Bought a new mobile recently? Over at Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter links to his own Foreign Policy piece about South China's "digital dumps" and the volume of domestic e-waste that ends up there--which should encourage you to think twice about selling your dead electronics to the neighborhood scrap-hunter.

This Friday's fifty 5 introduces five of China's popular journalist bloggers: Good reading, especially if you can read Chinese and want to get sucked into the Chinese-language blog world.

Chinayouren tells an apparently true and rather entertaining story set in a Spanish airport about an averted plane crash, a Chinese mother-and-sun duo, and the mysterious ducks that tie everything together.

The China Media Project analyzes BBC's and AFP's lazy reporting, in which the two news giants publish articles based almost exclusively on information in a China Daily piece about media rules in Shenzhen.

China Hearsay offers a take on the political reasoning behind the U.S.'s decision to slap a tariff on tires imported from China.

Long reading from Fool's Mountain: A translation of a post recounting Deng Xiaoping interpreter and academic Zhang Weiwei's challenge to other scholars to name a country that democratized before modernizing, questioning the value of democracy before economic development.
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And finally, China Geeks excerpts a Times of India interview with "the only senior Buddhist leader recognized by Beijing, the Tibetans, and India," Karmapa Lama Trinley Dorje, 24, who talks about the emotional therapy of playing war video games.
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Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.

The Plateau Music Project uploads three "endangered" love songs (with lyrics) from the Tibetan plateau as part of their efforts to record and preserve local music heritage. It's not just the pandas that are worth saving.

China Digital Times links to a high-quality interactive web video called Journey to the End of Coal, in which you are an investigative reporter, delving into the dirty world of coal in Shanxi province.

China News Wrap translates an article on Sohu that about increasingly unmet demand for migrant workers in China's southern cities--suggesting that factories might have to improve labor conditions in order to attract workers.

China Media Project looks at how state media are dealing with their "shackles" while writing about the 60th anniversary of the PRC.

More scary stuff from Chinahush: namely, 40,000 fake condoms.

And in an update for those of you interested in the "Shanghainese black girl" Lou Jing controversy, Chinahush posts a video of and translates the transcript of a long interview with Lou Jing about her experiences growing up black in China and her feelings on all the attention she's been receiving. And CNReviews chimes in with, All you foreigners are just as racist as the Chinese you're accusing!

One more from CNReviews: A look at the bias implied in the blogosphere fuss over Thomas Friedman's editorial in the New York Times, which points out some advantages of autocracy (China) vs. democracy (U.S.).

Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.

A current buzzword in Kunming officialdom is 'soft environment' (软环境), which covers impalpable influences on daily life such as policies, laws and regulations. On Friday the Kunming Daily announced that "Kunming will put everything it has into creating a top-quality soft environment" (see image).

The next day, the newspaper took local government transparency in China to a new level. David Bandurski at China Media Project summarizes what happened:

"Since the weekend the Web has buzzed in China with the news that Kunming Daily, the mouthpiece of top leaders in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, printed a list of the names of city officials, their contact numbers and their specific areas of responsibility.

The February 16 edition of Kunming Daily included a four-page spread with information on local government officials. An online copy of the list, which ran on the Kunming news site www.clzg.cn, was feverishly downloaded by Web users, according to a report in today's China Youth Daily."

This rare example of transparency by a local government in China precedes a much-hyped upcoming national law regarding openness of information that is scheduled for approval in May.

According to Kunming's top official, party secretary Ying Yongsheng (应永生), a manual regarding Kunming's soft environment will be publicized soon to make the city's government more navigable for residents and investors.

Image: Kunming Daily