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).
“We have to get the television ratings!”: A Hunan TV program secretly followed Zhang Chen, a Changsha civil servant, and edited footage to suggest that she was a home-wrecker. Zhang ultimately forced the program to apologize and pay compensation. ESWN translates the Southern Weekly investigation:
"Wang Yan said that there was no time to do any more interviews, because the show had already been edited. It is now in the production process and there was no way to withdraw it. She also said that if your department leader had not come, you people would not even be allowed to step inside the Hunan Broadcasting office building!" Zhang Chen told the Southern Weekend reporter.
NIMBY protests stop Shanghai maglev: Geoff Dyer of The Financial Times reports:
Shanghai’s local government has backed off construction work on an electromagnetic train line until at least next year after the plan triggered mass protests.
Han Zheng, Shanghai’s mayor, said on Thursday the new line, which has prompted protests from residents whose flats are near the planned track, was not on the list of major projects that would be started this year.
No forbidden zone in reading?: At the New Left Review, Zhang Yongle reviews a six-volume collection of articles from Duzhu magazine:
From 1996, however, when Wang Hui and then Huang Ping were invited to join the journal—initially on a temporary basis—after Shen’s retirement, Dushu was orientated along more critical and scholarly lines. The pair strengthened the social-science coverage of the journal and encouraged an open engagement with contemporary political and economic issues. They were also more interested in interacting with the international intellectual community than their predecessors had been. It was under Wang and Huang that Dushu emerged as a socially critical journal; uncongenial to some, but nevertheless posing questions that indubitably had a wider resonance.
Central Bank: strong yuan not way to fight inflation: From an article by Andrew Batson and Jason Leow in The Wall Street Journal:
China’s central bank governor said a stronger currency isn’t the best or only way to fight inflation, in statements that appear to counter widespread market expectations that the yuan’s gains will accelerate as the nation’s prices rise at their fastest pace in a decade.
‘Faster currency appreciation helps to rein in inflation, but not a lot,’ Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, told reporters Thursday. ‘To curb inflation, we will rely more on domestic policies. … There is no need to use exchange-rate reforms as a way to fight inflation.’