China Debates Terror Attacks Online

"Dog fuckers", a little known term of affection (we presume) for government officials, is how one Weibo user described the intended targets of yesterday's bomb in Taiyuan.

With public confidence in government officials not especially high these days. Xi's crackdown on graft is continuing, and a steady stream of videos and photos continue to emerge online of civil servants caught in compromising situations with women who aren't their wives, reactions to the bombings have been a little different to what you might expect.

David Wertime's analysis of the "lone wolf" attacks on Foreign Policy, shows there seems to be some debate in the Chinese webspace of whether exactly violent protest against the government is acceptable or not.  Always a good sign the everyone's happy exactly the way things are.

 

 

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Explosions in Taiyuan

Xinhua (along with everyone else) is reporting that several explosions have hit downtown Taiyuan, striking near the provincial party headquarters.   There are reports of ball bearings being found at the site, possibly indicating that this wasn't an accident and IED were involved.

“There were several explosions caused by small explosive devices near the  party provincial commission in Taiyuan,” the capital of the northern province  of Shanxi, local police said on a verified social media account.

Pictures have been posted on Weibo, they show that the area has been cleared by police, and one in particular shows a body lying in the road.  Xinhua has reported that at least one person has been killed, and a a gas leaked contributed to the blast.

[caption id="attachment_2418" align="aligncenter" width="440"] Metal pellets found at the scene of today's bombing in Taiyuan[/caption]

Typically in cases like these, the politicians are keeping a tight control on what exactly the press can and can't publish (we don't want any rumours to spread on the Chinese intertubes, remember), so what is coming out on social networks by eyewitnesses is about as good as the news coverage is going to get.

 

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China Sentences Three Over Xinjiang Attack

More death sentences have been doled out to beleaguered Uighurs caught up in violence in the troubled province of Xinjiang.  Three men where sentenced to death following an attack in June than left 24 police and civilians dead.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Friday that another man was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the June 26 violence, in which 13 militants were also killed. All four were found guilty of murder and being members of a terrorist organization and sentenced Thursday by the intermediate court in the city of Turfan at the end of a one-day trial.

The Chinese central government has repeatedly claimed that Islamic extremists are orchestrating the attacks from overseas, where a number of Xinjiang indepdence terrorist organisations are training and funding terrorist attacks in the region.  Actual evidence supporting these links is shaky at best, which doesn't stop the Party from playing them up as much as possible, trying to create it's own version of the "threat" from Al Qaeda.

Growing resentment over religious and cultural restrictions placed on the ethnic minority has led to a number of bloody clashes in recent months.  The June attack was the most deadly since a 2009 riot in the provincial capital, Urumqi, in which 200 people died.

The state-run Xinhua news agency published bellicose coverage of the trial, saying of the terrorist group that the sentenced men purportedly belonged to   "Their methods were extremely cruel and the nature of the incident was especially evil. Given the grave outcome, the case must be strictly punished by law, and by law the sentence was rendered.".

 

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Xinhua Apologises for Explicit Slideshow

In a Xinhua.net slideshow earlier last week we published revealing pictures of Xi Jin Ping being the President of China, apparently being photographed leading the country.

Usually, every effort is made at our media agency to substantiate such pictures, but, after extensive investigation, we were unable to find any evidence to support any act of leadership as depicted in the images.

We now acknowledge that Xi Jin Ping has been far too busy flirting with First Ladies, traveling around Africa on junkets, jailing critics and making sure that no websites with questionable content are accessible in China, etc, etc...

We are very sorry for any confusion or distress this may have caused.

China's Weird Weather

Xinhua's China Focus highlights some of the more extreme weather that China (you may have noticed) has been experiencing over the summer.  Shanghai, has been particularly hit:

After sweating through the hottest July on record, Shanghai upgraded its daily high-temperature alert from orange to red, the highest on the country's three-tiered color-coded heat alert system, at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, as the weather forecast showed a high of 40 degrees Celsius.

Tuesday also marked the fourth hot day in August for Shanghai, which saw a record-high temperature of 40.6 degrees Celsius on Friday.

The previous record was set in 1934, when a temperature of 40.2 degrees Celsius was recorded.

Shanghai's municipal government has requested that all companies and units ensure safe working conditions in the severe heat, especially for those working outdoors.

Meanwhile in Jiangsu, the demand for power for airconditioners has put a strain on the national grid.  In July, residents sucked 50 billion kilowatts per hour trying to keep cool in the summer heat.  In the south, The heatwave has left around 5.95 million people without drinking water, leaving land unfarmable and livestock, er, unlivable.

Conversely in the north of the country, rainfall has caused major flooding, with Gansu receiving double the amount rain that it usually gets at this time of year.  Torrential rains hit Sichuan, leaving 31 people dead, and the northern provinces continue to be battered with heavy rain

Twenty-four people died and one person was reported missing after rainstorm-triggered floods and flows of mud and rock hit Tianshui City in Gansu on July 25.

Four rounds of downpours swept Tianshui City in July, triggering floods, landslides and mud-rock flows in seven townships and affecting 1.22 million people.

 

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Xinhua Passes off Porn as News. Again.

Not content with copying and pasting stories from satirical website The Onion, beleaguered hacks at the state run media outfit, Xinhua have apparently taken to copying and pasting rape porn.  Ahem.



If you've been around long enough, you'll remember that that in 2012, Xinhua ran a story that it stole from The Onion which awarded Kim Jong Un the title of World's Sexiest Man.  That particular article was hastily taken down, but this slideshow uses screengrabs from a rape fetish porn movie, is still alive and kicking.

Purporting to be an "actual record" of an execution, the slideshow shows "the world's darkest side", despite being neither, both Xinhua and The Global Times have published the pictures, trying to pass them off as "news".  The worrying thing is, this isn't the first time it's happened.