Posts filed under ‘news n politics’
eeky whale explosion
January 30th, 2004
nice present for my birthday. NOT
Sperm whale explodes in Tainan City; Blood and guts of 17-meter long 50-ton mammal splatter sidewalks, automobiles parked nearby - check out the yummy whale guts!
“A dead sperm whale being transported through Tainan City on its way to a research station suddenly exploded yesterday, splattering cars and shops with blood and guts.
Certified by authorities as the largest beached whale on record in Taiwan, the 17-meter 50-ton carcass was being transported by a flat-bed trailer-truck to a special research location after National Cheng Kung University officials and security guards refused to allow the whale on campus.
….
The news also showed one section of the street along with several parked automobiles and pedestrian walkways covered in red with copious amounts of splattered whale blood.
Lying on the trailer-truck was the dead whale - underbelly exposed with a large elongated tear where the biological gaseous blowout took place. Besides the shocking red bloody mess, large piles of whale intestines and guts were strewn along the road, leaving an unpleasant and ghastly scene for startled residents.”
thanks stacey for the link. at least they didn’t intentionally blow up the whale like the clever americans in 1970 LMAO!
freeing sex slaves
January 29th, 2004
“Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20’s.”
reading this kind of reports just reconfirm my belief in how money alone will not solve the problems. so the reporter bought freedom of two young prositutes from their brothels; if this is a movie, they should both go home live happily there after. unfortunately when one of them returned home, it was merely a cheer. her parents were interested more in the reporter’s car than their daughter. “she (their daughter) was treated as no more than a lost cat that had shown up again.” but the good news for this one is that since she had a little bit of school and had only been a prostitute for one month. with some help, she’s ready to earning her living through a different way.
altho there’s warm celebration for the other girl’s return. but because she’s been a prostitute for so long. it seemed she just could no longer live a normal life and returned to her old brothel 3 days after. this is the same girl who seemed to be willing to give up her freedom for her cellphone.
“I could see how a girl with gumption like Srey Neth, unschooled and naïve, could yearn to get away. It is precisely this low status of peasant girls in so many countries that makes the trafficking possible. For trafficking to be wiped out, the low status of girls needs to be addressed through literacy and job programs and other efforts.”
(more…)
china’s middle class
January 28th, 2004
just think this is an awesome debate.. thanks richard & adam! you guys make great points 
story behind the tank man
January 24th, 2004
i’ve seen this photo too many times. and have also heard too much about 1989 (2) (3). but it is the first time i heard about the story of taking this photo. it goes well with other stories of journalists smuggling out reports, photographs, videos for 1989. chinese who helped them were easily executed.
see the video
Fifteen years later, a photograph of an anonymous protester facing down a row of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square still inspires astonishment. The photograph may not be beautiful or artistic, but it is nothing short of heart-stopping.
There he is, a thin young man dressed in a white shirt and dark pants squaring off against a line of tanks, a lone human figure daring a great nation’s military to mow him down in plain sight. The setting is Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the world’s largest public plaza, now well remembered as the site of the climactic showdown between student protesters and China’s socialist government 15 years ago this June.
The protesters had gathered to oppose government corruption, restrictions on free speech and joblessness, which led the government to send tens of thousands of troops from the People’s Liberation Army. They rumbled to the square in armored personnel carriers.
Jeff Widener, then a 33-year-old American Associated Press picture editor based in Bangkok, was photographing the melee at about 1 a.m. on June 4 when a brick, thrown by a protester, hit him in the face. With a bloody nose and a concussion, he bicycled the two miles to the AP’s Beijing office and then to his hotel.
Still woozy the next day, he headed back to the square, crossing streets littered with burned buses and smashed bicycles. He’d heard that soldiers were using electric cattle prods to force photojournalists to surrender their equipment, so when Widener stumbled upon a visiting American, a student he knew only as Kurt, he asked to take pictures from the young man’s room on the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel, not far from Tiananmen Square.
Out of film, he hastily borrowed a roll from Kurt and watched the crucial event unfold about half a mile away on a street leading to the square.
“The protester walks out and I’m thinking, ‘This guy is going to screw up my (photograph),”‘ Widener told Smithsonian’s Dana Calvo. “That’s how messed up I was. I knew they were going to shoot him, so I got focused and waited for them to shoot him. Then he started to walk up to the tank.”
Only after Widener had squeezed the shutter a few times did he realize his camera’s setting was wrong for the borrowed film. Too late: Several students grabbed the protester and pulled him out of the tanks’ path.
Widener gave the film to Kurt, who stuffed the roll into his underwear and bicycled past soldiers to the AP office. After being developed, the grainy photograph was transmitted on the AP news wire within hours.
A decade and a half later, Widener’s photograph retains all of its potency. “It’s an urgently important message about what you can do if you have the guts to do it,” says Mickey Spiegel, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch in New York City, who has hung the photograph in every office she has occupied since 1989.
