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Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google's bombshell blog post , which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our time. Read More...
With everyone else on the planet weighing in on Obama's visit to China last week, I didn't want to miss the party. I wrote a brief article for the website of the magazine Foreign Policy comparing Chinese and American press coverage of the visit. The title Read More...
To have one ethnic minority erupt in angry rioting looks like misfortune. To have two erupt in angry rioting suggests that a rethink of the overall approach might be a good idea. Urumqi has been in chaos for the last 72 hours, and reports suggest that Read More...
It turns out that the plan to have local officials prop up the cigarette market in Hubei has gone up up in smoke. Seems the people were fuming. From China Daily : The order made headlines in major newspapers around the world after being made public, triggering Read More...
We have to hand it to the Gong'an county government in Hubei, which has hit upon a novel approach to expanding the tax base in these straitened times: Order local officials to smoke more cigarettes : Officials in a county in central China have been told Read More...
After posting my thoughts about Jackie's controversial pronouncements at Bo'ao a couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Nick Mackie, the journalist who actually asked the question that kicked off the whole episode. As Nick points out, the question Read More...
One of the longest running soap operas involving foreign businesses in China is that of the foreign financial information service providers, Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and such. These companies have been involved in an on-and-off regulatory battle Read More...
...how do you reply? A: Well, if you're a Chinese government spokesperson you probably rarely pass up an opportunity to bury your positive points under much more quotable anger. James Fallows notes the predictably pyrotechnic response from Chinese government Read More...
ESWN translates a good essay on proposed reforms of CCTV's "Network News", the nightly news broadcast that is something of a televised version of the People's Daily : A protocol driven recitation of government messages. Since inception, the "Network News" Read More...
Imagethief sends his deepest sympathies to the organizers of the Bo'ao Forum for Asia, who's main contribution to the public discourse this year is a fierce debate on the meaning of what Jackie Chan said during a panel discussion he participated in. Personally, Read More...
It's well worth your time to go and read the two articles that David Bandurski has written for the indispensible China Media Project on Yunnan deputy propaganda chief Wu Hao. In the first post , Bandurski gets under the hood of Wu's "citizens' investigation" Read More...
From ESWN , the story of how opinion polls on local prosperity were rigged by the Jiangsu government: A few days ago, there was a random telephone survey of residents in the Qidong, Haimen, Tongzhou and other districts of Nantong city in Jiangsu province. Read More...
Imagethief was interested to see that someone at the regular Foreign Ministry press conference actually bothered to ask FM spokeswoman Jiang Yu about Chinese media censorship of Obama's inaugural remarks about fighting communism (a question apparently Read More...
Everything politicians do in public sends a message, and is part of the great of the, galumphing ballet of political communication. And that, in turn, is an important part of how a nation communicates about itself. There was, no doubt, much good transmitted Read More...