Ever the Quiet Burier of Ledes, Global Times published a news item Monday that surely qualifies for Hideous China Story of the Year (Relationships Edition)… although GT went for the more casual “Mom jailed for covert contraceptive.”

It’s a Turducken of a tale – one that gradually reveals more unpleasant layers with every sentence until, eventually, everybody loses. The action begins in 2015 with a young graduate, Zhang Yang, whose girlfriend, “Yanzi,” is pregnant. Unfortunately, Zhang’s mother Zhang Xiuqin does not approve of the match, and not only pressures Yanzi into getting an abortion – she does the procedure herself. Medical ethics are clearly not an issue for Nurse Zhang, though:

Zhang Xiuqin was handed six months and a 5,000-yuan ($743) fine…for implanting [a] diaphragm while performing an abortion on the woman, CCTV news reported.

Yanzi only discovered the device years later while seeking treatment because she had been unable to conceive since.

Zhang told authorities she inserted the contraceptive device to sabotage their relationship and prevent them from marrying.

Zhang said she had disapproved of their relationship because at the time her son was a college-educated and Yanzi was working as a waitress.

Things then take a deeply amoral twist for the worse:

Zhang began encouraging Yanzi and Zhang Yang to get back together after learning the former waitress had made a fortune.

For some reason, Yanzi didn’t fancy another invasive Ob-Gyn procedure at the hands of her meddling mother-in-law and went somewhere else to figure out why she couldn’t get pregnant again. The plot unraveled and the sociopathic Nurse Zhang ended up in jail (whether she is allowed to practice nursing again is another story, but am gonna guess probably… yes). Last, quick twist of the knife:

The couple eventually broke up.

The story is filed under GT’s “Odd” section, but is frankly so WTF-awful, it could form one of the plotlines in Party Members and still come off as a little extreme.

h/t Isabella Steger

As some readers may be aware, new measures restricting foreign content online in China (or “Administrative Regulations for Online Publishing Services”) are dropping March 10 – today. Over at China Law Blog, Steve Dickinson has answers to most of the major players and questions, but we felt obliged to follow up with Steve on a couple of local matters – for, you know, local people.

BJC: How will the rules affect the “expat rags” – English-language listings magazines — usually published in legally grayish partnership with a Chinese firm that has a proper “kanhao” (publishing license)?

SD: Foreign ownership of a print publication (e.g., That’s Shanghai, That’s Beijing, Redstar, City Weekend, Time Out, etc.) is illegal. All these magazines are owned and published by Chinese nationals and are subject to the standard PRC censorship rules. That is why they are so boring.

I am not aware of any foreign-oriented magazines that are published by foreign nationals. If such magazines exist, they are illegal and the publisher is subject to serious criminal sanction. However, I don’t know a printer in China who would take the risk, so I doubt that any such magazines exist that have any serious circulation. [Ed’s note: I know a few do exist but with tiny circulations and usually in Tier-3 type cities]

BJC: What about foreign-hosted websites that mainly focus on China-based content… like Beijing Cream? 

SD: All such websites are illegal in China. However, China does not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction. Instead, China has created the Great Firewall by which it selectively blocks the sites that it decides are objectionable, based on criteria no one really understands. All activities of such websites within China are illegal and participants in such activities (reporters) are subject to either being sanctioned, jailed, or deported. This happens for the foreign political websites that are written in the Chinese language. I have not heard of anyone getting sanctioned for writing for a general interest English-language foreign website. It does, however, remain a possibility. This vague threat of a visit from the government serves to chill the expression of opinion. It is cheap and effective and widely used in single-party Leninist dictatorships.

So there you have it. You’ll still be able to flick through City Weekend and Shanghaiist while waiting for feckless friends to arrive late… for the immediate future. But you never know. Thanks to Steve Dickinson of Harris Moure for the help. (Image via)

On Saturday morning, a middle-aged man boarded Bus No. 7 in Hangzhou and lit a package of flammable liquids. The ensuing flames injured at least 32 passengers, with 24 in critical condition. You can watch the frightening scene above, and also check out the scene from the street, outside the flaming bus.

