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).
From Dortmund to Handan: The New York Times tells the story of the ThyssenKrupp steel mill in Dortmund in Germany’s Ruhr Valley that was taken apart piece by piece and rebuilt in Handan, Hebei Province. The story focuses on the environmental problems connected with China’s new dominance of global steel production.
Old man Kuok to gobble up SCMP: Bloomberg reports:
SCMP Group Ltd., publisher of the South China Morning Post newspaper, rose the most in more than four years in Hong Kong after receiving a HK$2.37 billion ($304 million) buyout offer from controlling stockholder Robert Kuok…
…The publisher’s stock slumped to record lows last month on concern a government decision to stop requiring companies to publish corporate announcements in newspapers will hurt sales. SCMP profit doubled in the past five years as Hong Kong’s economic expansion lifted advertising revenue…
…Kuok, 84, bought a controlling stake in SCMP from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch in 1993. The company’s sales declined to HK$1.2 billion last year from HK$2.4 billion in 1997, when the U.K. handed Hong Kong back to China after controlling it for more than 150 years.
Kuok was rated by Forbes Inc. this year as Malaysia’s richest man, worth $7.6 billion. He also has interests in property and sugar manufacturing.
The South China Morning Post’s audited circulation fell to 102,013 in the second half of 2006, from 104,415 in the first half, according to its annual report published in April. That is just over a quarter of the sales of Chinese-language Oriental Daily News, Hong Kong’s best-selling newspaper with a daily circulation of 400,000, according to BNP Paribas.
The Middle Kingdom’s dilemma: In the Washington Monthly, Christina Larson asks "Can China clean up its environment without cleaning up its politics?":
[Geologist Yong Yang] opened a spreadsheet. On one side was a series of estimates, based on Yong’s research, of the volume of water in the Yangtze. On the other side were the official estimates prepared by the government’s Yellow River Conservancy Commission. The government data was supposed to be secret, but Yong had obtained it from a network of friends and former colleagues inside the government.
Yong found that the official figures were often "way off." In one section of the river, the government’s plans call for diverting between 8 and 9 billion cubic meters of water north each year. However, Yong’s research—supported by thirty years’ worth of reports from hydrology monitoring stations—indicates that the average annual water flow for that section includes a low estimate of 7 billion cubic meters. This means that when the river flow is low, the government would be hoping to divert an amount of water greater than the total volume in the river. Moreover, no sound engineering plan should call for redirecting all of the water in a river, since downstream communities, including Shanghai, will still depend upon the Yangtze for agriculture, industry, and hydropower.
via Alan Baumler’s post at Frog in a Well, which adds some historical perspective. See also: China’s pollution goes global in Mother Jones.
Behind the scenes in Xiamen: Southern Weekly talks to Xiamen official Zhu Zilu about the city’s decision to invite public participation in planning the future of the PX project:
At the time I thought that I wanted to hold an attitude that we are friends and not enemies. If I have to make a joke, I should be able to. I ignored all the formal rules and regulations of the meeting. Ultimately, I had faith in the quality of the citizens. Most of the citizens are on the same side as the government — we are all working for Xiamen. Only a small minority want to cause trouble.
Besides, more than 50% of the forum participants were young people who are easily excitable. If the forum was mismanaged, it would only cause resentment.
For each step, we had several proposals to choose from. We consulted the Internet opinion, especially the negative opinions. We disclosed all the details so that no one can complain. Since people accused the government of staging a show, we decided to reveal to them everything that we were doing. For example, the selection of speakers was supposed to be done by adults; since someone said on the Internet that the drawing was fixed, we asked children to draw the numbers. Although there was no reason to draw out all 200 numbers, we drew all 200 numbers sequentially to show that no number had been excluded.
Also from ESWN: The People and Wisdom Changed Xiamen
The made in Hong Kong literary challenge: Antoaneta Bezlova writes for IPS News about Hong Kong writers trying to break into overseas markets:
Recent buzz in literary and publishing circles has painted this hub, which straddles the East and West, as the coming of age literary centre of Asia. Hong Kong, long obsessed with celebrity gossip and the feng shui of success, is now stepping forward in a very different limelight. The city has an up and coming literary festival, its own literary magazine and recently inaugurated an international prize aimed at boosting the profile of Asian literature.
But despite these nascent stirrings writers here say the cluster of companies that control the global publishing business has been slow rediscovering Asian literary works after the demise of the colonial era. Their pursuit of instantaneous hits has shut many literary gems out of the global market, allowing only a small number of non-English books to enter the inner sanctum of English-language audiences.
Even as interest in original voices from Asia — a continent still perceived as full of exotic allure in the West — flares anew, Asian writers are struggling to get their works published and recognised outside of their home countries.