Chinanews, Nanjing, Nov. 14 ¨C ¡°People who suffer from mental illness are able to draw. Actually, they can draw very well,¡± said Guo Haiping, a contemporary artist in Nanjing.

Recently, Guo spent three months living with the mentally ill people at Nanjing Zu Tang Shan Psychiatric Hospital. When he was there, he taught them how to draw pictures. In three months, he collected more than 100 paintings drawn by the mentally retarded people, the Yangtze Evening News reported.

The paintings stun the artistic circle. This has raised a question to the normal people in society: how can we shed our prejudices against the mentally retarded people and view them from a totally new perspective?

Before, the mentally ill people in Nanjing had never touched painting brushes. Nor did they know any painting techniques. Now, artists have begun to speak highly of their paintings. After seeing their works, Guo Haiping said this group of people and their works should ¡°deserve more attention from society.¡±

¡°In China, no one believes that they can draw paintings. We have so many prejudices against this group of people and we really don’t know anything about their mysterious mental world,¡± Guo said.

At Nanjing Zu Tang Shan Psychiatric Hospital, Guo let the mentally retarded people see some paintings and gave them propylene, water color brushes, color pencils, oil chalk and clay. He told them they could do whatever they wanted with these materials. He didn’t teach them how to draw. He just encouraged them to pick up some of these materials and draw something. About 100 mentally retarded inmates participated in the activity. During the three months’ stay in the hospital, Guo Haiping had seen them complete more than 300 works.

Guo Haiping also came to know about these mentally retarded people and their mental world through the event. He had collected all the patients’ paintings and made them into a book. Many works drawn by the patients will be exhibited in Beijing this month.

Chinanews, Beijing, Nov. 13 ¨C Recently, He Lin, a student who now studies for her second year in college, and her twelve classmates, have obtained the qualification certificate as a state-level golf referee, the China Youth Daily reported.

Golf has always been viewed as a sport for the rich. In recent years, as Chinese people’s living standards improve, golf has frequently appeared in many business occasions. More people play golf and there is a boom for people to attend golf training classes. Many colleges have begun to open golf classes, too.

Recently, the third Social Sports International Forum was held in Guangzhou. At the forum, the South China Normal University said it planned to build one more golf course on its campus. Construction of the golf course might be completed next year, by then the school will open a golf class for students.

This is the fourth university that plans to open a golf class. Previously, Shenzhen University, Jinan University and Guangzhou University had already opened golf classes.

According to related information, more than 50 universities in China have opened golf classes. In addition, there are over 800 educational bodies (including some vocational schools) that offer golf training classes.

In China, there are about 200 golf courses, with 80 of them being located in the Pearl River Delta region. It is estimated that in order to develop golf sports about 100,000 people are needed to work in this industry, either as golf coaches or to do the marketing, either to manage lawns or to involve in product development work. However, due to the lack of personnel training resources, the limited land area and high training costs, the three universities of Shenzhen, Jinan and Guangzhou only recruited a small number of students for their golf classes. The small number of students can hardly meet market demand for golf personnel resources, said Yang Xiaosheng, a professor at the School of Sports Science at South China Normal University.

Chinanews, Beijing, Nov. 13 ¨C In a recent survey, 85.5% of young people feel that nowadays, many reports about college students are negative reports.

The survey was jointly carried out by the China Youth Daily Social Investigation Center and the Information Center at Tencent website. About 7,450 college students participated in the survey.

¡°It seems that we are now the trouble makers,¡± an interviewee said.

Li Taotao is a senior student at Beijing Normal University.

¡°Many reports about college students are not true. Sometimes they just exaggerate things out of all proportions. The things reported by media might only reflect some individual college students. They do not cover the whole part. When these reports repeatedly appear in newspapers or TV, many people tend to think that college students as a whole are just too bad. Several times, after my parents read some of such news they came to me and said, ¡®Have you done such things like them?¡¯ , or ¡®We are so worried that you might be dragged down,¡¯ etc,¡± Li said.

