Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Xu Qian and Guo Zhijun, from If You Are the One's first migrant worker special

China’s matchmaking reality TV shows are a much more harmonious place following an early June overhaul meant to root out materialism, fakery, and vulgarity.

The shows, such as Jiangsu TV’s If You Are the One (非诚勿扰, a personals-ad line meaning “sincere inquiries only”), pitted sharp-tongued women against eager suitors and featured sharp-tongued banter from both sides, but their methods drew criticism even as they brought high ratings: some contestants were called gold-diggers, others became embroiled in unrelated scandals involving risqué photos and sex tapes, and shows were accused of deliberately fomenting class unrest. For example, the mother of one bachelor described her ideal daughter-in-law in this way: “She can’t be a rural girl. If her family isn’t well off, then sometimes it would her mom coming in from the countryside, and other times it will be her older brother….then our home would be a hotel!”

After SARFT stepped in, vulgarity was eliminated by the ejection of controversial contestants, materialism was countered by a the addition of a professor from a Party school, who represented the moderating voice of the establishment, and then on July 18, the rural population was placated with a special episode of If You Are the One devoted to migrant workers.

In the piece translated below, Liu Yuan, publicity director for the editorial department of Jiangsu TV, which produces the program, explained why the station decided to focus on migrants. It’s interesting to note the term translated “migrant workers” in the piece is 外来人员务工, literally “staff from outside,” rather than the more traditional 农民工, or “peasant laborers.” Huang Han, the Party school professor, went even further and advocated calling these post-80s migrants “new urbanites” (新市民). A second migrant worker special was broadcast the following week, to mixed reviews.

Last Sunday night, If You Are the One began the first special episode of its half-year of broadcast: a special episode titled “Migrant Workers.”

For half a year, over a hundred thousand single men and women have applied to take part in If You Are the One, and among this group, we discovered a special population – migrant workers born in the 1980s. Coming from the countryside, they are pursuing careers in the city, and they believe that through self-reliance and hard work they can create a place for themselves in there. They are young and have their own dreams and desires for love, and they hope that they can find a partner with whom they can weather the storms and build a happy life. Our producers discovered that many of these migrant workers filled out two application forms when applying to the program: one for the production team, and the other to keep as a memento….

Danwei Jobs: Real jobs in China's media, communications and creative industries.

Adjunct Faculty - Modern Chinese Economics/Doing Business in China

Employer: IES Abroad Beijing Center
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Today
Contract: Temporary
Hours: Part-time
Categories: Education

Programme Manager - The Bookworm International Literary Festival

Employer: The Bookworm
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Yesterday
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full-time
Categories: Writing

City Weekend Online Content Editor

Employer: Ringier China
Location: Beijing
Date posted: Thursday, 22nd July 2010
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full-time
Categories: Writing

Shenzhen Evening News, July 30, 2010

News that woman in Shenzhen having her rectum "stitched closed" by her midwife during her cesarean delivery touched a chord with the public whose discontent to the current health care system often lead them to assume the worst when it comes to doctors' ethics.

The woman's husband affirmed that the midwife sealed his wife's rectum in retribution for their failure to come up with a more generous bribe; the midwife countered that she might have overstepped the boundaries as a midwife to tie up the patient's bleeding hemorrhoid, but by doing so she only meant to do good.

A panel of medical experts were called upon to investigate into the case, but evidence is insufficient to support either claim.

What is clear is that prior to the woman's labor, her husband gave an envelop containing 100 yuan to the midwife, who accepted it. The envelope with money was later discovered in the patient's cabinet. However, the two sides differ in when and under what circumstances the money was returned, and what the midwife meant when asking the couple whether they were "prepared."

