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 Ride the hutongs in style Mini is one of the sponsors of The Other Blog, which focuses on art, design, and internet trends.
The trendy car company has brought one of its new models to Beijing's streets in the form of a custom pedicab. "The Other Rickshaw," as the blog post calls it, is one part of a promotional campaign for the new Mini Clubman.
Manufactured in Germany and cut open in Hong Kong, the car was then shipped to Beijing, where it was remade into a tricked-out sanlunr to prowl nighttime hotspots like Houhai and Sanlitun.
There are lots more photos at The Other Blog, including a shot of a special double-decker bus-turned-accessories store that's on a twenty-city tour of mainland China. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Not an easy spring for China Xinhua reports:
Death toll rises to 60 in east China train collision
The death toll has climbed to over 60 and more than 400 were hospitalized after an early Monday train collision in east China's Shandong Province, railway authorities confirmed.
The Jinan Railway Bureau based in Shandong said 57 people were killed on the spot and three died at hospitals.
At least 70 of the injured passengers were in critical condition, a spokesman with the bureau said.
Among the injured passengers were four French nationals, all of whom have been hospitalized with bone fractures, a spokesman with the provincial foreign affairs office said.
Their identities were not known.
The casualties were from two passengers trains, one of which was en route from Beijing to Qingdao, a famous summer resort in Shandong and venue of the Olympic sailing competition, and the other, from Shandong's Yantai to Xuzhou in eastern Jiangsu Province.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Walk home. Taxi drivers in Beijing are forbidden from refusing to carry passengers. But what, exactly, does it mean to refuse to carry a passenger?
That question was asked in a court session yesterday, in which a cabbie tried to argue his way out of a 2000 fine.
Mr. Zhang, a 48-year-old taxi driver, picked up three passengers outside the Beijing train station last year. The passengers were headed toward Dongdan, not all that far away. After Zhang informed them that setting off on his side of the street would require a detour of 3km, the passengers exited the taxi, at which point Zhang was fined by a traffic cop. He sued, lost, and appealed.
At the appeals court yesterday, Zhang based his argument on the dictionary definition of "refuse," but the traffic agency took issue with his parsing:
"I looked it up in the dictionary: 'refuse' means 'no,' but at no time when the passengers were in the car did I say 'no.' And when the three passengers realized that it was more convenient to take a taxi on the north side of the street, they happily exited the vehicle. How can you call that refusal?" said Zhang.
Zhang said that the passengers were exercising their right to free choice, and that Beijing regulations prohibit taxi drivers from taking intentional detours.
"Although on the surface Zhang did not refuse, his actions in fact constituted refusal," said the representative of the Beijing Municipal Transportation Law Enforcement General Team. "Saying that it was the passengers' choice is a specious argument. He knew that they had just gotten off the train and that it was inconvenient for them to walk with so much luggage, yet he still convinced them to get out of the car."
The representative said...although there are taxis on the north side of the road, they are only there for quick drop-offs and pick-ups; taxis cannot wait for passengers.
"You can get cabs over there!" exclaimed Zhang. "There's actually a taxi stand there, too."
The Beijing Times reports that Zhang argued that he was carrying out Article 15 of the Beijing Taxi Management Ordinance: "Inform passengers of the true situation." A report from the China Court website quotes Zhang as invoking government buzzwords:
I just told the passengers that it'd be a long detour to go that way. I did it for "harmony"—is that refusal? I've been wrongly accused!
In an unrelated case, Wenzhou Evening News reported last week about a local taxi driver who was mugged by three passengers. He thought they looked suspicious and was about to drive off when they threatened to report him to the authorities for refusing to take passengers.
The newspaper asked for reader opinions on the situation:
Many city residents called and said that women, children, and the elderly should not be refused rides. Young people acting suspicious should be dealt with as the situation demands.
...Mr. Feng, head of the Taxi Volunteer Brigade...recommended that administrative departments issue a solution for "reasonable refusal": First, after 12 midnight, drivers may refuse to take passengers to city outskirts, distant areas, or on roads the passengers themselves are unfamiliar with; second, "passengers" who act suspiciously may be refused; third, drunks, the mentally ill, and other individuals unable to control themselves may be refused.
No decision was reached in Mr. Zhang's case yesterday. According to the government's representative, taxi drivers often use long detours and unfamiliarity with the area as excuses to refuse to take passengers to nearby destinations, so there's certainly reason to believe that he simply didn't want to lose his place in line to schlep three people and tons of luggage a few blocks down the road. On the other had, is it now impossible for passengers to change their mind and get out of a taxi without creating problems for the driver?
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 Chen Feng Much of the English langiuage coverage of the 17th party Congress has been speculation about leadership changes. It seems a little pointless; after all, there are neither hard-core Maoists nor fanatical reformers amongst the crew of bespectacled technocrats who will rule China for the next ten years.
