Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

On 1 June, the Beijing Waterworks Group announced that the city's water supply is safe to drink without boiling.

From the China Daily:

The Beijing municipal water authority said water in the capital had passed all 106 tests for contaminants as required by new national standards that took effect on Sunday.

"Beijing met the standards at the end of last year," Yu Yaping, official with the water authority told China Daily yesterday. "As industry insiders, we received the standards a long time ago. We immediately took action to improve the capital's drinking water quality," Yu said.

Fan Kangping, director of the water quality center of Beijing Waterworks Group, said the city's water had been potable since 2003.

Problem is, the fact that the city's tap water is drinkable doesn't mean it's drinkable from the city's taps. Water is drinkable at the plants, but the 7000 km of pipes in the city, some quite old, introduce "secondary pollution." Fan says, "We have a dilemma. The water piped out is clean and safe but gets contaminated before it reaches users."

So what's the point of the announcement, considering that the city's drinking water has supposedly been drinkable for four years? On Xinhua's online commentary channel, Jia Fenyong has an answer to that question:

Beijing tap water was long ago phased out of my family's recipe book, not because we don't want to drink it, but because we dare not. Using Beijing tap water to wash our black marble counter-tops always leaves behind white streaks when it dries; boiling Beijing tap water always gives off suspicious particles, and the water's surface is always coated with a floating, oil-like substance.

However, reports say that on 1 June, the Beijing Waterworks Group revealed that all of Beijing's tap water has begun to use the new 106-item national drinking water standards and had met the goals five years ahead of time. It is the first city in China to be in line with international practices; water no longer must be boiled before drinking.

In shock, I ran straight to the kitchen, carefully drew a glass of water to study it, and then heated it until boiling to ponder it some more. It was still the same water - unidentified particles still danced and stuff still floated freely on the surface.

Continue reading "At long last, drinkable tap water?" »

This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. Recruitment advertisements are currently offered free of charge to advertisers in relevant industries, as a service to Danwei readers. See all job ads.

Chinese Nationals only

Vacancy Number: VN/OCB/AFP/2007-032-1

Do you want to apply your well-developed communication and marketing skills to a good cause?

UNICEF, the world’s leading children’s rights organization, is looking for a Donor Relationship Manager to join its team in Beijing. Under the general supervision of the team leader, the incumbent will plan, manage and implement integrated co-branded fundraising campaigns to acquire and loyalize supporters to build a long-term relationship.

Continue reading "UNICEF is seeking a Donor Relationship Manager (CRM)" »

Sanmao, the wandering orphan created by cartoonist Zhang Leping in the 1930s, has been adapted for the screen many times over the years.

The latest adaptation, a live-action movie, is a Sino-Belgian co-production; some fans are worried about the prospect of Sanmao being "updated" and deprived of his Chineseness. Here's a recent article by Zhang's son Zhang Rongrong that explains how and why the family decided to grant a Belgian director the rights to the project:

Sanmao has not "gone to live abroad"

Sanmao was created by my father, Zhang Leping. We siblings are the inheritors of the Sanmao intellectual property. More than a year ago, we signed a contract with a Belgian film company granting them the rights to film a Sanmao movie; in addition to stipulating that the movie must use live actors (i.e. not a cartoon) and must be adapted from the original Sanmao's Wanderings comic book, there were a few other special rules to guarantee that Sanmao's image would not suffer. For example, the contract stipulated that the movie "must respect relevant Chinese laws and regulations and must not produce any negative influence on the work (i.e. the original Sanmao's Wanderings comic book) or Sanmao," and "the licensee (i.e. the foreign side) shall not register Sanmao or the Sanmao image as a trademark."

The contract with the foreign side also stipulated that "the licensee may freely select its own partners, but one must be a Chinese partner," in order to guarantee that the movie would be a joint production. The movie, which is currently in pre-production, is set in old Shanghai, so no matter which way you look at it, Sanmao has definitely not "gone to live abroad."

