Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

HolidayFu.com is a new Danwei partner, joining PopUp Chinese in the Partner Links section on the right hand column of our home page.

Holiday Fu is a blog style website about travel destinations, city tours and holidays in and around China.

Each post is about one destination, itinerary or special attraction.

You can search for holidays by destination, e.g. Shanghai or Vietnam, and by type, e.g. hiking, golf or city tour.

Holiday Fu's content includes originally written tours and recommendations, and edited stories from its sister website City Weekend.

Holiday Fu is also seeking contributors: please write to steven -at- ringierasia.com if you would like to write succinct holiday recommendations with attitude and get paid.

Note: Danwei partners are advertisers or revenue-sharing partners of Danwei drawn only from companies that Danwei itself intends to cooperate with in the long term.

A video about an auto dealer in Michigan selling the Wildfire, a 3-wheeled car apparently from China. But will American chicks dig it?

The Beijing News
January 7, 2009

The Beijing News reports that a 19-year-old woman who had been hospitalized since December 27 was pronounced dead on January 5.

A postmortem test conducted by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention revealed the presence in the deceased of the virus H5N1, known as avian flu.

According to Xinhua, the government has slaughtered all poultry within 10 km of Sanjianfang Village in Beijing's Chaoyang District, where the woman had lived.

Also:

● In 2007, the company Beijing Guge (北京谷歌) sued Google China for trade name infringement, alleging that it had sole rights to the name 谷歌. After the court dismissed its claim, the Beijing company was countersued by Google China.

A court in Beijing's Haidian District recently ruled that Guge had to change its name and pay Google China 100,000 yuan in compensation.

The Beijing company registered its name on April 12, 2006, the same day that Google announced that its Chinese trade name would be 谷歌.

● The Chinese navy carried out its first escort mission, protecting four commercial vessels in troubled Somalian waters yesterday. Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said yesterday that the fleet would provide escort services to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan vessels in addition to those from the mainland.

City Evening News
January 6, 2008

The Changchun-based City Evening News ran a notice on its front page (see the front page photo) looking for jigsaw expert to recover five thousand yuan worth of banknotes which were accidentally shredded in a corn grinder.

The owner of the shredded notes is a farmer named Ji Zhankui. At the beginning of last year, Ji decided to store the money in the corn grinder. His home had previously been burglarized and he believed the grinder to be a safe place. A few months later, he needed to grind corn for pig feed but forgot the money was there. By the time he realized the red scraps of paper pouring out of the machine represented the family's total income for the previous year, it was already too late.

All the banks he has contacted have refused to accept the money. Now Ji's only hope is to reassemble three-fourths of each note, which the People's Bank of China will exchange for the full face-value.

Also:

● A number of brands of a hair dye shampoo that promised results in minutes were found to contain m-Phenylenediamine and p-Phenylenadiamine, two carcinogens. The low-cost products, sold under the name 一洗黑 ("black in one rinse"), claimed to be "completely natural." The news was first broken by a CCTV consumer investigation program.

● Hong Kong singer and actress Vivian Chow got married to her long-time partner Joe Ngai yesterday. Chow was highly popular in the 1990s, both in Hong Kong and on the Mainland. The news of their marriage comes after Ngai's highly-publicized sex scandal last month which led to an announcement that the two had broken up.

James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He has been in China since 2006, writing articles for the magazine and an excellent blog.

His report on Chinese State control of the Internet, The Connection Has Been Reset, is best explanation yet published of the mechanisms of net censorship here.

Fallows was chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and has written nine books including National Defense which won the American Book Award for non-fiction. This month, he has a new book out called Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China.

Fallows has given Danwei permission to reprint an excerpt from his book below, and was kind enough to write an introduction to the excerpt. The book is available on Amazon.

Postcards from Tomorrow Square is a collection of essays about the subjects and themes the author has been exploring in his research and writing for The Atlantic over the last two years.

Below is an extract from the book published with permission from the author together with a brief introduction written for Danwei:

Introduction:

The passage picks up with an interview in which Lawrence Summers is commenting on the pattern through which a country full of poor people, China, kept sending money to a country full of rich people, the United States:

“From a distance, this, to say the least, is strange,” Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary and president of Harvard, told me last year in Shanghai. He was referring to the oddity that a country with so many of its own needs still unmet would let “this $1 trillion go to a mature, old, rich place from a young, dynamic place.”

