A group of people the other day were at the large shopping mall at a place called Shuangjing, just inside Beijing’s Third Ring Road, looking at their cell phones and comparing notes. “Don’t go to Sina Weibo—it’s too famous,” one person advised, referring to the largest of China’s electronic bulletin boards. “Go to Wangyi. It’s not so well known so it doesn’t get blocked so quickly.”
An infographic circulating on Chinese social media provides some background information on the planned oceanic wastewater pipeline and a compelling call-to-action for local residents in Qidong, a small city north of Shanghai. Fierce mass protest forced local government to abandon the project on July 28, the second successful mass NIMBY protest in China in a month. Tea Leaf Nation translates some salient portions of the infographic here.
Bloomberg’s news website remains blocked by China’s state censors a full month after it detailed the riches amassed by the family of Xi Jinping, the man who is expected to be the country’s next president. Although periodic outages of foreign media websites in China are common, the month-long total blackout of Bloomberg is an unusually harsh response, highlighting the extent to which its coverage angered the government.
Protests against a planned pipeline to channel wastewater into the ocean for a Japanese paper manufacturer near a major fishery on China’s east coast (just north of Shanghai) has turned ugly. Thousands of angry protesters in Qidong in China’s Jiangsu Province (江苏省南通市启东) have overturned police cars and threatened to overwhelm a massed police formation.
China's statisticians get a tough press. After all, it was Europe, not China, whose fudged public finance data helped usher in the latest round of global financial turmoil. The biggest corporate fraud in recent memory isn't China's Sino-Forest, but America's Enron.
Chinese Olympians were subjected to a state-sponsored doping regime which was modelled on eastern Europe, says a retired Chinese Olympic doctor.
Steroids and human growth hormones were officially treated as part of ''scientific training'' as China emerged as a sporting power through the 1980s and into the 1990s, she says.
Athletes often did not know what they were being injected with and medical staff who refused to participate were marginalised, she says.
Many bloggers have already written about the posturing of certain of our elected representatives on the issue of China-made clothing for US Olympic athletes, using various permutations of the word “idiot” (e.g., Daniel Drezner, “idiocies like the Olympic-uniform controversy”;Stan Abrams, “US Olympic Uniform Idiotfest”).
Taiwan regulators have put strict conditions on a bid by a China-friendly media group to purchase the island’s second largest cable TV system as concerns grow that China’s commercial clout is already undermining freedom of the press in one of Asia’s liveliest media markets.
This week on Sinica, attention turns to the torrential flooding which plagued Beijing earlier this week and claimed the lives of at least seventy-seven residents in the Chinese capital. As tempers flare and city officials resign, questions mount over whether this natural disaster is turning into a political crisis for the city government. Also under discussion is a sharp increase in hospital killings, a brazen rise in online shadow banking, Chinese acquisitions in foreign oil-field markets, and first-hand reports of potentially edible wildlife in the vicinity of the Lido Hotel.
