Bingfeng Teahouse

a panda-hugger. giant pandas live in the real world, unlike pandas, dragons only exist in the imageation of some people.

two interesting stories about giant panda. a few weeks ago, when a journalist visited a giant panda, the panda was so frightened that bait a flesh from the arm of the journalist, but recently one of the giant pandas fainted when the super voice girl Li Yuchun visited him with thousands of her fans screaming and taking photos of Li and the panda.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick cuddles a 5-month-old panda cub during a trip to a research center in Chengdu, in southwest China's Sichuan province Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006. The trip highlighted a sentimental U.S.-Chinese tie amid strains over trade, human rights and other issues.'For more than 30 years, pandas have been a very practical symbol of the conservation relationship between the United States and China,' Zoellick told reporters later, standing beside an outdoor pen as two adult pandas wrestled inside. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

via: r-conversation

with the joining of google, now we have a perfect "internet axis of evil" in china, but according to rebecca, google stays in a lower position on the "evil scale" than other internet firms in china. so, should we call it an "axis of minor evil"?

i like the idea of a "evil scale", or maybe a "social responsibility scale", which is a break with teh black-and-white world view.

related links:

danwei

china herald

asia pundit

i will keep this one but everything here will simultaneously appear in the "evil" blogbus mirror site.

when this site is slow, or, something worse happens, then you know where to find me.

recently my wife and I decided to carry our own chopsticks (pic below) with us whenever we dine out. single-use chopsticks made of wood is a main reason that cause china's forests disappear and other environmental problems. some of our friends have been taking their own chopsticks for environment and hygiene considerations and i think we should follow their initiative to protect our forests.

so this is my new years wish to everyone in china - SAY NO TO DISPOSABLE CHOPSTICKS AND BRING NON-DISPOSABLE CHOPSTICKS WHEN YOU DINE OUT:

this is the chopsticks my wife and i carry with when dine out, you could find a similar pair in local stores:

here is a post to elaborate the issue:

China's Chopstick Crisis

Usually when one hears about rates of global deforestation, you get stats such as "Amazonian rain forests are being decimated at a rate of 2.4 acres per second." But recently I'm hearing more about the amount of forest being razed to create disposable / one-time-use chopsticks throughout Asia:

China now produces and discards more than 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, cutting down as many as 25 million trees in the process, according to government statistics. Another 15 billion pairs are exported to Japan, South Korea and other countries. At the current rate of timber use, environmentalists warn, China will consume its remaining forests in about a decade.

And despite China's great land mass, they're importing 60 million cubic meters of timber yearly to meet demand. To make matters worse, the Chinese government actively encouraged disposable chopstick use for years to inhibit communicable disease. There is a nascent environmental movement in China which encourages people to carry their own non-disposable chopsticks, but I've heard from Chinese environmentalists that environmentalism in China gets even more strange looks than it does in the U.S.

So... what happens in a decade, when all of China's forests are gone?

what a disposable chopsticks look like:

how much wood we waste after a meal in a small restaurant:

we "ate" 25 million trees per year:

and no surprise, some greedy guys "re-process" them for re-use:

japan makes law to forbid cutting down trees to produce disposable chopsticks, 99% of disposable chopsticks are imported from china:

save china's forests is to save the world:

thanks