A boy has stunned medics with his ability to see in pitch black with eyes that glow in the dark. Doctors have studied Nong Youhui’s amazing eyesight since his dad took him to hospital in Dahua, southern China, concerned over his bright blue eyes.

Dad Ling said: “They told me he would grow out of it and that his eyes would stop glowing and turn black like most Chinese people but they never did.” Medical tests conducted in complete darkness show Youhui can read perfectly without any light and sees as clearly as most people do during the day.

When 300 men and women climb onto a rooftop and threaten to commit suicide in protest over denied compensation, it is impossible not to wonder how a company could lead its employees into such desperation.

But Foxconn did.

A little over a week ago, 300 employees at Foxconn’s Technology Park in Wuhan, China threatened their own lives because they were denied a vital pay increase. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs without it, or they could quit and be compensated.

Many chose to quit, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of the former workers received the promised compensation.

Production at the company was temporarily halted. It was not until 9 pm the next day that the town’s mayor was able to talk the 300 down from the roof.

Foxconn has been at the center of some considerably uncomfortable controversy over the last two years, after its high suicide rates and poor working conditions came to light. In total, it is thought 14 workers committed suicide in 2010.

Although previously the company’s suicide rate was well below the country’s average, it’s hard to downplay those numbers now.

Foxconn installed suicide nets at their factory last year, and workers in Chengdu are required to sign a “no suicide” pact in their contracts.

These are just a few of the many small details that add up to a more worrying whole…

More on ZDnet

Construction on “Wonderland” began in 1998 with the intention of building the largest amusement park in Asia…The project was scrapped. A strange landscape of half-built structures amid corn fields and cracked pavement. The park is strewn with fragments of anachronistic landmarks, anchored by an unfinished fairytale castle whose inchoate construction dissolves into the smog.

The Jian River in Luoyang, China had become a “river of blood”…Locals were subject to the water’s eerie, blood-like color for several days before government officials tracked the source of the color not to a Moses-like End Times but to two small chemical plants.

Although media outlets were alerted to the spill by citizens’ panicked calls, others who live neat the water are unsurprised, saying the water changes color often due to the various pollutants dumped into or along the river on a weekly basis. Some Chinese locals report that the river has turned dark green in the past.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 breezed through Congress and headed to the White House, even though public opposition to parts of the bill, now directed at President Obama in the hope of a hail Mary veto, remains strong. The most troubling aspects of the bill violate fundamental rights provided in the U.S. Constitution to American citizens by giving the government sweeping power to indefinitely detain citizens without trial. Like many other pieces of legislation, this year’s NDAA is another push in a long series of movements marching the U.S. Towards a hard right, nearly fascist state.

In addition to this, the NDAA also contains troubling language regarding Department of Defense interests in Iran, China, Wikileaks, defense contractors and more. A report from a conference on the NDAA contains tough talk in respect to both China and Iran. Considering the amount of saber rattling many warhawks have already engaged in, one has to wonder seriously whether the U.S. Could further engage in military actions towards Iran and what exactly, the DOD believes our attitude towards the Chinese will be in the coming year. The bill contains an amendment which requires economic sanctions towards entities in Iran as well as a provision for “an independent review of current U.S. Capability gaps to counter Iran and China” (emphasis mine). The conference report also says it “takes steps to ensure that the United States is fully prepared to defend our vital interests against an emerging competitor” in regards to China.

Given the information dumps from Wikileaks over past two years, as well as the horrid treatment of Private Bradley Manning, on trial for providing information to Wikileaks, the Pentagon is very interested in keeping other potential whistleblowers at bay. The Defense Department’s research arm already expressed interest this year in employing a disinformation campaign against would be Wikileakers. The NDAA conference report codifies that interest, saying it:

Requires the Secretary of Defense to establish a comprehensive program to detect unauthorized uses of classified information. Requires technological solutions, updated policies and procedures, and enforcement measures to assist with detection of such unauthorized activities.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media.

The Financial Times also has a decent article and video.

Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.

Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.

“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.

“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter.  Manufacturing — a key engine of growth — slumped to its lowest level in nearly three years last month, amid slowing demand from the European Union and the United States.

Beijing has started to implement measures to boost lending and spur growth in the world’s second largest economy.

