News You Might Have Missed: Tech, Blood, and Neanderthals?
Beijing’s getting high-tech, looking for snack certification, and adding to its long list of scandals.
Will Beijing become the new Silicon Valley? TechCrunch, a leading global tech blog, seems to think so. They’ve decided to host their first international tech conference here in Beijing as well as launch a Chinese website this fall. Their logic is that Beijing is no longer an emerging market ... it has now emerged. (By the way, Agenda agrees; check out their latest issue covering Beijing tech.)
One area Beijing is working on its tech is in shopping, namely making it more convenient to buy things no matter how far you are from an actual store. Last month, subway supermarket shopping began in Shanghai. After scouring the subway stops here in town, we finally found the Beijing equivalent – at bus stops. Yihaodian purchases can be made with smartphones; you use them to scan bar codes, and they promise to deliver the goods by the time you get home.
Hoping to up its cultural appeal, Beijing has nominated its traditional snacks for the intangible cultural heritage list. Only around 100 varieties of snacks are still in existence today, down from 600 at their peak, and many more are probably endangered, considering that the average snack artisan is over 70 years old. If you're wondering why these foods are such a big deal, check out our November 2010 issue for a guide to old-school local bites.
From good – or at least neutral – news to scandal, the Palace Museum is giving the high-speed rail a run for its money with its quick scandal turnover rate. The newest report is about embezzled revenue. Supposedly, the Palace paid out RMB 100,000 to a blackmailer to keep him quiet about a guard/tour-guide scam that pocketed visitors' ticket money. This all occurred back in 2009, which makes us wonder why it’s only coming out now, and what's behind allme serious dirt-digging on the Museum going on at the moment.
More reprehensible than scandalous are the reports of hospitals illegally threatening to withhold surgery until patients gather enough blood donors to “pay” for their medical procedure. One person allegedly had to get six Type O people to donate blood before she was permitted an operation. While it can be common for patients to donate their own blood prior to elective surgeries, patients here are being forced to supply blood (via other donors) in amounts far exceeding what would be required for surgery. If you'd rather not dwell on the heavy stuff, find out what your blood type says about you. Apparently I'm a social butterfly.
If you can handle more gore, there have been fairly disgusting reports about pills made from dead babies. A South Korean TV documentary claims stamina-boosting capsules are being made from the flesh of dead Chinese babies. The documentary includes undercover video footage of the hospital and factory. Forensic tests on the pills found the ingredients to be 99.7% match for human DNA. The exact science behind that is a bit beyond all of us, but we do know one thing that is a 99.7% match to humans: Neanderthal DNA. Could that be the real scandal in all this?
Photos: Shanghaiist, Carlly Chun
