Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

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On October 29, New Express reported (Danwei translated):

Chinese malware remover provider 360 had been in feud with other Internet juggernauts including Tencent, Baidu and Kingsoft. Their war was escalated when 360 singled out Tencent and accused it of secretly spying on competitors through its QQ, the most popular instant messenger application among Mainland internet users.

Last night, the war escalated as Tencent declared that its users － all 6 billion － cannot use 360 if they want to use the messaging service, QQ. A selection of media has reported on this on their front page, showing the two giants sacrificing their users for largely what is a corporate fight. Tencent's PR said that the move "could not be helped" and there was a lengthy press conference covering their decision.

Circulating on Sina microblogs today was a picture of PR rep Liu Chang (刘畅) who shed tears during a press conference as she said that the decision took all night and that Tencent workers hadn't slept at all.

Danwei Jobs: Real jobs in China's media, communications and creative industries.

TV Journalist

Employer: CCTV News
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Today
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full-time
Categories: Editing, Video Production

Time Out Beijing Deputy Editor

Employer: SEEC - Time Out Beijing
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Thursday, 28th October 2010
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full-time
Categories: Editing, Writing

Time Out Beijing Web Editor

Employer: SEEC - Time Out Beijing
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Thursday, 28th October 2010
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full-time
Categories: Editing, Web Development

Kliptown Youth Program gumboot dancers on the Shanghai subway sing Shosholoza, a much-loved traditional South African song sung by migrant workers on trains bound for Johannesburg where they would dig for gold for paltry wages. Found via the African Boots Twitter feed.

Tessa Thorniley reports from Hong Kong for Danwei on the city's drugged up financial industry.

On a Friday night in Lan Kwai Fong, a 29-year-old stockbroker knocks back a shot of sake and tries to work out how many people in his bank take drugs.

It is a question that has been rippling through the Hong Kong banking community since the death, in June, of Neil McCormick, the 36-year-old head of Asian equity derivatives at UBS on the island.

McCormick had returned to the UK for a wedding when, after snorting cocaine at a friend's home in Holland Park, London, he plunged from the balcony to his death.

While none of his friends suggested that Hong Kong had turned him into a drug user, other bankers who spoke to Danwei on condition of anonymity suggested that cocaine use on the island is ubiquitous.

“What happened to Neil is obviously terribly sad, but it is not that surprising,” says one. “The financial community here is buried in white powder.”

“On the evening of the last day of the 2009 financial year, I know of a team of accountants responsible for calculating traders' profits at a US investment bank in Hong Kong who snorted cocaine at their desks through the night until 9am in order to continue working,” she adds.

After another shot of sake, the young stockbroker, born in Hong Kong but educated in the UK, has his answer. “I would say around 65 per cent of the people who work with me have a recreational drug habit,” he says.

Recent research points to China as the origin of Europe's medieval bubonic plagues. Malcolm Moore and Gao Hang reviewed the research and spoke to Dr Yu Dongzheng, director of animal to human infectious diseases at the National Centre for Disease Control about the plague in China.

On Sunday, a team of scientists published a paper suggesting that the plagues that ravaged Europe, Africa and the United States in the 6th, 14th and 19th centuries originated in China.

Writing in the Nature Genetics journal, the team (which included Chinese scientists) assembled a "family tree" of Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium which has now been shown to be responsible for bubonic and pneumonic plague, which is usually carried by rats.

The scientists compared the genetic structure of 282 strains of the bacterium, isolated from locations around the world, including China, the US, India, and the former Soviet Union. They looked at how the different strains had mutated over time, and then mapped those timelines against the historical records of plague outbreaks.

The plague of Justinian (named after the Byzantine emperor ruling at the time) broke out in Constantinople in the 6th century after apparently arriving on grain boats from Egypt. The Black Death, which broke out in 1346, may have killed a third of Europe's population. A third pandemic, which broke out in Yunnan in 1855, killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone.

All three pandemics had a common ancestor, a strain of Y. Pestis that evolved in China between 2,603 years and 28,646 years ago (it's difficult to be exact on the timing, and the scientists said they had given themselves a cautious range of dates).

"What we know is that the bacterium evolved in China, and has been in China all this time, and seems most likely to have come out from China," said Mark Achtman, the professor at University College Cork who led the team.

The team also speculates that Zheng He, the 14th century Chinese admiral, may have taken the plague to East Africa in the rats that lived aboard his treasure ships. The scientists mapped the stopping points on Zheng's voyages and compared them to known plague outbreaks in those areas.

