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July 30, 2010Internet A Key Ally for Chinese Journalist Pursued By PoliceGreat investigative reporting wins readers and journalism prizes in the West. In China, it can turn reporters into wanted men, or worse. The recent case of Qiu Ziming, a business reporter for the Beijing-based Economic Observer, had a happy ending this week when he was able to come out of hiding after the police in the Eastern China province of Zhejiang were pressured to drop their efforts to arrest him for doing his job. For several days, though, the reporter was on the lam, because police put him on a national list of wanted criminals "for damaging a company's reputation." His crime: Writing stories that exposed insider trading and bribery at a powerful paper manufacturer in Zhejiang province.
Continue reading " Internet A Key Ally for Chinese Journalist Pursued By Police" Posted by markhass at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) July 14, 2010BangqiuThe last time the National League won baseball's All Star Game, China did not have a Great Firewall or a Starbucks. In 1996, if you were lucky enough to be among the handful of people with an internet connection here, you could freely surf across what was then called the World Wide Web. You could drink all the tea you wanted, but getting a decent espresso was impossible. The great Chinese leader and father of China's modern day economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, was still alive, even if the economic reforms he launched had yet to transform this country. And the word "baseball" would have been as foreign on the streets of Beijing as the concept of a hot dog. Posted by markhass at 4:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) July 7, 2010.中国 and .中國 ... .香港 ... .台灣 and .台湾
If you speak and write Chinese, you will officially become a full-fledged member of the world's internet community next month, when the Chinese characters in this blog's headline, known up to now as .cn, .hk and .tw respectively, will make their internet debut as top-level domain names. The agency that manages internet URL names, ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced that the language now spoken by 20% of the world will soon be all you'll need to surf the night away. Up to now, users could almost complete a web or email address with just a Chinese keyboard. Almost. But once the user got to the characters that follow the final dot (.com, .org, .cn, etc), only Latin letters would do. For the world's English speakers, the web has always been a language-friendly place, where our Latin characters were the basic typographical currency. If you wrote Chinese, or Arabic, or Russian or Hebrew you were something of a second-class citizen. Continue reading " .中国 and .中國 ... .香港 ... .台灣 and .台湾" Posted by markhass at 2:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) June 23, 2010Pass The MaskThe air in Beijing is my obsession. I watch it deteriorate each day, from "pretty good" during my early morning walks with my dog Buster, to worse in the afternoon as seen from my 33rd floor office window, to "very unhealthy" on many days by the time evening rush begins at 5 p.m. And the internet enables my obsession. Continue reading "Pass The Mask" Posted by markhass at 1:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) June 21, 2010You Say Tomato; I Say TomahtoThe yuan was big news over the weekend when China announced that it will begin allowing its currency, also known as the renminbi, to increase in value against the U.S. dollar. The issue has been a sticking point in U.S. China relations, so the announcement was big news both here in Beijing and in the U.S. I've written before about how the media in the two countries each present a unique point of view, in the context of objective reporting, on issues that divide the world's two most important economies, and the Yuan revaluation news was no exception. Each country's media played to readers and viewers who expected to read or hear the story from a U.S. or China perspective. Like that Louis Armstrong song, "Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off," a tomato can be a tomahto when it comes to China / U.S. media coverage. Continue reading "You Say Tomato; I Say Tomahto" Posted by markhass at 2:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
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