The Xinhua News Agency is reporting that sources say Hangzhou mayor Shao Zhanwei, a deputy at the 12th National Party Congress, died of a “sudden illness” in Beijing this morning. All other details are sparse, but another report identifies the sudden illness as a heart attack. It was just yesterday that Shao spoke about Wen... Read more »
Yi Ruilong, an extreme sports trailblazer in this country known as China's "first flying man," disappeared on Sunday evening after his hang glider crashed into remote Hanyuan Lake in Sichuan province. You can watch the video of his fateful accident above, in which he loses control while trying to complete a 360-degree turn.
Witnesses aren't sure whether Yi died on the spot, but search crews found no signs of the 70-year-old until two days later, Tuesday night, when they finally dredged up his body.
We just warned about the dangers of hotpot: last week, a man caught on fire when a waiter allegedly mishandled an alcohol-fueled hotpot stove in Beijing. An accident yesterday in Shouyang County of Jinzhong City, Shanxi province was much worse. At 7:52 pm, according to Xinhua, a large blast came from inside the hotpot chain Xiyangyang (Happy Sheep),... Read more »
In the early morning of August 19, @安娜830321 of Shantou, Guangdong province posted this message on her Sina Weibo: “So drunk, but still gotta drive home."
She didn't make it home. As Tea Leaf Nation tells us:
The next day, local news in Shantou, Guangdong Province, reported that a white BMW rammed into a road barrier in early morning and the female driver was killed.
An appalling story to report from Hunan. On Tuesday at around 1 pm, a 24-year-old traffic cop named Li Xiaofeng made what appeared to be a routine stop at a toll booth of a truck that he suspected was overweight. He put himself in front of the truck, but the driver wouldn’t stop. When a... Read more »
Image via Xinhua If we’ve said it once, we shouldn’t need to again: don’t tailgate road tankers carrying highly combustible elements. Between 2 and 3 am earlier today in Yan’an, Shaanxi province, all but three people aboard a 39-seat double-decker coach bus perished when the bus collided with the back of a tanker carrying methanol.... Read more »
An elevated stretch of highway on Third Ring Road in Harbin, Heilongjiang province collapsed at around 5:30 am today, according to China News, killing two immediately and injuring six others. One of the injured later died at the hospital. The accident happened about 3.5 kilometers from Yangmingtan Bridge, which we’re told was built less than a year... Read more »
In Chengdu recently, a speeding sedan driven by a drunk 19-year-old without a driver's license plowed into three roadside construction workers, killing one and injuring the others. After police and a news team arrived on the scene, cameras caught an astonishing sight: what appeared to be the driver and a young woman in a red dress being tender with one another. The journalist on scene reports that the man's demeanor immediately changed when he realized he was being filmed.
You don’t want to go out this way. Recently, a man on a scooter in Yuhuan, Zhejiang province died when a truck carrying 10 tons of boiling tar tipped over and deposited its contents on him. “‘The bitumen poured out all over the man on the bike. You could smell it burning. There were some... Read more »
How quickly fortunes change. On Tuesday in Urumqi, a blast of lightning struck and killed 173 sheep, inflicting up to 200,000 yuan of economic loss for the owners. (Technically, 143 died instantly, 30 more were swept away by rains.) This story comes on the heels of another sorry tale of lightning mishap: on July 6,... Read more »
