Death toll in natural disasters no longer kept as China's state secretBEIJING, Sept. 12 -- The death toll in natural disasters was no longer regarded as state secret starting from August this year, a government spokesman said here Monday. End item.
Well that's nice to know, but is probably of little comfort to people like journalists Zhao Yan, Shi Tao and Ching Cheong, all three of whom are currently in prison after being accused of leaking state secrets.
So what is still a state secret then? Christy Chung is evidently not a state secret, judging from the state-owned news agency Xinhua's photo gallery titled Can you breathe in front of her? (pictured). Careful observers will note that the area between Miss Chung's legs was felt to be too revealing of certain secrets, and was therefore pixellated by right-minded Xinhua editors to avoid causing social upheaval.
If you prefer a less frivolous answer to the question "What is a state secret in China?", China Digital News has translated a list of stuff that is officially regarded as secret in China. The list was compiled by a Chinese contributor to an online forum.
Recommended reading for all journalists: This is what you can be thrown in jail for revealing:
-Numbers of war dead and wounded since the founding of the People’s Republic of China from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which have not been made public by military or state government departments.-The strategy and overall plan of land use development.
-Quotas for seasonal, and mid- and long-range plans for national land use. (including national construction, town and village industry, and rural land use for housing development.)
-Statistics concerning land that have not been approved for publication by national or local governments.
-Environmental quality reports (Detailed text) from the national, provincial, autonomous region, or municipal levels.
-Reports and data related to public health disasters caused by environmental pollution that have had a national impact.
-Data and statistics about natural disasters, epidemics, and negative social phenomena that, once released, can cause instability in the human mind and in society.
If you read that last secret, you realize why SARS was, in fact, an official state secret.
So let's take it as a postive sign, Katrina-inspired, that the paranoid old farts who run this place have decided it's OK to be honest about floods and earthquakes. The government — a bunch of anonymous technocrats — have seen the leader of the U.S.A. humbled by an inappropriate response to a natural disaster, and they understand that media reports about disasters cannot be suppressed, not by George W. Bush, nor by the Chinese Communist Party.
The rest of the list of state secrets is below...
-Reports about the environmental impact, and archived documents relating to periods of feasibility research, site-selection, design and construction, fueling and operation, and retirement of mid- and large-scale military use nuclear facilities。-Statistics from the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) relating to serious accidents or industrial illness that have not been made public.
-The overall situation and statistics from the ACFTU relating to unemployment and poverty of workers．
-The overall situation and statistics from the ACFTU related to group labor protests, strikes, demonstrations and other serious incidents．
-The overall situation, and investigation and penalty records of activities of illegal labor organizations from national, provincial, autonomous region, and municipal levels．
-Accusations against the Party and national leaders which are in the process of being handled or have not yet been checked and handled.
Clear enough?
2. Beijing experiences longest period of hot days in the last 50 years;
3. Beijing Statistics Bureau: Beijingers work overtime about one hour every day;
4. The renovation project for Yongdingmen gate tower will be finished on National Day, the tower's gilt character sign has already been installed;
5. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a landslide victory in Sunday's general election.
If you read my blog and if you have a blog, tell me about it. I already have a short list of other bloggers who read my blog, but I got them mostly from comments and from blog-search tools like Technorati. I have a list called “Readers” in my RSS feed reader, but it’s still very thin and I’d like to boost it.
Those loveable editors at the state-owned China Daily's website just can't resist the copy and paste method of content creation. They have once again copied an entire article from a blog, this time from Hong Kong's hyperactively prolific ESWN. The article was originally titled "The Most Popular Forum Post Ever In China", and renamed "An anti-discrimination bout staged in China's cyberspace" by the China Daily.
The article is credited to "Sophie Beach (EastSouthWestNorth Forum)" — Sophie Beach writes for China Digital Times, which excerpted ESWN's article; ESWN is a blog, not a forum. But the China Daily has never worried too much about facts, those pesky things. Another recent story on the China Daily's website started with this line:
China's specialized campaign to enforce intellectual property rights laws has been extremely successful, government officials said...
Interfax has released a list of the top 20 Chinese print media by ad revenues in the first quarter of 2005, in a report about the China Daily's plans to launch yet another mundane newspaper — a Shanghai-focused English language daily.
