• CHINA - MySpace China - “Splittists” to Rupert Murdoch: Thanks for the Addy!
  “The terms of use and privacy agreements seem more or less identical to the English ones, except the Chinese terms of use have added lines about following the State Secrets Law, impugning the “honor and interests” of the PRC and avoiding “cults and feudal
• CHINA - “You Will Have To Die For Killing The Puppy!”
  “After the news story broke on April 26, many netizens were infuriated. By the hundreds, they showed up at the forums to call for respect for life, to establish laws to protect animals, to condemn the “murderers” …”
• CHINA - Hollywood to boycott China?
  “One learns, after a few years in the media industry in China, to ignore the chest-thumping threats of media moguls to withhold something from China. This is for good reason: the threats are usually empty.”
• ““He” in this instance was a local Mafia tough who found a young Chinese lady’s comment offensive in the bar in which they were hanging with their friends. The young lady happened to comment that a particular photo was quite ugly. The Tough took the
• CHINA - Wait, so you can actually buy software? That’s stupid.
  244: Number of genuine copies of Microsoft Vista sold in China in the first two weeks after its launch.

• “Huang Shengyi has a horse face, and big nose. When she smiles, she is fatally attractive.”
• CHINA - Liu Qi on civic responsibility
  “Security guards wear service caps and stand in the shade, but they allow strangers to come and go: they exist in name only. Hatred, but never criticism.”
• SOUTH KOREA - Gross video of still-writhing octopus tentacles for dinner
  AsiaPundit notes that ‘live’ octopus tastes just likel cooked octopus… only fresher! Yum.
• CHINA - MySpace China launches, Wendi officially on board
  “Rupert Murdoch’s wife Deng Wendi has a seat on the board; this is her first official position at News Corp., although people have been speculating about her influence on the company since she married Murdoch.”
• JAPAN - Likely hoax story on poodles in sheep’s clothing
  “Thousands of Japanese have been swindled in a scam in which they were sold Australian and British sheep and told they were poodles.”

• JAPAN - Researchers break internet speed records
  “the Internet2 consortium is planning to build a new network with a capacity of 100 Gbps. With the 10-fold increase, a high-quality version of the movie “The Matrix” could be sent in a few seconds.”
• ASIA - Growing Number of Asian Blogs Offers Alternatives to Mainstream Media
  “Asia’s blogging community is growing rapidly, as more people get access to the Internet. In countries with a controlled media environment, blogs promote free speech and offer alternative sources of news and information. But some governments in the region

• CHINA - SSales Pitch
  ” I don’t think the folks that hand out the Top Brand designation, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, are trying to push a Nazi agenda. . . . But given that the award is supposed to strengthen Chinese brands for promotion at home and abroad, they might want to rethink their imagery. I can only guess what the folks strolling a showroom floor in Europe or North America will think if they see an S.S. slapped on the side of a washing machine.
• JAPAN - Know the rules at a Sento 銭湯 Japanese bath house
  “If you’re making holiday plans to visit Japan this summer, remember to try and fit in a trip to the local Sentō 銭湯, a type of Japanese communal bath house…”
• CHINA - Internet censorship in China snore …
  “Tales of Internet censorship just don’t do it for me anymore. What I want to know is what does the Politburo think of proxies? But I would hope that even readers of MSNBC were not spilling their coffee in reaction to the headline “China launches plan to censor Internet”.
• SINGAPORE - Bak Chor Mee Man 2
  “You must pay top dollar for top talent. You must pay top dollar for top talent. Did I mention, you must pay top dollar for top talent?”
• JAPAN - A Mac nerd among otaku
  “Going to an anime convention, or con, is a lot like going to a computer show like Macworld Expo.”
• CAMBODIA - First Love in Cambodia
  “I thought I’d explore a question that is very commonly asked of a western man intending to marry a Cambodian woman – “Why on Earth would a young, beautiful girl like that want to marry an older, plain-looking geezer like you?””
• CHINA - Aussie newspaper kills story about Rupert Murdoch’s wife
  “Here’s one crackerjack cover story you won’t be reading in Good Weekend magazine any time soon – the revealing inside account of the life and times of Wendi Deng.”
• CHINA - Banking watchdog vows to sever capital flows of porn websites
  “A spokesman for the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) said Tuesday that the CBRC and other banking institutions will take action to stop pornographic websites from using banks’ settlement platforms and payment tools.”

• CHINA/TIBET - Trouble in Tibet
  “Anybody who doesn’t think China exercises extraordinary control and coercion over what happens in Tibet should try coming here with accreditation as a foreign journalist. It makes one radioactive.”
• CHINA - Ill-informed Chicago columnist scares the hell out of China
  “In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have
• “They’re young and they’re beautiful and when they approach the stopping cars with a big smile you might mistake them for selling sex, but no… they’re selling drugs”.
• SOUTH KOREA - Does anyone find this cartoon funny?
  “Naver News posted the following Seoul Shinmun cartoon on its site, here, at 20:48 on April 17, 2007. In its rush to take a jab at the United States, the newspaper posted the cartoon before it knew that it was a Korean citizen who had done the shooting.”

