The Beijing News
October 10, 2008

The Beijing News reported today that a senior at August First High School died during a 1,200 meter run yesterday. The run is a requirement at the school, which is located in Beijing's Haidian District. The cause of death has not yet been determined.

Last week, the Ministry of Education released its "Sunny Sports long-distance winter run" program (阳光体育冬季长跑), which requires the country's schools and universities to organize runs for students. The program is intended to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which takes place one year from now on October 1, 2009, so students are supposed to run distances that are multiples of 60 kilometers: 120 km for elementary students, 180 km for junior high students, and 240 km for senior high and university students. This equates to 1,000, 1,500, and 2,000 meters per day, respectively.

Critics argue that the plan puts politics ahead of students' health, and that a one-size-fits-all training program is unlikely to benefit everyone because of individual physical differences. In response, the Ministry of Education told a press conference yesterday that the "Sunny Sports Run," is only a recommendation, not an order, and is intended to be a goal for students to accomplish. There is no time limit for how long the run should last, and students who are physically unfit for such exercise should not be compelled to participate.

The controversy should really come as no suprise, because the Ministry of Education has a history of issuing policy "recommendations" that at first glance appear to be compulsory. In June, 2007, a plan to bring coed dancing to school physical fitness programs raised an uproar before the Ministry emphasized that it was only voluntary, and earlier this year public opposition forced it to back down from a proposal to make Peking Opera part of the required curriculum.

The Beijing News quoted teachers at a city school who complained that there was no space to have all the students run. They also said that students are usually too tired to focus in class after running. Beijing has barred schools from allowing students to run in streets and alleys following reports of students involved in traffic accidents in other parts of the country.

This article is from Danwei.org

Everyone's a journalist

Mention "participatory media," and what comes to mind are blog conventions, crowd-sourced op-ed columns, Twitter feeds from disaster zones, and citizen journalists typing out eyewitness accounts of local, breaking situations. A slick, full-color magazine sponsored by a state media group does not.

Enter Blog Weekly (博客天下), a new biweekly magazine that uses China's army of bloggers to report on current events.

The magazine's lofty ideals are on display in an ad was placed in a number of traditional news weeklies. Noting that 500 blogger-journalists reported on the nomination of Barack Obama and Joe Biden at the US Democratic National Convention in August, the ad speaks of the power of grass-roots media to change society:

Statistics show that China currently has 1.3 million online BBS forums with 230 million active participants, making it the country with the "largest online population in the world." The rise of the Internet has opened up a new space for public opinion in Chinese society and has had a profound influence on the structural makeup and methods of transmission of public opinion in society, affecting life on every level.

As a first-hand record of the Internet, Blog Weekly greets the historic opportunities of a wired society with a spirit of responsibility, sharing, and personal involvement, and will use the power of the Internet to spur China forward.

In an era of blogs, everyone's a journalist.

Blog Weekly is not the first print publication to recognize the value of web content, but it might be the first legitimate effort. Earlier attempts to print the Internet, such as Net News Weekly or Blogs, employed the dodgy strategy of taking an existing magazine licensed for an underperforming market, dressing it in a web-related motif, and filling it with downloaded material.

Many traditional media outlets supplement their own content with the odd blog post, and Vista (看天下), a Beijing-based magazine which, like Blog Weekly, is sponsored by the Ningxia Daily Group, uses Internet commentary to spice up its digest of the country's major newspapers and magazines. But the new magazine is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the wealth of content available online: according to a magazine employee, it currently is the only publication authorized by GAPP to draw its content exclusively from blogs.

Blog Weekly, October 15, 2008

Adopting the format of a typical news weekly, the magazine divides content into sections for current events, business, society, and entertainment. The most noticeable differences are that every article has a source URL attached, and appended to most articles are a few quotes from netizens that presumably appeared in the comments section of the original post.