Tibet Business Daily, November 3, 2010

Today's Tibet Business Daily declares that due to heavy snowfall, the Namtso Lake scenic area is closed. Meanwhile in Lhasa, a test run of a newly refurbished canal ended up flooding city streets because autumn leaves had not been cleared from the waterway.

Inside, the newspaper continues a feature it has been running since October 11 on the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Qamdo. The battle, fought in 1950 over a Tibetan border town, set the stage for the Seventeen Point Agreement the following year.

Though the Tibet Business Daily does not refer to the campaign as the "peaceful liberation" of Qamdo (as Xinhua's English-language reporting does), it notes in the title of today's installment that "The Battle of Qamdo Opened the Door to the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet."

A compilation of cartoon images of "Riben Guizi" (Japanese devil), a Chinese insult that Japanese computer nerds are trying to turn "into a beautiful young girl", to "let Chinese people full of hostility become fans of anime beautiful young girl". For more, see ChinaHush.

General Chi Haotian gets his dove

Nobel shnobel!

Foreign Policy reports:

As Ban Ki-moon finalized his preparations for his visit this week to Beijing, one of his top advisors, Sha Zukang, traveled to China to present an award to a retired Chinese general who had authority over troops that fired on unarmed civilians during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Sha, the U.N. Undersecretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, presented the World Harmony Award -- a glass plaque cut in the shape of a dove -- to former Chinese Defense Minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, in honor of his unspecified contributions to world peace, according to a report in Chinese state media. The World Harmony Foundation, a private charity headed by a Chinese businessman named Frank Liu, established the award.

See links below for more about the Harmony Prize.

Yangtse Evening Post, November 2, 2010

Today's Yangtse Evening Post focuses on its own iPad version; in other news the census officially started yesterday, the first since 2000. The top of the Yangtse Evening Post urges citizens to Please open your door when the census taker comes.

According to the inside report, when reporters from the paper followed census takers, some citizens only wanted to open a crack in the door to talk to them. The Dongguan Times splashed their front page with the picture of a citizen getting a free "environmental bag" which he says will be "good for shopping."

A Nanjing newsstand (see story #11 )

Nanjing has decided that news kiosks are a blight on the city.

Erected on the roadway, they create yet another unnecessary obstacle to the growing number of cars on the streets. Moved to the sidewalk, they pose a risk to blind pedestrians.

The plan, which was circulated among vendors this summer in the form of removal notices, has been roundly criticized by Nanjing media outlets, pundits, and Internet users. Where will Nanjingers buy their news from now on? Who will be responsible for the news vendors who are put out of work by the demolitions? What good does it do anyone it a newsstand is moved from a major thoroughfare to an out-of-the-way side street?

The reigning interpretation is that the government is more concerned with the city’s image than the livelihood of its population. One alternative suggested by the chengguan, the city management administration that is in charge of the removals, is for news vendors to rent space in supermarkets and other fixed stores. That option has its own problems:

“Inside operations” means encouraging supermarkets and other stores to sell newspapers and magazines. But operating costs are high, and they must pay taxes. A supermarket salesperson told this reporter that a news stall would occupy about two square meters, a space that could be rented from the supermarket for 30,000 RMB per month. Mr. Jiang, who has operated a newsstand for a decade, told this reporter that a newsstand can make at most around 4,000 RMB per month, so the cost to entry is far too high for them. As a result, very few newsstand proprietors have moved into supermarkets.

Other observers have expressed doubts about whether supermarkets will open their doors at 6 in the morning to allow commuters to buy the morning paper on the way to work.

Nanjing’s bid to rid the city of street-side newsstands is not without precedent. When Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province, wiped out newsstands in 2001, city authorities also mentioned city beautification, and in 2007, the local planning bureau issued a notice recommending that vendors rent space in supermarkets and other stores. According to The Beijing News, which ran a lengthy story on the situation, the income from periodical sales was far less than what it would cost to rent a stall inside a store. The city’s readers ended up getting their news from temporary, mobile stalls: a board thrown over a cart.

The Yangtse Evening Post reports that in a number of locations across the city, news vendors whose kiosks have been demolished have returned with carts laden with newspapers and magazines to serve a clientele that still requires print media. Ironically, the Nanjing government had eliminated these news carts a decade ago by encouraging the erection of free-standing news kiosks, in line with The Notice on the Establishment of Newspaper and Periodical Sales Kiosks in Cities and Towns Across the Country, issued in 2000 by the Civilization Office, Ministry of Construction, Ministry of Public Security, State Administration for Industry and Commerce, General Administration of Press and Publication, and the State Post Bureau.

