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Click on the link to get the full story. These are published by Danwei which reports on general everyday life in China.
 Post nationalism The wags behind Bullog.cn, an aggregator of liberal Chinese blogs, are selling T-shirts on auction website Taobao. You can buy a Bullog T-shirt here. Or see if you get any reaction from angry youths on the street when you wear the shirt in the photo to the left (click here to buy). The shirt says 'I heart foreign countries'. The shirt is a parody of the 'I heart China' T-shirts that patriotic people have been wearing since the riots in Tibet and through the disastrous Olympic torch relay, Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Games. This article is from Danwei.org I love foreign countries |
 Giving them control of their land? The Chinese government yesterday formally ratified its decisions about boosting the country's rural economy. Although the official communiqués about the decisions were rather short on specifics, the new policies seem to include allowing peasants to sell or rent the rights to their property. The China Daily put it like this:
The New York Times article linked below is a good overview of the issues at stake. Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Rural reform approved |
 The Beijing News October 10, 2008 The Beijing News reported today that a senior at August First High School died during a 1,200 meter run yesterday. The run is a requirement at the school, which is located in Beijing's Haidian District. The cause of death has not yet been determined. Last week, the Ministry of Education released its "Sunny Sports long-distance winter run" program (阳光体育冬季长跑), which requires the country's schools and universities to organize runs for students. The program is intended to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which takes place one year from now on October 1, 2009, so students are supposed to run distances that are multiples of 60 kilometers: 120 km for elementary students, 180 km for junior high students, and 240 km for senior high and university students. This equates to 1,000, 1,500, and 2,000 meters per day, respectively. Critics argue that the plan puts politics ahead of students' health, and that a one-size-fits-all training program is unlikely to benefit everyone because of individual physical differences. In response, the Ministry of Education told a press conference yesterday that the "Sunny Sports Run," is only a recommendation, not an order, and is intended to be a goal for students to accomplish. There is no time limit for how long the run should last, and students who are physically unfit for such exercise should not be compelled to participate. The controversy should really come as no suprise, because the Ministry of Education has a history of issuing policy "recommendations" that at first glance appear to be compulsory. In June, 2007, a plan to bring coed dancing to school physical fitness programs raised an uproar before the Ministry emphasized that it was only voluntary, and earlier this year public opposition forced it to back down from a proposal to make Peking Opera part of the required curriculum. The Beijing News quoted teachers at a city school who complained that there was no space to have all the students run. They also said that students are usually too tired to focus in class after running. Beijing has barred schools from allowing students to run in streets and alleys following reports of students involved in traffic accidents in other parts of the country. Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Controversy over compulsory running after high school death |
 Everyone's a journalist Mention "participatory media," and what comes to mind are blog conventions, crowd-sourced op-ed columns, Twitter feeds from disaster zones, and citizen journalists typing out eyewitness accounts of local, breaking situations. A slick, full-color magazine sponsored by a state media group does not. Enter Blog Weekly (), a new biweekly magazine that uses China's army of bloggers to report on current events. The magazine's lofty ideals are on display in an ad was placed in a number of traditional news weeklies. Noting that 500 blogger-journalists reported on the nomination of Barack Obama and Joe Biden at the US Democratic National Convention in August, the ad speaks of the power of grass-roots media to change society:
Blog Weekly is not the first print publication to recognize the value of web content, but it might be the first legitimate effort. Earlier attempts to print the Internet, such as Net News Weekly or Blogs, employed the dodgy strategy of taking an existing magazine licensed for an underperforming market, dressing it in a web-related motif, and filling it with downloaded material. Many traditional media outlets supplement their own content with the odd blog post, and Vista (看天下), a Beijing-based magazine which, like Blog Weekly, is sponsored by the Ningxia Daily Group, uses Internet commentary to spice up its digest of the country's major newspapers and magazines. But the new magazine is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the wealth of content available online: according to a magazine employee, it currently is the only publication authorized by GAPP to draw its content exclusively from blogs.  Blog Weekly, October 15, 2008 Adopting the format of a typical news weekly, the magazine divides content into sections for current events, business, society, and entertainment. The most noticeable differences are that every article has a source URL attached, and appended to most articles are a few quotes from netizens that presumably appeared in the comments section of the original post. When blogs first took off in China, journalists were quick to adopt them as a way to express themselves outside of the confines of the self-censoring mainstream press, and journalist-bloggers continue to be a force behind online public opinion. Blog Weekly takes advantage of the expertise and access of some of those bloggers in this issue. The first story in the "Live" section (mainly eyewitness reports) is a set of field notes written by Chengdu Commercial Press reporter Huang Xiuli after she returned from the scene of a mudslide in Shanxi. The accident on September 8, which according to official reports at the time had caused 34 deaths (that number has since risen to 261), was blamed on torrential rains. In the course of her investigation, however, Huang learned from local villagers that the rain had been light that evening; she also reported other contradictory information and brush-offs from the authorities. The Blog Weekly article is sourced to Huang's blog post, which has been deleted from her Hexun-hosted blog. Space and content restrictions in the Chinese media are issues that columnists and reporters deal with daily, and one solution has been for journalists whose work has been edited for length or content to post "uncut" or "behind the scenes" versions of their articles to their blogs, where length is not an issue and content restrictions are comparatively lax. Blog Weekly can make use of these expanded versions, but as a print magazine, it faces the same constraints as traditional media outlets. Huang's field notes, for example, filled three separate blog posts that ran into the thousands of words. Even though the magazine gave the story four pages (longish by the standards of Chinese news weeklies), it still had to make heavy edits to the original. To the magazine's credit, those edits maintained Huang's general picture of obstruction, evasion, and collusion on the part of