It’s May 1st – International Labour Day, no less. Up the workers and all that. And the world’s largest communist country* celebrates in true socialist style. By giving the middle classes the day off while all the actual working class have to go to work as normal. The street sweepers are still sweeping streets, the [...]
When they aren’t busy trying to kill us by turning our drinking water into cadmium soup, adulterating our yoghurt with melamine, recycling rancid cooking oil or just mowing us down on the streets by driving on the sidewalks, the locals have taken to producing poisonous disposable chopsticks. Inspections of three disposable bamboo chopstick “factories” in [...]
Since yesterday evening, most (but not all) non-Chinese sites, including this one, have been unavailable here in Liuzhou and in many other parts of China, other than by using Great Firewall of China vaulting systems such as VPNs. Normally available sites such as the BBC, Hotmail, etc are now unavilable. Reports have been received from [...]
I usually have a quick look at the BBC news site’s daily round up of news photos. Not every day but most. Today, Liuzhou turned up. It is a picture of the local constabulary incinerating supposedly confiscated “fake” cigarettes. This is something they do every now and again as a propaganda stunt. Sometimes cigarettes, sometimes [...]
Bamboo is amazing stuff. Not only is it a beautiful plant, but its uses are apparently endless. It is a food (as every panda knows); it is used as a building material; chopsticks are often made from it; it is used as scaffolding and to prop up buildings under construction. In Yunnan, I saw Dai [...]
It is out of date, and was out of date when it was broadcast, but here is a video of people buying water. Coming next – watching paint dry.
No text messages this morning, but here is a round up of the latest news. Feng Zhennian, deputy director of Guangxi’s environmental protection bureau told a press conference yesterday that tap water from all four of Liuzhou’s water treatment plants is safe for drinking. (I guess he means as safe as it ever was – [...]
Things seem calmer today. Following on from late last night’s cell phone message from Liuzhou government telling us not to worry, today they started sending out regular updates about cadmium levels in the river. At 10 am this morning, according to their reports, the level was 0.005mg/l which is the maximum level considered safe. By [...]
Friday food is a weekly article about one of the more unusual food items to be found in Liuzhou that week. This week we continue looking at the greenery. These are pea shoots. Known as 豌豆苗 (wān dòu miáo) in Chinese, pea shoots are indeed the leaves of the young plants grown from your common [...]
Liuzhou city is wishing us a Happy Spring Festival (which starts on Monday with the Chinese New Year and runs till February 6th with the Lantern Festival marking the end). Ever mindful of the need in these harsh economic times to preserve funds for more banquets, the authorities have gone in for a bit of [...]
Google News – Liuzhou