Al-Jazeera's report on the anti-Maglev protest has interesting footage of how the city government is collecting feedback and an emergency residents meeting in one neighbourhood. While municipal authorities have promised more research and feedback opportunities, train protesters have been warned not to conduct any illegal protest during Gordon Brown's visit to Shanghai.
Yesterday, we were tipped off on our Contribute page that an anti-maglev protest was going to take place today 2pm at People's Square. Apparently that has been derailed by the police. From Reuters:
Police in China's financial hub of Shanghai detained scores of people on Saturday after hundreds showed up to protest a planned extension of the city's magnetic levitation train, or "maglev", worried it would emit radiation.Continue reading "Anti-maglev protests derailed"
Troubling news has emerged over the last day regarding the tragic killing of a man in Tianmen, Hubei province.
Shanghai Awaiting Approval on Disneyland [AP] Shanghai is awaiting approval of mainland China's first Disneyland, and the theme park could be built on an island in the Yangtze River, according to reports in the mainland and Hong Kong media.Shanghai sets up $1bn fund [FT] Shanghai's city government is setting up a financial investment company with about $1bn to spend on investments in China and overseas.New mechanisms required for China's climate change efforts - Greenpeace [Forbes]...
Two weeks ago, when we told you that China's new labour law was going to be a big, big thing, we had no idea it would also be the cause of some serious blood-letting. Local gangs and triads have been attacking the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre which has been instrumental in providing legal advice for rural migrant workers and informing them about their rights under the new labour law. In separate attacks, they shattered...
For those of you that haven't been able to pluck yourself out of that sinking feeling, Xinhua has a scientific explanation for it — our city has been sinking! In fact, geologists say it's sunk 7.5 millimetres this year, with "severe subsidence" of 8.3 millimetres detected in downtown areas. The sinking's been caused by heavy construction as well as water being pumped out of underground aquifers for "industrial and agricutural purposes" which has now been...
Newsday.com brings our attention to Ellie Su, a 27 year old finance official from Dongguan who found a US$282.6 million error in the 2008 budget of the Nassau County Legislature barely 2 weeks into her internship there. On the page for debt service, it is reported, Su noticed one item that read $31.4 million instead of $314 million.
Shanghaiist contributor Micah has posted some information about the present and future of Wujiang Lu in the comments section of our post from yesterday. We thought they were worth highlighting.
Xinhua reports:
RIP Wulihe Stadium of Shenyang. Built in 1989, this stadium is best known for being the place where China qualified for the World Cup Finals by beating Oman 1-0 in October 2001. It was razed to the ground in a little over six seconds on Feb. 12, 2007.
Browsing the Ditiezu.com (Subway-ers) BBS, we came across some interesting tidbits:
From this blog we found an article that had been taken from news.163.com about a school for the children of migrant workers' in Shanghai that was forcibly shut down by the police. The Jian Ying School (建英学校) on Dan Ba Lu (丹巴路）was given an ultimatum on January 5 that the school had to be shut down by January 8. On Monday morning around 6 am, people, including parents, onlookers, and journalists, gathered around the school. The police brought large buses that they used to take the students away (where?), and as tension escalated people surrounded the bus and argued with the police.
You know the Beijing city government is worried about its images leading up the Olympics, because it recently invited Chinese and foreign journalists to visit the dog impounding facilities it's set up for all the unlicensed dogs they've caught in their recent campaign against rabies, biting, and dog shit:
From a reader we learned that all flights leaving and arriving at Pudong airport after 2 pm were canceled or rerouted. They sent us a link to the only new story on this so far, which is from the AP:
In a blow to those looking for blow and/or blowjobs, we learned from this report (in Chinese) that new hair salons, beauty parlors, foot massage and cards/mahjong establishments must be approved by the residents living in the area before they can open for business. While we don't know if this means a majority-rules or a single-vote-can-veto system, what it does mean is that the city government is cracking down on vice in the name of all those people who can't stand to hear other people getting blowjobs when they are trying to sleep because they have real jobs they have to go to in the morning.
Once again, our city government has stuck its nose where it doesn’t belong, and in the process dashed hundreds of local women’s dreams of finding true love and an American passport (not necessarily in that order), and likewise chances for 11 middle-aged divorced guys from the state of Washington to score some Azn Honeyz. The ever informative Shanghai Daily tells us:
But taking a dip into a major, disgustingly-polluted body of water is exactly what the governor of Guangdong Province and the mayor of Guangzhou did ... along with 3,500 other loyal citizens. Why? To prove that the Pearl River is now "neither black nor stinky" -- in certain sections -- after 30 years of being completely offensive:
Shanghaiist headed out to the city government on Wednesday morning to check out what was happening with the housing protester folks, who go there every Wednesday to meet with officials in hopes of solving their cases. It's been several months since we last reported on these folks, and nothing much seems to have changed. There are still of plenty of pissed off people. Wary of making too much of an impression on the guards over there, we talked briefly with some people and then headed next door, to the Shanghai Urban Planning and Exhibition Center, where they opened the The Blacksmiths' Alchemy exhibition. In case you missed it, here's a blurb:
• .. .train tickets have changed every-so-slightly? In a move to make the process more friendly to visitors from abroad, train stations are now printing the departure and destination city names in English, just below the original Chinese. Since the departure time and car/seat numbers are written in the other international language (numbers), the only thing left to fully interpret a ticket is the bottom/middle/top character on sleeper train tickets.
Photo by CaptainVideo taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos "shanghaiist". Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.
Shanghaiist remembers when they first appeared on street corners throughout the city. Shanghai's crossing guards look like lost UPS workers with whistles. And we've always felt kind of sorry for them. Because they have no real power -- they can't issue tickets, or even official warnings -- and everyone knows this. So pedestrians ignore them. And all the crossing guards can do is blow their whistles louder. Shanghaiist was a crossing guard in elementary school. Back then, in the mid 1980s, it was the cool thing to do for an 11-year-old. Not the case for a 40- or 50-year-old in Shanghai, as Howard French points out in the International Herald Tribune:
Shanghaiist has not witnessed, first-hand at least, many cities where traffic has gotten better. Usually we find ourselves in a city during the phase where traffic ineluctably changes from tolerable to shitty. But at least we know that here in Shanghai, there are city officials awake at night thinking about how to deal with this situation. Sometimes they think up modest measures, such as getting rid of the double-decker buses on the 911 line (we're sad about this one, lot of good memories on that bus) that take up so much room and disrupt traffic. More radical measures include creating those little bus stop islets so that buses don't block traffic when they stop. According to this report (in Chinese), this will have the effect of increasing traffic capacity by over 30 percent. That report also lists the 30 bottleneck spots that the city government are going to try to tackle, along with the proposed changes. Scroll down to the bottom to see if an intersection near you is going to be affected. Some will have left-turn lanes added, some will just add more lanes, others will have pedestrian lanes added.
Photo from the AP.
The World Expo Shanghai is almost here! Yes, that's what we'll be saying in December 2009. Until then, we are relying on titbits of information fed to us by the Mayor of Shanghai.
City Government approved the detailed construction plan for Shanghai ExpoContinue reading "1641 days to go ..."
Go ahead, stare at my chest
Monitors remind classmates that love is publically unacceptable
One is the loneliest number: 11/11 is Singles' Day
Electrolist: Musical legends rule, jah
Interview: Beijing Queer Film Festival
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