Police have identified the man as 34-year-old Bao Laixu from Gansu province. Motive is currently unknown, but terrorism has been ruled out. Global Times reports, “A source close to local authorities told the Global Times the suspect is not a Hangzhou resident, nor is he a Uyghur.”

The incident could have been worse, considering there were 80 people onboard and the fire was lit right in the middle of the bus, right next to the door.

Here’s a picture of the suspect:

Never mind, for the moment, the merit of Tiananmen vox pox in Sanlitun. We’re two days away from the 25th anniversary of that incident, and everyone is on edge. Careful out there.

UPDATE, 7:29 pm: The full email from the FCCC:

The FCCC condemns the increasing harassment and intimidation of overseas media and their local staff by Chinese authorities in an apparent effort to block reporting about the 25th anniversary of the military crackdown on Tiananmen Square.

The FCCC is deeply concerned that correspondents and their local staff have been summoned by Public Security officers to their office to be given videotaped lectures dissuading them from reporting on the anniversary. Some of the journalists were warned of serious consequences should they disobey the authorities.

This effort to deter news coverage is a gross violation of Chinese government rules governing foreign correspondents, which expressly permit them to interview anybody who consents to be interviewed.

The FCCC calls on the Chinese government and police to halt their harassment of foreign reporters and to abide by their own rules concerning the international media.

Examples of harassment:
“We showed the iconic photo of “Tank-Man” (a civilian who stood in front of a tank during the military crackdown on June 4th 1989) to people on the street in Sanlitun and tried to interview them about the events 25 years ago.
After 10 minutes police showed up and stopped our reporting. They ordered us into their police car and brought us to Sanlitun police station. They told us they had orders from PSB to do so. After one hour PSB officers showed up and interrogated us. They searched my handbag against my will. They took out the photos, put them in front of us and filmed the photos with us in the background. They took away two business cards of my contacts and photocopied them. We had to hand over the chip from our camera, which had no images on it. They separated us and questioned us for hours while video taping everything. The officer said: “You were speaking about a sensitive topic. You know that the topic is sensitive and the government don’t want people to speak about it.” I asked which Chinese law I broke. He answered: “It’s not a matter of law. It’s a matter of culture. The culture is above the law.”  They brought us back to the corner where we did our interviews. We had to show them where we interviewed people. They videotaped us showing the places. They kept our press cards and ordered us to come to the PSB the next day. We were released at around 9pm after six hours of interrogation.
The next day at the PSB two officers questioned us while another one was videoing. They accused us of “disturbance of public order”. We had to go in front of a video camera and they recorded our statements. We had to admit that we did something “very sensitive” which could cause “disturbance” and  we had to promise not to do what we are accused of in the next days. We got our press cards back and were warned that next time police will keep the press cards and our visas will be canceled.”
– French Broadcaster

“We were reporting on the strict security in central Beijing ahead of the June 4th anniversary.  In a span of two hours, police asked me for my documents five times. The next day two policemen came into my flat, which also serves as my office. They came with two women, who didn´t wear uniform. These women recorded my house with some mobile phones while the police asked us for documentation. The police said the documentation was for internal use.”
– European broadcaster

“I was called to the (police) Entry and Exit Bureau (which issues visas), and basically told this year security will be specially strict during the “sensitive period”, in “sensitive areas”, and with “sensitive interviews” related to the June 4thanniversary. They asked me to convey this to the bureau chief and other journalists in our bureau. They said that this is a second warning for me personally, and if I do not abide Chinese law, I should ‘expect the most serious consequences.”
– North American Media

“I found it very difficult to interview people this year regarding June fourth anniversary. Several well-known intellectuals, including people who are not considered dissidents, refused to be interviewed. They expressed concern for their own freedom or fear they would not be allowed to travel or to continue their work. Two had already been approached and specifically told not to give interviews on the topic. I had to cancel one interview in person the day before the meeting, since the interviewee told me the police was showing up to every appointment. The person later confirmed that the police showed up at the entrance of the compound as well as at the door at the time we were supposed to meet, and left only after been told I wasn’t going.”
– TV Correspondent

On Wednesday, Tunghai University student Cheng Chieh (Zheng Jie), 21, got on a subway from downtown Taipei and began indiscriminately stabbing people. Four were dead and 24 injured when the horrific attack ended, a portion of which was captured on video, above.

