mothernaturenetwork:

Rooftop farms flourish in space-starved Hong Kong
Unused roofs are some of the few places in the most heavily populated areas for budding vegetable gardeners.

(via silas216)

alexanderpf:

Stratfor: Chinese Investments in Africa via chrislindsay

While the U.S. is concerned about China’s influence in Africa, “the U.S. government is not in a position to do what China is doing nor would we necessarily want to,” said Todd Moss, a former State Department official who now runs The Emerging Africa Project at the Center for Global Development in Washington. More.

rocketboom:

Olympic left-overs. Beijing’s Water Cube is now a water park.

Via

motherjones:

uproxx:

Mark Zuckerberg And His Wife Photobomb Chinese Police Documentary

PWNED. This is what happens when a production assistant doesn’t double-check her Facebook privacy settings.

awesome.

theatlantic:

Why a Chinese Company Wants to Own Your Local Movie Theater

There’s good chance that your local movie theater will soon be owned by a large, Chinese conglomerate. This weekend, Dalian Wanda Group announced that it would pay $2.6 billion to purchase AMC Entertainment, America’s second largest cinema chain. It would be the most expensive foreign takeover yet by a private Chinese company, a summer blockbuster for the mergers and acquisitions world.  

For those prone to anti-China hysteria, this all might sound vaguely menacing (First they came for our factories, then they came for our Kevin James vehicles…). To others, it might simply sound a bit backwards. After all, China’s domestic box office earnings are on the upswing, growing faster than Hollywood’s catalog of comic book sequels. In the United States, theater revenues have essentially been stagnant for a decade as attendance has steadily dropped. From a strictly financial point of view, there isn’t much reason for a Chinese company to start snapping up American multiplexes.  

But Dalian Wanda isn’t buying itself higher profits, at least in the short run. Rather, it’s buying an education. China plans to massively expand its own film industry in the coming years. But even more importantly, it would like to expand its cultural influence by becoming as good at producing and exporting entertainment as it is computers and phones. Much as the country’s manufacturers evolved by co-opting technology and techniques from abroad, its movie business is apparently looking to leap forward with some aid from America. 

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

newshour:

Villagers in Zhengyangguan, in China’s eastern Anhui province, raise two children dressed as a deities onto poles. The “floating ballet” is an annual ritual once celebrated in many other villages but is now on the decline with fewer children now participating.

(Photo by AFP/Getty Images)

fotojournalismus:

An ethnic Uighur vendor (3rd R) and his family sell vegetables, as his son rests under his tricycle, on a street in Uqturpan county, Xinjiang, Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 3, 2012. 

[Credit : Stringer/Reuters]

A great snapshot of family and life.

pulitzercenter:

Most of America probably now knows that Mike Daisey fabricated sections of his popular one-man play about Apple iPads and his This American Life broadcast. But China’s bloody factories are a problem much bigger than Foxconn, Adam Matthews reports:

“Wang took me on a tour that even [Mike] Daisey couldn’t have dreamed up.”