Of course, inflaming Sino-Japanese relations isn’t that hard a thing to do, but this does seem kind of silly.

The makers of “Memoirs of a Geisha” expected to be lauded for creating the first big-budget Hollywood movie with Asian actors in every leading role. Instead, they find themselves defending casting decisions that have inflamed historical tensions between Japan and China.

The English-language film is set in Japan and adapted from the American novel. It stars Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li, and Chinese-Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh. They join several Japanese performers, including Ken Watanabe.

For months, the Internet has been filled with vitriolic debate over cultural insensitivity, and Zhang has been denounced in China for her starring role. The arguments boil down to this: A movie about Japanese culture should have a Japanese actress in the lead.

The filmmakers, however, thought that would be shortsighted and discriminatory. Producers Douglas Wick (“Gladiator”) and Lucy Fisher, and director Rob Marshall (“Chicago”), say the casting was an exhaustive, meticulous process that considered acting ability, star power and physical traits.

“Some Japanese actresses didn’t even want to audition, because they couldn’t speak English and were too afraid to try to take it on,” Fisher said.

Marshall said that when Zhang auditioned, she immediately established that she deserved to be the star: “Your hope as a director is that someone comes in and claims the role, says ‘This is mine.'”

The debate is somewhat perplexing considering that actors have been playing characters of different nationalities throughout the history of film.

“When you saw ‘Zorba the Greek,’ and you saw Anthony Quinn play Zorba, was that odd to you because he was Irish and Mexican?” Marshall said. ‘Or when you saw ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ and you saw
Omar Sharif, who’s Egyptian-born, play a Russian, was that something that threw you?”

Yes, very silly indeed. This is theater, with actors and actrssses. Thei own ethnicity is (or should be) irrelevant to the part they play. You don’t need to be ethnic Japanese or Chinese or Jew to play one in a film. Zhang Ziyi shouldn’t be criticized for playing a Japanese if she looks the part and does a good job acting.

But then, when it comes to Japan, logic and common sense are chucked out the window, and raw festering emotions take over. And it looks ever so stupid.

As the proud owner of two incredibly beautiful and loving cats, I can’t help but feel a sense of indescribable revulsion and outrage when I read this.

It seems that a sick, twisted Fudan University student adopted and tortured more than 20 kittens since September, according to an online bulletin board (in Chinese). The student, who went by the online monicker “YuhZLL,” had been trolling the animal section of the Fudan University BBS looking for kittens to adopt. YuhZLL — real name Zhang Liangliang — eventually, somehow, managed to adopt more than 20 kittens from university animal rescuers, mostly small kittens aged 3-4 months old. He later claimed that he freed these kittens from captivity (fang sheng or 放生 ).

Realizing that the same person had been adopting all of these kittens, students became suspicious. On November 29, three students from animal section visited Zhang’s dorm room and discovered an eight-month old white cat (pictured) — minus one eye — bleeding in a cage. They immediately suspected the worst for the other cats, which were nowhere to be found.

There’s more, plus a photo, at the original post. I’m glad to see that so many Chinese people were outraged by this. I just want to know where these people come from and how they came to be so sick. Anyone who could ever torture an animal (let alone a human being)….well, I don’t know what to say.

Beautiful photographs remind us of the humanity of those people we usually read about only in disaster articles.

Via the Shanghaiist.

Xiaohu is the name of this exquisite Kunming dog.

Rebecca MacKinnon says it was a hoax, and worries that the CCP, not exactly famous for its ability to laugh at itself, may now hold a grudge against bloggers.

I hope Wen Jiabao’s office doesn’t get too angry at the blogosphere. That could be bad, especially given the recent rumors that new regulations dealing with blogs specifically could come out at the end of the year.

As is well known, during the last couple of decades, China has moved from a fully-funded socialist health care system to a private one as government funding has nose-dived. Under the circumstances, allegations that hospitals charge for unnecessary treatment and drugs are inevitable.

However, China’s state media, including CCTV, has recently made a huge fuss about the shocking case of a Harbin hospital charging (unfortunately for them, the family of a well-connected and wealthy businessman) a staggering 5.5 million Yuan (approximately US$680,000) for 2 months cancer treatment for an elderly man before he died in hospital:

Weng Wenhui, a 74-year-old retiree, was admitted to the intensive care unit of Harbin Medical University No 2 in June after being diagnosed with cancer and died 67 days later. Family members say that, during his stay in hospital, they were billed for transfusions of blood weighing in total about 115kg, 588 separate tests for blood sugar and even some services which doctors said had been done after the patient’s death.

“After the patient died on the morning of August 6, the intensive care unit continued to do blood testing, up until the 12th, which cost an extra Rmb260,000.” A large percentage of the Rmb5.5m was made up of sales of imported drugs, family members said, which the hospital had urged them to buy.

