04/07/24 - There are only 100 seeing eye dogs in the whole country.
On the 10th of March, 2024, in the suburbs of Handan City, Hebei Province, a seventh grader, Wang, was murdered. On the 11th, three underage suspects, Zhang, Li, and Ma were arrested. The procuratorial office was highly concerned about this case, and became involved in the police’s investigative work. On the 21st of March, Handan City police station requested that the procuratorial office charge Zhang, Li, and Ma with murder in the first degree.
The procuratorial office believes that Zhang, Li, and Ma were older than 12 and younger than 14 when the murder happened, and they committed a severe offense in murdering Wang, and should bear legal responsibility. Hebei’s procuratorial office applied to Hebei’s Supreme Court to charge Zhang, Li, and Ma in accordance with the People’s Republic of China’s Criminal Code.
Lately, the Supreme Court has agreed to charge the three suspects involved. The prosecutors will continue diligently pursuing this case, fulfilling their legal duties to uphold the law, and increase efforts to prevent and resolve underage crime.”
Comments say, “There’s a lot more underage crime going on out there other than this case. All of them should be getting attention.”
“I think school bullies should lose their right to the college entrance exam, postgrad exam, and civil servant exam, and the teaching license exam. Bullying behaviour should leave a record in their student documents, and should impact their ability to find a job too! “Underage Minors Protection Law” should be protecting underage victims, not criminals!”
“If they don’t get sentenced to death, then more people are gonna copy them.”
A tiktok video of interviews with students from the Haiding area of Beijing [best school district in China] about what their parents do for a living:
The answers are respectively, that both their parents are university professors, doctors, and owners of various businesses (like power companies, entertainment, etc). Almost all of their parents have postgrad degrees from either Qinghua or Beijing University.
Comments say, “Second generation geniuses—see, everything has a lineage.”
“Two Qinghua PhD with a daughter going to community college—what’s there to brag about?”
“Forget about Beijing. They’ve got way more resources than everywhere else, and look at their grades. All the true geniuses are out of staters.”
A blogger reposts someone’s post asking for advice, “When my 20 month daughter eats buns, she’ll only eat the filling and throw away the skin. Should I make her eat the skin?
If she just didn’t eat buns at all, I wouldn’t push the issue. But she loves buns, and she’ll only eat the filling. When she’s at home, we can just finish her skin for her, but when she’s older and going to school, who’s gonna eat her skins? I don’t want to force her or anything, everyone’s saying you shouldn’t force kids to eat what they don’t want to eat. But if I don’t force her now, who’s gonna put up with her once she’s older?”
The blogger replies, “What you actually want to say is, “Her MIL won’t put up with her.” Right? Because whether your kid eats at her school cafeteria or work cafeteria or out with friends, nobody would care about a small detail like that. Only people who become housewives have to live kissing up to other people, and can’t even eat a bun how they like.”
Comments say, “It’s true that Chinese people’s daughters aren’t their daughters—they’re all someone else’s DILs.”
“She’s only 20 months old! What a poor girl…”
“If she’d only said it was for nutritional balance, I wouldn’t be so upset. She clearly lacked love and fairness in her life as a kid, and she’s become brainwashed and vengeful as an adult. She believes in the way she was treated as a child was fair and is carrying it on to the next generation. This sort of person is always going on about how, “We didn’t have this when I was little.” “What do you have to complain about?” It’s so obvious.”
Another blogger writing about the new platform barriers going into New York subways and how much they cost, in response to someone asking, “If the American government is so small and isn’t corrupt at all, and American taxes are so high, why do they still have such a big deficit?”
Comments say, “I think they’re not corrupt at all, because if this really was corruption or the government being in leagues with business owners, then they’d build these super fast all over the place. 100 million USD to install a couple of fences? They’d be doing it night and day, station after station.”
“Emigrants: At least they have freedom of speech. [doge]”
“Trump sent someone to investigate corruption in the Pentagon, and the people he sent commited “suicide”.”