The contract clearly stipulates that "the intellectual property rights to Sanmao and the Sanmao image are the sole property of the licensor." There have been some rumors that Sanmao would "go Korean" or become a Mr. Bean-type character to amuse adults. But Sanmao is simply Sanmao. His unique personality traits will not change. If Sanmao's image were truly going to be injured, not only would we (the licensor) definitely not consent, the Chinese joint production partner would not consent either. For example, there is one passage in the script that goes like this: Sanmao rescues a foreign child from the river. The child lives in Shanghai, and to repay Sanmao, the child's parents provide Sanmao with room and board at their home. But in just a few days, Sanmao becomes leaves angrily after the foreign family's unfair treatment of him. This story was taken from my father's Sanmao's Wanderings; the rescued child was changed into a foreigner, but Sanmao's personality was not changed.

Continue reading "Sanmao goes overseas" »

A "call and response" via Huang Yilong:

Who was Hong Kong returned to? (a call-and-response essay)

Call: In the present world, a united country should at least allow freedom of movement for the people within its borders, and freedom of circulation for printed material and radio & TV. If even a "quasi-nation" like the European Union has accomplished the free flow of information, the free movement of people, the free circulation of printed material and radio & TV, then why not a true nation! But this is something that cannot be done for Hong Kong and the mainland. All of this - can Hong Kong truly be said to have returned? Has it really become a part of the People's Republic of China?

--- Zhang Yunruo, Hong Kong - has it really returned?, 2007.6.18

Response: What Mr. Zhang discusses is just one part; allow me to add a second:

Hong Kong has indeed returned, it has returned to those who see it as their own backyard - the rich dudes who go back and forth practically every day. Officials like Liu Jinbao, and certain princelings and maidens. There, their every wish is granted and they do what they please - such comfort! A few newspapers, a couple books - what does that matter?

So perhaps Mr. Zhang's true question should be: Hong Kong - to whom has it returned?

--- Huang Yilong, 7.1

This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. Recruitment advertisements are currently offered free of charge to advertisers in relevant industries, as a service to Danwei readers. See all job ads.

This position is advertised under the Locally Employed Staff Program of the United States Mission in China. Individuals who reside outside China may not apply. Applicants who are not the family members of USG Employees assigned to China and under Chief of Mission Authority must be residing in country at the time of application and must be able to obtain the required work and residency permits before the position's start date to be eligible for consideration.

All Chinese citizen applicants must possess a valid Beijing City residency permit (Beijing Hukou) to be considered for this position.

OPEN TO: All Interested Candidates

POSITION: IPR Specialist (FSN-10/FP-5 steps 5 through 14)

OPENING DATE: June 28, 2007

CLOSING DATE: Open Until Filled

WORK HOURS: Full-time; 40 hours/week

GRADE: Not-Ordinarily Resident: FP-05 steps 5 through 14

Ordinarily Resident: FSN-10

Continue reading "IPR Specialist wanted for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing" »

China's Net Nanny seems to have unblocked the Wordpress blog hosting service which has been inaccessible since February 2006.

Weifang Radish is the only China-related blog hosted on Wordpress that your correspondent knows of, but feel free to add others in the comments section.

Naturally, the unblocking could just be a mistake, a side-effect of Nanny accidentally doubling her dose of meds. Have a look at Danwei's Net Nanny Follies channel for more on the crazy old gal's recent activities.

UPDATE: False alarm: Wordpress seems to be blocked again (July 3).

This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. Recruitment advertisements are currently offered free of charge to advertisers in relevant industries, as a service to Danwei readers. See all job ads.

The makers of a major historical motion picture with international financing, to be helmed by director Lu Chuan, are looking for a female dialogue coach to help with English dialogue. Candidates should be female and London-accented. The position will be part-time before September of this year, after which it will require four months of full-time presence on-set.

If interested, please contact Mi You at missumi@gmail.com.

This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. Recruitment advertisements are currently offered free of charge to advertisers in relevant industries, as a service to Danwei readers. See all job ads.

Emerging China is a new online magazine covering business in Central and Western China. We are the first magazine devoted to business topics away from China's coastal regions; and we report on any events that involve or could affect foreign businesses: developments in infrastructure, changes in regulations, relevant demographic information, etc.

