The Shēngxiào (Chinese: 生肖), better known in English as the Chinese Zodiac, is a scheme that relates each Chinese year to an animal and its reputed attributes, according to a 12-year cycle.
Maybe foreigners think Chine zodiac is interesting. But honestly, it not a big deal for Chinese people. If a Chinese people ask another, 'what is your zodiac?', he is just asking the age in a way not directly.
Zhu Yu is a performance artist in China. His most famous piece of conceptual art, titled "Eating People," consisted of a series of photographs of him cooking and eating what is alleged to be a dead baby.
We don't know it is a real baby body or not. But he made most of us sick. What the hell did he want? To get famous by being a freak? To make foreigners think we Chinese like to eat babies?
Fuck the so-called 'artist', fuck the humor of 'Chinese people eating babies'!
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet to teach Mandarin Chinese in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers.
The system was developed from earlier versions by Zhou Youguang (b. 1906), who led a government committee in developing the system in China (PRC) in the 1950s. The system was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is generally referred to as the New Phonetic System.
Learn more about Chinese pinyin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
China's Ministry of Culture has ordered domestic websites to stop providing playback and download services of 100 overseas songs that have failed to go through "official approval procedures."
"The websites are ordered to clean up the music products because the products have not gone through official approval procedures, but it does not mean the songs are banned because of their content," an unnamed official with the ministry told Xinhua on Saturday.
The official made the remarks in response to doubts from fans and media that the songs, including those by Lady Gaga and Owl City, might be banned for containing sensitive or offensive lyrics.
In China, websites must be licensed by the government before offering online music services, and imported music products must be approved by the ministry before entering the market.
According to the ministry, the country's search engines and websites were urged to check and "immediately cancel" all services related to these songs by September 15, or they will face punishment.
Previously, the ministry has already ordered websites to stop featuring 200 songs that include "Cold Wind Blows" by Eminem, "Push That Knot Away" by KT Tunstall and "Grenade" by Bruno Mars for similar reasons.
"The ministry will continue to clean up online music products that fail to receive official approval in a bid to regulate our country's online music market," the official said.
China's aging citizens will account for more than 30 percent of the country's total population by 2042, according to a legislature report.
Li Jianguo, vice chairman and general secretary of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), made the remark on Wednesday in his report on the implementation of the law on protection of senior citizens' rights.
Li submitted the report to the NPC Standing Committee, the country's top legislature.
Official statistics show that China now has more than 178 million people at or above the age of 60, or more than 13 percent of its total population.
Li said that China entered the society of grey hairs in 1999, when the country was still industrializing and urbanizing.
As families become smaller and more young people leave their hometown for job opportunities in the city, it is becoming increasingly difficult for families to take care of their elder members.
By 2030, there will be an average of 2.5 people of working age for every senior citizen living in China, according to Li. The ratio stood at five to one last year.
Li's report suggested ways to tackle the problem, such as establishing a national elderly care system, strengthening social security for the elderly and improving laws that protect the rights and interests of senior citizens.
For Duan Can, a graduate in electronic engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology, a half year of work on an graduate-school application has brought offers to attend three leading US universities.
"The biggest surprise was the offer from Stanford University because it only admits the most talented Chinese students every year," she said.
In the end, she decided to go to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. One reason for her choice was that she received a full scholarship to attend the school, which is more commonly known as Virginia Tech. The assistance will let her avoid draining her parents' money while she works for five years on a doctorate degree.
Virginia Tech was not the only school to offer a full scholarship; she has also got one from the University of Florida.
Some agencies that help Chinese study overseas are seeing leading US universities make a record number of admission offers for doctorate programs this year.
"We are so surprised and happy to see so many admission offers pouring in from Stanford University, New York University and Columbia University," said Zhang Meng, senior manager of CACDIY International, an agency that helps Chinese study overseas.
"If Chinese students only have admission offers, that means they have to pay all of their tuition and living fees," he said. "I guess US universities want to attract more Chinese students, who brought in a large amount of money this year.
