Today's Links: The NY Times goes to Yunnan, Getty pays heady tab for Chinese photos, and farmers get told to buy more entertainment

  • On Foot in the Mystical Mountains of Yunnan [NYTimes.com] "It was for a moment like this that I had made the long journey last fall to northern Yunnan Province from my home in Beijing — which has the dubious distinction of being both one of the most polluted and one of the most populous cities in the world. Back home, looking at a map of the rugged Tibetan areas of western China, my eyes had fallen on the deep river valleys of Yunnan, where three of Asia’s great waterways come tumbling down from their glacial sources in the mountains of the high Tibetan plateau."
  • Getty’s $100,000 Tab for Chinese Photos Signals Bargain Time [Bloomberg.com] "Wang Qingsong’s theatrical, large- scale photographs have been a hit with collectors, rising in price to $864,943 from $40,000 since 2006. Now, with prices for Chinese contemporary art eroding, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has purchased three prints by Wang and six by Hai Bo, who contrasts photographs of friends and relatives taken during China’s Cultural Revolution with their recent portraits."
  • Sichuan Earthquake Memorial Museum To Cost 2.3 Billion [chinaSMACK] "The complete plans for the Beichuan National Earthquake Ruins Museum that has been the subject of much attention by citizens from all walks of life have been released, with a preliminary budget requiring a ~2.3 billion yuan total investment/cost. The moment the design plan was introduced, it immediately caused huge amounts of heated discussion from all walks of life in society. Some netizens have questioned whether using vast amounts of money to construct a museum amounts to an “image project.”"
  • Chinese farmers in need of more books, films [Xinhua] "Rural households in China spent an average of just 139.3 yuan on entertainment last year, People's Daily overseas edition reported. Ministry of Agriculture statistics show each household spent an average of 348 yuan on cultural-related services in 2008, but that 208.7 yuan of this money was spent on their children's education… This represents an increase of just 2 yuan on the 2007 data and the newspaper blamed the economic downturn."
  • Road map charted for universal healthcare [China Daily] "A master plan for healthcare over the next decade was unveiled Monday, the first step in a highly anticipated reform of the medical system that aims to provide fair and affordable services for all citizens."
  • U.S. spies on China from Kyrgyz base: Russian TV [Reuters] "Russian state television accused the United States on Sunday of spying on China and Russia after secretly turning its only remaining air base in Central Asia into a state-of-the-art surveillance center. A U.S. defense official dismissed the allegations as ridiculous on Friday, when Rossiya television, widely seen as an official mouthpiece in Russia, released a clip of the documentary it aired on Sunday about the Manas base."
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By Elaine Chow in on April 7, 2009 10:00 PM Comment 3 Likes Likes

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