The video was flagged by the blog My New Life in Asia, which adds:

Upon his capture, Zheng kept repeating: “Since I was a child I’ve been wanting to do something big!” (我從小立志要做一件大事!) (note). According to preliminary investigations, the man was not drunk. When asked by the police whether he knew that he would be punished, he replied: “I know I will be sentenced to death” (note).

SCMP reports that Cheng told police the attack felt “nice.”

“[Cheng] also told us he chose to commit the crime from Lungshan Temple station to Jiangzicui station because he knew the ride – the longest between stops – would give him more time to kill,” said an investigator with the New Taipei City police department.

That’s Online has several graphic pictures of the attack’s aftermath.

Two vehicles rammed into pedestrians in an open market at 7:50 this morning on Gongyuanbei Street in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killing at least 31 people and injuring more than 90, according to Chinese state media. AP reports that “the Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack was ‘a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.’”

More details:

The SUVs then crashed head-on and one of them exploded, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It quoted an eyewitness as saying there were up to a dozen blasts in all and that at one point one of the vehicles stopped because it was blocked by bodies and handcarts.

Authorities have blamed separatists for the attack, with president Xi Jinping once again urging severe punishment and stability. He’s had to make similar statements in the very recent past: three were killed in a bomb and knife attack at a Urumqi railway station on April 30.

Also, this via SCMP:

In a statement domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu vowed to “destroy the arrogance of violent terrorists”.

Just the day before, on Wednesday, China sentenced 39 people to jail on charges of terrorism, many (or all?) with “ethnic Uighur names,” as Reuters points out.

If you’re wondering if the terrorist attacks will stop, Fear of a Red Planet offers this bit of distressing insight: “Nothing is ever likely to give the terrorists carrying out attacks like today’s what they want because what they want – at the very least independence for Xinjiang – is not achievable.”

Of course, the heinous act of targeting innocent civilians achieves less than nothing, and is the surest way to ensure one’s message goes unheard.

Some more photos from around the web (h/t China Digital Times):

From a place that loves quantifying the unquantifiable, such as happiness (congrats Haikou!), and numerical rankings of everything, and buzzwords such as “harmony,” it’s no surprise that a Chinese academy has reportedly mastered the science of measuring collective “honesty and mutual trust,” among other things. Here’s Xinhua with an explanation:

A top Chinese institute for rural studies has released an index on social harmony in China’s rural areas, the first of its kind in the country.

What is the index at now?

According to the Center for Chinese Rural Studies of the Central China Normal University, the rural social harmony index stayed at 59.2526 on the 100-point rating system.

A few more please and thank yous and we’ll hit the 59.2530 mark!

The index is based on six factors, namely democracy, justice, honesty, vitality, stability and harmony between humans and nature, which come from the definition of a harmonious society from the report delivered at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

Of course, it’s not the absolute numbers that matter — they seem, pardon my skepticism, a bit arbitrary — but how they compare across categories. As Xinhua points out:

Such scores indicate that farmers today still maintain a relatively high level of honesty and mutual trust, but environmental pollution, such as excessive use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides and random disposal of household garbage, has become a serious problem in rural areas, Xu [Yong, head of the institute,] said.

The problem with these indices, of course, is how inadequate they are in explaining what’s actually happening in these areas. Life is complicated, filled with hardships, not to mention accomplishment and joy. How would you rate that? 6.3256 one day, 1.5259 the next, for a monthly average of…? The overall number will likely get higher — China is making progress, as you may have heard — but what does that ultimately tell us? Isn’t it just another “key indicator” for decision-makers and local cadres to hang their hats on?

