The amusement park ride is at the Yangzhou Amusement Park, and the incident happened Sunday at around 8pm.

All riders were safely rescued by 9:15pm by firefighters.

One of the riders, a Miss Meng, said the ordeal began at 7:48pm. She said the experience was a harrowing one in which she became dizzy and had chest pains during the first 30 minutes.

Although the park offered apologies and free bottles of water to frightened riders, they were not willing to issue refunds for park admission.

Incidents involving amusement park rides in China over the past few years have stranded a number of riders, and in some cases have resulted in fatalities.

Sixteen riders on a roller coaster at the Wanda theme park in Nanchang, Jiangxi were stranded 70 meters above the ground for an hour when it suddenly malfunctioned in May.

This past June, a malfunctioning roller coaster at an amusement park in Quanzhou, Fujian left riders stranded 30 meters above the ground for 30 minutes.

In March, the Crystal Heavenly Wing roller coaster malfunction at the Happy Valley amusement park in Beijing, stranding 26 riders 30 meters above ground for 20 minutes before they were rescued.

In September of last year, a mother and her son were seriously injured when they were flung from a giant octopus ride in Wuhan.

On Labor Day last year, two people were killed when five riders were thrown off the “Scream Crazy” ride located at an amusement park in Zhejiang.

Last April, 19 people were injured when an amusement park ride at a temple fair in Henan broke in half, throwing its riders to the ground.

The post Ferris Wheel Strands Dozens of Riders in Mid-Air for 40 Minutes appeared first on The Nanfang.

China’s growing wealth has brought with it an appetite for high-end sports cars, which in turn has produced a growing list of collisions involving those high-end sports cars. But where previous crashes have commonly involved racing and drunk driving, this past weekend’s two Ferrari-crash in Yunnan saw a driver swerve to avoid hitting a dog crossing the street at the wrong time.

Two Ferraris with Shanghai plates crashed in Lijiang, Yunnan on Saturday. One sustained major damage to its front end by running into the median, while the other sustained damage to its rear.

The damage to both cars is estimated to be around 2 million yuan ($300,000), with each car worth about 5.6 million.

Local police say the drivers are not at fault. Both were found to be driving within the speed limit and had not consumed alcohol. Additionally, licenses and registration for each driver was in order.

Sadly, the dog did not survive the crash. Sadder still, no one has claimed ownership of the dog, which lay dead on the road among the debris of the car crash.

The post Another Two Ferraris Wrecked in China… This Time Because of a Dog appeared first on The Nanfang.

Four Chinese people remain missing after a fishing vessel capsized off the coast of South Korea yesterday. Another four crewmen were successfully rescued from the sinking, which occurred near the country’s South Jeolla Province.

One crewman is dead from the incident, while another has sustained injuries.

AP quotes an unidentified maritime police official from the port city of Mokpo claiming the boat was being towed due to mechanical issues when it capsized 85 kilometers (52 miles) northwest of Gageo island. The other vessels kept the boat from fully submerging until South Korean rescuers arrived, he said.

Hours after the sinking, South Korean divers rescued a Chinese crewman, who was conscious and able to talk. However, a fisherman that was previously rescued succumbed to his injuries. Four other crewmen are believed to still be inside the sunken vessel.

An unidentified official from the Ministry of Public Safety and Security said the Chinese fishing vessel was not authorized to fish within South Korean territorial waters. The incident occurred near the location of the 2014 ferry accident that killed some 300 people, South Korea’s largest maritime tragedy.

Chinese fishing vessels have been involved in a number of confrontations with South Korean maritime authorities, as fish resources dwindle in Chinese territory. Hundreds of Chinese citizens have been arrested for illegally fishing in South Korean waters, often resulting in violent and fatal clashes.

Last September, South Korean TV broadcast gripping footage of a Chinese fishing vessel speeding toward North Korean territorial waters as the South Korean coast guard tried to break through a locked door. A year earlier, the captain of a Chinese fishing boat was killed during a violent confrontation when the South Korean coast guard  the vessel.

In 2012, a 44 year-old Chinese fisherman was shot with a rubber bullet, while a member of the South Korean Coast Guard died after being stabbed during a confrontation in 2011.

The post 4 Missing as Chinese Fishing Boat Capsizes Off South Korea appeared first on The Nanfang.

However, cold alerts weren’t the only warnings being given out by Chinese authorities, let alone the most frantic.

