Official China Discussion Thread

My family in Beijing, whenever we visit always greets each other and my parents in a very boisterous way. My parents greet their friends in a very boisterous way. My parents argue with each other in a very boisterous way.

As to how the Chinese minorities in Malaysia feel, my parents and their relations spend a lot of time moaning about how the Chinese minorities in allegedly just about every other country has it better than things in Malaysia.

I just remembered, for relatively contemporary pop have you checked out Jay Chou, and if you're familiar with Final Fantasy VIII - Faye Wong?

New details have emerged about the tragic case of a Chinese woman literally swallowed into the gears of an escalator this week as she disembarked from the top of the moving staircase.

Surveillance camera images made public indicate that minutes before Xiang Liujuan, 30, stepped onto the metal footplate that collapsed beneath her feet and caused her to be crushed by the escalator’s machinery, two employees at the shopping center had stepped onto the same metal footplate and discovered that it was loose.

The two employees did report the problem to management; however, the escalator was not immediately shut down.

Poor emergency response from the mall and a design flaw in the escalator itself caused the horrifying accident that killed the 30-year-old mother in Jingzhou, a city in central China, said the official investigation report of the accident released late Tuesday, the state-owned China Quality Daily reported.

The security-camera video released by state-run China Central Television showed two female employees stepping onto the metal footplate together at around 10:06 a.m. Sunday, causing it to flip. The two almost fell.

“There’s a problem! Here! I almost fell into it,” one of the employees can be heard saying in the security video.

After reporting the issue to the mall’s management, the two workers returned to the escalator two minutes later and one of them even tapped the same metal footplate again with the tip of her foot to check if it was still loose.

While the two were discussing what was wrong, a family of three appeared at the bottom of the escalator. Xiang Liujuan took her son onto the escalator, while her husband stayed behind. When the mother and her son got closer to the top of the moving staircase, one of the workers warned Xiang that there was a problem with the metal footplate.

Pointing to where the problem was, one worker told her: “Jump over it.”

Xiang picked up her son with both hands and was prepared to jump. Unfortunately, she avoided the first metal footplate at the top of the escalator and stepped right onto the second, loose metal footplate, which collapsed. As she slipped into the machinery, she pushed her son toward the workers and was dragged down by the rotating gears.

The shopping center will be “held responsible” for failing to shut down the escalator after learning there was a problem, Chinese authorities said in the official investigation report. It was unclear what kind of penalties the mall might incur.

In addition, government investigators said the design of the escalator, manufactured by Suzhou-based Shenlong Elevator Co., had flaws that would cause the metal footplate to easily come loose and flip. The local safety inspection bureau in Hubei province, where Jingzhou is located, ordered all escalators made by Shenlong to suspend operations at once and all the escalators operating in the province to be thoroughly inspected. It was not clear whether other localities would follow suit.

Shenlong filed for an IPO in May last year but the company has not yet gone public. The company sold 8,861 escalators and elevators in 2014, the Beijing-based National Business Daily reported.

As the video of the horrific accident has been widely circulated on Chinese social media, many people have become exceptionally cautious when using escalators. A series of tongue-in-cheek videos has been making the rounds, showing people trying to avoid the metal footplates at the end of escalators by straddling handrails and performing other moves.

Chinese media reported that shoppers in different malls have begun to tap on the metal footplates at the end of escalators to make sure they’re stable, before stepping onto them. And a popular picture on the Chinese social media website Weibo illustrated which metal footplate, out of the usual three at the end of escalators, was dangerous and should be avoided.

Led by Chinese state media such as the People’s Daily, tutorials explaining where the emergency stop button is located on escalators became an instant hit on Chinese social media as well. Such “friendly tips,” while useful, may also be an attempt to divert attention away from questions such as the cause of the accident or whether the government has done its job to ensure public safety.

When a flash storm flooded the streets of the Chinese capital in 2012 and an SUV driver drowned in his vehicle in a downtown Beijing underpass, state media released a tutorial demonstrating how to break a vehicle’s window with the headrest of the car seat. Little attention was paid, however, to the city’s drainage system.

In view of the escalator incident, the Beijing News said in an editorial that a better regulated and strictly enforced safety inspection system would be much more effective than a few “survival tips” to ensure the public’s safety.

“To restore the public’s sense of safety, we cannot just rely on tips like ‘this is poisonous’ or ‘that is dirt’ to protect ourselves,” the editorial said. “We cannot jump like Super Mario Brothers every time we step out of the door. In a society with good social order, the public should not live with fear. A good system can help prevent those invisible loopholes.”

A 24-year-old woman was killed in a lift mishap in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Thursday, a local newspaper reported.

