Top-of-the-Week Links: Hillary Clinton on Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun, interview with Jia Zhangke, and an acid attack

At the Beijinger’s 12th anniversary party at Spark, via the Beijinger

Top of the week to ya. We’re at the Anthill’s shindig right now, so maybe see you there links.

Hilary Clinton on US role in Bo Xilai-Wang Lijun saga. “Instead, according to Clinton, American officials offered to resolve the incident by quietly brokering a communication between Wang and the national leadership in Beijing. China’s political system is unusually fragmented, with national and regional leaders often at odds. Bo in particular was well-known for a style of rule that was at odds with Beijing’s. Wang, it seems, had wanted to relay information about Bo’s abuses directly to national leaders before he could be spirited away by the police encircling the building, who Clinton said were ‘subordinate to Bo Xilai.’” (Washington Post)

Congrats on 100 posts to our friends at the Anthill. “We’ve hit 100 posts on the Anthill, and are celebrating with drinks in Beijing tonight. For the century, I’ve put together exactly 100 words, inspired by the mini fiction on this site. They’re all the clichés of writing about China I can think of – the kind of clichés we’re trying to belie at the Anthill, with stories of everyday experience rather than the ‘big picture.’ Who can add to the list?” (the Anthill)

Stop with the acid, people. “Nine people were injured and one man was arrested when a fruit stall owner threw corrosive liquid at a business rival in Cheung Sha Wan yesterday. // A stall owner surnamed Leung, 57, who allegedly sprayed the liquid at his neighboring stall keeper, was arrested.” (The Standard)

Interview with Jia Zhangke on A Touch of Sin. “You could say this was the most complicated of my films to make. Often when we were chatting, we’d say that it was like filming four separate movies, because these four stories are very different from each other. For each of them, the production and the pre-production had to be completely redone. So really we used the energy for making four movies to finish this one movie.” (Sinosphere)

Nate Silver, briefly, on China. “With China, you would have even more difficulty. I think the general lesson is that by looking at a broader consensus of indicators, you do well than just looking at one indicator or one sector. // It is problematic to think about ‘how do you measure Chinese growth.’ One way [is to look at] more public facing measures – by looking, for example, at the amount of light output emanating from China. // I flew through Beijing [on the way to Hong Kong] – there was less physical brightness coming from Beijing than you would have seen from a comparable American city or European city.” (WSJ)

Censorship. “Chinese readers of Ezra Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition. // The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang , purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest. Gone was the tense state dinner with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when Deng, preoccupied by the throngs of students then occupying the square, let a dumpling tumble from his chopsticks.” (SCMP)

Bad leak. “Three Chinese characters and a search bar are the only features to be found on the website chakaifang.info. However as internet users throughout China discovered last week, the nondescript website contained detailed records of individual guest bookings at hotels across the nation, including their names, addresses and phone numbers.” (SCMP)

Your reminder to never buy street animals. “This is Tiger. He is not some weird rare breed of pole cat; he is a tiny black puppy, dyed with chemicals by Shanghai traders to make him look like a rare breed.” (SCMP)