• [129]  Roderick Graham Murray news.  If you don't know who this man is, here is a brief re-cap:  Last August, barrister Roderick Graham Murray was suspended from practice for six months by the Hong Kong Bar Association for professional misconduct.  (HKBA) Specifics acts cited were (1) being late for court proceedings; (2) interrupted proceedings by way of inappropriate comments, laughter, gestures and hand clapping; (3) wore sunglasses during court proceedings; (4) appearing in court intoxicated; (5) falsely represented to a newspaper reporter that he had had a sexual relationship with the presiding Judge.  Two months later, he broke two bottles of liquor at a supermarket and was sentenced to probation.  In July this year, he got into a fight with two police officers outside a McDonald's in Mui Wo and destroyed three restaurant chairs.  This case is scheduled to be tried on September 30.  Meanwhile, he is out on bail.
   
  Yesterday, Roderick Graham Murray appeared in court and asked the judge to reduce his bail.  In his previous appearance, he had successfully reduced his bail from HK$1,100 down to HK$500 already.  This time, he asked the judge to reduce the bail from HK$500 to HK$100 because he needed the money.  The judge rejected his request.  Another barrister was kind enough to lend him HK$500.

• [128]  International Blog Day.  Via InMediaHK, quoting Nir Ofir: "In one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs, preferably, blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown
  Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers."  Here is my list of five blogs from other cultures, but I do share their proclivities:
   
  - Blood & Treasure (Manchester, United Kingdom)
  - Language Hat (USA, but global really)
  - Mon Journal de Chine - Pierre Haski (France)
  - The NarcoSphere (Latin America)
  - Public Opinion (Australia)

• [127]  The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend.  This Taipei Times article is not strange in itself as it came straight from the Central News Agency: "Nearly 10,000 people turned out for a rally in Taichung City yesterday supporting those 'wishing to renounce their membership' in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ... the number of withdrawals from the party had accelerated and was expected to top 4 million soon, said Chen Chang-hui (陳昌輝), a spokesman for the Global Alliance to Say Goodbye to the CCP, the organizer of yesterday's rally ... The group is a private organization based in Washington and was established by 91 smaller Chinese groups across the US last December.  Other participants [included]... Hwang Kun-hu (黃崑虎), chairman of the pro-independence Friends of Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) group."
   
  What is strange here is that someone inserted the following underneath the headline -- "DENUNCIATION: Thousands marched in Taichung in support of China's democratization and human rights in an event whose organizers are linked to the F----* G---."  A screen image has been saved here.  What is being denounced here?  The marchers?  China's democratization?  Or the Far Loon Goon?  Read the sentence and take your pick.

• [126]  Baidu vs. Google.  China Daily has a report on the CNNIC survey which gave Baidu shares of 52%, 44% and 48% versus Google shares of 33%, 38% and 28% in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou respectively.  Wait, but it is not so simple as DoNews has more from the CNNIC survey.
   
  In Beijing, the search engine market is dominated by teachers/students at 44% followed by corporate users at 33%.  Baidu has a 66% share among teachers/students whereas Google only has a 26%.  By educational level, Baidu has 58% among junior secondary students, 71% among senior secondary students, 73% among university students, 58% among university graduates, 40% among masters students and 25% among doctoral students.  By age, Baidu has a 63% share among persons under 25 versus 24% for Google; for persons 25 or older, Baidu drops down to 40% while Google goes up to 43%.  Among persons 25 or older with a university degree and monthly income more than 3,000 RMB, Baidu has 28% while Google has 59%.  The differences are attributed to the search engine tasks that different people do: Baidu is stronger for music, photographs, games, software and movies, but Google is stronger at web page queries, dictionaries and business applications.

• [125]  Television Ratings Landmark.  (Media Post)  Which is the highest rated television station for prime time in the New York City?  It must be one of the flagship local network affiliates such as WABC, WCBS or WNBC, right?  Wrong!  For the July sweek period, the Spanish-language Univision affiliate WXTV led in the all important adults 18-49 and 25-54 demographics.  The top rated program among 18-49 is its telenovela La Madrastra.  New York City is only 24% hispanic, but the hispanic viewers gravitate towards this main Spanish-language station whereas non-hispanic viewers are dispersed among the English-language stations.  In Los Angeles, Univision affiliate KMEX has been number one during prime time for some time.
   
  By the way, this is more than television ratings.  It can be about a political election.  It is entirely possible for a candidate for a minority group to win because the votes are split among multiple candidates within the majority group.  (BBC News)  In 2002, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada won the Bolivian presidency with 22.46% of the vote, followed by Evo Morales at 20.92% and Manfredo Reyes Villa at 20.92%.  (BBC News)  In October 2003, Sanchez de Lozado was brought down by mass protests and fled to the United States.

• [124]  How We Learned To Live With The Bomb.  From Taking the Bombs and Deaths in Iraq for Granted, Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 28, 2005.

Taking things for granted. In Baghdad and then in Beirut, I read of the latest “anti-terror” laws of Lord Blair of Kut Al-Amara. Of course, of course. After suicide bombers on the London Underground, what else do we expect? Our precious capital and its people must be protected. Having been three or four trains in front of the King’s Cross tube that exploded on July 7, I take these things seriously myself. And were I back on the London Tube today, I’d probably be trying to avoid young men with backpacks — as well as armed members of the Metropolitan Police. And after all the panjandrums in the press about our wonderful security forces, I’d also be taking a close look at these fine and patriotic folk. These are the men (and women?) who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

These are the chaps who couldn’t get a single advance trace of even one of the four suicide bombings on July 7 (nor the un-lethal ones a few days later). These are the lads who gunned down a helpless civilian as he sat on a tube train.

But hold on a moment, I say to myself again. The July 7 bombings would be a comparatively quiet day in Baghdad. Was I not at the site of the An-Nahda bus station bombings after 43 civilians — as innocent, their lives just as precious as those of Londoners — were torn to pieces last week. At the Al-Kindi hospital, relatives had a problem identifying the dead. Heads were placed next to the wrong torsos, feet next to the wrong legs. A problem there. But there came not a groan from England. We were still locked into our July 7 trauma. No detectives are snooping around the An-Nahda bombsite looking for clues. They’re already four suicide bombs later. An-Nahda is history.

And it dawns on me, sitting on my balcony over the Mediterranean at the end of this week, that we take far too much for granted. We like to have little disconnects in our lives. Maybe this is the fault of daily journalism — where we encapsulate the world every 24 hours, then sleep on it and start a new history the next day in which we fail totally to realize that the narrative did not begin before last night’s deadline but weeks, months, years ago. 

• [123]  False Advertising In The Tiger Meat Case.  For the original story, see the first part of The Battle of the Turtle Eggs - Feminists versus Naturalists.  (Yahoo! News)  Now that this has become a nationally prominent news story in China, the government has taken notice.  The local police visited the restaurant, and the owner said that the so-called 'tiger meat' was actually donkey meat sprinkled with tiger urine.  Lab analysis results are due later this week.
   
  Is there a crime in false advertising?  Do the consumers need to be protected?  That is a tough question.  Back in Washington Square in New York City, it is noted that there are always marijuana dealers hanging out.  Why haven't the police arrested them?  The dealers whisper "grass? grass?" or "weed? weed?" to passerbys and they are actually selling 'grass' and 'weeds.'  Except these are not marijuana and you can get as high as one inch off the ground if you jump hard enough.  What were the police going to do?  Arrest them for false advertising under the consumer protection law?  How much sympathy might a judge or jury have for consumers looking for marijuana or tiger meat?

• [122]  Income Inequality in China.  The Gini index in China has reached 0.45.  What in the world does that mean?  I have no idea, even though I am a professional statistician.  Here is what I can comprehend: a very well-known photo.  P.S.  If you insist on knowing about the Gini Index, here is a previous post.

• [121]  The Mystery of Wen Jiabao.  You know the meme -- the Chinese Communist Party leaders are a bunch of ruthless butchers who have slaughtered tens of millions of Chinese citizens.  Okay, so we got that out of the way.  Here is the question: Why do they do that?  You know the meme.  They want to seize onto their power.  Next question: To seize onto their power in order to do what?  This is where it is usually stuck -- they want to seize onto the power in order to seize onto the power, and this is obviously not intellectually satisfying unless you think every one of them is Mao Zedong as portrayed in Jung Chang's so-called 'biography.'
   
  Now we get to the question of Wen Jiabao.  What does he want?  The photo below (via Xici Hutong) was taken during his recent field study trip in Anhui.  Here, he is having lunch at the Ma'anshan Steel Factory workers' cafeteria.  For his own meal, he insisted on paying four RMB as required under the rules.
  
  Was this an act for the public?  Apparently not, because he is very consistent and you can read a longer account about him in The Chinese Peasant Study - Chapter 30.  No, the man does not take five week vacations.  And there is no indication that he is a schemer or plotter either.  So what is his motive for being in the Chinese Communist Party?  What does Wen Jiaobao want?  I don't know the answer to that question.  
   
  I do know that it is a bit too simple and naïve to think that all 70 million Chinese Communist Party members including Wen Jiabao are Mao Zedong-clones.  How then are you suppose to sort the good apples from the bad ones, and how will you deal with them?  Oh, I forgot, Mao Zedong was the one who wrote about how not all landlords and capitalists are bad and then he showed how to sort them out and deal with them ... whatever Mao did, you just have to make sure that you don't do it.

• [120]  Furong Jiejie as Unsustainable Development.  At RConveration, in reaction to China Net Star Cries Censorship, Rebecca MacKinnon ponders whether Furong Jiejie is being censored in China or her 15 minutes of fame has expired.  I regard the phenomenon as an instance of unsustainable development.  For proof, I offer the following photographs.  How long can you sustain your interest?
  
  She needs is a career makeover.  Fast.  With due respect, I'm not interested in Furong Jiejie's belly button ...

• [119]  Segmentation of Internet Portals In China.  Are all Internet portals similar and exchangeable?  Of course, not.  So how are they different then?  You'd have to pay someone to get that information.  Meanwhile, here are the results from the Super Girls song contest, for the official SMS vote tally as well as Internet portal voting (via Xici Hutong)

Contestant	Official totals	Sina.com	Sohu.com	Yahoo! China	MSN	Netease
Li Yuchun	3,528,308	234,977	17,441	116,627	134,494	28,846
Zhou Bichang	3,270,840	238,199	20,318	122,663	167,247	28,327
Zhang Liangying	1,353,906	161,423	39,694	111,372	488,276	28,327

 They don't have the same kinds of visitors, do they?

• [118]  Why Do People Love Hong Kong.  (Apple Daily)  In a survey of 986 respondents in Xing Qing Culture magazines, 92% of the respondents said that they love Hong Kong and 8% said they don't.  Here are the reasons why people love Hong Kong:
  - 70%: freedom
  - 40%: convenient transportation
  - 36%: the place where I was born and lived
  - 35%: convenient for dining, drinking and recreation
  - 33%: stable and prosperous
  - 31%: uncorrupt society
  - 30%: human rights and rule of law
  - 18%: democracy
  - 14%: unique local foods
  -   4%: fashionable/trendy
  -   3%: concentration of name brands
  -   3%: center of attraction
   
  Note: A Sing Tao commentator said that it was puzzling to see 70% for freedom but only 18% for democracy when the two are usually linked together.  Please re-read the question: Why do you love Hong Kong?  I choose freedom because I have freedom.  I don't love Hong Kong for its 'democracy' because there isn't much here (in the sense of universal suffrage).  Get it?

• [Administrative Note]  Someone out there does not like what I have to say about Taiwan.  Well, much of what appears on ESWN about Taiwan is directly translated from publications such as Apple Daily and The Journalist.  I don't personally agree with what they have to say.  In fact, I am often annoyed and disturbed, but I cannot pretend that they don't exist.  I note that the English-only reader can only access western media, China Post, Taipei Times and Taiwan News, and that is hardly representative of what appears in the Chinese-language media.  I translate from Apple Daily because it is the single most popular newspaper in Taiwan right now.  There is no point in rebutting this or that story on the details or the reasoning.  The real deal is to explain why such stories should be so well received by the people of Taiwan.  This is what they want to read and I, for one, do not like where this is going and I want you to think about how this came about.  You should ought to figure out why this is happening.

• [117]  Wars of the Virtual War.  (via InMediaHK)  The case is the slashing attack on a seven-year-old boy in Hong Kong.  Whatever else, Hong Kong does not lack Internet commentators/trolls. 
   
  Here is one: 唔好因為佢7歲就以為佢無辜先得口架!! (translation: Do not think that he is innocent just because he is only 7 years old.)  
   
  Here is more elaboration: 但係岩岩睇完新聞...話比之前都比人打過唔知幾多獲....我就o係道諗呢個小朋友係咩人.....因為我認為好人好姐唔會比人斬,仲要係7歲...佢又唔係比人打一獲.....之前都比人打過.......新聞仲好似提及個小朋友好似成日攪事...開始o係道諗個小朋友抵唔抵幫 (translation: I just finished watching the news ... they say that the kids has been assaulted numerous times ... I wonder who this kid is ... I don't think a good person will get slashed, especially a 7 year old ... he wasn't just assaulted this time ... he had been assaulted before ... the news also seemed to say that this little kid is a troublemaker ... I am beginning to think that the kid does not deserve any help)
   
  This must then lead to following comment: 我明白在網上世界嘩眾取寵是很有趣的事，因為沒有機會成本，大不了轉一個名和電郵地址而已，但這單新聞是發生在真實世界的實事，刀刃是鋒利的，小朋友流出來的血是鮮紅色的......不跟你們多說道理了，好好反省吧 (translation: I understand that it is a lot of fun to shock and outrage people on the Internet, because there is no cost; at most, you get another alias and e-mail address.  But this news item occurred in the real world where the knife blades were sharp and the blood flowing out of the kid was bright red ... I don't want to talk with you people anymore.  Please reflect on yourselves.)

• [116]  Horse's Fart Culture in Taiwan.  (Apple Daily)  More political football to kick around as anything and everything is scrutinised for a potential scandal.  It is alleged that in order to permit President Chen Shui-bian and Premier Frank Hsieh to inspect the Hsuehshan Tunnel, the Department of Transportation spent NK$16.5 million to build a temporary bridge and remove some steel structures on an emergency basis just so the entourage can pass through.  The legislator who brought the subject up called this "horse's fart culture" (馬屁文化), meaning "brown-nosing" or "kissing up to."
  
  The instant Apple Daily public opinion poll of 408 respondents found 81% think that this was a waste, 10% think it is not and 9% with no opinion.  On most issues, opinions tend to fall along party lines.  But this case as presented is so egregious that it is difficult to imagine what the 10% is thinking.  Meanwhile, it was also time to interview some political scientist to rehash the "deification" and "cult of the personality."

• [115]  Fear City.  (Apple Daily)  From the Hong Kong insurance industry association comes the reminder that full auto coverage does not include damages due to riots.  Based upon prior experience, at the WTO MC6 meeting, extremists will vandalize autos.  Therefore, the association suggests that auto owners should consider purchasing additional insurance.  Auto owners are also advised to listen to police reports carefully and avoid the demonstration areas.
  
   
  (Sing Pao)  Meanwhile, Police Commissioner Dick Lee and Secretary for Security Ambrose Lee were both on radio.  The police claimed that they do not have a black list of banned demonstrators.  However, the Immigration Department will "scrutinise carefully" all entrants with respect to "the tendency to disrupt social order" based upon questions such as "Why are you coming here?" "Where will you be staying?" and "How much money do you have on you?"
   
  This is only August and the meeting is for December.  If you don't think that they can sustain the fear level, you are underestimating the Hong Kong media.

• [114]  Newspaper Circulation Figures in Hong Kong.  So maybe the circulation figures are audited, but there are always unanticipated contingencies.  (Oriental Daily)  As a result of a dispute over delivery logistics with the distibutor, scores of newspaper vendors in East Kowloon have quietly refused to sell Apple Daily, Sing Tao, The Standard and Hong Kong Daily News.  Technically, the newspapers are there, but they are hidden underneath Oriental Daily, Ming Pao, Sing Pao and others.  If asked, the newspaper vendor will say "Not available" unless this is a loyal customer.
  
  What exactly is the nature of the dispute?  Can the distributor please get the newspapers out by 530am as before, as opposed to being more than one hour late these days?  And can the distributor please also get the magazines out on time as opposed to two days later?  This is not a political persecution campaign, but just common sense demands.  Yeah, why is it so hard?

• [113]  The Chinese Peasants Study Libel Trial.  With due respect, August 27 is the anniversary of the four-day trial without a verdict (see previous post).  What can the court be waiting for?  This is a civil suit and the verdict should be delivered within one week normally.  Do they think that if they wait long enough, this whole thing will go away by itself?  That won't happen if people like me keep bringing it up.  If you are a blogger too, I would ask you to post a happy anniversary note as well.

• [112]  China's Most Wanted Fugitive.  (Mainichi)  China's most wanted man was back in a Canadian jail Friday after a refugee board found he had breached his release conditions by socializing with reputed Chinese mobsters while fighting extradition to his homeland.  Adjudicator Leeann King said Lai Changxing violated the terms of his release pending his extradition hearings.  Lai has been under house arrest, with strictly limited amount of time allowed out of the house.  His attendance at the birthday party violated both the time limitations and the terms defining who he is allowed to socialize with.  According to Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board documents, the party was also attended by members of the Big Circle Boys, who are believed to be involved in the smuggling of drugs and people, as well as credit-card fraud and loan sharking.  According to the documents, "He felt an obligation under Chinese tradition to send a gift and would have been most unhappy if he didn't attend."
   