With that notice still in effect, critics of the Nanjing government’s demolition plans have accused it of violating national policy and going against the “spirit of building socialist spiritual civilization.”

The Yangtse Evening Post published an interesting look back at the recent history of news vending in Nanjing:

Oriental Morning Post, November 1, 2010

Today's Oriental Morning Post sums up the Shanghai Expo with an aerial drawing of part of the Expo site and a line from Tang Dynasty poet Wang Bo: "For close friends within the four seas, the ends of the earth are but a neighboring village."

The paper features a ten-page wrap-up of the festival that covers the closing ceremony, significant achievements, and implications for the future.

Today's paper also includes "To Shanghai," an eighty-page special section containing 133 letters to the people of Shanghai from an international assembly of Expo .

""Thrilling Games, Harmonious Asia" is the motto of this year's Asian Games, which begin on November 12 in Guangzhou.

To ensure that Guangzhou itself remains harmonious, one community has announced new fines on the use of 110, the emergency police hotline, by migrants during the course of the games:

Notice

To all tenants:

In answer to the spirit of "building harmony to welcome the Asian Games," and according to the wishes of the Dashi Transient Population Rental Management Service Center, all transient residents of Dashi Street are requested to refrain from dialing 110 during the period of the Asian Games. (One use draws a fine of 500 RMB, twice a fine of 1,000 RMB, and so on.) If you have the need, please dial:

Dashi Police Station: 020-84783027 or
Dashi Security Squad: 020-84785533 or
Dashan Police Commission: 020-39931632

On Tudou, a video called "This Is Reality" (事实就是这样) has been repeatedly deleted and uploaded: the father and brother of Chen Xiaofeng (陈晓凤), who died after being hit by a car driven by Li Qiming on the Hebei University campus, were interviewed by Wen Tao and Zhao Zhao for a video released by Ai Weiwei's team. You can also view this video on Youtube.

The beginning of the video runs an explanation:

On October 10, 2010, inside the gates of Hebei University in the city of Baoding in Hebei province, there was a case of drunk driving, killing one female student. The culprit of the incident Li Qiming (李启铭), shouted out: “My dad is Li Gang!”

On October 22, 2010, we interviewed Chen Guangqian (陈广谦), the father and Chen Lin (陈林), the brother of the decreased Chen Xiaofeng (陈晓凤) at the Hebei Baoding provincial guest house.

Li Gang is the deputy director of the PSB in Baoding's Beishi District (北市区). Although fellow video site Youku does not have the video, the site does have a page dedicated to the "Li Gang incident" which includes mention of the 70 kph incident from April 2010, which made the current incident more popular because of their similarities. Also on the page are various videos from TV that show Li Gang and his son Li Qiming apologizing on national TV. As they have been accused for putting on a 'show,' commenters on Ai Weiwei's video suggest that this one, with the parent and sibling of the deceased crying, should be broadcast on national TV too.

The interview starts with the father Chen Guangqian (陈广谦), and then the brother Chen Lin (陈林):

Chen Guangqian: My name is Chen Guangqian, I come from Nansi village in Xingjishi, Shijiazhuang city in Hebei province, My daughter is called Chen Xiaofeng, 20 years old, she grew up in the rural village.

Chen Lin: My name is Chen Li. I am 23 this year, I come from Nansi village in Xingjishi, Shijiazhuang city in Hebei province. My sister is called Chen Xiaofeng, she's 20 this year and born year of the horse; in 1990. She just got into university, she enrolled on September 2. On that day I went to Baoding to take care of some university business, when I came back I saw her once, and left the next day. The accident happened that night. Her classmate called the house. We couldn’t believe it.

New Express, October 29, 2010

Chinese malware remover provider 360 had been in feud with other Internet juggernauts including Tencent, Baidu and Kingsoft. Their war was escalated when 360 singled out Tencent and accused it of secretly spying on competitors through its QQ, the most popular instant messenger application among Mainland internet users.

According to today's New Express:

360 announced yesterday, based on its monitoring using Microsoft's Process Monitor and its own 360 Privacy Protector, QQ, China's biggest instant messenger, had been using abnormal methods to scan users' hard drives.

Qi Xiangdong, director of 360 said that he was very shocked. "I have never heard that such method was used for security purpose or any other purposes. It is totally different from what legitimate anti-virus softwares do to search for trojans and viruses."

Qi believed that Tencent was trying to collect information on competitors based on 360's discovery of a "blacklist" consisting multiple Internet companies that were purportedly targeted by Tencent's sinister scan. Qi suggested that Tencent might use the information it gathered to develop their own ripoffs modeled on their competitor's existing products, bundle them up with its QQ and force users to accept the pirated versions. Qi also criticized Tencent's violation of users' right to know for not notifying users or allowing them to activate or terminate the process at their own will.

