Danwei's Must-Read China News

"If we work together we can do anything"

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:15:08 +0800

Barking at the Sun reports on the relief effort underway in Chengdu:

Day four and the people of Chengdu are starting to return to their normal lives. The palpable sense of fear that gripped the city for three days now seems to be largely gone. Many have switched gears entirely: an individual sense of self-preservation has turned into a city-wide sense of urgency to help the victims, many of whom are located just an hour's drive north.

Why are schools crumbling like sand houses?

Thu, 15 May 2008 19:14:26 +0800

At The Economic Observer, Zhang Jinghua asks why so many of the earthquake victims were children:

It's always been our pride that we are a nation that respects the old and love the young. It's also been many officials' mottos that children and education always come first, however hard the situation is. Yet our schools are still so fragile.

Hopefully, we have learnt our lessons during this disastrous year. We call for more stringent standards to be set to enforce public infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals and bus terminals. Safety guidelines, especially those on quake and fire prevention, for public buildings must be strictly adhered to.

Peter Hessler's former students after Sichuan quake

Wed, 14 May 2008 19:23:51 +0800

A piece in the New Yorker: author Peter Hessler who taught English in rural Sichuan in the 1990s hears from his former students in the earthquake zone.

State TV on Speed

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:34:05 +0800

On the Newsweek blog, Jonathan Ansfield writes about the pressure on CCTV to keep up with their colleagues in other Chinese media organizations and the unprecedented transparency of the government's handling of media during this earthquake crisis.

Qian Gang: 3 crucial days

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:31:35 +0800

From the China Media Project: The China Media Project has been inundated with phone calls from journalists trying to reach our director, Qian Gang, author of The Great Tangshan Earthquake (唐山大地震). Unable to answer all interview requests, Qian Gang has issued [a] response to the Wenchuan earthquake, published in today's edition of Southern Metropolis Daily.

CCTV International brings new lows in top priorities

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:52:43 +0800

CCTV International still follows protocol in its nightly news-cast, leading with a bizarre phone call between Hu Jintao and US President Bush, reports Hugh Jorgen at the Zhongnanhai blog.

Rescue teams at epicenter, 60,000 missing

Wed, 14 May 2008 08:13:27 +0800

From the BBC:

Chinese rescue teams have reached the epicentre of Monday's devastating earthquake, Wenchuan county, where an estimated 60,000 people remain missing.

The quake and Twitter hubris

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:04:46 +0800

Kaiser Kuo:

It wasn't long before, within the community of Twitterati watching the horrors of the quake unfold, self-congratulatory messages talking about how Twitter was so much faster than the mainstream media, and how Twitter had proven itself indispensable. At first I was caught up in that feeling, too. But really, thinking back now on what happened, there was a little too much hubris in the rush to pronounce that Twitter's moment had arrived.

Wen Jiabao: get to epicenter by noon today

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:52:12 +0800

Xinhua reports from Dujiangyan in Sichuan:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ordered to remove barriers and open up roads to epicenter before 12 p.m. Tuesday after a strong earthquake jolted southwest China's Sichuan Province Monday afternoon.

Chinese diving star pregnant, out of Olympics

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:04:32 +0800

From China Sports Today:

In a bombshell for the Chinese diving team, one of China's biggest sports stars, two-time gold medal-winning diver Guo Jingjing, is pregnant and leaving the national team.

However, this CCTV report quotes a National Diving Team spokesperson who denies the rumors.

Twitter vs Xinhua

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:51:33 +0800

Mei Fong on the Wall Street Journal's China blog:

When the earthquake struck, the first instinct of one college student in Sichuan province, not far from the epicenter, was to duck for cover in his dormitory room. The second: record the upheaval, and post it online.

Chang Ping: tolerate public information sharing during quake

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:47:20 +0800

At the China Media Project, David Bandurski translates a new piece by Chang Ping in the Southern Metropolis Daily urging the authorities to tolerate open information sharing during the earthquake crisis.

Interview: China translator of 'Kite Runner'

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:55:16 +0800

At Paper Republic, Bruce Humes interviews Li Jihong, the mainland translator of Kite Runner:

[O]n the whole, Li Ji-Hong tends to avoid the approach used by Hosseini when he wrote "Kite Runner." Rather than citing the foreign term using English letters or transliterating it into Chinese, the translator uses easily grasped - even run-of-the-mill spoken Chinese - to convey quintessentially Afghan traits and customs. At times, the result is so mundane that one wonders if the reader might not get the impression that Afghan life, or at least the speech of its inhabitants, is rather similar to "ours," i.e., we Chinese.

Portents (listen to the suckhole)

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:12:44 +0800

Earthquakes are often seen as heralding major changes. Bokane notes another natural phenomenon that has been remarkably prescient over the past century.

Earthquakes hit Chengdu, Beijing

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:48:37 +0800

Xinhua reports that an earthquake measuring 7.8 (revised from 7.6) on the Richter scale occurred 100km outside of Chengdu at 2:28, while another earthquake, measuring 3.9, hit a Beijing suburb shortly afterward.

Wendi Deng's new China plans

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:06:14 +0800

From the blog of David Wolf, who knows a thing or three about News Corp:

Wendi Deng has told Vogue that she will be collaborating with her pals Zhang Ziyi and Florence Sloan to establish a new film production company based on the DreamWorks model. The first project of the unnamed venture is apparently an adaptation of Shan Sa's novel The Empress, and Ms. Deng dropped the name of Ridley Scott as a possible director.

Beijing is world's No. 1 toilet metropolis

Mon, 12 May 2008 10:02:47 +0800

From Xinhua:

Beijing, with 5,174 public toilets, has outpaced New York, London and Tokyo and become the world's No. 1 metropolis as far as public toilets are concerned.

See also Beijing WC, illustrated for one writer's take on the toilets of Beijing.

6 arrested for part in Chengdu stroll protests

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:58:08 +0800

From China Digital Times:

Police in Chengdu recently detained six local residents for posting Internet articles and demonstrating against a major petrochemical project, according to Sichuan News Online.

Being Chinese

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:54:46 +0800

Black and White Cat translates a reader's letter to Southern Weekly in which a girl describes a crowd giving her a hard time for taking photos that might make China look bad.

Thunder from Tibet

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:50:32 +0800

The New York Review of Books has published a review by Robert Barnett ofThe Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer:

Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.