It’s more than strange. Some Chinese people are rich, but China as a whole is unbelievably short on many of the things that qualify countries as fully developed. Shanghai has about the same climate as Washington, D.C. — and its public schools have no heating. (Go to a classroom when it’s cold, and you’ll see 40 children, all in their winter jackets, their breath forming clouds in the air.) Beijing is more like Boston. On winter nights, thousands of people mass along the curbsides of major thoroughfares, enduring long waits and fighting their way onto hopelessly overcrowded public buses that then spend hours stuck on jammed roads. And these are the showcase cities! In rural Gansu province, I have seen schools where 18 junior-high-school girls share a single dormitory room, sleeping shoulder to shoulder, sardine-style.

Better schools, more-abundant parks, better health care, cleaner air and water, better sewers in the cities—you name it, and if it isn’t in some way connected to the factory-export economy, China hasn’t got it, or not enough. This is true at the personal level, too. The average cash income for workers in a big factory is about $160 per month. On the farm, it’s a small fraction of that. Most people in China feel they are moving up, but from a very low starting point.

So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an extreme — as in China — it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living standards lower than they could be... China’s savings rate is a staggering 50 percent, which is probably unprecedented in any country in peacetime. This doesn’t mean that the average family is saving half of its earnings — though the personal savings rate in China is also very high. Much of China’s national income is “saved” almost invisibly and kept in the form of foreign assets. Until now, most Chinese have willingly put up with this, because the economy has been growing so fast that even a suppressed level of consumption makes most people richer year by year.

But saying that China has a high savings rate describes the situation without explaining it. Why should the Communist Party of China countenance a policy that takes so much wealth from the world’s poor, in their own country, and gives it to the United States? To add to the mystery, why should China be content to put so many of its holdings into dollars, knowing that the dollar is virtually guaranteed to keep losing value against the RMB? And how long can its people tolerate being denied so much of their earnings, when they and their country need so much? The Chinese government did not explicitly set out to tighten the belt on its population while offering cheap money to American homeowners. But the fact that it does results directly from explicit choices it has made — two in particular. Both arise from crucial controls the government maintains over an economy that in many other ways has become wide open. The situation may be easiest to explain by following a U.S. dollar on its journey from a customer’s hand in America to a factory in China and back again to the T-note auction in the United States.

Paparazzi world

On very same day that the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center criticized many of China's major websites for "vulgar and unhealthy" content, some rather revealing paparazzi photos have appeared all over the Chinese Internet.

The photos apparently show actress Zhang Ziyi and her fiancé Vivi Nevo on a beach.

The photos are available on hundreds of web pages on websites as diverse as the popular Tianya forum (cited in the document criticizing websites for being vulgar) and the website of People's Daily (not cited in the criticism document).

Zhang's manager responded to the photos (translated from QQ):

Ziyi and her fiance were vacationing on a private beach enjoying a normal part of life for the two of them. This is a matter of personal privacy. I sympathize with Ziyi and with all celebrities who have had their privacy invaded. It is difficult for them to enjoy vacations and even ordinary, everyday life.

Earlier on Danwei: Fake Zhang Ziyi image on state-owned website, Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe, and hyper-nationalist ranting

Searching Baidu images

China has announced a list of websites criticized for "low and vulgar practices on the Internet" as part of the latest Net Nanny campaign.

China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (中国互联网违法和不良信息举报中心), under the Internet Society of China, has announced a list of websites which contain "large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths.”

Each website listed is annotated with either a remark that the website had been given a notice, but didn't take effective action to clean up its content, or that it did not quickly delete newly added vulgar and low content.

Google and Baidu were both censured for not taking effective action, while all the other websites on the list did not quickly delete offensive content.

This campaign is very similar to countless content cleansing campaigns over the past few years. It does not signify much except that the Net Nanny is making sure everyone knows who is boss before the Chinese New Year starts.

