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).
‘Chocolate city’: African traders in Guangzhou: Blogging for China translates a Southern Metropolis Daily article about African traders in Guangzhou and elsewhere in China.
Chinese in Tanzania: Tudou.com co-founder Marc van der Chijs has just returned from a trip to the east African nation of Tanzania and has written a blog post about Chinese entrepreneurs he met there.
Middle name? No tickets for you: The WSJ’s China Journal blog tells of foreigners unable to claim Olympic tickets they reserved:
The online application forms requested only first and last names. But when foreigners showed up to claim their tickets, using passports for identification, bank staff refused to hand over tickets to people whose passports also included a middle name. (It’s a non-issue for most Chinese, who use family names and given names but not separate "middle" names.)
Hip-hop Olympics: At Blogging Beijing from the the Seattle Times, Daniel Beekman profiles Beijing-based hip-hop group In Three (阴三儿).
Make Polo: A group of journalism students from the University of Texas at Austin traveled around China in May and are publishing photos, articles and blog posts about their visit at ChinaOnThe Brink.com.
One of them, Patrick Michels, wrote about Internet startup MakePolo.com:
Makepolo is a search engine designed to help small businesses quickly find specific supplies and stock items from online retailers. By focusing on the online needs of a narrow group of users, Su is counting on the fact that just a sliver of the Chinese market can mean serious business–30 million small businesses in China alone, he says.
97 new airports planned: From The China Daily:
China sets aside $64b for airport shuffle
China drafted a long-term plan for development of air cargo, which will require the building of 97 new airports, consolidation of smaller airports and upgrading of certain key airports by the year 2020. The entire project will cost the government a massive investment of $64 billion.
Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?: Susan Brownell answers that trick question at The China Beat:
Global politics usually don’t change as quickly as we would like, but they do change. One year ago I was one of many people who thought that the biggest political threat to the Beijing Olympic Games was the movement toward independence in Taiwan. Now it appears that the Taiwan situation is comparatively stable. But the symbols associated with Taiwan – including words – remain one of the most politically sensitive areas of the Olympic Games.