  Why was it so important for people like Lai Changzing to mix with gangsters?  Easy as pie.  A person flees to a foreign country with hundreds of millions in ill-gotten gains in the midst of tremendous publicity.  This person will be the target of extortion by local Chinese gangsters wherever he/she may be.  The smart thing to do is to seek protection from a local gang, for which a signficant payment is expected for the service.  The person is also at the mercy of the sense of ethics of the protector, who may extract a very high price (see the urban legends about the four most corrupt Hong Kong detective superintendants who fled to Taiwan after the Independent Commission Against Corruption was established).  A person such as Lai Changxing was a business person in China with no gangster connections; once he landed in Canada, he had to fend off the sharks in the feeding frenzy.  He couldn't trust any Hong Kong, Taiwan or Chinese-Canadian gangs for protection, so he had to count on the mainlander "Big Circle Boys."  (note: Big Circle refers to the city of Guangzhou; see this urban legend article)

• [111]  River Plate Hearts China.  SLAM! Sports: Argentina's River Plate has launched an official website in Mandarin to try and build a fan following among China's 1.2 billion people.  Club president Jose Maria Aguilar announced the debut of cariverplate.com.ar/chino with a Chinese diplomatic entourage at a presentation late Thursday.  Aguilar said the Mandarin-language site was the first by an Argentine club. The site also offered English beside Spanish. River joined crosstown rival Boca Juniors in the quest to tap into the increasingly affluent Asian market.
   
  But will China heart River Plate?  Or perhaps their cross-town rival Boca Juniors instead?  There is a more general question: How do fans choose their soccer clubs?  You will not be surprised to hear socio-economic class has plenty to do with it, as I wrote in Brazilian Football Fans.  You may not be interested in Brazil or soccer, but this is really an article about human rights and choices.

• [110]  More Politics From Taiwan.  First up, there is this news headline from Taipei Times: MOFA begs US not to forget Taiwan.  What does the word 'beg' usually mean?  Is this what it has come down to?
   
  Meanwhile, Apple Daily reports on the Tainan prosecutor referring three major government-business-mafia corruption cases involving for than 130 individuals for trial:
   
  (1) The Tainan City Council Speaker was prosecuted over a public works project that involved NT$200 million in bribes.  The prosecutor has asked for a 17 year jail term, confiscation of NT$100 million in gains and NT$100 million in penalties.  Other legislators, government officials and mafia are prosecuted as well.
   
  (2) The Tainan City Council Vice-Speaker was prosecuted over his family-run illegal futures, lottery and sports betting business.  The prosecuter has asked for a jail term of 3-1/2 years and fines of NT$1 million.  His wife and son are prosecuted as well.
   
  (3) The Tainan County County Speaker was prosecuted for land theft and bid-rigging to the amount of NT$250 million.  The prosecutor has asked for a jail term of 4 years and 2 months and fines of NT$30 million.  Other legislators, elected representatives and government officials are prosecuted as well.
   
  All three prosecuted parties are claiming innocence and political persecution.  Meanwhile, they will continue to function in their official duties until as such time when they are convicted in court and stripped of their civil rights.  They will presumably be running in the upcoming local elections again.
   
  In a separate story, Apple Daily provided a re-iteration of the worst cases of "Black Gold" politics in Taiwan, showing that the local legislatures and governments are run just like in Sicily.
   
  - In 1996, the Changhwa County Council Vice-Speaker was the first elected representative to be shipped directly by helicopter to Green Island under the Chihping Anti-Gangster Program.  However, he was found innocent during a re-trial and regained his legislator status.  After ascending to the position of Legislature Vice-President, he continued to monopolise public works projects and directed his subordinates to shoot and kill others.
   
  - In 1994, the former Pingtung County Council Speaker ignored the fact that his friend's mother was kneeling in front of him and begging him to spare her son's life.  In cold blood under the full light of day, he fired dozens of bullets into his friend, just like in a gangster movie.
   
  - The Kaohsiung City Council Speaker was involved in an election bribery case as well as a tax evasion case for several hundred NT$ million, and fled overseas.  Even so, he was able to control the elections and enabled his children to be elected.
   
  - In 1998, the Chiai County Council Speaker was the subject of a manhunt under the Chihping Anti-Gangster Program, but he was still re-elected as legislator in the election.
   
  According to an academic scholar, "Black Gold" politics is a characteristic of local elections in Taiwan.  For one thing, these elections cost far too much and campaign donors (especially corporate owners with gangster backgrounds) must surely have ulterior motives.  This was the cause for the prevalence of politician-business-gangster collusion. 
   
• [109]  More Local Politics From USA.  The preceding item was about local politics in Taiwan.  What about the USA?  In thinking about it, I live in New York City and I can certainly name the POTUS (George W. Bush), my two US Senators (Hillary Clinton and Charles Schurmer) and my Congress woman (Carolyn Maloney).  But I have no idea who my NY State Assembly person or my City Council representative are.  That is rather unfortunate, because all politics is ultimately local.  It is indifference that led to five methadone clinics being placed in my district because we don't know about these decisions and we don't know how to object even if we know.  So it is a strange sight to walk on the street on Saturday mornings to see drug addicts from all over the city converging here to get their dose of methadone.
   
• [108]  More Local Politics From Hong Kong.  What about Hong Kong?  In thinking about it, I can name the Chief Executive (Donald Tsang) and the four legislators in my West Kowloon area (Tsang Yok-sing, James To, Lau Chin-Shek and Frederick Fung).  I cannot name my district councilor and this is actually understandable.  The district councilor is normally the person to whom you go to about moving a bus stop fifty feet down the road, or organizing a field trip for senior citizens or similar matters.  My neighborhood was just featured in East Week magazine with this map of the stars such as Andy Lau and Jackie Chan.  With due respect, Andy Lau does not take the public bus and Jackie Chan does not go on field trips with senior citizens.  All we want here is to be left alone and have our privacy intact.  If the district councilor shows up to reach us, we'd slam the door in his/her face.
  

• [107]  Translation Example.  I am reading the Chinese translation of Janet Wasko's Understanding Disney.  There are two translators listed (林佑聖，葉欣怡) and then, somewhat unusually, there is a proof-reader being credited (王乾任).  There are numerous errors in the book in translating certain proper names from English into Chinese.  Some were obvious typographic errors that the proof-reader missed (Jiminy Cricket, Philips Morris, Ratio Disney, ESPN Ratio, Celerbration, New's Corp, Manhatten, White Snow and the Seven Dwarfs, "Tron and the Black Hole", Olando, One Hundred And One Dalmation, ...).  But there is one translation that was truly astonishing.  Here it is: The second largest advertiser in the United States is a company known as 代理人與投機.  You scratch your head and you can't never figure out why you don't know what may actually be the largest global advertiser.  Who is it then?  Thankfully, the English name is included: Proctor & Gamble.  The term 代理人 means 'agent or representative' whereas the term 'proctor' is someone who supervises (as in an examination).  The term 投機 means 'opportunistic' whereas the term 'gamble' means 'bet or wager.'  So maybe this was not a perfect translation.  But the most crucial point here is that the name of the company is Procter & Gamble, named after its founders William Procter and James Gamble.  If the terms 'Procter Gamble' are googled, the proper name of the company in Taiwan (where the book was published) can be found to be 'P&G寶僑'.  It can't be that hard, can it?

• [106]  Rumsfeld Pronounces Taiwan To Be Sovereign Nation.  (Taipei Times exclusive from Charles Snyder in Washington DC; image saved in case they delete or revise the page)  "US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described Taiwan as a 'sovereign nation' Tuesday, saying it was up to Taiwan to decide whether or not to buy the US$15 package of weaponry Washington has offered."  Quick, take this very cheap deal quickly!!!  It's only US$15, for God's sake!!!  It beats giving those tens of millions to the Marshall Islands, Vanunu, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and other places that you can't find on the atlas to get the same "sovereign nation" endorsement.
   
  P.S. I love Donald Rumsfeld.  He made this website famous when he declared where Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were located: (DefenseLink) "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."  I love people with a sense of direction and complete command of the knowledge about a situation.

• [105]  An Extreme Case of Eviction in Shanghai.  (Observe China)  At 1 am on January 9, 2005, workers from a Shanghai residential relocation company proceeded to set fire to a building to ensure the eviction of all residents.  They had intended to intimidate the residents into signing agreements and moving out.  Since 2004, there had been 12 arson events at the location, in addition other tactics such as breaking the windows, cutting off the electricity, gluing the keyholes, ripping up the floors and roof.  Unfortunately, a 70-year-old man and a 71-year-old woman could not get out and perished.  Those two workers have been given suspended death sentences after a court trial.
  
  The words on the wall left behind say: "Use our lives to defend the constitution; use our bodies to protect our private property; the government must break from the eviction companies; collusion between government officials and business people must be stopped."

• [104]  The Case Against Anonymity On The Internet  (6Park)  On a certain morning, 20-something-year-old Guangzhou female resident Ah Li's mobile telephone began ringing nearly non-stop.  There were more than 60 calls on the first day, and it has not stopped since.  The calls were all from strangers, and the messages were all disgusting filthy talk.  One person said, "Oh, you are Ah Li!  I saw your marriage quest on the Internet and your photo.  I want to become your friend."  Ah Li yelled, "You've got the wrong number.  I am more than 50 years old and I'm already married."  Ah Li cannot turn off the telephone because she needs to use it for her job.
   
  Ah Li got on the Internet to check out the website that published her telephone number -- it was full of filthy language with the photograph of a scantily clad female that was not her.  That website has more than 2,000 pages that are related to 'unhealthy' proposals for relationships with contact telephone numbers.  The website even has a page for people to complain about pornographic material, except there is no contact information about how to actually do so.
  
  Ah Li has reported the situation to the local police.  According to a lawyer, the poster and the website have civil liabilities.  The poster is anonymous and is therefore beyond the reach of the law.  What was the website supposed to do?  Could they say that they are not responsible when their users exercise their freedom of speech?

• [103]  Why Become A Journalist?  (New Yorker)  What exactly are the American schools of journalism telling and teaching their students?

Daniel Cappello: [Katie]  Couric told you that she believes it is her responsibility as a journalist to explore and talk seriously about issues “that people need to know about to be informed citizens.”  She then pursued an exclusive interview with Jennifer Wilbanks, the “runaway bride,” and defended it as a “terrific story.”  Did you get a sense from any of the morning anchors that there was an internal conflict about what their journalistic mission is?

Ken Auletta: Most people don’t get out of bed in the morning believing they are going to do something tawdry.  When they do, they rationalize it.  At the networks—as throughout much of journalism—such rationalizations are commonplace. I don’t believe that Couric was lying to me when she said it was a “terrific story.”  I believe she was lying to herself.  An hour-long interview with the “runaway bride” is not why she entered journalism.

• [102]  Two Female Kidnap Victims in Shenzhen.  In Nanfang Daily, there was a truly horrible story about two working girls being kidnapped by men and tortured.  The description is explicit, but there is perhaps no need to go further than two photographs:
  
  The tatoo on the forehead reads "Prostitute Number One" and the one on the back reads "I am a prostitute."

• [101]  More on the Meishan Riot.  Yesterday, I wondered about the media coverage of this 'incident' (The Meishan Incident?).  Why did it appear only in AP/Reuters but nothing inside China?  A reader has turned in a link from Zhejiang Online: (translation)  On August 14, some villagers at Meishan town blockaded the entrance to a factory about an environmental protection issue.  For the next 6 days, the factory was shut down.  On the afternoon of August 20, the blockading villagers got into a fight without other villagers trying to clear out the obstacles.  At around 10pm, the villagers vandalised the office building and set fire to the production line.  The fire was put out at midnight.
   
  The ZJOL is the official party line statement, which usually refers to any mass incident as having been due to 'a small number of people' who misled the general public.  However, thanks to thought education conducted by the party leaders, the people now realized their errors.  Blah blah blah.  Duh!  Anyway, we can say for sure that there was some kind of mass incident at Meishan.

• [100]  Flash For Apple Daily Online.  (The Sun)  Printed newspapers are subjected to the "Pornographic and Obscene Articles Control Regulations" in Hong Kong.  While T&A are still publishable, they would be subject to restrictions (such as being sealed in plastic and forbidden to be sold to minors).  But what about the online edition of the same newspaper?  After all, there are some differences such as the ability to use videos, Macromedia Flash, and so.  But apparently, the identical restrictions hold.  In yesterday's Apple Daily, there was an article titled "爛砌天后COCOLO玩到悶收山" about a licentious female.  The photograph of the topless female had the two naughty points blurred in the printed edition, but it was unblurred in the online edition.  As a result, one citizen filed a complaint with the regulatory agency.  If convicted, this would be the 57th time for Apple Daily and 102nd time for the Next Media group.

• [099]  ESWN is being ignored.  Notwithstanding the post titled Reading Ching Cheong, the South China Morning Post continued to report on August 22, 2005: "Ching has been detained since April 22 when he returned to Guangzhou to collect transcripts of interviews conducted by Zong Fengming , a former party official and long-time associate of late Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang."  This is definitive proof that the SCMP editors and reporters do not read ESWN ... as if I give a damn one way or the other ...  after all, ESWN only makes fun of them in front of 6,000 people a day, so why should they care?  I mean, they are mainstream media and they don't care.

• [098]  New and improved incentive program for Chinese newspaper reporters.  Remember The Letter of Li Datong that denounced the China Youth Daily for allowing the reactions of criticized officials to determine job appraisals for reporters and editors?  Here is something completely different in People's Daily Net (via MediaInChina).  According to Zhejiang Province's "Temporary Regulations For Incentives To Reward News Media For Forwarding Evidence Of Job-Related Crimes To Law Enforcement", news reporters may receive between 1,000 RMB to 20,000 RMB for forwarding evidence of corruption/bribery, theft of public funds, abuse of official power and/or violation of human rights after the case is established to be factual.  For the truly serious cases, the law enforcement agency may in fact go above the 20,000 RMB upper limit.
   
  Now this is the pendulum swinging in the other direction to the extreme.  Given those kinds of money, reporters don't even have to worry about writing articles.  Just go out there and dig, dig, dig ...  Afterwards, if reporters were rational economic beings, they would (1) confront the subject with the evidence and demand a huge payoff to keep quiet; (2) if there is no payoff, then forward the evidence to law enforcement for the reward money; (3) if there is no reward, then write an article for the newspaper; (4) if the article is killed, then forward the information to an overseas dissident website.

• [097]  Equal justice for all  A common saying in Chinese: 在法律之前人人平等 ("in front of the law, all people are equal").  Anatole France wrote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."  Indeed.

• [096]  The Meishan Riot?  The usual mode of operation here is that I would translate a quick breaking report on a 'mass incident' published in Chinese (either mainstream media or Internet) and then it will be weeks, if not months, that the information appears in the western media.  The delay factor has less to do with information access by the western reporters, because they can read the same things that I do; instead, it has more to do with painstaking fact-checking because they would not want to report any Internet rumor as fact.  But here is an exception in which the process is inverted.
   
  From Audra Ang in Associated Press: Protesters demanding the closure of an eastern China battery factory they say is spewing lead into the environment clashed with police, and dozens of people were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said Sunday.  After the initial melee with police, thousands of demonstrators torched police cars and broke into government offices, witnesses reported.  Saturday's violence began after a large crowd gathered outside the Tian Neng Battery Factory in Meishan, a town in Zhejiang province, to demonstrate against lead pollution, said a villager, who refused to give his name for fear of retribution.  "Police fired tear gas into the crowd and beat innocent bystanders," the man said in a telephone interview. "I also saw some ambulances go through the area to pick up injured people."  He could not give an estimate of how many demonstrators were involved except to say there were "many, many people."  At the emergency ward of the Changxing County Hospital, a woman said between 60 and 70 people were treated Saturday for minor injuries related to the incident. She said most had been discharged, but she refused to provide any other details or give her name.  Another man, who did not want to give his name for fear of retaliation against his family, said about 1,000 police officers later went to villages and harassed and beat the participants, injuring at least 10 people. The police were holding shields and wearing helmets, he said.  The man, who said he was told about the incident by witnesses, said up to 5,000 residents retaliated later that night by "breaking into government offices and burning police cars." Telephones either rang busy or were not answered Sunday at the factory, Meishan police and government offices. A man who answered the phone at the Changxing County government office, which oversees Meishan, said he had "never heard of the case."
   
  From Reuters: "Chinese protesters set fire to factory buildings and police cars in a clash sparked by toxic waste, police and residents said on Monday.  "It's very serious. There was a clash between protesters and the police. Some people were injured," said an employee of the post office in the county of Meishan who declined to be identified.  Calls to the factory went unanswered and an official at the county government said he had not heard of any violence.  But a police officer in Meishan acknowledged there had been a protest, saying police had rushed to the scene to maintain order. She refused to give further details.  "A lot of children in our area have too much lead in their bodies and it will greatly affect their growth," said a receptionist at a Meishan hotel surnamed Han.  "People burnt the factory. The office building, workshops, and the factory's products were all set on fire," she said.  Four police cars had also been set alight, she said, adding there was heavy security presence in the area and police were rounding up suspects.
   