The midwife claimed that she initially took the money out of politeness only to realize it was wrong, so she returned it the next day, while the husband claimed that the midwife returned the money after he threatened legal action. As to the exact meaning of the contentious "have you prepared" (准备好了吗？), the husband believed that bribe was implied while the midwife insisted she was just asking whether the couple were ready for the C-section. In addition, the husband also accused the midwife of destroying evidence by tearing the stitches open under the pretense of giving his wife a massage.

Modern Express, July 29, 2010

Reporting around the explosion in a plastics factory in Nanjing has been patchy. The factory, which has been called a "time bomb" before a gas leak killed 12, was in newspapers in the former capital today.

Modern Express is a Xinhua-run commercial newspaper. Today a black cover points to the explosion in Nanjing, and about how it is testing its people. However, no other major newspaper in the city had the explosion in a featured position on the front page.

Yangtse Evening Post

The Yangtse Evening Post went with the time allocated for National day holidays and the Pakistan airplane crash;

Oriental Guardian

Nanjing Daily

The Oriental Guardian goes with the anniversary of the Tangshan earthquake, and the government organ Nanjing Daily with a small side banner about the explosion being under control;

Xinhua Daily

The Xinhua Daily (not affiliated with the Xinhua News Agency) marks the ninth 'double support' model city commendation ceremony, and mentions the explosion in a small piece at the bottom of the page.

Tip from Media Wang's Sina microblog.

Next Media, publisher of Apple Daily in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has become famous for it news animations of events like Tiger Wood's car crash and fight with his wife and the failed crotch bomb. Above is Next Media's take on Steve Jobs and the iPhone antenna affair.

Hu Jintao's jet trails

From Wired:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

Recorded Future has a blog where they explain some of their methods and show case studies. It includes two items about Hu Jintao that are linked below.

The posts use open source data from the Internet to track past Hu Jintao's travel arrangements. The first post attempts to analyze if his behavior has changed over the last year, and what that might mean his successor who is widely believed to be Xi Jinping (he of the well-fed foreigners remark).

The second post looks at Hu's travel arrangements in the run up to the Copenhagen climate talks last year and examines if it is possible to understand "intent through travel records".

Protests against factory before blast, broken windows after; source

Today is the 34th anniversary of the Tangshan earthquake, but the Chinese Internet has been buzzing the whole day with news of a different disaster.

State-owned news agency Xinhua reports:

A powerful explosion at a factory in eastern China's Jiangsu Province Wednesday killed at least six people and injured many more, witnesses and hospital sources said.

Xinhua reporters saw at least six people recorded as dead at hospitals treating people injured in the blast that ripped through an abandoned plastics and chemical factory in northern Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu.

An initial investigation showed gas leak from a pipeline going through the plant at Mufu East Road of Qixia District triggered the blast at about 10:10 a.m..

Buildings and vehicles within a 100-meter radius around the factory were seriously damaged.

Much of the commentary and reporting on the Internet by citizens has taken a very different line from Xinhua. A few noteworthy items:

• According to a posting on the Xici forum website linked below, residents have been warning about the dangers of having the factory since 2009. The posting calls the factory a "time bomb".

The photo above also shows before and after the blast photos taken in the area around the factory; the signs in the top photo complain about a factory in the residential area.

Immediate satirical reaction: Chinese cartoon mocking official who stopped TV crew; source

• A Jiangsu TV journalist broadcasting live from the scene of the explosion was reprimanded by an official whose identity is currently being debated on the Chinese Internet. The official told the journalist to stop filming, saying "Who allowed you to broadcast live?" (哪个让你们做直播的)

This saying has been widely circulated on the Internet and is already the subject of mocking Photoshop jobs. The videos are still circulating on the Chinese Internet and have also been saved on various servers outside the country as they may get deleted from Chinese websites.

• One person posting on the XCar forum says that windows in buildings as far as 3km away from the blast have shattered. Link below with many photographs.

• At the time of writing, the official death toll is six, but Internet reports are claiming as many as 100 people dead.

Update (2010.7.29): The official death toll according to Xinhua is now 10.

