At least five people were injured in a stampede this afternoon at Shanghai's Tongji University as hundreds of spectators, many of them students, jostled for a closer glimpse of David Beckham.
An ambassador for Chinese football, Beckham was scheduled to take the field alongside the Tongji team and a local youth team, but the event was cancelled.
The international icon posted the following message to his Sina Weibo account at 4:39 pm:
We're not ones to fawn over foreigners who speak Chinese good*, but we give plaudits where it's due: check out Jesse Appell performing a stand-up act in Chinese on Saturday as part of the Bookworm's The Humor Section, a monthly comedy event hosted by Des Bishop. (You might remember Appell as the Fulbrighter behind the Youku sensation Laowai Style -- and a recent guest on the Sinica Podcast -- who has since gone on to found the website Laugh Beijing with the goal of "connecting China and other cultures through comedy.")
Hong Kong is a city unlike any other, its buildings rising up out of the hills like ridged obelisks, its waters rippling with cargo ships, ferries, and buoys, its mountainside painted the shade of roiling green, its alleys stacked upon one another with overpasses and skywalks crisscrossing as in an M.C. Escher illustration.
I'm in Hong Kong at the moment, and to try to capture a bit of the wonder of this place, I made the above video. Hope you enjoy.
Way back when, a young and overeager Jackie Chan found himself in a fight scene with the legendary Bruce Lee in the movie Enter the Dragon. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. Bet he didn't think he'd almost get knocked out by his idol.
Watch the above for the full story, as Chan tells it as part of George Stroumboulopoulos's Best Story Ever series.
It's difficult -- it really is -- to say Chinese soccer has reached a "new" low, considering its history of match-fixing and utter, abysmal, unmitigated failure on the international stage (its only World Cup appearance coming in the year when two other Asian countries had automatic bids into the tourney). But after losing 5-1 to a mostly junior Thailand team on home turf on Saturday, more than a few fans are saying this is the bottom. "Disband the national team" has become something of a commonplace chant, as meaningless as "black whistle" when refs screw up, but the rallying cry attained something of a feverish tone of urgency on Saturday. Can it get worse? If so, it's only because we're talking about Chinese football here.
The latest case of chengguan violence comes from Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, where officers reportedly beat up the boss of a restaurant and his family and acquaintances.
On June 9, after a meal, chengguan went to the parking lot and found a car blocking its way. They demanded that the vehicle be moved "within three seconds." The restaurant's boss came out, but unable to move the car within three seconds, he suffered a beatdown.
Even while bashing the institution of urban management and enforcement -- so neatly summed up in one word, chengguan -- we acknowledge that the officers tasked with urban bureaucracy -- keeping street peddlers X meters away from the curb, making sure businesses have proper licenses, etc. -- do unenviable and difficult work. Keeping in mind that every time we see a video of chengguan beating the snot out of someone, the chengguan have their side of the story, too (and their side of the story probably has another side as well), let's examine one particular case from a few weeks ago in Yan'an, Shaanxi province, featuring a chengguan jumping on the face of a bike shop owner who was wrestled to the ground.
Wang Yaping, Zhang Xiaoguang and Nie Haisheng were launched into space yesterday, on the eve of Dragon Boat Festival (i.e. Duanwu Jie), from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in Gansu province.
Today, to celebrate Duanwu, the crew ate zongzi - glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves -- aboard the Shenzhou 10 capsule. Wang, 33, China's second woman in space, is featured in the video above showing viewers what space zongzi look like.
The Netherlands were in Beijing yesterday for an international friendly in Workers' Stadium. Less than 10 minutes in, Arjen Robben drew a penalty kick -- a pretty clear foul in which the defender slid into his heel -- and Robin van Persie connected for the game's first goal.
It's the second goal, however, that deserves your attention.