1. Google’s ‘web page search’ and ‘image search.’ The results show many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

2. Baidu’s forums and spaces contain large numbers of low and vulgar photographs, and some sections have obscene and pornographic content. The ‘webpage search’ within ‘Baidu search’ yields results that contain many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

3. Sina’s photo album and blog columns.

4. Sohu’s photo albums, blog columns, and Internet forums' images section.

5. Tengxun’s Sousou (search) images, photo album columns, and personal spaces.

6. Netease’s photo album column.

7. Chinaren community’s ‘Tietie Tutu (images).’

8.Zhongsou’s community section.

9. Mop’s images 'pretty girls’ (漂亮 MM) section.

Daily Sunshine
January 5, 2008

Shenzhen's charmingly named Daily Sunshine newspaper leads with a widely reported story on its front page:

17 board members of the state-owned overseas investment company CITIC Pacific, including its chairman Larry Yung (荣智健), were questioned by Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). The SFC launched a formal investigation into CITIC Pacific last month after the company predicted a 15.5 billion Hong Kong dollar loss from its currency bets last year.

The son of 'red Capitalist' Rong Yiren (荣毅仁) who was Vice-President of the PRC from 1993 to 1998, Larry Yung has topped the Forbes list of the richest Chinese several times.

His personal wealth was recently reported having shrunk by 70% from 3 billion US dollars at its peak

Other stories on the Daily Sunshine front page include:

● China Mobile will start issuing its 3G mobile phone numbers in Shenzhen on January 8. The new phone numbers, with their 188 prefix, are touted as the most "auspicious phone number ever".

● Li Zuopeng (李作鹏), a former PLA general who was sentenced for 17 years in 1981 for his role in what has been officially termed as the "counterrevolutionary coup plotted by the Lin Biao anti-party clique" died yesterday. Li was 95 years old.

For the New Year, Yao Ming stops by Liu Xiang's place to see how his recovery is progressing. Coca-Cola features prominently in this video broadcast on CCTV-News. Soft ad? Lots of people think so. (via Sina)

From Youku, a street performer outside the Shanghai train station on January 1. Looks like it was a pretty windy day. There's more video here.

Jesus plays a mean bass

Jesus returns to the cover of So Rock! magazine for the December issue, which arrived on newsstands just last week.

The rock icon previously appeared as Buddy Christ on the cover of issue 45 in 2005. Here, the message is less vulgar and slightly more positive: "New Year / God Bless Every Fxxking Guy." A relatively frequent cover model, Jesus also appeared on issues 34 and 36.

Featured in this issue is an irreverent take on Chinese Democracy, the new Guns N' Roses album. It's the group's first studio album in fifteen years so, like much of the western press, So Rock! mixes an album review with snarky commentary on how long it took to produce. Most of the feature is devoted to a look back at how the music industry has changed in the last decade and a half, from technological changes that brought about the iPod and MySpace, to the wax and wane of various musical trends, departed musicians, and the changing lineup of frontman Axl Rose's band.

In a related article, the magazine mocks Qin Gang, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson who brushed aside a journalist's question about the long-delayed album by calling rock music nothing more than noise that no mature adult would enjoy. An interview with a Mr. Bird Anus (禽肛, a homophone for the spokesperson's name) describes the health risks of rock music and the health benefits of saccharine domestic pop, and details how officials at the Ministry of Culture put themselves on the line every day, sacrificing their own moral health to screen porn and other unhealthy media that would destroy domestic harmony if it were to reach the public.

Interestingly, the magazine doesn't mention the common Chinese translation of the album's title: 中国民主. Instead, it uses the English name or its own translation, 天朝德先生, a clever combination of "celestial kingdom," a poetic name for China that's often used ironically, and the May 4-era term "Mr. Democracy."

This issue of So Rock! also contains an interesting profile of Zhao Yiran (赵已然), an aging bohemian musician and a fixture of the rock scene since the 80s. Interviewed by a 22-year-old writer, Zhao, also known as Zhao Lao Da, talks about his upbringing, his brother, his repudiation of western science and modernity, and how Nietzsche made his life make sense.

Here are a few excerpts:

Strait Herald
January 1, 2009

It's 2009, the last time that revelers can ring in the New Year while wearing novelty year-themed glasses, seen here on the cover of Xiamen-based Strait Herald.

People's Daily and other party papers led with an article on President Hu Jintao's New Year's address (summarized at the China Daily). Additionally, January 1 is the 30th anniversary of the Message to Compatriots in Taiwan, an overture to Taiwan authorities issued by the Standing Committee of the NPC in 1979 (more information here). President Hu spoke yesterday to mark the occassion, and most papers devoted a front-page headline to that news today.