See also ESWN: Newspaper Coverage Of Nanjing Gas Explosion

Dongguan Times July 28th, 2010

This morning, Dongguan Times published an exposé on the resurrection of slot machines in surrounding townships. These illegal devices were recently stamped out by localities to reduce gambling in the area, an effort which met with temporary success. Dongguan Times reports that slot machines have “risen from the ashes” in several surrounding townships, such as Hengli (横沥) and Shijie (石碣).

During the second half of last year, Dongguan’s strategy to punch out all slot machines was highly effective. In a short period of time, the once rampant slot machines seemed to disappear completely. However, recent information has shown that these slot machines are making a vicious comeback. In township avenues and alleyways, the slots can be seen everywhere.

Other headlines include a story about a Hubei prosecutor, Feng Bin (冯缤) who appealed a court order which caused his wife to lose her job, eventually causing Feng to lose his own job. Feng spoke with Dongguan Times reporters about his outrage, amidst warnings from officials to give up his case.

Another headline introduces the story of Lu Zhisheng (卢志胜), a Taiwanese gangster who fled to the mainland to avoid prison in Taiwan.

Lu Zhisheng was born in Taibei in 1972, a member of the Tiandao gang (天道盟天鸣会). In 2008, a warrant was put out on Lu for smuggling drugs. Because he had nowhere to escape in Taiwan, Lu moved to the mainland in order to continue his drug trafficking.

Dodolook, a girl from Guilin whose online videos became famous in China in 2006, is still around. In this new video, she compares Mandarin vocabulary as spoken in Taiwan with that of the Mainland. Also available on Youku.

The new Sinica podcast went up last week, hosted at the excellent Mandarin and Cantonese learning website PopUp Chinese:

Hosted by Kaiser Kuo with yours truly and Will Moss as guests, we discuss the state of the English language blog scene in China: Death of the China blog (link includes several ways of listening to the podcast).

We mention a lot of blogs; one good blog that has been around almost since the beginning of the China blog scene is David Wolf's Silicon Hutong. There are plenty of other good blogs that we did not mention in Danwei's Model Worker awards.

There's a good discussion in the comments section of the Sinica post, and some follow up on other blogs: Peking Duck and Will Moss' own Imagethief.

One last comment: Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated.

Oriental Guardian, July 27, 2010

Microblogs are a great resource for commuter newspapers. At just 140 characters, an entire microblog post can be quoted in a front page news-bite with enough space left over for a headline and short introduction.

Today's Oriental Guardian reproduces a post by director Feng Xiaogang, whose Aftershock (唐山大地震), a family drama set against the backdrop of the Tangshan and Wenchuan earthquakes, broke box-office records over the weekend.

With the box-office take for Aftershock skyrocketing, Feng Xiaogang has finally lashed out. In a microblog post yesterday, he replied to questions for the first time. "A certain expert commented that Aftershock has only tears but no feeling. This realization is not just unique: it is also displays great imagination. To be able to control the audience to the point of preventing their rush of tears from reaching their heart, to generate tears but not move the heart, requires technical ability far beyond that of Avatar. You'd basically have to join up with aliens. Your humble Feng has not mastered this sort of psychic power, so you've praised me too highly. Additionally, surveys show that cinemas in this country do not yet have plans to install oil sprayers to induce tears.

Feng also replied to accusations that he was exploiting a national disaster for profit

If this were the Cultural Revolution, charging Aftershock with "exposing national scars and exploiting a national tragedy for profit" would get me shot and my family would be billed for the bullet. And logically, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Titanic, and Hibiscus Town would all have to be brought to justice. Because their crimes are trading on fallen warriors, trading on the plight of the Jewish people, trading on the victims of a shipwreck, and trading on the victims of the Cultural Revolution. This age has finally made progress. I am fortunate, but fears linger.

