Sky News correspondent Mark Stone and cameraman Andy Portch were pre-recording a clip on Tiananmen Square on Friday morning for a piece about China's leadership transition when a police officer asked them to stop.
"According to a Sky News spokeswoman, police told the pair they were detained because they were not properly displaying their press accreditation badges," according to the Guardian.
You can sigh a million times, but until this country reforms its chengguan system, which allows urban management officers to lord over small business owners and street vendors with their misappropriated authority, videos like this will continue to surface.
On March 9, according to China Daily, a street vendor in Gulangyu, a scenic island off Xiamen, Fujian province, was knocked to the ground and kicked by a pack of chengguan.
One of China's traditional virtues, which we're constantly reminded of by automated messages on buses and subway trains, is to respect the elderly. In the context of public transportation, this means offering your seat. When you don't, the above is liable to happen.
In Zhengzhou, Henan Province on March 10, reportedly on the No. 89 bus, a young girl was beaten for refusing to offer her seat.
I don’t want to steal pageviews from Sina English, which has just published probably its funniest set of captions ever, so go over there and check out “Zoo plays AV to help pandas mate.” They run a total of three pictures, the captions to each are as follows:
The trivial and madcap escapades of drunken expats rarely rise to the level of serious news, the kind that might be featured on, oh, the Telegraph. But recently, a standoff between locals in Shanghai and foreign revelers on the popular bar street Yongkang Road escalated to such heights that the Telegraph's Tom Phillips reported on it in an article headlined, "Shanghai residents declare war on drunken expats."
Did you know that Tuesday, March, 12, was Arbor Day in China? On Zhi Shu Jie (植树节), literally Plant-A-Tree Day, people celebrated by planting anything they could. As Sina Weibo user @粮仓一鼠 put it, “Although there is no land to plant a tree, we can grow a pea in a flower pot.” Like him, many... Read more »
It’s been said before by many commentators — e.g., Eric Fish of Sinostand (“The Catholic church and CCP: estranged brothers?”) and Adam of Visions of Paradise (“Several times in the past I’ve read quotes stating that Communist governments learned how to manipulate their citizens by imitating the Catholic Church”) — that the Chinese Communist Party... Read more »
The Internet is for porn, but until I came across this Shanghaiist post, I hadn’t realized there’s a search engine that cuts out the chaff and takes you straight to what you’re after. Check it out: PornMD, which is safe for work until you write anything in the search bar, after which you should lower... Read more »
We thank Washington Post's Max Fisher for flagging a version of the above video, which has traveled from the YouTube account of British filmmaker and travel author Alun Hill (who created it) to Hong Kong's Phoenix TV, which broadcasts in China, before making its way back to YouTube... where Hill's name has been removed from the credits and some people have been, as they say, ensnared in the satire's net.