the authorities, and the sense that locals distrusted the official explanation. Similarly, an account by an Oriental Morning Post journalist of why he decided to mention Sanlu by name in his report on the melamine milk scandal had its overall integrity preserved even as it was slashed by two-thirds to fit onto two pages. The magazine's lead time may allow it to gauge the prevailing winds and print controversial material after it has been given tacit approval by the central authorities. There's also a question of copyright and financial compensation. Chinese copyright law allows any article not expressly prohibiting it to be republished so long as the copyright holder is properly compensated. Publications that swipe content often rationalize their actions placing a notice at the front of the magazine inviting authors to contact them for payment. As you might imagine, this does not always work out in practice. If an article's republication escapes the notice of the original copyright holder, the magazine scores free content, but even if it fulfills its obligation to pay bloggers, Blog Weekly may still win by getting bloggers to read it in the hopes of finding their works among its pages. Even in 2008, print confers a legitimacy that online publishing still lacks. Something else to look at will be how the magazine deals with zhuanzai culture — the largely unattributed reposting of articles that sustains China's blogs and forums. For example, one article in this issue credited to "anonymous" describes a beggar who has an astonishing grasp of economics and SWOT analysis. The URL points to a post made on the Dayoo on 11 September that clearly notes that the piece was originally published elsewhere. A little bit mucking around with search terms on Baidu pulls up what looks to be the original, posted by someone called "mossystone" to the XMFish boards on 25 July. Unattributed zhuanzai is a part of life on mainland blogs and forums, even if bloggers themselves often grumble that they're not getting credit for posts that make the leap to popularity. But does a print magazine have a responsibility to uncover the original source? The copyright issue gets a little thornier when a blog post is only an intermediary source, as in the case of translations. Examples:
Examining a few other articles reveals the limitations of blog-based media, at least at the present time. First-hand reportage published outside traditional media channels does exist, as the field notes of Huang Xiuli and the Oriental Morning Post reporter show, but the majority of current events blogs in China tend to be commentaries on the news. Sourcing a magazine from opinion pieces means that readers may not have the background information to put the arguments into context. Blog Weekly deals with this problem in two ways. In-depth reports like the cover feature on the Sanlu melamine milk scandal start off with a short original summary of the situation. For other topics, the URL for the "blog post" actually points to an online edition of an article from a conventional publication: a profile of Madonna in Mangazine, a complaint about Beijing subway crowding from novelist Qiu Huadong in Southern Weekly, or a profile of Huiyuan boss Zhu Xinli (inexplicably re-edited into the first-person) from The Founder, to cite three examples in this issue. So as a grass-roots news magazine, Blog Weekly is not entirely successful. That aspiration may not even be possible in China, where regulations require reporters to obtain official GAPP certification and unlicensed "citizen journalists" run risks by their very existence. The magazine does offer 0.5 yuan per character for first-run eyewitness blog accounts of major incidents (up to 4000 characters in length), so it will be interesting to see what stories it features in the future. Like a traditional current affairs magazine, Blog Weekly is geared toward a general readership. In your correspondent's eyes, it may appeal to the same audience that reads yWeekend, a Beijing Youth Daily-affiliated newspaper that explains the latest online memes and digs behind the week's most controversial stories through interviews with reporters and analysis of Internet commentary. But that's a weekly newspaper that sells for 1 yuan and has a distinct editorial personality, not to mention original reporting. By comparison, Blog Weekly is bland, expensive at 8 yuan, and at least two weeks behind the pace of Internet public opinion, which is notoriously mercurial in the first place. It does have lots of pretty pictures, which is a plus. Can it succeed? If it finds an audience and tailors its story selection to their tastes, it may. Participatory media may be the solution here, too: readers are rewarded 100 yuan if a story they recommend gets printed, and additional bonuses will be given out for audience favorites. If enough people are looking for a print summary of substantive online discussion or a record of what bloggers are talking about, Blog Weekly just might have a future. A trial issue of Blog Weekly was published in September; starting with the 15 October issue, it will be published on the 1st and 15th of every month. Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Grass-roots journalism meets the modern news weekly |
 Beijing Morning Post October 9, 2008 Historian Yan Chongnian, who was slapped at a book signing by someone who reportedly took issue with his sympathy for the Qing Dynasty, has been a hot topic of conversation both on and off-line for the past few days. Follow-up reports say that the attacker is facing a 1,000 yuan fine and 10 days in jail for the two slaps he delivered, but many netizens seem to have as little sympathy for the old man as for Sanlu milk powder. "Traitorous" quotes attributed to Yan circulating on BBSs continue add fuel to an already hot debate. In an interview printed in the Beijing Morning Post today, Yan denied uttering those quotes, which include praise for the Manchu Kangxi Emperor as being "greater than any Han Chinese emperor," an assessment that Qing's "word prison" (文字狱), the imprisonment and persecution of dissenters, "ensured social stability," and poems bemoaning the downfall of Qing dynasty. Here is translation of the interview.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org The slapped historian speaks |
This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. See all job ads or place a job ad. Care for Children Special Needs School is looking for a qualified Special Needs teacher to take over a class of international students from 1 January 2009. Our children vary in ages from 7-13 with mild to severe learning difficulties. We are need of a dynamic teacher who will grow with the students and the school to create a loving and stable learning environment for them. Applicants must have the following qualifications:
Roles include:
For more information please email meryl@careforchildren.com.cn This article is from Danwei.org Beijing: Special Education Needs Teacher |
 Yangtse Evening Post October 8, 2008 The Chinese people usually take deep pride, sometimes unduly so, in the so-called "traditional Chinese virtues" (中华民族传统美德). One thing that these virtues dictate is that one must think first of the needs of children and the elderly (尊老爱幼) because they require more care than you do. But not every Chinese person is happy to follow that old commandment. A front page headline in today's Yangtse Evening Post heralds an article reporting that a young woman in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, refused to give up her bus seat to senior and insisted that she had the right to do so. Here's a translation of an excerpt:
