The Asian Games in Guangzhou kick off tomorrow and everyone's eyes are on China's perennial favorite hurdler Liu Xiang's 110m hurdle, where he's expected to sweep the gold. After his second-place (but really tied for first) performance at the Golden Grand Prix, and his recent win at the National Games victory seems likely tomorrow night.
People all over the country have been doing wacky things for the 60th anniversary: hair statues, wild safaris, you name it. But this one takes the (urinal) cake: a public garden in Panyu has just opened a massive tourist park with over twenty scenic spots, and "six star bathroom facilities". What makes a bathroom worthy of six stars, you may ask? The bathroom is made of gold, of course! Apparently the luxurious bathroom in the new NanYue park complex cost eight million yuan to make, and will host a grand opening party on National Day. Happy birthday, China!
Bullying is a part of adolescent school life: it's sad and disheartening when you're singled out for being different in an unfamiliar place. But, then again, it's probably worse when the bullying is facilitated by a teacher. Sina has a bizarre story on the hazing of an eight year old student, started by his teacher and ultimately ending with him being likened to a monkey's red ass.
In one of the more bizarre police conflict stories of late, over a hundred gay men congregated at People's Park in Guangzhou this week to protest police efforts to keep homosexuals out of the park. The police have used reports of petty crimes such as robbery and stealing to keep homosexuals out of the park, which serves as a meeting place for gay people. Protesters verbally clashed with the police after park guards attempted to force the group to leave the premises, and several protesters and volunteers were detained and questioned before the protest began.
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.
Yikes these internet addiction camps just sound scarier and scarier the more we hear about them. After news of Deng, a 16-year-old who was beaten to death as part of a "personality training program," got out, Southern Metropolis Daily decided to investigate by going to a related training camp in Guangzhou. According to the translation by Danwei, the training camps were still in operation despite educational authorities' declarations that they had been halted. Children on the third and fourth floors, when they saw the reporters, began sticking notes into aluminum cans, drink bottles and slippers. They held up bamboo mats with the letters "SOS" written on them and some bore papers and clothes scrawled with the words "beatings" and "help." They were all stopped by the instructors. We've got chills.
Heating up the Netease forums is this sorrowful story: a Guangdong husband brazenly brought his affair back home after 10 years of marriage. If that wasn't enough, he even made love to his mistress in front of his wife and requested her to sleep with them.
While we've been inundated by news of the ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and Hans, it seems like there's another ethnicity that feels its not getting fair treatment in China - Nigerians. In Guangzhou, the death of a Nigerian who was trying to escape a police visa check allegedly triggered a 200-strong protest by angry Africans. Emmanul Egisimba, a clothes seller, had been trading at the Tangqi Foreign Trade Clothes Plaza in central Guangzhou when plainclothes police started checking visas in the area. He ran but was cornered on the second floor, 18 meters above ground. So he decided to jump, allegedly to his death. The protest, which was as much over “tight visa controls” thanks to the 60th anniversary as it was over Egisimba's sad demise, is believed to be the first by foreigners anywhere on the mainland. Source: SCMP
This may be obvious to anyone who's ever seen cop beat down videos in the U.S., but you probably shouldn't spit on the police. That advice holds true in China.
Get ready to say goodbye to Fido... if he's the second dog you have.
Guanzhou sits to the southeast of the Guangzhou economic machine. It’s a place that was simply leapfrogged by development. Further south, beyond University City, is Panyu, a suburban area now boasting Asia’s largest water park. To the north and west is the dense urban network of buildings and streets of a massive city on the make. Once you zoom out a bit, the wresting of land from villagers not too far from some of the most expensive land in China seems not only inevitable but long overdue.
A bookkeeping official in Dongfushan village, Guandong province allegedly razed 24 mou (亩) of land - roughly 4 acres - to provide himself and his family with a large "luxurious and imposing" cemetery plot according to a Guangzhou Daily article from last week.
The exploding cellphone incident in Guangzhou, which killed a young man at a Lenovo store, may have had some of us scrambling to make sure our cellphone batteries weren't going to be the end of us too.
A man in a Guangzhou Lenovo store died after the cellphone in his chest pocket exploded. The explosion severed a major artery in his neck and caused massive blood loss, almost immediately killing him. Though the make and model of the mobile phone are still under investigation, a member of the staff said the man had just changed his cellphone battery to a new one. This is the 9th recorded cellphone explosion in China since 2002, so maybe it's best to make sure your cellphone's in a bag or something, rather than on your physical person. Hexun
We chanced upon this old, but super awesome picture of a RMB50 bill recreated with eggs on Neatorama. The art installation was exhibited in Guangzhou about two years ago.
