Positive news from the Middle Kingdom

[ricky_v]

https://in.news.yahoo.com/dirty-rat-pho ... 17305.html

Photos have emerged which appears to show a rat that has been tied up and "shamed" for stealing rice from a shop in China.

The images, which were posted onto Weibo, China's version of Twitter, reportedly shows the rodent with its hand and feet tied in the Lianping County of Heyuan city in southern China's Guangdong Province.


The rat is seen with a yellow sign around its neck reading: "Is this the best you could do? Even if you beat me to death, I would not admit that the rice at your home had been stolen by me."

In a second pic, the rat can be seen with a second sign reading: "I dare not do it again!", reported the Daily Mail.


The user of the Weibo account which uploaded the pics, Jiu lian shan she zhang, said the rat was caught by staff at a shop owned by his friend.

He said: "Some people pitied the rat, some people hated the rat, and some people found it to be funny.

You dirty rat: Rodent 'tied up and shamed' after stealing from shop in China

"I pity the rat. It's just a small animal. It would almost certainly die being treated like this."

It is not known if the rat survived the incident. The shop owner, Lai Tiancai, dismissed the incident as "small" and added "It was just a rat".

surprised they didn't eat it.

[Manish_P]

Chinese bike share firm goes bust after losing 90% of bikes

A Chinese bike-sharing company has gone out of business after 90% of its bikes went missing in the first five months.

Chongqing-based Wukong Bikes said the bulk of its 1,200 two-wheelers were lost or stolen.

Unlike rivals, the firm did not put GPS systems on its bikes and by the time it realised the technology was necessary, money had run out.

[RCase]

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1445416/ch ... gine-luck/

SHANGHAI: A superstitious passenger delayed a flight from Shanghai for several hours on Tuesday after throwing coins at the plane’s engine for good luck, Chinese officials said.

The elderly woman was detained by police at Shanghai Pudong International Airport following the bizarre incident, forcing nearly 150 passengers to be evacuated from the plane bound for Guangzhou in southern China.
The 80-year-old threw nine coins at an engine of China Southern Airlines flight CZ380 as she was boarding on the tarmac.

Eight of the coins missed their target but one nestled inside an engine, airport police said, adding that a passenger spotted her and reported it to authorities. She was taken away by police after a fellow passenger reported the bizarre incident.

The elderly woman was travelling with her husband, daughter and son-in-law, Beijing Youth Daily said.

“A senior passenger threw coins to the plane’s engine and delayed the flight. The passenger involved has been taken away by police,” China Southern Airlines said in a statement on its Twitter-like Weibo account.

“In order to make sure the flight is safe, China Southern maintenance has conducted a full exam of the plane’s engine.”

The incident was soon trending on Weibo and police added in a statement: “After investigation the involved passenger surnamed Qiu said she threw the coins to pray for safety. According to Qiu’s neighbour, Qiu believes in Buddhism.

Hundreds of thousands of Weibo users had a field day, with one commenting sarcastically: “Grandma, this is not a wish fountain with turtles.”

The Chinese state media said that the elderly passenger will not face police action.

The People’s Daily newspaper, citing police, said that while she had broken the law and would normally serve five days behind bars, she is exempted because she is aged over 70.

[Manish_P]

China's famous elevated bus is now just a giant roadblock

After seizing the world's attention over the summer, China's futuristic elevated bus appears to have reached the end of the line.

Video of the road-straddling bus cruising over the top of cars during a test run spread like wildfire on social media back in August. But the quirky vehicle now sits idle at the test site in northern China, where it has become a hulking eyesore.

Billed as a potential answer to China's crippling traffic problems, the elevated bus is now the source of bottlenecks in the port city of Qinhuangdao. Cars traveling in both directions have to crowd together on the other side of the road to avoid the test tracks and the 26-foot-wide bus.

[amit]

China's famous elevated bus is now just a giant roadblock

After seizing the world's attention over the summer, China's futuristic elevated bus appears to have reached the end of the line.