  So how is it possible that there is absolutely nothing about the Meishan riot in Chinese?  Nothing in mainstream media, BBS's and forums in China, perhaps understandably so.  But nothing in the overseas dissident sites either, and they would have given such an incident full play.  You can go back and read the two reports carefully and look at the sources of information.  Think about whether you consider them solid enough.

• [095]  How Hong Kong citizens perceive their local news media.  (HKU POP)  Survey results from 1,001 persons interviewed between August 5-9, 2005.  Droll thing about freedom -- 64% think the local news media had given full play to the freedom of speech, but 66% think they had misused/abused the freedom of press (see this previous post Media Monitoring in Hong Kong).

- 20%: perceived the local news media to be responsible in their reporting
- 34%: perceived the local news media to be irresponsible in their reporting

- 64%: perceived the local news media had given full play to the freedom of speech
- 26%: perceived the local news media had not given full play to the freedom of speech

- 66%: perceived that the local news media had misused/abused the freedom of press
- 20%: perceived that the local news media had not misused/abused the freedom of press

- 40%: perceived that the local news media had practised self-censorship
- 40%: perceived that the local news media had not practised self-censorship

- 32%: perceived that the local news media had scruples when criticizing the HKSAR government
- 60%: perceived that the local news media had no scruples when criticizing the HKSAR government

- 60%: perceived that the local news media had scruples when criticizing the Central Government
- 28%: perceived that the local news media had no scruples when criticizing the Central Government

• [094]  More fantastical defense strategies in the Zhao Yan case.  The most detailed coverage of The Trial About Chinese Tourist Zhao Yan has to be the local newspaper Buffalo News.  Still, I am flabbergasted by this post in the unsourced 6Park: (Translation)  Defense counsel Cohen believes that "Zhao Yan could have been a terrorist, and her handbag could have contained a suicide bomb."  An observer believes that this assertion is totally absurd as the defense counsel wants to use rumors to influence the jury decision-making.  The observer is concerned about the defense counsel presenting these rumors as court evidence for the defense, and such rumors may indeed affect the support for Zhao Yan among the jury members.  As I say, all eyes in China on how this case unfolds.  The type of behavior described here is somehow putting the victim on trial, and will be duly noted in China.  It just makes it infinitely difficult to sell the 'democracy' brand in this market.
   
  This is same problem that people are having with the Nancy Kissel trial.  Is she on trial for killing her husband?  Or is her defenseless and dead husband on trial for bad behavior that brought on his much deserved demise?  And he cannot even mount a defense of his own name.  Why is it normal that the alleged victim must go through hell under this judicial system that grants all benefits of doubt to the accused?

• [093]  A contemporary big character wallposter.  (Beijing Times via Yahoo! News)  A fed-up Mrs. Zeng living in a ground floor Beijing apartment finally let the neighbors see the writing on the wall: "The tenants on the upper floors pay attention: Please put away your used condoms carefully.  Do not flush them down the toilet, because it may affect the hygiene of the people downstairs."  Mrs. Zeng had been unable to flush her toilet properly, and the maintenance workers found that it was due to the large number of condoms clogging the pipes.  After personal advice had no effect, she was forced to go public.
  
   
• [092]  A memorable brand name.  This is the name of a fashion store in China.  Literally translated, "Her grandmother's bear."  The well-understood colloquial meaning cannot be published on this site without losing our family-friendly rating.  Very memorable, indeed.
  
  The shop employee explained: "We used this very striking name in order to attract people's attention and memory."  When asked "Does your clothing line have anything to do with panda bears?  And is it really necessary to use this name to present yourself?" the shop employee said: "There is no connection with panda bears.  Anyway, it is about making the name unforgettable."  Some customers said: "This name implies a term of insult to us and makes us quite uncomfortable.  If a weird and unhealthy shop name can exist, it causes serious chaos in the street and it damages the name of our city."  Someone then got into contact with the boss and within moments, three workers came around and took the store sign down.  Once again, people power triumped and we are all happy ... for the moment ...

• [091]  How to solve a diplomatic problem (given the regrets of going to war in Iraq).  (Media Matters)  Pat Robertson, host of Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club and founder of the Christian Coalition of America on President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela:

There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chávez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chávez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Is this a terrorist threat?  Or an exercise of freedom of speech?  Now plug in the name George W. Bush for Hugo Chávez, and the U.S. Secret Service will be paying the speaker a visit.  
 
P.S. It is a federal felony to use instruments of interstate or foreign commerce to threaten other people. The statute is clear, and simple.  Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 875(c), states: "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

• [Administrative note]  My mysterious problem with accesing blogspot websites via i-Cable in Hong Kong has this solution: (Google Groups via the wonderful Sidekick): IE / Firefox => 工具 => 選項 => 一般 => 連線 => 連線設定 => 手動設定 Proxy => HTTP Proxy: Proxy.i-cable.com　Port: 8080.
   
  Are they f*cking nuts at i-Cable?  Do their engineers have too much time on hand?  Obviously, they must be.  Heaven forbid that they won't even allow access to Apple Daily.  What will I do with my life ...?

• [090]  Jury service terms.  While researching the Hong Kong jury system re: the Nancy Kissel trial, I noted the following (Judiciary.gov.hk): "A resident of Hong Kong is eligible to serve as a juror if he/she (1) has reached the age of 21 but is not yet 65; (2) is of a sound mind and has no disabilities such as hearing or visual impairments that might prevent him / her from serving as a juror; (3) is of good character, and (4) has sufficient knowledge of the language of the court proceedings (Chinese or English as the case may be)."  Hmmm ... what do they mean in (3)?  How would they know anyway?  Maybe that explains why I am not on the jury roll ...
   
  And then there is the question of exemption.  In New York City, one used to be able to write in and get an automatic deferment up to seven times.  So it was that I got my seven deferments.  On the eighth call-up, which in theory I could no longer defer upon pain of jail term, I was physically present in Hong Kong and obviously could not attend.  So I sent in photocopies of my passport pages and got an eighth deferment.  In Hong Kong, you can get exemptions up front (see Legislation.gov.hk) by being a special person such as the spouse of a consul of a foreign state, or the Commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, or the editor of a daily newspaper, or a pharmacist, or an imam of a Muslim congregation, or a airplane pilot, or a wireless telegraph operator and so on.  And even if you couldn't get out on that basis, you can still be exempted in court for specific reasons related to the case (e.g. personal acquaintence with a witness, etc).  But in New York City today, you couldn't get exempted even if you were the Mayor or the New York State Supreme Court Chief Justice.
   
  Here is another interesting factoid from Hong Kong: "A juror who has attended in response to a jury summons will not normally be summoned again within 2 years."  The same 2-year-rule applies in New York City.  However, I am currently on an eight-year hiatus, because my last stint as a grand juror for the Manhattan Narcotics Division went on for four full weeks.  Note that the statement from Hong Kong says 'normally' and that means exceptions also exist.  My mother shares the all-time record, as she got a lifetime exemption from further jury duty in Hong Kong after serving on one trial.  That trial falls into category of 碎屍案 ("a case of a dismembered body") and that jury was shown graphic photographs of the 28 (I think that was the number) pieces of the victim and they were excused for life in consideration of the psychological trauma.  My mother does not discuss that case, in spite of the persistent pestering from her son who was terribly interested ...
   
  Postcript: The Nancy Kissel jury got a 15-year exemption afterwards.

• [089]  Do not stop on the roadside to relieve yourself.  (Apple Daily)  More blood-and-gore guaranteed to sell copies.  In Taichung, two men stopped the car by the roadside to relieve themselves, and were murdered execution style.  When found, the two still had their zippers undone and the car engine was running.  Both men had criminal records (murder, robbery, narcotics, kidnapping).  While they were unemployed, they appeared not to have any money problems. 
   
  Due to the cold-blooded nature of these murders, a criminal investigator said that the murderers probably had received military training and (in the very standard way of phrasing these things) "it cannot be precluded that this was perpetrated by Big Circle Gang (大圈仔) members who had received training in the People's Liberation Army."
   
  Under the Military Service Law in Taiwan, all males must serve two years in the military, with 2 months of basic training and 22 months with their assigned units.  Are we now to assume that their military training is worthless, for none of them are capable of shooting people?  No.  So the deal here must be that Apple Daily wants you to be very afraid of the cold-blooded killers from China.  This is tabloid journalism and it sells.

• [088]  More WTO MC6 news.  In SCMP, Jimmy Cheung wrote: "On Saturday, Police Commissioner Dick Lee Ming-kwai warned that protests such as setting fire to a consulate or a company office would not be tolerated."  Ahem ... I sure hope that setting fire to a consulate or a company office would not be tolerated, and I don't think that there is too much dissent about that.  No, what Dick Lee said was that protest banners calling for specific acts of violence such as setting fire to a consulate or a company office would not be tolerated.  However, you can still have banners like "Down with the imperialist pigs" and so on.
   
  The SCMP article quotes Confederation of Trade Union legislator Lee Cheuk-yan: "The Hong Kong police lose no time in jumping on the opportunity to demonise civil society as organisers of violent protests, and whipping up anti-protest sentiment.  This is foul play and unfair. It also diverts attention from the real issues [such as those relating to the WTO]. We are also worried that this is a tactic to implant the wrong impression of the protesters in the minds of the public to justify rough handling and suppressing the protests."  He pledged to organise non-violent protests to arouse public awareness on issues such as job losses and poverty as a result of liberalisation.

• [087]  More strange public restroom tales from Hong Kong.  (Ming Pao)  Last night, a 36-old-female named Wong went into the public restroom at the intersection of Shanghai Street and Market Street in the Yaumati district.  Suddenly, two men jumped out and used a chloroform-soaked towel to render her unconscious.  When she woke up, she found out that her mobile telephone and $2,700 cash were missing.  She went down to the police station to file a report.
   
  Got it?  But you have to remember that this is Hong Kong, and you cannot trust any newspaper.  So here is the addendum.  (Sing Pao)  Upon understanding the circumstances of the case, the police believed that Wong had 'bad habits' (this is an euphemism for drug addiction).  Furthermore, Wong claimed to have entered the public restroom at 10pm but she woke up at midnight, so she should have seen by any other citizen using that restroom during those two hours.  Therefore, (and here we have the strange newspaper language) the police does not preclude the possibility that there are other explanations. 

• [Administrative note]  I live in Hong Kong, I use Cable TV broadband and for the past two days I've been 'bloggered' (i.e. no blogspot sites were visible).  I don't know if this is a problem with 'blogger' or if my ISP is filtering.  I don't care, I'll just get over it.  My advice to the rest of the world: get your own domain name and take control of your own fate.  Then, if 'they' filter you, it will be a badge of pride!  Finally, if and when that should ever happen, you know that you exist!

• [086]  QQ tanks after registration?  (ObserveChina)  [summarized translation]  The largest instant messaging service in China -- Tercent QQ -- claims to have more than 100 million users but after the registration requirements in July, tens of thousands of users have fled, with the white-collar workers migrating to MSN.  The Chinese authorities do not have the ability to blcok international chatting systems such as MSN, Skype, Yahoo Messenger and so on, which have gotten many more Chinese professional netizens even as QQ users have tumbled.  This will be significant for Tercent, which is a public company listed on the stock market.  According to certain Chinese IT experts, the number of MSN and Skype registered users have increased dramatically, and it is more common for netizens to leave MSN addresses.  Only teenagers continue to use QQ.  Technically speaking, MSN v.7.0 has better features than QQ anyway and there is no reason to return to QQ.
   
  BLOGGER'S WARNING: I have no idea how ObserveChina could know about user figures on QQ versus MSN other than anecdotal evidence.  Mark this one down as 'speculative.'

• [085]  Wiki marries Malice.  (InMediaHK)  This is largely in Chinese, but it has generated plenty of comments.  Basically, it is the worst thing possible on the Internet -- a combination of technology and malice.  It is an anonymous forum where people use Wiki to do oppo research (e.g. dig up private dirt, make up outright lies, etc) on others.  And these others are not even public figures but just other virtual celebrities such as web radio hosts, web commentators, bloggers, etc.    You may think this is entertaining until you become the subject and you will not be amused.  If you want a reason to impose regulations on the Internet, this is one.  Uggghhh!

• [084]  (Journal News)  Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer said today that Jeanine Pirro does not have a "Chinaman's chance" of getting the Conservative Party's nomination for U.S. Senate, sparking criticism from Asian-American groups that consider the term offensive.  "That level of racial insensitivity says something about our elected officials," said Glenn Magpantay, staff attorney for the New York City-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.  When a caller to the program later questioned Spencer about his use of the phrase, the former mayor insisted it was not derogatory and referred to the experience of Chinese immigrants in building the nation's railroads.  "It's an often-used cliche by talking heads all over the media," Spencer afterword in a telephone interview with The Journal News. "It is not derogatory at all and anyone who says it is is being a little bit political, I guess."  Advocacy groups disagreed, saying the term dates back to the late 19th century and has come to symbolize the racism and oppression faced by Chinese immigrants.  "'Chinaman's chance' refers to a sad period in American history when Chinese immigrants had little chance of survival in helping to build the nation's railroads on the West Coast," said Pradnya Joshi, president of the New York Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association., who was attending the group's national convention in Minneapolis today.

• [083]  Continuing with a listing of my dissatisifaction with the Hong Kong media coverage of the WTO MC6 (Sixth Ministerial Conference):
   
  (Sing Pao)  Police Commisioner Dick Lee was on Commercial Radio's "Saturday Politics and Economics" program and said that the police has received an application from the WTO alliance for three days of demonstrations.  He emphasized that the police will not permit any placards or banners that advocate violence.  For example, "Burn the XX headquarters", "Kill XYZ", "Burn the XX Consulate" are inflammatory and threatening, and the police will arrest any demonstrator and/or prosecute the organization.  However, "Oppose the government" and "Oppose one-party rule" are not restricted. 
   
  (Oriental Daily) The Hospital Authority has ten steps in place for the WTO:
  1. If the demonstrators block the traffic to the hospitals, they will set up an emergency medical station inside the Convention Centre itself
  2. If necessary, medical personnel will be sent out to the scene to provide assistance
  3. Procedures have been established to handle foreign casualties
  4. Increase hospital security
  5. Command will be assumed by a professional and operations staff, and they will have a major incident coordination network center
  6. They will plan with the Fire Department on where to send the injured.
  7. All leave will be cancelled for emergency medicenter personnel at various hospitals on Hong Kong islande.
  8. All non-emergency medical service will be reduced at those hospitals with emergency wards
  9. Experienced emergency medical personnel will staff medical assistance teams
  10. Contingency planning will be made in the event that the information systems are disrupted.
  

• [082]  (XinhuaNet via Wenxue City)  One morning in Dengfeng City (China), the public security bureau director was looking at a mass of peasants on a petition mission.  The peasants looked glum and sad.  The director was duly concerned and listened carefully.  It turned out not to be about land acquisition, pollution, official abuse, gangsters or any such.  The people wanted to get their names changed.  Once upon a time many centuries ago, the people in the village went by the name 敬 (jing).  Unfortunately, that name was also used by an Emperor, and they had to remove the 文 (wen) on the right hand side and ended with the name 苟 (gou).  Even more unfortunately, this name sounds the same as the word 狗 (gou), which means dog.  For centuries, they have been addressed as Mr. Dog, Mrs. Dog, Ms. Dog, Little Dog, Old Dog or even "Woof Woof", and they are sick of being social outcasts.  So they are petitioning to have all their names changed back to the original 敬 (jing).  Yes, the massive name change will take place and then the people will be holding a celebratory party.

• [081]  [Permalink]  Here are the latest arguments in the case of the beating of Chinese tourist Zhao Yan at Niagara Falls (see the post The Chinese Tourist Zhao Yan).  (ChineseNewsNet; see also Buffalo News)  The defense lawyer Steven Cohen has asked the court to bar the use of photographs of Zhao Yan's bruised face as evidence shown to jurors.  The reason is that one cannot determined from photographs alone that Zhao Yan had been assaulted.  Defense lawyer Steven Cohen used the testimony of New York State licensed doctor Eric Davis who said that his experience in the emergency ward showed that pepper spray can also cause the same type of bruises on the face, and therefore it would be prejudicial to show Zhao's photographs to the jury.
  
  So which do you believe?  Your own lying eyes, or the testimony of a paid-for 'expert witness'?  Besides, what is the difference between causing those injuries by punching or kicking or using clubs or applying pepper spray? 
   
  P.S.  Thanks to a tip from JR, I found out that ESWN was mentioned by Buffalo News:  "What happened to this woman?" EastSouthWestNorth, a Hong Kong Web site, asked in posting photos of Zhao. "Was she the victim of domestic violence? Was she in a train wreck? Was she the victim of a mugging?"

• [080]  (Washington Post via SFGate)  Philip P. Pan wrote: "Police in China's northern Shaanxi province have arrested one of the nation's leading advocates of private property rights, after officials posed as journalists and forged an e-mail from a prominent Hong Kong reporter to lure him out of hiding, friends and relatives said."  This statement is at variance with the one in Yazhou Zhoukan (translated in the post Trusting the Media), in which officials posed as a CCTV reporter.  It would seem that CCTV will have much more impact than a Hong Kong reporter, prominent or otherwise.

