For the first time ever, the Shenzhen Consumer Council has published a list ranking brands of water cooler drinking water available to consumers, reports Nandu.

Tests were carried out on 18 brands of water by the Shenzhen Bureau of Quality Inspection, which measured the water against national standards. The brands were separated into three categories: pure, mineral, and natural water.

These are the results, with five being the highest score:

Pure Water

Watsons

5

Wahaha

5

McBebe, also known as “mabo”

4.7

Smile

4.6

C’estbon

4.4

Ganten

4.4

Robust

4.4

Mineral Spring Water

Daneng Yili

4.7

Qiniang Shan (Seven Maiden Mountain)

4.5

Ganten

4.4

Idea

4.2

Wutong Spring (Parasol Tree Spring)

4.2

Caitian

did not meet standards

Natural Water

Wutong Xianquan

4.7

Nongfu Spring

4.5

Yibi (Jade Advantage)

4.4

Shanzhijun (Melody of the Mountain)

did not meet standards

Shenming Zhi Yuan (Source of Life)  

did not meet standards

Regardless of brand, bacteria will grow within an opened drinking water bottle five to seven days after opening. After that, water should be boiled before drinking.

People are also reminded to check the water container for its date of production and an intact seal of quality, to boil water if used with baby formula, and to clean the water cooler every three months.

Here’s the original infographic in Chinese:

Photos: free 11994, Nandu, gdzq315, Watsons, Wahaha, Mabo, Smile, C’estbon, Ganten, Robust, Daneng Yili, Qiniangshan, Idea, Caitian, Wutong Xianquan, Nongfu Springs, Shanzhijun, Shengmingzhiyuan

Hong Kong, already, somehow seems different. The police on every street corner yesterday made it feel like Tiananmen Square. We are left with depressing media coverage, the tears of democracy advocates, and the sobering realization that Hong Kong’s yearning for representative government is at a dead end.

But who can really blame Beijing? The Communist Party is simply looking out for itself, and was never going to allow open democracy on its own soil. It also has a point when it says the universal suffrage proposal for 2017 goes much farther than anything the city had under British colonial rule. But that’s cold comfort to a city that always believed it was ready to responsibly govern itself.

The most depressing fact, from this humble writer’s point of view, is the dead silence from the west. For the last century, western countries spoke out against injustice and promoted democracy abroad, often standing up to brutal dictatorships at great personal cost. Today, when one vibrant and mature society in a relatively undeveloped region sees its freedoms threatened, the west not only turns its back, it gets into bed with the aggressors.

The United States and United Kingdom, and companies from those two places, long ago sold their souls to Beijing. The UK has been silent on what’s happening in Hong Kong, despite the fact it’s a party to the Sino-British Joint Declaration and has some grounds to speak up. The United States has uttered not a word. British companies, notably HSBC and Standard Chartered, have pulled advertisements from Next Media’s Apple Daily under pressure from the Chinese government, proving they, too, know who their real masters are.

Even LinkedIn, a forward thinking, Silicon Valley social network, censors posts globally if China feels uncomfortable. The company’s PR head explained:

“It is difficult,” says LinkedIn’s Director of Communications Hani Durzy. “We are strongly in support of freedom of expression. But it was clear to us that to create value for our members in China and around the world, we would need to implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content.”

No, LinkedIn doesn’t support freedom of expression. If it did it wouldn’t censor content. It’s really that black-and-white. America and the UK don’t support it much either, or they would speak up too.

We are entering a new, dark era where even the west, with its professed love of freedom of speech, cannot be counted on to defend those values. In what would once be unthinkable, today western companies have no problems justifying outright censorship and adherence to brutal, authoritarian governments while western leaders keep silent.

Hong Kong, as a result, has been abandoned. If rich, western, first-world countries are loathe to offend Beijing lest business opportunities dry up, what hope does Hong Kong have to resist?

Home page photo credit: Quartz

While the capital is already infamous for its traffic congestion, September is expected to be absolute worst month due to the Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, the beginning of the school year, fall promotions in malls, and visiting relatives.

In fact, the Beijing Municipal Commission on Transport can even pinpoint particular days to avoid. They are September 4, 5, 15, 22, 26 and 28, 29 and 30.

To try to combat the girdlock, local authorities will be trying a bunch of different strategies including launching a Public Transportation Promotion Week, No Car Days, new private bus lines, and shortening the length between subway cars to just three minutes on Beijing Metro Line 6 between 5pm and 7pm,

[h/t WSJ China Real Time]

Photo: etu6

Yet while the automobile has become big business in China, electric cars haven’t quite taken off as expected. In 2012, the State Council of China initiated a plan to develop and promote new energy vehicles, with projections of 500,000 units by 2015. Sales have so far failed to meet expectations and, earlier this year, the national government lowered its target to 160,000 units.