Read More: Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

* A Further Observation from the Dystopia Diaries — a Glossa McGonagalica: What — you weren’t thinking you could run an export economy under an austerity-induced global demand slump, were you?

A Google Maps satellite has spotted a series of bizarre structures during a sweep of the Gobi desert in China.

The internet is buzzing with theories about what their purpose is, with suggestions ranging from giant QR readers to practise targets for military satellites.

To add to the intrigue, they are located on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang in northwestern China – an area that the superpower uses to build military, space and nuclear equipment.

In fact, some of the sites are less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, where China’s space programme headquarters and launch pads can be found.

Some internet users have been trying to overlay one of the strange structures on to various U.S. city maps, worried that there may be a sinister military purpose behind them.

Others have pointed out that if China wanted to attack a U.S. city, it doesn’t need a practise map in the desert.

However, upon zooming in, planes and burnt-out trucks can be seen on some of the photographs, which hints that they may indeed be targets of some kind…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

Ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered. Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.

As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.

The company’s vice president, Zhang Zhong, said there were more than 200 purifiers scattered throughout Great Hall of the People, the office of China’s president, Hu Jintao, and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound for senior leaders and their families. “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” boasts the company’s promotional material.

News that Chinese leaders are largely insulated from Beijing’s famously foul air comes at a time of unusually heavy pollution in the capital. In recent weeks, the capital has been continuously shrouded by a beige pall and readings from the United States Embassy’s rooftop air monitoring device have repeatedly registered unsafe levels of particulate matter.

Computer hackers, possibly from the Chinese military, interfered with two U.S. government satellites four times in 2007 and 2008 through a ground station in Norway, according to a congressional commission.

The intrusions on the satellites, used for earth climate and terrain observation, underscore the potential danger posed by hackers, according to excerpts from the final draft of the annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

“Such interference poses numerous potential threats, particularly if achieved against satellites with more sensitive functions,” according to the draft. “Access to a satellite‘s controls could allow an attacker to damage or destroy the satellite. An attacker could also deny or degrade as well as forge or otherwise manipulate the satellite’s transmission.”

Read More: Bloomberg

Pesticides and pollutants are related to a 450 percent increase in the risk of spina bifida and anencephaly in rural China, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and Peking University.Two of the pesticides found in high concentrations in the placentas of affected newborns and stillborn fetuses were endosulfan and lindane. Endosulfan is only now being phased out in the United States for treatment of cotton, potatoes, tomatoes and apples. Lindane was only recently banned in the United States for treatment of barley, corn, oats, rye, sorghum and wheat seeds.

Strong associations were also found between spina bifida and anencephaly and high concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are byproducts of burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Spina bifida is a defect in which the backbone and spinal canal do not close before birth. Anencephaly is the absence of a large part of the brain and skull.

“Our advanced industrialized societies have unleashed upon us a lot of pollutants,” says Richard Finnell, professor of nutritional sciences and director of genomic research at the Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. “We’ve suspected for a while that some of these pollutants are related to an increase in birth defects, but we haven’t always had the evidence to show it. Here we quite clearly showed that the concentration of compounds from pesticides and coal-burning are much higher in the placentas of cases with neural tube defects than in controls.”

Read more here.

He began gathering herbs in the mountain ranges at the age of ten, and also began learning of longevity methods, surviving on a diet of herbs and rice wine. He lived this way for the first 100 years of his life. In 1749, when he was 71 years old, he moved to Kai Xian to join the Chinese army as a teacher of the martial arts and as a tactical advisor.

One of his disciples, the Taiji Quan Master Da Liu told of Master Li’s story: at 130 years old Master Li encountered an older hermit, over 500 years old, in the mountains who taught him Baguazhang and a set of Qigong with breathing instructions, movements training coordinated with specific sounds, and dietary recommendations. Da Liu reports that his master said that his longevity “is due to the fact that I performed the exercises every day — regularly, correctly, and with sincerity — for 120 years.”

In 1927, Li Ching Yuen was invited by General Yang Sen to visit him in Wan Xian, Szechuan. The general was fascinated by his youthfulness, strength and prowess in spite of his advanced age. His famous portrait was photographed there. Returning home, he died a year later, some say of natural causes; others claim that he told friends that “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home.”

