Internet search engine, is adding Chinese content as it seeks to catch up with Baidu Inc. in the country, which has more Internet users than the entire U.S. population. Google should submit proposals to compensate Chinese authors whose works it included without approval and immediately stop the practice, the writers’ group said in November.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 1:56 PM | Permalink

Reuters reports:

The brief report on the "ground-based mid-course missile interception technology" from the state-run Xinhua news agency gave few details, and did not specify whether any missile had been destroyed in the test, staged on Chinese soil.

"The test has achieved the expected objective," said the report, without describing that objective.

"The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country," it quoted the Chinese Foreign Ministry as saying.

The announcement came soon after the United States last week cleared a sale of advanced Patriot air defense missiles to Taiwan despite opposition from rival Beijing.

The original Xinhua report is here, via China Daily.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Amongst the films withdrawn is Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!):

In celebrity wattage and as a showcase for the art of cinema, the Palm Springs International Film Festival has not garnered the attention typically bestowed upon similar carnivals at Cannes, Sundance or even, say, Toronto. But the Palm Springs festival has now earned a different kind of laurel: a bona fide diplomatic incident.

China formally told the festival this week that two Chinese films were being withdrawn from its program in protest of the scheduled screening of a documentary about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. While Chinese officials told the festival’s director that the filmmakers themselves had decided to withdraw their state-financed works, many China experts believe that it is the state sending a message, rather than the individuals.

Posted by Alice Xin Liu at 10:42 AM | Permalink

From The China Daily:

Beijing will complete its construction of five new subway lines and start work on another four this year, authorities said yesterday...

..."I don't think any other city in the world can surpass Beijing in terms of subway line construction speed," Liu [Yinchun, deputy director of the Beijing municipal commission of development and reform] said at a news conference yesterday at the commission.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:24 AM | Permalink

John Pomfret in The Washington Post on "a dramatic increase in China's influence on Capitol Hill, where for years its lobbying muscle never matched its ballooning importance in world affairs."

Members of Congress, lobbyists and other observers said China's new prominence is largely the result of Beijing's increasingly sophisticated efforts to influence events at the center of U.S. power -- and a growing realization among U.S. lawmakers that China has become a critical economic player across America.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:19 AM | Permalink

Another point of view in the ongoing debate about whether China's investments in Africa are good or bad for the continent, by Deborah Brautigam in Foreign Affairs:

Just as China promoted domestic growth by combining state intervention with private investment, it is now applying this same policy strategy to countries across Africa. The results have been impressive, and the United States and others would do well to start paying attention.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:19 AM | Permalink

In The China Daily:

China's 2009 fiscal revenue was estimated at 6.85 trillion yuan ($1 trillion), an increase of 11.7 percent over a year earlier, Finance Minister Xie Xuren said in Beijing Sunday.

Xie also said the budget of public investment in 2010 from the central government was likely to stand at 992.7 billion yuan, up 572.2 billion yuan from the 2008 budget.

With it, the Chinese central government would fulfill the target of adding 1.18 trillion yuan for public investment in the time period between the fourth quarter of 2008 and 2010, Xie said.

It is estimated that in 2009, the central government allocated about 924.3 billion yuan for public spending, up 503.8 billion yuan from the 2008 budget, according to the minister.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:16 AM | Permalink