Ou went to a clinic in Longgang District’s Nanling Village on Dec. 9 with a fever and a cough. On December 17, a sample from the patient tested positive for the H7N9 avian influenza virus at the Shenzhen Disease Control and Prevention Centre. The results were confirmed by provincial authorities one day later. He is now at Shenzhen No 3 People’s Hospital.

On Wednesday, Yangjiang was found to have its second and Guangdong’s fifth case. The 62 year-old male patient is also in a critical condition.

Guangdong appeared to have been out of the woods when the province’s first sufferer was discharged from hospital in early September. However, the province’s approach to containing the virus has been far from exemplary.

Shenzhen Public Security Bureau announced August 29 that it had busted a gang that had been transporting pig carcasses from Maoming’s Dianbai Village and Maogang Village. Most of the pigs had died of diseases and sold illegally to slaughterhouses. By the time it reached the consumer the pork had been pumped full of twelve times the legal amount of veterinary drugs such as oxytetracycline.

Consumption of the unqualified pork is particularly dangerous to the liver.

The joint police operation to bust the ring of unlicensed pork dealers began on July 22 when suspicions were raised about pork sold in Haijixing Farmer’s Market in Longgang District.

All those suspected of involvement in the operation have been arrested and a subsequent investigation has shown that at least 150 tons of the illegal pork has already been consumed in Shenzhen.

There are 2000 pig farms in Dianbai Village and Maogang Village alone so that may turn out to be a conservative estimate.

The aftermath, image courtesy of Southern Metropolis Daily

It follows the two sinkholes in Shenzhen that made headlines around the world this year: the one in Futian District in March in which the ground disappeared beneath a security guard’s feet and the one in Longgang District in May in which five people were buried alive.

There have also been a number of smaller ones which led to no fatalities, such as the one in June which occurred in a greenbelt in Luohu District.

Sunday’s sinkhole, which opened in Longhua New Zone, saw one of the injured require 9 stitches in his arm.

Due to heavy rain in the previous days, locals sensed there was a chance the road would collapse, so told the police. However, the police dismissed their claims and, lo-and-behold, on Sunday morning the sinkhole opened up just outside 32 Longfa Road.

Two of the injured were staff from the nearby Meijia Suermarket and one of those to fall in was a 12 year-old boy, but he sustained no injuries.

Local officials, such as Longhua Party Secretary Jiang Jianjun, demanded an investigation. However, nobody suggested this would not happen again.

In March, a man in Futian District was killed when the ground collapsed underneath him. Then in May, a massive sinkhole killed five in Longgang District.

This could easily have killed somebody, courtesy of Sina Weibo

Yesterday another sinkhole opened in Luohu District, but thankfully this time it took place in a greenbelt and there were no casualties, The Daily Sunshine reported in its microblog.

The incident took place around 1 p.m. at the intersection between Huali Road and Fenghuang Road. Repair work started immediately.

The Guardian gives an introduction on the causes of sinkholes:

In the language of geologists, the process that causes sinkholes is “the creation of a void which migrates towards the surface”. In the language of the layman, when there’s not enough solid stuff left underneath to support what is left of the loose stuff above, the whole lot collapses. The resulting depressions characterise what is known as a karst landscape, in which hundreds or even thousands of relatively small sinkholes form across an area that, seen from the air, can appear almost pock-marked.

But it’s not just scientists who have interesting things to say about sinkholes. The philosopher and theologian Jeremy Goad has this to say about the phenomenon:

For a variety of reasons (and, as I discussed in my previous post, for no particular reason), sinkholes made me question God. “Why, God, did you create a world in which the ground gives way underneath people’s feet? Is this really a result of humanity’s sin? Did sinkholes really not occur prior to the fall? Do I really believe in the fall? Do I really believe in Creation? Do I really believe in God? Do I really believe in Christ?” There was no specific logic to my questions. There was no motivating factors for this line of inquiry.

It felt like an avalanche of doubt, stemming from seemingly nothing and and yet in an instant it was gargantuan and oppressive. Like a Top Fuel dragster once completely motionless and in seconds racing at unfathomable speeds, I went from faith to uncertainty directly. I couldn’t control it. I wasn’t particularly happy about it. And I wanted the argument that would win back my faith.

Mr. Fan telling media of his heroism

Shortly after 7 a.m., an thief entered Mr. Fan’s shop to steal some cash and a mobile phone. Mr. Fan was sleeping upstairs but he heard somebody enter and he ran out to catch him. CCTV footage shows the subsequent chase.

Mr. Fan ended up catching the petty criminal. You can watch the chase in all its glory below.

Courtesy of Baidu images

The Guangdong Province Public Security Bureau received a tip off last month that a criminal organization intended to transport the illegal immigrants from Pingxiang and Dongxing in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, according to YESKL.

After an investigation, the operation saw three buses with Guangxi license plates seized at the toll booth on the Longgang stretch of the Jihe Expressway at 1:45 a.m. on March 6.

The illegals consisted of 23 men and 10 women and most were from the same town in Vietnam.

This 2010 article in China Daily talks of a surge in illegal immigration from Vietnam because the pay is better in China. In one case last year, 42 Vietnamese illegal immigrants were nabbed.

