Results tagged “chongqing”

• Growing Chinese Military Creates Uncertainty: U.S. [Reuters] "The U.S. military needs better dialogue with China to avoid "mistakes and miscalculations" given an unprecedented military expansion stoking uncertainty in the region, top U.S. defense officials said Wednesday."
• Why China Isn't Ready to Lead [The Wall Street Journal] "Chinese decision makers need to realize that global economic leadership does not stem only from a large cash hoard. In the long run, a credible respect for property rights and unbiased contract enforcement will draw a larger share of global investors into the Chinese economic sphere."
• Gang crackdown, lurid mob trials transfix China [Associated Press] "After she refused a corrupt cop's demand that she turn her teahouse into an illegal casino, three thugs beat Chen Yanling with electric batons, sending her to the hospital for nearly a month. Chen is now getting some vicarious revenge, joining the throngs outside a courthouse where modern-day China's biggest, most lurid mob trials are under way. The trials are exposing sordid, deep-seated connections between organized crime and corrupt officials and police in the central mega-city of Chongqing, once known as Chungking."

• Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors [NYTimes] "For nearly two decades, the Communist Party strove to wipe out the national memory of Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary who opposed the use of force against pro-democracy protesters in 1989. So when a former aide of Mr. Zhao’s, Du Daozheng, disclosed in May that he had helped secretly record Mr. Zhao’s memoir for posthumous publication, Mr. Du’s daughter refused to let him walk outside alone for fear of possible repercussions. She need not have worried. On June 25, a top official in charge of propaganda showed up at Mr. Du’s western Beijing apartment with a reassuring message from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government. Mr. Du said he was told that, as an old friend of Mr. Zhao’s, “Zhongnanhai and party central can understand why you did this.”"
• Olympic chief in ‘secret China deal’ [Times Online] "China made a secret deal with International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to support his election to the post in return for Rogge's lobbying for Beijing to win the 2008 Olympics, according to an explosive new book by China's sports minister at the time, Yuan Weimin. The former minister says Rogge explicitly bargained with him to win Chinese votes at the Moscow meeting of the IOC in 2001, which awarded the games to Beijing and three days later elected Rogge as president."
• China corruption trial exposes capital of graft [Telegraph] "Huang Guobi lost her husband four years ago to gangsters who brutally dismembered him with machetes before beating her senseless. When she took the case to her local police station, she found it was run by the nephew of the gang-leader. As she worked her way up the Chinese justice system, pleading for someone to bring the killers to account, she found each level riddled with corruption. This week, however, 47-year-old Mrs Huang stood outside the Number Five Intermediate People's Court in downtown Chongqing, filled with anger and satisfaction. Around her, 300 other people, many with similar stories, stood waiting for justice to be done. Inside, the first trial of China's largest-ever criminal investigation was under way, the culmination of five months of police work that has turned the city of Chongqing upside down."

You know what's a damper on any big day? A Divorce. And so at least one municipality has decided it's not going to let couples unwed during the 60th anniversary. Seven out of ten Chongqing districts have said that they will not process divorces during the eight-day holiday, even as they're getting extra staff to help with the weddings. Supposedly, they can't cope with the "high demand" for weddings and also issue divorces at the same time. Luckily for them, nobody's tried to process a divorce yet anyhow, though we wonder what kind of urgent circumstances would make couples want to split during a specific week and whether it then might be a good idea for Chongqing to ban knives as well, just in case.

Ex-Shanghaiist writer Thalia Kwok recently wrote a travel piece that made it into the semi-finals of the NYCGo Writing Contest. Her piece is about one of her favorite places when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chongqing - the 18 Staircases Teahouse.

Now that the Qingdao Beer Festival is over, we've been looking for other places to go to satisfy our wanderlust. We'd love to visit some tourist sites, maybe a beach or two, but what we're really looking for is a scenic, historic city filled with culture, nightlife, and of course, beautiful women. Lucky for us, ChinaHush has a translated list from Netease of the top 10 cities in China for beautiful women.

This latest ad has managed to shake ever our most jaded "This is China" hearts. A hospital in Chongqing is offering half price abortions if you show your student ID.

