« September 5, 2010 - September 11, 2010 | Main | September 19, 2010 - September 25, 2010 »
Xie Chaoping, the author of a book on relocations in the Sanmenxia area who was arrested in Beijing in August by Shaanxi police for "illegal business activity," has been released on bail because of "insufficient evidence," CRI reports.
By Dan Washburn on Par for China:
There are ... worse places to kill time than Hainan, China’s tropical island paradise in the South China Sea. And increasingly for professionals in the struggling world of golf course construction, if you aren’t working in Hainan or somewhere else in China, you probably aren’t working...
...Simply put, China—where golf was banned until 1984—is propping up the entire golf course industry, and being able to maneuver through the country’s minefield of challenges is fast becoming the key to professional survival. Of course, figuring out China is never easy. This may be the only country in the midst of a golf boom. But it’s also a place where new courses remain technically illegal. …
Teachers in Jiangsu dress too sexily and have a bad habit of talking out of turn, reports the Modern Express.
The One Foundation, a charity founded by Jet Li, is nearing the end of its three-year contract with the Chinese Red Cross, after which it will no longer be able to operate legally in the country, the Global Times reports.
At Japan Focus, Jenny Chan and Ngai Pun analyze the Foxconn suicides:
China’s emergence as a global economic power could not have occurred without the painstaking efforts of the older and younger generations of migrant workers. The Foxconn suicides have received much media attention and yet many other workers toil under equally terrible conditions. We believe that the labor and human rights issues raised by this human tragedy go far beyond the specific conditions at Foxconn, and demand wide-ranging changes at both the industry and governmental levels.
CN Reviews translates a Chinese Internet post that describes, rather sarcastically, the income, lifestyle, habitat and mating habits of "Shanghai’s 7 Social Classes".
Global Voices Online runs a translation about a law professor who is preparing to sell himself as he can't afford to pay for his second child.
On Japan Probe:
A few days back, I posted about how a Chinese trawler had been seized by Japanese authorities after ramming two Japanese patrol vessels near the Senkaku Islands. That post contained the above image, which was created by the graphic department at TV Asahi News. It shows the Chinese trawler colliding with the side of the Japanese patrol ships.
After checking out some China Smack’s translations of anti-Japanese comments left by jingoistic Chinese netizens, I noticed that at least a couple Chinese media outlets are using graphics that report a very different kind of collision.
From China Daily:
The incident happened around 11 am on Sept 7 when the boy Le Le (not his real name) was playing behind a BMW X6 car in a residential community, the Nanjing-based Yangtze Evening News reported on Monday.
The driver drove the car backwards without looking behind the car and knocked down the boy, the report said.
"My son was run over four times," the boy's father surnamed Li was quoted as saying while crying and watching the surveillance video that happened to catch the entire accident.
On The Financial Times' website, Richard McGregor writes about further censorship of his book author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (The book's Amazon and Barnes and Noble Web pages are already blocked):
The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Beijing kindly invited me to speak when I was there in early August and also did a video interview with me for their website. They followed up by asking me for an article, which was duly written and received with pleasure. Then, the Beijing government intervened. According to AmCham officials, who contacted me about the issue, Beijing government officials called to suggest - which in China means request - that that the video interview with me be taken down...
A few days earlier, That’s Shanghai, the what’s-on magazine catering to China’s commercial capital, was called about an interview a couple of their editors had posted with me on their website a few months earlier...
...Then last week, their boss was called in for an old-fashioned struggle session with city officials and told to expunge it from the site, which it duly was.
On the Liuzhou Laowai blog:
Guangxi Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs and Guangxi Center for International Exchange of Personnel have come up with an excellent ploy to rope in the local laowai to write their propaganda for them. They have announced an essay competition for foreigners. There are prizes. Unspecified prizes, but prizes...
...Of course, you can't just write any old thing. They have set a title...
"Amazing Guangxi - the Most Attractive Guangxi Cities for Foreigners"
The New York Times has a long story on Chinese immigrants in Prato, Italy, who are increasingly dominating the traditional Italian business of clothing and fashion:
But what seems to gall some Italians most is that the Chinese are beating them at their own game — tax evasion and brilliant ways of navigating Italy’s notoriously complex bureaucracy — and have created a thriving, if largely underground, new sector while many Prato businesses have gone under. The result is a toxic combination of residual fears about immigration and the economy.
At Shanghaiist, Robert Foyle pans the Miss Laowai 2010 competition:
8.15 Each contestant is introduced over loud pop music, while an introduction video for each entrant with a separate soundtrack plays (the remarks are all predictable variations on the theme of “I love China/Chinese people/food”). There’s also a female MC who gives an introduction of her own (example: “We think they’re from Down Under - when really they’re on top! Yes, this contestant is all the way from Australia!”). The result of this mish-mash? Barely anything can be heard. You can't help but feel sorry for the contestants.
As Number Two strolls on (Ellen from Indonesia), both computer screens crash. The audience watches a mouse desperately scroll through the desktop, looking for the right software (this takes a full two minutes)
Great Wall historian David Spindler and photographer Jonathan Ball's collaborative exhibition of Great Wall photographs illustrating important battles and historical events on the Wall is now in Palo Alto - click through for details.
Isaac Stone Fish writes for Newsweek:
“I read them quite a lot,” says Daniel Bettini, foreign editor for Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s largest newspapers. Editors in Pakistan and Turkey also praise Xinhua, noting that the language is simple and the quality has improved. “In the second Gulf war they were very good,” says Kamil Erdogdu, China correspondent for Turkey’s state news agency. “They got many things first; I used them many times.”
SeeChina runs a translation on Cui Yongyuan's documentary project.
Xinhua:
The 14 Chinese fishermen, on board the trawler which had been kept off Ishigaki harbor in Okinawa since Tuesday's collision, will fly home Monday morning from the Ishigaki airport on a flight of Tianjin Airlines, said Xinhua reporter in the field.
The trawler itself will also be taken home on Monday.
Xinhua:
The fisherman were detained after a collision with Japanese patrol boats near what Japan controls and calls Senkaku islands but which China claims as its own and calls the Diaoyu islands.Officials from the Chinese Embassy in Japan have visited the Chinese fishermen illegally detained by the Japanese authorities last week in the East China Sea...
...Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and other senior diplomats have for several times lodged solemn representations with the Japanese side and protested the detention of the Chinese fishermen, they said.
Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo summoned Japanese ambassador Uichiro Niwa early Sunday morning and demanded the immediate release of the Chinese fishermen and their boat. Dai urged Japan to avoid any misjudgment of the situation and to make a "wise political resolution."
On ESWN:
"You got a mistress behind my back, so I am going to broadcast you two live on the Internet!"
A wife finds her husband in bed with another woman. All three of them use Sina's Weibo microblogging service, and that's where the fight plays out in public view.
Yang Jian explains that Chinese film policy removes the unknown from horror, draining its capacity to scare the audience.
An op-ed for the People's Daily written in 1980 by noted actor Zhao Dan argues against censorship of the arts.
Wang Xiaofeng writes about the attack on Fang Zhouzi.