• [079]  In this week's Next Weekly (Hong Kong), there is a follow-up on former vice-chairman and chief executive of Bank of China (Hong Kong) Liu Jinbao, recently given a suspended death sentence in China for embezzlement.  Named among his connections was Sandy Mo, for whom Next Weekly gave a full description of her famous Beijing parties as well as her introduction of Liu Jinbao to many important people.
   
  (The Standard)  Sandy Mo, the former general manager of Shanghai Land Holdings on trial for alleged fraud and conspiracy, has denied she received financial aid from jailed banker Liu Jinbao.  Mo, the wife of jailed former Shanghai Land chairman Chau Ching-ngai, in an announcement in several Chinese newspapers Friday, disputed allegations by Next magazine about links with Liu. "I never knew Liu,'' she said. ...  Mo said she will pursue legal action against the magazine and related parties over the report.
   
  Since Sandy Mo's assertion was that she NEVER knew Liu, Next Weekly may be completely stumped to back up those 'introductions' that Sandy Mo allegedly made (such as the one to the son of a former Chinese president/chairman from Shanghai).

• [078]  I am really shocked that such things go on.  I am absolutely appalled.  I mean ... they promised us that everything would be perfect if we have a democracy with universal suffrage and freedom of press, didn't they?  

(Hardball)  Chris Matthews on the situation in Iraq: "What I keep doing here is asking people on and off camera who come on this program, high-ranking officers, enlisted, former officers. I get sometimes, not all the time, two different versions, the version they give me on the air and the version they give me the minute when we're off the air.  The version they give me when we're on the air is gung-ho, we're doing the right thing, everything is moving along. The version they give me off the air is, Rumsfeld is crazy. There aren't enough troops over there. We're not taking this seriously enough, or, we shouldn't be there, sometimes."

• [077]  There is a general ban on advertisements on healthcare and medical products and services in China due to the high proportion of misleading claims.  Here is an example of something in the Nancheng Evening News.  Inside the red box: (translation) "Each day 20,000,000 women around the world uses the 'Japanese Dream Abortion Method' to terminate their pregnancies."  I'll let you ponder on the implications for that 20,000,000 number.
  

• [076]  Two things about the Internationale in China.  If true, then irony is alive and well in China.  (New Century Net)  In the name of a harmonious society in which capitalists and workers are supposed to join hands, the singing of the Internationale will be banned at all public assemblies (such as migrant workers demanding back pay).  Offenders will be prosecuted for disrupting "social stability" in accordance with "party regulations and government laws."  That is to say, the revolutionary hymn that called the proletariats of the world to unite is now anti-revolutionary in the harmonious society.
   
  Meanwhile, there is a popular QQ version of the Internationale written to defend the rights and demands of real estate buyers: "起来，已经买房的人们/起来，准备买房的人！/满腔的热血已经沸腾/要为好房而斗争!/商人们个个油头滑脸/买房的人们起来，起来!不要说我们弱势无助/我们要做家园的主人!/这是正义的斗争/团结起来，到明天/信息对称就一定要实现/这是正义的斗争/团结起来，到明天/从来就没有什么救世主/也不靠神仙官府/要创造我们的幸福/全靠大家团结斗争/…" (Arise, people who have bought apartments! Arise, people who are about to buy!  Our chests full of blood are ready to boil to fight for good apartments!  The commercial sellers are devious, those who buy apartments must arise, arise!  Do not say that we are weak and helpless, we want to be the masters of our own gardens!  This is the fight for justice!  Unite together, until tomorrow when information symmetry will happen.  This is the fight for justice!  Unite together, until tomorrow.  There was never any Savoir, nor will we rely on a fantasy government.  To create our own happiness, it will depend on us uniting to struggle together ...)

• [075]  Nice work, as McDonald's defends its brand name.  Not the Big Mac brand name, but the brand name known as McWages.  (Oriental Daily)  A survey conducted by the Hong Kong and Kowloon Trades Union Council about 80 companies in fast food, cleaning, security, courier and supermarket industries showed that the lowest hourly wage is between HK$15 to HK$22.  McDonald's lead all the companies with HK$15.  In rebuttal, McDonald's said that after a 30-day probation period, the wages may be adjusted to an average of HK$18.  They explained that the salaries for the 12,000 Hong Kong employees amount to 23% of business revenues, which is commensurate with most other food service companies.  The labor union is looking for the government to enact legislation that mandates an hourly minimum wage of HK$25 and a minimum salary of HK$5,200 (while still paying overseas domestic helpers HK$3,320?).
   
  SCMP also covers the story: An hour's pay for a junior McDonald's staff member is not enough to buy the fast-food chain's cheapest combo meal.  McDonald's pays its staff $15 an hour - the lowest rate found in a union survey of 80 companies - compared with $20.30 for a Sausage McMuffin with fries and soda.  A person who worked for McDonald's for eight hours a day, 26 days a month could earn just $3,120.  McDonald's pay rate 10 years ago was $13 and climbed to $18 in the late 1990s, so it was now moving downwards.

• [074]  My reference to The Children of Iraq post brings in more hate mail.  Look, I am not going to discuss whether or not the child in this photo is seemingly delighted to be frisked or that this photo is a Photoshop job.  The fact is that I don't have a clue.  I only ask that you step back to look at the totality and then make your own inferences.  That is why that page has no words except for "The Children of Iraq."  It is up to you to say whether this is tragic or they ought to be happy and grateful about their new freedom.
   
  As to whether the photos on that page are inflammatory and propaganda, I note that Ellen Knickmeyer and Khalid Saffar reported today in the Washington Post: 

In the hours after a triple car bombing in the Iraqi capital Wednesday, state television broadcast a montage of faces of random children -- some appearing solemn, some smiling, some slyly glancing up at the camera. In the background, mournful music swelled, and the faces gave way to the bright flash of a car bomb, shown in slow motion.  "They were young but were turned to pieces of flesh," the singers lamented, as the network then broadcast footage of previous attacks showing limp children, wailing men and distraught women dressed in black abayas pushing through crowds. "Oh, oh Iraq, the land of bloodshed.

So the official television channel of the sovereign and democratic government of Iraq was not beyond such methods.  Whatever else, please don't tell me that everything is fine in Iraq and going according to plan.

• [073]  Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms."   Such morbid symptoms include false messiahs, doomsday predictions, UFO sightings, pyramid schemes, and so on.  Here is one story (Lanzhou Morning News via Wenxue City) that is just too bizarre:
   
  A certain Chinese woman has apparently developed a problem whereupon words (including phrases "Bank of China"),  numbers ("888") and even English letters ("ABCD")) appear spontaneously on her body.  The photo of the left has the words 美麗山川 and the right photo has 壯麗河山.  Both phrases can be translated to "beautiful mountains and rivers". 
  
  Understandably, her family is spooked.  Her children have been copying down the words that have appeared so far.
  

• [072]  I'm going through my Firebox bookmarks and deleting old items.  Here is something about the Hong Kong July 1 march that I saved from Long Hair's website: (in translation)  Civil Human Rights Front member April 5 Movment's Leung Kwok-hung launched an attack by saying that the Front "reported a number that was too low."  He believes that July 1 march was attended by at least 30,000 people.  The April 5 Movement's donation box at Gooseneck Bridge in Wanchai alone gathered HK$80,000 and so he thinks that there was at least 20,000 people.  He said that the Hong Kong University team of Robert Chung only counted in Wanchai, whereas they should be counting in Causeway Bay, Wanchai and Central in order to be more accurate.  He said that he is collecting the different methodologies used in different countries to count people and he will disclose them to the public later.
   
  I saved that item because I knew what the outcome would be.  Hong Kong currently has the most elaborate procedures for counting attendance at public places (see, for example, Mexico City By The Numbers, The Numbers at the 326 March in Taiwan, More Venezuelan Numbers).  Hong Kong counts are also replicated by multiple organizations.  If Leung really did his homework, he would be disappointed at not finding what he wanted.  I kept that bookmark to remind myself that Leung will never bring up that subject again.  He has not so far.  I have deleted that bookmark, but I now have this comment posted for the record.

• [071]  (The Standard)  The shooting of Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and Vice-President Annette Lu on the day before the presidential elections has been formally closed with the naming of a lone gunman, Chen Yi-hsiung.  Will the alleged perpetrator be prosecuted to the full extent of the law?  Ten days after the shooting, he was found drowned and his body was cremated a day later with the cause of death listed as accidental drowning.  Hmmm ... what am I supposed to think?  I resent being forced to be paranoid.
   
  Here is what people in Taiwan think, according to the instant poll results of 356 persons from Apple Daily (Taiwan).
  Q1:  The results of the 319 shooting probe led to Chen Yi-hsiung being lone gunner.  Do you believe that?: Believe (26.12%); Don't believe (62.08%); No opinion (11.80%).
  Q2.  Do you think that the case is closed, or should it be investigated further?  No more investigation: (32.58%); Continue investiagion (58.43%); No opinion (8.99%).
   
  
  China Times (via Yahoo! News) has a larger poll of 798 adults with breakdowns.  Do the respondents accept the explaination?  4% totally accept, 15% somewhat accept, 23% are dubious, 17% totally refuse to accept and 41% had no opinion.  By party affiliation, more than 90% of pan-blue supporters think the case is unsolved, whereas 69% of pan-green supporters believe in the official explanation; among the independents, 32% believe in the explanation, but 68% have doubts.  The only certainty here is that party partisanship trumps objective analysis, and this is not the only time.

• [Administrative note]  I'm working on my second conference paper today, so I will make it a point not to have a real blog post (like translating a 10,000 word Chinese-language essay).  Just to look busy (without having actually to be busy), I will note some historical statistics.  This blog began in April 2003 when I moved to Hong Kong from New York City.  In the 28 months of operation, the log files say:
  - 35,536,242 hits (=html files, images or videos)
  - 1,491,952 page views
  - 1,212,352 unique visitors
  - 934,047,716 Kbytes of data transferred.
  The single most popular blog post in my history was The Children of Iraq, with 167,125 page views.  That one post basically put EastSouthWestNorth v1.0 out of business due to the high bandwidth consumption.  I was forced to dump everything and re-start with a bandwidth-preserving no-frills v2.0 website.  The way things are going in Iraq these days, I just might have to revive the Chaos In Iraq series -- it is too easy!  But motivation is a problem these days.  Anger is a powerful force if I see people keep talking about how everything is going according to the plan or that Bush is brilliant; but these days, anyone who says that is most likely a troll, and I shall not be trapped.
   
  Just for old times' sake, here is an AFP report: "A group of Iraqi workers in Baghdad came under fire Tuesday from US troops who mistook them for insurgents, injuring 26, an interior ministry source said.  'The electricity went out at around 0500 (0100 GMT), so we exited the hotel to the street to have breakfast in the fresh air. A helicopter then opened fire into the street,' said Ali Mohammad, who sustained neck and leg injuries."  What kind of sovereign democracy has foreign military helicopters descending from the sky to shoot at people having lunch out in the street because that same occupation authority has no idea how to provide electricity?  Of course, this matter must be investigated fully (which means that you will never hear about it again).
  
  But of course the Today In Iraq blog does such a great job that I am not needed.

• [070]  Why is blog-city being blocked in China?  Well, I'm only a blogger and I am not privvy to know what was behind that decision.  But here is my favorite Chinese blogger Anti: (translation)  "I am reminded about how smart a netizen friend was: when he chose his blog service provider, he felt that blog-city has good functions but since Anti sets himself up there, he would be suicidal if he goes there as well.  Right!  So I am apologizing here to all the Chinese users at blog-city, but of course the blame will have to be on the Chinese Youth League and the Chinese Communist Party."  (Note: Just yesterday, Anti commented on The Letter of Li Datong in this blog post 中青报官僚情调复辟　体制内良心被迫出走.)  By the way, Anti's solution is to have a mirror site on MSN Spaces.

• [069]  On page 12 of East Week, a white page appeared: "Announcement of Apology: In the cover story for the Ching Cheong espionage case in issue 102 of our magazine, there was a reference to a mistress of Ching Cheong.  After further investigation by our magazine, it was discovered that errors were made during the process of establishment her identity and we mistakenly thought that Ms. Huang Wei was Ching's mistress.  Our magazine apologises to Ms. Huang Wei, all other related people as well as our readers.  East Week.
  
  How wrong were the media?  They got her name wrong, they got her job wrong, they got her university wrong, they got her child wrong (daughter instead of son) and they got her circumstances wrong (i.e. she shares a 200 RMB/month one-room apartment with three other women in Shenzhen and not a HK$5 million lifestyle).
   
  This leaves an obvious question: Did the Chinese government script all this?  Well, they couldn't be that incompetent as in getting all the details wrong and then permitting the woman to travel to Hong Kong to refute all those stories?
   
  For comparison on media manipulation and/or media malfeasance, read: New claims emerge over Menezes death  Rosie Cowan, Duncan Campbell and Vikram Dodd, The Guardian; Police under pressure over Menezes leak  Matthew Tempest and Simon Jeffery, The Guardian.

• [068]  Is this how the war on terrorism shall be won?  (The Guardian)  Five hundred televisions with free cable service are being distributed to teashops in violence-ravaged southern Thailand in the hope that English Premiership football matches will distract young people from militant action.  "Most children love watching sports on TV, but they can't afford that at home," said the interior minister, Kongsak Wantana. "So we are giving them what they love, hoping it can help solve the problem."  Thais are crazy about football, and about the Premiership, in particular. Several games are shown live every week and most of the others are replayed in full on two cable channels.

• [067]  Here is the English-language coverage of a Hong Kong rape trial: (SCMP) The girl has alleged her father began indecently assaulting her in the months after she started Primary Five in September 1998. The father allegedly raped her for the first time before December 1998, after forcing her to watch a pornographic film with him.  "I can't recall the exact period [it started], but it was after the big vacation" for schoolchildren that ends in September, she said.  The girl repeated her claim that her father performed sexual acts on her on numerous occasions over the subsequent year, estimating he had raped her at least five times.  She said the rapes always took place at her home, but could not be sure of all the details.  "It doesn't mean that I can't remember, but I can't recall the entire picture," she said. 
   
  Hmm ... in the Chinese-language press coverage, she evidently recalled many other things.  (Ming Pao)  First, when she was in Primary Six, her dad began to give her breast enhancement pills while saying, "Even though this is very expensive, I still bought it for you."  Second, she took a karate class in extra-curricular activities because she fought often with her dad after she entered secondary school.  She learned karate for self-defense: "I was afraid that he would outfight me."

• [066]  (Observechina)  Yu Jie wrote about female Hong Kong reporters: In mid-July 2003, I visited the United States and went through Hong Kong on the way.  This was my first time in Hong Kong and it was during an 'atypical' period.  There was plenty to attract the eyes of a new observer.  While in Hong Kong, I had plenty of contact with news workers.  I discovered a very interesting phenomenon: among Hong Kong news reporters, more than are women.  This type of situation is unlikely to occur in mainland China, and not even in the western countries in which women's rights have been going on for more than half a century.  I used to think that the reporter's job is hard in terms of both mental and physical labor and that makes women a weaker competitor in this occupation.  But after observing the Hong Kong news workers this time, my prejudices were "thoroughly" destroyed.

• [065]  (New Century Net)  Maybe Hong Kong legislator Emily Lau had some fine points to make about the march to democracy, but she lost me immediately after the first paragraph: (in translation)  The Hong Kong democratic movement has continued for more than 20 years ever since it began in the 1980's.  Although the central government has denied universal suffrage for 2007/2008 last year in April, more than 500,000 people showed up to strive for universal suffrage that year in the July 1 march.
   
  Once I read that, I hit the close button on the page and ignore the rest.  Why?  Previously, in The 2004 Hong Kong July 1 March Crowd Estimates, I wrote: "Anyone who paid even minimal attention and had an ounce of integrity would know that 530,000 could not be the true number in 2004."  Among many, the US State Department, the Voice of America and the BBC do not believe it.  As soon as I saw that 500,000 number in Lau's latest essay, I bailed out.  If she can't even get that right, everything else is rubbish.  This figure is unnecessary for any reasoned argument, so why bring it up when it only has negative consequences?
   
  Addendum:  Emily Lau is not the only such person in town.  In issue number 806 (August 18, 2005) of Next Magazine, Hong Kong Democratic Party vice-chairman Martin Lee wrote (in translation):  "At the July 1st march after the April 26 decision, the only theme was to fight for universal suffrage in 2007/2008 and 530,000 citizens participated, showing that the people of Hong Kong have not abandoned this democratic goal."  Why do they keep repeating this number when they must know that there can only be negative effects?

• [064]  Let me get into the speculation game.  This week's hot Chinese post is The Letter of Li Datong to the editor-in-chief of China Youth Daily about the new appraisal system for editors and reporters.  What do you think about his tenure at the newspaper?  Out the door in 30 seconds, or what?  As a piece of history, I will remind you that in July 25, 2004, more than one year ago, The Lu Yuegang Letter was published from another China Youth Daily editor.  Today, Lu still has his job and is doing nicely.  Having said that, I won't speculate on Li Datong's fate ...  after all, this is China, so who really knows?  In the Roman Polanski movie, the advice was: "Forget it Jake...it’s Chinatown."