In addition to putting both of Hu's speeches on the front page, Southern Metropolis Daily covers the latest development in one of the biggest stories of the second half of 2009: the melamine milk scandal. From 8 in the morning until after 10 at last night, Tian Wenhua and three other Sanlu executives appeared before a three-judge panel, where Tian admitted the company's misdeeds.

New Express also puts Hu on the cover, but surrounds him with eight major things to watch in 2009 — some national, others local to Guangzhou. In order:

1. National Day: There'll be a military parade this year to observe the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic
2. Preserve 8: China's growth target for 2009
3. Employment: A major challenge this year
4. 4 Trillion: The stimulus package the goverment announced in November
5. Personal Income Tax: The threshold will be increased yet again
6. Bus Rapid Transit to expand in Guangzhou
7. Subway: Guangzhou Metro line 5 will open
8. New Bridge: The Liede Bridge in Guangzhou's Tianhe district may alleviate congestion

And the entire front page of Chinese Business View is devoted a New Year's editorial that bids farewell to 2008, with all its tragedies and triumphs, and looks ahead to 2009.

People's Daily

Southern Metropolis Daily

New Express

Chinese Business View

Asia Business Leaders (东方企业家) is a monthly magazine started in 2006 by a group of people who defected from the popular news magazine Modern Weekly （周末画报) and other publications.

Jean Chen (陈俊) is a senior editor at the magazine and writes a blog. A native of Shanghai, Chen has worked in that city and in Beijing for TV stations, websites and newspapers including the Economic Observer.

At Asia Business Leaders, Chen covers Internet and digital business news.

He briefly answered some questions from Danwei about China's economic prospects for 2009.

What are your predictions for 2009 for China's economy?

The first half of the year will be the most difficult period. But the real situation will be even more severe than what has already been reported.

What do you think China's GDP growth of 2009 will be?

The predicted 8% rise, which the government wants to attain, will be hard to reach.

Which businesses do you think will be most affected by the economic recession, and which will benefit from the recession?

The most affected will be foreign trade, logistics, and real estate.

The ones that won't be affected are Internet gaming and e-commerce businesses.

Chinese government officials will benefit from the economic recession. They won't lose their jobs. The government will also benefit from the 4 trillion yuan they'll put into the stimulating the economy.

Asia Business Leaders December issue

Will companies like Baidu and QQ (Tencent) be affected?

No. Their business is driven by people who shut themselves in with the Internet.

What effects will the recession have on Internet media in China?

Internet media will integrate with print media. Like now, I preview who I will be interviewing on my blog, and collect questions from the readers.

Immediately after the interview, I write up interesting tidbits on the blog. Then when it is printed, I will paste it in and link to it. Recently I have also started to use social networking sites and microblogging — Twitter.

Yangtse Evening Post
December 31, 2008

Today's Yangtse Evening Post chose the following ten stories as this year's top ten fake news items.

'Fake news' (假新闻) has become a frequently heard term to refer to made-up stories and hoaxes that have become commonplace in China's censored anarchic media. According to the Yangtse Evening Post, the following news stories all appeared in Chinese newspapers and print magazines, but it does not name the publications.

Chinese peace keeper swallowed by python in Congo
March 2

A Chinese engineering unit dispatched to Congo (DRC) on a UN peace keeping mission returned home. In an interview, Zhang Yi, a translator with the unit told the newspaper that poisonous snakes and pythons are very common in the country. The barracks were constructed in special ways and the soldiers had to wear long rubber boots to prevent being hurt by the snakes.

Despite all the precautions being taken, tragedy still happened: A soldier didn't return after going out to relieve himself. The searching group found a huge python with a bulging belly. The beast was killed and gutted and the soldier was found but he was already dead.

On March 5, the peace keeping office of the Defense Ministry denied the report, saying "such accident has never happened to our troops in Congo" . The next day, the media which published the article issued a statement saying that the source provided false information during the interview.

Shanghai dialect "dia" ( 嗲) enters online Oxford dictionary
March 19

The Oxford online dictionary recently added a new entry: "dia" ("嗲" in Chinese). Along with "dia" as a noun, there is also "diaist", "diaistic","diaism" and other derivatives...

