Showing posts with label Taiyuan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taiyuan. Show all posts

Friday, November 8, 2013

China Reflects on International Journalists Day

One of the great things about living and working in a nanny state is that whenever things go wrong, you can always blame the nanny.  Which is exactly what The Global Times does as it laments the lack of journalistic standards in the Chinese news community.  

More state regulation is needed, it concludes, failing to appreciate that the central news agency in China is actually state controlled to begin with, but we all know that the cure for all of China's ills is laws and yet more laws on the statute books.  Other newspapers agree, but then, they don't have much of a choice.

Central to the plot that many (state-censored) newspapers are spinning is the detention of Chen Yongzhou.  Identifying a scapegoat to point at and shout derisively  is a long tradition in China, and it certainly didn't happen when Xinhua or CCTV embarked on one of their many cock-ups.  A series of missteps that eventually led many to be believe that a secret experiment designed to discover if bloated, overfed, half-literate baboons could run a news agency.

Xinhua is adept at slinging mud of it's own, attacking CNN and the BBC over it's coverage of the two bomb attacks that hit the capital and Taiyuan.  The Chinese, eager to make the case that China is a world power has has Muslim extremists willing to bomb government buildings to prove it, have derided "Western media" in the quaint 1950's era commie rhetoric that it does so well.

Complaining that the US doesn't recognise the attacks as terrorist driven act is like complaining that a Iraq War veteran with no legs doesn't recognise your appendix scar as a legitimate injury.  The Politburo would be unlikely to sanction US or British boots on the ground in Xinjiang, so it's belligerence towards western media essentially boils down to grandstanding in front of it's own captive audience.

The air, the bloody air, is touted as one of the success stories of Chinese investigative journalism.  It wouldn't be Chinese news if there wasn't some horror story about how bad the pollution is in China.  Wily commentators have pointed out the amusing side note to the ongoing saga of China's AQI that the smog is rendering many of the closed circuit TV systems designed to stop people rebelling against the state and, er, bombing government buildings, completely and totally ineffective.

For many, including the poor eight year old unlucky enough to be diagnosed with lung cancer in Jiangsu, you don't really need to conjure up mythical terrorist threats when the government itself is quite happy to mortgage the health of it's own people in search of ever bigger profits.


Enhanced by Zemanta

Thursday, November 7, 2013

China Debates Terror Attacks Online

"Dog fuckers", a little known term of affection (we presume) for government officials, is how one Weibo user described the intended targets of yesterday's bomb in Taiyuan.

With public confidence in government officials not especially high these days. Xi's crackdown on graft is continuing, and a steady stream of videos and photos continue to emerge online of civil servants caught in compromising situations with women who aren't their wives, reactions to the bombings have been a little different to what you might expect.

David Wertime's analysis of the "lone wolf" attacks on Foreign Policy, shows there seems to be some debate in the Chinese webspace of whether exactly violent protest against the government is acceptable or not.  Always a good sign the everyone's happy exactly the way things are.

 

 


Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Explosions in Taiyuan

Xinhua (along with everyone else) is reporting that several explosions have hit downtown Taiyuan, striking near the provincial party headquarters.   There are reports of ball bearings being found at the site, possibly indicating that this wasn't an accident and IED were involved.
“There were several explosions caused by small explosive devices near the  party provincial commission in Taiyuan,” the capital of the northern province  of Shanxi, local police said on a verified social media account.

Pictures have been posted on Weibo, they show that the area has been cleared by police, and one in particular shows a body lying in the road.  Xinhua has reported that at least one person has been killed, and a a gas leaked contributed to the blast.

[caption id="attachment_2418" align="aligncenter" width="440"]Metal pellets found at the scene of today's bombing in Taiyuan Metal pellets found at the scene of today's bombing in Taiyuan[/caption]

Typically in cases like these, the politicians are keeping a tight control on what exactly the press can and can't publish (we don't want any rumours to spread on the Chinese intertubes, remember), so what is coming out on social networks by eyewitnesses is about as good as the news coverage is going to get.

 


Enhanced by Zemanta

Chinese Answers

On the outside, China's answer to Silicon Valley doesn't look the part: It's a crowded mass of electronics malls, fast-food join...