China Digest, October 10, 2012
Beijing's sanitation workers cleared 47 tonnes of rubbish from Tiananmen Square during the eight-day national holiday that ended on Sunday, Xinhua reports. This was up 24.8 per cent from the holiday week last year, municipal officials said. Countless piles of rubbish were left behind by holidaymakers at scenic spots and highways across the country, sparking debate online about how to deal with the problem.
This year's Tour of Beijing bicycle race began yesterday with 148 top international cyclists, Xinhua reports. The five-day race, which debuted last year, is a professional competition overseen by the International Cycling Union and the first of its kind in Asia, as the Switzerland-based organisation tries to establish a more global presence. The Beijing race will feature some of the capital's most notable landmarks.
Construction on a 3-billion-yuan (HK$3.68 billion) Buddhism-themed park in the ancient city of Dunhuang kicked off earlier this month, Xinhua reports. When it is finished in about two years, the World Buddhism Culture Park will consist of a prayer square, a centre for studying Buddhist relics, a hall for debating Buddhist scripts, and a meditation centre.
Lanzhou is expected to finish its first subway line by 2016, the reports. Construction on the 36 kilometre line began in July and is expected to cost more than 20 billion yuan.
One in six Shenzhen residents suffers from hypertension, according to the city's Centre for Chronic Disease Control and Prevention, the Shenzhen TV station reports. More than 20 per cent of Shenzhen residents aged 35 and older had high blood pressure, and more than half of all residents knew nothing about their blood pressure levels.
Six people were killed and 35 were injured on Monday in a series of pile-ups on a section of the Daqing-Guangzhou expressway in Tongxu county, Kaifeng , Xinhua reports. The accidents were blamed on low visibility caused by a heavy fog.
A passenger bus carrying 18 people burst into flames on the airport expressway in Zhengzhou yesterday, the reports. Everyone on board escaped without injury, but the bus was completely destroyed. Fire trucks and an ambulance could not get to the scene promptly as vehicles were blocking the emergency lane. The cause of the fire was unclear.
A police officer and a firefighter talked a man out of jumping from a 20-metre-high cable he had climbed on the Second Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan on Monday, the reports. Traffic was backed up for about an hour while firefighters used a ladder truck to get the man down. He said he wanted to die because of financial and marital problems. More than 100 people have tried to commit suicide from the bridge since it opened in 1995.
A stray dog attacked and bit eight people in a park in Jianghan district, Wuhan, yesterday morning, the reports. More than 60,000 people are wounded by dogs each year in the city.
The death toll has climbed to 12 in a collision between two ships last Friday in Yuanjiang city, the reports. A steel vessel carrying 22 people collided with an unloaded sand barge on a river in the city. Rescuers managed to save only 10 of the 22 people who fell into the water.
Provincial health authorities will ask a third-party group to conduct an appraisal of a medical dispute involving a 25-year-old man who said that surgeons at a hospital in Yueyang illegally removed his left kidney during an operation last year to remove his spleen, the reports. Authorities will decide whether to further investigate when the appraisal is finished. The man said he did not know the kidney was missing until he received a body scan last month.
Security guards at the Jinling Institute of Technology in Nanjing called the police last Saturday night to report blood and suspicious people in the building. But when police arrived, they found the scene to be part of a film about zombies that students were making, the reports. The students had the institute's permission to film, but no one had told the guards.
Local police are hunting for suspects who smashed windows, glass doors, computers and furniture at a German-style bar downtown in Changning district late last Saturday night, the reports. Customers and staff at the Munich Beer Garden said the group of knife-wielding men, wearing all black with crew-cut hairstyles, entered and caused the damage without warning.
Five men appeared in court yesterday accused of human smuggling, charged with illegally transporting at least 30 people into the US on aeroplanes between March 2009 and last June, the reports. Prosecutors said the men trained stowaways to break into flight attendants' lounges at the rear of planes, where they hid. No verdict had been reached.
An effort to reduce the occurrence of northern China sandstorms - which occasionally hit Tianjin and Beijing - will be extended starting next year, at a total cost of about 87.7 million yuan over the next decade, China News Service reports. A similar 10-year undertaking was conducted from 2000 to 2010, but it focused on just 75 counties in the affected regions. The next effort will target 138 counties in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanxi , Hebei , Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia .
