China Digital Times

CHINA NEWS SECTION: media

• Photos: A Look at China

  

  CDT presents a look back at the past few weeks in China. The following photos from late August include subjects from the everyday to the extraordinary. Photos and captions (here, translated) can be found at paowang.net (1, 2).

  

  The Guangzhou station became a “place of grief” as left-behind kids cry as they return to the countryside by train. Guangzhou is the transportation hub for millions of migrant workers in Southern China.

  

  Changsha’s first student to enter the guzheng department at the Central Conservatory of Music in 30 years is a 9-year-old girl from Xiangxi. Her scores were the top in the nation to test into this school, and she will go straight to university!

  

  New brides lift their veils at the Rose Wedding ceremony in August 29.

  

  On August 29th, director of “Let the Bullets Fly” Jiang Wen (third from the left), Ge You (2nd from left), and others on the red carpet at the premiere.

  

  A thousand people gather together for a lively blind date event during the 26th of August’s “Qixi Festival” [note: somewhat analogous to the Western Valentine's Day] in the city of Xian, located in Anhui Province. The event planners organized over 1000 singles to participate in blind dates. Within the event were introductions, a talent show, as well as other items, all of which gave these young men and women opportunities to get to know one another.

  

  On August 23, the ladies from Miss Tourism Queen International take a group photo in front of a Shaolin Temple gate in Dengfeng, Henan. The Miss Tourism Queen contestants came from 120 countries and regions to visit Shaolin Temple.

  

  In the afternoon in Wuhan, this reporter spotted an eye-catching small advertisement affixed to the front of a white police car. The advertisement is for making fake IDs and seals, and includes a contact number.

  

  The province’s first women’s school in Chengdu’s Immaterial Culture and Heritage Park has begun classes. Zhou Yongchen, who is in charge of the school, [stated that] the intention in launching the school was to return classical, gentlewomanly cultivation to the modern woman and to promote Chinese traditional culture.

  

  In the morning of the 24th of August, Anhui’s Chaohu city Party secretary, Zhou Guangquan, received his verdict in Anqing’s mid-level for accepting a bribe, and possessing large sum of money from unkown sources. The Anqing mid-level court ruled that Zhou Guangquan would receive life imprisonment, be stripped of political rights for the rest of his life, and have his property confiscated.

  » Read more
  • September 9, 2009 12:21 AM

• James Kynge: West Miscasts Tiananmen Protesters

  

  

  From the Financial Times, James Kynge provides a critique of Western media representation of Tiananmen and provides an interesting perspective:

  When I think about the massacre in central Beijing that followed weeks of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which I covered as part of a team of Reuters reporters, I cannot help feeling troubled.

  Of course it was a brutal and harrowing time, but that isn’t the reason for my disquiet. I’m concerned because I don’t think we – the western media – got the narrative of those days quite right. People say journalism is merely a first, rough draft of history. But the problem here is that this draft appears to have been canonised, passing largely unedited into popular conscience.

  I do question, however, the western media’s basic assertion that the demonstrations had been “pro-democracy”. Even now, a raft of editorials commemorating the event’s 20th anniversary repeat the mantra that the students were “demanding democracy”.

  » Read more
  • June 4, 2009 1:25 AM

• Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys’ Abductions (Updated With Video)

  

  The New York Times tells the stories of young boys who were kidnapped, often when their parents take their eyes off them for just a minute:

  These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

  The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country’s strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.

  Su Qingcai, a tea farmer from the mountainous coast of Fujian Province, explained why he spent $3,500 last year on a 5-year-old boy. “A girl is just not as good as a son,” said Mr. Su, 38, who has a 14-year-old daughter but whose biological son died at 3 months. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”

  The documentary “China’s Stolen Children” treats the subject of child trafficking.

  Part 1:
  

  Part 2:
  

  Part 3:
  

  Read also: Kidnapped in China without hope by Bill Schiller, published on thestar.com last October.

  » Read more
  • April 4, 2009 3:12 PM

• chinaSMACK: translating the most outrageous of Chinese BBS

  

  Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei published an interview with the founder and contributors of chinaSMACK.  china SMACK offers a look at “Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China.  What’s popular, scandalous, or shocking that have the Chinese talking.”  Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

  When did you first start following Chinese online conversation, and have you noticed any big changes in Chinese online culture since then?
  Fauna:
  I started to read BBS forums every day maybe 2 or 3 years ago. Before that, I used to to read them but not so often as every day. I think the big changes for Chinese online culture are that Chinese netizens are now more funny, more yellow, and maybe more free.

