« July 4, 2010 - July 10, 2010 | Main | July 18, 2010 - July 24, 2010 »
Evan Osnos blogs about a placement in Congo:
The red-eye from Beijing to Delhi was sold out, as usual, the other night, and I squeezed into my seat beside a young Chinese scientist who struck up a conversation. He wore glasses and a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and he was fidgeting anxiously as the plane took off. “Where are you headed?” I asked. “Congo,” he said and gave me a weak smile.
Wheelchair basketball in Beijing's Shunyi District, at the Modern Lei Feng blog.
China Dialogue presents the first part of an interview that Shanghai-based urban planner Zhang Song gave to the Southern Metropolis Daily:
Since then, large scale rebuilding programmes have transformed the appearance of old cities. For years we neglected preservation of older areas, and so the environment declined and facilities decayed. China’s approach to development is also extremely backward. Developers take a piece of land they believe will be profitable and then completely rebuild it as they see fit.
If the government’s main function cannot shift toward the social – concentrating on things such as housing provision – then it will be led by the market. Currently, a completely commercialised mode of development is gaining strength and the quality of urban spaces is declining. And, of course, the government makes no small income from land development.
Adam Cathcart introduces some developing stories about Sino-DPRK relations, including some rethinking on the origins of the Korean War and the intriguing possibility of North Korean agents looking for defectors in southern China:
Reporting (originating from Daily NK) that North Korean agents are active in the Chinese province of Yunnan, with tacit Chinese assistance, to hunt down would-be refugees who have made it that far from the northeast....One indication if this story is true or not might come in the form of Chinese media refutations, which I have yet to see. This is a significant question, as at least some American rollback/regime change bloggers in the US tend to assume that Chinese security organizations and North Korean counterparts are like peas in a pod. Which may be the case, or, as I think is more likely, China is temporarily allowing North Korea to do this as a back-door means of giving them something privately while bashing them over the head publicly, as per the next item.
CFensi brings some info about the IMAX movie directed by Feng Xiaogang.
See also: The Global Times reports on the controversy over product placement in the film, which Feng claims is a necessary part of film-making in China these days.
It's a new PBR for the Chinese market.
Parsing the political secrets hidden in hanzi.
A feature in a Hangzhou newspaper pushes the benefits of circumcision for elementary school boys. With illustrations!
China had a spat with Costa Rica. From the Wall Street Journal's Real Time blog:
A recent diplomatic spat between China and Costa Rica — which gained little notice outside the Spanish-language press — is the latest example of challenges Beijing faces in its effort to expand its influence overseas.
The barb-trading centered on efforts by a Chinese construction firm to obtain visas for Chinese laborers in Costa Rica. The episode prompted criticism from the Costa Rican ambassador to Beijing and caused the company, Chinafecc Central America S.A., to abandon a condominium project in the Central American country.
More landslides in south-west China. The BBC reports:
At least 17 people have been killed and dozens more are missing after a series of landslides in south-west China, state media says.
The landslides, which were triggered by days of heavy rain, struck three rural communities in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
Four people were killed and 42 others were missing after one landslide in Xiaohe in Yunnan's Zhaotong city.
In Sichuan, two separate landslides left 13 people dead and two missing.
A leak was discovered at a copper mine in Fujian on July 3, but the company did not reveal the news to the public until this week, reports the China Daily:
Pollution from Zijinshan Copper Mine, owned by Zijin Mining Group Co, has contaminated the Tingjiang River, a major waterway in East China's Fujian province, leading to the poisoning of up to 1,890 tons of fish, local environmental authorities said on Monday.
...
"There has been no cover-up, no misrepresentation of the facts and no important omissions," the company said in a statement."Zijin Mining... will take full responsibility for the truthfulness and accuracy of its statements."
The mine said that it, along with the local government, was worried about sparking a panic among locals, who have told the media that fish first began to die off in late June.
The Diplomat interviews Jonathan Watts on his new book, When A Billion Chinese Jump.
ESWN translates a report from the Beijing Times:
The Green Dam project was run jointly by the Beijing Dazheng Language Recognition and Processing Research Institute and the Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Limited Company. The Beijing Dazheng general manager Chen Xiaomeng acknowledged that their office in the Huajie Building had been shut down at the end of last month and the more than 30 workers have been sent off.
There are still workers from Zhengzhou and they are also being sent off gradually. "These workers cannot come back to work at the Beijing Dazheng because they were workers for the Green Dam project for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. We cannot just take over."
Update: The China Daily reports that the companies involved have denied shutting down, but provides little clarifying information.
From the Chinese Law Prof Blog:
Reader Richard Li offers a first-hand perspective on the September 2009 administration of the National Judicial Examination. I like the system of posting official answers and then giving consideration to dissenting views submitted by test-takers. Richard notes that there's no evidence that the system actually worked in practice, but it's still a good idea that other bar examiners ought to consider.
The New York Times runs a book review of Rock Paper Tiger:
Lisa Brackmann’s first novel gets off to a fast start and never lets up. Its foul-mouthed narrator, Ellie Cooper, is a 26-year-old former National Guard medic who’s landed in Beijing, still traumatized by what she experienced in the “sandbox” of Iraq. Her marriage to Trey Cooper, employed by a Blackwater-like outfit operating in China, has fallen apart, and now, in between hookups with a local artist, she’s spending a lot of time popping Percocet, guzzling beer at karaoke bars and sipping coffee at Starbucks.
From Xinhua:
China issued a new anti-corruption regulation Sunday to require officials to report changes in their marital status, the whereabouts of their spouses and children if they have moved abroad, personal incomes, housing as well as their family' s investments.
The new regulation was issued by the General Office of China's State Council and the General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.
The regulation defines "officials" as those leaders holding official ranks of and above county level in government agencies, democratic parties, public institutions, state owned enterprises and state holding enterprises.
The autobiography of Tang Jun, former president of Microsoft China, claims that he received a PhD from CalTech, which has no record of such a degree. Tang says his co-writer added the line, and that he actually got a PhD from Pacific Western University. But that school is a notorious diploma mill.
Meng Jing writes for Xinmin Weekly about some unbearable Hunanese accents on display in TV dramas.
The lawyer Ni Yulan (倪玉兰) has been making the rounds on microblogs and the magazine world. Her story began when Beijing successfully won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics － and the municipal government promptly started to 'beautify' the city by razing houses and independently owned property.