China Daily has published one heck of a lede sure to make journalists cover their mouths and titter. Go read this five times:
Beijing, Shanghai and the eastern province of Jiangsu were found to be the three happiest places in China in 2012, chinanews.com reported, citing research.
Teehee!
Beijing, Shanghai and the eastern province of Jiangsu were found to be the three happiest places in China in 2012, chinanews.com reported, citing research.
Where do we begin? We could start by pointing… wait. Wait one sec.
Beijing, Shanghai and the eastern province of Jiangsu were found to be the three happiest places in China in 2012, chinanews.com reported, citing research.
We could point out that Beijing, Shanghai and “the eastern province of Jiangsu” are not exactly equivalent. I know Beijing and Shanghai are their own entities and humongous metropolises and Beijing has a freakin’ Seventh Ring Road under construction, but Jiangsu is 40,000 square miles. It has a coastline of 620 miles. What are we really talking about here? Or we could talk about “happiest,” what that means, what it doesn’t, etc. But I prefer to put the focus here: China Daily cited “chinanews.com,” which is itself a news portal, which in turn had to cite “research.” Research. Research? What the heck?
Buried in the fifth paragraph:
The research was conducted by students from Nankai University in Tianjin and aimed to investigate the relationship between residents’ happiness and the fiscal expenditure in livelihood. Statistics used in the research are from statistical yearbooks and government agencies.
Good for these students, using “statistics.” What other cities made the list, eh?
4. Tianjin
5. Zhenjiang
6. Guangdong
7. Liaoning
8. Shandong
9. Fujian
10. Inner Mongolia
Reminds us of this. Why did Tibet fail to crack the top 10 this time? So many questions.
Beijing was No. 1 for the fifth straight year is all that matters. Yay us!
(H/T Alicia)
Yes, why were all the areas with the sing-song, dancing and smiling ethnic minorities not included in the top 5? Surely they are happy happy ALL the time and appreciate everything the benevolent CCP has given them?
The happiest people in the whole world are those who have their sins forgiven against God by repentance toward God for their sins against him and have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour and have believed he died for all their sins on the cross, and was buried, and rose from the dead the third day, was seen of men, and went back up to heaven and have believed it in their hearts and this is found in the word of God, the Holy Bible in John and Romans in it. Sincerely ;
Yup! Crazy people sure are happy!