People’s Daily Building Design, Shanzhai Burj Al Arab? – China News

Heads are about to roll. An office director at CCTV and 11 others have been detained by the Beijing police for questioning surrounding the famous fire that consumed the boot-shaped north tower of the new China Central Television's (CCTV) headquarters complex.

As a China watcher, the most remarkable aspect about the recent death of North Korea’s hereditary Dear Leader is the level to which it has exposed the Chinese media’s divorce from reality.

Zhang Zhaozhong is like a Chinese Thomas Friedman (more like Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf): he's a celebrity professor with the PLA National Defense University, rear admiral in the PLA navy and a frequent commentator on military affairs for CCTV and other media, with many admiring fans and a reputation for adjusting his military conflict outcome predictions after the opposite turns out to be the case.

The prolonged investigations by state-run television, CCTV, into China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, look suspicious to some observers in the tech industry. Privately, some fear that the reporting is actually aimed at bolstering several state-backed search engines, such as Jike, Panguso, and – well, look at this – CCTV’s own brand-new search engine, at search.cctv.com.