Richard Baum, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, says there’s “an emotional legacy to that shot. I think that has cost China more in public image than any other single image in modern times.”
Widener, now 47 and a staff photographer for the Honolulu Advertiser in Hawaii, has considered going to China to revisit the story. “The picture’s part of my life now,” says the photographer. “His message was, ‘Enough’s enough. There’s been enough killing. It’s got to stop.’ “
i like this light
January 19th, 2004
i’m not relieved but i do enjoy the outcome of this case. it’s not only the justice but the fact internet is the major source of influence to help the case obtain the attention of the central gov’t. despite of all the banning and suppression, voices of the crowd can not be 100% muffled. i always believed internet should have the power. then i was depressed when i found how internet was overwhelmingly controlled. but even after they deleted the original news link they can not take away the knowledge from those who already read. the case is not unique at all; you almost expect things like that to happen the way it did. corruption, connection & money = power rules because justice doesn’t put food in your mouth*. whatever made this scandal, which excited enough snowflakes to roll into a snowball, should happen more often. i see the light of democracy from it. the influence of public opinions on a court case maybe good and bad. but mass participation and discussion is no doubt signs of democracy.
*
i just read an argument. i think it’s quite valid:
“I think there is definately something to the argument about China being morally adrift, unsure about correct standards of behaviour … but at the same time, the particular example of the onion cart seems to me to be an example of something different. In many civilised but pre-modern societies, it was a commonly accepted norm that crimes against and crimes committed by different levels of society would be treated differently. Thus the killing of a lower class woman by an upper class woman would be punished by a fine, while a killing of an upper class woman would probably end up with an execution. In China’s case, I am thinking particularly of the Confucian gentry. There were numerous benefits for passing the civil service exams, not least being immunity from certain types of punishment and interogation.”
- good mention on the confucian tradition. you read this in The Story of the Stone/The Dream of the Red Chamber. it’s truly a tradition which i think should be eliminated if China wishes to give its countrymen more reasons to be proud. on the other hand, it also alarms me since the tradition is so deep-rooted thus making it difficult to remove. thinking about china always make me ambivalent.
censorship got a bit messy
January 18th, 2004
LMAO the infamous internet censorship in China got a bit messed up. apparently it blocked then unblocked duke.edu for some myterious reasons. gotta love the quote!
“We don’t know for sure why it got blocked, and we also don’t know how it got unblocked,” said Gilbert Merkx, vice provost for international affairs.
maybe someone screwed up? it’s all a mystery. since no outside source knows a complete list of sites being blocked and their reasons, mistakes can not be tracked. censorship is common but most of the time they do have some reasons.
freedom of speech
January 17th, 2004
some people call for freedom of speech like a person walking in desert yearning for water. it strikes me as many chinese do feel the thirst.. the problem is how many of them will take to make a difference…..at all… wonder when that site will be banned by the gov’t but then they probably won’t need to ban it since it doesn’t make a difference anyway. i see it’s getting more oversea attention then domestic.. which is no surprise of course, it’s been like this for who knows how long. but like richard said, at least it’s an expression against a fundamental wrong. perhaps one day when they all add up, they will make some kind of difference.
mao the heroic murder
January 9th, 2004
yea it angered me when i first found out hu is going to celebrate Mao’s 110th birthday but this article is just wild. i can not imagine myself saying something to that degree. but it is true. esp. after reading wild swans and hungry ghosts. even the author of wild swans never dared to challenge mao’s in her book. it’s strange. coz i felt the same. i was taught about how great mao was for 12 years. and then i’m exposed to more horrible things he’s done. all the people he killed. it was not much different from hilter’s geocide but he was able to make people love him even after so many years of his death. is this a myth? i just don’t understand why…… it’s scary to think about it. on the other hand, aren’t there people still worship hilter and stalin?! i don’t know if it’s on a country level.
gay magazine in china?
January 8th, 2004
while some people are desperate about gay rights, someone believed they found the first real gay magazine in china. the only evidence are the photos plus the title “menbox” i think. i’d like to see more of the contents inside. just looking at the name and the photos i can not conclude it’s a gay magazine, can you? can’t it be a very light form of playgirl sorta? i realize the name is “menbox”.. but how many people in china understand that? surely not your daily average citizen. ok i just saw the chinese title in small font below the english title as shi shang jun zi but still it could be a light form of playgirl…
but it will be really cool if it’s real.
cause of SARS
January 5th, 2004
so have they really found the cause of SARS? apparently a microbiologist in HK who studies SARS had recently discovered SARS-like virus in civet cats. so the chinese gov’t decided to kill 10,000 civet cats. big deal right? since they were being eaten anyway. slaughtering rats had worked for china before, maybe slaughter civet cats will work this time as well?!