The paper's cover photos pair a submarine, which illustrates a story on the US-South Korea war games going on off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula, with an image taken in the DPRK, whose 57th anniversary of Victory in the Fatherland Liberation War is observed today.

The Beijing Times, July 26, 2010

The Beijing Times headlines today's newspaper with the story running at the top of Xinhua's Chinese language website and on a number of papers around the country: the government's new rules to deal with "naked officials", i.e. government officials whose family have emigrated to another country and who are therefore considered likely to flee China once they have saved enough money from corrupt practices such as embezzlement and bribery.

The rules are not very harsh. The China Daily explains them thusly:

The rules stipulate that these officials must disclose their rank, the whereabouts of their spouses and children if they have moved overseas, while overseeing any and all roles these officials play in matters of public affairs. These rules also dictate the procedures these officials must follow when applying for personal passports, as well as requiring them to disclose any travel plans to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan prior to departure.

The large photo shows an outdoor stand offering trips to seaside resort Beidaihe. According to the newspaper, the stand is run by a "fake" travel agency. The caption connects the photo with a story reported in the newspaper a days previously in which a travel agency using fake documents had arranged a bus from Beijing to Shenyang. The bus had an accident and three people died.

Another noteworthy headline is at the bottom in the box: "New demolition laws not dead yet". The story says that a Peking University professor believes new laws governing how residents are removed from their residences to make way for demolition and new development is still on the cards.

He believes the law will be considered together with amendments to China's land law, which will also cover taxes and levies on peasant farmers' houses. The professor's statements come after much media speculation that the new law was already unlikely to pass.

China Computerworld, July 26, 2010

The current issue of China Computerworld (计算机世界) features a cover story on Tencent, the Internet giant that runs the QQ web portal and Internet messaging software and has its fingers in practically every other sector of the online economy.

The report is written from the perspective of Tencent's competitors in the industry, and it is their exclamation of frustration that provides the feature's title: Fucking Tencent ("狗日的"腾讯).

Critics quoted in the piece complain about Tencent's lack of creativity: never a first mover, it enters established sectors and muscles out the competition — shamelessly imitating its rivals, according to some accusations:

Tencent is never the first to "eat crab" [to try out new things]. It looks for a space in a mature markets to shove its way in. However, the methods it chooses also invite controversy: imitation, sometimes unscrupulous "shanzhai" copying.

As early as 2006, Sina founder Wang Zhidong openly accused [Tencent founder] Ma Huateng of being the industry's "plagiarism king," and of brazen plagiarism at that. Similar voices have been heard in the years since. Most recently, Data Center of the China Internet (DCCI) director Hu Yanping questioned Tencent's creative abilities, saying that it was not an outstanding innovator, and was actually the mortal enemy of innovation among smaller Internet enterprises.

Beginning with its first product, OICQ (the former incarnation of Tencent QQ), which copied ICQ, Tencent has never been able to bury its "copying gene." First it brought in QQ Show and a line of value-added products from Korea, then it imitated Sina by building a portal website. In online gaming, it copied Ourgame (联众) by developing a platform, and then like Shanda brought in international players, started in-house development (like Netease). Then there was the C2C e-commerce site Paipai, and the third-party payment service TenPay (财付通). Without exception, these were "shanzhai" products, which lies at the root of the hatred for Tencent.

"Microblogs, anti-virus, e-commerce, and now group purchasing: the business models in these sectors are there for the taking, and everyone is copying. How can you say that Tencent should be generous and not try to make money there?" asked Xie Wen, a long-time Internet professional. In an interview with this reporter, he said that the animosity toward Tencent within the industry is like "whining children," and "Fifty paces laughing a hundred paces."

As for the charge of imitation, Ma Huateng's response is: Imitation is the most reliable form of innovation.

