Red Herring reports that the crackdown on Sister Hibiscus is less than promised.:

If
there’s been pressure on Sister Hibiscus from on high, it comes as news
to Bokee.com (formerly BlogChina.com), which hosts her blog. A
spokesman for Bokee.com flatly denied that any such instructions had
been handed down. “No one from the government has said anything to us
about Sister Hibiscus,” said Mai Tian, director of Bokee.com’s
Interactivity Center.
Mr.
Mai noted that her blog, at furongjiejie.bokee.com, is still being
updated several times a day and remains, by far, one of Bokee’s most
visited blogs.
A Beijing Youth Daily
reporter who covers society, Internet, and entertainment also said she
had heard nothing about a government pronouncement on Sister Hibiscus.
Jeremy Goldkorn, Beijing-based publisher of Danwei.org, a web site devoted to media in China, compares
Sister Hibiscus to Gary Brolsma, the Saddle Brook, New Jersey man who
rode to unwelcome fame when a self-shot video of his lip-sync and dance
routine to Romanian dance-pop tune “Numa Numa” hit the web.
“That kid is conspicuously absent from Hollywood and the American news media today, and that certainly isn’t because of
some clampdown,” said Mr. Goldkorn. “The whole idea of a Furong Jiejie
clampdown is absurd.”

Rebecca McKinnion has some words for the sister.

Now the important thing to understand about Sister H., who is plain and
not very talented, is that her stardom was basically the result of
bloggers and chatroom denizens making fun of her - a situation which in
her egotism and lack of sophistication she herself failed to
understand.  The plot only thickens from there.

And also for Reuters:

Usually, when somebody claims to have been cracked down upon, a
responsible journalist will make the effort to get at least
off-the-record confirmation from official Chinese contacts (even if
indirectly via friends of Chinese officials or people who work in
Chinese media organizations who tend to know about crackdowns) that
such a crackdown has in fact occurred. When I worked as a journalist in
China, I myself ran across situations in which artists and writers
claimed to have been censored when the reality was they just weren’t
very talented - but were trying to salvage their careers by claiming
political victimhood and getting buzz with Western journalists. The
tactic works surprisingly often, I’m afraid.

In other Asian fraud news, Jeff Ooi has outed a photographer who wasn’t what he claimed to be:

There is a far bigger question to the fraudulent claims made by Natgeo photographer wannabe.
The integrity of photography website PhotoMalaysia.com,
which allows the fraudster prominent visibility in its online space and
on-ground activities distinctively related to it, is now severely in
question!
This
is a live story of how a popular web forum has been found to condone a
fraud, and despite the fact that its administrators have been notified
of questionable claims made in their website, had chosen to endorse the
fraudster.

You know your blog is influential when state media plagiarizes it:

China Economic Net, which is is a website under the state-owned Economic Daily (经济日报), has pirate-published a Danwei article verbatim:
China Economic Net: The final week of super voice girls
Danwei: The final week of TV sensation Super Voice Girls
Socialism is the best!

Big news in Malaysia, Dr Mahathir has returned his Protons, the national car that was part of his legacy.:

In a move that shocked many, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
has returned all his official vehicles belonging to Proton, in what
seems to be his latest show of displeasure. It is by far the loudest
show of protest that the Proton advisor has undertaken.
In a story so hot that Wong Chun Wai penned it for
The Star, where he reported sources as saying that Dr. Mahathir has
taken to using his personal vehicle to get to work, adding that he was
‘deeply hurt’ with the recent developments within Proton.

From Virginia Postrel, signs that China’s legal system is improving.:

The WaPost’s Philip Pan reports
on an extraordinary development in China: a class-action suit by rural
villagers forced into abortions and sterilizations. The key argument in
the case, which was organized by Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught legal
activist, is that these coercive measures violate a 2002 law
guaranteeing Chinese citizens "informed choice" in reproductive
matters. The country’s population-control policies are now supposed to
rely on financial incentives, not physical threats and coercion.
The lawsuit is not just a human-rights crusade. It’s a crucial test
of China’s commitment to the rule of law–a commitment that matters
greatly to the country’s economic development as well as its civil
society. Pan’s reporting suggests that central-government officials are
at least saying the right things. Toward the end of the piece, which is
well worth reading in its entirety, he interviews a central-government population-control honcho:

Yu Xuejin, a senior official with the national family planning
commission in Beijing, said his office had received complaints about
abuses in Linyi and asked provincial authorities to investigate. He
said the practices described by the farmers, including forced
sterilization and abortion, were "definitely illegal."

