Andre

Tweets commenting the Chinese National Day parade, shown live on TV:

• Quiet outside, can stay home working until parade starts. Pearl runs CCTV9 Live all morning, too much info.. Better ATV at 9.45, seems less.
• CCTV 9 (cctv-9.com) shows live parade streaming but site barely loads from HK. With Great Firewall blocking much, shouldn’t speed be better?
• I really had hoped for the Great Firewall working once in *my* favor by focusing bandwidth on a stream I want to see coming from China. FAIL
• I almost forgot I have Now-TV where CCTV-9 is available as a free channel: now watching parade on big projector screen
• Love or hate them, but the Chinese know how to impress the masses by engaging the masses. From clean roads to clear skies, there’s no limit.
• They use the manpower of several times the Luxembourg population just to operate/secure the Beijing parade, not even including participants.
• The only signboard I saw was a huge Toshiba behind the tanks. That’s kind of ironic.
• Beijing’s blue sky is a testament to “if there is a will, there is a way”. It would be nice if they’d always want to keep things clean(er)..
• With those tanks rolling and planes coming in, Beijing’s blue sky will be gone by the time the parade is over.
• That 5sec video clip of marine boats was supposed to be what? Would have loved to see the boats as well. Overall, bad video cutting by CCTV.
• The standard Now-TV is crap: waving blue and red flags in full screen results in a pixeled image almost beyond recognition.
• 43000 participants just for the people’s part of the parade like dancers, floats… that gives you an idea of the size of this event. Costs?
• Now CCTV-9 lost the English audio feed and switched to Chinese. Sigh..
• The “One World” float was shown so briefly that by the time I realized it was about non-Chinese they switched to a long row of military ppl.
• The Hong Kong float must have been the most boring in the entire parade. Sigh.. Funny to see Donald having the biggest camera.
• A very nice parade but a crappy TV show, big FAIL. Let’s see if the show tonight is better (~6pm start).
• With over 100’000 participants in the parade (not including security and support), that is easily 280 times or more my (tiny) home village..
• The Beijing parade numbers keep climbing: now I read 8’000 soldiers and 180’000 participants. Still not including the security, support ppl.
• When a Western country runs a military parade (such as France), it’s called a festivity. When China runs one, it’s called propaganda. Hmm ..
• @Tortue End of the day it’s propaganda everywhere but also a festivity; it is a matter of point of view (if you’re a national or foreigner).

A week after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, more news articles and discussions are focusing on why so many buildings – in particular the over 9000 destroyed schools – collapsed.

The answer to that question is very simple and has nothing to do with prejudgement: absolutely no construction quality.

That was my very first thought when I heard about the quake (I didn’t feel it myself in Hong Kong though many others did). Sadly but true, Mainland China is well-known for saving wherever it can even if enough money is available, and most of the times the savings go into some local officials’ and constructors’ pockets.

How would you interpret the following sentence?
“All 61 schools funded by Hong Kong charity group Sowers Action were still standing after the quake and no casualties were reported at them – including 7 near the epicentre in Wenchuan County.”

You would probably come to the same conclusion as I did. As the group’s chief executive Johnny Leung Kin-wah points it out: mainland authorities were particularly concerned about the quality of projects involving foreign capital.

In theory, all constructions in China are required to meet certain seismic standards designed to protect buildings from a shaking level measured on a scale of 1 to 9. While these requirements vary among counties according to their geology, it is a general rule that kindergarten and primary schools are up 1 level from other buildings in that same region. Ironically, mostly schools suffered the greatest damage. Furthermore, why won’t secondary schools have to meet the 1-up requirement?

The best magnitude level system can’t protect buildings which can be teared down with a hammer by a single man. “Schools built in the 1980s were mostly made of wood and stones. It was not until the 1990s that they started to build concrete houses,” says Philip Lam Chak of the Amity Foundation.