When blogs first took off in China, journalists were quick to adopt them as a way to express themselves outside of the confines of the self-censoring mainstream press, and journalist-bloggers continue to be a force behind online public opinion. Blog Weekly takes advantage of the expertise and access of some of those bloggers in this issue.

The first story in the "Live" section (mainly eyewitness reports) is a set of field notes written by Chengdu Commercial Press reporter Huang Xiuli after she returned from the scene of a mudslide in Shanxi. The accident on September 8, which according to official reports at the time had caused 34 deaths (that number has since risen to 261), was blamed on torrential rains. In the course of her investigation, however, Huang learned from local villagers that the rain had been light that evening; she also reported other contradictory information and brush-offs from the authorities.

The Blog Weekly article is sourced to Huang's blog post, which has been deleted from her Hexun-hosted blog.

Space and content restrictions in the Chinese media are issues that columnists and reporters deal with daily, and one solution has been for journalists whose work has been edited for length or content to post "uncut" or "behind the scenes" versions of their articles to their blogs, where length is not an issue and content restrictions are comparatively lax.

Blog Weekly can make use of these expanded versions, but as a print magazine, it faces the same constraints as traditional media outlets. Huang's field notes, for example, filled three separate blog posts that ran into the thousands of words. Even though the magazine gave the story four pages (longish by the standards of Chinese news weeklies), it still had to make heavy edits to the original.

To the magazine's credit, those edits maintained Huang's general picture of obstruction, evasion, and collusion on the part of the authorities, and the sense that locals distrusted the official explanation. Similarly, an account by an Oriental Morning Post journalist of why he decided to mention Sanlu by name in his report on the melamine milk scandal had its overall integrity preserved even as it was slashed by two-thirds to fit onto two pages. The magazine's lead time may allow it to gauge the prevailing winds and print controversial material after it has been given tacit approval by the central authorities.

There's also a question of copyright and financial compensation. Chinese copyright law allows any article not expressly prohibiting it to be republished so long as the copyright holder is properly compensated. Publications that swipe content often rationalize their actions placing a notice at the front of the magazine inviting authors to contact them for payment. As you might imagine, this does not always work out in practice.

If an article's republication escapes the notice of the original copyright holder, the magazine scores free content, but even if it fulfills its obligation to pay bloggers, Blog Weekly may still win by getting bloggers to read it in the hopes of finding their works among its pages. Even in 2008, print confers a legitimacy that online publishing still lacks.

Something else to look at will be how the magazine deals with zhuanzai culture — the largely unattributed reposting of articles that sustains China's blogs and forums. For example, one article in this issue credited to "anonymous" describes a beggar who has an astonishing grasp of economics and SWOT analysis. The URL points to a post made on the Dayoo on 11 September that clearly notes that the piece was originally published elsewhere. A little bit mucking around with search terms on Baidu pulls up what looks to be the original, posted by someone called "mossystone" to the XMFish boards on 25 July.

Unattributed zhuanzai is a part of life on mainland blogs and forums, even if bloggers themselves often grumble that they're not getting credit for posts that make the leap to popularity. But does a print magazine have a responsibility to uncover the original source?

The copyright issue gets a little thornier when a blog post is only an intermediary source, as in the case of translations. Examples:

• "Dear Recession, You're Not So Bad," by Paul McDonnold (Christian Science Monitor, 2008.08.25). The URL in the magazine is for the original, English-language version, but the translation is actually edited from a version done by the collaborative translation website Yeeyan.
• "Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics," by Ben Stein (New York Times, 2008.07.13). The magazine references a post on the Canadian news aggregator, which clearly notes the original translation was done by Xiao Xuehua for the Ta Kung Pao.
• Hillary Clinton's speech announcing her withdrawal from the Democratic primary. The magazine links to a video of the speech on Clinton's campaign website but draws netizen comments from an analysis of the speech by blogger Ruan Yifeng. Ruan's post only offers a partial translation of the speech; the magazine's text is actually a translation done by Zhao Feifei for Xinhua.

