Thursday, September 2, 2010
Fast Company reports on an innovative plan by the city of Tianjin to deal with the water crisis and avoid the pollution that comes with the massive south-to-north water diversion project: The project has been in the works for 50 years and will cost an estimated $62 billion dollars. It involves transferring water from the [...] Read more »
Howard French, former New York Times’ Shanghai bureau chief, returned to the city this summer and noted changes on the streets: As this society rapidly grows richer, its social fabric and mores have been changing in ways far more dramatic than even the physical landscape, and sexual choice and expression are arguably in the leading [...] Read more »
Southern Weekend interviewed Zhou Guangquan, member of the Legal Committee of the National People’s Congress and Tsinghua University professor, about the recent proposal to reduce the number of non-violent crimes that are eligible for the death penalty. Translated by Duihua Human Rights Journal: Southern Weekend (SW): Among the 68 capital crimes in China, the death [...] Read more »
Like much of old Beijing, Peking Opera is now rapidly fading into history. The New York Times reports on the fight to keep it alive: This modest and slightly shabby theater is part of the Beijing Opera Academy, in a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city that has not been entirely torn down [...] Read more »
The New York Times reports on new registration requirements for cell phone users in China: The Chinese government began Wednesday to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes. The requirement, which has been in the [...] Read more »
The following examples of censorship instructions, issued to the media and/or Internet companies by various central (and sometimes local) government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to those instructions as “Directives from the Ministry of Truth.” CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of [...] Read more »
And the latest from the China Media Project: Since July this year there have been rumblings of change in the world of the Chinese microblog, hints that authorities are getting more active in the control of this new information medium, which allows virtual real-time sharing of information tidbits among networks of users. Last month, CMP [...] Read more »
The New York Times reports that a court in Anhui has taken the unprecedented move of accepting a case filed by a prospective school teacher who says he was denied a job for being HIV positive: The unidentified man, said to be in his early 20s, brought the case under a 2006 national regulation that [...] Read more »
China Media Project looks at the recent discussion among Chinese journalists and intellectuals around the idea that press freedom could be a logical first step toward political reform in China. David Bandurski translates an essay by He Weifang comparing Guangzhou and Shanghai in this regard: Shanghai and Guangzhou each have their own major events to [...] Read more »
AP reports: The Obama administration, under Congressional pressure to take a tough stance on Chinese trade policies, determined on Tuesday that Beijing had unfairly subsidized $514 million in aluminum products last year. But the Commerce Department stopped short of making a stronger ruling on claims by American leaders and manufacturers that an undervalued Chinese currency [...] Read more »
The Christian Science Monitor offers its view that the Obama administration’s recent announcement of additional sanctions targeting North Korea, as a response to the Cheonan incident, may in fact be part of a larger strategy toward China: On Monday, President Obama gave his strongest response yet. He slapped tough economic sanctions on key players and [...] Read more »
From the Japan Focus: The government of the People’s Republic of China has often been criticized for its policies regarding freedom of expression. Cinema in China has been central to this criticism, particularly with respect to the distribution of foreign films. This article uses a case study of the Japanese film Death Note (Kaneko Shūsuke, [...] Read more »
ABC News (Australia) interviews Guardian correspondent Jonathan Watts on his new book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, which explores the relationship between China’s economic growth and its massive ecological challenges: Read more »
China Daily reports that the All-China Journalists Association is investigating the police threat against Wen Liang, a reporter who wrote critical reports about a biotech company in Shandong: The ACJA said on Monday it is listening to all the parties involved in the case, in which police in East China’s Shandong province went to Beijing [...] Read more »
John Garnaut reports for Stuff.co.nz on how China’s overseas investments are playing out on the ground in Africa and other regions: The map of China’s overseas resource investments is not a pretty picture. In the developed world, Chinese investors are tangling with unfamiliar regulations, labour markets and technologies. In unstable nations, particularly in Africa, they [...] Read more »
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