As the excerpt suggests, the article itself is much less of a hit-piece than the provocative cover implies. Nevertheless, Tencent felt it necessary to respond to the brutal assassination of its beloved penguin mascot:

Statement by Tencent

On the cover of its July 26, 2010 issue, China Computerworld made a savage attack on Tencent. The Company makes the following statement:

Tencent is a meticulous and responsible company. QQ is a nationally-recognized trademark. For many years, we have striven to provide superior Internet services to the general public and to make the lives of our users richer and more convenient. We welcome commentary from the media on our products, services, and company development.

However, the China Computerworld feature story, without conducting any interviews with Tencent, used crude language against a responsible enterprise and used a disgusting illustration to damage our trademark and corporate image, creating an extremely adverse reaction and rudely hurting the feelings of the vast numbers of ordinary Tencent users. We strongly condemn this action and reserve the right to take legal action to protect our rights.

Tencent
2010.07.26

Update (2010.07.27): China Computerworld has responded with a pledge to continue its independent reporting on the industry.

We believe that controversy and differences of opinion are objective things that neither Tencent nor China Computerworld can avoid. For this reason, we choose to stay true to our duty as part of the media; we choose to stay true to objective questions about the industry; we choose to pull back the curtain and face controversy head-on.

We have noticed that upon its publication, the cover of this issue sparked attention and discussion, with supporters as well as critics. We will listen with an open mind to all opinions and, following our thirty-one-year principle of objective, independent reporting, will strive to provide the public with richer, more worthwhile content.

"Dragonfly" Hu Xinglian, a professional wailer in Chonqging

A fascinating feature story in The Beijing News earlier this week took a look at the careers of professional wailers, performers paid to present the eulogy at a funeral and lament the deceased through anguished songs.

Cell Phone (手机), a TV drama that premiered earlier this year, featured a character named Lu Zhixin who worked as a wailer. Catering to the public’s curiosity about the profession, newspapers in Chongqing and Chengdu tracked down some local wailers. The report in The Beijing News pulls together the stories of several of those individuals to present an overview of the funeral performance industry.

One can make a decent amount of money being a proxy mourner. The profession recently came to the attention of the public through the character Lu Zhixin, a professional wailer, in the popular TV adaptation of Cell Phone.

Wailers actually belong to an ancient profession that now keeps a low profile thanks to its singular characteristics. In Chongqing and Chengdu, wailers and their special bands have, over the course of more than a decade, developed into a professional, competitive market.

Studies show that wailers are predominantly laid-off workers. To support themselves, they rely on weeping and melancholy songs for their income. They and their bands believe that, like everyone else, they are engaging in a profession and performing a job.

Hu Xinglian’s hair is tied into pigtails pointing up in opposite directions.

Her stage name means “Dragonfly” in the Chongqing dialect (叮叮猫), and the two pigtails, which resemble dragonfly wings, are her trademark. She ties them up at every “performance.”

She is fifty-two years old, and she is a professional wailer.

Modern Express, July 23, 2010

Typhoons and flooding in the south are on many Chinese newspapers front pages today. The Modern Express, a regional paper owned by Xinhua and published in Zhejiang, reports that a five-storey high tree fell over in Nanjing, while in Changzhou a three-storey building collapsed. Other papers cover flooding and heavy rains along the Yangtze on their front pages.

The top headline of the paper is the government announcement of the next big gathering of the Party: the Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th CPC Central Committee will take place in Beijing in October. The aim of the meeting is to discuss China's 12th Five-Year Program (2011-2015).

New Life Post, July 22, 2010

Not a single newspaper has the Dalian oil spill in a prominent place on the front page, although yesterday, the Kunming newspaper New Life Post featured one of the by-now famous photos of two men drowning in the oil slick. One was rescued, the other died.

Most of the Beijing newspapers today front with a story on Beijing's population reaching the 20 million mark, of whom city officials say 12.4 million have a Beijing residence permit (hukou) while 7.26 million are migrants who have been in the city for more than half a year.