Last Tuesday, before the cold snap arrived, police authorities were dismayed when they discovered some 501 bags of road salt were missing from under a bridge in Pinghu, Zhejiang. What was most alarming to police wasn’t the loss of an essential road safety resource as a winter storm approached, but that the thief may actually attempt to eat the stolen road salt.

That prompted a local media station to issue a public health warning on the dangers of eating road salt. “A large number of bags containing road salt intended for the incoming cold front in Pinghu have apparently been taken by local residents. If used for cooking the consequences will be unfathomable! … It is not edible salt, do not consume!” wrote Zhejiang Traffic Radio wrote on their Weibo post.

Meanwhile, other warnings appeared to be directed towards the thief himself. “Eat at your own risk,” read a statement released by Pingu road management authorities.

More than 500 bags of road salt sound like a lot for any one person to consume. But as other unscrupulous criminals have found, rock salt can be counterfeited and sold to unwitting consumers.

Last July, Beijing police cracked down on a criminal ring that sold 20 tons of counterfeit table salt, an operation worth 20 million yuan. Guangdong police have been busy cracking down on separate fake salt producers who sold 600 tons of fake salt in Guangzhou, 19 tons in Dongguan, and 26 tons in Guangzhou.

For now, it appears the public health danger is over. A suspect, a 61 year-old man named Liu, was arrested last week for the theft.

Maybe it was his burning conscience or the knowledge that he was in possession of a public health hazard, but for whatever reason, it seemed like Liu just wasn’t able to “hold the salt”.

The post Things You Shouldn’t Need to Say: Road Salt is for the Road, Not for Eating appeared first on The Nanfang.

Some 15 to 20 years ago, mildly observant and averagely prescient Hong Kong people noted the huge and growing surge of investment into and exports out of Mainland China as the country’s economy bounced back with a vengeance after the lost Maoist decades up to the late 1970s. The risk-to-reward ratios were once-in-a-lifetime. We put our savings into amazingly underpriced Chinese companies being listed on the local stock market and saw returns of 500 percent or 1,000 percent in five-to-10-year spans.

It was a one-off historic opportunity for those of us lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. By the mid-2000s or so, China’s dramatic return to economic normality had run its course. Now, 10 years further on, the country is in trouble. The Communist regime faces a stark choice: relax its grip to let the economy grow, or tighten its grip to keep itself in power. The place is too big to fail, so we all vaguely assume they will find some middle way and wing it – though damned if we can see how, exactly. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is re-establishing a dictatorship, as Swedes and others are finding out.

But news travels slowly. In Europe, they have only just heard of this thing called the Great Chinese Miracle Stratospheric Rise Story. To the UK, Sweden and the rest of the West, it is still the 1990s and the big boom is just starting to take off. So besotted are they with the mythical riches bound to flow from China that they feel a need to indulge in the most cringe-making pre-emptive kowtows.

Western policymakers probably see Beijing’s rogue behavior – like kidnapping their own citizens – as an unfortunate but soon-to-pass phase that China is going through in its dazzling emergence as World’s Number-One Economic Power. They don’t realize that the clampdown on human rights (and media/academia/civil society/etc) is the direct result of, and response to, the end of the economic ‘miracle’. This is a corrupt regime fighting to survive. You don’t need to grovel to it. (At least with the Saudis you get some oil.)

As China does as it pleases with Swedish and British passport-holders, democratic Taiwan overwhelmingly votes for a Western-educated, reformist, progressive and pluralist leader. The West’s response? Implicitly criticize the Taiwanese for inconveniencing Beijing. Tut-tut at them for disrupting the Communists’ plan to absorb and crush their free society. Warn them, as the obvious troublemakers in all this, not to provoke China into ramping up the military threat.

Maybe in 10 years or so, the news will reach the West: the Big Wonderful Taking-Over-the-World Exploding Chinese Inevitable thing is over.

The post Dear West: The China Economic Miracle, World Power Story is Over appeared first on The Nanfang.

China’s Communist party-state seems to be starting 2016 in such a sorry situation – wading deeper and deeper into reputational problems as it struggles to reconcile its internal fictional message with internationally recognized facts.

The most pressing image-management ‘contradictions’ obviously involve the economy. With official data on GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and debt falsified or obscured, no-one really knows what is going on. But some things are observable. We see clumsy stock/currency market mismanagement, suggesting incompetence and panic – which themselves sound like cause and effect of bigger problems buried under the official stats. And there are all the clear direct or indirect signs of over-capacity, capital flight, labor problems and other trouble.