A scandal if I ever heard one. However, fair play to the government, for good or ill, they vowed a full investigation and the punishment of relevant staff. Amazingly, the Harbin hospital retorted that it actually undercharged the Weng family “out of special care” for the patient. However, a doctor, Wang Xueyuan, admitted (passed the buck?) by saying that hospital directors forced him to use “a lot of unnecessary and excess drugs”.

I suppose that if you’re rich and well-connected you have the opportunity to make a fuss if you’re overchardged. I’ll take good news whenever I can. Not so for the millions of poor people who are similarly shafted by the hospitals and for whom the paltry sum of several thousand Yuan is a massive burden. The greatest misfortune that can befall a Chinese family is that a relative should require lengthy medical treatment.

…but “Yes” to government efforts to block pornography and violence.

The vast majority of China’s internet users want to be free to discuss and read about politics online, but also believe that people should be protected from pornographic and violent content, according to a recent survey funded by a US foundation.

Only eight per cent of Chinese surfers believe that political content should be controlled, down from 12 per cent in 2003. However, 73 per cent want restrictions on violence, and 85 per cent on pornography.

The survey results are upbeat, indicating the Chinese people believe the Internet will bring them more political freedom. And the respondents seem pretty smart – almost all of them avoid government Web sites, presumably because they know there’s nothing there worth reading.

Via CDT.

It’s 1984 all over again. Every other day it seems we’ve killed Zarqawi’s top lieutenant or Al Qaeda’s No. 3 man. And the supposedly far-left, anti-war media never clears the record, but instead regurgitates the government’s propaganda. How short can the average American’s attention span be?

Iraq hawk Christopher Hitchens says it’s reprehensible and intolerable for our government to pay to plant propaganda stories in Iraq’s media. (Of course, that should go without saying, but a lot of chickenhawks are defending the practice as “PR as usual.”) It undermines the war, he says, and strengthens the arguments of the anti-war camp, proving that we cannot trust the supposed “good news” coming out of iraq. His conclusion is devastating.

[S]ometimes a whole new line is crossed and “propaganda” corrupts the whole process by becoming a covert operation against one’s “own” side. The worst violation so far has been the spreading of a falsified story about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Not only was he slain by “friendly fire” instead of by the foe—which is a tragedy in far more ways than just as a setback for recruitment—but the family and friends of this all-American hero were purposely deceived about what had really happened. It would be trivial to add that they were also pointlessly deceived (how long do the geniuses at DoD imagine that such a thing can be kept quiet?) except that it greatly added to the callousness of the thing, and except that this same pointlessness and moral idiocy are now apparent in the “good news” scandal in Iraq.

I remember reading, decades ago, of a moment when Richard Nixon had made some desperate speech from his bunker and had then arranged for telegrams of support to be sent to the White House. And I wondered—did he eagerly tear them open and turn moistly to his aides, saying, “See: You can always count on the horse sense of the American people”? Was he, in other words, utterly and happily insulated and yet alarmingly insane?

When we bombard ourselves with propaganda like this, we are the victims and we pay a heavy price, i.e., self delusion. It’s like a blogger spamming his own site with self-congratulatory comments and getting all puffed up about it. (And believe it or not, such bloggers actually exist, and they really do get high on their own self-praise.)

“…utterly and happily insulated and yet alarmingly insane…” Sounds like our own Preznit.

That’s right, all mobile phone users will have to register their phone numbers with telecom providers or lose their connection – all 383 million of them. Around 200 miilion people (like myself) use pre-pay cards that do not require any registration.

State media recently reported the announcement by the Ministry of Information Industry as:

“…part of a crackdown on telephone fraud and illegal text-messaging practices. The new requirement is expected to help authorities control advertising by short-message systems, advertising spam, financial frauds, mobile phone pornography and “improper political commentary“.

Implementation is expected to begin by the end of the year, and phone customers will probably have six months after that to turn in their paperwork. “It’s unfair if we require only new mobile phone users to register and ignore existing customers,” said Chen Yuping, a senior official at the ministry’s China Academy of Telecommunication Research. “More important, the registration mechanism loses its effectiveness.”

Just when we all thought that Big Brother-type control mechanisms couldn’t get worse in China, they got a whole lot worse. Previous overly-optimistic statements describing the mobile phone (along with the Internet etc.) as one of the guardians of freedom and a method of communication that would always elude government control and censorship, have just bitten the dust.

I’d also presume that, once the registration of mobile phone users is completed, all SMS text messages, even the humourous anti-government jokes that proliferate throughout China, can only be not only monitored but also traced back to the original perpetrators.