We are currently looking for freelancers to research and write stories for the magazine. Ideal candidates will be native Chinese speakers with business writing experience. A high level of English proficiency is an advantage, but we are willing to consider people whose English is not perfect. The most important quality we are looking for is the ability to uncover the right information.

We are Shanghai-based company, but we are looking for reporters from all over China. All that is needed is access to the phone and the internet.

Interested candidates should send a copy of their resume and two samples of written work to hr@tromblyltd.com . Candidates without writing samples should explain how their past experience is relevant to the job. For those with no experience, we have a number of intern positions too. These would be ideal for a university student interested in going into journalism.

We are also looking for people who have experience of doing business in Central and Western China who would be interested in writing informed opinion pieces.

Last Friday, China Youth Daily reported that a young teacher with the College of Art at Shanghai Normal University had been punished by the school for failing a number of students who had plagiarized their term papers.

During a grading session in February, Mr. Ma noticed varying degrees of plagiarism in the papers of eight students, so he marked them zero, submitted his grades, and went on vacation. At the start of the spring semester, the administration hauled him into the office and ordered him to change the grades; when he refused, they punished him for being "subjective" - he had overlooked several other plagiarized papers.

Ma believes the main reason for his punishment is that the college is upset with him for "making trouble for the school and destroying its harmonious atmosphere." Here's an excerpt from the CYD narrative:

The second time they talked about the matter occurred in the administrator's office not long after school resumed. There, Ma said that he did not intend to cancel the scores.

"So long as there is one sentence of the students' own writing in their papers, you cannot give a zero," said the administrator, "shocking" Ma. Another line was even more "stunning": "You either pass them all, or fail them all."

Continue reading "Harmony means everyone gets a passing grade" »

On Friday, June 29, the National People's Congress voted to pass the Labor Contract Law. Media coverage, including articles in China Daily, The New York Times and The Washington Post, has hastened to situate the law's passage in the context of the recent "Shanxi black brick kiln incident." Meanwhile, Chinese law makers revealed that, during the Standing Committee deliberations, members demanded that the Labor Contract Law "handle" the Shanxi slave situation.

Speaking at an NPC press conference yesterday afternoon, legislator Li Yuan said that the Shanxi kiln case resulted from "dereliction of duty" by government agencies. As a consequence, language was appended to the Labor Contract Law making relevant government bodies and their staff liable if they harm workers or employing units (用人单位) by failing to carry out their duties or if the government bodies or their staff violate the law in the exercise of their powers.

Notwithstanding the media coverage connecting the Shanxi slaves with the Labor Contract Law, the new law has only the scantest relationship to Shanxi's illegal kilns. Passing a law in China takes years, and the Labor Contract Law has been under consideration since 2005. In addition, the key passages of the law — which include requirements for written labor contracts and payment of severance wages, as well as restrictions on fixed-term contracts — offer no solace to slave workers. When bosses kidnap children and force them to work without pay, while the local government looks away and squelches local press reports, a law requiring written contracts is beside the point. Moreover, as Li Yuan pointed out during the press conference, to the extent that the Labor Contract Law explicitly addresses the dereliction of duties that led to the scandal in Shanxi, it's redundant: laws prohibiting the dereliction of duty already exist.

What's significant about the passage of the Labor Contract Law is not that it addresses the Shanxi kiln problem, but that the NPC wanted to create the impression that it would. In other words, the NPC used the Labor Contract Law as an opportunity to appear responsive to public outrage and to pander to public opinion. For a legislative body that isn't popularly elected, it's behaving an awful lot like the U.S. Congress.

Still, whatever might be said about the NPC's sleight-of-hand theatrics, both domestic and foreign press coverage have been accommodating of the illusive connection between the Shanxi slaves and the Labor Contract Law. And for a foreign press that's free of government censorship, it's behaving an awful lot like Xinhua.

Wu Si (吴思) is the author of the highly influential history books Hidden Rules (潜规则) and The Principle of Blood Payment (血酬定律). He also serves as vice-president of Yanghuang Chunqiu magazine (炎黄春秋 aka Chinese Chronicles), which has been on a reformist bent this year.

In an interview published in this week's Southern Metropolis Weekly (Life edition), Wu reflects on the Shanxi brick kiln scandal in the context of the history of forced labor in China over the past few centuries, as well as how it relates to China's capitalist reforms.

