Remember when I wrote yesterday, "Perhaps Party members should exercise more caution when dealing with people?" This story, published two days ago on Huasheng Online, is what I meant.
On September 3 in Chengdu, two journalists showed up unexpectedly at a university to investigate claims that East Star Airlines had engaged in illicit financial activities with the school. They were accosted by Gu Yingzhi, the school's dean and also a CPPCC Standing Committee member of Meishan City, Sichuan province.
I know it can be difficult sometimes to click on a 15-minute video, but this TEDTalk is both timely and worth it -- timely because Apple held its iPhone 5 unveiling yesterday in San Francisco, and worth it because Leslie T. Chang is awesome. She's best known for Factory Girls, by far the best book I've encountered about the people -- the actual people -- who live and work in the factories that churn out much of the world's retail goods.
In a cab yesterday evening, the first words the driver said to me were, "They gonna fight?" I was confused and signaled as such. He nodded at the radio. A broadcaster was in the middle of reporting on the Diaoyu Islands -- sold on Tuesday to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's administration from their Japanese owners -- and that's when I realized he really meant, "Might they go to war?"
Before we get into the who-what-when-where-why of this, just a simple question: how can a man ever bring himself to kick a woman half his size multiple times in broad daylight while she's already surrounded by the man's goons and has a young child standing next to her? There's something wrong here. There's something deficient in the man's character, to say nothing of his brain. I understand that petitioners can be annoying, and this woman technically was trespassing, but surely there's a better response than kicking her several times like you're some MMA wannabe?
One of the more popular Youku videos from last week, with 264,000 views, this recent incident in Changsha, HubeiHunan province has people talking. The woman in the picture was allegedly riding a motorized scooter in a part of town where they weren't allowed, and when she resisted something or other, traffic cops (possibly chengguan) decided to drag her away. When someone tried to film the proceeding, the camera got tossed into the grass. The woman's off-camera wails are far scarier when that's all you hear.
A neighborhood sinkhole in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province on Saturday afternoon caused a gas pipe to explode, sending up a huge column of fire that scorched several cars and forced hundreds to evacuate. After firefighters controlled the conflagration, the resulting pit in the road was 10 meters in diameter. Luckily, no one was hurt.
In the video above, a man and small child (let's just assume father and son) stand at a distance and watch, all the way until there's another explosion -- at which point they scurry.
Let’s play a game: identify the strangest part of this incident from Changzhou, Jiangsu province: Is it the man, on drugs, who, after his own vehicle was nicked on the road, got out and took two vegetable knives from a street-side vendor, dropped 100 yuan, and then “borrowed” (stole) a van? Is it the medium-speed... Read more »
Remember this truck with two other trucks stacked on it? It was very much worthy of the Robert Crumb "truckin'" cartoon, but it's no match for this truck here, shown lugging 18 trucks. Posted last week to YouTube by VIPCRUISING.
Here’s something new: the website This is Africa is presenting a monthly “short-doc series” called Africa in China. The first episode was posted on Thursday, featuring Sierra Leonean Mariatu Kargbo, a 2009 Miss World competitor who was supposedly the first foreigner to perform face-changing in China (bian lian), and Gabonese actor Luc Bendza, sometimes called the “African Bruce... Read more »
This is very cool. Posted last month to YouTube and Youku and recently blogged by NeochaEDGE, "A Fox Tale" is a short animation made last year by four Chinese students in France's Supinfocom Arles (one of them being Chinese). It represents what people here mean when they say "soft power," though we'd be doing a disservice to the film to attach it to such an overtly political phrase. Just enjoy.