"Chinese students who have more than two offers, regardless of their money situation, simply have more choices."
The biggest headache for agencies that help Chinese students study abroad used to be that their rich clients would come to them with impractical aspirations to be admitted into well-known universities.
Their wealth has since made attending such places easier, since it prevents them from having to rely on scholarships to afford tuition, he said.
"I feel so relieved when our clients can choose among several offers," he said.
On Aug 16, the Council of Graduate Schools, a US organization that promotes graduate education and research, released the International Graduate Admissions Survey, which looks at admissions trends. According to it, the number of Chinese applicants to US graduate schools increased by 21 percent from this past school year and the number of offers being made to prospective Chinese students increased by 23 percent.
This is the sixth year in a row that those percentages have increased by double digits, the report said.
"Expensive tuition fees are not a big problem for me," said Liang Shuang, a graduate from the Beijing Jiaotong University. "And the opportunity to study at Stanford will not be around for another year."
Liang this year received an admissions offer from Stanford, where she can pursue a master's degree in environmental engineering.
"My dreams have always been more important than making money, and I like being able to choose between offers," she said.
More and more Chinese students, seeing their number of options have increased, now have greater expectations.
Xia Chaolun, a graduate from Zhejiang University, said that of all the offers he has received, he is only considering those coming from US universities that are ranked among the 20 best such institutions and that will give him a full scholarship.
"I got an offer to study computer science at Cornell on a full scholarship," he said.
According to CACDIY International, scholarships to study computer science or engineering are the hardest for Chinese students to obtain when they are applying for graduate schools.
Chinese and the United States have jointly shut down a chain of pornographic websites, which were all in Chinese and advertised to Chinese-speaking individuals in China, the U.S. and elsewhere.
Wang Yong, key operator of the porn websites, was arrested in the United States on June 23 by U.S. police, China's Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on Thursday.
Chinese police detained more than 10 people suspected of maintaining the websites in China on June 23, according to the statement.
In Dongguan city of south China, there are many hotels in which many unemployed ladies give sexual service under strict management of a company.
The ladies have to work following a set of strong process “erotic standard” – so called “ISO”. It is a sophisticated structure behind the large and complex erotic industrial chain. Beauty Sex workers have to complete 15 to 30 pornography service in 2 hours , such as the beginning of colorful dance, facial expressions, and customer can get the number of orgasms. The rise of manufacturing industry make standardized production in Dongguan in recent years. The local manufacturing practitioners deride this service standard for porn industry of”ISO”, the “ISO” and afterwards assessment system: almost all the hotel sauna require customers to service for more than ten detailed separate evaluation, and once the sex beauty do not finish their duty job, they will be deduct pay strictly.
Before the sex worker start serve customers, they have to take system training. The training contents combine diversity, modernization and it focus on foreign advanced experience for reference. Some people learn it from HongKong and Taiwan, and they send sex workers to Japan to learn the advanced adult erotic sauna service. The teaching process is intensity than factory technician training including with fruit exercise to sex workers mouth strength etc.
In weekends thousands of men from Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hongkong will drive to Dongguan to enjoy the high class sexual service.
Police in central China's Hunan Province said Saturday they have launched an investigation into missing Vietnamese women -- who were bought as wives -- in its remote villages.
The probe comes after media reports said some husbands of the missing women received phone calls telling them to pay ransoms, or otherwise, the women would be sold again. About 100 purchased Vietnamese wives are missing from Hunan's mountainous regions.
Hu Qiulai and Hu Jianhe are from the same remote mountainous village in Shuangfeng County of Hunan; they lost their wives on the same day. Then two months later, they received phone calls from their wives.
"She sobbed and told me that she was kidnapped and sold to another remote village and needed 20,000 yuan ($3,130) to ransom her back," said Hu Jianhe, who bought the woman for 36,388 yuan in 2008.