Those numbers may finally get the boost the national government has hoped for with last Friday’s announcement that electric car manufacturer, Tesla Motors, has inked a deal with China United Network Communications Corp., the country’s second-largest mobile phone company. The agreement sets out an ambitious plan to build 400 charging stations at China Unicom outlets in 120 Chinese cities. The deal also includes construction of 20 “rapid-charge” stations which are said to work as much as 16 times faster than their conventional counterparts.

The Tesla Model S at one of its charging stations.

Not to be outdone by Tesla, the central government is also looking to get in on the action. According to a report in Automotive News, the government is considering spending up to 100 billion yuan to encourage demand for clean cars and expand charging facilities. While it will be sometime before we see as many electric cars in China as there are E-bikes (there were 100 million of them purchased in the last decade, more than all other countries combined), at least the country is moving in the right direction.

Yet while electric technology appears to be the next logical step for a country that has fallen in love with the automobile, not everyone is excited about China’s push for the electric car. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies (gasoline and diesel cars, diesel buses, e-bikes and e-cars), in 34 Chinese cities. Surprisingly, the study found that the overall particulate matter pollution of electric cars, which includes acids, organic chemicals, metals and soil or dust particles, can actually be worse than that of their petrol pumping predecessors: “An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” said Chris Cherry, one of the authors of the study. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to.”

In China’s case, there is also the very real consideration of the energy intensive manufacturing of electric vehicles, largely due to the energy and materials necessary to build lithium-ion batteries. China continues to be the largest consumer of coal in the world, with more than 80 percent of the country’s electricity generated from coal-fired power stations, and approximately one large coal plant built every week.

In China, a new coal plant is built every week.

As a result, the net benefit of electric cars produced by coal-generated electricity may actually be a net loss. In an interview with the BBC, Guillaume Majeau-Bettez, one of the authors of a recent Norwegian study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology examining the life cycle of conventional and electric vehicles, said that from an environmental standpoint, the success or failure of the electric car will be dependant upon how much we can clean up our electricity grid “both for the electricity you use when you drive the car, and for the electricity used for producing the car.”

While further inroads in clean, electric vehicle infrastructure in China is certainly promising, there’s still that dirty coal issue required to manufacture it that needs to be addressed. China hopes to raise its use of non-fossil energy to 11.4% of total energy consumption by 2015; but, it clearly still has a long way to go. While clean energy is critical to the future of China’s development, it’s important to keep in mind that all energy sources come at a cost: “There is no such thing as zero-emission anything, whether a zero-emission vehicle or a zero emission building,” said Majeau-Bettez.

The Mayo Clinic describes it as a disease that results in people starving themselves as an unhealthy way to deal with emotional problems. For these people, being thin is the only thing that gives them self-esteem.

There are many causes of anorexia, ranging from psychological, biological, and sociological; some sufferers are even influenced by images in the media. But the perception of anorexia in China is still evolving as medical practitioners come to terms with it. Here, the disease is still viewed as something you “catch” if you diet too much.

Chinese media has recently profiled a 24 year-old Suzhou woman who has apparently been suffering from a “mysterious ailment” that has caused her to continually lose weight for six years.

It’s a tough job being the parents of China’s “little emperors”, the sons and daughters of China’s one-child families. No one understands this better than the parents who just sent their children off to the Shenyang Aerospace University in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province before the start of the new semester.

After labouring all day, lugging heavy luggage that their precious little emperors were too cool to carry, the parents who weren’t able to book return tickets back home curled up on sleeping mats and slept through the night on the floor in the university’s stadium on August 30, China News reported.

According to the university, more than 400 sleeping mats were distributed to parents to temporarily accommodate them in the stadium. From the images shown in the report, parents were scattered around the floor, using their backpacks or bags as pillows.

The story has drawn a lot of sympathy online; most empathize with parents’ willingness to sacrifice for their children, quoting the Chinese phrase “nothing is as touching as parents’ love (可怜天下父母心)”.

But for the little emperors sleeping soundly in their comfortable beds, the phrase might be something they fail to fully comprehend.

Photos: CFP

There appears to be no shortage of public places babies and children will drop their drawers when nature calls. Yet, as far as we know, even this is a new one.

READ: Kitchen Confidential: Expose Details Beijing Restaurant’s Horrific Hygiene

According to the Anhui Economic Report, a father was photographed holding up his baby to relieve itself into a bucket full of dirty dishes at a waiter’s station in a restaurant in Hefei, Anhui Province.

After the photo was published on Weibo, the father was criticized online for letting his baby do what, apparently, is otherwise acceptable behavior for babies and children on subways, subway stations, airplanes, and most any other public place with a concrete floor, a linoleum tile, or a grassy pitch. Netizens were upset at his lack of manners and for not understanding that those dirty dishes are going to be used again one day, should they ever become clean.

A reporter tracked down a person named Wu who had posted the picture. According to Wu, the incident occurred at 8:40pm on August 30 at a branch of the popular Bifengtang restaurant chain. Wu had posted the photograph because he was upset at the lack of manners displayed by the father.

