« January 17, 2010 - January 23, 2010 | Main | January 31, 2010 - February 6, 2010 »
Forbes' Beijing correspondent Gady Epstein recounts "an interesting verbal brawl over dinner with some foreign business hands in Beijing. The point of contention: Are foreign companies fed up and just not going to take it anymore?"
Shanghai Scrap finds Christmas decorations repurposed for the upcoming Spring Festival holiday.
China Daily reports about 160 million year old fossil:
"It has unique features but it shares some features with birds. It moves its hands sideways, like how birds can fold their wings. Its head, veterbrae column, high limbs, hands are all bird like," said Professor Xu Xing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleonanthropology.
"Their legs have four digits like modern birds, with three digits pointing forwards. The first digit, unlike in birds which point backwards, this one points sideways," he said.
Alex Hofford visits Hong Kong's South Sokos Island to take photos of the plastics — bottles, toys, medical waste — that wash up on the beach:
Back in the 1960's this beach would have been pristine. It would not have needed cleaning. Discarded plastics in all their different shapes and sizes really are a huge problem.
The Economic Observer reports on the effect the new system is having as the Spring Festival travel rush looms:
At some ticket agencies, scalpers were still very active. Some scalpers brazenly tried to sell tickets to the reporter and other ticket-buyers in plain sight in the vicinity of a ticketing outlet on Shenzhen's Cuizhu road.
"Depending on how hard they are to get, tickets are marked up anywhere between 100 and 200 yuan," one scalper told the reporter, adding that as long as a ticket-buyer provided his or her ID card numbers, he was able to help them purchase any ticket they wanted.
When questioned about the source of these tickets, he said he knew someone who worked in the railways. Though he also added, "this year's commission fee is a little higher due to the complicated procedures of the real-name system."
At the China Media Project, Qian Gang writes in response to a government spokesperson's comments about online freedom of expression:
The spokesperson said in support of these statements that, “China now has more than one million online forums, and more than 200 million blogs, with Web users making more than four million blog posts each day, and new posts to various chat forums each day too numerous even to count.”
And yet, as hundreds of millions of Web users have borne witness, many forums and blogs have also been shut down completely. Countless blog entries have been swiped clean from China’s Internet, and postings in response to news stories, or gentie (跟贴), are obliterated in great numbers every passing moment.
Is the Information Office spokesperson completely in the dark about these practices?
China Daily reports on an audit of aid meant for the Wenchuan Earthquake rebuilding effort:
An investment holding company in Mianyang, Sichuan, misappropriated the 140 million yuan for the reconstruction of the city's Yong'an Avenue to the construction of the city's Chengnan New District.
Departments in charge of highway construction in Longnan, Gansu, used more than 7 million yuan of reconstruction funds to repay bank loans borrowed before the earthquake and cover daily expenses.
The newspaper reports that all the misused funds have been repaid.
Zhang's involvement in outdoor music and lights extravaganzas has drawn sharp criticism from the vice-mayor of a city in southern China.
The Chinese media is buzzing about the possibility that eating dogs and cats might be made illegal. But is that what the Animal Cruelty Law really says?
The Chinese Box transcribes some peculiar statements heard in the business-oriented city of Wenzhou.
The Global Times reports:
Long Shufen, his wife, said Tuesday that they had been to the Haidian district government and people's congress several times, but no one would give them an answer. Their appeal to the Beijing No 1 Intermediate Court against the Beiwu village committee is also being treated the same.
The court refused to file his case, saying that it comes under village autonomy. A statement from the Haidian district government in mid-December said that the relocation is voluntary.
"Government officials allege that the demolition was carried out by the village committee and has nothing to do with the government at any level," Xi told the Global Times.
People's Daily Online reports:
The mass-used Chinese search engine Baidu has been cleared by court of copyright infringement in a dispute with the music industry, the IFPI trade body for the music sector said Tuesday.
A Beijing court ruled that the search engine had not broken rules by providing a link to music products.
The case was launched in the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court by Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong, and Warner Music Hong Kong in 2008. They accused Baidu of providing "deep links" to hundreds of thousands of tracks on third-party sites.
From The Global Times;
The former residence of famed Chinese architect couple Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin has been determined to be an immovable historical relic by the government, according to a January 7 report in The Beijing News.
The move nearly came too late, as Liang and Lin's former residence (from 1930 to 1937), located in Beizongbu Hutong of Dongcheng district, has already been nearly half torn down. Still, volunteers from the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center consider the government's legal support to be quite the victory.
The Washington Post reports:
Even if its stand against censorship leads it to close its search engine in China, Google Inc. still hopes to maintain other key operations in the world's most populous Internet market.
Google is negotiating to keep its research center in China, an advertising sales team that generates most of the company's revenue in the country and a fledgling mobile phone business as the company navigates the delicate negotiations with the government.
Both sides are torn by conflicting objectives.
The Global Times also has a feature.
As part of Danwei's panel discussion event about the future of mobile media, we Q&A'd four China digerati: Thomas Crampton, Lu Gang, Tangos Chan, Benjamin Joffe and Richard Robinson.
The editor-in-chief of the Qingyuan Daily discusses the qualities of a good newspaper in this jaw-dropping New Year's editorial.
From The Shanghai Daily:
Repairs will start this year on the landmark new headquarters for state broadcaster China Central Television, part of which burnt in a blaze that killed one fireman last year...
...An unlicensed fireworks display arranged by CCTV to mark the end of the Lunar New Year started the blaze.
More than 20 people have been arrested over the accident, including staff from CCTV, the fireworks company, the building's designer, builder, supervisor and suppliers.
They will be tried in two groups, with the first batch due to go to trial before mid February and the rest around March, according to earlier reports.
The Guardian publishes an extract from Xinran's Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories Of Loss And Love.
Hecaitou examines the implications of a proposal by China's mobile phone companies to cut off SMS service to users who send dirty jokes.
Global Voices Online has posted about John Chan's (陈冠中) new book, The Fat Years: China － 2013 (盛世 － 中国 2013).
From AP / The Guardian:
Four senior Communist party officials known for their liberal views are pushing for the release of an imprisoned Chinese dissident who had called for political reform.
The four have signed a strongly worded letter addressed to "incumbent party and government leaders", urging authorities to reconsider the verdict against Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced in December to 11 years in prison on subversion charges.
James McGregor in Time:
In my more than two decades in China, I have seldom seen the foreign business community more angry and disillusioned than it is today.
See also Paul Midler's blog post on the same theme, in which he examines his own predictions about this subject in his book 'Poorly made in China'.
From The China Daily:
China plans to close thousands of offices established by regional governments in Beijing following longstanding allegations of corruption, the influential Outlook Weekly reported in its latest issue.
The report said that various offices representing administrative departments of regional governments, management committees of economic development zones or governments at county levels will be closed within six months.
It is estimated that there are more than 10,000 such offices, including 5,000 established by county-level governments.
ESWN has translated CBN Weekly's cover story about four young Internet entrepreneurs, titled 'Those worried young people':
I interviewed four young people. The oldest among them was only 33 years old. They are a new generation of entrepreneurs, they are in the vivacious Internet market and they put their unlimited creativity into action. But they are not a happy lot.
It shouldn't be this way. The websites that they founded all have sizeable numbers of users. With so many fans, they are the objects of admiration for peers who could not attract users. But today, they are just several young people who were affected by the 2009 Internet clean-up campaign in China.