Stories about Chinese from August, 2007
Hong Kong: Construction Workers’ Strike
In 1997, the daily salary of metal workers in construction site is HKD1,200 (USD150), today it is less that HKD600. Workers from Southeast Asia are even less. More than a thousand metal workers have been striking for 13 days to demand for an increase of daily salary to HKD950. Citizen...
China: Blogs deleted, barred and officially backed
An eventful week on the backside of the Chinese blogsphere with an entire blogging website desisted, one high-profile blog deleted and another put on the unmentionable list; two web 2.0 companies battle it out in the courts and one novice blogger tries to gain readers the nouveau-riche way.
Hong Kong: Business Sector Wants To Keep Functional Constituency
Charles Mok blogs about the discussion in a seminar organized by the business sector on the consultation of future election system in Hong Kong. The business sector expressed their wishes to keep the functional constituency in Legislation Council. Charles commented that Hong Kong people are ready for universal suffrage, and...
Hong Kong: Yahoo Hong Kong, Please Explain!
Flickr lover from inmediahk.net picked up the story on Yahoo Hong Kong's direct involvement in Shi Tao's case and commented that the company had violated the “One country Two system” principle as Hong Kong registered company should follow local law and protect its users accordingly (zh). He demanded the company...
China: Land Expropriation For Panda Base
Zoula reports on the forced land expropriation for panda base in Chengdu. Villagers were forced to move away with very limited compensation (zh).
China: Traffic Jam Fee
Shenzhen will be the first city in China to introduce traffic fee to vehicle to increase the cost of driving and avoid traffic jam. Wei Ying-jie from 1510 disagreed with the arrangement and argued (zh) that the cost of driving is not low because of road fee (70% of the...
China: Manpower Parallel Rail
Kanchai pointed out that the labour market in China is now in parallel rail, which means two different salary system for same the same job, people coming from rural areas earn far less that urban citizen. Such discrimination is caused by the rigid political system (zh).
Taiwan: Thao Indigenous People
Esouth has a series of posts on the Thao indigenous people in Taiwan. There are 500 people left in Taiwan, less than 50 families. Because of the development of tourism, their distinctive culture is vanishing (zh). Here is a chronology of development projects since 1932 that ruined their living space...
China: Chongqing home buyers cheated
Don't mess with Chinese homeowners. A property development company in one central Chinese city tried backing out of an agreement which left empty-handed people who thought they had already bought a new home and led to angry and destructive retaliation, including clashes with police that netizens are saying turned violent.
Taiwan: What's Next After Wikimania 2007?
Wikimania 2007 at Taipei ended on August 5th. To members promoting Mediawiki in Taiwan, this international conference is a wonderful opportunity for exchanging ideas. Among organizers and contributors, we can find five IT-related research institutes in Taiwan...
China and Hong Kong: Merging of Shenzhen and Hong Kong
Hong Kong Chief Executive's think tank, Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre, proposed the merging of Shenzhen and Hong Kong into a metropolitan, Lu qui luwei noticed the change of attitude in relating to China and the potential debate on free flow of population(zh).
Hong Kong: No Fur
The World's top model Joanna Krupa took a nude photo to promote no fur campaign in Hong Kong. Littleoslo found the poster design very unattractive.
China: Grassroots Magazine banned
Yaoblog reported that a grassroots magazine Minjian was banned by Guangdong Publication Department (zh). The Magazine was founded in 2005 by social development research center in Zhongshan University.
China: Cultural Revolution
Zhao Si-long recommended an article about the economic background of Cultural Revolution (zh) with some class and social grouping analysis.
China: One Olympics, One Voice?
European and American fighters for press freedom have infiltrated the capital, Canadian-Tibetan activists have gone underground and blogged from around the country about what's been called the Darfur Olympics, the Gas Mask Olympics even the Coming Out Olympics, so basically now the Pick Your White Elephant Olympics. But when one...
China: Speaking for the Rich and Working for the Poor?
Xueyong has recently terminated his working relation with Southern Metropolitan News because the newspapers has censored his criticism of Mao Yushi who argued that intellectuals should be “speaking for the rich and working for the poor”. Xueyong criticized Mao's argument and such intellectual positioning (zh).
China: Google and Baidu Spoof War
William Long posted some spoofing videos produced by Google and Baidu, in which, Google called Baidu “hundred poisons” and Baidu mocked google as a foreign / alien company (zh). Spoof has become a popular genre for advertisement in China.
Hong Kong: Government Promotion of DRM
I Resource Center (IRC, a company owned by the Hong Kong Government) announced yesterday that the song, “Just Because of You”, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of reunification, can be downloaded with DRM protection. Plastichk laughed at the practice as the song was meant to be distributed as wide as...
Hong Kong: E-government
Charles Mok criticized the two recently launched e-government websites govhk and youth. gov.hk, both are non-interactive web 1.0 websites (zh).
China: Blogger goes to court
Back in late February, bridge blogger I, Yee wrote a post on the plight of Yetaai, an open source programmer in Shanghai who had noticed that a website of his had been blocked. Yetaai did some tests and discovered the problem originated within the China Telecom network, so he phoned...
China: Baidu rolls out 1GB blogs
Chinese search engine Baidu has announced its Baidu Space bloggers now have 1GB of server space to work with, writes China Tech Stories blogger Mao Xianjia, making “hi.baidu one of the largest personal album service on the web.“
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