Many interviewees said that nowadays, many college students work hard in their studies in order to find a good job in the job market. ¡°Nowadays, there is intense competition among college students as many are working hard to pass the college graduates entrance examination or the examination of public servants. Faced with heavy pressure in the academic study and in job market, many college students have no time to live a vicious life. It is unfair for the media to give a biased report on them,¡± they said.

In the survey, 46.5% of the respondents said media wrote too many negative reports about college students in order to meet some readers’ curiosity about students. 83.9% of the respondents thought media often gave inaccurate reports about today’s college students.

Chinanews, Xi’an, Nov. 13 ¨C Cao Guoxing, a senior official from the Ministry of Education, said that Chinese is becoming an international language, but there are still not enough teachers teaching Chinese abroad. From then on, China will train more teachers and volunteers to teach Chinese in foreign countries. He said these during an education cooperation forum held in Xi¡¯an, Shaanxi Province.

Cao said that currently 62 countries and regions have Confucius Institutes that offer Chinese language course for the foreigners. Cao said that China planned to build 500 Confucius Institutes before 2010. ¡°China’s growing international influence has attracted more and more people abroad to study Chinese,¡± he said.

China has sent 1,500 teachers and 2,000 volunteers to teach Chinese abroad, and the Office of Chinese Language Council International has planned to provide regular training for Chinese language course teachers.

Chinanews, Beijing, November 13 ¨C The Broadway musical masterpiece, 42nd Street, will be introduced to Beijing citizens on November 13.

The 42nd Street is famous for its magnificent scenes and dances that combine various folkdances from all around the world, not to mention its luxurious stage decoration and gorgeous costumes. Besides eye-attracting scene-settings, the musical also presents great a sense of humor to entertain the audience.

The organizer of the performance has invited the translator of the Lion King the Musical, which had made a great hit in Shanghai last year, to project the Chinese subtitles for the 42nd Street. The translator is confident of success in couching the American-style humor in Beijing dialect, with no risk of its charm.

(Source: China Daily/Xinhua)Nov.12 - The authorities are cracking down on bogus reporters to guarantee a fair, open and clean journalism environment for overseas reporters as the 2008 Olympics Games approaches, the country’s top press official said.

Liu Binjie, minister of the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), said fake reporters, especially those representing overseas-registered media, harm society and deserve severe punishment.

“Disguising reporters to threaten and intimidate others to collect money is cheating and very dangerous to society,” Liu said in a group interview yesterday.

Liu’s remarks came after police shut down The Social News, an allegedly illegal newspaper, and arrested two of its staff after the paper had reported an alleged miscarriage of justice.

Liu said the authorities are building a database of overseas reporters’ profiles for the reference of interviewees.

A database of the 8,000 overseas reporters who will be allowed inside of Olympic venues has been completed, while a database of the 20,000 foreign reporters to be allowed to work in China during the Games is being built.

Statistics show that 150 fake reporters and 300 unregistered publications were detected during a nationwide campaign launched on August 15 to crack down on fake reporters.

The Social News had not been licensed for distribution on the Chinese mainland by the GAPP. It also provided false information about its registration in Hong Kong, a statement from the GAPP said yesterday.

Police have arrested Gao Yang, the newspaper’s president and chief correspondent. He had not been certified by the GAPP, which registers journalists and issues press cards, the statement said.

He Guiying, the newspaper’s financial controller, was also arrested, the statement said.

Gao is likely to be charged with fraud, publishing and distributing illegal publications and organizing an unauthorized public gathering, the police said. They said the case is still under investigation.

The statement said that from June until August, Gao and He, acting on behalf of foreign reporters, interfered with the court in Yingkou, Liaoning Province, and organized the local people to surround the courthouse.

Investigators found that Gao had printed his newspaper and press cards illegally in a small town in Langfang, Hebei Province.

In Shanxi, a coal mining region that has been at the center of several fraudulent reporting cases, some local people have used fake press cards to extort money.

People pretending to be reporters have visited small and medium-sized coal mines for “investigations” and then departed after being given bribes.

“Nineteen fake reporters holding more than 20 fake press cards were detected in just three hours at a toll station in Shanxi last month,” Li Baozhong, an official with the GAPP’s market supervision department, said.

The GAPP last week announced the extension of the fake reporter campaign until the end of March, five months longer than originally planned.