Chinalysis : China related articles - September 14th

The Chinalysis is my humble roundup of special blog and media articles I read regarding China and Chinese culture.

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Virtual China has a unique hi-tech China related story about the Digg battles between the international Digg and the Chinese version with "Web 2.0 cross-cultural mobs : Digg battles" :

Some Diggers didn't take kindly to a Chinese version that looked almost exactly the same as the American site, so they used the structure of the Digg system to join the Chinese site, tag politically sensitive or even fabricated stories, and get their friends and fellow Diggers from the US site to join in and "digg," pumping up the numbers, ensuring that their entries would dominate the site until the Digg.cn editors decided to delete them.

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The Shanghaiist has another strange one with "Chinese court uses computer to help decide sentences" leading to a story called "Justice at the click of a mouse in China" :

A court in China has used a software program to help decide prison sentences in more than 1,500 criminal cases, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Wednesday.

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Yizchak Shichor, who was a fascinating and witty person to listen to in Israeli conferences about China, has issued another interesting article in the Jamestown Foundation "China Brief" about "China's voting behavior in the UN security council" (found through Simon World) :

Abstaining as a Strategy - As a rule, the Chinese prefer that conflicts be settled by the parties concerned or, as a last option, by local and regional organizations, without external intervention, including that of the UN or the International Criminal Court.

Contrary to the media's assertions that China would block UN Security Council resolutions to impose sanctions against Iran-not to mention the use of force-Iran is unlikely to provide an exception to China's time-honored behavior in the Security Council.

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The Daily Standard introduces the Chinese press coverage of the Israel-Lebanon war with "Meet the Chinese Press" by Kin-ming Liu,  stating that "In the People's Republic, coverage of the war in Lebanon was uniformly anti-Israel".

READING THE PRESS IN China, one would never know that the Communist state has diplomatic relations with Israel. A sampling of the coverage from China's tightly-controlled newspapers on Israel's recent war against Hezbollah can lead to only one conclusion: Beijing is no friend of the Jewish state.

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More blogs cover the China fury over the recent Israeli officials visit to Taiwan.

"Israel Matzav" with "Did they mean to challenge China or was this amateurish bumbling?" :

Forgive me for speculating about this - I don't think this trip was so innocent. I think it was designed to send several messages to the Chinese.

First, in the recent war in Lebanon, China was playing both sides of the table. [...] Second, Israel owes the United States big time. [...] Third, by sending a group of MK's to Taiwan who are not known to be foreign policy, China is being told that this is only a warning, and if it doesn't change its behavior, there is more that can be done to escalate the situation.

"China confidential" with "China-Israel relations worsening" :

Relations between Israel and China are deteriorating as a result of China's strengthening ties to Israel's enemies–Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

An accidental Israeli killing of a Chinese United Nations peacekeeper during this summer's Lebanese war did not help matters [...]

To make matters worse, from a Chinese viewpoint, five Israeli lawmakers recently met with Taiwanese officials–in Taiwan. Diplomatic sources tell China Confidential that Yonglong is angry about the Israeli article because it inaccurately referred to Taiwan "sovereignty.".