“I won’t comply!”
Those were reportedly the last words of Xia Junfeng, a street vendor who ran a kebab stall in Shenyang, Liaoning province, just before his excution on Wednesday. Four years ago, in what he insisted was an act of self-defense, Xia stabbed to death two urban city management enforcement officers -- chengguan -- and wounded another. Most Chinese, including many law professionals, believed Xia should have been charged with "excessive defense," but after four years of appeals, the Supreme Court finally approved his death sentence.
There's a horror movie in here somewhere -- or at least an unnecessary flashback to Thomas J's death in My Girl.
At least 18 people have died from wasp attacks in Angkang, Shaanxi province in recent months, according to the Guardian, citing city health official Zhou Yuanhong, who says more than 100 people in the area have been stung.
Last month Adil Hushor (Ch: Adili Wuxor) pulled off his latest feat – walking over the Pearl River on a wire suspended 116 meters in the air. Over the past decades he has walked between skyscrapers, over China’s most iconic valleys, canyons, stadiums, lakes, and rivers. He’s broken multiple world records by doing it faster and longer, higher and weirder. As a 19-year-old he broke 12 bones when a rotten rope broke in Shanghai and he fell 15 meters. But the everyday trauma of risking his life has not stopped him from tackling bigger and more dangerous feats.
Seventeen-year-old Li Guanfeng -- alternately called Li Tianyi, problem child, brat, and rapist -- was found guilty of gang rape by Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing earlier this morning. His high-level connections -- his father is renowned PLA singer Li Shuangjiang, and his mother is singer Meng Ge -- apparently weren't enough to get him off the hook for allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman with four of his friends in a Beijing hotel on February 17.
Florentijn Hofman's rubber duck is the goldmine that will never be depleted. Deflated, maybe, but never depleted. This we know because his rubber duck arrived in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on Thursday ahead of Typhoon Usagi -- that storm that's killed 33 people in southern China and southeast Asia so far, i.e. around where Taiwan is located -- and attracted half a million spectators.
A pair of sisters, ages 4 and 2, died inside their home's washing machine on Saturday around 1:30 pm in Nanchang, Jiangxi province. The details are grisly.
This is what we were afraid of with the anti-rumor campaign: thin-skinned officials out in the middle of nowhere -- specifically, places where it's difficult for watchdog organizations or institutions (media? ha!) or individuals to keep authorities accountable -- cracking down on one's freedom to express anger, frustration, or any host of other very human emotions that this country would prefer stay bottled up in the repressed chambers of our being.
Behind Chen Zhifeng’s hotel and gallery in Northern Ürümchi are giant Jurassic Park-style gates often guarded by a huge hound (which I'm told is Chen’s personal pet). Inside the gates is something Chen refers to as an “Ancient Ecology” park: a collection of rare Xinjiang artifacts. There is a forest of petrified wood, a collection of meteorites, sand-polished boulders, mysterious stone balls, and a collection of ancient Turk ancestor stelae known as balbals. It is here, among propped-up 3,000-year-old desert poplars (the iconic symbol of Xinjiang), that Chen meets visiting heads of state and domestic dignitaries for business negotiations and history lessons in Xinjiang style.
Hackers have infiltrated the local government website of the city of Shaoxing, Zhejiang province (sx.gov.cn) and replaced four of the five pictures in the "featured images" slider with mooncakes that display unflattering messages against the Chinese government.