..."嗲", a character which takes its origin from the English word "dear", now makes its way back to the English language again. According to John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, it was the influence of Shanghai as a global metropolis that convinced the dictionary to create an entry for "dia".

It is said that the news was denied by Oxford University. Beijing Youth Daily traced the origin of the story to the blog of a Taiwanese university student who was studying in Shanghai.

Real estate developer association chairman: Destroy Forbidden City to make room for new property development
March 25

"The math is very simple: instead of spending billions of yuan on maintenance every year, why can't we just blow it up, and make room for new buildings, which can solve the high property prices in Beijing caused by the scarcity of land resources?" a developer told the media recently.

Hu Yunjing, chairman of Beijing's real estate developer association agreed with that idea. According to Hu, 24 million square meters of surface space would be created had the Forbidden City been totally demolished. The space would be enough for buildings capable of housing 1.2 million people.

This, again, is an Internet spoof that made its way to the print media. In the original Internet post, it was clearly stated that the story was a piece of "literature" rather than "fact".

The Economic Observer is one of China's best weekly newspapers. Its website has an English section comprising translations from the paper and some original writing.

Today, they also published an 84 page electronic book in PDF format titled Hope Through the Storm.

The book includes stories about shoddy school construction and the Sichuan earthquake, the melamine milk scandal and Beijing's post Olympic economic blues.

You can download it for free here or read about it on this web page.

The blog xiaoerjing is self described as "tales of an American Muslim trying to make a life in the state of Wu", but it's more than that.

In a post written today, the blogger says:

in an effort to be more systematic with language acquisition i'm making a plan. i'm currently working at chinese, manchu, uyghur and wu (specifically changzhou and shanghai wu. to hell with suzhou hua).

Neglecting Suzhou dialect, what a lightweight!

Nonetheless, his blog includes an glossary of "common Islamic and Arabic phrases" in English, Chinese, pinyin, Arabic, Persian, and Uyghur.

Aside from his linguistic skills, he can code: on his blog you can download dashboard widgets (for Mac only) that use translation and character conversion from Popup Chinese and nciku.

This is the second installment of a two part essay by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of Global Shanghai, 1850–2010.

The first part of the essay was published earlier on Danwei: A brief history of Shanghai's future.

Pudong's special economic zone [is] highlighted by the multi-scintillating Jetsons-style Oriental Pearl TV tower…
Pepe Esobar, “Shanghai Rocks!” AsiaTimes Online, October 29, 2003

Where Las Vegas Meets Blade Runner
Headline to a story about Shanghai architecture, The Guardian, November 8, 2004

To call the city science fictional is correct but too general…the landscape offers a full spectrum of sci-fi echoes and allusions…
Mark Kingwell, The City of Tomorrow, Harper’s Magazine, February 2005

Shanghai’s ties to science fiction, the most future-oriented of genres, are many and varied. Consider these links to film and other visual arts alone:

As my opening quotes suggest, the contemporary cityscape routinely inspires people to site parallels to televisions shows and films set in either futuristic versions of real cities (Blade Runner’s action unfolds in the L.A. of 2019) or completely made-up places (the Jetsons call Orbit City home).

The Pearl of the Orient Tower and other space-age structures located in today’s Pudong sometimes pop up in works of entertainment set in a Shanghai of the future—as is the case with Code 46, a cloning film directed by Michael Winterbottom.

Stylized versions of Pudong’s future skyline are featured in Wong Kar-wai’s sci-fi inflected film 2046, as well as in “Five Centuries of Progress, 1974-2474,” a World’s Fair-themed posted by fantasy artist Steve Thomas blogged about and shown recently at Shanghaiist.

Turning from the visual arts to literature, we again find plenty of diverse Shanghai connections. Here are three relating to Western sci-fi luminaries whose literary careers began between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s:

Jules Verne mentions Shanghai in passing in his 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days and used the city as the main setting for his lesser-known 1879 novel Tribulations of a Chinese Gentleman.

Aldous Huxley—not just a sci-fi writer, of course, but the author of Brave New World, a classic in the genre—included a description of the city in his 1926 book Jesting Pilate, using phrasing that still gets quoted in some Shanghai guidebooks.

