Zhang Ziyi’s new website:
Spotted by Beijing blogger, Tennessee Ruck, who is here. Zhang Ziyi is here. Tennessee Ruck has an eye for Chinese media, even beating danwei.org to the scan on this one:
That’s the latest issue of China’s would-be New Yorker, ‘Shucheng’ (book city) or ‘Read’ as it’s known in English. Tennessee Ruck:
“It shows a complacent Cowboy Bush dozing now that he’s got Saddam not realizing Bin Laden is in his face. Saddam being in the custody of the decadent West is chillin’ with a copy of Playboy magazine. Blair and Putin are present. The odd one of the bunch is Sun Wu Kong, the Chinese legendary monkey king who is a character in the classic tale Journey to the West. I presume he was included to represent the time period, being that this is the Year of the Monkey”
Not trying to be the New Yorker at all, Sanlian Life Weekly investigates the recent kidnapping of actor Wu Ruopu.
The cover story looks at how kidnapping is affecting the life of the rich and famous in China. The large coverline is “The Wu Ruopu affair and the clampdown on kidnapping’. Wu was kidnapped outside Powerhouse, a bar in Beijing bar zone Sanlitun.
There is a story doing the rounds in Beijing’s film and entertainment circle:
Wu was kidnapped by men pretending to be police officers. However, they neglected to kidpap his companions, so the police were on the trail soon. The kidnappers were soon surrounded by police in some place just south of Beijing. This was when one of the kidnappers said to Wu: “Look, I’ll kill those other guys, I am not really a bad guy, I’ll kill them, just tell the cops that I had this talk with you, and that I did what I did.”
The kidnapper killed his fellow gangsters.
Then the cops came.
When Wu Ruopu was with the cops, he made a statement, and reported the above story. The cop said: “Do you really want to sign this statement? Do you realize that if you sign this statement, that guy will live? And do you realize that the guy you might save, that guy, he was the one who planned the whole operation?”
So Wu Ruopu left that part out of the statement.
I don’t know if that story is true, but it is being told.
On another note, the other headlines on the Sanlian Life Weekly cover are:
– Miyun trampling accident and citizens’s safety
– Livestock industry encounters bird flu
The yellow strap on the top right corner means: ‘Special report: Who did the BBC lose to?’