Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Guests of the Metropark Hotel Wanchai in Hong Kong lean out the window for a photo op, by Patrick Rasenberg.
China Geeks has posted an update on Ai Weiwei’s project to collect the names of all the children who were killed in collapsed schools in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake: Once again, Ai has posted a list of essays deleted from his blog with typical “Sorry for the inconvenience messages”. Among the deleted was his overview [...] Read more »
Wildly popular blogger Han Han is planning to launch his own magazine. Chinayouren writes: Chinese ultra-blogger Han Han is starting a magazine. He announced it before on his blog, and his last post is already giving the details to send in article drafts and job applications. I learned this last night from my friend 2Ting, who [...] Read more »
From Los Angeles Times: For the family of Gao Zhisheng, a maverick lawyer under house arrest for years after confronting the Communist Party head-on, security was so tight that police sometimes sat in the bedroom of their Beijing apartment, insisting the lights remain on all night so they could keep an eye on them. In order [...] Read more »
From Reuters: A county government in central China has rescinded an order which was intended to make officials smoke more to help the local economy, local authorities said on Tuesday. Functionaries in Gongan county in rural Hubei province had been ordered to smoke at least 23,000 packs of cigarettes a year, worth nearly 4 million yuan ($586,700), [...] Read more »
On the New Yorker’s site, Evan Osnos has a video report about filmmaker Jia Zhangke: Osnos’ blog post has additional links about Jia’s work. Read more »
CNReviews is compiling a list of China blogs written by, or primarily by, women. They are accepting suggestions of additional sites in their comments section. From the introduction: Last week, after my post about Eclectic China Blogs–offering an antidote to the “standard business and current affairs white-dude-in-China blogs”– an interesting blog and email conversation emerged between [...] Read more »
NPR’s Melissa Block was in Sichuan a year ago when the earthquake struck. She revisited the area recently and reported on how people in the area are coping one year on. From NPR: The plan is for the old, abandoned Beichuan to be turned into a memorial site and attraction. Tourists will be able to [...] Read more »
In the far Eastern Economic Review, an op-ed argues that the commercialization of China’s media sector is working against forces promoting press freedom, and not increasing freedom as anticipated: The irony is that the dominant Western narrative on China has it that market-oriented development would inevitably lead to liberalization, including, presumably, for the news media. This [...] Read more »
Danwei looks at domestic magazine coverage of the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement: “Youth” is the day’s keyword. May 4 was designated National Youth Day in 1949 to commemorate the students in the street, but it is the “new youth” from the pages of the magazine who dominate retrospectives ninety years on. The April issue [...] Read more »
From AFP: China has more than tripled its target for wind power capacity to 100 gigawatts by 2020, likely making it the world’s fastest growing market for wind energy technology, state press said. China is aiming for an annual wind power growth rate of 20 percent for the foreseeable future, Feng Junshi, an official with the National [...] Read more »
Paul Mooney reports on the demolition of Kashgar’s old town and of a centuries old way of life: A government plan worth US$440 million (Dh1.6 billion) calls for the relocation of 65,000 Uighur households, about 220,000 people, whose families have lived in the Old City for centuries. Until a few weeks ago, the area housed 40 [...] Read more »
In a reversal from their previous optimism about China, foreign media companies are becoming disillusioned with their prospects there and moving to other markets, notably India. The New York Times reports: Media executives still believe that Chinese audiences are receptive to Western culture — “SpongeBob SquarePants” is a big hit in China — but many companies [...] Read more »
From AP: Two things still haunt Wang Bin a year after an earthquake decimated his village: the death of his teenage son and a purchase he made more than a decade earlier. He bought the cartful of bricks and two tons of cement in 1995 from a contractor who said they were extra material from a [...] Read more »
For the Guardian, Isabel Hilton interviews exiled leaders of the 1989 student movement, including Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, and Wang Chaohua, about their experiences then and in the intervening twenty years. From her introduction: Last week I listened to a man in his 40s unburden himself of a secret he had carried for two decades. He [...] Read more »
HBO will broadcast a documentary about parents who lost children in the 2009 Sichuan earthquake: At Hanwang Primary School, 317 students died. Standing amidst the ruins, a father still hasn’t found his daughter: “After ten days I haven’t seen her face.” Another man explains that local leaders said “we weren’t hit hard, we can handle ourselves.” [...] Read more »
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