Chinese are coming together to extend moral support, cash and blood to help the victims in the Sichuan disaster. It’s a heartening thing to witness. So much blood was collected on Wednesday 5.14 in Beijing and Shanghai, that the blood collectors had to turn people away.
Sina.com is keeping a list of companies that have donated RMB 1,000,000 or more. It’s good to see lots of major Chinese corporates kicking in some cash. Several foreign companies with a presence in China are big donors too (Mary Kay, Intel, GE, Carrefour, IDG (venture capitalists putting their money to great use!)).
The French retailer and target of Chinese nationalist fury over the Olympic Flame controversy, Carrefour, has donated RMB 2 million (US$290,000) in earthquake relief. Chinese ‘netizen’ response is mixed. One site has mixed postings of thanks and others pointing out it’s a pittance considering Carrefour “broke the hearts of all Chinese people”, with one posting a picture of a french baby giving the bird, cynicism was expressed here from a user named “son of a bitch little Japan (狗日小日本) that Carrefour wouldn’t have made the donation if not for the boycott of its stores in China earlier this month. But lots of commenters kept it positive with thanks, and one here saying this proves Carrefour is a friend not an enemy of China.
It’s now 5:30pm in China. The 7.8 earthquake with an epicenter in Wenchuan, Sichuan province that struck at 2:28pm is being reported on local TV and the internet. While State media is reporting that Premier Wen Jiabao is headed to the area and that emergency aid is being sent, and that Hu Jintao has said the injured must be helped immediately. However there have been no reports of injuries or deaths. Television reporters on CCTV9, the Chinese language news channel, have not even mentioned the possibility of casualties. They are currently doing interviews with reporters around the country, but have not been able to reach any reporters near the area of Wenchuan.
My friend in Shanghai from Shaanxi Province (which borders Sichuan) called a friend in Shaanxi. The friend said that students in Shaanxi have been hospitalized due to falling debris in their school. My friend in Shanghai from Sichuan has been calling Sichuan but Read the rest of this entry »
WUHAN, March 15 (Xinhua) — A five-year pig raising project involving 1.36 billion U.S. dollars in investment launched on Saturday in Hubei, making the central China province the nation’s largest pig raising base.
China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp.( COFCO), the country’s largest oils and food importer and exporter and leading food manufacturer, started the project in Wuhan, the provincial capital.
Perennial Chinese Basketball Association bottom-dwellers Xinjiang Guanghui made an unexpected run to the playoffs this season and were considered strong CBA title contenders with a regular season record of 26-4. But there will be no title for the Flying Tigers after they were stripped of most of their points disqualifying them from the playoffs. It turns out the team’s star point guard Guan Xiuchang wasn’t born in Heilongjiang, as claimed by the team but rather is a Vietnamese-American named Song Cun-sou. This minor technicality violates the CBA’s two foreigner per team rule. When first questioned, the team insisted he was from Heilongjiang. Under continued pressure, they provided fake papers identifying him as a citizen of Macau. Eventually his true identity came to light, though Xinjiang Guanghui inexplicably denies knowing Song was from overseas. Incredibly, Song apparently played for another team, Yunnan Honghe in 2004-05.
This makes me curious. How did they get away with this for so long? Did everyone know they were cheating but didn’t do anything about it until they were a title contender? That sounds most plausible to me. Or perhaps they actually fooled people into thinking he was Chinese. I’m guessing Song speaks some Chinese (he did play in China in 2004-05) and attempted to blend in somehow. Did they limit his contact with the media and other outsiders?
A school in Wuhan, Hubei Province, has sparked controversy after it requested more than 30 students to undergo cosmetic surgery before graduation.
The surgery was for double-fold eyelids, breast enlargement and the removal of moles.
It was to make the students, most of them girls, more attractive and therefore stand a better chance of gaining employment.
Many of the students want to be airline cabin attendants after graduation.
