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).
Life on the Qiantang River: flowers and pollution: At China Dialogue, Yong Yongfeng reports on his visits with coastal residents:
There are many different types of fruit trees in Shao and Wei’s front garden. Shao lit a cigarette. "See those pomegranates? They’re about to flower – red flowers, really beautiful. But in autumn, as the fruit ripen, you will find they are black and rotten inside." He pointed out a loquat tree. "We used to get fruit as big as a hen’s egg from that. Now, they are more like pigeon eggs."
19 years ago today…: Shanghaiist rounds up some articles looking back at the events of Jụne 4, 1989.
China: Democracy, or Confucianism?: At the China Beat, Xujun Eberlein introduces Political Confucianism (政治儒学) by Jiang Qing (蒋庆):
Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline "China rules out copying Western democracy." My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing, a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book, Jiang Qing draws a blueprint for China’s political future based on Confucianism. It is the first such conception since the 1919 May 4th movement that denounced the traditional Chinese ideology as a feudal relic and began the age-old country’s modernization efforts.
Quake lake likely to burst: The Economic Observer reports that the lake at Tangjiashan formed by the May 12 earthquake has a 93% likelihood of collapsing:
By 17:00 on June 3, the water level at Tangjiashan, holding 205.5 million cubic of water, had reached 737.33 meters, only some 2.37 meters away from its overflowing point near the diversion channel dug by risk mitigation team, according to the Water Resources Ministry.
Liu Ning, chief engineer of the Ministry, disclosed that if rainfall continued, chances of the lake to burst were 93%, as every two millimeters of rainfall upstream could increase the water level by one meter. Frequent aftershocks also added the risk, he said.
250,000 people have been evacuted.