This piece is republished with permission from the Anthill, a writers' colony for narrative writing about China
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The neighborhood meeting was scheduled for Saturday morning and promised to tackle the Five Great Problems plaguing our housing community, No. 19 Ju’er hutong, Beijing.
A young woman scaled a railing above the Sanlitun Hooters in Beijing yesterday at around 9:30 am and threatened to jump. Policemen were soon on the scene. After a bit of talk, one quick-thinking officer handcuffed his wrist to hers before pulling her to safety.
The dude who built this may be a charlatan and asshole who's ignored sensible maintenance requests for four years and is about to get chai'ed, but Zhang Biqin deserves at least a little credit: his "high-rise villa" in Beijing's Haidian district makes for some pretty stunning visuals.
The good folks of Sherpa's -- a delivery service that brings food to your doorstep from select restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou -- are joining us to help make Chug-Off for Charity memorable. All contestants -- and there are still slots available, just email tao@beijingcream.com to register -- will receive a 100 RMB Sherpa's voucher, which is, like, two free burgers, or a giant plate of chicken wings and salad, or a Pad Thai plus chicken curry. The combinations are endless.
This is cool and all at first glance, but let's call a spade a spade: it's illegal, and not so cool if you're living underneath this rooftop villa, i.e. inside the 26-floor apartment building.
Somehow, the rich bastard who built this -- a medical practitioner (quack?) with a private business (definitely quack) known as "Professor Zhang" -- has accomplished the nearly impossible: made us root for chengguan.
The thunderstorm that swept through Beijing on Sunday filled us with a collective terror that ramified into the outer ring roads. Everything that follows is true.
This is quite the tragic story. On August 9 at about 4 pm, a young man, reportedly 26, went to Kudi Pet Park in Beijing's Chaoyang Park with his wife and two dogs. Only his wife would walk out alive.
"This used to be a dog amusement park, now it's a park of horrors," an eyewitness tells a Beijing TV reporter in the above video.
"The pet park is for dogs to go swimming," another eyewitness says. "We all raise our dogs like they're our children, and then this happens!"
The "emergence" of punk, in 2008, was a social interest story, as international media arrived in Beijing for Olympics coverage but "discovered" Chinese rock.
It's different now, as Nevin Domer, COO of Maybe Mars and founder of Genjing Records, explains in our latest episode of The Creamcast.
Ever since we found out that Florentijn Hofman's famous Rubber Duck was coming to Beijing, the question has been: where will it be placed? Houhai? The National Center for the Performing Arts ("The Egg")? Zhang Xin's personal swimming pool?
On Tuesday night around 10 pm, a young woman was attacked by two men near the subway station at Communication University of China, according to eyewitnesses. Police rushed to the scene. Thirty minutes later, an ambulance transported the victim to the nearest hospital, where her condition is currently unknown.