The "never give up your seat group" turns out to be a online discussion group registered on Douban, a SNS website. The group, which shared a belief that it's unfair for the young to give away their seats to the old, has launched a campaign calling for more people to join the movement to "never give up your seat." Complaints and reasoning that can be found on their pages include:
They also have a manifesto for their cause:
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Screw the elderly, I'm keeping my bus seat |
 Esquire, October 2008 The cover of the October issue of Esquire features Donnie Yen as Saint Sebastian by way of Muhammad Ali. Yen (), a Hong Kong action star and fight choreographer currently on-screen in the supernatural love story Painted Skin, is known for his explosive fight scenes and the mix of martial arts forms he employs in them. The Esquire cover feature examines his on-screen violence against the backdrop of a serious social issue: the effects of violent films on the youth. In what the magazine describes as a coup, it obtained a letter written in Yen's own hand urging young people to take the road of peace (see below). Editor-in-chief Dou Jiangming, who replaces Wang Feng with this issue, comments on the feature in a meandering column addressing youth, violence, and revenge that quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., poet Bai Hua, and the Shiji:
The feature itself follows a personal and professional bio of Yen with a Q&A in which he discusses topics ranging from his upbringing to why wushu won't be an Olympic sport. Yen makes a distinction between purely skill-based martial arts like boxing, and Chinese wushu, which is tied up with cultural issues and divided into sects, each adding its own aura of mystery. The cover shot is a conscious homage to the famous April 1968 Esquire cover featuring a martyred Muhammad Ali (named the third greatest magazine cover of the last 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors). Peter Pen, the feature's editor, describes the shoot in a short note:
That letter was reprinted at the start of the feature: A letter to a young person who met a violent endby Donnie Yen / Esquiredear friend: Your departure fills me with deep sadness and remorse. As someone with a true love of Chinese kung fu, I am acutely aware that violence can mislead people to savage and desperate actions, and how fascination with violence has led untold numbers of young people to pay a heavy price, or even lose their lives. But some situations have no need for a violent resolution; kindness and humanity is altogether possible. In many cases, the use of violence will not only fail to solve a problem, it will make it even worse. And once it is used, there is no taking it back. Violence begets more violence rather than bringing justice.  Donnie's handwritten letter The highest level of Chinese martial arts is harmony among all things. It stresses both inward and outward cultivation and possesses a wealth of meaning and profound implications. It is the power of spirit and of faith. Violence belongs to a novice's misunderstanding of martial arts and advocates a competition of reckless force; there is no way for it to ascend to a contest on a spiritual level. The true way to solve a problem is through an attitude of tolerance, patience, magnanimity, and humility, and above all by using a spirit of harmony to resolve discord. Looking through the pages of human history, we see far too many people who have shed their blood or lost their lives due to war and aggression. They believed in violent martial arts and hoped to use its great power to win victory over others, thereby achieving vainglory and satiation. But ultimately they discovered that this is a fearsome snare permeated with all of our greed, desire, bigotry, and inhumanity, a glittering enticement that pulls humanity into an inescapable pit. Many are those who have succumbed to it through violence. Chinese martial arts have a long history, so we should understand all the more what real power truly is, and what our stance should be when trouble nears. Using this opportunity given me by Esquire, I hope that your friends, those young, violent movie lovers, will take this bitter lesson to heart, and will find better fortune along their road in the future. Donnie Yen Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Donnie Yen meditates on violence |
 The Beijing News October 7, 2008 Yan Chongnian (阎崇年), a scholar specializing in Qing history and Manchu culture, was attacked on October 5 when he was in Wuxi to promote his new book, The Kangxi Emperor. The prolific author was smacked twice in the face, allegedly because the attacker disagreed with his historical views. Yan is the director of the Manchu studies department at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and is a guest host on the CCTV-10 TV show Lecture Room. That program, which focuses on Chinese history and traditional culture, has made him a celebrity, as it has for other academics including Yu Dan, arguably the most popular exponent of Confucius ever. After first being disclosed in a post on the Tianya BBS written by someone who claimed to have witnessed the incident, the news made the front page of The Beijing News today:
The newspaper also quoted the attacker's brother, who said that the attacker "disagreed with Yan's historical views but had no chance to debate him. He just couldn't control his impulses under the circumstances." Yan himself couldn't be reached by the newspaper for comments. "Traitorous" words attributed to Yan can be found on the Internet, but it is not clear whether he actually said them, or in what context. Here are a few of those statements:
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Historian slapped in the face for pro-Manchu views |
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The rectory of Fuzhou's Fanchuanpu church is making way for road construction. This video shows part of its first 80-meter journey. Then it will rotate 90 degrees and slide over to its final destination. Photos here and here. This article is from Danwei.org A 1,500-ton building on the move |
 The Beijing News October 6, 2008 Beijing's tourism hit a new peak over the week-long National Day holiday, which concluded on Sunday. According to The Beijing News, 5.25 billion yuan in tourism revenue was generated from the 2.35 million tourists who visited the city last week. The year-on-year of growth of tourist volume and tourism revenue are 22% and 27% respectively. Among Beijing's numerous tourist spots, the Olympic Green topped the list as the most-visited destination: a total of 2.42 million people visited the park last week. It was followed by the Forbidden City, which scored 625,000 visitors. According to the newspaper, "many tourists said that because they were not able to come during the Olympic Games, they hoped that the National Day holiday could make up for their loss." It goes without saying that the strict security policy had kept many potential visitors out of the city during the Olympic Games. According to news reports, gross retail sales in Beijing during the holiday reached 420 million yuan, with 115 million yuan coming from restaurants. Newly married couples were one of the factors that contributed to holiday market prosperity. "Many newlyweds [this year] chose to get their marriage licenses during the Olympic Games and hold their ceremonies during the golden week," said an anonymous functionary quoted in The Beijing News. The paper also reported that sales of home appliances enjoyed a double-fold increase during the holiday, but home sales moved in the opposite direction, falling 72% versus the same period last year. The Beijing Youth Daily reported that over 4,000 plain-clothed officers had been sent to patrol major streets and venues during the holiday, making more than 370 arrests and busting 23 criminal gangs. That paper also cited data from Beijing's Public Health Department that showed that 3,587 people reported being bitten by dogs during the holiday, a slight increase over last year's 3,435 dog bites. Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Recapping the National Holiday |
