What always unsettles me about these beatdowns is the moment the person with the upper hand sticks out a finger as if it's the long appendage of Death and holds it above the face of the fallen. How humiliating. How unbefitting a street champion. As if the slaps didn't already acutely communicate all that was necessary.
This week's podcast was recorded at the Bookworm on Wednesday for the Literary Death Match, hosted by Adrian Todd Zuniga, featuring the four readers/competitors Leslie Ann Murray, Tom Carter, Stanley Chan, and Anthony Tao, and the judges Alice Xin Liu, Vicky Mohieddeen, and Sherwin Jiang.
According to pictures brought to us by Weixin (that have since been deleted), a policeman critically wounded a watermelon seller in Urumchi, Xinjiang for refusing to vacate his spot on the sidewalk in the downtown shopping area of Nanmen.
Meet Andrew Moon, a participant of a growing trend in mainland China’s increasingly sophisticated independent music community — that of the curious outsider whose interest in the country’s creative culture was piqued by pals within and has since gone on to develop deep ties to domestic musicians during trips back and forth from New Zealand.
Chen Zhifeng is a “self-made” billionaire, founder of the Western Regions Photography Society, and a major force in Xinjiang’s art scene. He is part of a newly minted cohort of Xinjiang capitalists: the Xinjiang 8 (or 9), who have taken advantage of Chinese-Central Asian market development and the post-Reform oil and gas economy. His Wild Horses Corporation brings in an annual income of $700 million selling Chinese-made women’s underwear and TVs in Russia and Kazakhstan.
Yet, unlike some other Xinjiang elites, Chen has reinvested his wealth in Xinjiang.
If you ever run a scam, please note that overcharging by roughly 8,000 percent will probably get you caught. That's the sort of greed that's plain reckless.
In Shanghai last month, as reported on Sunday, a cab driver charged a Japanese passenger 2,300 yuan for a 4-km ride in Pudong. But there's a happy ending here, as Global Times reports:
The relationship between China's central and local governments has never been linear or completely top-down. There are times of harmony, but more often, there's tension. In the recent past, thanks to social media, conflicts and disagreements usually kept behind closed doors have begun leaking into the public domain.
Several recent posts on Sina Weibo by legal organs revealed that tensions are as manifest today as they were during historical times. Many netizens have gone as far to call these posts an act of “rebellion.”
