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.

This may be the start of a trend judging by the actions of a man at a Bank of Communications in Shenzhen’s Longhua New Zone on Sunday (July 21). Unhappy with the service he was getting at the bank, he caused it to be cordoned off by police for three hours after claiming over the phone that there was a bomb in a red suitcase in the bank, Baoan Daily reports.

The bank was evacuated as soon as the call was made. Police arrived with sniffer dogs and an explosive ordnance team and indeed there was an unattended red suitcase in the bank. However, there turned out to be nothing in the suitcase.

The man was caught and is currently being detained in Longhua.

A street in Baoan District

Last month, the quality of Guangzhou’s drainage system was called into question after the downtown area was severely flooded due to heavy rain. Now it is the turn of Shenzhen’s western area after basements were flooded, shops were forced to close and roads were blocked in Shenzhen’s western area after the city’s drainage system was unable to cope with heavy rain at the weekend, Nandu Daily reports.

Flooding reached over a metre in some parts as subway construction and a poor drainage system were blamed for the heavy floods in Baoan District, Nanshan District and Longhua New Zone.

At least 20 shops on the busy Xixiang Walking Street had to close due to their stock being soaked and by midday on Sunday, 20 cars on the street were stuck in water.

A woman in Xixiang in Baoan District

Sanitation workers at Shenzhen Baoan Stadium Subway Station, an intersection between the Luobao and Huanzhong lines, said if the rain had continued for another hour, the station itself would have been in severe danger of flooding.

80 property owners in Taihua Yangguang community said their basements were flooded with around half a metre of water, and one said it took more than two hours to pump it out.

Cars were also stuck on 107 Road and two children had to be rescued by firefighters.

Nanshan District’s Shahe West Road’s Baimang Village junction was under a metre of water. Four lanes were completely paralysed as a result.

The junction between Fulong Road and Jianshang Road.

The junction between Fulong Road and Jianshang Road resembled the Yellow River, according to one driver. The driver’s car stalled and he fled before the situation got worse.

Between 9:38 and 10:38 on Sunday morning, Xixiang Matou meteorological station recorded 74.5 mm of rain.

At 1 a.m. on Oct. 11, a man surnamed Chen drunkenly attacked a man surnamed Tang with a knife after mistakenly thinking he was starting a fight in Gemi Bar. Tang was stabbed in the chest and didn’t survive, Chen was detained.

An investigation into the bar showed it had inadequate fire safety equipment, and a further investigation showed that many of the bars lacked fire safety equipment or their existing equipment had expired.

The city’s Ministry of Culture discovered that all of the bars had seen their licences expire in 2009 or 2010. Authorities in Longhua explained that their cooperation with the Baoan District government had decreased in recent years as they had been given more autonomy.

For this reason, there was a failure to delegate responsibility.

In May of this year, Lu Yi, Party chief of Longhua New Zone told reporters: “Longhua is planning 200 billion yuan (US$32 billion) of investments in the next five years to become a high-standard, booming region. The GDP will increase 100 billion yuan by 2015.” Good luck with that.

In 2008, a nightclub fire caused by a fireworks display in Longgang District killed 43 and injured 65. 13 people were arrested, which was presumably as much in the name of Darwinism as it was in the name of justice.

A journalist from the paper went to the school and saw three students that had either red or blue stamps on their faces in a third-grade classroom.

A parent surnamed Zhang told the paper that a neighbour’s child came home one day with a blue stamp on his face. After inquiring, he discovered that the teacher gave blue stamps to students he deemed bad and red stamps to students he deemed good.

A student with a blue stamp on his face said he was laughed at by his classmates and could only wash it off when he got home.

It later emerged that as of this school year, the school has had a policy in place of marking children’s notebooks with red or blue stamps to denote whether they have been good or bad.

A new teacher, surnamed Guo, went a step further and marked the students’ faces without permission from her superiors.

The vice principle of the school, surnamed Li, has apologized to students and pledged to train new teachers better in future.

During the Cultural Revolution it was common to punish criminals by pouring black ink over their hair and faces.