« March 7, 2010 - March 13, 2010 | Main | March 21, 2010 - March 27, 2010 »
On Qingdaonese: Tombstones of Europeans from Qingdao's old graveyard that were used to line a ditch during the Cultural Revolution were recently rediscovered and some names have been identifie, including the wife of a man who invented German Pinyin.
From GoKunming:
village near Baoshan is in shock after the arrest of a man who stands accused of murdering two children and eating their brains, allegedly to cure his epilepsy.
29-year-old Wang Zhaoxu (王朝旭), a resident of the village of Xianqi, is awaiting trial in a local detention center for the grisly murders of a three-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy earlier this year.
Another villager reportedly discovered Wang crouching over the boy's corpse in a field on January 23.
The Global Times reports:
More than 70 State-owned enterprises will be withdrawn from the real estate sector once their current development projects are complete, China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Com-mission said Thursday.
The latest attempt to cool the red-hot real estate sector would be of little use, analysts say.
The super-wealthy centrally administered enterprises are blamed for a land-acquisition frenzy that is seen as having further pushed up soaring housing prices.
The latest such lavish purchases were made in Beijing at a record price of around 11 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) by three State enterprises Monday, a day after Chinese lawmakers closed their annual assembly, which intensively discussed how to contain property prices.
On ESWN:
Sexy Photos Gate ruined Gillian Chung while Sexy Video Gate made Shoushou famous. This made the post-90's young girl named Feng Yangyan jealous.
So she decided to set up "Defloration Gate" to make herself famous.
At the high school attended by Feng Yangyan, the in-crowd happened to lead "alternative" lifestyles. But as everybody knows, a virgin could not very well be "alternative"! Therefore, Feng Yangyan spent money to hire a man to deflower her!
The AFP reports:
US Internet giant Google will close its business in China next month and may announce its plans in the coming days, Chinese media reported on Friday, after rows over censorship and hacking.
The China Business News quoted an official with an unidentified Chinese advertising agency as saying Google would go through with its threatened withdrawal on April 10, but that Google had yet to confirm the pull-out.
From The Economist:
Millions upon millions of women are trapped in loveless and often miserable marriages to homosexual men...
...They are known as “tongqi”, combing the words “tongzhi”, or comrade, Chinese slang for “gay”, with “qizi”, meaning “wife” in Mandarin...
...the number of tongqi in China may be as high as 25m.
In Shenzhen, some live in cargo containers. From China Hush.
Zaichina: A promising new Spanish language blog about China and Chinese media.
Jonathan Watts reports on tigers in captivity in China, and the closure of Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo (or Bingchuan Wildlife Park):
The authorities have launched an investigation into the Shenyang Forest Wildlife zoo, a semi-private operation that slashed rations for its animals after running into financial difficulties.
They will also examine the structural problems facing the country's massive captive-breeding business, in which – the Guardian has discovered – more than 1,000 other tigers are at risk of malnourishment. The Shenyang zoo, which is partly owned by local government, came into the spotlight after 11 Siberian tigers starved to death in the space of six months. It emerged that the keepers were feeding the animals cheap cuts of chicken because the zoo was short of money.
A short post about two very similar films about three taxi drivers in Beijing. Co-incidence or something else?
The Far West China blog lists other Xinjiang orientated websites.
In the wake of several high profile and messy closures, we ask: Why are so many foreigners fleeing China in the wake of language school bankruptcies?
The Jing Daily interviews Jia Zhangke at MoMA:
JD: Can you tell us a little about the current state of film production in China? What changes in particular have you noticed in the last 5-10 years?
JZK: In terms of the industry side, we’re in the midst of the rapid development of the Chinese film industry. Why do I say it’s a period of rapid development? Because in the not-so-distant past, in the 1990s, for a while there a lot of screens simply disappeared, lots of theaters closed down, especially in medium- to small cities. Basically there were no [movie] screens. After 2003, however, development of the movie industry really sped up, particularly in big cities. The number of screens skyrocketed. Last year, I saw a figure that every day 1.7 new screens are opening up [in China]. That’s a pretty big deal. It really is developing quickly.