On an slightly ironic note, on the "watched list" are some of Tencent's allies such as Baidu and Kingsoft, who had just issued a collective declaration with Tencent, railing against 360 for "illegal competition".

In the big image, China's vice president Xi Jinping, who was named the new vice-chair of the Central Military Commission, was shaking hands with a delegation from PLA National Defense University following the footsteps of President Hu Jintao.

A Hangzhou TV show calls a Zhejiang government official to ask about citizen complaints about parking fees; unhapy with the official's response, one of the guests shouts at him: "What kind of official are you? Resign! If you don't serve the people, get out!".

Daily Sunshine, October 28, 2010

A centenarian buddhist monk's birthday has drawn large number of followers to Shenzhen's Hongfa Temple, today's Daily Sunshine reports.

According to the article, Monk Benhuan, the 104-year-old founding abbot monk of Hongfa Temple is both a highly achieved buddhist master as well as a generous philanthropist, who has raised hundreds of millions of yuan to help the poor and build more temples.

Monk Benhuan's legendary spiritual accomplishments includes holding a meditation that lasted 91 days without falling asleep in his youth; locking himself up in a temple for seven years and spending an entire year pilgriming from Baoding to Wutai Mountain, kowtowing to bodhisattva every three steps.

All these are perhaps not as remarkable as his eidetic memory. According to his disciple Monk Yinshun, Monk Benhuan once recognized a visitor who visited him five years ago at 16. That goes without saying that the famous monk has tens of thousands of visitors everyday asking him for blessing.

Among these blessing seekers, there are no shortage of important government officials and successful businesspeople but they are treated no differently. Monk Benhuan would tap a stick or a folding fan on their heads while chanting: "Fortune, fortune, make a big fortune; promotion, promotion, have a big promotion."

Beijing Times, October 27th, 2010

With the daily lowest temperature barely hovering above freezing point, winter seems come to Beijing earlier this year. Here at Danwei's headquarter, your correspondent has put on a feather jacket to fortify against the biting chill, huddling over the only non-human heat source in the office - a laptop.

According to Beijing Times, responsible authorities in Beijing conferred yesterday and decided that Beijing would not switch heat on before November 5th, citing that the average temperature in the next five days is unlikely to drop below 10 °C. The current policy dictates that the heat will be turned on only when the average temperature in five consecutive days drops below 5 °C.

Above the advert banners at the bottom, a small headline announced that a previously unknown super-bacteria had been discovered in three patients. Two carriers were newborn babies and the third, a 83-year-old cancer patient, had been pronounced dead.

The big image shows a new high speed railway between Shanghai and Hangzhou which started to operate yesterday. The domestically manufactured bullet train which travels at a maximum speed of 350 km/h, has reduced the travel time between the two cities to 45 minutes.

This article is by Malcolm Moore, the Daily Telegraph's Shanghai Correspondent. You can follow him on twitter.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s tens of millions of Chinese farmers set out to make their fortune on the coast.

This first generation of migrant workers transformed China, building its skyscrapers, manning its factories and digging its mines.

But where are they now, and did their dreams come true?

* * *

Cheng Guorong sits stiffly and silently on his bed, staring into space. When he lights himself a cigarette, his hands shake.

Cheng Guorong, a.k.a Brother Sharp

Seven months ago, the 34-year-old was living rough in the eastern port of Ningbo, eating food out of bins and scraping tobacco out of butts to roll into new cigarettes.

In March, however, he briefly became one of the most famous people in China after a candid photograph of him was posted on the internet, wandering through the city with his cheekbones framed by cigarette smoke.

His striking looks won him the nicknames “Brother Sharp” or “China's Sexiest Tramp”. After his fame spread, local government officials tracked him down and rescued him.

He became such a sensation that several different families popped up claiming to be his relatives. His real family had to prove they knew him by revealing they were aware of a scar concealed underneath his matted hair.

Today, he is back in his hometown, living his life with mother and two sons in a village near Poyang Lake in Jiangxi province. His wife and father were killed in a car crash just two months before he became famous.

Meanwhile, the trauma of his years in Ningbo still haunts him, and he rarely speaks.

“He shows his affection for us through his actions,” his 22-year-old cousin, Cheng Si, says. “For example, he always serves us the best cuts of meat at the dining table with his chopsticks,” she adds.