Lucia has some questions for the HR department running Malaysia’s space program.:

ahh… so malaysia is now in the process of selecting the right person to become the country’s first astronaut.
imagine!
854 people applied for the post! didn’t know there were so many people
that interested in going to the moon. however, it is not that easy to
get selected. there will be a series of rigorous tests going on to
short list the applicants….
well, malaysia’s vision - destination moon by 2020.
but what i don’t quite understand is the applicants are mostly in late
20s or 30s. let’s say a 32 years old is selected, and malaysia only
hope they’ll be able to send their first man as astronaut in 2020, this
means another 15 years time… by that time the 32 years old will be 48!
*blur blur*

Thailand’s government is regressing.:

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has extended his offensive
against journalists to his own press conferences, using a hand-held
buzzer to ridicule (and refuse to answer) questions he deems
"destructive." This undignified behavior has aroused considerable anger
in the international journalistic community. Combine this with the
bizarre cabinet meeting last week where Mr. Thaksin grilled his
ministers on which of them had a penis-enlargement operation, and it
looks like the Thai government is regressing back toward infancy.

More Here!

A test on the Great Firewall.

Monday’s gratuitous shots of the female body comes to us via Japundit.:

In case you missed it, Saturday was Samba day in Tokyo.
Samba dancers from Japan and other countries gathered for the Asakusa Samba Carnival parade where they strutted their stuff to drums and whistles before hundreds of thousands of spectators.

From the Marginal Revolution a China Fact.:

…in China, where government regulations severely limit distribution
and piracy is common, Hollywood studios took in a grand total of $1.5
million (slightly more than one-tenth of a penny per capita) from
theaters in the first quarter of 2005.

In spite of that, as noted at Keywords, Hollywood sees the Chinese market as a potential cash cow.:

Writing in the Asia Times, Zafar Anjum explores why China’s film industry has netted so much love from Hollywood, while India hasn’t produced a single art-house hit since Lagaan
won the best foreign language film Oscar in 2001. Part of his answer is
that the Indian film industry is content to live off of its loyal
viewers:

India’s bright directors at home don’t
give a damn about the global entertainment market. For them, netting in
the desis (natives) everywhere generates enough moolah.

Gateway Pundit informs us of the passing of a Bishop in China.

Bishop Xie was arrested for "loyalty and obedience to the Pope."
This painting commemorates the 120 Chinese Martyrs canonized in the year 2000 by John Paul II.
An elderly Chinese Catholic Bishop who had been jailed for 28 years because of his faith has died of leukemia in China:
Monsignor
Xie Shiguang, the bishop of Mingdong, died of leukemia on Thursday.
Xie, 88, was first arrested in 1955 by Chinese authorities "because of
his loyalty and obedience to the pope," and released a year later,
Vatican radio reported late Saturday.
He was arrested
again in 1958 and jailed until 1980, Vatican Radio said. Xie was also
imprisoned from 1984-1987, and finally for two years starting in 1990,
and was kept under surveillance by authorities until his death, the
radio report said.

North Korea may or may not return to the six-party talks. Via the Marmot, an argument from Cato that stopping getting North Korea from getting nukes :

The most recent round of six-party talks (involving China, Russia,
Japan, South Korea, North Korea and the United States) made, at best,
incremental progress toward a solution to the crisis. Throughout the
negotiations, the U.S. goal has remained the same: a complete,
verifiable and irreversible end to North Korea’s nuclear program.
A
growing number of influential Americans are dissatisfied with such a
“narrow” agenda, however. Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas,
Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Michael Horowitz of
the Hudson Institute are among those who demand that the United States
add North Korea’s human rights practices and the issue of regime
“transformation” to the list of topics the next round of six-party
talks must address. Congressional passage of the North Korean Human
Rights Act last year points to a similar strategy.
That approach would be a profound mistake.

I’ve said before that no one in Washington should be losing any sleep over the Sino-Russian wargames the same can’t be said for Pyongyang.:

Unless this isn’t a “War game”, but the preparation for staging for a lightning invasion of North Korea.
Not by us, but by the Communist Chinese and the Russians, who both
share a border and an unfortunate history with the Hermit Kingdom.
There are only three routes out of North Korea into China. The
Chinese have spent the last 4 years building elaborate fences to
control those three exits. The very last thing the Chinese want is
millions of famine suffering refugees streaming into China, and the
same goes for Russia.
And the very last thing either of these countries wants is one more
place where the United States has allies sharing a border with their
country. One way or another, North Korea is going to fall, its just a
question of will it be a “controlled fall” or a total catastrophe. If
nothing is done, catastrophe is assured, therefore, something must be
done, but the question is “by whom”. China has a great interest in
seeing that it’s a “controlled fall”, and so does Russia, and they both
have an interest in seeing that we stay out of it.

For more, check out Martyn’s latest post at the Peking Duck.

Finally, Mr Miyagi has new digs and his very own niamod!

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