 The Founder, issue #1 With the economy looking increasingly uncertain, take your mind off the turbulent stock market by looking at two new business magazines devoted to corporate success: The Founder and Rich Weekly. The inaugural issue of The Founder (创业家) features a cover story on entrepreneur-of-the-moment Zhu Xinli, who explains why he decided to sell his fruit juice company Huiyuan to Coca-Cola. The acquisition faces pressure both from the government's new anti-trust law, which might apply in this case should the resulting company control too much of the beverage market, and from segments of the public who fear that Coca-Cola's first action upon acquiring Huiyuan would be to eliminate the brand altogether. Zhu's been criticized for selling off the company he built with his bare hands over the course of sixteen long years. In this issue, he defends his decision in a statement that suggests he's taken the lessons of The Art of War to heart:
This issue includes profiles of other entrepreneurs, and the first few pages contain congratulatory remarks from famous domestic businessmen (see here for a collection). Magazine president Niu Wenwen served as editor of China Entrepreneur from 1999 through this year. Writing about the launch, Niu grants that it might seem foolish to start up a magazine devoted to entrepreneurship during an economic downturn, but he notes that Fortune Magazine was founded in 1930, four months after the market crash on Black Tuesday. This is not the first magazine to bear the name 创业家: an earlier incarnation was published by provincial government of Hunan under the English title Entrepreneur (registration number CN43-1351/D), but that seems to have folded in 2004. The current magazine is published out of Beijing (CN11-5747/F). Will it have more staying power its predecessor? Maybe in 75 years we'll be looking back on The Founder as one of the venerable institutions born at the start of Great Depression II.  Style supplement  Rich Weekly, October 2008 The test launch of Rich Weekly (富) came included as a free supplement with a mid-September issue of China Newsweek. Published out of Changchun (registration number CN22-1378/F) with editorial offices in Beijing, Rich is made up of two separate sections: the main, business-oriented magazine, and a Style supplement, which focuses on travel and lifestyle topics. The cover of the October issue promises strategies for cashing in on the economic crisis, which allows them to pull out this hoary chestnut:
The magazine is surprisingly optimistic about the future, particularly in light of its rundown of 2008's unfortunate events:
Rich Weekly claims to have a website but whether because of cost-cutting or some other reason it doesn't appear to be up. This article is from Danwei.org New business magazines try to make the best of a bad situation |
 Fake Fapiao Inc. From July 22 until September 20, your correspondent recorded every spam mobile phone text message received by my China Mobile number by forwarding the messages to a Twitter account. There were 114 spam messages over the three month period. You can see the messages at Twitter.com/ChinaSpam. Most of the messages were from real estate developers and agents, home tutor services (especially those offering foreign English teachers), one particular Beijing nightclub, and companies offering fapiao, the tax invoices that allow a company in China to write off expenses against tax. This type of spam is the target of frequent government clampdowns—the service is illegal—so many of the spammers write the Chinese characters as for fapiao as "发*漂" or "fa-票" or use other character combinations to get through the filters that China's mobile operators use to prevent this type of spam. Email spammers use similar tricks: see for example the JPG that was attached to a blank spam message offering the same service from an organization that calls itself "Fapiao Agency Company Ltd." Things have changed a little in the last few years: In 2004, I collected mobile phone spam messages over a period of three months. The majority of them were for smuggled cars and cigarettes, but there were also messages advertising the services of hit men, prostitutes and black market gun dealers. Not a single such message in 2008. But the Beijing nightclub China Doll has done a stellar job of cluttering up my mobile phone's inbox in both English and Chinese. This article is from Danwei.org Tax invoice spam |
 Former China Wall Street Journal correspondent Leslie T. Chang has written a book about migrant workers called Factory Girls. With a wonderfully light touch, Chang describes the social and economic factors behind the largest mass movement of people in history—the urbanization of China's rural population. As the name suggests, Factory Girls focuses on female migrant workers who make up the majority of the work force in most of southern China's factories. In particular the book tells the stories of two migrant women who became friends of the author: Wu Chunming is an ambitious go-getter who falls for pyramid schemes, narrowly avoids being drafted into service of ill repute at a massage parlor, starts her own company, keeps a diary and constantly re-invents herself; Min remains a factory employee throughout the period recounted in the book, but does manage to get off the assembly line, the worst paid place to work. Chang spent several years getting to know her subjects and found herself increasingly interested in her own family history, which she traces back to an ancestor named Zhang Hualong who migrated to Jilin Province in what was then called Manchuria. The author herself was born in the United States, and her family's story is one of moving around. As she writes, "the history of a family begins when a person leaves home", and she gracefully sets the progress of her migrant worker friends against her own family history. Below is an excerpt from the chapter titled 'To die poor is a sin' from Factory Girls. Factory Girls is published Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. This except from the book is republished with permission. You can read a review of the book by Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Newsweek here, and buy the book on the Random House website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders. The excerpt below starts with a translation of a diary entry written by Wu Chunming. To die poor is a sinby Leslie T. Chang