After Li’s death, General Yang Sen investigated the truth about his claimed background and age. He wrote a report that was later published. In 1933, people interviewed from his home province remembered seeing him when they were children, and that he hadn’t aged much during their lifetime. Others reported that he had been friends with their grandfathers.

I have studied Taoist immortal techniques and spent many years dabbling with Baguazhang and Xingyiquan, so I am not unfamiliar with the myths surrounding such “ancient sages,” but most of the other reports I had read were either clearly falsified or were intentionally vague, saying things like “he looked like a man of seventy though he lived for centuries.” But this one is a bit of a head-scratcher. It is true that extreme claims call for extreme evidence, and this is probably in one way or another faked. But can we prove it?

More on Modern Mythology

Hundreds of villagers in eastern China have held three days of protests at a solar panel plant over pollution fears. Around 500 people started gathering at Zhejiang Jinko Solar company in Haining city, Zhejiang province, on Thursday. Some of protesters stormed the factory, overturning several company cars and destroying offices, officials said. Residents in the nearby village of Hongxiao said they became concerned after the deaths of a large number of river fish.

One 64-year-old villager told the Associated Press that the factory — located close to a school and kindergarten – discharges waste into the river and spews dense smoke out of a dozen chimneys. “The villagers strongly request that this factory be moved to another area,” he said. “I am very worried about the health of the younger generation”.

More on the BBC

Photo: Robin Chen (CC)

Chinese capitalism has something uniquely in common with historical Maoism: atheism. Vast economic growth met with a huge demand for traditional culture has meant Chinese cultural institutions are increasingly trading in their social values for growth-based business plans. Via the Independent:

Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by “finger punches” of warrior monks over the centuries.

This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.

The commercial success of the temple is obvious, even if some of the sights are jarring – the telephone kiosks with Buddhas on top, for example. It has some monks shaking their heads and fearing that its spiritual peace is threatened. One monk said he was leaving after decades at the temple to be a hermit in the mountains of eastern China.

“There are internal conflicts here, and it’s complicated. When I came here it was very shabby, and it has improved a lot. But I don’t think this is a place for religion anymore,” he says.

Many others are inspired by the Shaolin tradition. Kung fu is the epitome of martial arts, and practitioners say other fighting arts including karate originated from kung fu. There are more than a million learners of kung fu around the world and many centres of Shaolin culture globally.

More on the Independent

Photo: SlimVirgin (CC)

AsiaOne reports:

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself. The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed. The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis. The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

Read more here.

Vice President Joe Biden’s famously loquacious style has now become the source of some international tension.

At the senior levels, the American and Chinese delegations actually seem to be getting along quite well. But relations between the press and staff traveling with the vice president and Chinese officials guarding access to the leaders are another story entirely.

Biden’s schedule Thursday, his first full day in China, included two bilateral meetings with Chinese Vice President Xi Jingping. American and Chinese press were to be allowed in to hear the opening remarks at the start of the first, expanded meeting.

At least that was the plan.

Xi spoke first, calling Biden’s visit a “major event” in the U.S.-China relationship and expressing his desire to work with America “to promote development of relations between our great nations.”

[Continues at LA Times]

Elephant poaching in Africa and Asia is being fuelled by China’s economic boom, according to a study of the ivory trade.

Authors of the new report found that the number of ivory items on sale in key centres in southern China has more than doubled since 2004, with most traded illegally. The survey comes amid reports of a dramatic rise in rhino poaching across Africa, and a spate of thefts of rhino horns from European museums and auction houses.

Based on the results of their survey, the ivory researchers are calling for China to tighten its enforcement of ivory trading regulations, saying that such a move is vital to reduce the number of elephants that are killed illegally. The report is published on the eve of a meeting in Geneva of the Cites organisation, which is responsible for controlling trade in endangered wildlife species.

Esmond Martin, a Kenya-based expert on the ivory and rhino-horn trade, and his colleague Lucy Vigne surveyed ivory carving factories and shops in Guangzhou and Fuzhou in January. In Guangzhou, they found that the volume of ivory goods on sale had doubled since 2004. But while some of the ivory they found being carved or sold was being traded legally – including an increasing number of prehistoric mammoth tusks imported from Russia – most lacked legally required documentation, and many traders were unregistered.