Examining a few other articles reveals the limitations of blog-based media, at least at the present time. First-hand reportage published outside traditional media channels does exist, as the field notes of Huang Xiuli and the Oriental Morning Post reporter show, but the majority of current events blogs in China tend to be commentaries on the news. Sourcing a magazine from opinion pieces means that readers may not have the background information to put the arguments into context.

Blog Weekly deals with this problem in two ways. In-depth reports like the cover feature on the Sanlu melamine milk scandal start off with a short original summary of the situation. For other topics, the URL for the "blog post" actually points to an online edition of an article from a conventional publication: a profile of Madonna in Mangazine, a complaint about Beijing subway crowding from novelist Qiu Huadong in Southern Weekly, or a profile of Huiyuan boss Zhu Xinli (inexplicably re-edited into the first-person) from The Founder, to cite three examples in this issue.

So as a grass-roots news magazine, Blog Weekly is not entirely successful. That aspiration may not even be possible in China, where regulations require reporters to obtain official GAPP certification and unlicensed "citizen journalists" run risks by their very existence. The magazine does offer 0.5 yuan per character for first-run eyewitness blog accounts of major incidents (up to 4000 characters in length), so it will be interesting to see what stories it features in the future.

Like a traditional current affairs magazine, Blog Weekly is geared toward a general readership. In your correspondent's eyes, it may appeal to the same audience that reads yWeekend, a Beijing Youth Daily-affiliated newspaper that explains the latest online memes and digs behind the week's most controversial stories through interviews with reporters and analysis of Internet commentary. But that's a weekly newspaper that sells for 1 yuan and has a distinct editorial personality, not to mention original reporting. By comparison, Blog Weekly is bland, expensive at 8 yuan, and at least two weeks behind the pace of Internet public opinion, which is notoriously mercurial in the first place. It does have lots of pretty pictures, which is a plus.

Can it succeed? If it finds an audience and tailors its story selection to their tastes, it may. Participatory media may be the solution here, too: readers are rewarded 100 yuan if a story they recommend gets printed, and additional bonuses will be given out for audience favorites. If enough people are looking for a print summary of substantive online discussion or a record of what bloggers are talking about, Blog Weekly just might have a future.

A trial issue of Blog Weekly was published in September; starting with the 15 October issue, it will be published on the 1st and 15th of every month.

This article is from Danwei.org

Beijing Morning Post
October 9, 2008

Historian Yan Chongnian, who was slapped at a book signing by someone who reportedly took issue with his sympathy for the Qing Dynasty, has been a hot topic of conversation both on and off-line for the past few days.

Follow-up reports say that the attacker is facing a 1,000 yuan fine and 10 days in jail for the two slaps he delivered, but many netizens seem to have as little sympathy for the old man as for Sanlu milk powder. "Traitorous" quotes attributed to Yan circulating on BBSs continue add fuel to an already hot debate.

In an interview printed in the Beijing Morning Post today, Yan denied uttering those quotes, which include praise for the Manchu Kangxi Emperor as being "greater than any Han Chinese emperor," an assessment that Qing's "word prison" (文字狱), the imprisonment and persecution of dissenters, "ensured social stability," and poems bemoaning the downfall of Qing dynasty.

Here is translation of the interview.

Beijing Morning Post: Do you think it was an impulsive move?
Yan Chongnian: The coverage from some media saying that "a man charged up to Yan Chongnian" is untrue. He didn't rush, he was in line [waiting with readers to have their books signed]. He was also there listening to my talk and didn't ask any questions.

BMP: Have you considered suing him?
Yan: I was not at fault in the incident. I don't know him and don't bear any grudges toward him. I was physically attacked by him and I emotionally hurt. I went to the hospital for a medical checkup, and my blood pressure had been raised to 105/185. My reputation has also been damaged. I have every right to sue him, but I haven't decided yet.