Perversely, the Chinese authorities stick with the clear lie that growth remains at 7 percent (or 6.9876 percent or whatever). Such a high growth rate at the same time as the capital flight/labour protests/etc would indicate an economy so grotesquely imbalanced that it is sure to explode. If they were honest and admitted to (say) 2 per cent growth, the problems would be more understandable, and the picture would actually be more reassuring. As it is, most observers are being realistic/charitable and politely ignoring the 7 percent-growth fiction. But the blatant refusal to admit the obvious does make Beijing’s officials look infantile.

The PR problems get nastier as they get more localized. The big story of the weekend was the victory of Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP in the Taiwan elections. The polling started with news that a Taiwanese K-pop star had been forced to make a groveling filmed ‘confession’ to the PRC after waving an ROC flag in a video. The main villains are the Korean entertainment company (which reaps big bucks from stars’ Mainland commercial deals) and an aging Mainland-domiciled Taiwan star who likes to expose unpatriotic rivals. But the message is clear: Beijing expects and requires humiliation of 16-year-olds for the slightest transgression of its ‘Taiwan doesn’t exist’ fantasy. If you wanted to alienate people whose loyalty you crave, I couldn’t think of a better way.

But wait! I could…

As we all know, in accordance with the regime’s obsession with image-manipulation, Beijing’s security apparatus has been abducting Hong Kong book publishers. After a fifth was grabbed in late December off the streets of Hong Kong itself, this became a big scandal. The Chinese authorities are now looking for a way out. Behold – they are busy making the PR screw-up even bigger.

Following presumably faked communications from Lee Bo, we now get a televised ‘confession’ from Gui Minhai, who disappeared from Thailand. It is standard Stalin-showtrial-with-Chinese-characteristics stuff. But the apparently uninspired spin-doctors still have another three (four, with Lee) accounts of the disappearances and ‘guilt’ to concoct and disseminate. Such contrived stories for all five victims will inevitably come across as a joke. Hong Kong’s officials and Beijing loyalists will be forced to make themselves part of the joke if their masters order them to publicly embrace this crap as the truth. And even then, one day, the five will have to be freed to tell their stories.

This mess started off as an attempt to protect the regime’s image at home, and it has now become one more blight on the country’s international reputation. To the audience in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the world as a whole, China self-mutilates rather than saves face. Yet again.

I could go into the way China’s censors banned ‘Tsai Ing-wen’ from Internet searches for a while on Saturday, then changed their minds. But we could go on and on.

Are we going to have a whole year of this? It will be the most gruesomely entertaining ever.

The overall impression the world gets from Beijing’s frantic attempts to impose the Communist Party’s fiction everywhere is that China’s leaders and political system are simultaneously both child-like and evil. It is a combination (The Exorcist/The Omen/Stephen King/etc) that manages to be creepier than any other type of sinister. Bang goes the cuddly panda bear.

The post China Fumbles Badly Trying to Put the PR in PRC appeared first on The Nanfang.

Lines 1, 2 and 8 of the Shanghai Metro will all continue to run until 80 minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve. The last trains to run on Line 1 will depart terminal stations Fujin Road and Xinzhuang at 11:50pm and 11:52pm, while the last trains on Line 2 will depart from their terminal stations at 12:05am. The last trains to run on Line 8 will make their final run starting at 11:50pm.

As well, 72 Shanghai public buses will extend their services late on New Year’s Eve including routes 13, 21, 23, 37, 123, 139, 923, and 934.

Meanwhile, the Shenzhen Metro will extend service on New Year’s Eve to 12:30am and on January 1 (New Year’s Day) until midnight on Lines 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

As of the time of this article, no plans have been announced for the Beijing Metro.

And while subway service in other Chinese cities was increased this past Christmas Eve and Day to facilitate more crowds, Beijing focused much of its attention upon increasing its police presence after the US Embassy warned of a potential threat against Westerners.

Shanghai has likewise cut down on large-scale celebrations, limiting crowds to 4,800 at a gathering in Xintiandi. However, crowds are expected at shopping centers expected to stay open late throughout the city.

Last year New Year’s Eve in Shanghai, 36 people were killed in a trampling incident at the Bund where crowds converged in massive numbers.

The post Shanghai, Shenzhen to Extend Subway Service on New Year’s Eve appeared first on The Nanfang.

Did they, or didn’t they have plastic surgery? That’s the question being asked at Wanli University in Zhejiang as ten former students’ grad photos were substantially different from the photos from their third year of high school.