• [063]  Mergers and acquisitions are usually about synergies between corporations.  Last week's Next Magazine has a story about a joint venture between the Hong Kong Federation of Handicapped Youth and the Liksun Collection Agency.  Where is the synergy?  Debt collectors are usually mean-looking muscled martial arts experts who show up at the debtor's home or office to create a racket, employing methods such as spilling red paint, dumping feces and even arson.  How are handicapped young people going to help on that?  It turns out that a supplementary technique for the debt collectors is the persistent phone call, to the tune of hundreds of calls a day, and that will be just fine for people who cannot move easily move around.  There is also the marketing cold call, by going through the yellow pages from A to Z to see if anyone needs assistance in debt collection.  This arrangement stinks, but it is apparently quite legal.

• [062]  (Blog.ChineseNewNet)  On this day 60 years ago, the WWII ended.  Hundreds of thousands of Japanese went to pray today for their war dead, of whom the most famous were the kamikaze pilots.  One week ago, a man with terminal cancer exploded a bomb on a bus in Fuzhou (see The Fuzhou Bus Explosion).  On August 10, the French newspaper Liberation covered that story with the title: "Un cancéreux chinois kamikaze s’explose dans un bus."  Literally, this means "A cancer-suffering Chinese suicide attacker exploded himself in a bus."  To the French, kamikaze is an imported term that they use to mean "suicide attacker."  That wouldn't make the Japanese very happy about this usage.

• [061]  (DoNews)  Market competition is good, eh?  On August 11 in the BuyNow computer market in Hefei (China), a customer bought something at Store A.  But the Store B salesperson offered a lower price immediately and told the customer to return the goods at Store A.  This led to an argument between Stores A and B employees.  The lone salesgirl at Store A was outnumbered.  On the next day, four male friends of Store A came to administer justice.  After perfunctory compliments to each others' mothers, a fight broke out.  Weapons included a broom and a LG display monitor.  The floor was littered with broken glass and blood.  Where were the security guards?  They were there to make sure that nobody else interfered and also prevented people from taking photographs of the fight.  Basically, the security guards were spectators in a match without neither referees nor prizes.
  
  The question: What was it that they fought over?  Was it so valuable?  Answer: A mousepad!

• [060]  (Ming Pao)  First, here are data from the Hong Kong Statistical Bureau: there are 214,000 persons age 15 or above who are economically inactive but who would be willing to work if the right job opportunity appears.  75% are women; 52% do not work because they have to take care of household chores, children and/or elders.  As to what they are looking for in a job, 35% said "flexible/convenient working hours"; 49% would work 5 to 6 days a week, at 8 hours per day; and only 22% are looking for fair wages (HK$6,000 for full-time and HK$3,500 for part-time).
   
  Now for the reactions.  On one hand the Statistical Bureau said that these desired working conditions do not mesh with reality since most service industry jobs require employees to work on weekends and for long hours.  On the other hand, community activists said that women have to take care of their families, and their 'conditions' are a matter of necessity as opposed to being 'unrealistic.'  The Social Service Department offers childcare services: Monday-Friday 8am-6pm.  So there you have it, noting the sharp differences in positioning above.  Somebody is brain-dead and I'll let you guess who ...

• [059]  Here is a quiz.  You should think carefully before you choose the answer.  The question is: Which of the following photos is for the building in which the International United Nations Academy of Sciences is located?
  
  Given that I even asked, the answer should be obvious.  Yes, you were right.  It is the one on the left.  The International United Nations Academy of Sciences is located inside an apartment on the 19th floor of the Lok Hing Public Housing Estate in the Chai Wan district of Hong Kong.  It is in the business of awarding doctorates and academician titles.  You don't even have to study.  All you have to do is pay HK$40,000 for the diploma/certificate.
   
  But what about the building on the right?  It is in today's headline news in Sing Tao (see also Beijing Times):
  
  It is the non-existent building for the Chinese Management Academy of Sciences in Beijing.  The rates are cheaper on the mainland since they only want 30,000 RMB for an academician title (although senior academician and lifetime academician titles are more expensive).  The reporter went to the listed address and found an ordinary office building quite different from the one in the photograph.  There were many companies in the building, and the Chinese Management Academy of Sciences was located in an unmarked office (room 901) on the ninth floor.  The reporter spoke to the 'deputy director' who displayed a business certificate for a Hong Kong company permitted to collect market information.  The reporter estimates if that 200 people fell for this at 40,000 RMB a piece, then the take is 8 million RMB already.
   
  The Chinese may be overpaying here.  Regard, for example, Hong Kong Legislative Council member Philip Wong, who has a J.D. (Law) from Southland University (USA) and Ph.D. (Engineering) from California Coast University (USA).  More details at Hemlock.

• [058]  This Oriental Daily story falls into the "dog bites man" category.  Two scholars at the Hong Kong Institute of Education analyzed the contents of 26 martial arts comic books in terms of values.  Among those not sealed in plastic at the newsstand, 46% of the page involved violence but only 5% involved sex and obscene language.  Among those sealed in plastic, 35% of the pages involved violence, 20% involved sex and 30% contained obscene language.
  
   
  In terms of characters, the men are gangsters and the women are prostitutes, and they hang around night clubs and dance halls.  Hong Kong-style comics convey these six sets of values: (1) adulation of violence; (2) lack of creativity as the story lines following a convention; (3) exultation of lower-class culture, including large amounts of obscene language; (4) monolithic cultural background; (5) absence of any moral sense of right vs. wrong; (6) hedonism.  The usual way of dealing the women of an enemy is to rape them and then kill them -- that would fit with all six value sets above.
   
  Wow!  We are shocked that this is going on ... NOT!  If this study is to warn us about the ills of Hong Kong comic books, then it has come a few decades too late.

• [057]  I'm sorry, but on some days I have zero sympathy left to give.  (Yahoo! News)  In Portland Street (Mongkok district, Hong Kong), an 18-year-old high school graduate procured a 17-year-old prostitute, completed a transaction, pulled out a knife and robbed her of HK$4,000.  But he left his wallet behind, and that has his HK ID card inside.  When he came back to retrieve his wallet, he ran into the police investigators and was arrested immediately.  In the standard terminlogy, this is called "paying tuition (交學費)."  He'll get better if and when he gets out of jail, because he'll probably get excellent tutors inside.
  
   
• [Adminstrative Note]  I am in the process of writing two conference papers, so blogging will slow down a bit.  The first paper is about survey participation, in which the hypothesis is seemingly trivially obvious: people who like to do surveys in general and who are interested in the survey topic are more likely to participate than others.  The difficult part is how to prove this as well as quantify the resultant survey biases, given that one doesn't know anything about the non-participants by definition.  I thought I've got a trick through data mining and my proposal was accepted by the conference organizers.  Now that I'm actually looking at the data, things are less melodramatic than I previously imagined.  However, this will still be of interest because it justifies the current survey practice

• [056]  (Zhengzhou Evening News via Yahoo! News)  On August 4, two security guards patrolling a commercial center in the city of Zhengzhou China saw a row of red letters written on a gate: "我们在你们这里放150斤炸药，白(别)天准备1800万元。" (translation: "We have placed 75 kilograms of dynamite here.  You better prepare 18 million yuan by tomorrow (note: there was a misspelling)."  The guards gasped and called the police immediately, and about 200 police officers, including the bomb disposal squad, rushed over to search the place.
  
  Who were the terrorists?  As the militia fanned out, two of them found four youngsters sleeping in the street.  It would turn out that these four kids -- ages between 11 and 14 years old -- had come to Zhengzhou from their rural village with 9.5 yuan among them.  While sitting on the toilet a few days ago, one of them read about an extortion case.  So they thought that they would try to raise some money this way.
  
  The kids were given a stern lecture and sent back to their very worried families.
   
  Who is to be blamed here?  The media, of course.  First, for giving the wrong ideas to suggestible children.  Second, worse yet, the media had not taught the children that 18 million yuan would come as 180,000 one-hundred-yuan notes (see Imagethief's Fistful of Yuan), which is about one (or several) truckload(s).

• [055]  In addition to the famous press conference, here is more from yesterday's radio interview with James To.  (Ming Pao)  Should he have bowed in apology to the cameras?  "我認為我已道過很多次歉，但有人跟我講，我們是中國人，中國人對於你有多認真和嚴肅，是有尺度分別的。 (translation:  I believe that I had apologised many times already.  But somebody told me that we are Chinese, and Chinese people distinguish how sincere and serious you are.)"  How did he take it personally.  "我有問過上帝，你為何讓我面對這種事情﹖ (translation: I have asked God, 'Why did you let me face this sort of thing?')"  His pastor comforted him that this was just God's way of preparing him for greater things.  "不必了，我但求安安穩穩做這個（立法會議員），監察政府紀律部隊不要濫權，我不是要做更大的事情。 (translation: That won't be necessary.  I only wanted to do this (legislator's job) smoothly to monitor that the government does not abuse its power.  I don't want to do anything grander than that.)"

• [054]  Where would the World Wide Web be without hypertext linking?  So it is that I marvel at some of the unintended results.  Here is an example: Dustless Workshop wrote about the problem of Chinese-English translation.  Through an ephemeral link as an item for reading here, there is now a link from the Italian blog Taccuino di Traduzione:

Why is it that, when the Chinese translate stuff from English or whatever to Chinese, do they have to add extra meaning on top of the tranlation itself?  Risponde The Dustless Workshop (link segnalato dalla mia ultima scoperta, il curiosissimo EastSouthWestNorth). 

Curiosissimo, indeed.  Molto.

• [053]  There is a new racket in China and it has to do with top ten lists.  The most detailed exposure is about the listings known as the worst ten cities in China in 《华尔街邮报》：一个中国骗子炮制的“美国大报” at Xici Hutong.  A person set up an organization in Beijing and claimed to have conducted a survey with funding of 28 milion yuan from various government organizations to rank the cities along various attributes (e.g. air quality, traffic congestion, etc).  To publicize this organization and the study results, a news report was published in the Wall Street Post.  Yes, the Wall Street Post.  You have heard of The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, but have you heard of the Wall Street Post?  Probably not, because this is an online newspaper whose owner was traced back to ... you guessed it ... the person who owns the organization that conducted the survey.  By the way, all the named government organizations denied having provided any funds for this survey, and on general principles, they do not see such an exercise to be meaningful.
   
  So next time you see a ranking of the top ten or wost ten of something or the other in China, you need to be skeptical for a couple of reasons.  The first reason is that the rankings are usually available for sale, and this is how the racketeer makes money (and lots of it too).  The second reason is that this is meaningless in terms of methodology.  Even if you want to do a survey properly, you should think about how you want people to rank cities or brands of soap or automobiles -- the survey respondents will know the brands that they use or used, but they will have no knowledge of most other ones.  For example, how would I compare Shanghai with Chengdu, which I have never visited before?
   
• [052]  On a slow news day, there is always the Apple Daily (Taiwan) front page story that can always be counted to give a rise.  On this day, the headline said "Father tortures 10-year-old daughter; taken around with a dog leash."
  
   
  The following illustrations and photographs make it unnecessary to offer too many words.  But how does a father come to behave like this?  One word: Drugs. 
    

• [051]  Hong Kong Legislator and Democratic Party James To finally faced the press yesterday about the mess known as the Target Link affair.
   
  (The Standard)  James To: "I formally offer my apology to the public for my administrative errors.  There have been several investigations into this matter and no one has doubted my integrity.  We will carefully listen to the opinions of my voters, but the integrity issue does not exist and I will not resign.  I have always provided reasons to support my criticism, with analysis and factual data, which other parties can criticize if they believe the evidence to be wrong.  The public, therefore, can judge for themselves whether those criticisms of me are valid."  And then he bowed deeply to the cameras once.
  
   
  (SCMP)  Polytechnic University social scientist Ho Kwok-leung: "Mr To's constituents are the public.  How can he be so certain that the public still has faith in him?  He should resign and stand for election again."  If it is up to the public to decide in a democracy, then here is the Oriental Daily poll of 693 adults in Hong Kong:
  
  Q1: James To chose only to apologise to the public because he says his personal integrity is not being doubted.  Do you accept his apology or not?  Yes: 167 (24%), No: 459 (66%), No opinion: 67 (10%)
  Q2. Do you think that James To should resign from this Legislator position?  Yes: 420 (61%), No (168 (24%), No opinion: 105 (15%)
  Q3. Do you believe what James To that the entire affair was due solely to some major administrative lapses? Yes: 144 (21%), No: 460 (66%), No opinion 89 (13%)
   
  But of course Hong Kong is a faux democracy and the public does not get to decide.  That is what we are being told all the time.  It is evidently true.

• [050]  (6Park)  In Chongqing, a woman in a green t-shirt yelled "You didn't take my call!" to a man, grabbed his collar and then kicked him in the balls.  The man fell to the ground and said, "I didn't do anything ..."  Whack!  Whack!  The woman slapped him, leaving hand prints on his face.  Then she slapped him another dozen times.  What is the deal?  This is a married couple, and last night, he didn't come home and he wouldn't answer her telephone calls.  A bystander said, "Your husband was working here, and he doesn't fight back when you slap him.  How could you keep hitting him?"  She said, "This is my special love for me.  Besides, it's for the good of the family."
  

• [049]  The so-called 'other woman' Huang Wei  (黃 偉) in the Ching Cheong rumor cycle has given an interview to Yazhou Zhoukan and also appeared on Hong Kong Commercial Radio.
  
   
  Here are her present circumstances (Yahoo! News): In February 2005, after her publishing house published the book about Zhao Ziyang, she was briefly detained and released (note: the public security officers did not ask her about Ching Cheong during the detention) and then she was dismissed from her job.  Since then, she has worked at seven or eight jobs.  She is presently a clerk at a Shenzhen arts & crafts company with a monthly income of more than 1,000 yuan.  She does some proof-reading work in the evenings.  She shares a one-room apartment with three other women, each paying about 200 yuan in rent.  She has a 13-year-old son (and not a daughter as reported).
   
  Huang was quoted in The Standard:  "If I were really Ching's mistress, owned an apartment and received millions of dollars, my life would not have been difficult.  In fact, I would really prefer to be that 'mistress.'  Public security officers did not approach me before June and, even after I got to know about his arrest, I was called by public security officers a couple of times, but they never mentioned anything about Ching's arrest."
   
  Here is Oriental Daily's summary of all her contacts with Ching Cheong.
  - May 2004, Huang was working for the publishing house that published the book on Zhao Ziyang written by Zhao's qigong master Zong Fengming.  Her boss asked her to forward a book (note: didn't say which book) to Ching Cheong.
  - October 2004, Ching was trying to find her boss but couldn't reach him.  So he called her up to ask about how Zong's book was doing in terms of sales.  Ching said that he could not find copies of the book in Hong Kong bookstores.  They had a one-hour meal after which she went back to work.
  - April 20, 2005, Huang called Ching to see if he could help her find a job.  This was after she lost her publishing job.  They met in a Shenzhen coffee shop for about 30 minutes.  Ching didn't think that she could get a job in Hong Kong without a resident permit but said he would see if there are publishing jobs available in China.  Then Huang left the restaurant and took a bus home.  She never even realized that he was arrested until June.
   
  This should eliminate two lines of inquiry: Huang Wei as the secret mistress and a second Zhao Ziyang-related manuscript (because she was no longer working for the publishing house and besides Zong Fengming said that there was no second manuscript).  Both rumors were floated by individuals or newspapers, and not included in the official Chinese announcements.
   
  Was the rumor about Huang Wei floated by the Chinese government?  Who knows?  But if you look at today's post Media Monitoring in Hong Kong, then the Hong Kong media are easily capable of creating fiction without any assistance.  Actually, I lean towards the hyper-imaginative media as the culprit of this fiction -- the telling clue is that Oriental Daily refers to her as Huang Hui (黃 卉) instead of Huang Wei  (黃 偉).  The Chinese government should not have been tripped up by not getting the name of the person right in a propaganda campaign.  And besides, why would the government let her travel to Hong Kong and rebut those rumors?
   
• [048]  (6Park)  In the city of Wuhan (China), there are children roving the streets with roses in their hands.  When they see couples walking by, they would run up and say, "GG, buy some roses for JJ" and "JJ, you are so pretty, buy some roses."  They would resort to grabbing the man's leg and not letting go.  See photo 1.  Where do the children come from?  They had been rented out by their parents to 'bosses' for 300 yuan a month to work in the streets.  If they don't make enough, their bosses would scold and beat them.  See photo 2.  If they do well enough, the bosses may give them a piece of candy.  The bosses keep all the sales receipts, because they work very hard too.  See photo 3. 
  
  So, should you or should you not buy a rose if you encounter this situation?  This is likely to be a global business model not localized to Wuhan.