The first time Wu Chunming went out she did not tell her parents. It was the summer of 1992 and to migrate was something bold and dangerous. In her village in Hunan Province, it was said that girls who went to the city would be tricked into brothels and never heard from again. Chunming was seventeen years old that summer. She had finished middle school and was peddling fruits and vegetables in a city near home; she migrated with a cousin who was still in school. The two girls borrowed money for train tickets to Dongguan and found jobs in a factory that made paint for toys. The smell of the chemicals gave them headaches, and they returned home after two months as broke as before. Chunming went out again the following spring. Her parents objected, and argued, and cried. But when she decided to leave anyway, with a few friends from nearby villages, her mother borrowed money for her train fare. Guangdong in 1993 was even more chaotic than it is today. Migrants from the countryside flooded the streets looking for work, sleeping in bus stations and under bridges. The only way to find a job was to knock on factory doors, and Chunming and her friends were turned away from many doors before they were hired at the Guotong toy factory. Ordinary workers there made one hundred yuan a month, or about twelve dollars; to stave off hunger, they bought giant bags of instant noodles and added salt and boiling water. "We thought if we ever made two hundred yuan a month," Chunming said later, "we would be perfectly happy." After four months, Chunming jumped to another factory, but left soon after a fellow worker said her cousin knew of better jobs in Shenzhen. Chunming and a few friends traveled there, spent the night under a highway overpass, and met the girl's cousin the next morning. He brought them to a hair salon and took them upstairs, where a heavily made-up young woman sat on a massage bed waiting for customers. Chunming was terrified at the sight. "I was raised very traditionally," she said. "I thought everyone in that place was bad and wanted me to be a prostitute. I thought that once I went in there, I would turn bad too." The girls were told that they should stay and take showers in a communal stall, but Chunming refused. She walked back down the stairs, looked out the front door, and ran, abandoning her friends and the suitcase that contained her money, a government-issued identity card, and a photograph of her mother. Footsteps came up behind her. She turned in to one alley and then another, and the footsteps stopped. Chunming ran into a yard and found a deserted chicken coop in back. She climbed into the coop and hid there, all day and all night. The next morning, her arms laced with mosquito bites, Chunming went into the street and knelt on the sidewalk to beg for money, but no one gave her anything. A passerby brought her to the police station; without the name or address of the hair salon, the police couldn't help her either. They gave her twenty yuan for bus fare back to her factory. The bus driver dropped her off only partway back to Dongguan. Chunming started to walk, and a man on the street followed her. She spotted a young woman in a factory uniform and asked if she could sneak into her factory for the night. The young woman borrowed a worker's ID card and brought Chunming in, where she hid that night in a shower stall. In the morning, Chunming stole clean pants and a T-shirt that were hanging out to dry in the bathroom and climbed the factory gate to get out. By then she had not eaten in two days. A bus driver bought her a piece a bread and gave her a lift back to Dongguan, where her cousin and his wife worked. Chunming did not tell them what had happened to her. Instead she wandered the streets. She befriended a cook on a construction site who let her eat with the other workers, and at night she sneaked into friends' factory dorms to sleep. Without an ID card, she could not get a new job. After a month of wandering, Chunming saw an ad for assembly-line jobs at the Yinhui toy factory. She found an ID card that someone had lost or left behind and used it to get hired. Officially she was Tang Congyun, born in 1969. That made her five years older than she really was, but no one looked closely at such things. For years after she left the factory, she received letters addressed to Tang Congyun. Chunming never found out who she was. This article is from Danwei.org To die poor is a sin |
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Beijing rock music enfant terrible He Yong (何勇) in 1994: a short monologue and a live performance of the song 'Girl, Beautiful' (姑娘漂亮). This article is from Danwei.org He Yong in 1994 |
 Making development zones attractive This article was contributed by Iacob Koch-Weser. Word has it the wild west of Shaanxi province has spawned a new "gunslinger." He's not a double-dealing coal maverick or a guanxi-savvy cadre - he's just a freelancer who spices up government reports as quickly and accurately as a Colt .45. By penning a few thousand words to promote the New Development Zones mushrooming around the capital Xi'an, he is making a real killing. The archetypal "gunslinger" is Yu Menghong, who was profiled this week in The Economic Observer. A graduate of Journalism from Zhejiang University, he started his career back east at an economics newspaper until he followed his girlfriend out west in 2005. He worked at Xi'an's largest paper for a while, a job that many other writers in a saturated market would have been more than happy to have. Yet Yu soon decided that his talents didn't suit the writing and interviewing style of a popular daily. Rather than consider a move to the burgeoning private sector, Yu realized that the dusty info machines of the government were in dire need of fresh talent. Midway through each year, districts and counties around Xi'an prepare to publish reports about the annual achievements of the New Development Zones in their area. Because this PR gimmick is a key to attracting capital and resources, local governments often allot up to tens of millions from the obscure depths of their coffers in support of the cause. That means high payouts for both the newspapers who allot space for the reports, as well as for those outsourced to write them. When it comes to things like environmental protection, cutting-edge R&D, and efficient use of resources, Xi'an's outskirts don’t exactly represent the vanguard of the PRC. That's where the "gunslinger" comes in: armed with hyperboles, allusions, and poetic élan, he adds that extra something to gloss over the imperfections. Consider the concluding lines to one of Yu’s more sublime pieces about the Qujiang New Development Zone:
This may not seem all that impressive, until you consider that Yu is typing up these articles at a pace of 2 x 3000 characters a night. Plus, there are subtle nuances: "It has to suit a newspaper style by adhering to journalistic standards," Yu says. "At the same time, it has to present the achievements of government work...It can't just be well-versed; it needs show familiarity with the government system and with the people at higher and lower levels within it." What makes the task tricky is that the targeted reader is not your average Xi'an noodle house customer. We’re talking about the big shots from the public sector, the ones who are chauffeured around in lustrous Audis while jabbering into their cell phones. Enchanted by Yu's eloquence, the hope is that they might just spread their limited wealth to Development Zone X rather than Y. Whether that actually happens or not doesn’t much concern Yu. As a "gunslinger" in the "advertising war," he is contracted by officials from various Zones. His salary of more than 10,000 yuan per article is on par with any feature journalist at the papers he used to work at. That said, he is a bit dissatisfied that his writing talents aren't accruing more symbolic capital. He concedes that he's envious of the "journalists who do real news." As The Economic Observer puts it: "He can only console himself by saying that writing is just another job to make some cash." The smell of money seems to have prompted "gunslingers" of other shapes and sizes to appear on China’s job market. Take, for instance, the “exam gunslinger" who