Barbaric Paper Dragon People's Republic of China: Idiotic Musings.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/t...rs-burping-farting-talking-loudly-public.html

Welcome to Japan. Please do not burp, fart, or soil public toilets.

These are just three unwanted habits a Japanese tourism board has highlighted in a brochure in a bid to stop holidaymakers behaving badly when visiting.

Following a spate of perceived bad behaviour on the part of Chinese tourists, the Hokkaido Tourism Organization decided to print a guide on etiquette. It stresses that speaking loudly in public, farting, meals not being finished and queues being jumped are all frowned upon.

China has said it will monitor the behaviour of unruly tourists abroad and punish them on their return home after being shamed by a string of well-publicised incidents in recent years.

Research by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch found that more than 100 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2014, spending some $164 billion.

But reports of disruptive behaviour have tarnished their reputation, such as passengers scalding a flight attendant with hot water and noodles or a holidaymaker fined in Thailand for washing her feet in the wash basin of a public toilet.
 

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Part of engine on China Eastern Airlines jet tears away after takeoff

A China Eastern Airlines jet suffered a major engine failure shortly after taking off out of Sydney for Shanghai on Sunday.

After the airplane landed safely back in Sydney, emergency crews found a gaping hole in the front part of the engine nacelle's structural casing, known as the nose cowl.
The incident with the jetliner's engines is the second of its kind in as many months.
No passengers or crew aboard the twin-aisle Airbus A330-200 were injured during the incident, according to Xinhua news. The jet typically seats around 265 passengers.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/11/world/china-eastern-a330-engine-failure-sydney/index.html
 

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China’s one-child policy has a legacy of bereaved parents facing humiliation and despair


A generation burdened with hunger, a lack of education and enforced family planning must now also face the plight of those who lost their only offspring and the emotional, social and financial consequences that entails


“Both my husband and I were youths in Mao Zedong’s era,” says 63-year-old Wang Aiying. “We abided by the Party’s words, answered the Party’s call of duty and supported the Party’s policy.” Among other things, that meant adhering to the one-child ruling, an act of obedience that would, in 2015, leave Wang in deep despair. After her son died, she became a shidu fumu, one of a growing number of bereaved Chinese entering their twilight years without the emotional and financial support of a child.

Her son, Chang Jia, was nearly not born at all. In 1980, having been pregnant for just a few weeks, Wang, who had previously suffered a miscarriage and wasn’t taking any chances this time around, was in hospital when managers from her place of work came to visit. She had not been given approval by her employer, the Yu Opera House, in Handan, Hebei province, to have a child, they said. “They told me that it wasn’t my turn,” says Wang. “‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you think this is? That I can return the goods?’”

Wang, 26 at the time, successfully argued for the right to have her baby, but after the birth of her son, she was asked by her employer not to have a second child. She agreed and received a certificate for having just one child. “I felt honoured back then, because I listened to the words of the Party,” says Wang. Having five siblings herself, she accepted that the one-child policy was for the greater good and that young people should follow its guidelines.

Zhao Bingyi’s petitions to government requesting more support for shidu parents. Picture: Fan Liya

In 2012, Chang was diagnosed with liver cancer. He did not respond to treatment and, two years ago, he died, at the age of 35. Wang was distraught and she is now childless. She and her husband, who were both laid off before retirement age, were suddenly facing old age without support from the next generation.

Shortly after her son died, Wang applied for the 3,000 yuan retirement subsidy available to one-child parents but she encountered many obstacles. Because she had been laid off, in 2003, she was told she was not qualified for the retirement subsidy. “I don’t have money, nor do I have my son,” says Wang, weeping. “Why did I need to go here and there for all kinds of approvals to get the subsidy?”



That was Wang’s first experience as a shidu parent. Meaning “lose only”, shidu is a term that has been used by the media since 2010 to refer to parents who have lost their only child and are no longer able to have another. According to a 2013 report by the China National Committee on Ageing, a government branch overseeing the country’s increasingly grey society, there are at least one million shidu parents in China, and the number is increasing by 76,000 a year.



Hopeless and alone: Spring Festival a bitter reminder for China’s elderly parents who’ve lost their only child


As shidu parents of the first generation of the one-child policy are now in their 50s and 60s, many are becoming increasingly concerned about old age without a child to rely on. And they often find themselves the object of scorn.