READ: China’s Shrink-Wrapped Eating Utensils Are Not As Clean As You Think

As it turns out, the mother of the baby contacted Wu on his Weibo account. She apologized on behalf of the father and explained that the baby was in a rush, that it wasn’t intentional, and for everyone to please excuse the incident. This was good enough for Wu, who took down the photograph.

A worker for Bifengtang confirmed that the restaurant in the picture is indeed theirs, and are said to be performing their own investigation into the incident.

Related:

• Watch: No toilet, no problem: Lady poops in Shenzhen metro lift, man keeps a look-out
• Not Again: Guy Pees On Shenzhen Metro Line 5 
• Woman takes a shit on the platform of Shenzhen subway station
• Shenzhen government proposes punishing “uncivilized” behaviour

Photo: Global Times

The NFL on Tour is set to bring the NFL experience to several mainland cities through the use of an interactive audio and visual presentation. Visitors will be able to try on official equipment as well as enjoy an NFL China pop-up shop selling official team merchandise.

The NFL on Tour kicked off in Shanghai and is expected to make stops in Wuxi, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Changsha and Guangzhou.

As well, NFL Home Field will return to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The games will begin for Guangzhou on September 14 and be held weekly, culminating in the University Bowl to be held in Shanghai on November 22 and 23.

NFL Home Field will feature on-field workshops and clinics as well as tackle games featuring the teams from the American Football League China. Furthermore, an NFL Hall of Fame legend is rumored to appear, as did Joe Montana in 2013.

[h/t the Beijinger]

Photo: nicekicks

An African woman in Guangzhou’s Xiaobei Road, known to the locals as the “chocolate city”.

The African community residing in Guangzhou is now the largest in Asia, which is presenting another set of problems for Chinese immigration agents: up to half of the Africans in the city are apparently there illegally, according to a study released by the Guangzhou Developmental Academy of Guangzhou University.

The study, released last week, said Guangzhou is now home to more than 200,000 people from Africa, but up to half of them are sanfei foreigners or “three illegals”; that means they either illegally entered, are staying or working illegally in China.

In 2007, Guangdong authorities arrested 7,000 sanfei foreigners and detained more than 700 people. In 2008, the number swelled to 13,000, of which “Africans account for a large share”, the report said. The crime rate among the sanfei foreigners has been on the rise, and the report claims drug-related crimes alone accounted for nearly 60 percent.

Two African persons walking outside of a clothing wholesale market in Guangzhou.

As well, the study linked the city’s African community with “mass incidents”, a euphemism for protests, and other social vices including rape, AIDS and childbirth out of wedlock that “affect Guangzhou residents’ social life and the city’s social stability”.

On the flip side, African immigrants have contributed to the city’s burgeoning economy, and are heavily involved in business and trade with their home countries. Many have married Chinese wives and plan to stay long term.

In 2012, a large-scale protest erupted in the city after a Nigerian man died mysteriously in police custody. In mid-July of 2009, hundreds of Africans protested in front of a police station in Guangzhou after a Nigerian man jumped from second floor to escape a surprise immigration raid.

Africans first started to immigrate in large numbers to the city in the 90s drawn by Guangdong’s manufacturing industries. Clustering in Xiaobei Road, Huanshi Road and Sanliyuan, many Africans buy cheap clothes and electronics and export them to Africa.

Related:

• Africans Block Traffic in Guangzhou After Foreigner Dies in Police Custody
• Nigerian Launches Social Network Serving Africans in Guangzhou
• African Expats Fight to Stay in Guangzhou as Policies Tighten

Photos: Nandu, AFP

[This post contains graphic images that may be upsetting to some readers.]

It is an ominous start to the new school year.

A man charged into an elementary school in Hubei Province on the first day of classes today and attacked students and faculty with a knife, killing three children and leaving six others injured, including a teacher, reports CCTV.

The assailant used a knife to attack a total of nine people. In addition to the three fatalities, six people have been injured. Five of the injured are students, and one is a teacher named Liu Hongqing.

Two of the students are in serious condition. The victims have been moved to hospital for medical treatment.

The attack happened at 10:40 this morning at the Yanxi County East Elementary School. Following the attacks, the suspect, identified as Chen, committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the school building.

A parent named Li Zhiguo said her ten year-old daughter was attending her fifth grade class when she was attacked. Li’s daughter sat in the desk in the second last row next to the window. The assailant didn’t even enter the class to attack his victims, but used his knife to slash through the window, injuring Li’s daughter’s face.

UPDATED 4:51pm September 1: According to a preliminary investigation, the discovered why Chen used a knife to kills and injure so many schoolchildren is because his own daughter was not allowed to enroll for class today because she had not completed her assignments from summer holiday, reports the Foshan Daily.

Chen is now said to have specifically come to the fifth grade class of the school to attack its students and teacher with a fruit knife.

Photos: Weibo (2), CCTV