She insists that he is not mentally-disturbed, and that a psychiatrist has seen him and claims that his condition is reversible. Nevertheless, Cheng now measures out his days in cigarettes, and whatever happened to him as a migrant worker on the coast seems to
have destroyed much of his spirit.

Cheng was 16 years-old when he first went out to work in 1992. Although he is only in his mid-30s, that makes him, in terms of timing, part of the first generation of workers to leave China's countryside and seek their fortune on the coast.

The “first generation” of Chinese migrants are now aged anywhere from their mid-30s to their mid-60s, but share an ability to “chi ku” or eat bitterness that younger migrants are often said to lack. The second generation, according to the Chinese media, has grown up more fragile, with high expectations and an impatient urge to better themselves.

In terms of attitude, Cheng belongs squarely to the first generation. He seems strong and wiry, silent and self-contained. And when I interviewed him earlier this year, I suddenly realised that there must be many more like him, men who sweated and toiled to build modern China, but who had failed to find the dream they were seeking.

* * *

Shenzhen Evening News, October 26, 2010

The green capsule inside a plastic shell on the front cover of today’s Shenzhen Evening News is a wonder drug.

The miracle pill is marketed by the World Environmental Protection Association (世界环保协会), which claims that it can cure everything from diabetes to cancer. Such a powerful drug doesn’t come cheap: each dose is priced at 5,000 RMB.

But there’s good news: if you join WEPA, you’ll be able to buy it for just 500 RMB.

According to the Shenzhen Evening News, WEPA distributes the pills, which are not approved by state drug authorities, through a multi-level marketing network headquartered in Shenzhen. The drug discount is the initial attraction, but members get hooked by the thought of sharing in the proceeds from the Association’s multi-billion-yuan investments.

In fact, in June, before Shenzhen authorities launched their investigation into WEPA, the paper published a thinly-disguised press release announcing that the organization had signed nearly 10 billion RMB worth of investment contracts in areas such as biofuel, wind power, and natural gas. Perhaps the prominence of today’s take-down is meant to make up for the paper’s earlier lapse in judgment.

Living large

Sina.com recently got together New Weekly magazine to publish a book called Microquotes: A digest of microblogs 2009-1010 (微语录 2009-2010微博年选).

As the name suggests, it's a compendium of tweets from Sina's Weibo microblog platform about all kinds of subjects, divided into themed chapters. One of my Weibo tweets is included.

Today I received a royalty fee for the use of the words: a postal order for 25 yuan.

Chris Taylor is the author of Harvest Season, his debut novel set in southwestern China and published earlier this year by Earnshaw Books (You can read the first chapter here). He recently answered Danwei's questions about how he came to write his first work of fiction.

How long have you been in China and what have you been doing here?

I first visited China in 1985 as a traveler and a student of Chinese, and traveled quite extensively before leaving via Tibet into Nepal. I didn’t make it back until the very early 1990s, when I coordinated two editions of the Lonely Planet China guide and did an all-new version of the Tibet guide. I was based in Taiwan at that time, and life was
so good there – and so brutally push and shove here in China – that I never imagined once ever living here. It’s easy to develop a somewhat anti-mainland attitude in Taiwan also, and so I avoided returning for close on 10 years, until a job with the South China Morning Post started sending me over the border and I became intrigued again.

Cutting a long story short, I’ve been living in Yunnan for the last four or so years and doing as little as possible so as to focus on things I want to do rather, than Shanghai- or Beijing-style, rushing around from morning until night making money to pay the rent.

When did you start writing Harvest Season? Is this your first work of fiction?

When I first came to Asia, I was writing fiction. Thankfully, nobody was interested in it, and I got side-tracked by Lonely Planet and then by journalism. I started Harvest Season a couple of years ago, and it was mostly fueled by an anxiety that I was never going to have a serious stab at completing a book of fiction.

I got through it by writing it for the amusement of friends, who read it in installments and were for the most part enormously encouraging – probably more so than they should have been, given all the work I had to do to fix it after I’d completed the first draft.

Is expatriate life in China good for a working novelist?

I find it hard to imagine it could be. The impression I get from a lot of my expat friends in the big cities is they’re too busy. And then there’s the question of whether it would be worth it anyway.

Pitching fiction set in China written by a non-Chinese is a tough sell. It’s a pity. I mean, back in the day, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Co were in Paris, and the Beats were in North Africa (mostly for the boys and the hashish, I think, but they did some writing too), and then you've got Greene and Co, wandering the margins of collapsing colonialism.

But, despite the fact that China is full of foreigners amid change that is unprecedented in history, and many of these foreigners now speak Chinese, very little fiction is emerging from that.