The two men reported the case to local police after some hesitation, as the women, who were bought on the Sino-Vietnam border, were not their legal wives.
Hu Gengqing, Hu Jianhe's father, acknowledged that women trafficking were rampant in his county. "They were all bought from Yunnan, which borders Vietnam, and the total number (in the county) could be in dozens," he said.
There are more males than females in Chinese rural areas, as boys are preferred, so some men in poor regions resort to buying their wives as they cannot find women to marry them.
Police officers at the public security bureau in Shuangfeng County said the bureau has set up a special team to investigate the reported women trafficking and marriage fraud.
The bureau is seeking to ascertain the exact number of missing wives, as many partners may be unwilling to report the cases for fear of being accused of trafficking, they said.
Since September last year, the bureau has only received two cases in which four wives were found to be victims of trafficking, they added.
Three people were killed and 17 others injured, two severely, after a blast ripped through a boiler room in a hospital in northern Chinese city of Changzhi Friday, local authorities said.
A person was killed instantly when a boiler exploded at about 4 p.m. at the Chengqu Hospital in Changzhi, Shanxi Province, and two others died while being rushed to the emergency room, the city government announced in a statement.
The injured people are being treated at the hospital and all are described in stable condition.
Online photos show that half of the boiler room was destroyed after the blast.
Local authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the accident, the statement said.
In China, weibo.com is a website like twitter in US.
On August 17, A weibo user tweet a message involving a uniformed officer beating an elderly woman on a street in Jinan city.
The message from the netizen Liu about the street chaos, posted at 18:32, was soon forwarded many times on weibo.com.
The police in Jinan city reacted via its weibo page later at 20:15 by confirming that it was a female prison guard, not a police officer, involved in the case. She had stopped to fix her vehicle when the incident occurred. She has been detained and interrogated at the police station.
Eleven minutes later, another message from the local police reiterated that the police are taking the case seriously.
At 20:26, Liu said in another post that it was a man beating the elderly woman and he has been taken away by police.
At 22:21, the police went on tweeting: “The female prison guard surnamed Lin quarreled with the elderly couple as she fixed her vehicle, and she sent her husband, a doctor at a hospital, to beat the elderly woman.”
According to the report, the injured woman was rushed to the hospital. The police are further investigating the case.
Shen Yang, a professor at Wuhan University, said that this was a good example of police reacting to tweeted news.
About 300,000 yuan ($46,950) was robbed by passers-by and locals after a car accident took place on part of the state highway in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, according to cnwest.com on Thursday.
Last Thursday, in the late afternoon in Yuyang district, Yulin, a yellow Hyundai driven by a couple collided with a tricycle and then hit the wall of a large garden on its right-hand side.
According to Guo Hao, deputy director of Yulin First Traffic Police Division, both the driver and the woman were thrown out of the car and died instantly. The woman had been holding the cash in her arms.
"Some money dropped directly out of the car, while the rest was found under the woman's body," Guo added.
The driver's uncle told reporters that his nephew was on the way to Yulin to deliver the money as part of a work-related transaction, but that only 58,000 yuan ($ 9,077) remained on the site when he arrived.
A witness said that about 200,000-300,000 yuan ($31,300-4, 6950) was scattered on the road and that the scene became flooded with people picking up the money.
Fishermen in north China's Hebei Province are preparing to sue a U.S.-based oil company, as they believe recent oil spills in a nearby bay are to blame for the deaths of large numbers of scallops.
Fishermen from the province's city of Tangshan said they believe that the scallops they were raising along the shores were poisoned by contamination from oil spills in the Penglai 19-3 oilfield located in the Bohai Bay.
The oilfield is jointly operated by a Chinese subsidiary of the U.S.-based oil company ConocoPhillips and its partner, the China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC).
The North Sea branch of the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) announced on Aug. 3 that the bay had been contaminated with fuel oil.