Video of the road-straddling bus cruising over the top of cars during a test run spread like wildfire on social media back in August. But the quirky vehicle now sits idle at the test site in northern China, where it has become a hulking eyesore.

Billed as a potential answer to China's crippling traffic problems, the elevated bus is now the source of bottlenecks in the port city of Qinhuangdao. Cars traveling in both directions have to crowd together on the other side of the road to avoid the test tracks and the 26-foot-wide bus.

I know this post is not in the spirit of "positive news" of this thread. However, it needs to pointed out how good the Chinese are in myth building.

Sample some of the news reports from a year ago from the usual Western suspects. I'm just posting two but there are several dozens out there.

China's elevated bus: Futuristic 'straddling bus' hits the road

China’s Straddling Bus, on a Test Run, Floats Above the Streets

Note the reportage, no cynical PoV, no question of why China needs that when it has so many other problems - you know the usual drill. No incredulity, of how can these Asians do it etc. Just a straightforward lapping up of the hogwash. Contrast that with the cynicism displayed when some folks in India pointed out, rightly, that Aadhar was the biggest ever IT project implemented in the world and took just six years! (Sorry for the OT).

In one way you have to give it to the Hans, they've transformed their image from opium addicted "yellow" people into something no one really likes but can't ignore.

[Javee]

China says launch of Long March-5 Y2 'unsuccessful'

The launch of China's latest heavy-lift carrier rocket, the Long March-5 Y2, was announced unsuccessful on Sunday evening. An anomaly occurred during the flight of the rocket, which blasted off at 7:23 p.m. from Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern province of Hainan. Further investigation will be carried out. The Long March-5 made its maiden flight in November 2016 from Wenchang, sending its payload into preset orbit.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1054549.shtml

[deejay]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... _scam.html

Turns Out That “Car-Eating Bus” From China Might Be a Scam

By Angelica Cabral

Well, on Sunday, the Chinese government took to the social media site Weibo to announce the whole thing is a scam. It wasn’t fake news, exactly—the video itself was real, not doctored. But the video didn’t correctly portray how well the bus would work in real life.

On Aug. 2, 2016, China Xinhua News unveiled the bus to the world. According to China Xinhua News, the bus had just begun its maiden drive in Qinhuangdao, a city east of Beijing with a population of about 3 million. The bus purportedly operated by following a predetermined route and could carry about 300 people. The bottom was 7.2 feet off the ground, so cars under that height could go under it and keep driving (unless it was turning, in which case cars reportedly had to wait for the bus to finish). The internet loved the videos that emerged and labeled it a “car-eating” bus.

But the tide quickly turned.

Soon after the test run, Forbes called into question the validity of the project, noting that China’s state media had questions about the project, including how well it would actually perform, considering the test run was only 300 meters long and didn’t factor in a wide variety of details. Then in December 2016 CNN reported that the bus had been abandoned on the special tracks built for it and it was causing, not fixing, traffic issues. On June 21, the bus was finally relocated, and officials announced plans to remove the special tracks on which it ran by the end of June, according to Quartz.

Now the project is running into legal troubles with its investors, 72 of whom have filed lawsuits against two people who run an online investing platform, Huaying Kailai and Bai Zhiming, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, a Chinese language newspaper.

The two raised about $1.3 billion for the project, with potential investors having to pay a minimum of $150,000 as a buy-in. The investors were promised a 12 percent return on their contribution. Police in China have arrested Zhiming, who also bought the patent for the design, along with 31 of his employees, NPR reports.

But rather than running from the scene of the crime, Zhiming said the bus would be relocated to another city after being moved from its abandoned post, Quartz reported. This guy doesn’t seem to know when to quit.

[deejay]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ns/517809/

Big in China: Murder Villages and Scam Towns
In some rural areas, crime has become a cottage industry.

