When the New Number Two Primary School fell, parents, relatives and friends of pupils rushed to the site. Sang Jun arrived about 20 minutes after the earthquake to look for his son. “There were already five people digging,” said Sang. He jumped in to help. His arms and legs, like Bi’s and other parents here, are now scarred with scrapes and bruises from the frantic efforts to pull apart the rubble and get to their kids below. Holding a pair of dirty blue jeans and a blue work shirt stained with blood, Sang said: “I was wearing these. I pulled out more than 20 children … Only five were alive.”

Zhang Chao was recovering from surgery in a hospital nearby. When he heard the school was demolished, he got up and went to help, pulling several bodies from the wreckage.

Down the road, a hefty farmer with a buzz cut named Zuo Jun hobbles with a crutch along a dirt path beside a golden field of wheat. Zuo injured his left foot prying through the rubble in search of his 11-year-old son, Zuo Hao, who appears pudgy with a crew cut and a jovial smile in family photos. At the end of the raised path in the corner of the field is a mound of fresh dirt where Hao is buried. “If the teachers had been there, he would be alive,” said Zuo with a pained look. “During the lunch break, the teachers put two classes together, locked them in and then went to play mahjong. This is what students said.”

“Did quake really kill my little girl?”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 16th May, 2008

Jiang, who comes from distant Kaili city in Guizhou province, was working in the highway administration department in Yingxiu, the town in Wenchuan County at the epicentre of last Monday’s quake. Jiang was working the night shift, so was asleep at the Yingdian Hotel when China’s worst natural disaster in a generation struck at 2.28pm. “I was buried in complete darkness, but my quilt was covering my body; that must have protected me,” he said. “I knew that I wanted to live. I didn’t want my parents to grieve for me. Their voices, telling me to work well before I left home for Sichuan, echoed from time to time in my ears in that darkness.

Jiang’s mother, Long Jinyu, a 52-year-old administrative worker at a vocational school, flew into Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 4am on Saturday, then took a taxi out to Dujiangyan city… Police and soldiers were preventing civilians from going any further… They would not let her continue, but when they were distracted, she began to climb the mountain. “I kept scrambling up, sometimes on my feet, sometimes on my hands and knees. I don’t know where my strength came from. I caught up with a team of soldiers heading the same way. I was the only civilian there.” Running over in her mind as she kept travelling on were the words, “Son, hold on, Mum is coming to help you.” When she arrived at the ruins of the town, a firefighter told her a quite stable signal had been found where the Yingdian Hotel had been, indicating there was still one person alive, buried under the pile of tiles and bricks. “I ran up to the ruins, and shouted into them, ‘Erge, Erge!’ - my son’s special pet name from when he was little. “And I heard him answer ‘Mum’. It was like a voice from heaven. I can’t tell you how I felt.

“Mother’s voice saves son”, The Australian, Monday 19th May, 2008

155 A.D.
Repeated attempts to make pandas fight in the colosseum end in failure.

695 A.D.
Japanese Empress Jitō asks Chinese Empress Wu Zetian to send a panda for her garden. The Japanese are outraged the following year when an exhaustive list of tribute demands arrives written on a sheet of panda skin.

1925
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. earn the dubious distinction of being the first foreigners to shoot a panda… at the Bronx Zoo. The teenaged Chiang Chingkuo shoots a bison at Beijing Zoo in retaliation.

1964
The transfer of a panda from London zoo to Moscow provokes clashes along the Sino-Soviet border. Hostilities only cease when Chichi is smuggled back into West Berlin in the trunk of a black and white Trabant.

2005
China offers two pandas to Taiwan, but because pandas are called bearcats in China and catbears in Taiwan, customs turns them away on the grounds that the shipment’s contents do not match their description.

* May not correspond to historical reality.

1898

Jian Bozan, Chinese Muslim and Marxist historian, born in Taoyuan County, Hunan Province. Jian studied at the University of Calfornia in 1924-26, later writing the first Marxist interpretation of Chinese history. Jian joined the CCP in 1937 and was promoted to Dean of the Peking University Faculty of History. Criticized by Mao at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Jian committed suicide along with his wife in 1968 following a campaign of sustained persecution.

1981

China triumphs at the thirty sixth Table Tennis World Championships, winning all seven gold medals on offer.

1997

United Nations vetos Anti-Chinese Rights (fan huaren quan) legislation for the seventh time. “With the direction and support of America, Western nations have raised anti-Chinese motions at seven separate hearings of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights since 1990, out of so-called “concern for the human rights situation in China”. China united developing nations to defeat Western attempts to apply a double standard and use human rights as an excuse to meddle in China’s domestic affairs”.

在美国的操纵和支持下,一些西方国家从1990年起,以“关心中国人权状况”为名,在联合国人权会议上, 7次提出反华议案。中国团结广大发展中国家,共同挫败了西方国家在人权问题上搞双重标准、借人权问题干涉中国内政的企图

Original text here .

HK Experts: Jiang Faction Promoting Power of Party “Princes”
New Tang Dynasty Television 08/03/2008
Liang Zhen in HK reporting

According to overseas shortwave news reports, Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang and HuYaobang’s son, Hu Deping, may have been made vice-chairmen of the CCPPC (Chinese People’s Consultative Conference) in recent days. There is a long history of the offspring of CCP leaders being promoted to leadership positions at national assemblies. Though analysis suggests Hu Jintao feels indebted to party princes, Hong Kong specialists in Chinese affairs suggest that in fact the power of these princes is being promoted by the Jiang faction.

Following the central political role played by seventeen great party princes last year, many heavyweight princely figures reappeared at the two assemblies of the Political Consultative Conference held this year, including Mao Zedong’s two daughters, Li Min and Li Ne, Mao’s grandson, Mao Xinyu, Zhou Enlai’s niece, Zhou Bingjian, Li Peng’s daughter, Li Xiaolin and others, among whom Deng Xiaoping’s eldest son, Deng Pufang, and HuYaobang’s son, Hu Deping, were recently made assembly vice-chairs.

Though analysis by Reuters suggests the reason for this is Hu Jintao’s wish to repay the patronage of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, Hong Kong Open Magazine’s executive editor Cai Yongmei who has made a deep study of the party prince problem suggests that this kind of Communist bloodline, of “old revolutionaries and their children”, has in fact been realized by assiduous maneuvering by the Jiang faction.

Read more! »