These are the sort of National Day occurrences that will ruin your vacation. At the super popular tourist destination of Jiuzhaigou (Jiuzhai Valley National Park) in Sichuan province on Thursday, 4,000 tourists were stranded until after-hours as authorities scrambled to supply enough vehicles to take everyone to base.
This is the sort of thing we've grown accustomed to seeing from Chinese street entrepreneurs. In Wuhan, Hubei province, some peddlers got the bright idea to charge 1 yuan for letting pedestrians use their stepladder to scale a fence that divides the two sides of Huanle Expressway.
As the coils of economic development have tightened around the cities of Southern Xinjiang over the past dozen years, many Uyghur parents have increasingly found themselves without land, jobs, and stable futures. In many cases the strain of existential insecurity is most sharply expressed in the lives of children.
Despite the hoopla around China's new free-trade zone that opened on Sunday, details are sparse on exactly how the promise of economic liberalization will help boost the economy.
The 11-square-mile area in Shanghai will purportedly become a testbed where interest rates will be set by markets, foreign firms can freely trade the yuan, and outside investors can put money into previously off-limit state sectors.
The US government shut down on Tuesday as Congress failed to pass the necessary bills to keep it operational -- "it" being the government. If you want a quick-and-dirty primer on the situation, CNN has you covered, as does Washington Post, and James Fallows offers wise analysis as always over at his blog.
But what does China think?
The Hunan-based Sanxiang Metropolis Daily brings us this picture of a 5.1-kilogram, 90-centimeter-long (nearly a meter!) rat that you just might be seeing in your nightmares.
According to the Youku description, the party secretary of a Hubei town recently siced hired thugs from his hometown onto a construction site in Shiyan due to a contractual dispute. The brawl recorded here happened on September 27 around 9 am.
In a story that would make researchers of the Stanford prison experiment proud, on September 20 in a village in Anhui, a 15-year-old surnamed Pan found keys inside an urban management official's car -- a chengguan's vehicle -- hopped in, and almost instantly began trying to enforce the "law" as chengguan would.
What do you think of when you think of the military? Pomp? Austerity? Solemnity?
Or, just maybe, Swedish pop band A*Teens's dippy pop hit "Bouncing Off the Ceiling"?