Economic losses of the fishermen are believed to be between 150 and 170 million yuan (about 23.5 to 26.6 million U.S. dollars), as more than half of the scallops the fishermen raised have died, according to Yang Jizhen, president of the Laoting County Fishery Association.
"Each family (of fishermen) has been affected to a different extent. A more accurate figure will be calculated by November," Yang said.
Local authorities have not offered an explanation for the loss of the scallops, leading the fisherman to hire lawyers to sue ConocoPhillips, Yang said.
Three million yuan (about 469,300 U.S. dollars) has been raised by the 153 families of fishermen who are planning to sue the company, according to Yang. The money will be used to cover their legal fees.
On August 18, U.S. president Joe Biden went to a small restaurant Yaoji to taste local food in Beijing during his visit to China. Outside the restaurant, there were many armed police on guard.
In China, the website weibo.com has gathered more than 140 million users since it was allowed to get online 2 years ago. In Chinese, weibo means microblog. Just like twitter, people can tweet or retweet short message on the site and follow other people. Message can spread very soon in short time.
A decade ago, the most favored medium for Chinese people to air their complaints was perhaps through the state-owned China Central Television network.
However, the Internet has superseded television as the most popular means for the airing of discontent, with microblogs leading the charge.
Microblogs came to prominence in China just two years ago, but have exploded in popularity. Sina Weibo, one of the country's most popular microblog providers, has allowed the country's citizens to supervise - and criticize - China's government in ways that were never thought possible before.
In comparison to microblogs, traditional media entities face technical and systematic restrictions in their efforts to observe and supervise the government. The Internet and its vast number of microbloggers are now able to make up for this deficiency, according to Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Microblogs make it easy for people to speak their thoughts in real-time, essentially making their public voices louder, according to Professor Zhan.
Sina Weibo was launched in August 2009. Since then, it has attracted more than 140 million registered users, with the number expected to exceed 200 million by the end of this year, according to the company.
Microblogging services enjoyed "explosive growth" in the first six months of this year, with the number of registered microblog users surging by 208.9 percent to reach 195 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.
WIRED WATCHDOGS
A 2010 report quoted by the Beijing-based newspaper International Herald Leader said that more than one-fifth of the 50 most-discussed public events in 2010 were first reported on by microbloggers.
Traditional media outlets have blind spots in performing their role as "society's watchdog." However, microblogs have allowed ordinary citizens to fill in these gaps.
During the recent crises of confidence faced by the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC) and Beijing's Palace Museum, microbloggers were the first to report on the scandals. Traditional media outlets scrambled to cover the stories after they broke online.
The RCSC came under fire following a scandal revolving around a young woman calling herself "Guo Meimei." The woman claimed to be a general manager for "Red Cross Commerce," a group that the RCSC said does not exist.
The woman posted photos on her microblog detailing her lavish lifestyle, provoking the ire of netizens who speculated that she might have funded her extravagant purchases by embezzling money from the Red Cross Society.
The Palace Museum was thrown into the spotlight after microbloggers accused it of concealing an incident in which an antique was damaged by a testing instrument due to an operational error.
Xie Yungeng, an expert on media economics and management at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said many officials are unaware of the powerful influence of microblogs. "They lack an awareness of new media. They are too arrogant to care."
BOOSTING TRANSPARENCY
Perhaps the greatest example of the power of the country's microbloggers came after last month's fatal high-speed train crash in the eastern city of Wenzhou. Forty people were killed in the accident.
Netizens took to their keyboards to express outrage over the way China's railway authorities handled the accident, while others offered condolences to the victims.
Following the public outcry, government authorities promised an "open and transparent" investigation regarding the cause of the crash, as well as increased safety checks for high-speed railways and slower operating speeds for high-speed trains.
The general offices of the State Council, or China's Cabinet, and the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee issued a circular 10 days after the crash, stating that information on major emergencies and items of public concern, such as government efforts and the results of official investigations, should be released to the public in an "objective and timely manner."