And Shisun, for a time, made a killing off of killing. Last year, Chinese prosecutors indicted 40 of the village’s residents for arranging 17 murders. At least 35 more deaths are under investigation; dozens more victims may never be known. News of Shisun’s killing ring provoked dismay in Hunan province, but not shock; similar gangs have been caught in Hebei, Henan, and Sichuan provinces. Indeed, the type of murder conspiracy seen in Shisun is so common that it has its own nickname: Mangjingshi Fanzui, after the film Mang Jing (“Blind Shaft”), which details a similar scheme. Like the movie’s characters, Shisun’s plotters killed migrant miners—staging each man’s death as a mining accident—then posed as grieving family members. Corrupt mine bosses in turn paid these impostor “families” hush money, rather than risk any investigation into working conditions. The scam was grisly but profitable—each death could net as much as $120,000, an unimaginable sum in a country where the average rural family’s annual income is $1,800. The new concrete houses that line the mud-brick village’s main street are a testament to the windfall.

Remote and difficult to access, many villages in China’s interior have developed a criminal cottage industry, involving anything from drugs to internet fraud to counterfeiting. (In fact, shanzhai, the slang for counterfeit, literally means “mountain village.”) In coastal Boshe, a village of 14,000 people, 20 percent of the population—including pensioners, police officers, and politicians—helped produce a third of China’s methamphetamine. Shutting down Boshe’s meth labs three years ago required 3,000 tactical officers backed by helicopters.

Many observers blame crime villages on the widening gap between China’s urbanized population and its left-behind agrarian one. Minimal policing, neglected infrastructure, and grinding poverty have isolated whole communities not just from society, but from traditional morality. Crime offers villagers a way to make a living, but beyond that, it provides essential revenue for cash-strapped local officials. In a report on “gangsterized” villages in Hunan province, Yu Jianrong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, writes that thugs are often used to keep public order and even collect taxes. In peasant communities, notes Feng Qingyang, a prominent blogger and social critic, clan loyalty to feudal chiefs supersedes deference to government authority. “People, rather than laws or government, rule,” he wrote on his blog. And when most of a village is implicated to some degree in a crime, notes Zheng Guihong, a Beijing-based political commentator, the prevailing view is that “the law cannot punish the majority.”

Authorities claim that poverty-relief efforts will consign crime villages to the past—provided local officials don’t embezzle the funds, of course. In the meantime, catching perpetrators is a game of Whac-a-Mole, with the criminals forever ahead of the cops. Rewards for crime are high, penalties are low, and living conditions are often dire. Tales of peasants who have prospered in the city inspire many to dream of overnight riches, according to Feng. But few can make a fortune without crime. The lucky strike gold alone; for others, it takes a village.

[kancha]

Just finished reading this book. Highly recommended for the good folks on this forum as well.
The authors were white expats who stayed in China for a long time and published this book after first hand observation of the Chinese society. A brutal commentary on the warts that the CCP tries hard to hide.

[sanjaykumar]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 98216.html

I think part of the Confucius Institute soft power being exported to Australia.

[sanjaykumar]

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... tnam-china

A report on China's voracious demand for resources and how OBOR may help the misfortunate 30 milion single princeling masturbators join the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

[sanjaykumar]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_ ... 00181.html

More insight into Chinese culture of the most superior Han.

So, as often happens in China, the victim of injustice became a suspect, a threat to the state if he or she dares to protest that injustice.

[Peregrine]

Yellow Sh*t hits Chinese Fan!

Septic tank at centre of huge China blast

A septic tank was the epicentre of a massive explosion that rocked one of China’s largest port cities at the weekend, killing two people and injuring at least 19, authorities have said.

The blast tore through a crumbling light-industrial area adjacent to crowded residential towers in the city of Ningbo, just south of Shanghai, and was so powerful that it was heard several kilometres (miles) away.

The force of the explosion shattered windows in nearby apartments, mangled cars and reduced small buildings at the epicentre to rubble, though locals said the structures were already in poor shape and slated for demolition.