The poster for Aftershock. Source: China news

Today is the opening of Feng Xiaogang's Aftershock (唐山大地震), a tear-jerker of a movie, with the promoters hinting that there won't be a dry eye in the cinema.

Based on the big earthquake of Tangshan in 1976, Feng's wife Xu Fan plays a mother who has to choose which of her offsprings will live. The film is also the first I-MAX movie made out of the United States, and predicted to be a top box office smash.

The Liaoshen Evening News published an investigation into the commercial backing of the film, interviewing its producer on the Tangshan side, Yao Jianguo (姚建国):

The Tangshan side of the project expressed that it wanted to 'invite' first-rate directors from the mainland to direct the film, but as for how much capital to invest, they didn't have a full picture. At this point in time, the deputy director of the Film Bureau of SARFT, Zhang Hongsen (张宏森) gave Tangshan three different packages. They were:

• Invest 50 million yuan, use The Knot (云水谣) as the standard;
• Invest 1.2 hundred million yuan, use The Banquet (夜宴) as the standard;
• Invest 3 hundred million yuan, use The Day After Tomorrow and Red Cliff (赤壁) as the standard.

The team eventually chose the second offer. They had considered choosing Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige to direct the film, but when both directors were unavailable they turned to "Feng Xiaogang, who was good at using small characters to reflect real times, and made commercial New Year movies (贺岁电影)" based on the release of war movie The Assembly (集结号), which made him appear more serious.

At the end of the article there was a 'related links' section, which summed up the Chinese film industry in very plain terms:

High production rate: In one year China is able to make 500 films

Dong Gang (童刚), the director of the Film Bureau of SARFT, said that in the first half year this year China produced 288 films. This year the total production rate could reach 500. This figure is third in the world after India and America. (From Tianjin Daily)

Quite sad: The percentage of loss for Chinese films is 70%

The deputy manager of the big shot New Film Association, Gao Jun (高军), accepted an interview and said that most of the films in China are cutting a loss. This is true for the majority of the 20 films shown in June. For example, Love In Cosmos (摇摆de婚姻) stopped showing after not making 5 million yuan, Ocean Heaven (海洋天堂) will hardly make the 8 million yuan it spent on production, and it would be hard for Welcome to Shamatown (决战刹马镇) to make a profit on its 16 million yuan production and 8 million yuan running costs. "At the moment procedures should be taken to cool down the market." (From Dahe Daily)

Daily Sunshine, July 22, 2010

Song Shanmu’s (宋山木) detention period was extended one month while awaiting trial on a rape case for which he was arrested on May 21st. Song allegedly demanded a female employee to pose naked while he photographed her, and then used the photos as blackmail to force the employee to sleep with him.

Song Shanmu is the founder of Sun Moon Education Group, a multinational group training center with almost 300 branches in more than 20 cities including London and New York. Until recently, Song’s bearded grin could be seen on billboards around China.

July 1 marked the 89th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

In this short video (viewable on Tudou), farmers take advantage of the Internet to accomplish an important project to mark the occasion. It has the feel of a viral ad done up in the style of a colorful piece of local news.

A transcript is below:

Yangtse Evening Post, July 21, 2010

Jiangsu's Yangtse Evening Post calls attention to the potential for rain in the evening. It also says that rain lowers temperatures by 10 degrees centigrade. However, tomorrow brings another hot day. The photo itself was actually taken the day before at Nanjing Xinjiekou at 3:40pm.

Main news items are listed on the side column:

• The first showing of Aftershock (the film about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake by Feng Xiaogang) is at 12 midnight tonight.
• Actor Sun Honglei sues an imitation biography.
• A white baby girl is born to a black couple.

Another interesting headline is related to the ongoing Bawang Group Chinese herbal shampoo scandal. The license for the product is shared with a product called Litao anti-hair loss shampoo (丽涛防脱洗发液), a product that had already expired, according to the State Food and Drug Administration website.