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, and the action in one of his best-known books, 1984’s Empire of the Sun, takes place in and just outside of the metropolis.

The three don'ts

President Hu Jintao's speech last week commemorating the 30th anniversary of China's reform era contained a number of quotable phrases, and the one that has received the most attention was the "three don'ts": 不动摇, 不懈怠, 不折腾.

The China Daily translated this as "don't sway back and forth, relax our efforts or get sidetracked." Op-eds and blog posts over the past week have attempted to explain precisely what President Hu meant by 不折腾, and at a press conference yesterday, State Council Information Office Minister Wang Chen offered up his interpretation:

[In response to a reporter's question,] Wang Chen said, "General Secretary Hu Jintao's important speech at the 30th anniversary of the 3rd plenary session of the 11th Party Central Committee was profound in its ideological content, but it also contained vivid language drawn from the masses. I too noticed that when the General Secretary mentioned 'don't waver, don't slacken, don't get sidetracked,' the audience chuckled in understanding, showing that they truly endorsed President Hu's words.

Speaking of his own interpretation of the phrase, Wang raised his voice: "In my understanding, when General Secretary Hu said 'don't get sidetracked' at such a solemn occasion in which he was speaking for the Party Central Committee to sum up the experiences and lessons of the past thirty years, he wanted to express that the great successes achieved by the party and the people over the last thirty years of reforms were fundamentally an unwavering adherence to socialism with Chinese characteristics, an unwavering adherence to the theoretical system of socialism with Chinese charactistics. It is none other than this road and this theoretical system that will, over the next thirty or fifty years, allow China to achieve even greater successes and better development, and to stand tall among the peoples of the world."

Wang concluded by saying, "don't get sidetracked" means that we must advance courageously down this road, and it is indeed the wish of everyone in the country and the common will of the entire party.

That makes things a little clearer. However, there's still the issue of whether "don't get sidetracked" is the ideal translation of 不折腾. Yesterday's press conference didn't decide the issue:

Significantly, the interpreter simply rendered 不折腾 into pinyin, to the amusement of the entire assembly of journalists. Perhaps bu zheteng will become an English-language proper noun in the future.

Kai Pan at the group blog CN Reviews today posted a list of English China Blogs To Watch In 2009.

The list includes some of the usual suspects of the English language China blog scene. Danwei is in there, although we are chastised for publishing a large "amount of book reviews and high-brow culture posts that go on and on" which Kai finds "too esoteric and irrelevant".

In other English China blog news, voting for the Chinalyst blog awards of 2008 closes today. There are some good finds amongst the nominees, although it seems Chinalyst is run by robots because there are also many blogs on the list that have not been updated in months.

The grand old daddy of English language blog listings is the China Blog List, compiled by John Pasden of Sinosplice.

Finally, occasional Danwei contributor Peter Micic now has his own blog, An Imperfect Pen, about an eclectic variety of China related topics topics from history and music.

Raymond Zhou (周黎明) is a well-known Chinese film critic, bilingual blogger and former China Daily columnist.

Zhou is the author of many popular books including The Seven Veils of Salome (莎乐美的七层纱) and Hollywood Politics and Economics (好莱坞启示录), as well as collections of Chinese film criticism.

Earlier this year, China Intercontinental Press published a collection of 99 columns from his time at the state-owned China Daily titled X-Ray: Examining the China Enigma.

Below is an extract about 'human search flesh engines', originally published in 2006.

What is the difference between the masses and the mob?

For me, the former express their opinions rationally while the latter try to impose their judgment on others by means that are unacceptable in a civilized society.

Some outside China tend to see China's netizens in rosy colors - as mostly young, educated and well-informed. I bet they haven't surfed a typical Chinese Web forum. One is as likely to encounter fist-waving and vituperation as a sensible discussion, more so when it involves a hot topic. Something like the recent incident of a supposed adulterer hunted down by slogan-shouting throngs numbering in hundreds of thousands.

After a husband revealed online the details of his wife having an affair with a college student, thousands joined in the denunciation. Online sleuths later uncovered the true identity of the student, leading to calls of harassment and threats of various kinds, including "to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband". Very pompous language reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.

Did these people care whether or not the allegation was true? And if yes, did they have the right to act out their moral indignation in ways that were so obviously out of line with law and order?