• ASIA - Flying Seoul-o
  “Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a fascinating and profound question: who are the world’s biggest w
• INDONESIA - The press still in danger despite ‘Playboy’ ruling
  “The South Jakarta District Court that acquitted Erwin Arnada, the editor of the Indonesian version of Playboy magazine, deserves some guarded applause.”
• SINGAPORE -Bad Marketing gimmicks for matchmaking agencies
  “The New Paper’s headline today shouts “15 China Brides for free” and the owner says it like any other market gimmicks.”
• CHINA - Chinese PriceWaterhouseCoopers auditors dance!
  Dancing … Chinese … auditors

As China is faced with a WTO complaint alleging that the country is being deliberately lax in enforcing copyright and intellectual property rights, AsiaPundit knew that a crackdown was in the air.

And that was even before there were any noticeable toxic emissions:

China sets fire to pirated goods in latest crackdown
BEIJING (Reuters) - China launched a new nationwide crackdown on pornography and pirated tapes and DVDs on Saturday, setting fire to 42 million offending items, Xinhua news agency said. . .
Of the items destroyed, smuggled and pirated audio/video, software, electronic publications made up 30 million, and pirated and illegally published books and magazines totaled 11 million

If AsiaPundit were still a reporter he may ask: ‘Were any environmental impact studies done on the effect of burning 30 million discs?; ‘How toxic were the fumes for those unprotected officials and laborers in the ?’; ‘How will this adversely impact the achievement of Premier Wen’s emission reduction target?’

Torching 10 million books that could have been recycled is bad enough, but burning CDs is a spectacularly bad idea.

CDs and DVDs are made from mainly plastics and metals, such as aluminum, polycarbonate (a type of plastic made from crude oil and natural gas), lacquer made from acrylic, gold, chemical dyes partially made from petroleum products, and numerous other materials such as water, glass, silver and nickel. When they are manufactured and eventually disposed, they can release chemicals that contribute to global warming and create environmental and health problems.

We suspect that the WTO complaint is a deliberate attempt at making China an even more difficult place to live by simultaneously reducing entertainment options and worsening air quality.

• CHINA - How China is helping expand European classical music
  “Communist Leader Chairman Mao banned classical music in China. But in today’s China, classical music is massively growi g in popularity - at a time when its success is in decline in the West. British conductors find to their amazement a more knowledgeab
• NORTH KOREA - Communist ate my rabbits!
  “A rabbit breeder who sold 12 of his animals to North Korea so the communist country could start its own breeding program fear they have been eaten by officials.”
• SINGAPORE - Whore or hero? P orn star Annabel Chong’s life on stage
  “Few Singaporeans have courted controversy like sex star Annabel Chong, but a new play about her life which opens on Thu sday aims to reveal the person behind the pornography. “251″ is named after Chong’s most famous film, “The World’s Biggest Gang Bang”"
• ASIA MEDIA - When Speech Can Get You in Jail
  “To be clear, civil libel is common, and, in many cases, appropriate, even though it has sometimes been misused in Asia to bankrupt political opponents. Criminal libel uses the organs of the state to punish defamation, and in Asia criminal defamation is u
• SOUTH KOREA - The apotheosis of the American Netizen
  “Obama is right now a historic figure: For he would now appear to have what my UCLA students term the “Korean Netizen factor” in his camp. This is the relatively new-found power of the Internet to network countless “little” people into money-raising chain
• CHINA - Pirates are not insulting, say netizens and academics
  “On Friday, the International Herald Leader reported the results of an online survey in which 61% of respondents felt that Chow (Yun Fat)’s character does not insult China, while 22% felt that it does. There are reports that SARFT shares the minority view
• JAPAN - Porn trade leads to a military security leak
  “A Japanese naval officer is in big trouble after he allegedly swapped porn with a mate of his and accidentally also giving away classified information”
• “This is what happens when otaku start pimping their ride.”
• MALAYSIA - April Fool’s joke on penis enlargement
  “Doctor-blogger Dr Alan Teh …wrote an April Fool joke to humour his readers the way Google did. The topic was enticing: Malaysian men clamouring for pioneering penis surgery”
• SINGAPORE - Impossible to get cabs just before midnight in Singapore?
  “What happens when you get a bunch of bloggers who can’t get cabs just before midnight? They whip out their cameras and write about it.”
• MALAYSIA - Are Malaysian Bloggers Under Threat of State Control?
  “Dr Mustafa K Anuar and Anil Netto, coordinators of the Malaysian human rights group Charter 2000-Aliran, say their organization “is deeply concerned by the [Malaysian] government’s potential move to impose mandatory registration of bloggers who use web
• CAMBODIA - Something Fishy aka Consultants in Cambodia
  “Give a fishing community $20 million, they’ll eat forever; give it to a consultant, he’ll do something fishy.”