“People sometimes humiliate me because my son died,” says Wang. In early April, she says, her electric bicycle was stolen from the parking rack at the bottom of her apartment block. She accused the security guard of negligence, only to be cursed as being someone who will “die without any descendants”.

Wang’s husband, 67-year-old Chang Shunde, has barely recovered from a cerebral infarction he suffered in 2010. He walks unsteadily and cannot talk or hear clearly. While listening to his wife, he cries and tries hard to say something. It’s not clear what. “I feel especially sad when I need help in my daily life,” says Wang.

Zhao, 66, supports his 14-year-old granddaughter, and worries for her future should he fall ill. Picture: Fan Liya



The one-child policy, announced through the state-run Xinhua News Agency, took effect in 1980. The article, addressing Party members, advocated each couple having only one child, so as to keep the country’s population below 1.2 billion for the rest of the 20th century. In 1982, the policy was written into the constitution and became mandatory. It was abolished in 2015.



“My wife was forced to have an abortion when she had been pregnant for four months,” says 66-year-old Zhao Bingyi, at his home in Handan. Zhao was a sheet metal worker in a foundry at the time, and the pregnancy would have resulted in the couple’s second child. “Officers in my factory came to my home day after day and would not stop until we agreed to have the abortion.”



The child they did have, Zhao Jingxuan, who as an adult serviced air conditioners, died in an accident at the age of 27, in 2005.



Behind China’s one-child policy is a growing army living alone


“My son was capable, loving and well behaved,” says Zhao. “He would give us 500 yuan if he earned 600 yuan.” Zhao senior had intended to retire in 2007, and was expecting a carefree later life. “It happened in October, two days after we had a heater installed at home. He fell from a building while setting up an air conditioner.”

Zhao, quiet and restrained, takes off his glasses and wipes away tears. His wife, Li Shuju, has pink marks at the corner of her eyes. “I have cried too much and these are leftovers of tears,” she says.

On a wall in their living room hangs a large photo of a baby girl, Zhao’s granddaughter, who lost her father at the age of two. The child’s mother left in 2010, and sees her daughter only on occasional weekends.

“She became introverted and barely talked after her father’s death,” Zhao says of the child. “I am worried about that, but worrying is all I can do.”

Wedding photos of Zhao’s son, Zhao Jingxuan, who died in 2005, at the age of 27. Picture: Fan Liya

From his monthly 2,500 yuan (HK$2,900) retirement pay and a 340 yuan shidu subsidy from the local government, Zhao must take care of the daily and educational needs of his granddaughter, who is now 14 years old. Fearing what neighbours might say to her about the death of her father, Zhao sent her to a middle school far from home. “It’s a more expensive, private school, but no one there knows her father’s story,” says Zhao.



And he worries for her future should anything happen to him. “I am 66 years old already. How much longer can I live?” he says. “What if I die all of a sudden? Who would take care of my granddaughter?”

Since 2013, Zhao has been calling for more public awareness and financial support from the government. He has accounts on Weibo, posting feeds about the latest policies relating to shidu parents. He has also created groups on QQ (one of which has more than 400 members) and WeChat, forums for shidu parents first in Hebei and then across China.
 

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TEA LEAF NATION
Meet the Chinese Trolls Pumping Out 488 Million Fake Social Media Posts

New research exposes a “massive secretive operation” to fill China’s internet with propaganda.


They are the most hated group in Chinese cyberspace. They are, to hear their ideological opponents tell it, “fiercely ignorant,” keen to “insert themselves in everything,” and preen as if they were “spokesmen for the country.” Westerners bemoan their propensity to beat the drum of nationalism, bombard Chinese liberals with personal attacks, and pollute online dialogue with wave after wave of strident propaganda. While their ranks have been unknown and their precise inner workings uncertain, at least everyone agrees on their name: wumao, or 50-centers, slang for the 50 Chinese cents they allegedly receive for each social media post. Now, a new report suggests it’s time to re-imagine who these people are and how they operate.