Individuals in this utilitarian society have, since the beginning of time, found themselves screwed over for the greater good, whether that means relocating for the Three Gorges Dam or being silenced in the name of economic progress. These indices help you ignore their plights. Numbers talk, but don’t protest, or scream.

We’ll probably soon be calling Lhasa the happiest place in China. (Note: that’s already happened.)

Most people know better than to eat street malatang, which — if you don’t know — basically consists of pieces of veggie and tofu and fish balls and squid and other indecipherable foodstuff stabbed on sticks and boiled/drowned in oil and spices. It’s disgusting and no one likes it. But sometimes, because you’re drunk or too prideful to say no to a dare, you do eat, and your stomach dies a little.

Just be glad you’ve never actually died.

Sina reports:

20-year-old Yu Yue has been critically ill after eating boiled spicy vegetables (“麻辣烫”,a variation of hotpot) since a month and half ago. She was diagnosed gastrointestinal perforation and severe infection by the PLA Air Force General Hospital at Beijing, where her conditions improved a lot with the treatment, but the cause of the illness is still a mystery.

You can check out her misery in the video above, but we don’t recommend it. She’s a student at Yunyang Teacher’s College in Hubei province who ate malatang with old classmates in Jilin province on March 18. That same night, she checked into a hospital “with symptoms of abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and fever.”

She was transferred to a Beijing hospital, and lots of internal bleeding later, she appears to be doing better — but not fully recovered. Doctors at the PLA Air Force General Hospital in Beijing reportedly don’t know the cause of illness. “Malatang” should suffice, no?

Sadly:

Yu’s parents have spent all their savings on her medical treatment. They even own the PLA Air Force General Hospital about 50,000 yuan (about $7936) for Yu Yue. They admitted to Beijing TV Station that for several times, they’d been thinking about bringing Yu Yue home and just waiting for her death. Now organizations are raising fund for Yu Yue from the public.

Be careful about chuan’r, too. As for malatang — let this be a warning:

(H/T Alicia)

Take note: if you go on a slashing rampage in public, you’ll be shot and treated like a rabid dog, held down by metal poles. Take a look at the video, which shows police manhandling a knife-wielding suspect who wounded six passersby yesterday at Guangzhou Railway Station.

Initial state media reports said four people were involved in the attack, but as Reuters reports, “Guangzhou police said their initial inquiry found there was just a single suspect. He had been shot and wounded.”

Xinhua news agency said that the attacker had been hospitalized, and that police were not immediately able to identify him as he had no documents on him.

State television said that reports police had picked up another suspect near the station were also wrong, and that a person who had been detained had nothing to do with the case.

The area has returned to normal, reports the Guardian:

The area was back to normal by Tuesday night, though one armed policeman could be seen near the spot where the man struck and others wore helmets and bulletproof vests. A security guard carried a large U-shaped metal implement on the end of a long pole, of the kind given to guards to incapacitate attackers following previous stabbing incidents in China.

Meanwhile, fears of extremism are again on the forefront of everyone’s minds. Last Wednesday, a knife and bomb attack at a Urumqi train station wounded 79 and killed one civilian. On March 1, 29 were killed and 130 injured in Kunming Railway Station. And last October, an SUV exploded in Tiananmen in what was described as a suicide attack.

Reuters again:

Speaking while on a visit to Hong Kong, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel expressed “horror, outrage and sympathy” at the attack.

“We oppose terrorism in all forms, and in those instances where the available information or the information shared by the Chinese authorities pointed to terrorism by a group or individual, we have condemned it as terrorism,” he said.

Six people were injured by knife-wielding attackers around 11:30 am today on the plaza in front of Guangzhou Railway Station. They’ve been sent to the hospital, but their conditions are unknown. A People’s Daily tweet from 12:54 pm claims there were four attackers. State media reports that police fired shots at the attackers, hitting at least one of them.

The pictures that appear here are via Hexun and social media. More info as it becomes available.

This is the third attack on a Chinese train station since March, and the second in the past seven days. Last Wednesday, three were killed and 79 wounded in an attack reportedly by religious extremists at South Railway Station of Urumqi (two of the dead were apparently suicide bombers). On March 1, knife-wielding assailants, later identified as Xinjiang separatists, killed 29 civilians and injured 130 others in Kunming Railway Station.