Ah, homegrown engineers, how we love thee. We'd previously witnessed someone building their own homemade helicopter, so we guess news of a homemade airplane wasn't far along. This one was the result of 150,000RMB and six years of effort by a Chongqing Telecom officer named Peng Cong. What's most amazing, his salary is only 2000RMB a month, which means that he basically put every penny into making this plane. We wonder what he did for food.

When summer comes, everyone wants to dive in the water to cool down. Recently, many hotels and high-end clubs in Chongqing posted ads in a BBS claiming that they offer beauties at the pool to "play with" as a deal to attract male customers.

Before Transformers 2 officially came out yesterday, a netizen from Chongqing posted a photo on Dayu of a 2-meter "Transformer" outside of a villager's house in Qianjiang Village. The villager told him that this "Transformer" is for keeping the doors safe.

What’s causing these wing-like appendages is still a mystery, but theories have been aplenty since the first incidence of winged cats appeared in Sichuan. Cat owners there reasoned that the province's hot summer spell and a stressful love life for their felines were causing wings to appear. Scientists were not convinced.

Looks like China's first attempt at a sexually explicit theme park came a little before its time. After videos of its statue, a giant pair of leggy legs in a red thong spinning atop the park's name, were released to the internet - Chongqing officials demanded that LOVE LAND be torn down. Love Land had been set to open in October and was envisioned to be a path towards sex education and a way to help adults "enjoy a harmonious sex life." Unfortunately, it seems like much of the population just found it "vulgar" and overly-explicit instead. Source: NYTimes

Yes, that is what appears to be the lower half of a shapely female... and yes, it is rotating. According to Netease, this is an unfinished mascot for a theme park located in Chongqing called... "LOVE LAND." Construction has just begun, but wily netizens leaked the video to the internet. Most people found it way too explicit and somewhat vulgar. Go figure!

A Chinese mother is producing so much breast milk that she bathes her baby in the excess every day. The mother said she usually ends up producing two liters more milk than her six-week-old daughter needs to drink, so the family has been finding clever ways to get rid of it. At first, she, her husband and her mother-in-law took turns drinking the extra milk. But when there was still plenty left over, they began giving the baby milk baths, which have made the baby's skin very smooth and white. Source: Ananova

Guess some kids get started on the ciggies a lot earlier than others. A lot earlier. Source: ZhongNanHai Blog

• The Dalai Lama entertains the idea of himself going to hell and of his lineage coming to an end at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. [China Rises]
• The WSJ's China Journal tells us of a "rare and violent strike" among cabbies in Chongqing yesterday protesting against fuel shortages and heavy fines.
• Sam Flemming of the China IWOM Blog tells us of Gome's launch of a tuangou (团购) or "group purchase" opportunity through the Chinese forum KDS. This is interesting because tuangou activities are usually initiated by consumers.

The counterfeit appears from 00:14 onwards.

In recent years the government has taken a serious stance into curbing the rampant corruption that is still common place in various levels of the government. Although they have a long way to go we have seen some headway in recent years.

As we mentioned earlier this week, the Ted Koppel special "The People's Republic of Capitalism" is currently airing on the Discovery Channel in the U.S. For those of you who can't wait for the bittorrent, here are some clips from the series, most of which was filmed in Chongqing.

A new hotpot restaurant in Chongqing that named itself after the Wenchuan earthquake on May 12 has been shut down by authorities after a huge public outcry. The Chinese characters used in the name of the restaurant "512震宗锅" (or "512 Quake Pot") was a homophonous pun for "authentic hotpot". Netizens have called it the "most shameless hotpot restaurant in Chongqing" and the owner of the restaurant has apparently been sent in for "criticism and re-education". Just two weeks ago, a Chongqing magazine was also shut down by the propaganda bureau for publishing "sexy" earthquake pictures in a special earthquake edition.

UPDATE: More photos are available here (link in Chinese). We should warn you that they are pretty tasteless though. (h/t to Danwei)

A stampede in a Chongqing Carrefour hypermart has left 3 dead, 24 injured and another 7 seriously injured. The culprit? Cooking oil. As part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, a 5-litre bottle of cooking oil that was originally priced at RMB51.40 was to be sold at only RMB39.90. This news was enough to get Chongqingers to start queueing from as early as 4am in the morning. Sometime around 8.20am when the doors were finally open,...