CNN runs with a rush transcript of an interview with artist Ai Weiwei, failing to note that Weiwei is his first name, not surname, in the transcript:
WEIWEI: My father studied in Paris in 1930s. So in his 20s, he come back to China and he was put in jail immediately.
AMANPOUR: Why was he put in jail?
WEIWEI: Those young -- young artists, he was studying art, so they are prepared for a kind of demonstration. So the nationalistic party just put them in jail, just -- and he spent years in jail. And later, he joined the communist struggle.
AMANPOUR: And he was a hero of the Communist Party?
WEIWEI: For a while, he was. He was, because the Communist Party used his influence to really take a lot of young people to join the Communist Party.
The Waffles and Steal blog writes about roadside turtle deals in Guangdong:
A couple weeks ago, as the weather started to get consistently warm, I began seeing the turtle sellers on the roads again. When I first wrote about them last fall, I noted that I had never seen anyone stop to buy one of the reptiles. I wondered why they were being sold in my neighborhood, mostly populated by expats, Hong Kongers and nouveau riche Chinese. Surely, the foreigners weren’t buying them. Were the well-heeled locals eating them?
Well, I got my answer on Sunday. I was finishing a 105-kilometer ride and was just a block away from my apartment complex when I saw a guy crossing the street with a bamboo pole with a turtle hanging from a string from the end of it. I stopped, fished out my camera from my back jersey pocket and got into position to shoot.
China Daily's multimedia team gets a peek into a Beijinger's life after forming a family.
From The New York Times:
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago...
... And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation...
...“The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. [Victor] Mair wrote.
From The China Daily:
Zhang Ziyi has vehemently denied accusations that she committed fraud in the name of charity, but admitted to inexperience when organizing a donation drive for the relief of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victims.
The New York Times chief film critic A. O. Scott evaluates Zhao Dayong's documentary Ghost Town:
From the start Mr. Zhao’s camera is an acknowledged, if discreet, presence. In the opening shots, unseen residents of the town are heard commenting on how their familiar world looks as they peer through the lens. Later some of their neighbors address it directly and with minimal self-consciousness, talking about their personal histories, religious practices and the hardships they have faced.
What they have to say is fascinating — in particular the reminiscences of an elderly preacher who serves as the patriarch for the local Christian population — but Mr. Zhao has an exquisite ability to balance words with images. The life stories and household interactions that fill out the film’s three chapters take place against a natural background that is shot beautifully, though never ostentatiously. Green mountains and deep, shadowed valleys frame the desultory daily routines of the villagers, while the nonhuman population of dogs, chickens and pigs receives a proper and proportional share of attention.
The Guardian reports on the household registration system:
"I wish my kids could go to a state school," says Hu. "Parents always wish their children could receive a better education."
The contradictions of the hukou system, designed for a 1950s planned economy, become more painful with every year of China's development. About 140 million rural migrants are now working in the cities, where average incomes are more than three times than those of the countryside. Migrants have fuelled the country's spectacular growth but not reaped the benefits. And once they become parents, they face an unpalatable choice.
The Associated Press reports:
Chinese authorities have ordered the closure of a lead ingot factory in the country's southwest after 94 people, including 88 children, in nearby villages were found to have lead poisoning.
Reports of lead poisoning have emerged around the country since last year, highlighting the heavy environmental cost of China's rapid economic development.
Authorities organized medical tests for some 1,600 residents in four villages within an 2,600-foot (800-meter) radius of the Zhongyi Alloy Co. in Longchang county of Sichuan province's Neijiang city, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday. Ninety-four residents were found to be suffering from lead poisoning, while 745 others were waiting for their test results.
Sports authorities are blaming Dong Fangxiao for lowering her age after winning the bronze in Sydney. The Absurdity, Allegory, and China blog finds a few other examples of people whose official age is incorrect:
The young man in question was not legally registered at birth, though everyone knew how old he was. If his family had tried to get a birth certificate when he was born, they would have put themselves in a position to be officially audited at some other, higher level beyond their village. As it was, it remained a village issue, and the extra land was allotted and everyone had enough food to eat.
Jump ahead a few years and the family finally gets a certificate that records the boy’s age as being three or four years younger than he actually is. No big deal. He’s the son of farmers, and what does age really matter as long as you have a certificate, even if it is off by a few years?