BMP: How have you been feeling recently?
Yan: It is not just something that has befallen me; it is a sorrow for the spirit of society. Academic research and discussion should be protected by law, and so should the dignity and safety of researchers. At the level of an individual human being, each of us deserves respect. Without provocation - I cannot understand it.

BMP: Quotes circulating on the Internet, such as the "word prison" ensuring social stability and Han costumes having nothing to do with the national spirit, have caused lots of controversy. Did you say those things?
Yan: Let me make a statement here: I have checked up on all those quotes. I said none of them, they are pure fabrication. I has been critical of the "word prison" and never expressed any opinion about Han costumes. If someone insists that I said such things, please point out in which book and on which page, or in which one of my talks. The imprecision of the quotes is not scholarly at all.

BMP: A poem on the Internet commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Qing emperor's abdication claims to be your work and has been the target of criticism. There's also talk that you lied when you said you were Han Chinese.
Yan: I can clear that up. I never write poems. I can show you my ID and tell you assuredly that I am a Han Chinese. I correct these Internet rumors every time someone asks. Someone even faked my blog and cooked up discussions between me and someone else. I can assure you that I do not blog.

BMP: Do you think these online rumors are ridiculous?
Yan: No they are not. They should be dealt with seriously. Some of it is speculation and we cannot stop people from speculating. But fabrication is irresponsible behavior, and personal attacks, slander, and defamation must be punished by law.

BMP: Some say that you academic celebrities have the right to speak but readers have no channel to communicate their ideas to you. What do you think?
Yan: I have received thousands of letters from readers since 2004, and have held discussions on different occasions. Whenever anyone seriously brought up a different opinion, I would check out the facts. For example, when I was talking about the Kangxi Emperor, I said that Han, Manchu, Mongolians, and Daur all contributed to the victory of Yakesa Battle [a border conflict between the Qing and Russia in the 17th century], but then I was told by an old Evenki that their people (called Solon at the time) also helped win the war, so I told the publisher to add that to my book.

BMP: The netizens also criticize you for paying too many compliments to the Qing emperors.
Yan: My studies never denies the merits or neglects the wrongdoings of anyone. I praise what is good and criticize what is bad. For example, the Kangxi Emperor didn't reform the Eight Banner institutions, which were good during wartime but bad during peacetime. Kangxi himself studied the West, but didn't institutionalize it as a government function, leading to China's total ignorance about the West after the Qianlong Emperor. I also said on TV that the failure of Opium War pinned Daoguang emperor to the wall of shame forever. Are those compliments?

Those people, who probably haven't read my books at all or watched all the episodes of my show, act out of nationalist prejudice to take things out of context and even distort and fabricate. Those who disagree with my historical views are entitled to do so. But hitting me is not about academics.

This article is from Danwei.org

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This article is from Danwei.org

Yangtse Evening Post
October 8, 2008

The Chinese people usually take deep pride, sometimes unduly so, in the so-called "traditional Chinese virtues" (中华民族传统美德). One thing that these virtues dictate is that one must think first of the needs of children and the elderly (尊老爱幼) because they require more care than you do. But not every Chinese person is happy to follow that old commandment.

A front page headline in today's Yangtse Evening Post heralds an article reporting that a young woman in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, refused to give up her bus seat to senior and insisted that she had the right to do so. Here's a translation of an excerpt:

Yesterday 11 o'clock am, your correspondent boarded the Line 4 bus which was full of passengers who didn't have seats. About half of the passengers were elderly, most of whom were going to the Fuzimiao [a tourist spot in Nanjing]. Despite a loudspeaker notice that reminded passengers every so often, "Please give seats to the elderly, pregnant women, and people holding babies," few people budged from their seats. Most of them just turned their faces to the window with indifference, except for a couple of students in school uniforms.

One old woman, apparently in her seventies, had been standing beside a 30-something woman for over ten minutes. Every time the bus braked suddenly, she had difficulty keeping her footing.