Her boyfriend told a doctor that her left ear cracked while they were kissing. The woman later found she couldn't hear anything with that ear.
From RFA:
近日有聽眾向本台提供片段，指廣州街邊出現不少不法商人將用過的舊茶葉晒乾，加上香精後，然後加上偽冒的一九五八年普洱包裝，在市場上銷售。由次片段所見，在廣州街邊有人在衛生條件惡劣的露天地方，將晒乾的茶葉包好，然後印上一九五八產普洱字樣出售。工人 在地上包裝和處理茶葉，整個包裝地點都未有任何衛生及消毒設施。Continue reading "Video: Used tea repackaged and resold in Guangzhou"
Taxi driver strikes have been spreading from city to city lately. China Digital Times tells us of the latest one that took place in Guangzhou:
Cabbies in Guangzhou took to the streets Monday to protest the alleged beating of a fellow cab driver by a government official yesterday evening. The cab driver was beaten by three men after a traffic accident. Related photos, video clips and blog posts were all over Chinese cyberspace. The official media also quickly put out its own version of this protest. Read these stories from Xinhua and Shanghai Daily.
From Adam Schokora's new blog 56minus1:
this video short was filmed on the campus of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Also available on Youku* and Tudou for perhaps faster loading in China. Music by B6, a song called “Take You with a Sigh” from his new album Post Haze.
The NBA keeps doing its best to dominate the post-Olympic China sports news cycle. The latest: the Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors will play a pair of pre-season games in China in October.
According to China Daily, more and more middle and high school students are taking advantage of the summer holidays to make the kind of changes that will impress their peers come fall. But it isn’t a summer class or even a new workout routine they are adopting — it’s cosmetic surgery.
A bikini battalion of 1,202 ladies gathered Sunday at the Changlong Water Amusement Park in Guangzhou to form the Olympic rings logo and broke a Guinness world record — not for the largest Olympics logo ever formed with human bodies, but for the largest swimsuit photo shoot ever (previous record was set last year at Bondi Beach by 1,010 ladies). Yet another utterly useless record, you might say, but these girls sure look like they're having a blast!
As China rapidly climbs to world economic power, some enterprising individuals are emigrating here in the hopes of finding a new version of the American Dream. Blogging For China translates an article from the Southern Metropolis Daily on African traders who move to China (notably the city of Guangzhou, which currently holds an estimated 100,000 Africans) with the same burning desire of an earlier generation who emigrated to America: a better life. Many of them face strong prejudice against blacks in China and struggle to integrate themselves into their villages. The reporter follows one Liberian trader as he greets Chinese store-owners in his neighborhood:
He’ll loudly greet them, “Friend, how are you recently?” His “friends” don’t respond. Some pull out a cell phone and intentionally ignore him. Others impatiently wave at him, and say in a combination of Chinese and English: “If you’re not buying anything, then go… quickly GO!”Continue reading "The Chinese Dream?"
We've all been hearing reports about the nightmare caused by the snow, or what Xinhua calls "China's war on snow havoc", which isn't quite as felicitous a phrase as the "US War on Terror", but hey, at least it's more real! The New York Times, among other media outlets, talks about the sense of anger and resentment that people are feeling about what some consider as a lack of preparation on the government's part.
1. university students who might be studying medicine and could use the cash, 2. people who want to further the cause of medicine (and who might be sick themselves, and thus have a stake in it), and 3. people who are in it just for the money.
Okay, so we've all seen people writing with their feet, but have you seen anyone doing calligraphy with their HEAD? Hell, eversince we received our first computer, we've barely been able to hold a pen! We can't be too sure where this amputee-calligrapher-busker is exactly because the guy who uploaded this video did not give more information, but from a few comments we gather he is somewhere out there on the streets of Guangzhou. Okay,...
There recently was bit of kerfuffle over the exhibition of certain group of historical pictures at the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival: these pictures, unlike many of the other exhibits, featured some inter-species passion. According to an informal survey of twenty exhibition participants, there were those that a) supported showing such pictures b) did not support such pictures and c) those that were just "observing" and didn't really hold any opinion. Most of those that supported...
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