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).
Utopia bombards Lust, Caution: ESWN translates a 1510 blog post by Shi Feike, who attended a session at Peking University devoted to the discussion of Lust, Caution:
Researcher Wang then led things to a climax by saying that Lust, Caution‘s female character was based upon the patriotic martyr Zheng Pingyu but Eileen Chang wrote this story because she was a Chinese traitor who hated the people’s heroine Zheng; furthermore, Eileen Chang was ugly and therefore jealous of the beautiful Zheng. Wang concluded emphatically: "The ugly female Chinese traitor Eileen Chang wrote a story filled with dark and vile imagination in order to express her hatred against the beautiful heoine Zheng." That was how Lust, Caution was created!
Yahoo settles with imprisoned journalists: From ComputerWorld:
Yahoo Inc. today settled a lawsuit brought against it on behalf of imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao, and pro-democracy writer Wang Xiaoning, according to court documents. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Yahoo could not be reached for comment.
The settlement comes after a contentious Congressional hearing last week in which members of the U.S. House of Representatives accused Yahoo of providing information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest and imprisonment of journalist Shi Tao. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) also accused Yahoo officials of lying to Congress about how much Yahoo knew of the facts surrounding the case when it provided information to the Chinese authorities.
Apple iPhone to launch officially in China?: iPhones are already widely available in China: they come pre-hacked so that you can use them with China Mobile’s network. Now it looks like they will be sold officially here too; from CNN.com:
‘It seems that iPhone is hot in some markets. We are willing to discuss with Apple,’ Li Zhengmao, executive director and vice president of China Unicom told Dow Jones Newswires on the sidelines of the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau…
…China Unicom’s rival China Mobile Ltd. said Tuesday it was in talks with Apple to bring the iPhone to China.
Baidupedia in Business Week: Andrew Lih quotes a BusinessWeek story on possible copyright violations and censorship at Baidu Baike, and then looks at what Baidu thinks of Wikipedia:
When I met one of Baidu’s program managers a few months ago, I told her I’d be interested in talking to folks from Baidu Baike, just to let them know how to conform to the GFDL. It was actually fine to copy Wikipedia’s content, and also to censor stuff they don’t like, as long as they complied with the GFDL.
She got back to me saying Baidu’s folks on that side were "scared" of talking to folks involved with Wikipedia, after the strong comments by Wikimedia Foundation chairperson Florence Nibart-Devouard.
Who knows what they know?: The Telegraph’s Richard Spencer muses about BOCOG’s database of 28,000 Olympic journalists:
"The major purpose is to provide better service to the media, it is not to monitor the press or threaten anyone," they said. "Some reporters like to cover sport and some others are very interested in politics. So we have some kind of data and information concerning that."
Well, no harm in that, I suppose. But it raises the age-old question of how efficient one’s minders are. Will we be allowed to check the list? What if by some mistake we are left off, and judged to be fake reporters? Will we know this is the reason for all our interview requests being turned down? Worse – what happens if the man from the Financial Times is accidentally confused with the man from Kazakh Wrestling Weekly? Just think of the chaos that might ensue.