A blogger shows off the five books that her dad wrote about her journey growing up. There’s a lot of pages shown, so I’ll translate a sample of a few, “Wei’er coming home! Wei’er finally came home! It’s been 28 days. I was worried the whole time Wei’er’s forgotten about daddy and mommy. Daddy was so nervous heading to the train station, but it only took Wei’er 3-5 seconds to recognise daddy from the crowd. She grinned and reached our for a hug, and as soon as she was in my embrace, she wouldn’t let go. She wouldn’t even go to grandma.
I was so happy! So overjoyed! I felt like I was suffering from oxygen deprivation the whole night—dizzy, a little drunken feeling.
There was lots of luggage, and daddy was prepared to be the porter, but Wei’er wouldn’t get down from daddy, so I didn’t end up touching a single suitcase at all. Thankfully, plenty of people showed up to welcome Wei’er home. Thank you, Uncle Yang, Uncle Peng, and Auntie Zhang Qi.
We walked out with the crowd, Wei’er sitting in the crook of daddy’s arm, back straight, head up high, like she’s super proud. Daddy could feel his heart tremble. Like, I just wanted to fight somebody for her sake.”
“Tonight’s theme is picking Wei’er’s name. Daddy stayed up all night last night, cutting the list of potential names down to 23. We’re going with a fully democratic process, with all of the family participating.
From noon today, all eight members of our family are voting in from Beijing and Chengdu. The first round eliminated 15 options. The remaining 8 options went through a second round of voting. At 5PM, we’re down to the three best options selected out of the third round of voting, and we’re vote on the final winner tomorrow.
Tomorrow, our little Wei’er is gonna have a real name!” [Wei’er here is a childhood nickname, not the name that goes on your documentation.]
“Noon, after his meeting, grandpa came to the hospital to visit Wei’er. Wei’er’s impression of grandpa is pretty blurry by this point. The last time she saw grandpa was at Chinese New Year. Even though she says hi to grandpa all the time on the phone, she’s too shy to talk to him in person. They had to play for a while before she’ll mumble “grandpa” under her breath. But grandpa was still overjoyed!”
OP says, “There’s also a handwritten notebook by my grandma, where she’ll document my daily diet, what I ate down to the gram, when I ate down to the minute, and my health and stuff. Grandma will even rate me. I think the lowest score I got was 96, because I snuck some snacks and got a bad tummy. The highest score was 102 XD”
Comments say, “I feel like a stray cat looking at a pet cat with a four-story kitty playhouse. It was only after I became a mom that I realised how casually my mom and dad raised me hahahaha.”
“It’s not just Wei’er’s family who loves her. The passage where she was getting her nails trimmed by grandma was written by grandpa. Grandpa even bothered to write it in the form of a poem. He loves his grand daughter, but he also loves his wife. These families love their children, and they love their spouses. All of this is so healthy that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I guess this is what my dad meant when he said “love is sacred.”.”
“Finished reading. My cold dead heart feels a bit warm.”
The Supreme Court’s official weibo account reposts the story about the Handan murder case suspects being charged.
Question: “What’s the longest con you’ve ever seen?”
Answer: “The whole concept of seeing eye dogs is a long and elaborately set up con.
There are 17.31 million blind people in China. From when China first introduced seeing eye dogs in 2006 to today, 15 years have passed, and yet we’ve trained less than 200 seeing eye dogs, and less than 100 of them are in service right now. They’re exceedingly rare, because seeing eye dogs are extremely expensive to breed and they can’t be scaled. The first seeing eye dog in China was bred and trained by the Dalian Training Base, and in 12 years, this base was only able to train 148 seeing eye dogs. It’s so inefficient, it’s kind of scary. It costs 200K to train a seeing eye dog—much more than that if you count infrastructure spending.
