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).
Song Qingling memorial: A video on Shanghaiist:
Song Qing Ling Memorial (宋庆龄陵园), a little known cemetery in western Shanghai home to the remains of Song Qing Ling, numerous other Chinese personalities — and scores of foreigners who came to Shanghai mostly during its early boom years in the mid-1800s and early 1900s, some identified by simple gravestones, and some anonymous.
News reports with errors also need “breathing space”: At the China Media Project, David Bandurski translates beleaguered journalist Chang Ping’s latest op-ed:
It should be pointed out that the CCTV case has not been widely affirmed on the Internet, but instead has met with much suspicion. This is because CCTV, as a state media organization, is invested with government authority. [This raises the question of whether] the core of the case is about media reporting on matters of public interest, or about government authority in a standoff with private interests. More importantly, in many cases concerning government authority and incidents [or matters] of public interest, not even a drop of the spirit of the Sullivan decision is evident. In the April 28 railway disaster, for example, a Web user from Shandong province was detained by police for five days for posting inaccurate information (exaggerating the number of dead).
The Olympic effect: anthropologist conference cancelled: From GoKunming.com:
The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences … has been notified by the Chinese organizers of the 16th IUAES World Congress that the event, originally scheduled to be held July 15-23 in Kunming, had been postponed.
So Clinton was right about Beijing and jello: Richard McGregor in The Financial Times:
The conventional wisdom in recent years is that Beijing’s internet police have been more successful than anyone could have imagined in controlling the spread of political ideas in cyberspace. Bill Clinton’s famous remark in the late 1990s, that such efforts were doomed and akin to ‘nailing jello to a wall’, is now considered wide of the mark.
It turns out that the former US president was right, but not in the way that he thought.
3 Chinese workers kidnapped in Nigeria: From The China Daily:
Three Chinese workers were abducted by unidentified kidnappers on Tuesday in Calabar, the capital city of Nigeria’s southern Cross River State, company sources told Xinhua here on Thursday.
The workers, all employees of China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, were seized near the company’s compound in Calabar, according to a company official.
Korean and Chinese hackers arrested: Korea-based blogger Marmot’s Hole translates from the Korean press:
Chinese authorities have arrested three accomplices involved in the January hacker attack on popular Korean auction site ‘Auction,’ the Korean subsidiary of eBay.
Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean authorities have identified the actual hackers, a Korean and a Chinese, and are looking for them now, an unnamed Korean police official said.
Japan and China make nice: Hu Jintao is in Japan, offering pandas and being very friendly with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. This links to a Xinhua report that gives the Party line.
Olympic torch on Everest summit: 09:11 am Beijing time: Most Chinese TV stations have been broadcasting live coverage of the summit ascent of the Olympic Torch (as interesting as watching paint dry), and Xinhua has been publishing regular updates.