A May 17 paper written by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego provides the most detailed and ambitious description of China’s 50-centers available to date. It confirms the existence of a “massive secret operation” in China pumping out an estimated 488 million fabricated social media posts per year, part of an effort to “regularly distract the public and change the subject” from any policy-related issues that threaten to anger citizens enough to turn them out onto the streets. But the research finds no evidence these 50-centers are, in fact, paid 50 cents, nor does it find they engage in direct and angry argument with their opponents. Instead, they are mostly bureaucrats already on the public payroll, responding to government directives at a time of heightened tension to flood social media with pro-government cheerleading.

“The content of [50-center] posts was completely different than what had been assumed by academics, journalists, activists, and participants in social media,” Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor at Stanford and one of the report’s authors, told Foreign Policy. “They — and we before we did this study — turned out to be utterly wrong” about how pro-government shills actually operate.

Understanding the behavior of pro-government netizens is important, given the stakes. In the past two and a half years, the Chinese government has used a combination of muscle and guile to cow online opinion leaders into submission, muzzling social media as a political force, and leaching public dialogue of much of its independence. But beneath the peppy, pablum-filled surface that has resulted, Chinese social media remains a contested space.

Broadly speaking, the clash pits so-called leftists — that is, conservatives and neo-Confucianists who marry stout Chinese nationalism, a yearning for reconstructed socialism, and the quest for a reversion to hierarchy and filial piety — against rightists, or reformists, who continue to espouse what a Westerner would recognize as universal values, such as civil and human rights, government transparency, and democracy and constitutionalism. It’s more common for the two camps to exchange barbs than ideas. The leftists label the rightists sellouts, turncoats, and “public intellectuals,” the latter delivered with an implicit sneer. The rightists often call the leftists “50-centers,” regardless of who really pays their bills.

Given the infighting, it’s not hard to picture a shadowy coterie of young, angry, and irremediably argumentative 50-centers pitted against the nation’s liberals. Actual 50-centers, it turns out, are also far less likely to trade arguments or insults with their interlocutors than they are to stream peppy drivel into major discussions at just the right time. Of the posts the researchers analyzed, 80 percent were labeled “cheerleading,” and 13 percent “non-argumentative praise or suggestions.” These include such barn-burners as, “We all have to work harder, to rely on ourselves, to take the initiative to move forward” and, “We hope the central government provides us with even more support.” There’s little to offer such blather beyond a shrug or a grunt — that, of course, is precisely the point.


Although the number of fabricated posts is impressive, it’s also small compared with the heaving corpus of approximately 80 billion posts generated on China’s hyperactive social media each year.Although the number of fabricated posts is impressive, it’s also small compared with the heaving corpus of approximately 80 billion posts generated on China’s hyperactive social media each year. And 50-centers spend about half their energy posting on the friendly terrain of government-run websites. That means that only one out of every 178 posts on commercial Chinese social media actually comes from a 50-center. To maximize influence, the commentary mostly emerges at times of particularly intense online discussion, when the volume of chatter spikes — and when, the report’s authors argue, the possibility of online protest emerging into the real world is highest. (Disappointingly, researchers do not attempt to estimate the total ranks of 50-centers.)


The path to unmasking the 50-cent group began with a December 2014 leak of emails emanating from the Internet Information Office of Zhanggong district in Ganzhou, a small city in the southeastern province of Jiangxi. Researchers sought to identify how many of those named in the leak were actually 50-centers. Smoking out these notorious pro-government trolls didn’t require too much derring-do; researchers simply asked them by creating pseudonymous social media accounts, then direct-messaging those named in the leaked documents with this message: “I saw your comment, it’s really inspiring. I want to ask, do you have any public opinion guidance management, or online commenting experience?” (The anodyne term “public opinion guidance management” is widely recognized as the government’s code word for 50-centers.) Many, perhaps flattered by the approach, were happy to respond by admitting what they did. Pan said she was “not particularly surprised” the subjects were so forthcoming. “If you participate in online sentiment guidance, you might see yourself as someone who helps improve the general tenor of online discussions — this would not be something to be embarrassed about or ashamed of,” she said.

Beyond the eye-popping numbers, this report may prove most useful in outlining the limits of 50-center scope and influence. The notion that a massive, paid army of truculent pro-government netizens is largely to blame for China’s impoverished public dialogue is Orwellian, yet strangely comforting. If most of the pro-government invective calling reformists traitors to the motherland is driven by government dictat, that makes it possible a less illiberal regime could turn off the spigot of venom, allowing more recognizably Western views to thrive. But this report implies that those espousing nationalist nastiness aren’t paid shills after all. They mean precisely what they say.