• [047]  (Beijing Youth Daily)  The Next Weekly (Taiwan) paparazzi team got on singer Jay Chou's nerve, so he got out of his car and confronted them.  According to the video, Jay and the reporter had a heated exchange of middle-finger waving in the middle of the road.  Later, Jay posted the following essay on his record company's website: "不好意思让大家担心了今天终于有可以替艺人朋友们争口气的机会我怎么可能放过只可惜我没有打狗棒可以好好发威不然你们肯定可以看到精彩的平常我可是很爱狗儿的但今天这只狗儿的嘴脸我看不下去没想到狗嘴言语充满了挑衅竟然比文山的词还精彩如果你有耳朵的话你会跟我一样很想教训它我真不敢相信我只有玩弄它的安全帽它就落荒而逃当我要离开的时候它竟然有勇气拉住我的手拖延时间好等着它的同伴到来我也搞不清楚狗儿的身上为什么总是有DV和相机是用骨头换的吗？我气我当时没有DV不然我就会拍给你们看看狗儿的嘴脸正当我上车的时候狗儿竟然一直叫着(偶像动粗啊！偶像动粗啊！)搞到连旁边的机车骑士都看不下去劝狗儿停止无聊的行为有时候想想我到底还要被跟多久也许很久吧不好意思让大家担心了"
  
  (Apple Daily)  Jay Zhou gave an analysis of paparazzi cultures: "In Taiwan, they are intolerable.  The paparazzis in Hong Kong follow tightly, but they are the best mannered.  There is beginning to be paparazzis in mainland China as well.  Only in Singapore can one be totally free."

• [046]  FBI sees big threat from Chinese spies (by Jay Solomon for The Wall Street Journal via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette):  ... the FBI and Justice Department have sent hundreds of new counterintelligence agents into the bureau's 56 field offices, many with a specific focus on China ... thousands of Chinese nationals regularly come to the U.S. as students and businessmen, some working for major U.S. defense contractors ... the vast majority of them are in the U.S. innocently working or studying. Counterespionage experts say the trouble often starts when they are contacted by Chinese government officials or one of the more than 3,000 Chinese "front companies" the FBI alleges have been set up in the U.S. specifically to acquire military or industrial technologies illegally ... about 150,000 Chinese students are studying in the U.S., according to the FBI, and the number of new admissions has been rising. Nearly 64,000 Chinese students entered the U.S. last year, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, up from 55,000 in 1998. All told, about 700,000 Chinese tourists and business executives visit the U.S. each year ... Mr. Szady acknowledges the inherent complexity of monitoring the Chinese community in the U.S., and says he is trying to find a balance: "How do you protect without being overbearing?" But he argues that it is the Chinese government, not the FBI, that is blurring the lines between legitimate transborder commerce and national rivalry ... the Beijing government runs an extensive, informal, decentralized spy network, counterespionage experts allege. In most cases, Beijing's spy agencies don't send trained agents to the U.S. to penetrate companies and government agencies, but rather simply seek to glean information from the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who visit and study in the U.S. every year. They also try to get Chinese-Americans to provide information, appealing to their desire to help uplift China's economy ...
   
  Duh ... where do I begin with this?  How about the first sentence with the 'hundreds of FBI counterintelligence agents sent to the 56 field offices'?   What is the problem with that?  99.9% OF THEM DON'T SPEAK OR READ CHINESE.  See my post Translation and its Discontents for this problem.  It does not matter if they assign 200,000 or 500,000 FBI agents to monitor the Chinese in America -- they can't process the information!  (Anecdote:  I once heard that there was a Wenzhou person who needed to be interrogated in New York City; there was NO resource in the entire Chinese translation community that knows that dialect.  The putonghua translator who was brought in resorted to using an improvised sign language!)

• [045]  (Oriental Daily)  Another day, another brothel bust in Hong Kong with 64 females arrested.  So what?  This Portland Street joint turned out to be trickier for the police undercover operation because once the undercover got inside, he could not use his mobile phone to signal his team to come in for the arrest.  How so?  The rooms had all the walls, doors and windows covered with aluminium foil!  Strangely, though, the article did not explain what the police did to get around this wall.  Trade secret, eh?

• [044]  (Yahoo! News)  Huang Jingao, the bullet-proof vest Communist Party Secretary of Lingjiang County, Fujian, has been formally charged with corruption through receiving 3,685,300 yuan, US$228,000, 30 precious rocks (worth 26,000 yuan), one laptop computer (valued at 17,000 yuan), one gold brick and two platinum chains.  He published a famous open letter at People's Daily and the detailed charges (including his six mistresses) are here.

• [043]  Great expectations for the World Trade Organization conference in Hong Kong.
  (Oriental Daily)  
  - McDonald's and Starbucks should be prepared in case protestors use cement to block the bathroom pipes and cause flooding
  - Police guessed that protestors will form human chains to blockade the entrance to the Hunghom tunnel, and have arranged for tow trucks and mobile units to respond
  - The good news is that there will be no use of tear gas because the police fears the possibility of massive lawsuits in case the drifting clouds affects innocent civilians; the police also promised that they will not use their MP5 machine guns.
  (Sing Pao)
  - 800 police officers will be detailed to protect VIPs
  - 2,346 'blue berets', riot squad, traffic police and tactical units will be deployed around the convention center for crowd control
  - 1,026 will be stationed in the six district command headquarters
  - 2,337 will be stationed in the 19 local police district, each with 123 persons. 
  - 3,889 police officers will be formed into 42 criminal investigation teams and they will be undercover to observe and arrest lawbreakers
  - about one-third of all Hong Kong police officers will be involved in WTO-related activities, with each being required to put in 3 to 4 hours of overtime per day.
  (Sing Tao) 
  - The Department of Corrections have set aside Victoria Prison for holding arrestees.  The prison has a maximum capacity of 430.
  (Oriental Daily)
  - If the protestors should block the Tsing Ma Bridge that links Lantau Island to Kowloon to disrupt vehicular traffic to and from the airport, the police have made plans to move VIPs either by the airport express train or by boat.
  And you can add the other stories about the aquatic divers who will reach the Convention Center under water.

• [042] (6Park)  The photos below show the emergence of a new occupation in Shenzhen.  The idea came to a working woman who personally had a hard time finding public restrooms in the city.  So she quit her job and developed the notion of 'restroom guide.'  She nets about 8,000 yuan and she has eight workers who make 1,500 plus yuan per month.  They stand on the street with signs that offer to guide people to clean restrooms for a small fee.
  

• [041]  (NYT, James Glanz):  At dawn the atmosphere glowed orange, like the embers of a fire. Objects 25 yards away disappeared, as if a curtain had been drawn in front of them. Baghdad residents began waking up with the sour taste of grit in their mouths and a film of dust on their furniture and clothing, and by 8 a.m. Nireen Abdul Khalek began to feel that she could not breathe.  Five hours later, Ms. Khalek, 24, stood amid the pandemonium in the emergency room at Yarmouk Hospital, one of Baghdad's largest, where at least 500 patients had been admitted with respiratory ailments brought on by a blinding dust storm that many residents said was the most vicious they had seen in years.
  

• [040]  More details about Ching Cheong were given in the Oriental Daily and Eastweek (see 030, 032 and 037 for previous developments).  First of all (Oriental Daily), the Taiwan foundation has been identified as the Foundation on International and Cross-Strait Studies (中華歐亞基金會) (with the mottos: "strategic vision, policy impact, transcend partisanship").  Founded in 1994 with an office in Taipei, its purpose to to "analyze policies in order to influence."  It is said to be a fringe organization for the Taiwan National Security Bureau funded by the government and business community.  The foundation is headed Zhang Jingyu, a former Mainland Affairs Council member and a director of the Tanjiang University International Affairs and Strategy Analysis Institute.  The members of the board of directors have political and intelligence backgrounds.  The Executive Vice-President Tung Li-min is the director of Mainland Affairs for the Democratic Progressive Party and his charge is collecting mainland Chinese intelligence, with the Foundation being one of its partners.
  
  Then there are more details about that other woman.  East Week refers to her as Huang Wei (黃 偉) but Oriental Daily refers to her as Huang Hui (黃 卉).  She is described as beautiful and graceful.  She is a 42-years-old single mother with a daughter.  Between 2001 and 2003, she worked as an editor at the Shenzhen publishing house which published the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang.  At the end of 2001, Huang met Ching Cheong and they began an affair next year.  In 2004, Huang left the publishing house and Ching began to take care of the livelihood of the mother and daughter.  Whenever she called, Ching would go and meet her in Shenzhen.  Meanwhile, Mary Lau believed that her husband needed to go to Shenzhen for work reasons (but East Week claimed that Lau knew about this extramarital affair).
   
  On the morning of April 20, even though Ching Cheong realized that he was a target of investigation, he still took the risk to go to Shenzhen to see Huang.  Prior to that, National Security Bureau personnel had spoken to Huang about the Zhao Ziyang memoir and they asked her to get Ching to come to Shenzhen.
   
  Ching and Huang met in a restaurant in Shenzhen.  He told Huang that he was working to cover the China trip by KMT chairman Lian Chan.  At that time, Ching did not realized that CASS researcher Lu Jianhua who had been supplying him with intelligence had been arrested, and he was unsuccessfully trying to reach Lu.  During this meeting, Ching's mobile phone kept ringing and someone speaking in Cantonese kept asking him to go to a certain place.  Huang left after 30 minutes, and Ching was detained by members of the Chinese National Security Bureau.
   
• [039]  More Ching Cheong related excerpts from the Hong Kong-based Chinese language media.  These are the other side's reactions to what those other ones that you can find earlier here (scroll down in the archives).  
   
  (Economic Journal via InMediaHK)  Szeto Wah of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China: "All these things should have been said in court.  They should not slander him before that.  They would have been charged with interfering the course of justice in Hong Kong.  This is unfair to Ching Cheong and his family.  Even if these is a girlfriend, it has nothing to do with the country.  It would be up to his wife to speak up."
   
  (Apple Daily via Boxun)  Lin Huoli: "Over the five years of espionage, Ching Cheong received only HK$5 million.  Let us even say that he made HK$7 million of which he kept half for himself, then he only got HK$700,000 per year.  His salary at the Strait Times was more than HK$1 million with good promotion prospects and pension.  Why would be sell his country out and his own soul for just HK$700,000.  I have known him since 1971 at Hong Kong University, and I cannot believe that he is so cheap.  To emphasize that Ching's case is unrelated to Zeng Fengming's manuscript on Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese special agents emphasized that Ching had a sentimental problem with a Shenzhen publishing editor Ms. X.  When Ching went to China in April, Ms. X called him several times that she has the second and most important manuscript of interviews with Zhao Ziyang.  According to Ching's family and friends, this editor is a single mother who is experiencing hard times since losing her job and had borrowed several tens of thousand dollars which Ching has told his wife about.  First of all, Ching is not a lecher.  Second, he has done the China beat for many years, and he has always turned down free offers of "special entertainment service" after meeting with company owners.  It is unlikely that an 'ascetic monk' like Ching would mess around with a not-particularly-pretty source?
   
  (Apple Daily via Boxun)  Li Yi:  It is a woman, again!  But if even if you believe the 'informed source,' this girlfriend of Ching Cheong had nothing to do with his obtaining intelligence about China and offering that to Taiwan.  According to my information, the most worried ones are the pro-Beijing elements in Hong Kong who are connected to mainland Chinese cadres while having access to internal information and also communicate with organizations in Taiwan.  This case must be causing them worries.
   
  (Apple Daily via Boxun)  Zhang Hua: These articles that have been appearing in the last few days are of the variety "Let's decide that Ching Cheong is a spy, and then find the evidence to prove the case."  Before the Chinese court finds him guilty, he is innocent.  We cannot assume that just because he was detained by the National Security Bureau, then he must be a spy.  We must give the reasonable doubt to Ching Cheong.  Besides, as long as Ching Cheong is under arrest, he cannot rebut any unfavorable media accusations.  These unfair reports should be avoided.
   
  Relevant link:  Pro-Beijing HK dailies denounce ST reporter.  Strait Times via Asia Media.

• [038]  At the time when supermodel Chiling Lin returned from Dalian (China) to Taiwan after her injury, her mother issued thanks in what must be considered an offensive way (as in phrasing it as the people of one country thanking the people of another country for taking care of their daughter).  The history of the pro-Independence politics of Chiling Lin's parents was then posted on the Internet.
   
  The Strait Times (via 6Park) now reports that there is a spontaneously organized movement inside China to pressure Proctor & Gamble to release Chiling as their spokesperson or else face a consumer boycott (beginning with collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures).  Chiling's representatives responded by saying that she is completely apolitical and multi-colored.  It is likely that she will eventually have to make an explicit but carefully crafted statement to that effect.
  
  Chiling's woes are shared by other professionals, ranging from singer Chang A-Mei (who sang the ROC national anthem at Chen Shui-bian's first presidential inaugural ceremony in 2000 and got banned in China for a while) to anyone who does business in China such as Hsu Wen-Lun of Chi Mei Corporation (who renounced Taiwan independence in March 2005).  This is the dilemma for Taiwan independence.  It would be nice to have your own little country, except for many people, their economic livelihood is tied in with China (as in more than US$100 billion invested in China, 1 million people who go to or live in China for business and a trade surplus of almost US$20 billion per year).  Even Chiling Lin's father owns a factory in Dongguan, China (see Xici Hutong).  A singer such as Jay Chou can have a base market of 20 million in Taiwan or 1.3 billion in China; Japan and the United States are not open to him.  Obviously, if Jay Chou is rational, he would avoid politics at all cost.
   
  Is it fair to use singers as political chips?  Would this happen in a democracy?  Let's look at the recently deceased Ibrahim Ferrer of the Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club.  He won a Latin Grammy for best traditional tropical album but he could not receive the award in person because the United States of America wouldn't issue the 78-year-old singer a visa to someone from a "terrorist state."  There was not a chance that this person could be a terrorist in any way, shape or form.  This whole happened to appease the Cuban exile community in Miami which made the difference in the last American presidential election.

• [037]  The proverbial 'unnamed source' fills out more details in the Ching Cheong.  As usual, I will note that this is unverified, but this is what is going around.  If you don't like this, you can go back to read your Washington Post.  (The Sun)  An informed source said that it all began in 1998 when The Strait Times posted Ching Cheong in Taiwan.  At the time, a certain person representing a foundation contacted Ching and asked him to write about mainland Chinese society, economy and military.  He praised Ching for his opinions, and paid him as much as HK$20,000 for every 3,000 words.
   
  When Ching Cheong found out that the foundation did not publish what he wrote, he wanted to stop.  He posed a direct question to the foundation, which admitted that it was related to the Taiwan national security bureau but persuaded Ching Cheong to continue.  On one hand, Ching had written so much already without any negative consequences.  On the other hand, Ching needed a lot of money.  So that was how he became a spy.
   
  Later, Ching was told that his reports were 'lacking in substance,' so he had to start asking his mainland Chinese 'friends' for help.  These included Lu Jianhua of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  CASS deputy assistant Chen Hui faxed documents on behalf of Lu.  At the end of last year, Chen faxed certain documents on national politics and economy at a business center of a certain Beijing hotel, and this gained the attention of the authorities.  When Lu Jianhua was detained, he disclosed all his activities and implicated Ching Cheong.
   
  Over the five years, Ching Cheong has collected more than HK$5 million, but he only gave Lu Jianhua HK$160,000 as writing royalties.  Ching Cheong needed a lot of money because he was having an affair with a woman.  Mary Lau was very strict about Ching's finances, so he purchased a flat in Shenzhen where he went to meet his girlfriend under the guise of working in mainland China.  He was arrested in Shenzhen in April.
   
  Mary Lau wanted to see her husband in Beijing.  The informed source said that Beijing told Mary Lau that she could come, but she did not go.  The speculation is that she is afraid to go because she is in fact a material witness in the case and she needs some kind of assurance that she will not be swept up.

• [036]  (Ta Kung Pao)  A survey commissioned by Websense of 50 middle managers and 50 workers in information technology in Hong Kong found that 83% of the workers browse work-unrelated websites at work and spend an average of 3.3 hours per week on the computer handling personal matters.  However, their managers believe the workers spend 7.1 hours.  82% of the IT managers believe that corporate network security is more stressful than moving, marriage, divorce, traffic accidents, job change and having children.  Apart from network intruders, managers also worry about workers downloading viruses inadvertently or violate intellectual property rights by downloading songs or movies.  

• [035]  SCMP: Frequent secret visits to the mainland by senior Hong Kong officials could give the impression that the trips are being used to receive orders from state officials, a legislator warned yesterday.  "It's one thing for senior officials to travel to the mainland to meet state officials, but going there too often would give the impression that they go there to receive orders," Emily Lau Wai-hing, of The Frontier, said on the RTHK radio programme Letter to Hong Kong.
   
  Waaaaaaa ... !  Help me here!  We live in the year 2005 and people don't have to meet in person to deliver orders.  There are things such as landline telephones, mobile telephones, satellite telephones, video conferences, e-mails, instant messaging, text messages, VoIP, faxes, diplomatic pouches, courier services, postal mail, personal envoys coming down from Beijing and so on.  So what is this really about?  Evidently, whether or not they receive or follow orders is unimportant.  It is more important for Hong Kong officials not to make physical trips to Beijing because that creates the 'impression' that they follow orders.  This is the essence of a highly autonomous Hong Kong.  You got that?  Now back to our regular program ...

• [034]  There was an interesting opinion piece in Sing Tao about accuracy in Zhang Yihe's much acclaimed <<The Past Is Not Like Smoke>> (see previous post).  If the book is about certain recollections of people in Chinese history, then these are subjective evaluations and there cannot be any rights or wrongs.  I can like someone, or I can dislike them.  However, Zhang Yihe's book was criticized by scholars for being wrong on the 'hard' facts.  For example, there was a section in Zhang's book about how the widow of a friend did not inform the Zhang family of his passing away.  Well, that was her recollection.  Except the deceased man's nephew kept the guestbook at the memorial service, and Zhang's mother signature appeared in it.  And so on and so forth.  These errors were pointed out to Zhang, but she has not corrected them.
   