  However, I think it is also very clear that the Chinese government cares more about the Internet now than before also and many “bad” things are deleted very fast too. Sometimes I notice that the source of a post we are working on is deleted before we are finished translating. That makes me worried that if I post it, I will attract too much attention from the government.

  I only hope they do not care too much because we are just translating and most Chinese do not read English. We also try to talk only about social things and not very political things like democracy or human rights.

  Ping Gao:
  When I was 18 or 19, in college I was not as busy as when I was in high school, so I could spent more time on internet. Yeah, big changes! I think the influence of the Internet has been growing. Internet was more about sharing information 6 or 7 years ago, but now it can has social influence as well.

  Chinese online culture is not only playing a role as media and as encyclopedia, but it’s also a window for people to know the world, and to let the world know China. This is very important for a growing and changing country.

  Kris Chen:
  I always receive lots of information from KDS, and it actually makes reading news (TV news, newspaper) unnecessary for me.

  Big changes, hmm, basically there are a few changes, but most of them I consider as negative. It’s like people don’t know what to do with their newly granted right, e.g., exposure of private photos without the owner’s consent, taking girls pictures on the streets and posting them on the web, etc. It’s kind of an infringement of others’ legal rights.

  Though many online communities provide people with access to various information, people helping each other to solve problems, is kind of encouraging. But basically it seems a higher moral standard is needed.

  Joe Xu:
  I’m beginning to see the use of more memes or Internet catchphrases that may have resulted from online censorship.

  » Read more
  • October 22, 2008 3:02 PM

• China’s CCTV Squashes Pesky Free Market in the Ratings Wars

  

  China’s state-run CCTV hasn’t had to fight off competition when it comes to broadcasting the Olympic Games this summer, and they’re raking in advertising revenues. From Wired:

  Strangely, without any competitors, “government censorship does not seem to hurt the company’s bottom line.”

  Since foreign broadcasters are shut out from China, it does a healthy business with international and foreign brands, striking advertisement deals with companies like Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Adidas.

  During the opening ceremonies, 840 million people tuned in to watch the games in China, which might be the largest audience viewing an event from one place ever. Nielsen numbers show that up to 96 percent of Chinese households with television sets have tuned into some part of the Olympic competition, with the women’s table tennis final on Sunday drew 330 million people — an audience larger than the entire U.S. population.

  In the first 10 days of the Games, over 100 million people in China watched events over streaming video on its Web site, CCTV.com. That’s compared to the 42 million viewers that NBCOlympics.com boasted after twelve days of Olympic coverage. It’s good to be a state-sponsored monopoly.

  » Read more
  • August 22, 2008 9:02 PM

• Sexy Beijing: East of the River

  

  Sexy Beijing’s second episode produced with National Public Radio’s All Things Considered:

  American expat Anna Sophie Loewenberg discusses dating across East-West lines with her friends in Beijing.

  Video is available via YouTube:

  » Read more
  • July 16, 2008 12:10 PM

• Sexy Beijing: Forever Tango

  

  The newest episode of Sexy Beijing, the first in a four-part series produced with National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, explores different opinions on marriage and the over-fifty-crowd’s penchant for dancing.

  The video is available via YouTube:

  » Read more
  • June 21, 2008 8:50 AM

• Reporter’s Night on Park Bench

  

  NPR’s Louisa Lim wrote a heart-warming story on her experience of being caught unexpectedly in an aftershock panic outside of Chengdu:

  When I set out to interview panicky people sleeping outside, little did I imagine that I myself would become one of them. In fact, I’d confidently predicted that I’d be back at the hotel within an hour. But that was not how things turned out. I’d taken a taxi to a place where many people were still sleeping outside in tents and cars, a week after the shock. When I first arrived, it seemed this constituted only a tiny minority of people, generally the elderly or the very nervous. But as I was interviewing, suddenly a massive influx of people came running to the square, quilts and tents under their arms, jostling to commandeer a space of their own…

  She couldn’t get back to the city and had to spend the night outside with thousands of Chengdu residents.