Photo credit: MARK RALSTON/Getty Images

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China’s one-child policy has a legacy of bereaved parents facing humiliation and despair

“Both my husband and I were youths in Mao Zedong’s era,” says 63-year-old Wang Aiying. “We abided by the Party’s words, answered the Party’s call of duty and supported the Party’s policy.” Among other things, that meant adhering to the one-child ruling, an act of obedience that would, in 2015, leave Wang in deep despair. After her son died, she became a shidu fumu, one of a growing number of bereaved Chinese entering their twilight years without the emotional and financial support of a child.
The last thing that Chinese parents would want now is a war with India as thousands are going to lose their only child due to the silly one child policy of the brainless Hans of the CPC. Parents don't want their only child to join the Chinese armed forces as they'll lose the only support they have. Even Chinese youngsters shy away from joining the forces.
 

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The last thing that Chinese parents would want now is a war with India as thousands are going to lose their only child due to the silly one child policy of the brainless Hans of the CPC. Parents don't want their only child to join the Chinese armed forces as they'll lose the only support they have. Even Chinese youngsters shy away from joining the forces.
Absolutely, sir. Another thing which is less widely known is that they all lease their property and don't actually own it. If the kid dies and the parents are unable to pay the lease, they will be homeless.
 

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Forget the barbaric government, but read this story of a guy who sentenced his own mom just because she spoke against Mao.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/27/china-cultural-revolution-sons-guilt-zhang-hongping

They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her.

Fang Zhongmou's execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child.

More than four decades on, Fang's son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic.

Fang's plot is already hemmed in by buildings and a wall is rising behind it. Nearby streets are stacked with window frames, tiles and pallets of wood. Without official recognition, fears Zhang Hongbing, his mother's grave and story could soon be swept away – part of a wider, shadowed past that is fast disappearing.

"My mother, father and I were all devoured by the Cultural Revolution," said Zhang, 60, who is now a lawyer. "[It] was a catastrophe suffered by the Chinese nation. We must remember this painful historical lesson and never let it happen again."


Zhang Hongbing holds a photo of his mother. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian
Thirty-six million people were hounded and perhaps a million died in the turmoil unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. They were condemned by their political views and social background or someone's whim, enmity or attempt at self-preservation through incriminating others. Victims included the father of China's new leader Xi Jinping, who fell from grace and was sent to labour in the countryside.

The Communist party long ago deemed the period a disaster. Even so, authorities are chary of its examination. "It's almost not dealt with at all in official history," said Michael Schoenhals, of Lund University, who co-authored Mao's Last Revolution.

Yet history departments now run courses on the period and there is growing coverage online, he noted. In part, he said, the emerging discussion reflects the passing of time: "The people who were then doing some of the worst things – because they were young and stupid and enthusiastic and eager – are now pushing 70. They want to write before they go, or sometimes their children want them to write it down."

In a chilly study piled high with books and papers, Zhang leafs through family mementoes. One photo records his father being paraded in a dunce's cap. Another shows crudely pencilled illustrations of their story, from an exhibition that lauded Zhang's fervour. In the last sketch, blood spurts from his mother's mouth as she is executed.

The family was once "harmonious, happy and warm", said the lawyer.

Fang, only 44 when she died, was bold, extrovert and honest in all dealings, recalled her younger brother, Meikai. He struggled to speak through his tears: "When I talk about her, I want to cry," he said. "From the age of three I would follow her around; she was like another mother."


Zhang Hongbing's family photos and pictures of his mother. The bottom photo is an original copy of a photo from which other copies had her image torn out. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian
She met her husband when they joined the revolutionary cause, but their life was scarred by politics from the first. Her father was executed as a suspected Nationalist agent; Zhang blames a personal grudge. Later, as they struggled to survive the Great Famine, Zhang's younger brother was sent away to a relative who could feed him.

Then the Cultural Revolution burst into their lives. In the streets of Guzhen, Red Guards smashed heirlooms and burned books: "I thought it was great – an unprecedented moment in history," Zhang said.

