Results tagged “hangzhou”

• No worries about getting the runs while exploring the World Expo - Shanghai has been making extensive efforts to ensure that we are never far from a toilet. The city has installed toilets about every 200 meters for the estimated 400,000 daily visitors expected each day. In addition, sophisticated rubbish collection systems will help us to forget we're in a Chinese city. [Shanghai Daily]
• Looking for something culturally stimulating this week? The Tony award winning Soul of Shaolin tells the story of Hui Guang, a son and his mother. The show is a stunning display of Wushu Kung Fu that is sure to astound you. The performance starts this Thursday at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. [Smart Shanghai]
• China is planning on forming an organization of top universities called the C9 and Shanghai's very own Fudan University and Shanghai JiaoTong University will join with other prestigious schools across the nation in a Chinese "Ivy League". We wonder if they're copying this tradition for better education opportunities for their students or to increase elitism? [People's Daily]

Thinking about the Brooklyn Beer we had at Vargas' Bistro Burger last week has got us thinking about the alcohol market in China. With fancy bars and designer restaurants offering all sorts of international beers, it's getting easier and easier to find your favorite in the ever-increasing wine list. But who doesn't remember the days when Budweiser was considered exotic, and the Qingdao Beer Festival a real representation of international beer? So we took a look into the expansion of the alcohol market in china and found some interesting things.

With China's tech industry becoming increasingly sophisticated and profitable, it comes as no surprise that the powers that be have pulled out all the stops to jump start the industry. This weekend, the city of Hangzhou hosted a forum for small and medium businesses, featuring heavyweight speakers such as former U.S. president Bill Clinton and executives from Lenovo and Alibaba, two of China's most successful IT companies. But who stole the day? None other than Basketball legend cum technology expert Kobe Bryant. The Lakers star gave businessmen tips on how to succeed using his inspirational "basketball stories are just like life" gospel. Best of all, the crowd gave a roaring ovation when he gave Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba, an oversized pair of sneakers. We guess nothing says "reach farther, jump higher" better than a fresh pair of Nikes. Photo: Daylife

Now that the Qingdao Beer Festival is over, we've been looking for other places to go to satisfy our wanderlust. We'd love to visit some tourist sites, maybe a beach or two, but what we're really looking for is a scenic, historic city filled with culture, nightlife, and of course, beautiful women. Lucky for us, ChinaHush has a translated list from Netease of the top 10 cities in China for beautiful women.

          

Sure, Shanghai is a great city. But after going up the Jin Mao Tower for the fourth time, eating at Wujiang Lu for the tenth time (this week), and seeing, breathing, and hearing nothing but Expo all day, every day, a little bit of nature is more than appreciated. After searching around for day-trip recommendations, we finally decided on the tea mountains of Hangzhou, and we weren't disappointed.

The title says it all: some guy is riding a scooter with a watermelon balanced on his head. Chinasmack has translated some of the Youku comments for us, but most of them are just people amazed that a guy is riding a scooter with a watermelon balanced on his head. Did you hear that? A GUY IS RIDING A SCOOTER WITH A WATERMELON BALANCED ON HIS HEAD.

Our neighboring city Hangzhou's Xixi Wetlands played host this last weekend to the finals of the Hangzhou Xixi International Dragon Boat Match.

George Soros was in Shanghai a few days ago and gave a lecture at Fudan, and then went off to meet his old buddy, Alibaba head honcho Ma Yun, in Hangzhou, where he talked without notes and generally enthralled people with his guru-ness. According to Soros China is the bomb and is already recovering from the financial crisis even as the rest of the world still founders, and yeah, he put Alan Greenspan in his place, and yeah those yangmei (Chinese bayberries) are delightfully delicious. Oh, and one of the articles had this interesting intro:

• Readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy" [The China Beat] The China Beat compiles readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy," when NATO missiles were fired into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals and sparking protests all around the world from angry Chinese citizens. Included are two news accounts from the time - one by the BBC and one by CNN, a Salon.com piece by a Beida foreign student and two later analysis of the situation.
• China eyes regular Olympic show [Financial Times] "Less than a year after China hosted the Olympics, Beijing is planning to put its stunningly choreographed opening ceremony back on as a regular evening show at the “Bird’s Nest”, the main stadium built for the games... Zhang Hengli, vice-president of the National Stadium Company that now runs the Bird’s Nest, said: “We want to put on a regular evening show like the opening ceremony. But that will take longer to realise [than other performances in the works for the stadium] because it requires a huge amount of money. We need to find an investor and deal with potential issues of intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee.”"
• Communists Can’t Outspend Capitalists as China Jobless Increase [Bloomberg] "Demand for work is so high that 5,000 students jostled at a Shanghai employment fair in March for 400 jobs available in the funeral industry. One woman with a management degree applied for a position as a mortician’s assistant to “make up the faces of the dead,” state media reported. The attraction: It paid 4,000 yuan ($585) a month, equal to what she might have earned in an office job two years ago."

