Monday, October 31, 2011
Relativity Media, the studio behind films such as The Social Network, has come under heavy fire for shooting in Shandong’s Linyi prefecture, near the site of activist Chen Guangcheng’s illegal house arrest. From Relativity’s press release, which touts the firm’s close connections with local officials: The hilarious comedy, 21 and Over, stars an up-and-coming cast [...] Read more »
An official with China’s new Internet watchdog announced Monday that authorities recently shut down 50 microblogs for pornography and vulgarity, the latest in a series of crackdowns since the government began implementing recently-passed measures designed to aid its control of information on the web. From China Daily: According to an unnamed official from the State [...] Read more »
With the unmanned Shenzhou 8 on the verge of its Tuesday launch, a spokeswoman for China’s space program announced plans for up to two manned space missions in 2012. From Reuters: The rendezvous and docking exercises between the two vessels are part of China’s effort to develop the technological and logistical skills needed to run [...] Read more »
The Los Angeles Times’ Barbara Demick explains how the air in Beijing can be “slightly polluted” according to Chinese measurements, but “beyond index” (formerly “crazy bad“) according to the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir tweets — a state not found in America “unless you were downwind from a forest fire”. Chinese monitoring stations around the capital track [...] Read more »
China Media Project’s David Bandurski notes a speech given by propaganda chief Li Changchun on Friday, in which he explained the relevance to news media of the recent official emphasis on cultural development. From Bandurski’s introduction and the translated description of the speech from state media, respectively: Li Changchun’s speech signals again that despite all of [...] Read more »
The ceremony for the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize will be held in Beijing next May, the Wall Street Journal reports: This is the first time in the prize’s 32-year history that the ceremony will take place in China. “We have held ceremonies in fourteen different countries, in venues ranging from the White House in Washington [...] Read more »
The New York Times reports the announcement of a Chinese supercomputer built with domestically designed and manufactured chips. Although it runs at only 40% of the speed of the Intel- and Nvidia-based Tianhe-1A unveiled last year, its homegrown innards have surprised foreign observers. The Sunway system, which can perform about 1,000 trillion calculations per second [...] Read more »
The Diplomat’s Peter Mattis argues that misconceptions about the nature of China’s intelligence-gathering threaten to undermine other countries’ attempts to combat it. He cites the recently revealed arrest by Russia of Tong Shengyong, who allegedly sought information on a missile system Beijing had purchased from Moscow years earlier. Most analysts believe the Chinese intelligence threat [...] Read more »
After the most recent self-immolation of a monk in Sichuan, the Dalai Lama has called China’s policies towards Tibet “ruthless and illogical” and claimed that these policies, such as the crackdown on the Tibetan language and monasteries, led to the monks setting themselves on fire. The Guardian reports: The Tibetan government-in-exile, which has accused China of an official [...] Read more »
A gas explosion at a state-owned coal mine in Hengyang City, Hunan Province killed 29 workers, and six other workers were rescued. The cause of the blast is believed to be from a large burst of gas in the mine that was ignited by sparks from machines. The Washington Post reports: Five of the workers were rescued, while one [...] Read more »
China’s Ministry of Public Security announced Sunday that police had seized more than 300 kilograms of illegal drugs and arrested more than 12,000 people involved in production and trafficking through a network of online video applications and chat rooms, according to Xinhua News: In March, police in the cities of Lanzhou and Xi’an in west [...] Read more »
Violent protests erupted in central China’s Henan province on Saturday after a drunk police officer lost control of his van and killed at least five people, according to media reports. From AFP: People gathered to protest after police tried to take the bodies away, some of them smashing and flipping over three police cars and [...] Read more »
In GlobalPost, Kathleen McLaughlin writes about a home-grown incarnation of Wikileaks in Wenzhou, which has shrugged off attempts at censorship to detail the local effects of the credit squeeze plaguing private enterprises in China: The site has played host to just about every dramatic detail of the credit collapse; some of it very true, though much [...] Read more »
Michael Sata was elected President of Zambia after waging a campaign in support of workers’ rights and against abuses by Chinese companies operating in the country. Soon after taking office, Sata declared he would target Chinese businesses in a general crackdown on corruption. His tune now seems to have changed, as recent comments are more [...] Read more »
Rumors emerged in the spring about a possible Sina Weibo public offering, and a spin-off has looked more likely since parent Sina registed an offshore entity for its microblogging business in June. With a recent white paper from Sina indicating that its registered users had increased nearly 300% since 2010, to 250 million, iChinastock assesses [...] Read more »
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