UPDATE, 3:34 pm: A gentleman surnamed Yang witnessed both the March 1 Kunming attack and today’s attack in Guangzhou. As Nandu reports, he had just arrived from Kunming to Guangzhou via train K366 this morning when a young man in a white cap brandished a knife and lunged toward him. He ran. Two hours later, he was “paralyzed” on the plaza, dazed and not sure what to do.

UPDATE, 5/7, 1:21 pm: More on Yang, via The Nanfang:

When interviewed by Nanfang Metroplis Daily afterwards, Yang said: “I don’t know why I am so unfortunate. On that day (of the Kunming attack), I was seeing my friend off at the train station when I heard people saying someone was attacking people. Today, just as I walked out the station, the same thing happened again.” The attack was so traumatic that Yang ran and hid in a branch of the China Post located in the west corner of the station. Yang sat there for two hours before he recovered. “I saw the attacker slash a man’s neck. The man covered the wound with his hands, but it was dripping with blood,” Yang recalled.

Also, here’s a video of police subduing the attacker (apparently only one, not four):

Around 3 am on Monday, April 21, a suspected carjacker in Foshan, Guangdong province was tailed by police into a toll booth / checkpoint, where he was surrounded and ordered to get out of the car. The suspect, surnamed Tan, did no such thing. He did the opposite of getting out, which is stepping on the accelerator, even if it meant ramming his car backwards into police vehicles and officers alike.

Police reportedly fired warning shots into the air. Failing to deter the suspect, an officer fired at him. Efforts to resuscitate Tan were unsuccessful.

Two officers were injured and three cars were totaled.

April 13, 2014, the day China was made safer… from airsoft guns and swords to be sold to tourists.

Sounds ridiculous, right?

However, reading reports, both from Chinese and international media, one gets the impression that a) China has a huge gun problem, b) Chinese police are awesome, and/or, perhaps most importantly, c) THIS IS A BIG DEAL.

I submit for your consideration:

1. Reuters (emphasis mine):

China has seized more than 10,000 illegal guns in the southwestern province of Guizhou, state television reported on Sunday, marking its largest haul of illegal firearms as it steps up efforts to crack down on violent crime.

Gun attacks are rare in China but the government has stepped up efforts against violent crime following a spate of incidents, including a knife attack at a station in Kunming city in March blamed on militants from the western region of Xinjiang.

2. Daily Mail:

CAPTION:

Sniper rifles: The massive seizure, in the southwestern province of Guizhou, includes 10,500 illegal guns and 120,000 forbidden knives - all destined for the country’s flourishing underground arms trade

3. China Daily:

Yang Tao, an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department at the Guiyang Public Security Bureau, said the guns, pistols and rifles were made of iron and used steel balls as bullets.

The firing range of the pistols is 30 to 50 meters, he said.

Fired from a great distance, the guns could cause permanent disability, he said, and at close range they could be lethal, he added.

Yang said the firing range of rifles could exceed 200 meters.

After a cursory search, a few inconsistencies arise. First, the investigation into and seizure of these weapons is somehow connected to the train station attack in Kunming on March 1. However, the investigation, including “deep undercover work,” actually started in January.

Second, just how dangerous are these weapons? Judging from the description, these guns are modified versions of either a BB gun or an airsoft rifle, the more likely candidate. (BB guns use metal balls, but are spring loaded, severely limiting range.) If they are airsoft, then they are highly modified. The guns with the longest range sold online are “sniper rifles” with a maximum range of 250 feet. That’s only 76 meters. And as one airsoft enthusiast advises: “Do not expect to hit a stationary, man-sized target more than 30% of the time at 100m if your gun is able to even reach that mark.”

Yes, airsoft and BB guns can put an eye out if you’re not careful, but disabling shots from 200 meters?  That seems a little bit too much to ask from an air-powered gun.

