Strange article in Shanghai Daily today, "Police help poor village cast off shit name" -- who knew SHDaily were allowed to curse like sailors! Aside from the strange editorial oversight that allowed one of the "Big Three" swearwords into a publication that's read by thousands of expat families (though this story was not in the print edition), is the odd story itself. more ›

Two trucks transporting 70 tons of explosives in Guizhou province exploded next to a motor vehicle testing station on Tuesday morning, killing 8 people and injuring 218 others. The explosion was so enormous that six local schools canceled classes because of damage to their buildings. more ›

Record rains have caused serious floods in Guizhou, Sichuan, Shaanxi and Henan provinces, affecting a grand total of 12.3 million people according to the AFP, 12.3 million people were affected. 57 people have died so far and another 29 are missing. Here's a look at the situation in Guizhou. Don't miss the treacherous rescue operation toward the later part of the video. more ›

Oh we know how much China loves their minorities! And every year those minorities get to flaunt their individualism in the 9th National Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities (第九届全国少数民族运动会), which began this year on September 10 in Guiyang, the capital of southwest China's Guizhou Province. more ›

This is the decidedly low-tech parallel to the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, and it involves Wang Xiangui (王先贵), a department chief at the taxation bureau in Guiyang, Guizhou province. more ›

(Warning: Video shows images of the deceased) Beaten to death at the hands of the universally-despised chengguan (城管), news of a street vendor's unjust demise in Anshun (安顺), Guizhou has gone viral and sparked rioting throughout the city. more ›

Somebody needs to give these kids a chance at dance school!
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Last week we posted about a coal mine fire in east Shandong province that trapped 36 miners underground in a mine owned by Zaozhuang Fangbei Coal Mine Co. Ltd. In more recent news, 24 miners remain trapped with little hope of a successful rescue. more ›

More insane photos of the flooding in southern China that has killed a total of 54 people, according to the latest from Xinhua. Guizhou province was hardest hit, with 21 dead and 36 missing. Guizhou's Wangmo country recorded 4.1 inches of rain in just one hour, the most in 200 years! The torrential rains follow months of severe drought, and have wreaked havoc on 4.8 million people in 12 southern provinces. From AFP: more ›

Floods have taken 21 lives in Guizhou's Wangmo County (望谟县), with an additional 32 people being reported as missing. The torrential downpour that began on Friday has impacted 16 cities and counties in Guizhou province, affecting nearly 400,000 people, with 13,000 hectares of ruined farmland (32,124 acres) and an estimated 1.34 billion RMB in damages occurring in Wangmo County alone. more ›

Shanghai Daily reports that a 14-year-old girl ran away from her hometown in Guizhou province to attend the Shanghai Expo. The girl, surnamed Tan, had big dreams to experience the glitz and glamor of the Expo with a friend she had met on the Internet. But her hopes were dashed -- although she managed to make it here by bus, she was immediately detained by police and later returned to her parents, who flew to Shanghai to bring her home. We don't advocate running away from home, but couldn't they have let her visit Expo grounds? Battling the crowds may have been punishment enough. more ›

Not until netizens came across this pretty hilarious photo of a Guizhou government hot line billboard. The sign calls for citizens for Zunyi County to message the number below if they had any suggestions in order to help create a glorious, happy 2010. Only, if you thought regular 13-digit cell phone numbers were difficult to remember, try inputting this: 106573031103010002. more ›

We thought we'd seen the last of babies taking drags off ciggs with the first video, but nope. more ›

This is probably one of our favorite Chinese traditions so far: apparently lottery winners, in order to conceal their identities from the populous, dress up in costumes when receiving their fake oversized media checks. This has been going on for a while, and netizens have begun to give awards for the best costumes on Chinese forum sites. It's kind of like a taste of Halloween year round! more ›

Screenshot was taken from People's Daily online, in an article about a Guizhou tourism official who caught the attention of netizens for being so beautiful. From the picture, it seems that nationalistic fervor in China was a little more amorous than we thought. more ›

By 2015 it could happen, GoKunming reports. The journey currently takes 37 hours. According to GoKunming, "the Shanghai-Kunming passenger line (沪昆客运专线) will connect Shanghai and Kunming via the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan, passing through the major cities of Hangzhou, Nanchang and Changsha. Its target speed is reportedly 350 km/hr." more ›

After Xinhua reported that county officials in Weng’an—including its Communist Party secretary, Wang Qin, and head of the county government, Wang Haiping—were fired on Friday following the June 28 riots, Western media has hailed Weng’an as a turning point for China. Both WSJ and TIME remark that Xinhua’s handling of the Weng’an incident is remarkable in itself; not only did state media report the riots almost immediately, but quickly produced "unusually long investigative stories." Adding to this assemblage of information are the voices of Chinese bloggers, who are doing their part to increase transparency in China. "Aggressive Chinese bloggers make an art of challenging Chinese government propaganda. This week, they can claim a victory," writes Geoffrey Fowler and Juliet Ye for the Wall Street Journal. "The Weng'an incident and its seemingly more open coverage are signs of the greater latitude enjoyed by the state media in the wake of the May 12 Sichuan earthquake," adds Simon Elegant of TIME. more ›

To bolster confidence against terrorist attacks in the upcoming Beijing Olympics, Xinhua gives us stills from a CCTV special of the armed police demonstrating anti-terrorist tactics in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province. more ›

China's bloggers have always gone to extreme lengths to share information and criticism. But after the Weng'an riots this weekend, bloggers have had to become especially crafty when distributing information on the riots and their aftermath. In addition to burying coding inside search phrases that hide the words from online censors and taking a screenshot of written text, the Wall Street Journal reports netizens on Tianya.cn now flipping sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally to get past all the usual keyword blocks. Sinobyte suggests that this new method might be better than most, since Chinese is an ideographic writing system "probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages." Sinobyte further explains that since Chinese words are split into meaning-based units, reading reverse text is more like reading the English word "bass ackwards" instead of "sdrawkcab ssa." more ›

While yet more versions of the Weng'an, Guizhou riot have surfaced on the internet, the Guizhou provincial government has also finally given its version — which, believe it or not, has sparked off a new pop phrase on the Chinese internet — "I'm here to do push-ups" (我来做俯卧撑的). Netizens are now suddenly flooding the forums with pictures of TV host Ou Zhihang (区志航) doing push-ups in his birthday suit by famous Chinese landmarks such as the Tiananmen in Beijing, Lujiazui in Shanghai and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou. more ›

By Hilary Faxon and Adrienne Wong more ›

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens more questions than it answers, paving the way for all sorts of unsubstantiated rumours to dominate public opinion. more ›

Several thousand rioters have gathered in Guizhou's Weng'an County, torched a police station, ransacked government buildings and overturned police cars, after allegations of a cover-up over a 15 year old girl's death blew up. Ming Pao reports the son of the county's vice-deputy mayor had raped and murdered the girl along with another youth and tossed her body into the Ximen River. Police only detained the suspects for five hours and released them without charge. EastSouthWestNorth says unconfirmed, conflicting reports are now swirling around the Internet but has several telling pictures which indicate a large proportion of the population was out on the streets. [Xinhua] [Reuters] [AP] [AFP] [Youtube videos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] more ›

If you are familiar with drinking heavily or going to Chinese banquets (basically the same thing), you've probably been forced to chug try some Maotai. Deemed "China's national liquor" by Reuters, Maotai or máotáijiǔ (茅台酒) is one of the most famous brands of Chinese rice wine (or báijiǔ). Although dignitaries like Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon have put this put-hair-on-your-chest drink to their conservative lips, the popular liquor is now threatened. You see, Maotai is... more ›