Construction on the new rail line between Shanghai and Hangzhou will start by late March, officials said. The line will be 159km long with trains that run up to 350kmph, shortening the trip between the two cities to 28 minutes. Altogether, the project is expected to cost 29.68 billion yuan. Source: Xinhua

Via City Weekend we learn that the documentary film about last year's Converse-sponsored (and Split Works organized) Love Noise rock music tour of China is now viewable at a DVD player near you. Love Noise put Beijing bands PK14 and Queen Sea Big Shark on a converted bus and sent them on a two-week, six-city tour during the height of Olympics craziness last August. The trailer to the Love Noise film is embedded in this post, and after the jump you'll find a slew of related clips, uploaded to YouTube six days ago. The director's first name is Hammer, so it's got to be good.

By 2015 it could happen, GoKunming reports. The journey currently takes 37 hours. According to GoKunming, "the Shanghai-Kunming passenger line (沪昆客运专线) will connect Shanghai and Kunming via the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan, passing through the major cities of Hangzhou, Nanchang and Changsha. Its target speed is reportedly 350 km/hr."

Peijin Chen reports that the death toll in the Hangzhou subway tunnel collapse we told you about earlier has gone up, and that the problems that led to the tragedy were discovered a month ago.

Just when Mengniu's CEO is telling everyone that almost everything is back to normal, two gorillas are suspected of becoming the latest victims of tainted milk. Reuters Newswires quoted a Hangzhou newspaper, reporting that the gorillas, both from Hangzhou Wildlife World in eastern Zhejiang province and aged one and three, had been diagnosed with crystallisation in their urine:

Both had been fed with milk powder made by Sanlu Group, at the heart of the scandal in which four infants have died and thousands have fallen sick with kidney stones.

Continue reading "Two gorillas suspected of Sanlu milk powder poisoning"

The Shanghai Daily reports that a 20 year old man, apparently dissatisfied with his genital surgery killed a 71 year old doctor by stabbing him with a pair of scissors in Zhejiang. He has since been detained after attacking two others in the rampage. The murder was committed at the Hangzhou Changzheng Medical Outpatient Department.

WARNING: The video on the right contains footage of someone dying and as such may be disturbing to viewers.

• Despite earlier protests, there will be a new maglev line between Shanghai and Hangzhou. This week, the local government announced that the construction of this line will start in 2010, three years later than planned. It is supposed to be finished in 2015, when we will be able to go to Hangzhou in just 30 minutes.
• Things are looking dark on the Shanghai stock market: This Monday the Shanghai Composite Index ended down 5.34 percent, at 2, 319.868 points. Over the last seven days, it dropped a whopping 14.95 percent.
• Safe sex is on the agenda, this week we read about free condoms in the office district of Jingan, now Shanghai's university and college campuses will get condom vending machines. According to Shanghai Daily, 85 percent of the students in a recent survey found it most convenient to buy condoms from machines, rather than in stores. We just think it's a little unfair that the students have to buy their condoms while office workers get them for free.

Or, at least, out of the sh*tter. Nearly three years after we first wrote about a toilet-themed restaurant in Taiwan, looks like they're expanding on their growing poopularity (ouch!). Shenzhen has one that's a couple of years old, and the same group responsible for Taiwan's Toilet Restaurant has now opened one in Hangzhou, with more to come. We're hoping they skip our fair city, lest we find ourselves having to review the dump (ooooh, not again!)

              

By Benjamin Cohen

A summary of some of the Shanghai public-transportation-related stories making the news lately:
• The longest ocean-crossing bridge in the world is set to open near Shanghai on May 1. According to the Shanghai Daily, "the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, which starts in southern Shanghai and ends in Ningbo, will shorten the trip between the two cities by more than 120 kilometers". Construction on the bridge began in 2003.
• Nanjing will soon join Beijing in banning foldable bicycles from their subway system, leaving Shanghai and Guangzhou as the two major subway systems that don't explicitly forbid them.
• The 10 year-old Xujiahui subway station underground shopping street was closed for renovations on March 31st, and will reopen by the end of the year with a new set of tenants and new entertainment options. Exits 1-7 will be closed during renovations. Xujiahui is the site of the future Line 1/9/11 interchange.

Thanks to the commenters on that last post, especially the one that alerted us to videos of the protests/marches that were on the Taiwan Youtube site. There were two that we found, embedded below. The first one is just a short clip of people walking around during the day. The second is from Xujiahui in the evening, with more chanting, from the evening of January 6. Oh yeah, and to the commenter who mentioned that we ought to put "alleged" in front of "health effects", you're probably right. If you're interested in learning a little about what health effects maglevs might have on people, you could try this Google scholar search. No definitive answers, but maybe a rudimentary way of glimpsing what is out there.

From Boxun.com (you need a proxy) we discovered that there was a maglev-related protest on January 6th. It first started around 11am, around the Xinzhuang/Minhang area, and was dispersed, only to form again sometime around 3pm, this time in the busy Xujiahui CBD. It managed to, in some form, last until 11pm. Protesters carried signs saying "out for a walk" (散步), while other chanted slogans about protecting their homes. The proposed maglev was to link the city's two airports as well as Shanghai to Hangzhou. However, recent protests brought public attention to the health effects of the maglev, leading, according to some, to the recent government decision to reroute the maglev so as to minimize the noise, radiation, and collateral damage. These proposed changes are part of the reason why the price estimates of the maglev have increased from 200 million per km to about 500 million per kilometer.