  As I lay outside I realized how much of a bubble we’ve been living in at our reinforced hotel. The reality for most Chengdu residents is that every time they leave home, they’re still not entirely sure that they’ll be able to return. Every night they weigh up the relative safety of their buildings and the speed of their legs. And everybody here is traumatized to a certain extent. But people are finding comfort in community. When the kind couple who’d lent me the blanket left, another elderly neighbor pressed his red plastic raincape on me. I said I’d be fine. He told me what a hard time we journalists were having and that I mustn’t get sick. I told him I didn’t need his cape. He shoved it at me. I shoved it back. Then we had a comic tussle as he attempted to tug the raincape over my head, while I tried to pull it off. Intense negotiations ensued over the ownership of the raincape. Raising the stakes, he threatened to throw it in the bin if I didn’t take it away with me…

  She recounted her emotional bond with farmers in an earthquake-struck Sichuan village in an earlier post To Eat or To Mourn:

  “Sit down! Eat!” was the order. Bowls of steaming rice porridge were shoved into our hands and stools jammed under our knees. We looked at each other, unsure of what to do next.

  We’d just watched as the Ma family buried their eighty-seven year old matriarch, Li Mingxiu, on the hillside above the devastated remains of their quiet country village. Her reflexes dulled by her age, the old lady had been too slow to run outside when the earthquake struck, and she’d been crushed when the kitchen wall collapsed on her.

  But we had to admit we were hungry. And the family’s neigbours were refusing to take no for an answer. “Eat! Please eat!” they kept on urging us, pushing the bowls of hot food into our chests. Finally we gave in and sat down. They looked relieved. When I thanked them for their hospitality under such difficult circumstances, they broke into smiles. “That’s what Chinese people are like,” they said.

  » Read more
  • May 21, 2008 2:11 PM

• Information Flows?: Hunan Water Utility Case

  

  From China Media Project:

  It was just over a week ago that China’s long-awaited national ordinance on openness of information took effect, mandating “active disclosure” by local governments of a whole range of policy-related information. While some observers have suggested the ordinance could be a historic step forward in bringing about greater government transparency in China, others have questioned the ability and willingness of party leaders to carry out the legislation’s mandates.

  Media reports this week suggest we may now have our first test case of citizens using the ordinance to access information about government behavior. According to a report in China’s Legal Daily newspaper, Huang Youjian (黄由俭), Deng Bosong (邓柏松) and three other plaintiffs from Rucheng County (汝城县) in the Hunan city of Chenzhou (郴州) have filed a case in a local court demanding the release of information about the restructuring of the county’s water utility.

  » Read more
  • May 9, 2008 9:01 AM

• Video: Don’t Be Too CNN

  

  In the latest Internet video — this time a musical one — criticizing Western media’s biased coverage of recent unrest in Tibet, Mu Rongxuan takes on CNN. Mu opens the video by singing, “That day on the Internet I saw a picture from CNN of the unrest in Tibet I thought the picture showed the whole truth, but then, little by little, I realized it was a fake.”

  Also, see this report from News.com.au.

  » Read more
  • April 15, 2008 11:19 AM

• Website Petition Takes on Biased Western Media

  

  AFP is reporting that as of Saturday 1.19 million people, mostly inside China, had signed a petition at Sina.com condemning the Western media’s reports of recent unrest in and around Tibet:

  The appeal repeats Chinese government statements in referring to “violent crimes of beating, smashing, looting and arson” in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, last month.

  “Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event. Please sign your name here to lodge your strong protest,” it says.

  The Chinese government has in recent weeks organised for the state press to heavily criticise the Western media over its coverage of the unrest, while denying foreign reporters access to the protest areas.

  

  » Read more
  • April 5, 2008 6:09 PM

• The Challenges of Reporting in China

  

  The BBC’s Asia bureau chief Paul Danahar, who is based in Beijing, responds to a flood of criticism from Chinese readers over Tibet and other issues after the news services website became accessible in China for the first time in years:

  …When suddenly the English language edition of the BBC News website (the Chinese one is still blocked by the government) became accessible in China, some readers here, but by no means all, took exception to what they saw.

  People like Xie Huai from Zhengzhou e-mailed the site saying: “I often find that stories about China diverge from the truth. Why?”

  The answer to the question lies in the word “truth”. Only now are many Chinese getting the chance to debate the “truth” of foreign media publications (and only those not in Chinese) because only now are they getting a point of view on some important topics at odds with the one provided by the state-controlled media.

