The heavy rains found their way inside Fourth Ring Round around 1 pm today, and it's been sporadically pouring ever since: some deity simply dumping bucket after bucket of water over the city. I was outside around 1:30 pm to witness the sky and everything underneath it go eerily dark; 10 minutes later, a dazzling white mist rose out of nowhere, like the ash of a mythical sky creature. It was unbelievable. I put out both arms and said "What the fuck?" several times.
Yesterday night, a man took a subway security guard hostage for about 70 minutes at Tuanjiehu station on Line 10, and when negotiators failed to get him to release the hostage, a sniper took him out. A lot of the dialogue in this video is unintelligible, but we're pretty sure that at the beginning, the hostage-taker tells everyone nearby, "Don't come any closer."
YouTube embed of this video after the jump. Beijing is not a city where you expect to hear about someone being shot dead, but that’s what happened last night when a man took a security guard hostage at knifepoint inside Subway Line 10′s Hujialou station. According to Beijing TV this morning, the incident began just after 9... Read more »
Yesterday evening, residents and landlords of Jiezuo Dasha apartment complex on Xingfucun Zhonglu, which is close to the popular bar district Sanlitun, staged a peaceful — though justifiably angry — street protest after water and electricity were cut off to many of the homes and businesses in the area in the morning. A Beijing Cream reader... Read more »
By The Good Doctor I have a theory about what makes Beijing so attractive to so many expats: whatever activity it is you’re interested in, you can advance to a higher level here more quickly than you could back home. And if there’s an activity you’re interested in, it’s much easier getting started in Beijing... Read more »
Did you know there are 14,694 people per square kilometer in Beijing, and five million people own cars as of January? Furthermore, did you know that the area inside Second Ring Road, just 62.5 square kilometers, makes up 6 percent of Beijing's total area yet accounts for 30 percent of all traffic? Or that within Second Ring Road, government compounds take up an incredible 58 percent of space, with the implication that the government's transportation needs -- think private cars, probably Audis -- does more to cripple the traffic grid than anything else?
I have nothing to add to this Xinhua news flash, as Weibo is quiet at the moment: A foreign man is dead after being stabbed in downtown Beijing on Wednesday afternoon, local police said. The foreigner, whose nationality remains unknown, was stabbed by an unidentified assailant at 3:20 p.m. at the entrance to Qudeng Alley... Read more »
Update: there’s now a video after the jump. The storm that wrecked Shandong, Tianjin, etc. has apparently found its way to Beijing. Today, water got dumped on our collective heads. Lots and lots of water. As the Beijinger’s Josh Ong tweeted, “Right about now I’m wishing I had this inflatable boat.” Kris Pickett, who found... Read more »
What happens when you’re a socialist Chinese blowhard and you get your ass handed to you by a girl after challenging her to fisticuffs in a Beijing park?
You tell everyone you won, of course.
In one of those weird "This is China" moments, while the rest of Beijing came to a grinding halt over some light rain at 1 pm on Friday, a whole bunch of Web users and bloggers – all of whom were carrying at least four or five umbrellas apiece – convened at the south gate of Chaoyang Park for a Grumble in Das Jungle.
![Bicyclists Strewn Everywhere: One Car Kills Five [UPDATE]](http://beijingcream.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Cyclists-deaths-2-150x150.jpg "Bicyclists Strewn Everywhere: One Car Kills Five [UPDATE]"){kind=small}