One passenger asked the younger woman to give her seat to the older one. Unexpectedly, the young woman retorted with something really preposterous: "I would never give up my seat to anyone in a bus." To your correspondent, who tried to talk with her, she said, "Please give me a reason why I should give up my seat. I am a member of 'never give up your seat group.' Go and check it out on the Internet if you like." She said nothing else but sat there like a rock.

The "never give up your seat group" turns out to be a online discussion group registered on Douban, a SNS website. The group, which shared a belief that it's unfair for the young to give away their seats to the old, has launched a campaign calling for more people to join the movement to "never give up your seat." Complaints and reasoning that can be found on their pages include:

• Some of the old people, despite their advanced age, are actually stronger and healthier than younger people;
• Some old people take the privilege for granted and have no gratitude to seat-givers;
• Young people are shouldering the burden of the entire society, and deserve a few minutes' rest during their commutes.

They also have a manifesto for their cause:

Please give me a reason why should I give up my seat.

When you saw grannies and granddaddies full of energy lining up to wait for the Olympic bank notes (many of those who waited overnight were grannies and granddaddies) adopt an old and weak appearance once they got on a bus, taking for granted whatever they think they deserve simply because they are old, how did you feel? As a matter of course, in this vast country, every time people queue for something, ranging from a supermarket selling extra-cheap eggs to the a discount at a department store which, old people are always the in the majority in the queues. Based on this fact, we believe that standing in a bus for few minutes is not such a big deal.

We know that many younger people are unwilling to give up their seats, but finally they relent because of a sense of guilt if they do not, especially with all those other grannies and granddaddies around you.

We must fight the unscientific and unfounded theory that the old should always take the seats. Every time you contest the idea, you contribute a bit to the final destruction of the absurd theory.

Our slogan is "Never give away your bus seat."

This article is from Danwei.org

Esquire, October 2008

The cover of the October issue of Esquire features Donnie Yen as Saint Sebastian by way of Muhammad Ali.

Yen (甄子丹), a Hong Kong action star and fight choreographer currently on-screen in the supernatural love story Painted Skin, is known for his explosive fight scenes and the mix of martial arts forms he employs in them. The Esquire cover feature examines his on-screen violence against the backdrop of a serious social issue: the effects of violent films on the youth. In what the magazine describes as a coup, it obtained a letter written in Yen's own hand urging young people to take the road of peace (see below).

Editor-in-chief Dou Jiangming, who replaces Wang Feng with this issue, comments on the feature in a meandering column addressing youth, violence, and revenge that quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., poet Bai Hua, and the Shiji:

In a small hotel in Shanghai, Donnie Yen grew silent as he faced our photographer's camera.

We needled him over and over with one question: Your movies (SPL, Flash Point) are chock full of fights and bloody violence, so how do you face the real-life issue of young people who are impulsive and violent?

It was coercion to stick arrows into his body, to put him in a Gandhi t-shirt. We wanted to force the biggest martial arts star in China today to utter the word "repentance."

However, I know that there are deeper reasons behind violence in society. Assigning blame to cultural products with a violent aesthetic has echoes of the sort of restrictions on speech that the world has abandoned, and as literary criticism is defeated and impotent.

But we have not yet learned how to face violence.

The feature itself follows a personal and professional bio of Yen with a Q&A in which he discusses topics ranging from his upbringing to why wushu won't be an Olympic sport. Yen makes a distinction between purely skill-based martial arts like boxing, and Chinese wushu, which is tied up with cultural issues and divided into sects, each adding its own aura of mystery.

The cover shot is a conscious homage to the famous April 1968 Esquire cover featuring a martyred Muhammad Ali (named the third greatest magazine cover of the last 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors). Peter Pen, the feature's editor, describes the shoot in a short note:

The day before doing the cover shoot, I spent an entire evening chatting with Donnie Yen at the Shanghai Sofitel. He had come to Shanghai from Hong Kong expressly for the purpose of doing the Esquire shoot. The fatigue of the journey did not seem to have affected his spirits. When he had heard our plan for the shoot, he said, "I never imagined that a mainland magazine would be so creative. It's been a long time since I've done such an interesting magazine shoot. Most magazines have me stand in a studio and tell me to pose this way or that. I'm tired of them." I said, "The theme of this shoot is 'The Lessons of Violence.' Do you have anything to say about violence?" He said, "The world around us sees new violent objects and incidents every day, but this question really deserves some thought." His tone was gentle and sincere, and possibly even a little gallant.

