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- Google Earth Used By Netizens To Discuss Urban Planning [chinaSMACK] "For those of you who lived in or been to any major city in China, you must have at one point gotten stuck for hours during the morning commute or being lost within the maze of side streets and intersections. Things apparently don’t look that much better from the bird’s eye view, as curious Chinese netizens shockingly discovered (thanks to Google Earth) that even cities in Africa have seemingly better city planning and layouts than Chinese ones. The crux of the arguments boils down to whether it was truly poor city planning or because that most Chinese cities, like Rome, were not built in one day."
- The Akamai Of The East [Forbes] "In the first seven months of this year, 40 million users plugged into China's Internet for the first time, about 7 million more than the entire population of Canada. For China's Web sites and telecoms, that's a server-straining, broadband-bending rate of growth. For a privately held Beijing company known as ChinaCache and its investors, it's the kind of statistic that opens champagne corks. As the top content delivery network (CDN) in mainland China, ChinaCache holds a near monopoly on the lucrative business of selling Internet-based companies a fast track through the country's congested cyberspace."
- Taiwan film festival pressured to drop film about Chinese dissident [Monsters and Critics] "After Chinese protests, the organizer of the Kaohsiung Film Festival came under pressure Thursday to cancel a showing of a film about the life of a Chinese dissident. The Kaohsiung Film Archive announced earlier this month that it planned to show the Ten Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, during its October 16-29 film festival in Taiwan's second-largest city."
- Asia banks for a world turned upside down [Financial Times] "On Wall Street and in the once-shimmering financial capitals of Europe, banks have been shaken to their foundations. Barring a few winners, such as Goldman Sachs - able, in the absence of rivals, “to Hoover up $1,000 bills”, as one observer put it - most western financial institutions have been brought to their knees. Many are now wards of state. Others have been absorbed by rivals, broken up or forced to beg for capital from taxpayers and foreign institutions. But if western banks have been turned upside down, in Asia, precisely the opposite has happened: they have been turned downside up."
- Third flu shot producer in China [The Press Association] "The Chinese government has licensed a science institute in Shanghai to begin producing a single-dose swine flu vaccine, raising the number of such manufacturers in China to three. The official at the public affairs office of Shanghai's Food and Drug Administration confirmed that the government-affiliated Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences would begin mass production of the vaccine."
- Chinese schools quietly discard controversial Web filter [Reuters] "China last month formally backed down on a plan to preinstall the Internet filter software on all new computers sold in the country after July 1 after an international and domestic outcry. But schools were still ordered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to install the web filter, which Chinese officials said would block pornography and other unhealthy content. Critics said it could be used to spy on Internet users and block politically sensitive sites. Nonetheless, some schools have chosen to uninstall it."
- China Needs More Political Freedom to Control Carbon Emissions [WSJ] China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, and countries around the world from the United States to Japan are pressuring Beijing to lower emissions and to introduce an absolute cap on emissions. But asking China's central government to impose a carbon cap is the wrong approach. Even if Beijing wanted to do so, such a decision would be almost impossible for the central government to enforce. Greater political freedoms are the key for real environmental improvements in China.
- People’s Republic of Desire [Bright Shadow Films] "Local film production company Bright Shadow Films is preparing to start filming on their debut feature-length film, The People’s Republic of Desire, an adaptation of Annie Wang’s 2006 novel. The shoot is scheduled for the middle of next month."
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I see nothing wrong with Beijing's City Planning.
But Beijing could be built disorderly, at a time when Washington were still a no-man's land where even birds hated to sh*t on, who cares?