More in the Guardian

Photo: BirdABroad

DVD bootlegs and ripoffs have been around for awhile now, but what about whole store ripoffs? At least fives “Apple” stores, including two that have already been shut down, are nearly perfect replicas of legitimate Apple stores. Wired reports:

After an American blogger in Kunming posted photos of “a beautiful [Apple store] ripoff” last week, Chinese officials began to investigate around 300 shops in the area, finding five fake Apple stores. Two of the stores, lacking the proper business permits, must now close their doors. Despite the intellectual property concerns, the other three remain open for now.

In China, companies aren’t allowed to copy the “look and feel” of other companies’ stores. These retail outlets are impeccable replicas of Apple stores, down to the winding staircases and employee t-shirts. In fact, the stores are so convincing most staffers believed they worked for an authorized Apple retailer. All five stores sold genuine Apple products, according to a Kunming city official.

[Continues at Wired News]

Then again, what makes any Apple store “real” when the point is to use psychology to sell an intangible “brand”? And how can you tell a real Apple store from a fraudulent one? Paradoxically, real Apple stores never say “Apple store”. The Consumerist reports:

An American blogger living in the middle of China was amazed to stumble across a fake Apple store in her town. It was a complete counterfeit of a real Apple store, designed to look like the real thing. It had signage, and employees walking around in the iconic blue shirts with those lanyard nametags. It had the big long wooden tables with Apple products on them and the typical Apple store winding staircase. But certain details were off.

None of the employee nametags had their names on it. They just said “staff.” And Apple never writes “Apple Store” on their signs, they just put up their logo. A 10-minute walk revealed two more such stores.

First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city “of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris,” and it would “contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.”

Now, though, we learn that a Chinese firm has been “secretly” copying an entire UNESCO-listed village in Austria, called Hallstatt. Residents of the original town are “scandalized,” Der Spiegel reports, by these “plans to replicate the village—including its famous lake—in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.”

After all, in addition to the uncanny experience of seeing your buildings, streets, sidewalks, and even trees repeated on the other side of the world, “creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jörg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO.

Take a look at some photos of other Chinese duplication spaces, including the photo-friendly Thames Town, modeled after an English village (”when Thames Town was completed in 2006 not everyone was happy about it,” we read. “One English woman complained that her fish and chips restaurant had been copied in exact detail”).

If anything, China’s food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre.

In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.

Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded “like landmines” after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.

“The profit margin is bigger than drug trafficking if you add the lean pork powder to the pig food,” said Zhou Qing, an author and dissident, who has styled himself as China’s equivalent of Upton Sinclair.

In 2006, Zhou published a book about the Chinese food industry that would extinguish the heartiest appetite. He wrote about foods tainted with pesticides, industrial salts, bleaches, paints and, especially nauseating, imitation soy sauce made from clippings swept up from hairdressers’ floors, sold for 5 cents per pound and sent to factories that extract from it an amino acid solution. Zhou wrote that fish farmers confessed to pouring so many antibiotics and hormones into their ponds that “they never eat the fish that they farm.”

Although Zhou’s book has been published in 10 countries — it sold 50,000 copies in Japan alone — it is not available in China. After failing to get the book in shops, receiving threats from police and getting beaten up by thugs, Zhou left China in 2008. He now lives in Germany.

Even victims are punished if they complain too loudly. Zhao Lianhai, an advertising executive who led a campaign for safer baby formula after his son developed kidney stones as a result of the melamine-tainted baby formula, was sentenced in November to 2 1/2 years in prison for “inciting social disorder.”

A giant 55 foot ’sea monster’ has been found washed up on a beach in China. The beast from the deep is so badly decayed it cannot be identified. But according to local reports from Guangdong, in the south-east of the country, it weighed at least 4.5 tons.

People have flocked to see the creature — despite the rotting corpse’s foul stench. It was found tangled in ropes and one theory is fisherman caught it but could not land it as it was so big.

Sometimes a story comes along that contains so many fanciful elements one must assume that it is the work of fiction. Such is the story of Su Kong Tai Djin.

Tai Djin was born in China in 1849. He was born unique, afflicted with hypertrichosis. Unlike Jo-Jo, who would be born a few decades later, Tai Djin was born into a highly superstitious family. As A result they saw his affliction as the work of demons and he was left in the forest to die.

