Danwei Picks: 2008-01-10

Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Beijing's sky blues: tweaking API measurements: In a Wall St. Journal op-ed, Steven Q. Andrews describes how Beijing has adjusted its air quality monitoring stations to achieve more "blue sky days.":

From 1998 to 2005, the same seven stations -- located in the city center -- were used to measure air quality. These stations monitored areas with different characteristics, including high traffic areas, plus residential, commercial and industrial districts. In 2006, however, just as international scrutiny on China's air quality was increasing, two stations monitoring traffic were dropped from the city API calculations, while three additional stations in less polluted areas were added.

Calculating the average daily Beijing API values for 2006 and 2007 using data from the original monitoring stations changes the outcome considerably; in fact, 38 of Beijing's 241 so-called "blue sky" days in 2006 would not have qualified as "blue sky" under the old methodology. The number is even less for 2007: 55 fewer days would have attained the "blue sky" standard, out of 246 reported "blue sky" days.

Mr. Andrews also talked to Jim Yardley of the New York Times. Additionally, the Beijing Air blog reveals that additional downtown air monitoring stations were dropped for 2008.

The death of the teacher-prostitute: A pretty female teacher prostitutes herself in order to raise money on behalf of education, and becomes an Internet celebrity.

But she turns out to be a publicity stunt authored by a man who offers services to 'do anything and everything possible to create an Internet legend for you'. ESWN has the story in English.

Three Chinese Internet luminaries reflect on 2007: At Ogilvy's Digital Watch blog, Kaiser Kuo is translating a "mini-salon" that Keso, Mai Tian, and Xie Wen held last December:

You have to look at this from two sides. In 1999 when I was working on Ourgame.com our traffic reached the top spot very quickly. Simultaneous users reached 10,000 quickly, and at the time Tencent was actually smaller than we were. Were we mainstream? We simply had more features than the others. Everyone loved it because there just wasn’t any alternative. This is a sort of self-affirmation. Real society isn’t like that. With nothing else to do they just start playing. Everyone had to go through life, but without services on the Web that could satisfy them. The demand was generated off-line. The process of transition from off-line to online isn’t complete, and you can’t generalize about Netizens that way.

This is part 7 of 9; the post has links to earlier installments.

The death of a citizen journalist: David Stanway in The Guardian reports:

A man who used his mobile phone to film a violent clash between villagers and officials in rural China was beaten to death by public order 'enforcers', Chinese state media reported yesterday, bringing more unwanted attention to the country's unruly hinterlands.

The People's Daily reported that 24 residents of Tianmen, a city in central China's Hubei province, have been detained after Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a company owned by the local water resources bureau, was pulled out of his car and savagely beaten.

For more about this case, see this summary of Chinese media reports by David Bandurski China Media Project.

The $1.4 trillion question: In the Atlantic, James Fallows discusses how certain decisions made by the Chinese government resulted in such a large stockpile of dollars, and what obstacles its new investment strategies are encountering:

But saying that China has a high savings rate describes the situation without explaining it. Why should the Communist Party of China countenance a policy that takes so much wealth from the world’s poor, in their own country, and gives it to the United States? To add to the mystery, why should China be content to put so many of its holdings into dollars, knowing that the dollar is virtually guaranteed to keep losing value against the RMB? And how long can its people tolerate being denied so much of their earnings, when they and their country need so much? The Chinese government did not explicitly set out to tighten the belt on its population while offering cheap money to American homeowners. But the fact that it does results directly from explicit choices it has made.

'Be objective, don't sensationalize': Black and White Cat reflects on a BBC piece about CCTV media directives, from the perspective of someone inside the system:

That gives the impression that we get these instructions every day. We don't. True, pop-ups do greet us when we log on. But the vast majority of them have nothing at all to do with what can or cannot be reported, or how to report it. They're just notices to directors and producers saying that such-and-such a promo is ready for use, or messages from the IT department warning that the system might be unstable during an upgrade. Banalities that are of interest to practically no one. And if there is some instruction on how to report a story, it usually consists of nothing more than "be objective, don't sensationalize." Not very exciting at all.