says he can ace tests for you on demand. During a visit to a Tianjin university campus over the winter holidays last year, a journalist from Tianjin's Metro Express was appalled to find a bunch of hand-written ads by "gunslingers" posted on message boards. Strangely enough, there were also plenty of ads by students desperate to employ these brainy assassins to take exams in their place; one student offered up to 2000 yuan for a math test. Evidently, the disparities in both pocket money and learning ability among the student body have opened up this market. It’s always fun to view the rapidly developing, semi-lawless PRC as a wild west of sorts. Such was the tack taken by a hit documentary on UK’s ITV last year, which featured a brawny British businessman with a Cockney accent climbing into mines and hoodwinking merchants in northwest China. That show, of course, was an orientalist farce that aimed to please the English bourgeoisie. Our pen-wielding "gunslinger," whether as writer or test taker, might be a more suitable embodiment of the modern Jessie James. In June, Iacob Koch-Weser took a look at the Chinese edition of National Geographic. Update (October 10): The Economic Observer today published an English translation of the Chinese article linked below: Confessions of a propaganda hitman. Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org In Shaanxi's ad industry, there's a new cowboy in town |
 Hello, Xiaoping! October 1, 2008, marks the 59th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua reports that 190,000 spectators watched the flag-raising ceremony in Tian'anmen Square this morning. This year is also the thirtieth anniversary of the economic and institutional reform policies launched at the end of the 1970s. The Beijing News, which is running an extended series of articles to mark that anniversary, devoted yesterday's feature to the festivities surrounding the 1984 National Day, when the line "Hello, Xiaoping" (小平您好) entered public consciousness. During the National Day parade that year, Peking University students unfurled an unauthorized, hand-made banner greeting China's top leader by his first name. The Beijing News interviewed Guo Jianwei, one of the students who conceived the banner, and Wang Dong, the People's Daily photographer who snapped the most famous image of it. Guo describes how he and his classmates came up with the banner text and how they snuck it into the parade. Wang explains why he was one of only two photojournalists to get a shot of it (the only other known photographs of the banner were taken by He Yanguang, a reporter with the China Youth Daily), and how it almost didn't make it into print. Guo Jianwei: Writing "Hello, Xiaoping" on a BedsheetTBNThe Beijing News: How did you come up with the idea of writing the "Hello Xiaoping" banner? He came back late and we had already finished with the work. He liked doing unusual, unorthodox things, and because he knew that the next day would definitely be televised live, he said that he should write a few words to let everyone in the world see his calligraphy. We all agreed, and began thinking of a slogan. TBN: What slogans did you come up with at first? TBN: So how did you come up with "Hello, Xiaoping?" We felt that we should let the country and the leadership know about our feelings. We went back and forth, and came up with "Hello, Comrade Deng Xiaoping," and then we decided we didn't need the "Deng." TBN: How did the "Comrade" come to be deleted? But after we continued to discuss it, we felt that there was no malice in it; we just wanted to give a friendly greeting to a leader on the part of college students. So we bucked up our courage and got rid of "Comrade," because in the end there wasn't enough room. TBN: How many students were involved? Ultimately, all the male students in the class knew about it. Everyone kept it secret, because our superiors didn't allow us to carry in anything that hadn't been reviewed. TBN: So how did you get the banner in? TBN: The security inspection didn't find it? TBN: How long was the banner up during the parade? TBN: Were you afraid of any consequences? I went to a relative's house in Beijing where I hid out for a few days. TBN: Didn't you know that the People's Daily ran a positive report on the incident the next day? TBN: Did the school say anything to you about bringing in the "Hello, Xiaoping" banner without authorization? TBN: How did people outside the school interpret your action? TBN: Do you think that has anything to do with the era you were living in? TBN: From a historical standpoint, you did something that defined an era. Without "Hello, Xiaoping," you wouldn't be able to go from "Long Live Chairman Mao" to "Fans of Hu and Wen." We unwittingly accomplished something that influenced history, but it was a pure action, something based on our feelings and knowledge at the time. TBN: What effect did it have on your life? Later on, my girlfriend found out about it and said, you were part of that, but now look at you. My current work unit doesn't know about my part in the incident, but we're still proud that we were able to do it. TBN: You said that the photo of "Hello, Xiaoping" taken by People's Daily photographer Wang Dong doesn't show you in it. Are you disappointed? Wang Dong: That photo nearly didn't make it into the paperTBNThe Beijing News: It's said that before the troop review at National Day 1984, you weren't an accredited photojournalist. TBN: At the ceremony, where were you standing to take photos? I had a driver with the agency motor pool set up a platform one meter square and two meters high at the southern end of Jinshui Bridge. I shot the party and state leaders on Tian'anmen Gate with a fixed-angle telephoto lens, and then used a Leica to shoot the parade. TBN: When did the "Hello, Xiaoping" banner appear? TBN: How did you notice the banner? I saw it right when they unfurled it, and after I took a couple photos it was gone, just a few seconds. The other big banners were all well-made and standardized. Even though there were also handwritten signs reading "Long Live the Motherland" and "Celebrate National Day," their handwritten sign was interesting. TBN: Didn't you think they were pretty gutsy? After all, they were addressing Xiaoping directly. TBN: It's said that the photo nearly didn't make it into the papers back then. That day's issue had major news on page 1 and page 4, and it wasn't selected for either page. I was a little disappointed. Bao Weijun, who was head of the Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Department at the time, was a pretty open-minded individual. He said, the photo's good, so run it across two columns on page 2. So it's thanks to Bao Weijun that the photo made it into the paper (Bao later became the deputy editor-in-chief of the People's Daily).  China Youth Daily version, by He Yanguang TBN: What was the reaction when the paper came out the next day? Some people think that anyone could have taken that photo. True, it's a simple photo, and if you were told before hand that the event would happen, anyone could have taken it. But no one told you, so not everyone would have been able to take it. There were several hundred other reporters at the scene, and as far as I know, only China Youth Daily reporter He Yanguang got the shot. I've heard that when Xinhua's photo department summed up the propaganda work for the 35th National Day, it said that the major slip-up in its reporting was that it missed out on the scene of Peking University students holding up a banner reading "Hello, Xiaoping." TBN: That photo brought you quite a bit of accolades, didn't it? TBN: Did the photo have any effect on your life or work? Previous National Day posts on Danwei: The 'national' in National Day, Another National Day, by Gereme R. Barmé Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Celebrating National Day, 1984 |
