Photographer Zhang Kechun first got the idea to walk along the Yellow River in 2008, and for two years, he did just that, documenting "images of life," as Slate's photo blog Behold puts it, along with "flooding, pollution, and destruction caused by China’s push to modernize."
The Wall Street Journal has a follow-up to a Chinese state media article we linked to yesterday, in which a South Korean broadcaster, while trying to express relief that the two girls who died on Asiana flight 214 from Shanghai to San Francisco via Seoul were not Korean (as if nationality matters in these tragedies), used utterly regretful phrasing.
Johnnie Walker Blue Label hired director Joseph Kahn to create an ad, and they got one heck of a finished product, titled "Game Changer." It features Bruce Lee in Hong Kong. Well, CGI Bruce Lee, anyway. As Kahn explains on Vimeo:
Two spicy women came to blows on the Chengdu subway after reportedly bumping into one another, or something. Check out the woman in green who takes a seat next to one of the lassies at the 40-second mark, and immediately regret it. Her spot is vacated 15 seconds later.
Last Monday, a curious new Chinese law called the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly went into effect, forcing the country's healthy adults to visit their parents on a semi-regular basis. “Family members who live apart from their parents should visit often or send their regards to their parents," the law stated. (That same day, a court in Wuxi, Jiangsu province cited the law in an actual court case.) But most people say the law is more symbolic than anything, a piece of regulation designed to remind the cosmopolitan, rapidly modernizing citizens of China of their traditional Chinaness, which includes filial piety.
A 23-year-old gorilla named Jiaku became famous at Tianshan Wildlife Zoo in Xinjiang for being a "heavy smoker." He was known to perform tricks -- doing handstands, turning in circles, clapping his hands, even performing ballet moves -- to get visitors to throw him a smoke, and would sometimes get desperate without his nicotine fix.
His trainer, however, out of concern for his health, has recently tried to wean him off cigarettes. The method has been to lace his ciggies with chili pepper and to apply an ointment on the end.
China watchers already know this, but longtime China correspondent Evan Osnos, who has written for the New Yorker since 2008, has moved back to the United States. "A Billion Stories," published Friday in the best China blog in the business, amounts to his farewell, and it's a typical Osnos piece: descriptive and instructive, poetically constructed from graf to graf, perfectly allusive in the way that the world sometimes is, and keenly humanizing.
Family and friends have begun to mourn the loss of 16-year-olds Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia of Jiangshan, Zhejiang province, the only two fatalities in the Asiana Airlines 214 crash on Saturday in San Francisco.
The New York Times and Associated Press both have stories worth reading on this matter.
It happens every year, but the algal bloom in the Yellow Sea near Qingdao, Shandong province has been historically large this year, according to the Guardian. "This year's incident has swathed 28,900 sq km (11,158 sq miles), twice as much as the previous biggest bloom in 2008," in fact, leading officials to use bulldozers to remove 7,335 tons of this green stuff from beaches.
An incomplete statue of Soong Ching Ling, a.k.a. Madame Sun Yat-sen, which appeared in November 2011 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, was "quietly removed" recently, state media reported on July 4. How does one quietly remove an eight-story statue from a downtown area? Perhaps one should ask how one quietly commissions the building of an eight-story statue in the first place.