  The opinion piece writer then suggested there is a double standard when dealing with Zhang Yihe.  With respect to the factual errors, people are willing to use a literary standard for fiction; with respect to the historical currents, people will use a non-literary (but historically truthful) standard to praise her courage.  This leads to opinion piece writer to wonder if the reason why Zhang's books are fashionable because they serve to sculpt and reinforce a set of common understanding and which is resistant against any need for correction.

• [033]  (Tai Kung Pao)  This is a civil lawsuit about Internet defamation in China through which law enforcement was asked to identify the owner of an email account.  A person named Zhang was the director of security for a property management company in Panyu, Guangdong, China.  In February last year, the individual property owners demonstrated in the street while Zhang tried to persuade them to stop.  Later on, a post from 'gdda' appeared on the 21st Century CN real estate forum with Zhang's photo take at the demonstration plus the words "The mean and tough pighead security".  Other netizens added comments such as "Send him to the slaughterhouse!  Chop him up into eight pieces!  I want to kill the pig!"  Zhang believed that the poster was a resident named Zhou and sued him in court for defamation.  During the trial, Zhou denied being 'gdda.'  The Panyu Court asked the Guangzhou PUblic Information Internet Security Monitoring Office to check with the 21st Century CN real estate forum found out that 'gdda' has the same telephone number and ID number as Zhou.  As a result, Zhou was found guilty and must apologise on the forum to Zhang as well as pay 10,000 yuan for causing mental anguish.

• [032]  More about Ching Cheong from the local Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong.  Please bear in mind that both of the cited newspapers are staunchly pro-Beijing.  The articles are much longer, and I have only translated the sections that gave new and interesting information.  The first excerpt is about how the media were allegedly manipulated for political purposes, and the second excerpt explains why an open and transparent trial is not to be expected.
   
  (Tai Kung Pao)  [translation]  Ching Cheong was detained on April 22 in mainland China, but the first one to report the news was the Washington Post.  The source of information for WaPo was the Taiwan intelligence service.  After Ching's espionage activities were detected, the Taiwan intelligence service wanted to misdirect attention and therefore used a pre-emptive strike to leak the news to the American media.  The goal was to muddy the waters based upon the fact that Ching Cheong was a "veteran news worker" and there was a "Zhao Ziyang manuscript involved."  This became a case of "freedom of news being trampled upon" and "a journalist being oppressed" because "China is lawless" and "people can be arbitrarily arrested."  American spokesmen then came out to "express their concern" and international journalist organizations ran "global" petitions to "rescue Ching Cheong."  Obviously, the Taiwan intelligence service's "pre-emptive" measure was coordinated with the Americans to "re-cast" a spy case into a political affair, both to avoid culpability and to "demonize" China.
   
  (Wen Wei Po)  [translation]  National security is needed to guarantee the survival and development of any sovereign country.  All countries in the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, have laws related to the protection of national security.  In Hong Kong, some people criticise the Chinese legal system with respect to national security, but they prefer not to discuss the American or British systems.  That is a hypocritical double standard.  In Hong Kong, there are even some people who are demanding an open court trial.  This is also against the national law as well as standard international practice.  According to China's Criminal Prosecution Law Article 152: "When the First People's Court conducts a trial, it is normally done openly.  But when national secrets or personal privacy are involved, the trial will not be done openly."  Western countries such as the United Kingdom also have similar regulations for closed trials that involve national secrets.
   
  Well, I can contribute something too.  Ching Cheong's wife Mary Lau published an open letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao (Grand Unification of Theories about the Case of Ching Cheong, Theory #3).  She explained that Ching Cheong had access to internal papers provided by CASS's Lu Jianhua for the purpose of writing policy reports.  She cited as examples the invitation to Tawian opposition leaders to visit China and the replacement of Tung Chee-hwa by Donald Tsang as Hong Kong Chief Exeucutive as their recommendations.  She said that one time, Ching was so busy that he gave her an outline and she wrote the actual paper that Ching sent in.  Hmmm.  On the basis of the new developments, it was likely that Lu Jianhua was sending internal documents by using various Beijing hotel business centers to send faxes to Ching Cheong who was producing reports ... to send to Taiwan!  And Mary Lau hadn't been told whom it was for.  But if no such policy reports or recommendations ever reached the top decision-makers in Beijing, then Lau's open letter became state evidence and practically sealed Ching and Lu's fates.  What do lawyers advise their clients?  "Keep your mouth shut!"  But I remind you once again that I am a blogger and not a professional reporter; I only read news reports and make inferences which can be totally off the mark.

• [031]  (Yazhou Zhoukan)  Here is a brand new tactic for harassing people in China.  Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao are the authors of The Chinese Peasants Survey.  Recently, someone was throwing rocks and bricks at their home in Hefei (Anhui province).  Their ceramic vases in the yard were broken, and their five-year-old son was terrified.  They called the police who came and arrested a person.  But the person came back next day and repeated the same thing.  "The public security bureau said that the person was a mental case, and there wasn't anything that they could do."  Since July 16, the person has been throwing rocks at this house for more than a dozen days.  There are other buildings in the area, but the person only targeted their house.  The "130" service workers and the garbage collectors tell Chen that the 'mental case' was dropped off at Chen's door by persons in uniformed.  When people tried to take photos of this person, he knew how to cover his face or run away.  So Chen Guidi and family have moved into the suburbs to avoid this person.

• [030]  More information on the Ching Cheong case from the Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong, and this is quite different from what you will read at the New York Times or Washington Post.  Ming Pao has an inside source who said that the investigation was triggered when the National Security Bureau found that Taiwan had gotten hold of some Chinese national secrets.  The leak was traced to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Lu Jianhua, who was followed and observed to be frequently using the business centers at various Beijing hotels to send faxes to Ching Cheong in Hong Kong.
   
  When Ching Cheong was arrested, he told the investigators that between 1998 and 2000, he was posted by The Strait Times in Taiwan and got acquainted with members of the intelligence services.  At that time, the intelligence services used cover organizations to ask him to write about China.  According to the records in Ching Cheong's laptop computer, the fees were sometimes as much as HK$100,000 per report.  Lu Jianhua was one of Ching's sources, and he had been paid by Ching too.  Mary Lau, the wife of Ching Cheong, is unaware of these transactions.
   
  When Ching Cheong was transferred back to Hong Kong, Ching was asked to continue to write in-depth reports on increasingly sensitive topics.  To protect himself, Ching Cheong adopted the pen name of Chen Yuanchun for those reports.  Ching Cheong had asked his handler whether these reports were going to the Taiwan intelligence services or not, and the other party just laughed and this non-denial was taken to be a "yes."
   
  The Ming Pao article said that Ching Cheong was arrested in Shenzhen, and not Guangzhou as his wife originally said.  Why Shenzhen?  The article has this obscure phrase "暗示程涉及感情問題." (translation: "It was hinted that Ching Cheong was involved in a sentimental matter.")  What does that mean?  Here, we have to look at Sing Tao which has a scurrilous story in its print edition:  It has been rumored that Ching Cheong has an 'intimate female friend' in mainland China (and that would explain where the money was going to and Mary Lau was kept in the dark).  For confirmation, Sing Tao asked DAB legislator Choi So-yuk and she said that she too has heard those rumors.  Read it carefully: Choi did not say that she knew that for a fact, but only that she has heard the same whispers like many others -- this is not a confirmation.  As such, Sing Tao should not have been publishing unverified rumors.  Still, there you have it.  I report this not because I think it is true or false (because I don't know that), but because this is what is going around.  (Addendum:  This story has now appeared in Oriental Daily and Sing Tao, but still without any persuasive evidence).
   
  Oh, here is some more gossip from another Ming Pao article: various channels have called the pro-Beijing supporters as well as democrats in Hong Kong to warn them not to be too extreme in public discussions, because they (as well as Ching Cheong) are going to be burned if the very strong evidence should ever be released (remember the case of Alex Ho?).  Legislator Choi So-yuk said: "我現在好混亂，唔知點睇件事。我認識程的為人，如果他真的做這些事，我會很驚奇。"  (translation: "I am very confused.  I don't know how to look at this matter.  I know Ching as a person.  I would be very surprised if he really did these things.")

• [029]  This is about newspaper competition in Hong Kong.  This was covered in detail in this previous post: Newspaper Competition in Hong Kong.  Here is my anecdotal evidence.  At issue is the effect of the entry of the two new free newspapers -- Headline News and AM730 -- on all the other newspapers in Hong Kong.  My benchmark is the newspaper rack at the local OK convenience store.  Previously, most of the newspapers are sold out by 7pm.  Recently, there are stacks of them left in the evening.

  Conversation at the convenience store:

  Clerk: You're not buying newspapers anymore.
  Customer:  No.  Am I the only one?

  Clerk: It seems nobody is buying newspapers these days.  Compeition is tough.  We are still selling them at the same HK$6 with a free packet of tissue.  But the newspaper stall down the street is selling them at HK$5.50 with a free packet of issue.  And you obviously know about the free newspapers that are being distributed.
  Customer: So there you have it.  Why would I buy any newspapers here anymore?

• [028]  In his New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote about Design for Confusion.  The subject is the marketing of the 'theory' of intelligent design in American schools.  The concluding paragraph: "The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom."  Hmmm ... that just sounds very much like what I suggested in The Roots of Anti-Japanese Feelings in China about how to market a revisionist history of Japan, wherein I suggested the marketing of intelligent design as illustrative of the approach. 

• [Administrative note]  On Thursday, the number of page views at this site soared to almost 18,000, which is a record high in v.2.0 of EastSouthWestNorth.  The driving factor was the Nancy Kissel trial, and once again confirms that the drawing power of big money, violent sex and drug abuse is unbeatable.  This is still lower than what v.1.0 was getting before it had to be abandoned due to excessive bandwidth costs.  The bandwidth on Thursday was a tolerable 900 megabytes.  I expect that the numbers will drop after the Kissel trial is over.

• [027]  (Wen Wei Po)  The Chinese government has announced the results of the advertising audit for second quarter 2005.  Out of 3,497 newspaper ads, 1,095 (31%) were found to seriously violate the advertising regulations.  Out of 5,267 television ads, 447 (8.5%) were found to seriously violate the regulations.  The violations occur in three major areas: (1) pharmaceutical drug advertisements that make unscientific assertions or guarantees; (2) medical service advertisements that promise or guarantee cures; (3) food advertisements that suggest medical benefits using the names of medical organizations or doctors.
   
• [026]  I saw the movie Ah Sou today.  What a f*cking waste, but what wasted potential!  All the trailers suggested a powerhouse of a movie with that all-star cast, but it turned out to be sudsy.  If I could gather all the raw footage, I could have made a straight gangster movie around the Karena Lam figure as a ruthless Godmother (yeah, that reads funny but you would not be laughing if that Karena Lam character was staring at you).  Ah Sou's debut in China has been delayed (see Danwei); my advice to the Chinese: stay home.

• [025]  (Reuters)  The official Chinese news agency Xinhua announced that journalist Ching Cheong has been formally arrested for spying for Taiwan in return for money.  The western reports are necessarily terse, so I would like to remind people that the case contains a lot of conflicting information: see the EastSouthWestNorth blog posts Grand Unification of Theories about the Case of Ching Cheong and Eastweek on Ching Cheong.  In the classification of the theories, this is theory #7 (with a bit of theory #3).  Of course, this development does not make the theory true.  As to what happens next, there are two opposite views -- one, Ching Cheong will be charged, tried and sentenced to at least 10 years in jail; the other, Ching Cheong will be expelled back to Hong Kong without a trial.  I'm just a blogger, so I don't have a clue.

• [024]  (Nanfang Daily)  看过不知哪一期的“超级女声”，好像是杭州赛区的总决赛，有个叫叶一茜的漂亮女子和另一位女子要二选一，主持人叫她们PK。我顿时觉得自己老土，不知汪涵同行的英文何意，后来简单一看也便懂了。  (translation: I don't remember which edition of Super Female Voice it was; maybe it was the Hangzhou regional final.  There was a pretty girl named Ye Yixi and another girl and only one of them will move on, and the host told them that it is PK.  I immediately felt left out, because I had no idea what the two English letters meant.  I looked it up and it was easy to understand.)  Oh, boy, I too had to look it up.  This sort of thing makes me feel ancient.
   
  P.S.  In Cantonese, "PK" stands for 扑街.  That is a not-very-nice term that stands for something quite different. 

• [023]  Privileges.  That is why this article Return of "elite" airport lines doesn't fly with everyone by Sara Kehaulani Goo for the Washington Post bothered me.  I can be counted as a frequent traveler as I live in Hong Kong but I work in New York City and therefore I go back and forth frequently.  I always travel in economy class, because I see no justification to pay a few thousand more US dollars for a more comfortable 15-hour flight.  That additional money would have made some of the lower echelon workers in my company a lot happier (and therefore a lot less grief to the management).  Of course, the savings don't flow down by osmosis but that is another story -- my only concern is my personal conscience.  On my last trip, though, I was truly stunned when the stewardess came up to me and said, "We are serving brunch starting from the rear of the plane.  You are seated at the very front here and you may not get what you wish by the time the food cart gets up here.  Could you tell me what your personal choice is and I will bring it up to you right now?"  She had a list of valued customers based upon their accumulated mileage and she was instructed to give them preferential treatment.  All it did was made me sick to my stomach.  I did mumble one thing or the other to her, but only not to distress her because I realized that she was only doing her job.  I only want to be treated like everybody else who sat in the same section.  In my college years, I was quite touched/devastated when I read Michael Harrington's The Hidden Injuries of Class.  And such experiences have continued to hurt. 

• [022]  (Ming Pao via Yahoo! News)  On a seemingly unrelated matter (even though we know that nothing is ever unrelated), the Hong Kong police blotter reports that a father-and-son team got into a physical battle with four men in a Tsimshatsui bar and all were arrested by the police.  So what?  The father was Ho Yung-hing (何容興), who was a famous soccer goalie.  He was unusually tall at 6'4" for a Chinese person but still extremely agile.  More significantly here, he represented the Republic of China in World Cup qualifying matches in the 1970s.  This would be relevant to my blog post Soccer in Hong Kong.  I wonder how he feels if informed post facto that he had actually represented the Independent Republic of Taiwan.  He has been banned for life from certain soccer activities due to violent actions on the field, so his reaction may not be very gentle.  So, don't ask!
   
  P.S.  Ho Yung-hing was legendary for having saved a penalty shot by superstar Cheung Chi-toi (張子岱) but broke his wristbone in the process.  In my youth, I enjoyed watching Cheung Chi-toi play for the true bizarreness.  He was a superstar in Hong Kong for having played for Blackpool as a professional.  Today, Blackpool is a minor league team in England, but it was a top brand back then for having players like Sir Stanley Matthews, who was knighted because he played soccer so well.  When Cheung Chi-toi returned to Hong Kong, he was just an arrogant prick who stood immobile in midfield with his hands on his hips and cursing his teammates for not passing him the ball.  On his team was his younger brother Cheung Chi-wai (張子慧), who was probably a better player.  But it was truly amazing to watch and hear Cheung Chi-toi cursing his younger brother in the traditional Cantonese way: "I f*ck your mother's stinking rotten c*nt!  Why didn't you f*cking pass the f*cking ball to me!?" and so on.  One would think that their mother did not attend those matches.

• [021]  (Sing Tao)  Three years ago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong freshmen reception stunned the world with slogans that reeked of sexual harassment.  Big character wallposters went up at the democracy wall to deplore those slogans.  The promotional poster for this year's freshmen reception is about sex and the university student and features images of a Japanese geisha, kissing lesbians and Japanese male gay manga.  Whoaaa!?  Are we back to the basic instincts again?  This was enough to get a full page treatment in Sing Tao.
  
   
  Well, maybe not.  This is a progressive attempt to discuss sexual knowledge, gayness and sex workers, including a field trip for the latter.  The student association emphasized that there won't be any sexual activities and this is not sensationalized.  The school says that the students assume full responsbility for themselves.

• [020]  In tracking the history behind the article Memo to Time and Reuters: Chávez Did Not Call Bush an "Asshole", I googled "Chavez"+"pendejo" and was surprised to see the EastSouthWestNorth blog getting the top ranking.  È strano!  What other high Google rankings does this blog own?
  - #1: "Lu Xuesong"; "Jiao Guobiao"; "Huankantou"+"Huaxi"; "Meng Weizai"; "Chen Xiwen"; "Hinano Mizuki"; "Chinese or dogs"; "Virgin prostitutes"; "Zhang Ziyi"+"Toilet"; "Remy Martin"+"Beijing"; "Fujian"+"Explosion"
  - #2: "Yan Lianke"; "Shengyou"; "Shalan flood"; "Chizhou"+"riot"; "Ching Cheong"; "Shi Tao"
  - #3: "Chen Guidi"; "Nancy Kissel"; "Chico Buarque"+"Pasquim"
  - #4: "July 1"+"Hong Kong"
  - #6: "Qian Zhongshu"
  - #7: "Eileen Chang"
  This explains how this blog differs from most others.  For most blogs, people come to the homepage, read the current post and then leave and forget.  Most blog visitors here come as a result of Internet searches on specific subjects on which the blog posts are good enough to stand alone.  The ratio of pageviews to homepage visits is running higher than 15-to-1 right now.