Public security officials “have confirmed that the blast’s epicentre is a septic tank in an empty field,” the local government said in a statement late Sunday.

Methane and hydrogen sulphide — both highly flammable gases — can build up in septic tanks.

Officials have ruled out the possibility of a gas explosion or of the blast being intentionally set off by someone.

The statement said in addition to the two fatalities, two people are missing after the explosion. Four people were severely injured and 15 others had minor wounds.

“We were having tea and bwaaaah! It knocked my mother off her stool. It was incredibly loud,” said a local woman who lives about 400 metres (yards) from the blast site and who gave only her surname, Wu.

Authorities had thrown up a cordon around the collapsed buildings and were still investigating the cause of the explosion in Ningbo.

– Missing relative –

An elderly woman said one of her children was in the area at the time of the blast.

“Yes, we live here and one of my children is still inside (the cordoned-off area) and hasn’t been found yet,” she said, declining to give details.

She dabbed tears with a tissue and repeatedly dialled a number on her phone. Asked who she was calling, she said, “my child”.

Early Monday, locals were sweeping up piles of debris and glass at the blast site where rubble was strewn across an area several hundred metres wide.

The government said it had received hundreds of reports of damage, such as shattered glass, twisted window frames or damaged cars.

The local government and state media have variously described the site of the explosion as a vacant lot or an abandoned factory.

An AFP reporter at the scene said the site appeared to be a run-down former light industrial area.

Residents said some people from outside Ningbo had been squatting there, but others disputed that.

“Most people had left here a long time ago. It was just a wasteland lot,” Wu said.

She said most structures in the blast area had been crumbling for some time, and that not all the rubble seen was caused by the explosion.

Another local man, who declined to give his name, said: “It’s lucky that more people did not die but no one was living here anymore.”

China has been rocked by several industrial accidents in recent years.

In 2015, giant chemical blasts in a container storage facility killed at least 165 people in the northern port city of Tianjin.

The explosions caused more than $1 billion in damage and sparked widespread anger at a perceived lack of transparency over the accident’s causes and its environmental impact.

A government inquiry eventually recommended 123 people be punished. Tianjin’s mayor at the time of the accident was sentenced to 12 years in prison for graft in September.

Cheers

[nandakumar]

But septic tanks are supposed to have an air vent to prevent such things. It is almost standard design. How come the Chinese Don't have it?

[vijaykarthik]

^ The Chinese think that their sh!t doesn't stink.

I found this funny considering the topic that was under discussion - a septic tank blast : “We were having tea and bwaaaah! It knocked my mother off her stool. It was incredibly loud,” said a local woman who lives about 400 metres (yards) from the blast site and who gave only her surname, Wu.

[Pathik]

Just reading the news here makes me wonder how English proficiency has worked like a double edged sword for India. Most of the events in China and other non-English speaking countries are worse than what happens in India, yet our English speaking media and public goes all out to advertise India's bad image using the very English skills they posses. The international media like WSJ, BBC and NYT again use this against us to re-educate our macualites

[shiv]

Chinese overland rocket launches cause boosters to fall on houses
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index ... msg1787409

[shiv]

This is the Chinese Benis thread...
https://youtu.be/GEfxUVoZUVQ

[manju]

Just finished reading this book. Highly recommended for the good folks on this forum as well.
The authors were white expats who stayed in China for a long time and published this book after first hand observation of the Chinese society. A brutal commentary on the warts that the CCP tries hard to hide.

lot of data. worth reading for china watchers on BR

[anupmisra]

Signs in chinisthan

[kancha]

Little Prince in Chongqing City gets acquainted with Karma!

[Vasu]

Eight Chinese police officers hurt in clashes with 100 ‘eviction officials’

A long-running dispute over a property development in central China escalated into violence on Sunday as police clashed with urban management officials accused of intimidating people into leaving their homes, according to a news report.

