CORRECTION, 11:49 am: While the instructional video and gif appeared last week on Sina Weibo and has since spread to TV shows such as Society of Transparency, the incident itself happened in 2010 in Taiwan. Pudong Highway Patrol stripped out the timestamp in the original footage, but the reportage error is mine and I regret... Read more »
According to SETV (东南卫视) News, an ambulance in Taiwan was recently transporting a critically injured 12-year-old boy when the driver encountered two cars on the highway that did not immediately give way. There was first a BMW, which took three seconds to move over for the ambulance traveling at 180 kilometers per hour. There was then a sedan that apparently never switched lanes, even after the ambulance honked and flashed its lights for 10 seconds.
This video is a month old, but I’m posting it anyway because it’s just so rich. Watch as a bunch of goons ransack street vendors just because they can – because they’re “chengguan,” China’s street-level thugs in uniforms who are officially known as “urban management officers.” Paraphrasing something I wrote earlier on this site, you create a... Read more »
I don't know that this is strictly a public relations stunt, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that at least one of the scenes in the above newscast is staged. In case you missed this story, which I linked to in Monday's links post, an urban management bureau in Hefei, Anhui province has taken to hiring foreigners to do street enforcement. There are three of them, from Central African Republic, Afghanistan and South Africa, and you can check them out "in action" via Global Times.
I remember, earlier this week, looking at Reuters’s David Gray’s photos of old Beijing Olympics venues and not thinking twice about them, because the headline on Atlantic Cities, where the pictures appeared, read “Beijing’s Olympic Ruins.” I could guess the nature of the misinformed captions that awaited, the smarmy condescension, the clueless-about-China editor at his... Read more »
Xinhua’s English-language website launched something called “English Forum” yesterday, whereby registered netizens are “welcome to share your opinions about news from China and abroad, post new topics that you are interested in, and participate in all kinds of votings at the forum.” Hopefully no one has any illusions that this will be anything other than... Read more »
On Monday evening in Changsha, Hunan province, a snacks and drinks factory belonging to Want Want Foods ("Wang Wang" in Chinese [旺旺食品], best known for its rice crackers) turned into a giant fireball that belched great big balls of black smoke into the air.