Compiled by Zhiyang Damen Market Research, the ad revenue numbers are best taken with a sprinkling of salt. Here is the list of publications together with the quarterly ad revenue stated by the Interfax report:
1. Beijing Evening News RMB 401.23 milllion
2. Guangzhou Daily RMB 290.27 milllion
3. Beijing Youth Daily RMB 288.07 milllion
4. Peninsula City News RMB 283.82 milllion
5. Shanghai Morning Post RMB 248.74 milllion
6. Chengdu Economic Daily RMB 192.45 milllion
7. Beijing Times RMB 191.25 milllion
8. Xinmin Evening News RMB 173.9 milllion
9. Shopping Guide RMB 173.81 milllion
10. Shenzhen Special Zone Press RMB 171.47 milllion
11. Chutian Metro Daily RMB 165.42 milllion
12. Qilu Evening News RMB 160.69 milllion
13. Chinese Business View RMB 156.8 milllion
14. Huaxi City Daily RMB 156.25 milllion
15. Dalian Evening News RMB 152.29 milllion
16. Today Evening News RMB 140.64 milllion
17. Qianjiang Evening News RMB 134.91 milllion
18. Nanfang City News RMB 133.75 milllion
19. Beijing Entertainment News RMB 120.85 milllion
20. Wuhan Evening News RMB 111.67 milllion
On a related subject, a few weeks ago Hong Kong blogger ESWN translated a post by Liu Jin from the Yannan online forum about the real circulation figures of Beijing's newspapers. These are the numbers Liu gives as genuine:
Here are the true figures:
Beijing Evening News prints 700,000 copies — 450,000 for retail and 250,000 for subscribers. Of the retail copies, 50,000 to 100,000 are unsold.
Beijing Daily Messenger prints 180,000 to 200,000 — 60,000 for subscribers; of the 120,000 retail copies, at least one-third is unsold.
Beijing Morning News prints 180,000 — 130,000 are for subscribers; of the 50,000 retail copies, at least 20,000 are sold by the distribution center director as waste paper.
9月15日，晚7点，上海，绍兴路咖啡书房（电话021-64455467），由计世网主办的“创业与投资”沙龙，将召集沪上及苏杭各地的20多个优秀创业团队，与VC共同探讨新一轮互联网创业项目中出现的种种问题。报名条件及方法：必须正在独立运营中的与互联网相关的创业项目，由项目负责人直接发短信联系13520446510（黄志光）或13520700396（王翌），报名并确认后于当晚签到入场。
欢迎大家参加。我把我在上海和杭州的一些朋友通知到了，自己反而不是很想参加了。越发觉得，静下心来在家里做出些好东西来才是正事儿。最近互联网很热，在互联网大会上居然第二天一大早没有了座位。大家都在忙着交流，见VC。真应了那句话，“我的朋友不是在见VC，就是再去见VC的路上”。
很多东西的变化就是这么潜移默化，不知不觉。《旅行的艺术》第一章《对旅行的期待》的第一句就是：
时序之入冬，一如人之将老，徐缓渐近，每日变化细微，殊难确察，日日累叠，终成严冬，因此，要具体地说出冬天来临之日，并非易事。先是晚间温度微降，接着连日阴雨，伴随来自大西洋捉摸不定的阵风、潮湿的空气、纷落的树叶，白昼亦见短促。其间也许会有短暂的风雨间歇，天气晴好，万里无云，人们不穿大衣便可一早出门。但这些都只是一种假象，是病入膏肓者临终前的“回光返照”，于事无补。到了十二月，冬日已森然盘踞，整座城市每天为铁灰色的天空所笼罩，给人以不祥之兆，极类曼特尼亚或韦罗内塞的绘画作品中晦暗的天空，是作为基督耶稣遇难之类油画题材的绝佳背景，也是在家赖床的好天气。
96年的时候，报业人士高呼：“互联网时代来临了，报纸的终结者来了，报业的没落指日可待了”。过了几年，报纸依然红红火火，没有丝毫颓势，大家吃了定心丸，轻松的说“看来是多虑了”。报纸又回到了往日的平静。而今年的报纸广告忽然大滑坡，又让人担心起来，互联网的广泛应用的趋势还是趋势，只不过不像互联网刚刚开始出现时大家预料的那么快而已。
