Beijing News You Might Have Missed This Week, Jan 2

Joey Knotts, Contributing Editor | Jan 2, 2021 11:30 am | Add a comment | 488 reads

Beijing is a happening city! Don't miss a thing with our weekend roundup of the latest news.

Birds back in the cage: For much of this year, international students who chose to stay in China during the pandemic were confined within campus walls, permitted to leave only for emergencies. In some cases, students were not even allowed to order waimai delivery and had to live off of cafeteria food alone. The gates finally opened to them once Chinese students returned in the fall, but with another wave of cases upon us, campuses are closing once again. BLCU released a notice this week to that effect, and although there are certainly worse campuses to be stuck on, it will likely be followed by other campus lockdowns.

英语不南 Yingyu Bu Nan (S): Apparently deciding it’s high time that all station signs be switched out, the Beijing Subway has made some alterations to the way it writes station names in English. While stations that have true English names like Summer Palace or National Library will be unaltered, stations who’s English name is written in Pinyin will now include spaces between words, and stations with a direction in their name will include an abbreviation, such as “(S)” for south. Moreover, station names will no longer be written in all capital letters.

Ticket for the metropolis, please: For as much as Chinese media likes to talk about the Xiong’an New Area becoming a grand central spot connecting the metropolis of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei, the realization of that dream has felt distant. But it feels a bit less distant now that there is an actual high-speed rail connecting Beijing to the area via a route that goes by Daxing International Airport.

A Maiden Voyage: This week, OTT Airlines – which was founded earlier this year by China Eastern Airlines – completed its first Shanghai-Beijing flight. We’re hoping to see more such flights as the Shanghai-based airline expands its fleet from three to nine jets this year.

Tencent music goes north: Tencent Music, creator of the Chinese Spotify counterpart QQ Music, has released an album with the Norwegian Embassy in Beijing titled Norwegian Special: Northern Lights. The album is now available on QQ Music, Kugou Music, and Kuwo music, so you can experience Aurora Borealis, localized entirely within your kitchen (if that is where you choose to listen). Unfortunately, the album did not make Will Griffith's list of top 30 records released this year.

In other music app news, the future of Alibaba’s Xiami, which focuses on more niche music selections, appears to be in jeopardy as its parent company is hit with investigations.