The morning of the shoot, he arrived to the studio even earlier than the crew, saying that he wanted be in the best condition for the shoot. During styling, nonstop talking alternated with moments where he pondered the questions put to him by the interviewer beside him. At times lighthearted and at times serious, he crafted a melody from the chords of the interviewer's questions. His face peered out of the make-up mirror for lengthy periods as he ruminated over questions. Indeed, for him, violence is a subject fraught with internal contractions. His masterful martial arts put to bold use in violent movies has won him cheers and box office rewards, yet he protests to the mirror, "the audience can decide not to watch."

Preparing the arrow-pierced image for the cover, he noticed immediately that it was to some degree a recreation of the April 1968 Esquire cover featuring boxer Muhammad Ali. Ali had encountered all manner of injustice in the US for his opposition to the war. On some level, a connection exists between someone who made a living through violence standing up to oppose violence as a solution to problems, and an violent movie actor coming forward to advocate a spirit of non-violence; they could even be metaphors for each other. He waited patiently as the prop master stuck each arrow onto the front and back of his body, and then in the instant the bulb flashed, he was like a statue, his entire body imbued with tenderness, and a tinge of the heroic flitting about his eyes.

The final setting of the photo shoot was in a run-down hotel in one of Shanghai's alleyways. It had only two floors, and the corners of the room were filled with white paint chips. It was an unassuming corner of the neon-lit Bund, yet it was also a place that could easily gestate and give birth to violent situations. In the intervals between shots, he would peer through the window to the street outside, the expression on his face a melancholy that I had never found in his films. When the photographer pressed the shutter button, this melancholy settled out to some extent, and I believe that this is the most valuable part of this series of photographs.

Also worthy of note is the fact that Donnie Yen hand-wrote a letter for this issue of Esquire in which he recorded his thoughts on violence and violent movies that he has found during several decades in the movie business. Prior to this, no media outlet had ever such an opportunity to hear him speak from his heart.

That letter was reprinted at the start of the feature:

dear friend:

Your departure fills me with deep sadness and remorse. As someone with a true love of Chinese kung fu, I am acutely aware that violence can mislead people to savage and desperate actions, and how fascination with violence has led untold numbers of young people to pay a heavy price, or even lose their lives. But some situations have no need for a violent resolution; kindness and humanity is altogether possible. In many cases, the use of violence will not only fail to solve a problem, it will make it even worse. And once it is used, there is no taking it back. Violence begets more violence rather than bringing justice.

Donnie's handwritten letter

The highest level of Chinese martial arts is harmony among all things. It stresses both inward and outward cultivation and possesses a wealth of meaning and profound implications. It is the power of spirit and of faith. Violence belongs to a novice's misunderstanding of martial arts and advocates a competition of reckless force; there is no way for it to ascend to a contest on a spiritual level. The true way to solve a problem is through an attitude of tolerance, patience, magnanimity, and humility, and above all by using a spirit of harmony to resolve discord.

Looking through the pages of human history, we see far too many people who have shed their blood or lost their lives due to war and aggression. They believed in violent martial arts and hoped to use its great power to win victory over others, thereby achieving vainglory and satiation. But ultimately they discovered that this is a fearsome snare permeated with all of our greed, desire, bigotry, and inhumanity, a glittering enticement that pulls humanity into an inescapable pit. Many are those who have succumbed to it through violence.

Chinese martial arts have a long history, so we should understand all the more what real power truly is, and what our stance should be when trouble nears.