A Shaolin monk traveling through the forest discovered the child and took him back to the Fukien Shaolin Temple. There Tai Djin was raised by the monks.

He was trained in martial arts and it quickly became apparent that he was exceptional in both appearance and ability.

Perhaps the most amazing part of that much the story is true. Su Kong Tai Djin was a real man, he really did have hypertrichosis and he was associated with Shaolin. Some have built and embellished upon his legend but the kernel of truth is there.

More on Human Marvels

This man broke the world record for the heaviest bee suit after being loaded up with 83.5kg of the flying insects. Zhang Wei, from Zizhou County, in western China, wore a special frame covered in foliage to hold the mass of bees.

Wearing a pair of gggles and holding a tube in his mouth for breathing, Mr Wei was seated as around two dozen crates full of bees were released next to him.

The man – who was wearing a jacket and trousers but did not have his hands or face protected – did not seem to mind as thousands of the insects buzzed around him and almost completely engulfed his frame.
Mr Wei achieved the feat just two days after Chinese beekeeper Shen Zonghong broke the previous world record by having 36kg of bees on his body.

The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, told a local TV station he had arranged the sale of the kidney over the internet.

The story only came to light after the teenager’s mother became suspicious.

The case highlights China’s black market in organ trafficking. A scarcity of organ donors has led to a flourishing trade.

It all started when the high school student saw an online advert offering money to organ donors. Illegal agents organised a trip to the hospital and paid him $3,392 (£2,077) after the operation. With the cash the student bought an iPad 2, as well as a laptop.

For more information, see original article.

A 54-year-old prisoner at the Jixi labor camp in the northern province of Heilongjiang said he was forced to play games on the internet in order to build up credit that was traded by his guards for real money, a practice known as “gold-farming”.

In an interview with the Guardian, the prisoner said online gaming was a far more lucrative activity for the managers of the labor camp than the physical labor the inmates were forced to do.  “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labor,” he said. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

He added: “If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things.”

It is estimated that 80 per cent of all gold farmers are in China and with the largest internet population in the world there are thought to be 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country.

Senior executives at Cisco Systems worked closely with Chinese government security agents to tailor hardware and software they knew would be used to track, detain and torture followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a US federal lawsuit filed last week.

The suit accuses the networking company’s chief executive John Chambers and leaders of Cisco’s China business of close collaboration with Beijing, citing statements on company websites, at trade shows and in internal documents.

The 52-page complaint was brought by the Washington-based Human Rights Law Foundation, which has handled other legal issues for Falun Gong followers, on behalf of residents in the US and survivors of some said to have been killed in China for their participation in Falun Gong activities.

Cisco has faced criticism in the past for allowing its routers, which have the greatest share of the world market by revenue, to play a crucial role in China’s massive internet blocking and surveillance.

The suit says that by 2007 Cisco and its executives had “played a major role in the high-level design, implementation and post-production support” of a project called Golden Shield, “with solutions specifically tailored to isolate, surveil and suppress Falun Gong practitioners in China”.

[Continues at Financial Times]

The world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption, while surging demand from the developing world threatens to create “very significant price rises” before substitutes like biofuels can serve as viable alternatives, the British bank HSBC warns in a new report.

“We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left,” Karen Ward, the bank’s senior global economist, said in an interview on CNBC.

The bank, the world’s second largest in assets, further cautioned that growth trends in developing countries like China could put as many as one billion more cars on the road by midcentury. “That’s tremendous pressure on oil to power all those resources,” Ms. Ward said.

Substitutes, such as biofuels and synthetic oil from coal, could fill the gap if conventional supplies fall short, but only if average oil prices exceed $150 per barrel, the report notes. Increasingly tight global supplies, meanwhile, are likely to cause “persistent and painful” price shocks, it says.

For more information, see original article.

BEIJING — The overuse of a chemical that helps fruit grow faster is causing a rash of exploding watermelons in eastern China.

An investigative report by China Central Television airing Tuesday found farms in Jiangsu province were losing acres of fruit to the problem.

It said farmers sprayed too much growth promoter, hoping they could get fruit to market ahead of season and make more money. China is battling rampant misuse of pesticides, fertilizers and food additives, like dyes and sweeteners, meant to make food more attractive and boost sales.