The original report, made by a National Business Daily journalist, also interviewed someone who works inside the Administration:

The main reason that the Administration can't "officially approve" the product is because they can't verify its special ability. In the fax published by the Bawang Group stating its original license it really did say that "the Ministry of Health did not organize the verification of the abilities of the product, and this license doesn't not recognize the effect that the product claims to have.

In other words, Bawang Group's shampoos, which claim that it could turn hair black using only natural herbal ingredients, were not approved by the relevant State bodies to begin with. In other myth-busting news, an article in China Entrepreneur Magazine calls into question Bawang's claim that it is a 'golden family of Chinese medicine with one hundred years of history' (百年的'中药世家'). One reason: the company was set up in 1989, according to the article.

The CCTV program that follows the evening Network News (新闻联播), Topics in Focus (焦点访谈), recently discussed the shocking phenomenon of bar hostesses, or 'sex industry workers,' wearing military uniforms.

The program was an investigation into the use of '07-issued uniform' (07式军服) among civilians, a practice that is illegal. It was exposed, according to Topics in Focus, in April this year, when some dodgy-looking bosses were discovered wearing the '07-issued uniform.' They turned out to be purchasing the clothes, putting name tags on them, and giving them to their staff to wear.

Another trade utilizing the uniforms is the sex industry. Bar hostesses were filmed in a show wearing military gear from the air force, navy, and army.

On July 12, a post on the iFeng forum shows stills from a parade in Dongguan, where ladies of the industry pose in nurse and army uniforms.

Daily Sunshine, July 20, 2010

There's not much that's sunny about the front page of today's Daily Sunshine:

Jia Baoyu is angry: Yu Xiaotong (于小彤), who plays the young Baoyu on the new TV adaptation of The Dream of Red Mansions, got into a scuffle with a spectator at a promotional event held in Suzhou. The paper quotes the spectator:

During the event, Director Li mentioned repeatedly how this adaptation is faithful to the original, and she trumpeted how this is the most complete adaptation of Red Mansions ever filmed. I've loved Red Mansions for years, and I couldn't hold back the truth: "Li Shaohong, you've sullied a classic!" Then the Yu Xiaotong, who plays the young Baoyu, who had come out a hundred meters, suddenly turned around and grabbed my collar: "What's that? Say it again" and then the hit me. I was about to reason with him, but then a group from the crew came out and surrounded me, supposedly to mediate but in actuality to "escort" Yu Xiaotong from the scene and away from the photographers.

However, the emcee of the event tells a different story:

Chen Yongzhou says...as it was about to conclude, a man in glasses stood atop a rock and shouted crude language, "the basic meaning was that Li Shaohong had sullied a classic, and the production team should get lost." This angered "young Baoyu," who charged forward to argue with that audience member. "The staff quickly came up to intercede, and from my vantage point I didn't see any shoving," Chen Yongzhou said. "At the time, I wondered whether this had all been arranged by someone."

Vegetable prices rise again: The CPI increased 3.8% in June; the price of vegetables, fruit, and nuts in Shenzhen rose anywhere from 12.4% to 19.8%.

Guangzhou to continue restricting traffic: On July 18, the city tried out a traffic reduction policy in preparation for the Asian Games: cars with license plates ending in an odd digit are only allowed to drive on odd-numbered days; even digits are allowed on even-numbered days. Over the course of nine hours on the first day of the trial, the city issued 6,352 tickets to violators, 70% of whom were from outside of Guangzhou. Many Shenzhen drivers arrived in Guangzhou unaware that their cars would be ticketed.

Floods in Sichuan: The old town of Guang'an in Sichuan Province is underwater. Flood waters have reached the Three Gorges Dam.

Shanghai Volkswagen General Manager killed in auto accident: Liu Jian and three other high-ranking managers of the automaker were killed near Jiuquan, Gansu Province, on Saturday when their car collided with a truck. Neither vehicle had license plates.