After the media exposed the Shanxi kiln affair, there was a swift reaction from critics, who went after the core issue from different perspectives. The ethical bravery and rational power of public opinion became a welcome bright spot amid the process of rescuing the kiln slaves. Today, aid has been mobilized, but the analysis and contemplation of the situation should not halt yet. We have been searching for a deeper vision with which to evaluate the illegal kiln affair, and we found Mr. Wu Si. This student of history, who discovered amid the voluminous historical record "unwritten rules" and a "principle of blood payment," has had his theories verified by the illegal kilns: do not those cold-blooded, black-hearted kiln-masters and local officials believe in none other than grey "unwritten rules" and a blood-drenched "principle of blood payment"? The final termination of illegal kilns depends on the termination of the local blood payment system. Wu Si has a new concept to apply to the illegal kiln affair - the local tyrant system. And it is under the local tyrant system that illegal kilns spring up all over.

China has had illegal mines since ancient times

Southern Metropolis Weekly: Looking at the information revealed in the Shanxi illegal brick kilns affair - child labor, the mentally disabled, corpses, wolfhounds, thugs, the town's party secretary, and the 95% unlicensed rate - were you surprised?
Wu Si: I wasn't surprised. These things aren't unique to Shanxi. Other provinces may have them as well, and history shows that this sort of thing was prevalent throughout China. In addition, the solutions of the past were basically the same as those today - they rely on supervision of the subordinates by their superiors. If China did not have this sort of thing, then I'd find it strange. Because the core power structure has not changed: it is still an upwardly-responsible pyramid. The exposure of this incident just further corroborates my argument.

SMW: So looking at history we can see that this type of thing has been around for a while?
Wu: I'll read for you a few passages that I've copied down. In the twelfth month of the fourth year of Jiaqing (1799), Jiaqing issued an edict: "Xishan's coal-pits are most vulnerable to harboring treachery. We have heard that there is a bandit in that place named 'Water Foreman' who coaxes common people into the pits and flogs them so ruthlessly that they die." The emperor commanded the Shunyi Magistrate: "If there is such a ruffian, then find him, seize him, and prepare a memorial so that his crimes may be punished according to the law."

So a magistrate named Lu led a contingent "through many pits, thunderously liberating all of the miners imprisoned in the tiny dorms." And they dismantled all of the coalpits and dorms. The records state that the miners who were rescued "all cheered and put their hands to their foreheads." The Xishan coalpits were where Mentougou is today.

Continue reading "Wu Si on the intractable problem of forced labor" »

Playboy magazine has seen its sales decimated on one end by by crass lads mags like FHM, and on the other end by easily available Internet pornography.

However, the magazine's name and it bunny logo remain widely recognized from Australia to Zambia. The group, under the leadership of Hugh Hefner's daughter Christy, is therefore putting money into its other lines of business: namely Internet, video, and the Playboy branded clothing line.

In addition, Playboy has started opening Playboy clubs again. The original chain of clubs ran from 1960 to 1988, mostly in the U.S., and were a major source of income for the Playboy empire. After opening a new Playboy Club in Las Vegas last year, the famous bunny is bound for China.

Christy Hefner recently announced plans to build a Playboy club in Macao. Variety magazine said that Playboy Enterprises and Macao Studio City had joined forces to open up a "Playboy Mansion ... described variously as a 'club' and a 'multi-faceted entertainment destination'."

It will be interesting to see if it works: in a city full of brothels, will the prospect of being served cocktails by girls dressed as bunnies have any appeal for the punters?

In unrelated news, a Danwei source close to the Wynn casino in Macao has reported the the new American-owned gambling houses are currently getting the jitters: the Mainland authorities have slowed down the processing of travel permits to Macao, which has drastically reduced the house takings of the clutch of new casinos in the city.

If you want to see what some of the new casinos look like, below is a Danwei video shot about a year ago in Macao.

UPDATE: Philip S. sent email noting that Playboy.com is currently accessible in China. It is not clear when the long-standing block on the website was removed, but the unblocking may be a temporary typical glitch.