  See also Sydney Herald Tribune’s report: China Eases Wikipedia Controls

  » Read more
  • April 3, 2008 10:21 PM

• Dharma Bummin’

  

  The recent riots and protests in and around Tibet have echoed around the world — they’ve also caused a new rash of metajournalism, that is journalism about journalism. Jonathon Ansfield has written a lengthy, two-part post on Melinda Liu’s Newsweek blog, Countdown to Beijing, in which he recounts his recent problem-filled journey into Gansu province to cover unrest there. “Correspondents emerged from Tibetan hot zones,” he writes, “with more first-hand coverage of being shut out of those areas than of the areas themselves.” Ansfield’s piece is a little of both:

  Been playing cat-and-mouse out West on the Tibet beat, and the cliche resonates on a few too many levels. When your movements are cut off and cornered by shifting, shrinking boundaries, you’re prone to feel like just some lab rat in an uncontrolled test of reform. It’s very hard to prove any side right, and much easier to slip into the trap of going wrong.

  Dharma Bummin’ 1 here, and Dharma Bummin’ 2 here.

  » Read more
  • April 2, 2008 12:25 PM

• China’s English-Language Media on Tibet

  

  China is using its press machine to counter accusations of “cultural genocide” in Tibet. China.org.cn has a Tibet portal, “Lhasa Unrest in China,” up and running to keep English-language readers abreast of the latest Tibet news. A quick glance at the site at the time this blog post was written seems to reveal a two-pronged strategy: blame recent riots in Tibet on outside influences, i.e. the Dalai Lama clique (see Dalai Lama Clique Planning Suicide Attacks), and emphasize that inside Tibet things are returning to normal (see Restoring Faith and the picture below of the happy, smiling Tibetan women).

  

  In another Tibet-related article available at China.org.cn, a team of Belgians, Serge Pairoux, Secretary-General of the Belgium-China Cultural Center, and Henri Lederhandler, Vice Chairman of the Belgium-China Economic and Commercial Council, argue that Tibet was essentially always part of China and that before the communist liberation of Tibet life there for the average person was Hobbesian — nasty, brutish and short. They also blame the recent unrest in Tibet on the Dalai Lama clique, and criticize the Western media’s biased coverage of events.

  Tibet has fascinated the world for centuries and inspired many romantic myths and legends. The remote mountainous region and the exotic character of Tibetan Buddhism have stirred the western imagination.

  But pre-1949 Tibet was not the imagined paradise of people living a simple, happy life going about their religious activities. Society was in the grip of a type of feudal serfdom under which politics was intertwined with religion. Temples obstructed all reform; nobles ruthlessly defended their privileges and constantly intrigued against each other. In the old Tibet, serfs were traded and exchanged like pack animals. They were regarded as “horses that can talk”, not human beings.

  Today the Dalai Lama is seen as a kind, attractive person; a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. But until 1949, the Dalai Lama was the speaker and representative of Tibet’s feudal system.

  Under feudalism, temples and sutra schools forced families with two boys to send one of them to become a monk. Until 1951, 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate.

  The China Daily picked up the article and drew on a patchwork of other sources, including a piece from The Economist (deemed unbiased presumably), in order to bolster China’s official position on recent events in Tibet, namely that Tibet should not be independent, that the Dalai Lama clique masterminded the riots, along with some “influential US political groups,” and that the recent unrest was not merely the peaceful protesting of monks. At the end of the article the reporter cites a letter to the editor published in the South African newspaper Business Day to argue that the Dalai Lama should not be seen by Tibetans as a savior — after all Tibet was “a backward feudal region with its people enslaved” before the communists liberated it; plus the Dalai Lama has no “democratic credentials.”

  For more news about the alleged planned suicide attacks on the part of Tibetan monks see this Howard French article in the IHT.

  Also, Reuters is reporting today that an ethnic guerrilla group in northern Myanmar caught two “key” Tibetan political activists and deported them to China.

  » Read more
  • April 1, 2008 4:39 PM

• Chinese Netizens Say, ‘Big Brother, Please Watch Me,’ According to Pew Report

  

  A new Pew Internet Project report indicates that most Chinese internet users think that web content should be controlled and monitored and that the government should be in charge of doing it, James Fallows writes on his Atlantic Monthly blog. This from the report:

  Most readers of the Western press are aware of efforts by the Chinese government to control what its people can read and discuss online. Outside observers and human-rights groups monitor and criticize the government’s actions and publicize the techniques through which technologically savvy Chinese internet users can work around restrictions. Some analysts also track and interpret the government’s subtler shifts in balance that seek to encourage internet development while still exercising control over it…

  [O]ther evidence suggests that many Chinese citizens do not share Western views of the internet. The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the internet.

  Fallows recently wrote an article on China’s Great Firewall here that is worth reading if you haven’t yet.

  Also, here is a link to the report, which was written by Fallows’ wife, Deborah Fallows.

  » Read more
  • March 31, 2008 2:53 PM

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