Results tagged “housing”

More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute 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 (and here).

This a rough translation of Fan Gui's response to Sun Liping's essay (which we wrote about here): 1. Regarding Sun's first point, I believe that he has ignored a very crucial fact—the growing gap between rich and poor. 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, how can you say that such a status quo has "flexibility"? While Professor Sun divides the population into urban and rural, does he mean that the urban poor...

On Friday, the People’s Bank of China raised mortgage interest rate and hiked minimum down payment needed for purchasing investment and commercial properties. In a joint announcement with China Banking Regulatory Commission, the PBoC said

Cathay Pacific and Air China's parent company abandoned an attempt to block Singapore Airlines from buying a stake in China Eastern, as the battle for the lucrative Chinese market heats up.

The Aluminum Company of America, better known as ALCOA sold its entire 7 percent stake in its largest Chinese counterpart, Aluminum Company of China, or CHALCO for short (ALCOC just doesn’t quite have the same pizzazz, not to mention potentially misleading). ALCOA acquired the Chalco stake for roughly USD $200 million back in 2001 when the Chinese firm went public in Hong Kong. And six years later, the same stake just exchanged hands for 10 times the value, USD$2 billion. 25 major institutions were reported buyers, and just to be nice, ALCOA priced the shares at 15 percent below market, how very generous!

Recently while out of town, our landlord called us on our cell phone to inform us that he wanted his apartment back ASAP. Why, we asked? He wanted to renovate it, he said, but we were not convinced. You see, the few of us have been living in this apartment for coming to 3 years now, and there was this implicit agreement that we could stay on for as long as we liked, so some time back we didn't sign any lease with him, but continued to dutifully pay our rent each month (no delays) as we have done for such a long time.

Security guards in a Suzhou housing complex found a nude man lying dead on a platform on the second floor while on their regular walkabouts. Police found that the man, surnamed Geng, was a tenant on the 12th floor of the complex and was working in a sauna in the neighbourhood. The night before, a woman living on the 16th floor returned home at around 3am in the morning, only to discover there was an unwelcome visitor in her bathroom, and he was nude. Naturally she screamed at the top of her lungs and ran out. Later, she discovered that her cell phone was still in the bathroom and when she went back in again (we think that's such a strange thing to do given the circumstances!), the man was gone. Apparently, her scream had gotten her peeping tom into a fluster, and he fell to his death.

Pioniers, a minor league team in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2007, he was signed by the Beijing Tigers of the China Baseball League (more info here). The CBL season already over, Kim recently answered some of our questions via email.

In a report just released an hour ago, Reuters tells us that Shanghai housing rights activist, Chen Xiaoming, who was one of seven Chinese activists awarded the 2006 Housing Rights Defender Award by the Geneva-based Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions, "has died hours after he was released on medical parole".

Harshing the mellows of college kids all over China, the Ministry of Education has announced a ban on off-campus student housing:

In a notice issued on Friday, the ministry instructed all universities to make the dormitories "another front for political and ideological education" to create "a good climate for the students' growth."

Continue reading "Education Ministry mandates curfew and bedchecks for university students"

Housing evictions and tenants' rights have become hot button issues in Chinese society today, a flash point in the conflict between ordinary citizens, land developers, and the government. The most famous case of this, at least in recent memory, was the Chongqing nailhouse, which became an internet-fueled media phenomenon. And now, a similar situation has appeared in the Fengtai district of Beijing. A group of residents who did not agree to conditions offered them by land developers for compensation and resettlement are making a last stand in their homes. As you can see from these pictures (the report is in Chinese), deep 'trenches', in some places three meters deep, have been dug around the homes, making it nearly impossible for a person to enter or leave without a ladder or professional pole-vaulting skills. The electricity and water have also been cut off.

From wodingg.com we discovered that Google China (soon to be China Google?) has come out with a new search engine function called Google Sheng Huo (生活), which you can use to search for stuff like housing, jobs, and stuff to buy. Basically what it does is to gather results from other websites and search engines.

Property agents in Shanghai have come up with a novel way of giving house buyers important information about the home they intend to buy. Ask them about neighbourhood construction plans for malls, motorways and high rise appartments and they may take you to the third floor of the Urban Planning Museum in People's Square. There lies the model of the grand plan of the city centre for Expo 2010.

This morning, Chinese language news portal 163.com had a great scoop, and revealed the future planning for Shanghai and China's Maglev railway system.

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists.

China has moved a step closer to diversifying its US$1.07 trillion in foreign reserves, with the yet-unofficial appointment of two senior officials to head new vehicles that will seek to invest a portion of China's reserves, which are the largest in the world.

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.

Lots of juicy transportation news today:

As the world holds it's breath, teetering precariously on the cusp of the Super Bowl (well, at least in America), the wheels of the -ists keep on turning.

There appears to be a push (or maybe a slight nudge) to save an old house on Taojiang Lu that for four years in the 1940s was occupied by Soong Ching Ling, also known as Madame Sun or Sun Yat Sen's wife. The two story villa, which is very close to O'Malley's, is currently occupied by 40 workers from the Shanghai Qianggu Construction Engineering Company.

On a recent stroll near the Bund, Shanghaiist chanced upon a curious joint that was billing itself as a restaurant, design house, hair studio, live music joint, and art gallery. Ma.Design, it was called. We were intrigued.

Photo by spiky247 taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute 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 has been wary of taking pictures of protesters, as it's gotten us in a wee bit of trouble with the authorities before. We got a call a couple of a days ago from some of the folks connected with the housing demolitions and tenants' rights "movement" here in Shanghai, telling us that something was going to happen on Monday. We went, and saw this man (pictured here), making one last stand on the roof of a building where he lives and which is slated for destruction. He'd been there since early in the morning and policemen on motorcycles were on the street monitoring the situation. Our contact happened to live nearby and we managed to get some snaps before they urged us to leave for our own good.

It’s true, the first Pompidou Centre in China is landing in Shanghai. According to this report (in Chinese) by Oriental Morning Post, Renaud Donnedieude Vabres, culture minister of France, and Bruno Racine, president of the Pompidou Centre (we're going to call it the "PC" from now on), the first PC in Shanghai is going to cover 10,000 square meters at the intersection of Huaihai Zhong Lu and Songshan Lu, near the site of the old French concession police station (pictured). The report was kind of vague, as they often are, but the historic building is expected to be preserved and somehow incorporated into the project.

Austinist was in an entertainment state of mind as they covered the dickens out of the Austin Film Festival, depicted all the Big 12 football coaches as South Park characters, and interviewed Jose Gonzalez.

Live in Shanghai is split up into four major sections -- Fast Facts, Transport, Housing and, of course, Miscellaneous -- and also includes plenty of interactive features, like the "Dress up the Cabs" animation pictured above. The Shanghai Metro Map isn't too shabby, either.

Somehow, the world of -ists managed to make it through the week despite news that Jen & Vince broke up.