The attention was quickly moved on to the rescue mission. The crash site is in a reasonably populated area, only about 4 kilometres outside the Wenzhou South train station. Besides rescue workers, local residents (many joined the initial rescue) and journalists reached the site fairly quickly. The fiasco of the rescue operation was on full view, live to many eyewitnesses and many many more Weibo users sitting in front of the screen waiting for latest update.

Many questions have been raised, in particular to the rushed end of the rescue operation, the total number of people killed and the decision of burying locomotive and carriages of the crashed train right away. These, along with the compassionless and arrogant demeanour of the spoke person from railway ministry, fuelled suspicion and anger, propagated quickly among re-posting Weibo users. Even the arrival of China’s premier Wen Jiabao at the crash site and an on the spot press conference couldn’t calm all the emotions.

What the press conference did was to give journalists an anchor to launch attack on the railway ministry, who is not only responsible for the safety of the railway, but also in charge of the rescue mission. For a week, Chinese journalists had almost free run on the story, producing many in-depth analyses and human interest stories, along with bold criticism towards railway officials while questioning China’s high speed rail strategy.

The authority, inevitably, responded in the way they knew best. On Friday evening, many journalists posted on Weibo the news that they had received a directive ordering them to strictly minimize coverage of the crash and remove any criticism towards the railway ministry. Many out-of-line mini-posts on Weibo had been deleted at the same time. A lot of journalists reacted by posting the images of the ‘killed-off pages’ of next day’s newspapers.

While most of newspapers seem to toe the line, there are exceptions. Some weekly newspapers and magazines were in better position to defend themselves because the next issue had already been sent to printers while the directive arrived. Among them, a weekly business newpaper, Economic Observer (a publication I write for) devoted 8 pages for the train crash and its aftermath. On the front page the headline says ‘There is no miracle of Wenzhou’, clearly referring to a callous remark made by the railway ministry spoke person. Being a business newspaper, it also raised the issue of railway ministry being too powerful, although the suggestion of ‘splitting the railway ministry’ doesn’t sound very realistic.

It’s been rumoured in the last few days that the railway ministry’s priority was resuming normal service instead of saving lives, which was denied by an unnamed official. Indeed the normal service did resume within 48 hours of the crash. However after allowing the press to run free in the last seven days, the censors may find it’s little bit more difficult to resume the normal service.

OK, for those of you wondering what’s the fuss about, here are the vidoes of Mary-Jess Leaverland, who is on the front page of today’s Guardian. Her victory in a “Chinese X Factor” competition is reported by several papers (Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Sun).

The TV singing competition is called Min Ge Chang Fan Tian (民歌唱翻天, literally means “stars from ordinary people singing over the heaven”), organised by a TV channel in Jiangsu Province.

The vidoes show the final round. At the begining the first video, three competitors were presented, then the second runner-up was out, followed by the duel between the last two who each sang the final song, before the phone-in results were announced (in the second video). Mary-Jess Leaverland was called by her Chinese name Li Meijie (李美洁) throughout.

This video shows the round before that, begining with the “grand entry” of the last three competitors. Mary-Jess Leaverland spoke Mandarin in her intro video (at 6′30”), but it looks when it came to singing, she still preferred English songs.

The sad truth is that those who have made the effort of climbing over the GFW in order to access Twitter and like are belong to the 30%. In the same survey, over half the participants said their online activity won’t be affected by Google’s leave. This figure looks to increase if nothing happens.

Shanghaiist’s has a good summary of the Google v. China standoff. On the Guardian website, Tania Branigan has canvassed the opinions of some bloggers and media insiders. Whether Google decided to end its self-censorship purely out of moral reasons I’m not sure. I agree with some of Evgeny Morozov’s analysis. I guess it’s more likely they are fed up with the restraint and criticism while not seeing much gains in Chinese market.

Anyway, what Google has done is to blow it into the open, burn the bridge, making the stakes incredibly high. Now Google.cn is not censored, will the servers be forced to shut down, or moved out of China? And then what? Will Chinese government have to block Google.com as well?

Among the multinationals in China, Google is the one who has the power, influence and resources to make a clear stand on censorship. And now it has the will too. For that it should be praised.

The temperature at the South Pole is about -22C to -25C at the moment. It is technically true that the coldest place in the UK is only a couple of degrees warmer than the South Pole. But I’m wondering whether the journalists realised, or chose to ignore the fact that it is summer now at Antarctica?