Four police officers were taken to hospital and four others were also hurt in clashes with more than 100 urban management officials in the city of Shangqiu, Henan province, The Beijing News reported on Wednesday.

The incident happened as the plain clothes officials – known as chengguan in Mandarin – were trying to evict people from a residential area slated for redevelopment, the report said.

“Bulldozers stopped outside in front of our courtyard. Ours was the first door they started to break down,” she said. “I kept reporting it to the police, phoning continuously. By the time we had phoned they had already broken the door down and come in.”

The local Communist Party committee is investigating the incident, the report said.

[Mukesh.Kumar]

Early Diwali in LIzard Land

Chemical plant explosion in China's Jiangsu province kills 6 people, injures 30

[Mukesh.Kumar]

And in the Middle Kingdom's search for securing their future population stability, (wait for it), A Breed Ready Data Base for Brides.

Chinese Data Breach Exposes 'Breed Ready' Status Of Almost 2 Million Women

“In China, they have a shortage of women," tweeted Dutch ethical hacker Victor Gevers over the weekend. “So an organization started to build a database to start registering over 1.8 million women with all kinds of details like phone numbers, addresses, education, location, ID number, marital status, and a 'BreedReady' status."

"The youngest girl in this database is 15y," Gevers pointed out. "The youngest woman with BreedReady: ‘1’ status is 18y. The average age is a bit above 32y, and the most aged woman with a BR:1 is 39 and with a BR:0 is 95y. All are single [89%], divorced [10%] or widow [1%]. About 82% lives in 北京市 [Beijing]."

.........

Sure as hope this is a case of wrong translation, else the future is too dystopian to believe.

[ricky_v]

i see posts alluding to the fact that the chinis have not fought any wars, well then how do you explain this?

Four Pests Campaign

and the sparrows – specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.[1] The government also declared that "birds are public animals of capitalism".[2] As a result of this campaign, many sparrows died from exhaustion; citizens would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky.[3] Sparrow nests were also destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks were killed. In addition to these tactics, citizens also resorted to simply shooting the birds down from the sky.[4] These mass attacks depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near extinction.[4]

It was a great success though,

ho pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12]

i hope that chini fighting abilities are never questioned again.

[Singha]

four pests campaign...wow did not know of that

[Lilo]

File pic of Chinese laser weapon being readied to fire at Indian Sats in September 2016

Heard its laser last fired at the RISAT 1 of India successfully disabling it after the Pakis got bum rushed in URI surgical strikes.

Not to be outdone by recent Indian ASAT test, Chinese launched this laser weapon into space and after a successful fizzle out reaching the tallest point in space it reached its target deep in the Indian Ocean.

Paki-Chini friendship fried Tallel than Space and dived deepel than the Indian ocean

[Manish_P]

Concerned about the environment heroic Chinese bus dlivel gives up his life (and the lives of his passengers) to create artificial leef for fishes

A bus driver in China deliberately crashed and killed 21 people after his house was demolished

A driver deliberately crashed a bus full of passengers into a reservoir in southwestern China, hours after discovering his house had been demolished, local police said Monday.

Twenty-one people died and 15 were injured on July 7 when the bus swerved across five lanes, smashed through a guard rail and partially sank, according to police in the city of Anshun, in Guizhou province.

There were 12 students on the bus at the time of the crash, five of whom died, according to state media. Some of the students were about to sit their their college entrance exams, known as the gaokao, China Central Television (CCTV) reported.

Forced demolitions of housing to provide space for new development is a common occurrence in China, especially for people living in less developed, or more rural areas. The developments sometimes leave the old residents homeless and unable to pay for expensive new housing, without the safety net previously provided by the Communist State.

[sooraj]

China shuts down viral video after anal Covid test accusation

Authorities in China have been forced to refute the authenticity of a viral video that claimed to show recipients of the nation’s controversial coronavirus anal swab “walking like penguins”.