And seeing eye dogs aren’t even all that great, because they can only remember a couple of set routes. You can’t get too far from home, or else they’ll lose track of where they’re going. They can’t tell the difference between red and green lights, because they’re colour blind. As far as serving blind people go, a 1000 RMB electronic walking stick is way better.
Seeing eye dogs are basically a luxury. For most blind people, even if you gift him a seeing eye dog, he can’t take care of it or afford it. Blind people can’t take care of dogs on their own, they have to hire somebody to take care of the dog. So why not just hire somebody to help them directly then?
As technology develops, electronic walking sticks are getting more and more functions, and seeing eye robots or robotic dogs are going to come out any day now. Like the fifth generation Alpha robot dogs have a walking speed that breaks world records, and can help guide blind people. With these industrially produce, low cost, high tech products, seeing eye dogs don’t have a purpose anymore.
But despite the trend of technological development, some media sources are still stubbornly promoting seeing eye dogs, and taking up the platforms through which blind people can be heart. Every day on World Blind Day, media won’t shut up about seeing eye dogs, but nobody talks about what blind people actually need—grooved paths, blind schools, subsidies for blind people employment, etc. And media never talks about electronic walking sticks either. Seeing eye dogs can only help a couple of elites among blind people, but they’ve taken the whole blind people community hostage, and became a cancer that prevents blind people from getting help. Seeing eye dogs are nothing but a scam.
Dog lovers promote the status of “dogs” as a creature by promoting seeing eye dogs. People who work in the dog training industry promote seeing eye dogs to get more government subsidies and societal donations.
There are only 100 seeing eye dogs in the whole country, but they get on the trending hashtags a dozen times a year. This is abnormal. And actual voices of blind people calling out for what they need is drowned in all the noise about seeing eye dogs.”
Comments say, “Why do they have to start from PR every time they want to sell something?”
“They’ve been working at this for 20 years and only gotten 100 or so victims? And the profits have to be spent among all that people? I doubt this is actually making anyone money.”
“Why not use border collies for seeing eye dogs, then? They can practically take care of themselves. Taking care of blind people seems no issue. Not to mention, how many blind people really live by themselves?”
“Never, ever break the wine at Bianli Feng [a convenient store]! I’ve already paid for it. Like, don’t go out if you don’t have eyes on the back of your head. We haven’t even negotiated yet, and they demanded money from me. I was in a hurry, so I just gave them the money. Plus, I was just confused at the time. When I came back to negotiate, we called the police, and they came out and told me to go call the fire department or the business regulators or the court or whatever. Now I’ve called the mayor hotline and they still can’t fix anything, and just told me to call Bianli Feng’s headquarters. The Consumer Rights Union told me to wait 7 days too. This is the first conflict I’ve gotten to in my life, and it’s not even about the money. I just don’t think I’m entirely responsible. Like, is the placement of this red wine not problematic? The worker tells me that another girl’s broken a bottle of red wine before, and I asked him why do they keep putting it out like this then. And he just bullshitted me. When the police came, she insisted it happened at a different location.
Pic 1 is when I shattered the wine. Pic 2 is how the wine looks when I came back to negotiate.
Comments say, “Looking at how they placed that wine, they were obviously trying to screw you.”
“Real story, last month, I went to Bianli Feng to buy some wine. I go to this location all the time too. I was carrying my wine up to the cashier to pay for it when somebody pumped into me, and I dropped the wine and it broke on the floor. And the guy who bumped into me just ran off. I stood there and waited for a worker to come over, and they immediately started in telling me I have to pay for it. And I was like, “Dude, calm down. I didn’t say I wasn’t going to pay for it. It’s not like I’m running.” And they said they were gonna call the police, and I was like, “Fine, call them then.” The police came and reviewed the security cameras and said it wasn’t my fault since someone bumped into me, and told me I could go.”
“If you break it, you’ve gotta….um…never mind, I think you should sue them for emotional damages from being scared by the broken glass.”