Results tagged “southernmetropolis”

Diving queen Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶) has been slammed left right and centre for her less than stellar behaviour at a press conference after taking home the silver for the women's 3m springboard final at the "Good Luck Beijing" FINA Diving World Cup where she was edged out by team mate Wu Minxia (吴敏霞).

According to renowned photographer Bao Kun, the photography expositions in China did not follow international practice of dividing works into documentary versus art categories. This occurred as a result of historical reasons and led to a series of problems. As a national competition judge many times, Bao Kun has identified many altered photographs winning documentary prizes. After the problem with was exposed, he contacted the China Photography Association. He found that the Association was ready to rescind the award but then it realized that with so many other altered photographs winning awards, it would be a disaster to rescind all those awards. Thus, the awards stayed. Bao Kun thinks that the competitions should be separated by category and the higher quality judges are needed.

Just three days after Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong regained his freedom, China has released yet another media man — Yu Huafeng (喻华峰), general manager and deputy editor of the Southern Metropolis News《南方都市报》, the Guangzhou-based paper that is one of China's boldest and most critical papers.

Shanghaiist has often wondered what China would look like if it had complete religious freedom, as in the freedom to organise and set up religious denominations and associations outside of the five "official religions", and to have all these religious groups enter the free-wheeling marketplace with their books, CDs, video programmes and what not. This weekend, we caught a glimpse of that when a woman claiming to be "Jesus' sister" was arrested in the Guangdong province. She charges upwards of RMB100,000 to "heal" each cancer patient and owns three fancy villas.

For those of you using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds and wondering why you haven't been able to read any of your favourite blogs, it looks like it might have been GFW'ed. CNet Asia's Little Red Blog says the Feedburner block was only temporary, but we're still unable to access any of our feeds at http://feeds.feedburner.com. It also recommends that we check out FeedSky, which it says is China's number one RSS feed service, but we're not convinced -- you mean the net nanny is so stupid as to allow a Chinese RSS feed service bypass all its blocks so netizens here can read Blogspot blogs?

We told you about some Chinese journalists probing the Fenghuang (凤凰) bridge collapse getting harassed and beaten by local thugs, and EastSouthWestNorth has followed up with a translation of a fascinating first-hand account of the assault on People's Daily《人民日报》reporter Wang Kefei (王克非). He was accompanied by journalists from China Youth Daily《中国青年报》, the Southern Metropolis Daily《南方都市报》, the Economic Observer《经济观察报》 and Oriental Outlook 《瞭望东方周刊》, some of whom were also attacked. The attackers are allegedly men working for the local department of agriculture. The local propaganda chief has threatened to take legal action against the China Youth Daily, Southern Metropolis Daily and Oriental Outlook reporters for "illegal news coverage", while the five reporters have threatened to sue the Fenghuang government.

This Youku video shows some women offering old men massage hanky-panky, all out in the open in an unnamed city, for as low as RMB5! The world's oldest profession is alive and well in China, and it is everywhere.

Update: EastSouthWestNorth translates a story from Southern Metropolis Daily tracing how the story of the bogus buns was found to be fake, and says kudos to the netizens who raised the following doubts from the beginning:

We mentioned in this earlier post that Prof. Li Yinhe, the noted sexologist, had just written on her blog that she was being pressured to keep her mouth shut, i.e. not talk about spouse-swapping and not submit proposals to officials about legalizing gay marriage in China.

Shanghaiist has posted before about the controversy surrounding the new high school history textbooks in Shanghai, which were thrown under the media spotlight after an article in the New York Times by Joseph Kahn claimed that the new history books were a big departure from the old books and went so far as to nearly remove Mao from China's history. You can read what the folks over at the Peking Duck thought about it this issue here and here. It seems that only one or two people there managed to compare the new history textbooks in Shanghai, which move away from the "great man" theory of history, with a somewhat similar movement in teaching of American history towards more social and cultural history, along the lines of (and this perhaps isn't the best or only example) Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

The Southern Metropolis Weekly's latest print edition had an interesting article about videos and movies online. The article profiled and compared some of the people working in this area and analyzed the business models and economics behind each. One of the people profiled was none other than Hu Ge, the Shanghainese man that caused a stir with his parody of The Promise, director-turned-hack Chen Kaige's latest attempt to waste several hours in the lives of innocent and hard-working people. That parody, a short film called A Bloody Case That Started From a Steamed Bun, got Hu Ge in trouble with the aforementioned hack, who threatened Hu with a lawsuit. The net result has been to make the once unknown Hu Ge into a cause celebre cum indie movie rebel. Not suprisingly, he's gotten some offers, most notably, to make another parody, this time with the approval of the filmmakers. The filmmakers behind the film 血战到底 (Karmic Mahjong). We think that the media might have already seen the parody version (which is basically advertising for the film itself) and were disappointed: Hu himself acknowledges that he made Steamed Bun for fun and because he was pissed off, whereas Karmic Mahjong is already comic and a bit of a spoof (we will review it soon), making it hard for him to find the inspiration. Unlike the first film, however, he isn't allowed to bring in bits and pieces from other movies and TV shows or music -- otherwise known as copyrighted material -- which also made his job harder. These days, Hu is living in a house in the suburbs where has a "studio" and is hatching plans to make a real, live-action film on digital video. The problem is, not many people have expressed interest thus far in investing in it.

From Reuters:

Shanghaiist was (un)fortunate enough last December to go to Shangcai prefecture out in Henan, which is where the famed "AIDS village" (艾滋病村）is located. We were shown around the hospitals and schools, always under the supervision of officials. Even though we never paid for the sumptuous meals downed with numerous bottles of beer and rice wine, and were often pestered at night by the hotel staff wanting to know if we needed a "massage", we were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, at least in terms of moral character, to the officials -- they are skimming, no doubt, crooked, yes, but at least not to a degree that makes them utterly reprehensible, right? Wrong. Maybe -- check out this report (in Chinese) which investigates Shangcai, and tells stories of officials skimming money from overcharging for medicines, not delivering basic promises of patient care, skimming money from the salaries of doctors, and of course, not letting people with a penchant for speaking the truth mouthing off at inopportune moments out of their homes. They said that when one of the most corrupt officials quit his job, the local people set off firecrackers and that it was "more festive than Chinese New Year"!

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) recently decided to allow two Chinese regional papers, Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News (新民晚报 or Xin Min Wan Bao）and Guangzhou based Southern Metropolis (南方都市报 or Nan Fang Dou Shi Bao) to station journalists in Taiwan.