Even if true, the following isn't something you want to be caught saying on tape if you're a government official:
“If the police don’t beat people, what’s the point of keeping them? The police are the government’s violence machine.”
Xuanyu Zhong, the son of a Chinese government official, stood before a British court recently on charges of sexually assaulting a girl at Northumbria University in December 2011. Daily Mail reports that Zhong, 25, spurred by an obsession with rape porn, spiked a girl's drink with a date-rape drug one evening. At the court hearing, Daily Mail reports that he expressed his intent "to copy the videos" -- the many rape videos he watched -- "by raping his drugged victim." Instead, he "changed his mind at the last minute and sexually assaulted her instead."
It's scary to think so, but adult breastfeeding might be the latest way to show off one's wealth. At least, if you believe what you read in the papers.
In Shenzhen, as reported by SCMP, "increasing numbers of adults have been hiring wet nurses so they can consume breast milk for its nutritional value, Lin Jun, a manager of Xinxinyu Household Service Company in the southern city of Guangdong, told the Southern Metropolis Daily."
Around 1 pm yesterday, a massive fire engulfed a row of warehouses near Changsha South Railway Station in Hunan province. Witnesses say they heard explosions, though the specific cause of the explosions remains unknown. There were no reported injuries. Firefighters needed two hours to put out the flames.
Certain people in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province have been petitioning for more than a year for legal action to be taken against corrupt Party members in their small village (this was before the government's latest enabling of online petitioning, of course). Recently, authorities responded: by sending in the goons.
Hundreds of onlookers, like flies to light, were entranced by a public showing of pornography on a big-screen near a railway station in Jilin, Jilin province last Wednesday, reports SCMP. This is not the first time something like this has happened.
Sometimes newspapers bend the truth, or cast a story in its own editorial light. For examples of this, follow James Fallows's sporadically updated series about why he reads more than one newspaper.
But then there's the above. Tens of thousands marched in protest yesterday of Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung and Beijing political influences, but if the only newspaper you read was the China Daily (a hypothetical that applies to no one), you'd be forgiven for thinking all those bodies around Victoria Park were celebrating the 16th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover.
We wrote about Ping Fu earlier this year when she was called out for lying in her memoir, Bend, Not Break. It looks like the author is in the news again, giving an interview with SCMP in response to a lawsuit threatened by Soochow University, Fu's alma mater, along with some of her former classmates who remain upset over the "falsehoods" in her book.
China's government is still figuring out how servers work. Either that or it's hilariously naive, specifically about what might happen when 1.3 billion people are offered a fast, convenient way of submitting formal complaints.
You know, because what would anyone have to complain about?
The annual pro-democracy, complain-about-everything rally in Hong Kong drew tens of thousands of people starting at 2:30 pm yesterday in Victoria Park. This happened despite threats of a tropical storm and heavy rain throughout the day. Hong Wrong has basically all the pictures you'll need, including the above, so let's start there.