Forbes offers this analysis of the situation of illegal immigration into China from Southeast Asia.

A waitress from the restaurant in Pingdi Subdistrict told the TV station that the officers would regularly book a room for the discounted price of 135 yuan for an unlimited amount of time. The waitress added that the restaurant tended to see the most police officers on Saturdays and Sundays.

One of the policemen who frequented the restaurant was known to drive a public vehicle with the registration number B 2014. A picture of the vehicle was uploaded to Weibo along with the allegations.

An officer who is in charge of training at the police station said he would treat the allegations with the utmost seriousness.

Another officer at the station who was known to drive the vehicle claimed there had been a misunderstanding.

An investigation is ongoing.

Many young people get round this by paying other single people to act as their boyfriend or girlfriend for the duration of the holiday. One 27 year-old woman in Shenzhen who tried to do this had a happier ending than anybody had even hoped for.

Miss Yuan, who lives in Huanggang Subdistrict in Longgang District, is now preparing to return to her native Hubei with her “boyfriend for hire” to buy a house together, Chutian Metropolis reported yesterday.

In early February Mr. Zhou, 32, received a message in one of his QQ groups that a man was offering to act as a boyfriend for hire for just 38 yuan on Chinese New Year. A bachelor, Zhou jokingly forwarded this to all of his contacts and all of his groups, pretending to offer his own services.

Yuan did not see Zhou’s proposition as a joke and was in fact so keen that she offered to add an extra ’0′ to the end of the asking price.

Although not convinced that she was being serious, Zhou started to chat with Yuan on QQ and they had something of a meeting of the minds which led to the exchange of phone numbers.

On the evening of February 7, Zhou had to face his parents in Huanggang and explain that he still didn’t have a girlfriend. His father’s scolding led him to promise that he would bring a girl home the following day.

The following afternoon, Zhou, a white collar worker who is based in Wuhan but whose parents live in Huanggang, called Yuan and invited her to his home. It turned out they lived less than an hour apart. On February 9, they met and immediately liked each other. Zhou’s parents were delighted to welcome a girl to their home and his mother pulled out all of the stops to make sure Yuan enjoyed the meal of her life.

That day, Yuan, who works as a tutor, had lied to her parents and told them she was just going to town to do some shopping. But upon returning home, she told her parents everything that had happened.

She told her parents that she wanted to be with Zhou and they respect her decision, Yuan told the paper. Now she is set to move to Hubei where they intend to buy a house together.

I suppose at their respective ages they can’t afford the luxury of taking it slowly.

The lavish temple that Lin Jian is accused of owning

A low-level government official based in Shenzhen’s Longgang District has been accused by villagers in Guangdong Province’s Shanwei Municipal Region of building family monuments with public money. The villagers claim he built a family tomb with 100,000 RMB and an ancestral temple with 1 million RMB, Liaoning Satellite Television reports.

As the province pilots forcing officials to declare their assets, netizens are eager to know where the official, Lin Jian, got the money. According to residents of Tanxi Village in Lufeng, despite being based in Shenzhen’s Nanwan Street, Lin has used public money to build the family monuments.

The cost of burying the dead has been a controversial issue in China in recent years. Many families are choosing the more affordable and environmentally friendly method of sea burials.

The tomb that allegedly belongs to Lin’s family

The ancestral temple has elements of both Ming and Qing Dynasty architecture and was built with top quality materials, the villagers claim. If their claim is true, then the constructions would be unaffordable to somebody in Lin Jian’s income bracket.

This news comes at a doubly inopprtune time for Lin as China has just announced data on its level of income inequality. It was the first time since 2001 China had officially announced its GINI coefficient, which showed tremendous disparity between China’s wealthy and those less fortunate.

Zheng Junpeng

After we recently reported that a woman in Shenzhen had beaten her own daughter before burning the body to make the death look like an accident, Shanghaiist intelligently connected the problem of weak child abuse laws with the government’s reluctance to focus on anything but economics.

But the frequency of child abuse cases at the hands of both parents and teachers may force the government to act.

The latest such case saw a 6 year-old boy die after his father lashed him ferociously with a belt in Shenzhen’s Longgang District on the night of December 28, Liaoning Satellite Television reports.

The father, Zheng Junpeng, told police he was beating the boy to “educate” him at their home on Bantian Road. When he realised the seriousness of his son’s injuries, he rushed him to hospital, but the boy, Xiaohao, could not be saved.

It was the seventh child abuse case to make the news in Shenzhen in 2012, according to Southern Metropolis Daily.

The beating happened around 10 p.m. after Zheng had been told by Xiaohao’s teacher that his son was a bully who would try to steal classmates’ money and beat them if they failed to comply.

The landlord, Shu, overheard the beating and knocked on the door to tell Zheng to stop. Zheng did not answer the door so Shu shouted through the door, asking Zheng not to beat his son so hard before leaving.

Xiaohao was found cold in bed but he was discovered too late. The case is being investigated.

A 2005 survey carried out by the All China Women’s Federation led to the discovery that child abuse was extremely common in China. The Hong Kong Law Blog tackled the issue of child abuse in Mainland China in November.