From the Christian Science Monitor, a report on the harassment of independent candidates running for local People’s Congress positions: The polls closed at noon and by 2 p.m. Yao Lifa was hunkered down inside a restaurant with a group of first-time candidates, waiting to hear who had been elected to their local assembly. Mr. Yao […]
Read MoreFormer actors from the soap opera Dream of the Red Mansions recently started their own blogs on Sina Web. Almost 20 years after the show was first produced, many people are still very interested in the stories, how the actors were chosen for the soap opera, and how the former actors make a living today. […]
Read MoreFrom DefenseNews.com: China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources. It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful. But the combination of […]
Read MoreRadio Free Asia reports on the growing defending rights (weiquan) movement in China: Lawyers and political analysts note a new awareness of civil rights among ordinary Chinese”epitomized by the failed attempt in July 2005 by villagers in Taishi, Guangdong province, to recall their elected village chief amid corruption allegations. A new adjective is being applied […]
Read MoreFrom ESWN blog: The following is a translation of a blog post by Southern Weekend reporter Fu Jianfeng (ÂÇÖÂâëÈîã). This is about the FoxConn-versus-China Business News case that Fu and his colleagues were working on, but never go to publish it after a ban was issued on further coverage. So this is yet another case […]
Read MoreFrom Reuters: China will train 620 endangered Siberian tigers to survive in the wild as part of a controversial effort to return them to the country’s shrinking northeast forests, state media reported on Monday. The captive-bred tigers would be taken from enclosures in Harbin, capital of HeilongjiangÔºàȪëÈæôʱüÔºâprovince, to a 15-hectare (37-acre) fenced patch of forest […]
Read MoreFrom Financial Times: An attempt by China’s Xinhua news agency to tighten controls on foreign rivals has sparked fierce criticism abroad and rumbles of discontent at home – but no trace of such negativism finds its way into the agency’s own reports. While international agencies such as Reuters have covered Beijing’s defence of the new […]
Read MoreA two-month old blog attracted more than 150,000 clicks and over 3,000 comments. Its daily visitors reached as many as 5,000. This is not a blog about sex or private lives. It’s about social problems, economic reforms and bureaucracy, and it’s written by a motorcycle taxi driver who never went to college, and whose business […]
Read MoreNaomi Li interviews Ma Jun, the man behind the China Water Pollution Map, an impressive online water survey that aims to catalogue and make public levels of water pollution–and the companies responsible for it–throughout China: NL: There are 2,500 offending companies named on your website? MJ: Yes. I hope those companies we have named will […]
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Here you are, all alone in Tongxian. How do you stay in the loop?
[Turns to his laptop] Let me show you QQ. [Clicks open QQ] Look at all these chatrooms. Here’s my “gossip” (Â∞èÈÅìxiaodao) chatroom – 159 contacts. Here’s my “in-depth” (shendu) chat room – 198 contacts. In all these chatrooms combined, there are at least 500 journalists. Many are from party newspapers and a lot are young reporters. Of those, at least 200 do investigative reporting. I can’t possibly keep up with them all.
Would it be easy for a foreign reporter to join one of these chatrooms?
Well, you’d have to be invited. Generally, no one would want to invite a foreign journalist. It’s anti-productive. We all have very different backgrounds, but we do share a general consensus. We don’t want to see social upheaval. We rather see our country to proceed toward democracy in orderly way, step by step..
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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