2011-10-06

On the cusp of deflation?

Shanghai Tang homeless ... for now
Luxury brand Shanghai Tang plans to move into a group of tents at a ferry pier after becoming the latest victim of soaring commercial rents in Central.


The iconic Hong Kong clothing company is quitting the Pedder Building premises that housed its flagship store for 17 years after the monthly rent more than doubled to HK$7 million. It plans to move the flagship store to a four-storey building 350 metres east of the Pedder branch in March next year.
Rioting in model village attests to graft woes

On the morning of September 21, hundreds of villagers took to the streets and staged a sit-in protest against local officials for "secretly selling" hundreds of hectares of collectively owned farmland to a real estate developer and "embezzling" more than 700 million yuan (HK$853 million) of compensation money since 2006, a young woman who saw the protest said.


"Some policemen were sent in and severely beat some teenage schoolchildren who had sounded the brass gong to urge fellow villagers to join the protest that morning," she said. Upon hearing that several of the youngsters had been seriously injured and sent to hospital, hundreds of furious villagers fought back before laying siege to a local police station in which 30 to 40 officials and policemen had taken refuge.


Hundreds of fully equipped riot policemen then engaged in a stand-off with peasants armed with iron bars or wooden clubs. "At this point, some said two of the teenagers were severely hurt and in critical condition," she said.


"Others suggested they might have died because no one knew their whereabouts in the hospital."


The rumours spread like wildfire and thousands of villagers blocked the nearby highway and smashed the windows and overturned at least six police vehicles.
This village is in prosperous Guangdong province.

  Net tightens on online rumours
"The central government has recently passed new measures to manage [mainland microblogging site] Weibo," Song said, adding that provinces and municipalities were also experimenting with new controls.

"For example, Beijing's municipal government is likely to promulgate a real-name requirement system to regulate Weibo soon."

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