EditorsWeblog is blogging that China will limit media licenses for foreign companies and more generally "exercise tighter control over the country’s cultural life."

On Tuesday China announced that it will tighten restrictions on foreign newspapers, television programs, books and performances. The goal is to strengthen control over China’s cultural life. According to the International Herald Tribune the new rules state: "Import of cultural products contrary to regulations will be punished according to the circumstances, and in serious cases the import license will be revoked. In the near future, there will be no more approvals for setting up cultural import agencies."

China will limit television companies as well as foreign-owned print media businesses as Chinese officials seek to address outside influences on the nation. The previously cited IHT article opines that:

The regulations may also be part of an effort to repair what one Chinese report recently called the "cultural trade deficit." In recent years, China has authorized publication of more than 12,000 foreign books in Chinese translations, but only 81 Chinese books have secured foreign publishing rights, said the report, which appeared in China Comment, a magazine run by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

It’s unclear just how great the impact on foreign media businesses will be, but for now it is clear that bids by Viacom and Disney, among others, are on hold. If the government is trying to balance the 12,000:81 publishing ratio, it has its work cut out for it. Yet China has a strong academic community and as interest in the country grows, there will only be more demand from foreigners to hear about life there.

In early July, New Scientist carried a warning from Chinese scientist studying migratory birds in Qinghai province.

Thousands of wild birds in north-west China may have been infected by a bird flu virus closely related to the one that has devastated poultry farms in south-east Asia. The birds might carry the virus as far as India, Australia and Europe.

That is the warning from two teams of scientists in China. They report in Nature and Science this week that a massive die-off of birds at Qinghai Lake in north-west China, a major summering spot for migratory waterfowl, is due to H5N1.

The RNA sequence of the Qinghai virus reveals that three of its eight genes are almost identical to those of a virus isolated from a chicken in Shantou in 2003. The other five genes resemble those of viruses found in southern China earlier in 2005, which belong to the “Z genotype” virus circulating across east Asia.

This means the Qinghai virus was not, as first claimed by officials, brought into China from other countries by migrating birds. The bird that started the outbreak might have picked up the virus in southern China or from poultry closer to Qinghai, say Guan and Gao.

The latest issue of New Scientist reports that the Chinese officials are rejecting the research.

The head of the ministry of agriculture’s veterinary bureau, Jia Youling, has rejected research on bird flu published in the journal Nature last week by Yi Guan and his colleagues at the universities of Hong Kong and Shantou.

Ominously, Jia added that Guan’s group did not even go to Qinghai or have permission to do the research, and that his lab does not meet safety standards. Yet Guan’s BSL3 lab complies with international standards, and his team collected samples from Qinghai before the government introduced rules last month saying no one could study dead animals or bird flu, or even report an outbreak of animal disease, without permission. “They are trying to close everyone’s lab,” Guan told reporters.

Arsonists have attempted to burn down Ayah Pin’s giant teapot, the architectural centerpiece of his interfaith ‘Sky Kingdom’ sect.   Based in Malaysia’s strongly Islamic state of Terangganu, devotees of the teapot’s purifying infusion have previously been arrested (as noted earlier on Asiapundit). 

Meanwhile, striking tea-plantation labourers in Bangladesh and India are starting to settle their bitterly-protacted pay negotiations, but Nepalese tea-labourers associated with the Maoist insurrection have forced the closures of 21 tea estates. 

And Texans newly introduced to green tea smoothies seem to think that green tea has no caffeine, and that once fat-filled artery-clogging smoothies have green tea added to them, that they are healthy.