The victim died at 10.30am as she walked out of the lift on the 16th floor of a residential building in the city, the capital of Zhejiang province. The lift suddenly moved upwards, trapping her by her neck, the Qianjiang Evening News reported.

She was retrieved by firemen at about 11am and rushed to a hospital, where doctors battled for about an hour to resuscitate her before she was pronounced dead.

A doctor at the hospital’s emergency ward said the woman showed no signs of life when she was brought in and died from severe trauma to her neck.

Residents of the building said the lift had malfunctioned before, including shaking and dropping suddenly. It underwent maintenance last year.

The apartment block, built in the 1990s, was sealed off from outsiders while police investigated the accident.

CHENGDU, China — While China clamps down on logging within its borders, illegal Chinese loggers are felling the world’s forests with abandon for the sake of teak floors and fancy chairs.

In late July, 153 Chinese nationals were sentenced to life in prison for illegal logging in Myanmar’s northernmost Kachin state, a region rife with coveted teak, padauk, beechwood, ebony and rosewood species. Last week Burmese authorities granted their release in a gesture of goodwill toward China, which is Myanmar’s largest trading partner. But the gesture, while benevolent toward the loggers, will do nothing to stop the ongoing of ravishment of the region by Chinese companies who’ve been plundering Myanmar for over a decade, mostly illegally.

Thousands of precious teak trees, protected by Myanmar's Forest Law, as well as other species protected by a timber export ban passed in 2014, are shipped every year to eastern China to be transformed into teak floors for luxury buildings or hongmu (“redwood”) chairs, tables and chests. Once limited to Chinese elites, hongmu is now lusted after by China’s nouveau riche, with individual pieces fetching one million dollars or more.

Myanmar isn’t China’s only victim either. Indonesia, which has the world’s third highest carbon emissions rate (owing to deforestation), placed a moratorium on logging four years ago. Since then, forests have continued to be chopped and in 2013 half the world’s illegal timber came from Indonesia and ended up in China.

Meanwhile, Cambodia suffers the world’s third highest deforestation rate and 85% of its timber exports go to — you guessed it — China. The Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s sixth most forested country by area, created a logging permit system to combat deforestation, but industrial-scale logging continues; 90% of its logging is illegal and last year 65% of its timber exports went to, yes, China.

China also became Brazil’s leading market for wood in 2012, it consumes 80-90% of Papua New Guinea’s timber, over 90% of Mozambique’s, and in Equatorial Guinea, its log purchases have consistently exceeded the legal limit.

What’s fueling this ravenous appetite for timber? Chinese demand for wood increased 300% from 2000 to 2011, in part due to growth in China's construction industry and a 474% increase in per capita GDP, allowing more Chinese hotels, deluxe apartments and upper-class consumers to quench their thirst for rare furniture products.

Moreover, while nations like the United States and Australia have passed laws banning the import of illegal wood, China refuses to do so, believing the cost would be too high. At the same time, China has passed bans on commercial logging within its borders: in Heilongjiang province in 2014 and in Inner Mongolia and Jilin last April. In fact, Beijing wants to cut commercial logging of state forests by 20% before 2020.

This discrepancy has brought charges of hypocrisy from some observers. Faith Doherty, a team leader with the British NGO Environmental Investigation Agency, has described China’s behavior as “effectively exporting deforestation around the world.”

What, if anything, is the answer to this problem? Alison Hoare, a senior environmental researcher at British think tank Chatham House, wrote last month that Beijing should take a leadership role by raising this issue at ASEAN and G20 summits. But China isn’t likely to begin awareness-raising campaigns.

As Bob Flynn, international forests director at the timber consultancy RISI, says in a recent book about China’s environmental impact, “Chinese really don’t care where their wood comes from, as long as it’s cheap. If you’re talking about illegal logs from Indonesia or cutting down the last tree in the Solomon Islands, they apparently have no issues with that.”

Or as one Shanghai flooring company representative said, “we don’t log or smuggle any teak out of Burma. As for how the suppliers get teak, I don’t really care.”

So what will it take for Chinese to care about the forests of Mozambique? Hoare of Chatham House believes that economic self-preservation may be the answer.

“I do not think that the approach taken by China is a question of it protecting its backyard—not least because this approach is failing to ‘protect’ its domestic processing industry,” she told Global Post. To keep its huge timber processing industry alive, she said, and to develop its exports to prosperous nations that ban illegal imports, China “needs to be able to ensure that the materials which are being imported to supply the industry are legal.”

“China has been exploring ways to tackle the trade in illegal timber,” she added, citing work to create a verification system for legal wood.

“However, this is only just beginning to be implemented by industry and it remains a voluntary measure."