This winter writer-blogger-race car-driver Han Han found himself facing charges of plagiarism from celebrated fraud-buster Fang Zhouzi. Both Han and Fang have huge followings among China’s microbloggers. And their personal disagreement soon exploded into a chaotic on-line battle among different camps of intellectuals.
Chinese social media outlets lit up after sharp-eyed viewers caught Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg making a cameo appearance on Chinese Police, a documentary series produced by China Central Television (CCTV). Just a few second long, the footage shows Zuckerberg and his new wife Priscilla Chan, strolling the streets of Shanghai in an episode on high-tech crime-solving methods. The bizarre and seemingly unintended cameo appears to have been shot during the billionaire’s March 2012 trip to China.
When ecologist Xie Yan heard about the Natural Heritage Conservation Act, she knew she had to kill it. So she wrote a letter. The open letter, posted on February 5 to Xie’s blog, became the focus of a story the next day at one of China’s most respected news organizations, Caixin magazine. It was the opening salvo in a month-long campaign against the legislation draft up for submission to the National People’s Congress during the annual “Two Meetings.”
On May 25, the official Weibo account of the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong published its “Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People’s Daily.” The humorous and sarcastic tone of the comments caused large scale re-posting and commenting.
A senior executive at one of the mainland’s Big Four state-controlled banks has been detained amid a widening investigation into allegations of illegal gambling and the misappropriation of clients’ money.
China will require its citizens to register their fingerprints when applying for ID cards from January 2013 in a bid to curb counterfeit ID cards and ensure faster identification, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
Censoring the Chinese Internet must be exhausting work, like trying to stem the flow of a fire hose with your thumb. Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service, says its 300 million registered users post more than 100 million weibos, or tweet-like posts, a day.
From their website:
The Nieman Journalism Lab is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.
The Internet has brought forth an unprecedented flowering of news and information. But it has also destabilized the old business models that have supported quality journalism for decades. Good journalists across the country are losing their jobs or adjusting to a radically new news environment online. We want to highlight attempts at innovation and figure out what makes them succeed or fail. We want to find good ideas for others to steal. We want to help reporters and editors adjust to their online labors; we want to help traditional news organizations find a way to survive; we want to help the new crop of startups that will complement — or supplant — them.
Contrary to myths and assumptions, economic liberalization and development will not inevitably lead to corresponding political liberalization and development. Economic power has only reinforced an increasingly absurd state power in China.
On May 9, China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s (CNOOC) first deepwater drilling platform began operating in the South China Sea. The world-class vessel is stationed in the Liwan 6-1-1 field, about 320 kilometers southeast of Hong Kong, in waters about 1,500 meters deep.