 In the wake of the melamine milk scandal, there's been renewed attention in China on the benefits of breast-feeding, and media observers have been examining the questionable ways in which dairy companies hawk their products. An article in the Mirror connects those issues to growing concerns over personal privacy. At the end of August, as the NPC Standing Committee was discussing changes to the country's criminal law that would beef up privacy protections, the paper printed a report illustrating how hospitals sell off their patient's personal information. A Mirror reporter interviewed a sales manager for a milk powder producer who described how his company spends several million yuan every year to obtain the personal information of expecting mothers, and millions more to curry favor with hospital administration and staff:
It's not an entirely convincing article, however. It's completely reliant on information provided by one anonymous source, and some of that information seems contradictory: at one point, the sales manager suggests that there are only a few people in a typical large hospital who can access files on new mothers, but later on he gives the large number of people aware of that information as a reason why any investigator would have a difficult time pinning a leak on any one individual. But if it's true, it adds another angle on the pressure that new mothers must be facing from the dairy industry to formula-feed their babies. Hospitals can make 1,000 yuan off one pregnant woman's personal informationby Wang Hongyu / MirrorFor the past few days, the fourth session of the 11th NPC Standing Committee met to discuss revising the criminal law to increase protections of citizen's personal information. yesterday [2008.08.26], a sales manager for a dairy company revealed to this reporter how hospitals make money by selling pregnant women's personal information. "Do you know what people are most interested in new mothers' information?" The interview had just started when the thirty-something sales manager put this question to the reporter. Then, the manager proceeded to answer it in detail. According to the manager, people who purchase personal information from hospitals, particularly information about new mothers, typically sell baby products or provide related services. Those products mainly include milk powder for pregnant women, infant formula, health supplements, disposable diapers, maternity and baby clothes, shoes and hats, cribs, and strollers. Specialized domestic help companies, hair-stylists for mother and baby, companies that take hand and foot imprints or make calligraphy brushes out of the first hair clippings, photo studios, and even companies that help pick a name for the baby will contact the new mother. "These are all services that a healthy baby needs. In the event of an untimely death, infant funeral companies will contact you to cremate the baby, and cemeteries will call you up, first to offer their condolences and then to sell you a burial plot," the sales manager said. During the interview, the sales manager took out a printed form from a hospital, a print-out that detailed the mother's name, age, ethnicity, profession, position, mobile phone number, home phone number, and address. It also held all of her husband's information. Additionally, the form recorded private information such as the time of her first checkup and her due date. To test the information, the reporter called up the father's mobile phone number. He was shocked at how the reporter was able to obtain the information. When the situation was explained to him, he said that from the day the child was born, he had received nearly 1,000 calls from people offering services or selling something. The sales manager pointed to the information: "Hospitals actually sell this for just one yuan apiece. It's all printed out from computers in the maternity ward. You pay for how ever many you print out. Typically, our people will hit all of the hospitals once a week, getting print-outs on several hundred people each time." The sales manager told the reporter that in the dairy industry alone there are forty-some major domestic brands plus over a hundred foreign brands. If a hospital sells personal information for one yuan to each dairy, it can make several hundred yuan off each person in just that one market. He said that there are more than one thousand companies selling products for mothers and infants in Beijing, so if a hospital sells an individual's information to them, it can make more than 1,000 yuan. Judging from the materials provided by the sales manager, it would seem that selling personal information is one way for hospitals to make money. But he shook his head: it's individual doctors and nurses who do it. Contact a hospital and try to buy information if you don't believe me. The reporter called up the maternity ward of a certain Beijing hospital and asked to buy personal information. The response was severe: "No. personal information here is highly confidential. We would never sell it." Then the sales manager himself called up the head nurse in the maternity ward. The nurse recognized him and told him to come right over to the hospital to pick up the information. He said, "We always go directly to the hospital. Sometimes we wait in a corner, other times we wait right out in the hallway. We used to call up and make an appointment with them, but later they simply gave us the material they'd already printed out. We gave them the money, they gave us the information, and then we'd hurry off." According to the sales manager, generally speaking there are only a few people in a large hospital who can access the personal information of expecting mothers: the head of obstetrics, the assistant head, and the head nurse. These individuals each have their own separate network of companies to which they sell the same information. It's usually enough just to give them the money; there's no need for a receipt. He said that there are many ways hospitals sell personal information, and sometimes the trade doesn't even take place in the hospital itself. "The information dealer prints out the data in the hospital, and then gives it to us outside the hospital after work. Or they might enter it into their phone as an SMS; then we have to pay for the information and the message fee." "Some hospitals are even more clever: their computers are connected to the Internet, so they can simply email us all the data. Or we can provide them with a blank USB drive, onto which they'll copy the data over from the hospital computer. Then we trade money for information," he said. He also said that these techniques are unlikely to be discovered: who's going to be looking for them? Besides, there are so many people in a hospital who can access that information, so even if someone wanted to investigate, how would he determine who sold it? "Our company has a medical affairs department. A milk powder producer with a medical affairs department - it's ridiculous, don't you think?" The sales manager said, "That department is actually responsible for purchasing personal information from hospitals and maintaining good relationships with them. It does nothing but burn money." This is how the medical affairs department of that well-known dairy company runs its personal-information gathering operation: First, a dozen or so special sales mangers are responsible for going around to major hospitals to buy personal information. Then the information is turned over to the telemarketing department, where phone operators methodically call up pregnant women. According to the sales manager, his company only has control of a few maternity hospitals in Beijing's suburbs. They can't get in to the major district hospitals because a few major international brands have already cornered the market. Even so, their medical affairs department spends 20 million yuan every year, much of which goes toward taking doctors and department heads on tours overseas, inviting them to dinner, and sending them gifts. Only a few million is spent on actually obtaining the personal information. The sales manager said, "Even though we have to burn all that money every year to buy personal information, our annual profit is several hundred million, and we can accept that rate of return." Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org Selling out patient privacy to the milk industry |