In a blaze of enthusiasm, the children changed their names. Zhang, previously called Tiefu, became Hongbing, or "red soldier". His elder sister joined millions of Red Guards trekking to Beijing to see Mao. But shortly after her return, she collapsed and died from meningitis, aged 16. Months later, their father was attacked as a "capitalist roader" in at least 18 "struggle sessions" of verbal and physical abuse.

"I wrote a big character poster about him; I just wanted to follow Chairman Mao," said Zhang. "For a child to criticise their parents wasn't just our household. The whole country was doing it."

In 1968, Fang fell under suspicion due to her father. Two years of investigation, detention and uncertainty tormented her: "Why don't they just make a decision on me?" she asked.

"Her father's death, her husband's persecution, her daughter's death – everything that happened made her suspicious of the Cultural Revolution … She was sick of [it]," said Zhang.

Eventually conditions improved and she was allowed to sleep at home. Then, one evening, her zealous son accused her of tacitly criticising Mao. The family row spiralled rapidly: Fang called for the return of purged leaders and attacked Mao for his personality cult. "I warned her: 'If you go against our dear Chairman Mao I will smash your dog head,'" Zhang said, at times reading from his father's testimony. "I felt this wasn't my mother. This wasn't a person. She suddenly became a monster … She had become a class enemy and opened her bloody mouth."

Fang's brother begged her to take her words back, warning she would be killed. "I'm not scared," Fang replied. She tore down and burned Mao's picture.

When her husband and son ran to denounce her, "I understood it meant death," Zhang said. In fact, he added, he called for her to be shot as a counter-revolutionary. He last saw her as she knelt on stage in the hours before her death.

Most children who turned on their parents were under political pressure, said Yin Hongbiao, a Beijing-based historian.

"Those with 'bad parents' suffered a lot and they resented their parents instead of resenting the system which brainwashed them daily," added Michel Bonnin, of Tsinghua University.

"They were encouraged to denounce their parents, so as to 'draw a line' between them and the enemy. It was the only way to save themselves. There were many cases of children who tried to protect their parents against the violence of Red Guards and were then beaten or even executed."

Zhang's case is much more unusual, but Schoenhals suggested timing was critical: early 1970 saw a harsh campaign against counter-revolutionary activities, known as one-strike and three-anti. "You could come across anything if you had 700 million people embroiled in a conflict of this seriousness and magnitude," he added.

Fang Meikai, though furious with his sister's family, was powerless to help her. "I wanted to see her, but I wouldn't have been allowed. I was afraid that if I went I would also be involved in the case," he said. "That was the situation back then: they could kill whomever they wanted."


Zhang Hongbing: 'I felt this wasn't my mother. She suddenly became a monster.' Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian
After Mao's death and the Gang of Four's fall, the political tide turned. Cultural Revolution victims began to be rehabilitated. When Fang Meikai appealed on behalf of his sister, Zhang and his father agreed to support him.

Zhang, belatedly confronting his guilt, said he was a son "who could not even be compared to animals".

Fang was cleared in 1980; two years later, they erected a headstone at her grave, metres from where she was shot. At the execution ground, an acquaintance later told them, her eyes swept the crowd as if looking for faces she knew.

A lost decade
The Cultural Revolution was a lost decade of tragedy and waste. What historians Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals call the "chaos, killing and [ultimately] stagnation" claimed lives throughout the country and at all levels.

Under pressure due to the Great Famine, and unnerved by the Soviet repudiation of Stalin, Mao wielded mass support to see off rivals. Frustrated that Communist ideology had not truly taken root, he also sought to destroy old ideas and institutions.

Top leaders and revered intellectuals were humiliated, beaten and driven to suicide. Youthful Red Guards abused or murdered teachers and bad class elements. In Chongqing rival factions battled with guns and tanks; in Guangxi, there are reports of cannibalism. Friends, neighbours, colleagues and families turned upon each other. Cultural treasures were destroyed; universities shuttered. Millions of "educated youth" were sent to labour in the countryside. The economy was devastated.

Yet many believe that China's reform and development resulted from the era: Deng Xiaoping and other leaders realised only drastic measures could make up for lost time and win back popular support.

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For one reason, China/ese must be dealt with - for being adharmic. I mean which sane person would lead his mom to death, and China is filled with such psychopaths.
 

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