It seems that, in this case, the real losers are not criminals looking for some real firepower, but the airsoft markets around the world who will be losing out on a pretty big shipment. Rather than big busts that make the Chinese cops look like they’re doing their job, maybe what the people need is a short course on how to tell a real gun from “not a toy.”

Follow John Artman on Twitter @KnowsNothing

The latest update on still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 – New York Times: “China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as Much as Helping” — puts the attention on China’s naval incompetence and prestige hunting. Apparently good intentions don’t get you good press. I read the Times’s article while slowly shaking my head at the entirety of the MH370 situation/mess. Then I came to this quote:

“This is a chance for China to regain some of its lost prestige and show the world what it’s capable of,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University. “There’s a lot of prestige on the line here.”

You can hear Kingston and a lot of others silently seething, can’t you? There’s a lot of prestige on the line here drips with sarcasm, even if it might not be intended that way.

Another Times’s excerpt follows. Go read the whole story if you want to be disappointed in people.

On April 5, Chinese state-run news media reported that Haixun 01, a Chinese government search vessel apparently operating outside the zone designated that day by the search coordinators, had twice detected underwater signals that might have come from the missing plane’s flight recorders.

Photographs published by the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, showed crewmen using a hand-held hydrophone intended for use in shallow water, casting doubt on the value of the claims.

Still, search officials sent H.M.S. Echo, a British vessel equipped with highly sophisticated listening technology, to verify Haixun 01’s report. Several days later, Echo was quietly pulled from the area of the Chinese ship and sent to assist Ocean Shield, an Australian vessel also equipped with high-tech listening equipment that had detected four signals that search coordinators believed came from the plane’s flight recorders.

The delay in deploying Echo to join Ocean Shield may have cost searchers the opportunity to record more signals and narrow the underwater search area, officials say.

(NYT)

UPDATE, 4/30, 1:05 pm: People’s Daily responds by calling the Times “circling vultures.”

At least 15 people were sent to the hospital after a passenger train derailed early Sunday morning (3:17 am) in Hailun county in the city of Suihua, Heilongjiang province, Xinhua reports. The train, K7034, departed from Heihe, Heilongjiang and was headed for Harbin, the provincial capital. There were no reported deaths.

Train accidents are rare in China, a country that sees nearly 2 billion passengers every year. The last major derailment was, as many will remember, noteworthy for China’s official response — and its effects on censorship and social media (a boon for Sina Weibo).

Sunday’s accident, at least initially, doesn’t look nearly as bad or newsworthy. Nonetheless, some more pictures via Xinhua.

UPDATE, 4/18, 12:19 pm: Sabotage! Via Xinhua:

Police in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, confirmed on Thursday that a train’s derailing in the province on Sunday morning was caused by sabotage of rail tracks.

The Harbin Railways Public Security Bureau said on Thursday that it has arrested a suspect, but declined to give the suspect’s identity or a motivation for the sabotage.

This morning around 9 o’clock, a five-storey apartment building in Fenghua, Zhejiang province collapsed because it was old. (We’re not sure what the technical term might be.) Details are scarce, but CCTV News reported around noon that up to five people had been rescued, though an untold number remained buried.

The building had four units, one and a half of which simply crumbled. Here’s a picture via Shanghai Daily:

UPDATE, 4/5, 1:30 am: One dead. Via Sinosphere:

So far, six people have been pulled out of the rubble and sent to hospital, where one woman died, the city government said on Fenghua Announces, its official Weibo account.

UPDATE, 4/7, 2:39 pm: Via China Daily:

A building that collapsed in Fenghua, Zhejiang province, on Friday morning killing a woman, was registered as “unsafe” in December but no remedial measures were taken.

The woman was among seven people trapped after the five-story residential building crumbled to the ground at 8:45 am. All were pulled from the debris by the evening, but Chen Yuexiang, 68, died at a hospital.

UPDATE, 4/9, 1 pm: Two have been arrested, according to Shanghai Daily:

Two people have been detained by police and a third released on bail in connection with a fatal building collapse in eastern province Zhejiang.

A statement yesterday by Fenghua City local government did not identify those involved nor give details on why they had been held.