More interesting than the succession debates are the clues to changes in Party thinking that you find in the state-owned press. Danwei earlier covered a part of Hu Jintao's speech that talked about creating "conditions to allow even more people to enjoy income derived from property" (see Property for the masses).
Another interesting sign is the prominent coverage given to the ambitious (i.e. hard-core capitalist) businessman Chen Feng, founder of Hainan Airlines. This is what Xinhua had to say about him in the special 17th Party Congress section of their website:
Chen Feng is in the spotlight again Friday as he unraveled plans for next year's inauguration of Grand China Air, a new carrier to consolidate four domestic airlines.
The new company will consolidate operations of Hainan Airlines, Xinhua, Chang'an and Shanxi, said Chen, chairman of Hainan Airlines Co. Ltd., the parent company...
...Hainan Airlines, based in Haikou, is China's fourth largest carrier, as well as its first ever Sino-foreign joint venture airline company, with international financier George Soros being one of its leading shareholders.
Chen is a delegate to the ongoing 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, representing the aviation sector...
...In five years to come, Chen said he wishes to make Hainan Airlines one of the world's top 20 carriers in terms of seat occupancy rate, revenue and profits. "Chinese entrepreneurs should face up to the globalization drive."
That is not the kind of talk you used to hear at Party congresses.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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From GoKunming:
Kunming first Chinese city with monthly 'No-car Days'
Kunming newspaper Dushi Shibao is reporting that beginning on the 27th of this month, Kunming will be the first city in China to have monthly 'No-car days'. After this month, private cars will be banned from entering the city's ring road between the hours of 9:00 am and 7:00 pm on the fourth Saturday of each month.
On September 22 Kunming was one of more than 100 Chinese cities to ban private cars downtown during the day. For twelve hours, downtown Kunming's streets were primarily occupied by buses, taxis, electric scooters and bicycles. The city's effort was one of the most successful in the country, while Beijing and Shanghai's no-car days received lukewarm reviews...
Lukewarm is a bit of an exaggeration. It was impossible to notice any effects of Beijing's no-car day in September.
The capital of Yunnan Province, near Laos, Thailand and Burma, Kunming has always been one of China's most pleasant cities. If they actually manage to decrease car use, it will be even nicer. This article is from Danwei.org
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Xinhua reports that the two halves of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge that will connect Shanghai to Ningbo were linked yesterday after more than three years of construction.
According to Xinhua, the bridge has the world's longest cross-sea span. It will cut the length of the drive from Shanghai to Ningbo from 400 km to 80km.
Also in the biggest, longest, most macho category of engineering achievements, another report from Xinhua says that 'the two ends of the bridge with the world's longest span were connected over China's Yangtze River' on June 18. The report explains:
Started simultaneously in the cities of Nantong and Suzhou in 2003, the Sutong Yangtze Road Bridge, linking Nantong and Changshuin Suzhou, runs 32.4 kilometers, with 8,146 meters spanning the Yangtze, China's longest waterway.
It has the world's longest span of 1,088 meters, usurping the previous record holder, the Tatara Bridge in Japan, which has a main span of 890 meters.
Its steel and concrete bridge towers, the tallest in the world, stand at 300.4 meters...
... Around 150,000 bridges had been built in China over the past 15years, an average of 10,000 a year, said Xu Kuangdi, president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The bridges, with a total distance of more than 8,300 kilometers, include road and railway bridges, cloverleaf intersections in big cities, and 156.7 kilometers of bridges built on frozen ground for the Qinghai-Tibet railway.
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 Jean-Pierre, how do I drive through this? No doubt responding to constituent demand, the folks at the European Union Chamber of Commerce are hosting a "Road Safety in China" seminar. The program's stated goal "is to provide information and guidance in road safety for the employees of European companies in China, and help participants understand the various aspects of road safety . . . . as well as [provide] some useful recommendations for participants to improve their road safety awareness."
To be fair, as anyone who lives here knows, Beijing is a challenging driving environment. It has a lot of old, narrow roads, and construction is a constant fact of life. Many of the city's drivers are new — and bad. The streets are teeming with all manner of non-car vehicular transport, including bicycles, tricycle carts, pedi-cabs and horse-drawn wagons. Pedestrians traffic can be erratic — for example, the couple your correspondent saw jogging along the shoulder of Airport Expressway last week — and during rush hour, the waves of pedestrians crossing at major intersections can engulf cars. All these factors make China the world's number one location for traffic deaths: about 9,000 in 2006, accounting for 15-20% of the total traffic deaths in the world.
Still, a seminar on "road safety" seems on par with a seminar on "grocery shopping": it's common-sensical and, if you can't figure it out, you do deserve to die. Moreover, the seminar's conclusion is obvious. In the interest of saving European Union Chamber of Commerce members 200 yuan, here it is: pretend you're in Italy.
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