• [019]  (Shanghai Evening Post)  The Great Cyber Nanny of China is in fact a real nanny in human flesh and blood.  This is the story of a retired school teacher with diabetes and a heart problem who patrols nine Internet 'bars'.  This volunteer verifies that the bars adhere to their business hours, monitors the content of their games and checks customer IDs to prevent minors from entering, and then reports the results to the district youth and cultural officials, including contact information for offending minors.  There are numerous other retired teachers and party cadres who play the same role.  This teacher got involved in the volunteer program when a 15-year-old student robbed an old woman to obtain money to in order to get on the Internet and got caught.  Well, what are you going to do?  Hate her for being a tool of the horrible party apparatus?  If so, trying telling that to her face.

• [018]  (Chongqing Morning News via Yahoo! News)  Groan!  This is yet another story about a deputy mayor accepting 225,000 yuan in bribes on 9 occasions.  This was not disputed.  But this man was fined only 60,000 yuan and sentence to 3 years (with a 5 year deferral).  At Sina.com, an Internet survey with 59,531 votes as of August 3 (8:00 am) show 66.53% don't believed that he was guilty of accepting bribes, and 72.14% believed that the verdict was unfair to him.  Is this the end of morals and ethics in society?
  
  What makes Yu Bin so special?  Because he took the money out of desperation -- not for himself, but for the poor people who came to see him.  He had no choice.  In the interview, he used this example: "It was before the Spring Festival in 2003 and three dismissed workers came to the municipal building, sat in the mayor's office and refused to leave.  They were not asking for much: 'Here is the New Year and we dismissed workers don't have any meat or fish to put on the table.'  So Yu took out his wallet and gave them 200 yuan apiece."  Money doesn't grow out of trees, and Yu Bin said he had to keep finding money to help people even though it was against the law.  During his trial, he offered evidence about how the money went towards solving practical local problems (such as schools and water works), but the court refused to consider it because the only legal issue was whether he took the money or not.

• [017]  Quotes for eternity from Rafael Palmeiro of the Baltimore Orioles from the Los Angeles Times.
  March 2005, House Government Reform Committee: "I have never used steroids. Period. I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never."
  August 2005, press conference call: "I have never intentionally used steroids. Never. Ever. Period."
  Many more quotes at Slate.
   
• [016]  Fear sells newspapers.  We all know that.  The fear factor has been raised another level with this Sing Tao story: Hong Kong people crossing the border at the Nantou entry point have been terrorized by a group of about 10 AIDS patients.  These are all drug users who infected each other through shared needles.  A Hong Kong resident named Wen recalled passing through Nantou and then had a collision with a pedestrian.  The two people pulled Wen aside and showed him ten needles, three of which were broken.  They then demanded HK$300 from Wen whom they said broke the needles.  When Wen demurred, they pulled out another needle filled with red liquid and claimed that it was AIDS-infected blood; they also showed him their AIDS treatment records.  Wen ended up paying.
   
  Last Thursday, a Shenzhen resident named He was extorted of 70 yuan by the same means.  He called the police and when the police stopped the two individuals, they took out their needles and AIDS treatment records and cursed the victim: "How dare you report to the police when we haven't even stabbed you yet?"  The two were taken back to the police station and released shortly afterwards because the police station has no facility to accommodate people with AIDS.
   
  A migrant worker named Li said, "If the robbers ever stabbed me with an AIDS needle, I'll kill them for sure since I am going to die anyway."  Fear factor.

• [015]  (First Economic Daily via Media China) According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2005 survey of 1,169 Internet citizens in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Changsa, the most frequent Internet activities are news (65.9%), followed by browsing, games, downloading music and entertainment information.  E-mail comes in at only 44.8%.
   
  From the 2005 MARS survey in the USA, the list of most common activities are e-mail (88.1%), followed by shopping (45.5%), banking (42.5%), news (38.1%) and games (30.1%).  It is noteworthy to compare the positions of news and e-mail in China and USA.  Shopping and banking are well-established and trustworthy in the United States than in China.
   
  From the 2005 TGI Brasil study in Brazil, the list of most common activities are e-mail (78.2%) followed by news (57.8%), instant messaging (38.8%), music (37.8%), chat room (36.1%) and games (31.6%).  This is again a different Internet world (and they didn't even ask about fotologs in the survey).  And the Brazilians won't do shopping and banking on the Internet either.
   
  In the 2005 CASS study of the full 2,376 sample (both netizens and non-netizens), the media contact rates are television (97%), newspapers (86%), books (56%), magazines (53%), Internet (49%) and radio (38%).  After getting the Internet, 43.2% of the netizens listened to less radio, 39.3% read fewer magazines, 32.5% watch less television and 29.8% read fewer newspapers.
   
  No, we don't live in a homogenized globalized world.

• [014]  Funny shot from Liberal Oasis at how Bob Woodard might have explained Watergate today:  "It’s not a break-in. It’s opposition research. There’s a tendency here to treat every hardball tactic as some sort of crime. There are stories going around that the DNC front door was unlocked. If that is true, then how can you blame a guy for walking in and checking what’s in the file cabinets?"  This spoof statement is indeed what passes for discourse these days, if not Woodard then others.  What a cultural seachange!

• [013]  (Nanfang Daily)  Yet another piece of bêtise:  A plastic goods factory took advantage of the summer vacation to hire youth workers, including many of whom are under 16 years old.  The children said, "We worked from 8am-noon, 1pm-5pm and 630pm-1130pm every day and we make 1.8 yuan per hour."  One 15-year-old said that he was grabbed by the hair and slapped four times by the group leader for being slow.  When asked, the manager said that they were aware that some of the workers were under-aged but that they did not know the child labor laws actually cover the summer workers.  Duhhhhh! 
  

• [012]  (The Sun)  Here is a piece of bêtise: There are many underground lottery games in mainland China.  But the players would not trust the operators to come up with an honest game (i.e. the operators will probably come with a number so they win the grand prize themselves each time).  Therefore, many of those games use the Hong Kong lottery numbers.  Some people in Hong Kong have been receiving unsolicited emails from mainland China that offer to pay them HK$3,000 in cash if they can offer tips on playing the Hong Kong lottery.  Apparently, this came from a company that offers its clients final tips just before the drawing.
   
  Let me get this straight -- suppose that I know what the winning numbers will be (and don't even ask me how).  On one hand, I could tell this company and get HK$3,000.  On the other hand, I could play those numbers here in Hong Kong and win the grand prize (which was HK$60 million last time).  Decision, decision, decision ...  The fact is that I could do both without jeopardizing anything, but why should I care about HK$3,000 even as I colleect HK$60 million?  I am not that desperate, am I?

• [011]  (Xinhua)  The Second China International Adult Toys and Reproductive Health Exhibition is being held in Shanghai.  Here are some photos are the scene (via Wenxue City):
  
  

• [010]  At InMediaHK, Lingnan is traveling in Mexico and reporting about the newspaper industry over there.  The important thing is to realize that newspapers in one country may be completey different from another for political, cultural and economic reasons.  Hong Kong has theoretically 48 newspapers (about a dozen big ones) in a city of 7 million; New York City has 7 newspapers in a city of 7 million; Mexico City has more than 30 newspapers in a city of 20 million.  Next, you look at circulation: Oriental Daily has 400,000, Apple Daily has 340,000, etc in Hong Kong; The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times has circulations of about 2 million; in Mexico City, nobody gets more than 200,000 and most of them are fewer than 10,000.  How is a newspaper supposed to survive on a daily circulation of 5,000?
   
  There are two things that you won't see as much elsewhere:
  (1) La Gacetilla which is a form of paid advertisement whereby a newspaper features a politician as a front page news story;
  (2) Self-censorship (see Fiona Morgan's A wrench in the "ruling party machine" and Jeffrey Stoub's Self-Censorship and the Mexican Press) to make sure that the largest advertisers do not get offended;
  It is no wonder that common people don't read the newspapers, but the newspapers can nevertheless survive economically.
   
  P.S.  There is no English-language newspaper for the reason that anyone who reads English is probably Internet-savvy and can get anything that they want in English or Spanish.  Websites such as The Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, BBC, CNN, ESPN and others have Spanish editions.  If you must, you can subscribe to the Mexico edition of the Miami Herald published in partnership with Mexico City's El Universal (see link).

• [009]  (Oriental Daily)  Yesterday was the inauguration of the special train from Tung Chung to Disneyland in Hong Kong.  18,000 people took the train.  Please remember this: Disneyland is not open yet -- this is a train to nowhere right now, and 18,000 people took it.  By comparison, 700 people showed up on Sunday on behalf of freedom of speech (see link).  P.S. More than 4 million people saw the dinosaur exhibit.
  
   
• [008]  On August 1, Edward Cody reported extensively on the Chizhou riot in the Washington Post.  The article is very similar to the one in Southern Metropolis News that appeared one month ago (translated on this blog at The Chizhou Incident).  So why should you wait one month to read it in WaPo?  Just come here instead.  P.S. Boxun should not have received credit for the photo in WaPo, which was harvested off the Internet.
    
• [007]  With a little time on hand this afternoon, I went to see Tsu Hark's Seven Swords.  As a child, I read the original martial arts novel Seven Swords Descend Mount Tian by Liang Yusheng many times, even though I don't enjoy his style.  The problem with Liang's novels is that it is a rigid meritocracy -- people are graded on their martial art skills, and when a superior fighter encounters an inferior fighter, the outcome is always the same.  For example, if you are 20% better, you will win in 50 blows; if you are 10% better, you will win in 100 blows, and nothing ever changes.  It would take the later generation of writers such as Gu Lung and Wen Rui'an to rectify this rigid structure and in a big and exciting way.  In real life, inferior fighters can win by deception or luck.  In any case, this adaptation is quite divorced from the original story, which was alright for me except this screen story is superficial in that there was no way to develop all the characters within the time allowed for a commercial movie.
  
  Liang Yusheng was considered to be a pro-China writer.  For example, his martial arts series on the Empress Wu was taken to be an apology for the misunderstood chairman of the People's Republic of China, while the Tibet series was about ... well, you know, Tibet.  So it goes without say that this movie is bound to be scrutinised through a political lens.
   
  There is an interesting discussion at InMediaHK about how to interpret the ending of the movie.  The seven swordsmen have defeated the bounty hunters but there will undoubtedly be more coming.  They will never find peace because they have broken the Emperor's law against owning weapons and practicing martial arts.  So their idea was: "Let's go to the capital and petition the Emperor to rescind the law" and the seven set off as the children (=future generation) waved goodbye with their hands.  At this point, one is bound to groan at the sell-out.  Just like the Chinese peasants of today, these heroic swordsmen's imaginations (or lack thereof) boxed them in to think that only the Emperor can change things.
    
  Hmm ... not so fast here ... here are seven mean and nasty sword-carrying fighters heading toward the capital to ask the Emperor to rescind the law against people bearing arms and practicing martial arts.  This is like robbers petitioning against robbery laws, rapists against rape laws, etc.  And didn't they come from a village belonging to the Heaven and Earth Society, a well-known pro-Ming/anti-Qing subversive group dedicated to overthrowing the Empire?  Did they think that they were just going to knock on the gates of the Forbidden Palace and ask for an audience?  Why would the Emperor see them or listen to them?  He shouldn't -- unless he loses his head, literally and not just figuratively.  There was no other way to interpret that ending in spite of Tsu Hark's apparent statement.  官逼民反!  And the Emperor was the root of the problem!  And the seven swordsmen had no choice but to cut his head off!
   
  By the way, if Seven Swords makes breakeven or better at the box office, you can expect a sequel.  The most dramatic part about the Seven Swords was that one original member became a turncoat whereas that character is the most positive person so far in this movie.  He was also the most skilled swordsman in the story (ooops, I just gave away that he is Brother Number One); under Liang's meritocracy, no one else can beat him, so the reader may wonder how he was eventually defeated (and he must be defeated because martial arts novels at the time was not yet ready to accept that evil triumphs over good sometimes).  Be prepared!  It would be a shame if the sequel wasn't made.

• [006]  There is an update report posted at the Yannan BBS about the Dingzhou (Shengyou) incident (for details, see The Shengyou Reporter's Field Notes).  The report says that the government will pay for all medical expenses of the injured villagers, plus 2,000 yuan for 'nutrition fees.'  For the six dead villagers, the government has reached an agreement with their families to the amount of 230,000 yuan per family in compensation and this will allow burials to take place (which the families previously refused to do so until the case is settled).  The criminal case against the attackers is proceeding separately.
   
  But this post is remarkable for the last paragraph.  The author identifies himself as Chu Wangtai (楚望台), he lists his ID number 370702198501072231 and he declares: "I relinquish the copyright to this essay and I will assume legal responsibility for the veracity of this report."  In other words, "Bring it on!"  If this man gets arrested for stating this, I swear that I will spend the rest of my life fighting on his behalf.  That is a promise.

• [005]  (Apple Daily)  Remember that in the post Freedom of Press in Taiwan about the license renewal process for cable/satellite television news channels in Taiwan?  The verdict is in.  In an evening meeting of the 12 members of the evaluation committee that was recorded on video tape and monitored remotely Minister of the Government Information Office (GIO) Pasuya Yao (姚文智), ETTV-S was the only one denied a license.  A press release indicated that the reasons are: violation of the "Children and Youth Welfare Law", "Prevention Against Sexual Abuse Law", "Food and Hygiene Administration Law" and "Satellite Broadcasting Territory Law".  
   
  Previously, during the first round, the committee rated ETTV-S as "lacking in media self-regulation", "accumlating 25 administrative penalties", "corporate debt in excess of 66% in violation of legal requitements" and "failure to delineate relationships with political figures."  The last item referred to Taipei Councilor Wang Yu-cheng (see A Cockroach in Taiwan) as well as to a certain unnamed heavy-weight legislator and his wife in southern Taiwan.
   
  As a result, ETTV-S must stop broadcasting effective August 3 or else face fines.  The jobs of about 50 employees will be affected immediately.  Six other non-news channels were also denied licenses.
    
• [004] In Ming Pao (via Yahoo! News), Jackie Hung said that in the future the Civil Human Rights Front of Hong Kong should not be bothered by the number of attendees at the demonstrations.  "The Civil Human Rights Front was concerned about its reputation and popularity, and this constituted a kind of pressure to maintain a large number in the demonstrations.  This caused the Front to look only at mainstream topics while ignoring minority issues."  She said that the counting of the number of marchers should be "outsourced" to other organizations to relieve the pressure on the front.
  
  Of course, Jackie Hung was the same person who accused everyone who doubted her 530,000 figure in 2004 as traitors to the cause of democracy (see The Hong Kong 7/1 March: Crowd Size Estimates).  I wish the Ming Pao reporter could ask her, "Do you still stand by the 530,000 figure for 2004 then?"  But what is the point, because I am sure that she will still continue to waffle: "Justice lives in the hearts of the people!" and not face up to that everlasting legacy!

• [003]  RAID!  Police officers raid illegal adult entertainment establishments in China.  Is it fair to show faces of the 'alleged' offenders?  In the United States, the names and photos of 'patrons' are published by the police after they are convicted, but these photos were taken during the raid and before any court trial.  Still, are there any doubts?  Well, this is about protecting that one exceptional wrongful case (see More Virgin Prostitutes, for example).
  
  
  
   
• [002]  First meet the hype (Ming Pao):  The Democratic Force To Save Hong Kong will hold a demonstration march to support Raymond Wong and the freedom of speech.  Legislator Leung "Long Hair" Kwok-hung announced at a press conference that 4,000 to 5,000 are expected to attend.
   
  Then meet reality (Sing Tao): About 500 citizens demonstrated in Central to ask the government to open up radio frequencies, set up civil radio stations and offer platforms for free speech.  (Update: Ming Pao)  About 700 citizens attended with a peak of 1,000 according to the organizers.  Meanwhile, (Ming Pao) reported that four million people attended the dinosaur exhbition in Hong Kong.  There has to be sense of proportion here about how things are what they are.

• [001]  Well, you know this routine: when you need a boost in audience ratings, you put out news stories that are the stuff of nightmares for all parents.  (Wenxue City)  In Harbin, a mother found her son acting strangely recently.  The child used to be outgoing, but these days he just shuts himself in his room and surf the Internet.  So the mother decided to check what the son was up to and found him chatting live with a topless girl.  Ooops!
  
  And when a news item like this shows up, it also makes you wonder if it is time for another round of Internet censorship.  After all, they are going to point to this 12-year-old boy as the indefensible and inexcusable reason.  Xinhua just said: "In this virtual world, the pervasion of indecent information is inevitable. Social administrators should help people distinguish the bad from the good and punish netizens who violate related laws and regulations."  Look out!
   
  Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Ming Pao focuses on another parents' nightmare: a 13-year-old has been arrested for being a Sun Yee On triad member who has already forced three other schoolmates to join the gang for 'protection.'  By custom, new members have to pay initiation fees in an amount of three followed by a string of sixes.  For example, a grown-up might have to pay HK$3,666, but these young kids only had to pay HK$3.60 (less than US$0.50) based upon the ability to pay.  In market-oriented Hong Kong, everything depends on the ability to pay.

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• July 2005