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).
Pro-PX workers protest, no one notices: At China Digital Times, Jonathan Ansfield reports on a small demonstration outside the Xiamen government by workers fear they will lose their jobs if the PX project moves to Zhangzhou:
Uniformed workers fanned out and blocked the front gates of city hall, said a woman who watched the protest unfold while manning a door at the People’s Hall across the street. Then the group sat on the ground. They did not shout any slogans or carry any banners, she said, so she had no inkling of what they were on about. "Who were they?" she asked blankly. Public security and military police vehicles soon showed up and officers secured the scene.
Company officials were not aware of the sit-in until it was in-progress, the contact recounted. The Dragon Aromatics general manager, Lin Yingzong, got to the scene from the plant in Haicang district in the late morning. He and other company supervisors met with city officials to discuss the matter and helped persuade the employees to move along. "They still abide by what our company says." The firm sent buses to transport the demonstrators back to the Xianglu campus. They were dispersed within a short period of time without any incident or detentions, a military police official told one local journalist.
America’s pastime to come to China: The Hollywood Reporter says that Major League Baseball is coming to China:
Major League Baseball will play its first games in China in March and hopes to broadcast them on local television in a push to internationalize America’s pastime, league executives said here Thursday.
MLB, which earned $6 billion in revenue in 2007, is huge in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, but so far China has contributed little due to minimal TV coverage. Moreover, the game is due to make its last appearance as an Olympic sport for the foreseeable future in August in Beijing.
"We are here to show that baseball is truly a world game and worthy of being in the Olympics," said Paul Archey, MLB senior vp international business operations. "The potential to grow the sport in China is tremendous."
The unheard director: Variety‘s Kaiju Shakedown blog brings together information about Gan Xiao’er and his films about Christianity in China:
The most interesting thing to me about Gan’s films are that they’re coming from a point of view that’s less concerned with dogma and theology and more with the role of spirituality in everyday life, something that’s almost totally absent from most modern Chinese films. And he can sound downright dangerous at times.
"The most important thing is whether a person has something to hope for inside. I think a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam or others, has a major role because it tells us that in the eye of God, we are very precious."