 Dou magazine, premiere issue (May 2008) Sun Rui, Lin Changzhi, and other writers have joined forces for Dou (, "funny" or "tease"), a new magazine filled with irreverent parodies and other funny stuff. This issue of the magazine is published by Volumes Publishing Company under an ISBN rather than a periodical registration. It's the May issue, but it didn't actually make it to print until July and arrived on local newsstands even more recently than that. According to alternate ISBN information hiding under a sticker on the back cover, Dou was originally supposed to be published by 21st Century Publishing House. The magazine's sense of humor is similar to the egao phenomenon online (and, truth be told, a lot of the pieces in this issue could easily have come off of blogs or humor forums). There are genre pastiches, wuxia parodies, schoolyard antics, and a serialized screenplay version of Sun Rui's hit novel Waiting in the Rye (草样年华). Sun Rui is also the writer, with Wang Yang as illustrator, of the comic strip collection "Hapless Cat" (倒霉催的猫). It's similar to The Book of Bunny Suicides (or that series' sunglasses-wearing Chinese cousin, Cartoon Suicide Rabbit), except that the cat is not suicidal: he simply has extraordinarily bad luck. This issue of Dou has a few Hapless Cat panels; two are shown below. In the following example, it helps to know that "hide and seek" (捉迷藏) is also known as "hide the cat" (躲猫猫 or 藏猫猫):  "Let's play hide the cat" Another strip is purely visual:  The old "drunk with a flashlight" joke In China, this joke is most closely identified with a classic crosstalk sketch by Hou Baolin. Here's a translation of a little bit of 90s nostalgia that also serves to show how, for all their hand-wringing about protecting the country's youth from the corrupting influence of decadent culture, China's censorship regime is not incredibly effective when it comes to subject matter that teenagers really want to read: Jia Pingwa: Sex Educatorby Sun Rui / DouI recently finished reading Jia Pingwa's Abandoned Capital all the way through. I bought it from a used book vendor for 4 yuan (it was originally five, I said three, but the boss refused. Thirty seconds of negotiations later, I got the discount). A genuine edition, yellowed with age. Truth be told, the book's not bad. Instead of a critique, however, I'll discuss something a little different. It was a certain psychological complex that brought about the purchase of this book. Fourteen years ago, the book opened up the door to sexual awareness for a whole generation of thirteen-year-olds. Zhongguancun in those days was no high-tech park: it was just a village. And the women who walked back and forth carrying their children were just villagers - they weren't selling pornos. I had just entered my third year of junior high and I didn't even know a VCD was. Porn was out on videocassette, but those weren't in circulation among Beijing's middle-school students. And of course, BitTorrent, Xunlei, and eMule were even further off. All of a sudden one day, a copy of Abandoned Capital appeared in class. The news quickly spread that this wasn't a healthy book, finally bringing a reprieve to the dull atmosphere of learning: we had just finished holding class meetings during which the teachers told us about how tough third year would be, that it was a turning point in our lives. Back then, no one who acquired something like that would hide it for themselves. They'd take it out and practice communism instead, not because they were looking for the excitement of having more people talk about their experience reading it, but simply to show off how awesome they were: Maybe I can't compete with you in school, but I can get ahold of this stuff. Before anyone had figured out who the book belonged to, it became common property of all the boys in the class. The book was full of blanked-out spaces, following which were notes in parentheses: XXX characters deleted. From the context around the blanks, you could tell that the deletions were depictions of sex. And even though what came before the blanks foreshadowed it and what came after was a summing up, and even though there was little actual detail, we were still so absorbed by the book that we forgot to eat or sleep. It used to be that no one ever stayed in the classroom to study at noontime, but now, even during lunch itself there was always someone there holding a book. Even during the breakneck preparations for the high school entrance exams a year later, there wasn't the same sense of racing against time. We had come across other books involving hormones, like A Health Handbook for Middle School Students, but they were a far cry from Abandoned Capital. That book's descriptions were more detailed and involved personal relationships, but the former was all stuff like: "Young friends, our present tasks are to gain scientific and cultural knowledge, to make contributions to the four modernizations, to establish a correct outlook on life, values, and love, to correctly address the stirrings of adolescence, and to put our efforts into use in their proper places so as not to lose sight of the big picture." A short while later an even more inspiring piece of news went around: the book had been banned. Reading it had become a criminal act, which subtly increased both the "not for children" aspect of the book and the thrill of reading it. Students who had not yet had their chance were even more eager to read it. Reading on the sly was more exciting than being out in the open, and so a second round of reading began once all of the male students had gotten their turn. The girls knew that the boys were passing a book around, and whenever boys came to them to copy homework, they kept wanting to ask for it in exchange. But the ever-bashful girls couldn't bring themselves to say anything. Fifty people in the class sharing a single book: a case of many wolves but little meat. Therefore, an unwritten rule formed: each person could have it for one day, but the following day he had to pass it off to the next student. Before half a month was out, the book had turned black from all of those fingers. But not all black: the dingy pages all had blank sections on them. Our reading habit at the time concerned only our lower bodies, not our upper bodies. All that page-turning meant that the book would flip open to a page with blanks at the mere touch of a hand. The sign on the classroom wall showed more than 200 days until the high school entrance exam when one boy, thinking of sustainable development, wrapped it in a book cover. He'd never done that for any of his textbooks. As time |
