The New York Times Chinese-language venture, launched this Wednesday, is off to a bumpy start. While the website itself is running, the site’s Sina Weibo account went down just hours after its launch. It was up again on Thursday evening. “Given that the site was brand new, they could not have possibly posted anything controversial,” says Philip Chun at Shanghaiist. But Chun, CDT and other media outlets spoke too soon. @nytchinese is down again.
Web users in mainland China are unable to access Bloomberg's websites, after they were blocked by local authorities. The news agency thinks the move is a response to an article published about the fortunes of Vice President Xi Jinping's extended family.
As the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland China on July 1 approaches, local journalists say that press freedoms have eroded in recent years and self-censorship is on the rise. According to a survey by the Hong Kong Journalist’s Association, 87% of journalists say that access to information has been limited and obstruction of news coverage has risen in the past five years under Chief Executive Donald Tsang, who steps down from office on June 30. That figure is 29% higher than the results of a similar survey the association conducted in 2007.
With more than two decades of hindsight, it has become clear that 1989 marked a key turning point in world history. It is now possible to analyze the momentous events of 1989 in a historical fashion, and also to teach history classes about them. In fall 2010, 19 students in an undergraduate history seminar at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia embarked on a group writing project about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Their original compositions were published at the end of the term as Wikipedia entries, and have already reached an audience of thousands. They are also archived online at the SFU Tiananmen Square Project.
From their website:
For the past 50 years, Perspectives on History has been the principal source for news and information about the historical discipline. Published monthly during the academic year, Perspectives on History offers articles and commentary on teaching, computers and software, history in the media, museum exhibitions, and archives and research. Also includes the most comprehensive current listings of employment openings and historical activities, both within and outside academia.
The first China-born editor of Hong Kong's flagship English-language paper admits he made a "bad call" in cutting coverage of a mainland dissident's death, but denies he is a stooge for Beijing. The South China Morning Post's editor-in-chief Wang Xiangwei has himself been making the news, accused of muzzling the newspaper to appease Chinese authorities, amid a broader fear that Hong Kong is losing cherished freedoms. Such concerns fuelled Hong Kong's biggest protest in eight years on Sunday just after a weekend visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, to mark the 15th anniversary of the territory's handover and the inauguration of its new leader.
The dark clouds over bankrupt Swedish car maker Saab have finally cleared.
Saab Automobile AB’s liquidator signed an agreement in mid-June with National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB (NEVS) to sell the company’s main assets to the Sino-Japanese investment group.
Jiang Dalong, president of NEVS, said Saab would no longer be a traditional automaker but a producer of electric vehicles.
Chinese authorities are reconsidering legal reforms they enacted in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms had emphasized law, litigation, and courts as institutions for resolving civil grievances between citizens and administrative grievances against the state. But social stability concerns have led top leaders to question these earlier reforms. Central Party leaders now fault legal reforms for insufficiently responding to (or even generating) surging numbers of petitions and protests.
From their website:
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The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 675,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 565,500 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications.