Using this opportunity given me by Esquire, I hope that your friends, those young, violent movie lovers, will take this bitter lesson to heart, and will find better fortune along their road in the future.

Donnie Yen
2008.09.02

This article is from Danwei.org

The Beijing News
October 7, 2008

Yan Chongnian (阎崇年), a scholar specializing in Qing history and Manchu culture, was attacked on October 5 when he was in Wuxi to promote his new book, The Kangxi Emperor. The prolific author was smacked twice in the face, allegedly because the attacker disagreed with his historical views.

Yan is the director of the Manchu studies department at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and is a guest host on the CCTV-10 TV show Lecture Room. That program, which focuses on Chinese history and traditional culture, has made him a celebrity, as it has for other academics including Yu Dan, arguably the most popular exponent of Confucius ever.

After first being disclosed in a post on the Tianya BBS written by someone who claimed to have witnessed the incident, the news made the front page of The Beijing News today:

In the afternoon of October 5, Yan Chongnian arrived at the Wuxi Xinhua bookstore to meet with readers and present a talk to history enthusiasts....after the talk, Yan began to sign books. A tall young man charged towards him and slapped in his face twice before he was held down....another man in glasses tried to break away from the crowd and continued to swear at Yan: "Traitor", "You deserve it."

The newspaper also quoted the attacker's brother, who said that the attacker "disagreed with Yan's historical views but had no chance to debate him. He just couldn't control his impulses under the circumstances." Yan himself couldn't be reached by the newspaper for comments.

"Traitorous" words attributed to Yan can be found on the Internet, but it is not clear whether he actually said them, or in what context. Here are a few of those statements:

• Wu Sangui, the general who has usually taken the blame for the collapse of Ming Dynasty (the last Han Chinese Dynasty) by virtue of his surrender to the Manchu invaders, should be reevaluated for avoiding mass bloodshed that may have resulted had he not surrendered;
• Censorship and crackdown on dissenting views by the Qing ensured social stability despite certain limitation;
• The Manchu invasion promoted the integration of different ethnic groups, and the human loss it caused was inevitable.

This article is from Danwei.org

The rectory of Fuzhou's Fanchuanpu church is making way for road construction. This video shows part of its first 80-meter journey. Then it will rotate 90 degrees and slide over to its final destination. Photos here and here.

This article is from Danwei.org

The Beijing News
October 6, 2008

Beijing's tourism hit a new peak over the week-long National Day holiday, which concluded on Sunday.

According to The Beijing News, 5.25 billion yuan in tourism revenue was generated from the 2.35 million tourists who visited the city last week. The year-on-year of growth of tourist volume and tourism revenue are 22% and 27% respectively.

Among Beijing's numerous tourist spots, the Olympic Green topped the list as the most-visited destination: a total of 2.42 million people visited the park last week. It was followed by the Forbidden City, which scored 625,000 visitors. According to the newspaper, "many tourists said that because they were not able to come during the Olympic Games, they hoped that the National Day holiday could make up for their loss." It goes without saying that the strict security policy had kept many potential visitors out of the city during the Olympic Games.

According to news reports, gross retail sales in Beijing during the holiday reached 420 million yuan, with 115 million yuan coming from restaurants. Newly married couples were one of the factors that contributed to holiday market prosperity. "Many newlyweds [this year] chose to get their marriage licenses during the Olympic Games and hold their ceremonies during the golden week," said an anonymous functionary quoted in The Beijing News. The paper also reported that sales of home appliances enjoyed a double-fold increase during the holiday, but home sales moved in the opposite direction, falling 72% versus the same period last year.

The Beijing Youth Daily reported that over 4,000 plain-clothed officers had been sent to patrol major streets and venues during the holiday, making more than 370 arrests and busting 23 criminal gangs.

That paper also cited data from Beijing's Public Health Department that showed that 3,587 people reported being bitten by dogs during the holiday, a slight increase over last year's 3,435 dog bites.

This article is from Danwei.org