There are many reasons that could explain the radical change: a loss of weight, make-up, a change of clothes or hairstyle. And yet, despite the implausibility of a university having the time and money to withdraw from their studies, another possible explanation is plastic surgery. One the one hand, that may sound insulting, but on the other hand that could be a roundabout way of explaining the unbelievable transformation by which adolescence blossoms into adulthood.

Here are the transformations so that you can judge for yourself. Is it just growing up, or is it plastic surgery? We’re not sure, but we think longer hair with bangs and turning up the contrast on Photoshop may have to do with it:

The post Did These 10 Zhejiang University Students Have Plastic Surgery? appeared first on The Nanfang.

Launched in 2006, the free, 24-hour hotline (962288) offers services in 15 languages, the most popular being English, Korean, and Japanese. Operators at the center assist callers with a number of issues such as travel, transportation, education, healthcare, and entertainment.

The hotline is staffed by 50 female operators in their 20’s from six countries and takes an average of 550 calls on 250 lines per day. The most common questions relate to directions to an address and simple translations, but can sometimes involve things like negotiating disputes.

Twenty-seven year-old Desislava Koleva said one of the strangest and saddest calls she took was from a man who needed help giving a police report. The man had just been tricked and robbed after going to one of the city’s many bar streets. “I listened to him but I can’t really comfort him in the real sense of the word. I am only supposed to translate what he says to me,” said Koleva.

In trying to keep with the times, the call center is updating its systems to allow operators to field questions via text message.

The Shanghai Call Center is sponsored by the Information Office of Shanghai Municipality, and the Foreign Affairs Office of Shanghai Municipal People’s Government.

The post Shanghai Celebrates Anniversary of an Often Used Foreigner Helpline appeared first on The Nanfang.

A massive landslide Sunday in Shenzhen, the manufacturing capital of China, has buried or collapsed 33 buildings while 81 people remain missing. Seven people are confirmed dead, reports the Wall Street Journal, while CCTV reports seven survivors have been rescued from the landslide and 13 are hospitalized, including three with life-threatening injuries. Some 900 Shenzhen residents were safely evacuated from area homes yesterday afternoon.

The landslide struck the Hengtaiyu industrial park in Guangming New District, Shenzhen at around 11:40am on Sunday. The mud has covered an area of more than 60,000 square meters with an average thickness of 6 meters (20 feet), according to geological experts at the site. Other reports say the landslide has an affected area of 100,000 square meters.

The landslide was caused by a steep, man-made pile of construction waste piled up against a 100 meter (330 foot) hill accumulating for over two years, said the Ministry of Land and Resources. Heavy rains had made the pile of construction waste unstable, leading it to collapse.

The New York Times said local official newspaper the Shenzhen Tequ Report reported on its Weibo micro-blogging account that the giant pile was illegal but had been approved by local officials. Those posts were later deleted.

The 33 damaged or collapsed buildings included 14 factories, two office buildings, one cafeteria, three dormitories and 13 sheds or workshops, Shenzhen Deputy Mayor Liu Qingsheng said at a news conference The landslide has also caused an explosion at a nearby gas pipeline owned by PetroChina, but the fire was put out by Monday morning.

A total of 1,500 people are actively involved in the rescue that include the services of 104 fire engines, 123 life-detectors, four drones and 30 sniffer dogs, according to the official Weibo account of the Fire Department under the Ministry of Public Security.

To date, signs of life have been reported at three locations. However, the Public Security Bureau’s Firefighting Department noted that the mud has infused with the collapsed buildings, suggesting that the “room of survival extremely small.”

The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a local worker as saying he saw “red earth and mud running towards the company building,” while another resident living around 4km (2.5 miles) from the site described hearing a “loud explosion” at the same time the landslide hit.

Local villager Peng Jinxin said the mud came like “huge waves” when the landslide struck. Another villager said he narrowly escaped the disaster before torrents of mud engulfed his home, saying”At one point the mud was only ten meters away from me.”

A number of dramatic videos have been published that show the devastating power of the landslide. In this video, buildings are violently toppled as bystanders run for their lives:

(Same video, different source)Here is footage of the landslide in action as taken from a distance away:Here is aerial footage that shows the extent of the devastation:Deadly landslides most commonly hit Shenzhen and much of Guangdong Province during heavy storms that strike during the annual rain season as it did last year, killing eight people.

In November, 25 people were killed in a landslide in Zhejiang.

The post 81 Missing and 33 Buildings Demolished in Massive Landslide in Shenzhen appeared first on The Nanfang.