The People's Daily, the CPC's flagship newspaper, urged officials to answer questions from Internet users in a timely and accurate fashion and to brush up on their online communication skills in a recent article titled "How to Speak in the Microblog Era."
The article encouraged officials to address public concerns through online platforms and not to shy away from answering thorny questions. "Online performance reflects an official's all-around capability," the article said.
However, a survey quoted by the Guangzhou Daily newspaper earlier this week showed that 80 percent of the country's microblog users have doubts regarding the authenticity of information posted on microblogging sites.
Of the survey's 2,960 respondents, one-third believe that there is too much "negative and worthless information" posted on microblogs, while over 11 percent argued that the authenticity of the information posted on microblogs is difficult for most people to verify.
In Shanghai, a middle-age man died Sunday morning after jumping off a subway platform and being struck by a moving subway car, local police said.
According to eyewitness accounts and footage from the subway station's security cameras, a man jumped onto the tracks at the Yishan Road subway station at 6:45 a.m. He was hit by a train approaching the station and died after being rushed to a local hospital.
Police have not been able to identify the man, but initial probes indicate that the death was a suicide。
Zhong Yichun was an elderly farmer from east China's Jiangxi Province. He never expected that helping his friend Zeng Qingxiang to commit suicide would bring him a two-year prison sentence.
Zhong buried Zeng last October as part of an agreement they made regarding Zeng's suicide. Zeng overdosed on sleeping pills and laid in a hole in the ground; Zhong called out to him 15 minutes later to ensure that he was dead before burying him.
A police investigation showed that Zeng suffered from a mental illness and had begged Zhong to help him commit suicide several times.
In May of this year, the Longnan County People's Court sentenced Zhong to two years in prison after convicting him of criminal negligence resulting in the death of another person.
Zhong did not confirm Zeng was dead before burying, the court found. An autopsy report showed that Zeng died from suffocation instead of from an overdose of sleeping pills, which meant that he was still alive when he was buried.
Zhong insisted on his innocence and appealed the sentence. However, the Intermediate People's Court in the city of Ganzhou rejected his appeal earlier this month.
The case has aroused a nationwide discussion on euthanasia. In China, euthanasia is prohibited by law. In Zhong's case, it didn't matter whether or not he had a criminal motive to kill Zeng, as his legal punishment would've been doled out regardless of his intent.
However, the center of the debate revolves around the definition of Zhong's behavior - was it a case of intentional homicide, or simple negligence?
Zhong's case reflects one of the key concerns regarding euthanasia shared around the world.
Governments in the Netherlands, Belgium and some states in the United States have legalized assisted suicide. However, most governments regard it as a form of criminal homicide.
Even in the Netherlands and Belgium, it is still technically considered to be homicide, although it is not prosecutable if the doctor meets certain legal conditions.
The Supreme Court of India ruled in March that hospitals may offer "passive euthanasia" to patients with terminal diseases under the supervision of courts. The ruling marked the first time for euthanasia to be legally permitted in India.
"If euthanasia can be accepted by the general public, it is an advancement of both society and morality," said Ma Xuesong, a scholar from the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences.
Ma said the gap between China and places that legalized euthanasia lies in the quality of medical service and legislation.
Euthanasia, a very complicated issue that involves many factors such as jurisprudence, ethics and medical technology, is difficult to handle in practice.
Some experts argue that China is not prepared or mature enough to legalize euthanasia.
Lin Cunbao, chief partner of the Baohui law firm in Guangdong, said those who are against euthanasia hold the view that the right to life is above other considerations.
Yan Sanzhong, director of the Department of Law at Jiangxi Normal University, said China should analyze the basic principles of its criminal law and take steps to gradually promote the legalization of euthanasia.
"China should first accumulate judicial experience in handling cases regarding euthanasia. The Supreme Court can then come up with judicial interpretations and guidance and finally legalize euthanasia at the proper time," said Yang.
This old woman want to give her husband a surprise. So she asked her daughter to do something on her face.
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