Ah, baijiu. Dust of the attic, wine of the gutter. Here are two stories that remind me exactly why I stopped casually drinking it. Subtitle: DEATH AND PAIN.
An explosion outside Balijie Primary School between 7 and 8 am today in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has left at least two dead and 17 injured. Witnesses told Xinhua that the explosion happened when "a man riding a three-wheeled motorcycle passed the entrance," though the exact cause of the blast remains unknown.
Our friend (and Beijing Cream contributor) Jim Fields was at the annual Qingdao International Beer Festival a couple of weeks back, and he returned with this video. Watch a kid grow up right before your eyes.
Dennis Rodman has returned from Pyongyang. No Kenneth Bae (of course), but Reuters reports he "spent quality time" with Kim Jong-un, and has pictures (above) to prove it. That's something. The hilariously mismatched friends apparently watched a basketball game, according to KCNA news agency.
This comes via Valentina Luo's review of Hu Xijin's new book, Hu Xijin Talks About the Complex China (he put his own name in the book title?), in That's Beijing:
Last week I wrote about the way endearing child stars such as the seven-year-old Berna are being mobilized as a method for securing the future of Uyghur ways of knowing and speaking. Yet Uyghur “mother tongue fever” has a long legacy. The famous Uyghur poem Ana Til, or “Mother Tongue,” was composed by the poet Haji Qutluq Shewqi in the mid-19th century when a love of Uyghur was directed in opposition to the dominance of Persian and Arabic in Uyghur education. While the vectors of linguistic force have found new centers of gravity in the past few decades...
Yang Dacai, dubbed the "smiling official" after he was pictured grinning ear-to-ear at the scene of a horrific traffic accident last August, has been sentenced to 14 years in jail for accepting bribes. He smiled. As Wall Street Journal notes, he looked "oddly beatific."
The parents of kidnapped children are often anguished, distraught, hysterical, and other things we can't begin to imagine. That's easy enough to understand, because we've all had something stolen from us, maybe even something valuable, so we can at least appreciate what it's like to lose a child.
But this -- this is slightly tougher to fathom.
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