Residents complained the school was focusing too much on the appearance of students instead of improving the quality of its teachers. But the school said it was important to improve the appearance of students when considering the tough employment market.
This school was only playing the game like everyone else. I’d bet many of the students would have had the surgery done anyway, for the same reasons.
A cluster of cities in central China has been designated the country’s latest experimental zone, this one for energy saving and environmentally friendly programmes, state media reported on Monday.
The Hunan cities of Changsha, Zhuzhou and Xiangtan — late chairman Mao Zedong’s hometown — as well as the Hubei capital of Wuhan, will be targeted to lead China’s drive to make its breakneck economic growth more environmentally sustainable. Read the rest of this entry »
Avoid going out and eating outside in the next few days! A man with AIDS from Xinjiang has been going around to cities all over the country and spreading the disease by pricking himself with a bamboo stick and then dripping blood into other people’s food! This is not a hoax. Some university students have already been infected, so please be careful! Don’t go out unless you have to, and if you eat out, bring your own eating utensils!
Apparently Xinjiangers, already widely maligned as the “Thieves of China“, aren’t satisfied with just pickpocketing anymore. Now at least one is traveling across the country and dropping his AIDS into the food of unsuspecting students–mostly Han students, no doubt.
I didn’t know that one could get AIDS from eating a drop or two of AIDS-infected blood–unless it’s super AIDS, in which case all bets are off. At least we now know that bringing your own sanitized bowl and chopsticks will kill the super AIDS, though.
A recent City Weekend article, “Culture of Complaint“, investigates the constant whining among expats in China. I’m as big a whiner as the next person, but the topic of the first complaint is what caught my eye:
After a three hour drive along an unfinished road in a rattling “mianbao che,” Anna Grace Carter and her husband finally reached their new home-a cement block building located on a dirt road off an empty highway in Zunyi, Guizhou province.
“The first six months I hated it and wanted to go home,” Carter admits. “I tried to like it. I pretended I liked it.” Despite the fact her apartment didn’t lack for amenities, she wasn’t used to the “squatty potty” and certainly not ready for the crushing isolation that comes with being one of a handful of foreigners in town.
I was lucky enough to visit Zunyi on a bicycle trip last February with SHTig and ODB. We loved it! It’s a great little city in northern Guizhou, famous in ChiCom lore as the site of the 1935 Zunyi Conference, where Mao stepped forward as the supreme leader of the Communists in China. Read more about the Zunyi Conference here.
Zunyi sits along a river in a mountainous area with beautiful scenery and clean air. It’s a major destination for Party-sponsored tours and conferences, and as a result it feels like a prosperous place, unlike most of the rest of Guizhou. We spent Chinese New Year’s Day there, watching a lion dance from while sipping freshly brewed coffee at a Dicos overlooking a town square. It was certainly not the place for Ms. Carter, though:
Coming to China was not Carter’s idea. Her husband, who had been fascinated by Chinese culture and kung fu movies for years, decided to make the move when Anna was unable to find work in Italy. Neither of them spoke a word of Chinese…
Now happily ensconced in Beijing, Carter, whose dream job is to be a presenter on CCTV9, finds that she complains much less. “In Zunyi people stared at me and treated me like an alien, not like a person,” says Carter, who would even avoid going out because of the pressure.
Anyway, if you have the chance to go there, whether for a day or a year, I highly recommend Zunyi.
Doctors in China admit they are baffled after a man began to perspire green sweat. Cheng Shunguo, 52, of Wuhan city, says his sweat turned green in the middle of November. “I noticed that my underwear and bed sheets were all green, and even the water in the shower,” he told.
Cheng says he feels no discomfort, but went to hospital because he was worried about his condition. Doctors thoroughly cleaned his armpits but it took only 10 minutes for his sweat to turn a piece of white gauze green again.
They have carried out blood tests on Cheng, but found everything to be normal. “We can’t find the cause,” admitted a spokesman for the hospital which reported the case to the media in the hope of finding a solution.
