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• ‘Second Generation Red’ Fall in Behind Xi Jinping
• Photo: Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close, by Michael Steverson
• Hollywood, China, and the Freedom to Blow Up Tiananmen
• Shanghai Dialect Makes Comeback Among Youth
• Chinese City Reports Second Bird Flu Fatality

‘Second Generation Red’ Fall in Behind Xi Jinping Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:04 PM PST For The Age, John Garnaut reports that Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has consolidated the support of the offspring of the Communist revolutionaries, since he himself is a member of their group, unlike his predecessor, Hu Jintao: At the largest reunion, held on Saturday at the People's Liberation Army's August 1 film studio in West Beijing, children of revolutionary leaders lauded the Xi administration for "correcting" the Party's course at its "critical moment of life and death", when it was in danger of abandoning socialism altogether. "There is hope in the snake year now the Party leadership has shown us the content and direction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," Hu Muying, the daughter of former Politburo member Hu Qiaomu, told the gathering of about a thousand descendants of revolutionary veterans. "We shall prove by our own actions that we, the children of veterans, are indeed worthy of the name 'Second Generation Red'," said Ms Hu. "Let's strive together towards The China Dream," she said, endorsing Mr Xi's political motto. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: CCP 5th generation, CCP history, Hu Jintao, princelings, Xi Jinping Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Photo: Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close, by Michael Steverson Posted: 24 Feb 2013 09:34 PM PST Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Michael Steverson Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Hollywood, China, and the Freedom to Blow Up Tiananmen Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:51 PM PST While China may have finally scaled the highest pinnacle of international literary acclaim, no such triumph is on the cards atop tonight's glittering pile of Oscars. Didi Kirsten Tatlow at IHT Rendezvous wonders why, when Hollywood seems to be tripping over itself to build bridges with China, China has yet to establish a presence on the Academy Awards stage: As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China's movies aren't nominated for the world's biggest awards? […] The most popular answer to the question, held by ordinary Chinese and film experts alike, is: "Too few good films. That's the real reason in recent years Chinese films have moved further and further away from the Oscars dream," wrote The International Herald Leader newspaper, in a story carried on the country's popular Tencent entertainment site. An article by The Economic Daily, carried on People's Daily Web site, gave another interpretation: "The Oscars have never been a communal forum, the films taken seriously have only the responsibility to portray the North American world view and the lives they're willing to see." The Oscars' presence in China is almost as thin as China's at the Oscars, according to The Los Angeles Times' Barbara Demick. Only one of this year's Best Picture nominee has so far reached Chinese theaters: Ang Lee's Life of Pi, which as a co-production with China enjoyed exemption from tight import quotas in exchange for compliance with the whims of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. As for Oscar viewing parties? Unimaginable. The ceremony, which begins at 9:30 a.m. Monday in China, will be broadcast only in much-redacted form hours later by state-owned CCTV. (Last year, it didn't air until 10:40 p.m. Monday.) […] […] "Nobody even has the live stream in China," complained Raymond Zhou, film critic for the English-language China Daily. "The government won't allow it. They are afraid somebody will say something against China." Chinese television used to broadcast the ceremony live, but stopped after Richard Gere, as a presenter in 1993, called on then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to remove troops from Tibet. "The Chinese translators didn't know what to do, so they just tried to ignore the sentences. After that, they were afraid of the Oscars," said Wu Renchu, a Shanghai film critic. "It is regrettable. There are many Chinese movie fans, students and white-collar workers who really would like to watch the ceremonies." [Update: CCTV6's M1905.com (via Bill Bishop) is streaming the awards ceremony.] Gere's outspokenness earned him a twenty-year ban from the awards, ending tonight with a musical performance to mark Chicago's six-Oscar haul in 2003. "Apparently, I've been rehabilitated," he told HuffPost UK. "It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they've banned you." Despite this punishment, Gere became a symbol of Hollywood's defiance of Chinese authoritarianism, before hunger for Chinese funding and market access made this a disposable luxury. From Damien Ma at Foreign Policy: In Hollywood in the 1990s, China was an oppressive place. Red Corner opens with Gere gazing up at security cameras in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, ground zero of the infamous bloodshed of early June, 1989, seared into many Americans' memories. Brad Pitt, too, had been blacklisted from China, ostensibly for starring in the 1997 feature Seven Years in Tibet, in which his character becomes friends with the young Dalai Lama. [… But t]he era in which China could still be a menacing villain and stir political passions from the Spielbergs and the Geres appears to be ending. Even Brangelina are reportedly studying Mandarin. And the political drama surrounding disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, ripe for Hollywoodification, will never see the light of day. Too bad, because the Bo Ultimatum is the Chinese Godfather waiting to be made. As Hollywood gathers for its biggest awards night Sunday, the industry seems to be biting its tongue. After all, the future, as Jeff Daniels quips in Looper, is in China. From The New Yorker's Evan Osnos: [… T]hese days, Hollywood directors find themselves in the curious position of being more compliant than some of their Chinese counterparts. When censors ordered the Chinese director Lou Ye to make additional cuts to his movie "Mystery" just over a month before the film's release date, Lou took the unusual steps of publicly tweeting the censors' demands and then removing his name from the credits. Online, he explained his decision to break the taboo of discussing censorship in the hope that the system would "become more transparent and eventually be cancelled." He was not willing to comply in silence. "We are all responsible for this unreasonable movie-censorship program," he wrote. […] By comparison, Hollywood has been less vocal on the subject of censorship. When James Cameron released "Titanic" in 3-D last year—having agreed to censor Kate Winslet's breasts—the Times asked him about the compromises of working in China. He said, "As an artist, I'm always against censorship… [But] this is an important market for me. And so I'm going to do what's necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I'm going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I'm not going to change people's minds that way." Transparency might be a more constructive approach than either foot-stomping or meek compliance. While there may be no end in sight for Chinese film censorship, Osnos suggests that the industry could formally and publicly catalogue cuts made at SARFT's behest. Lou's defiance, meanwhile, together with changes recently imposed on imports such as Cloud Atlas and Skyfall, has prompted calls for a more codified and less capriciously restrictive system. From Kristie Lu Stout at CNN: […] Lu Chuan is calling for change in the censorship system, hoping that Chinese filmmakers can be governed less by guesswork and more by a transparent rating system. Lu says there must be change for the sake of his craft and also because his audience demands it. "In an American movie, you can blow up the White House. We cannot blow up (Tiananmen) Square. It's different. But the audience wants to see a lot of exciting visual things. So I think the leadership will think about that." He's asking for the freedom to film China's own "Independence Day," the freedom to blow up anything without fear of political blowback. © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Academy Awards, Dalai Lama, Evan Osnos, film censorship, film distribution, film industry, hollywood, Lou Ye, Lu Chuan, oscars, Richard Gere, SARFT, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Titanic Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Shanghai Dialect Makes Comeback Among Youth Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:22 AM PST While Shanghai strives to be an international city, locals are worried about the preservation of its cultural identity. After the 1990s, when Shanghai increased its efforts to become an international metropolis, the use of Shanghainese, the local dialect, decreased in favor of English or Putonghua. According to the South China Morning Post, the success of Shanghai comedian, Zhou Libo, and young people creating groups for the promotion of their local dialect reflects the  comeback of Shanghainese: A study by Shanghai's Academy of Social Sciences found that only 60 per cent of pupils in local primary and junior middle schools were able to speak the local dialect. Only a few were fluent and anecdotal evidence showed that some children of native parents were not able to speak a single word of Shanghainese. In 2011, a group of young people, mostly university students, launched a campaign to promote the local dialect. The group, called Hu Cares, gathers at the People's Square every week, calling on people to preserve the Shanghai dialect. The word Hu is the short form of Shanghai in Chinese. Their efforts attracted the attention of local education authorities, who introduced the dialect in music and art lessons in the September semester and provided students with new textbooks featuring poems and folk songs in Shanghainese. Unlike people in Guangdong, who insist on Cantonese's superiority because it has a richer linguistic history than Putonghua, educators in Shanghai suggest that outsiders learn Shanghainese because a command of the local dialect will make them more confident residents of the city. See also Zhou Yunpeng: We Want to Sing in Dialect, via CDT, which discusses the use of dialects in music as well as the tensions between dialects and Putonghua. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: dialect, language, putonghua, Shanghai, Zhou Libo Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chinese City Reports Second Bird Flu Fatality Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:34 AM PST Chinese State media report another patient has died after having contracted the H5N1 influenza virus, also known as Bird Flu. From Xinhua: The second of two people confirmed by the Ministry of Health to have contracted avian influenza H5N1 died in a hospital in Southwest China's Guizhou Province on Friday, according to health authorities. The patient, a 31-year-old man, died of multiple organ failure at Jinyang Hospital in Guizhou, the provincial capital, at 4:40 pm, sources with the provincial health department said. The man developed symptoms on February 3 and was hospitalized on February 8. Another patient, a 21-year-old woman, died of multiple organ failure on February 13. They both tested positive for the H5N1 virus on February 17. This most recent fatality comes a year after a bird flu death in the same province. The New York Times reports the two more recent victims were in close contact with birds: The flu, which is circulated in poultry and birds, has infected only 600 humans in the last decade, but has proven fatal in half the cases, so public health officials closely monitor its transmission. Scientists fear that the flu could mutate into a form that is highly contagious in humans. The news agency added that 110 people who had been exposed to the victims had been released from quarantine. Amid fears of the possible mutation of bird flu into a more contagious virus, according to Bloomberg, health authorities in the United States have outlined the conditions for funding research on the virus: The Department of Health and Human Services will only fund studies that meet seven criteria, officials including HHS chief- of-staff Sally Howard and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins wrote in the journal Science today. The criteria include a requirement to demonstrate that a virus that scientists plan to create in a lab could evolve naturally, and that safety and security risks can be managed. The conditions are aimed at enabling research that would help the world prepare for a rapidly spreading form of H5N1. The virus has infected 620 people in 15 countries since 2003, killing 60 percent of them, according to the World Health Organization. Most victims have had direct contact with birds, and the virus has so far failed to acquire the ability to transmit easily between humans. "HHS must, out of necessity, support some scientific research that involves a certain level of inherent risk but that is nevertheless essential for our health and well-being," Howard and colleagues wrote. Scientists worldwide issued a voluntary moratorium on H5N1 research in January 2012 after two NIH-funded studies showed how to make the virus easier to transmit among ferrets, the mammals whose response to flu is most like that of humans. Read more about bird flu in China, via CDT. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: bird flu, bird flu deaths, bird flu prevention, H5N1, public health Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

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