A series of short videos were posted on a Chinese video sharing website. You don’t have to know any Chinese to understand it, because you will have probably seen the scenes before somewhere else…

The title of the series, by the way, is Office HipHop Quartet. Besides ‘recreate’ the scenes, the makers – they have credit sequence – of videos are also cheerfully unasamed of the fact that two commericals are bluntly ‘placed’ (it goes way beyond ‘production placement’, without any irony).

Valued itself as a website through which its members can ‘discover, translate and read the best internet contents not in Chinese’, Yeeyan has been doing a valuable work of introducing foreign language (mostly English) news and stories to the Chinese readers through an unofficial channel. It ran like a social network. Members of shared interest congregated around specific topics or particular publications before picking up pieces from foreign news sites and translate them into Chinese.

Since its launch three years ago, Yeeyan’s been providing a great service China’s young, vibrant and inquisitive internet population, the ‘netizens’. By overcoming the language barrier, and because of Yeeyan’s social networking nature, varieties of information and opinions around the world become quickly accessible to a much wider audience. Early this year the Guardian started to cooperate with Yeeyan to make some of its contents available in Chinese. (The Guardian published a cautious response yesterday.) Recently a Telegraph channel was also setup on Yeeyan.

There has been little information available about the circumstances causing Yeeyan’s (hopefully temporary) closure. Those who run the website are clearly aware of the restrictive environment, having tried to stir away from the political sensitive stories. The suspension came as a surprise to some and sad news to many. I hope Yeeyan will sail through this crisis, because if not it would a big loss to our all.

Well they are fighting a losing battle. Bai Gong has been commonly used to call the White House for many years (I doubt it has ever been called anything else). Bai Wu is plainly ridicules. I’m not sure whether this is political correctness or purely bureaucratic – in order for Chinese not to confuse President Obama with a monarch?

Washington Post also managed to read into the choice of Aobama and Oubama as a political gesture. Aobama is used in China mainland, while Oubama is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. So Beijing’s insistence of using Aobama in the face of American ’standardization’ must have some political undercurrent? It even suggests Ao (奥) in Chinese could mean ‘difficult to understand’, ‘abstruse’ and ‘obscure’, as if using Aobama is Beijing’s way of subtly demeaning Obama. I have to say this is fanciful over-reading. The simple fact is Aobama or Oubama doesn’t have much difference. Aobama, if you read aloud in Mandarin Chinese, sounds better, more masculine I would say, than Oubama. The character Ao itself, meanwhile, belongs to a pool of Chinese characters often used to translate foreign names, not associated with ‘difficult to understand’ etc. in such case.

Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on Obama’s official Chinese name, because he’s in danger of acquiring an unflattering nickname there. A lot of English media reported in headline that in a Shanghai ‘town hall’ style meeting, Obama ‘attacked Chinese internet censorship’. No he didn’t ‘attack’ anything. Instead, he was trying to tip-toe around this sensitive issue in order to satisfy his domestic audiences, not to offend the Chinese authorities, and charm the Chinese internet population. A difficult task indeed.

Chinese internet users, the proud ‘netizens’ as they call themselves, were not amused. Often fierce and verbally inventive, they have started to call Obama ‘Xi Ni Ma’ (稀泥马), which can be roughly translated back to English as something like ‘muddling horse’. If you’re familiar with the story of ‘Cao Ni Ma’ (grass mud horse), you will know this plays on the similar spirit. ‘Ma’, the last syllable in Obama’s Chinese name, means ‘horse’ – nothing derogatory here, mind you. ‘Xi Ni’, though, is to describe the act of muddling through to make everyone pleased.

To be fair to Obama, nobody should expect him can somehow change China’s internet censorship by denouncing it publicly in China. Indeed part of exchange on that meeting itself was censored, so is his interview with Southern Weekly newspaper rumoured to be. I guess that is not the first thing in his mind when he touched down in Shanghai. He certainly has more pressing issues to talk about with the Chinese leaders. The result is that Obama bat off this censorship question relatively well but, (not) helped by the social network media, he may have to leave China with a nickname that I don’t think he’s too eager to keep.

I didn’t watch the live coverage of the parade, but by watching several social networking sites, fed by pictures and comments, I managed to follow the event nonetheless. I wonder whether this is becoming the viewer experience in the future, that we must follow the online live comments from Twitter or others. Perhaps TV network would facilitate twittering in order to re-establish watching TV as a real-time “event”. But I dread the day when tweeting in the cinema becomes the norm.

The best pictures and videos I’ve seen are from The Big Pictures and Dan Chung’s time-lapse and slow motion version.

China’s 60th Anniversary national day – timelapse and slow motion – 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.