Airplane Photography and "Handshake Buildings" in the Urban Villages of Xiamen
In the north of Xiamen's main island in Huli District, just west of the airport, is Dianqian Community, one of Xiamen's last urban villages (and its largest). Urban villages are called 城中村 (literally: village in a city) or sometimes 村子.
Urban villages can be found in large cities in southern China especially, and are often described as China’s “ghettoes” or “slums”. This is not quite correct in my opinion, and the topic deserves a separate thread. But they are indeed generally home to people with lower incomes.
Dianqian has gained fame in recent years on social media as a place of pilgrimage for aviation enthusiasts visiting Xiamen. It lies immediately beneath the final descent path of airplanes arriving at Xiamen’s Gaoqi Airport, offering unique photography opportunities.
Greetings to you all. I am Hu Xiaohong, Vice Mayor of Zibo Municipal People’s Government.
As the seasons turn and we greet a new year, I extend, on behalf of Zibo Municipal People’s Government and our 4.7 million citizens, heartfelt greetings and best wishes to every resident of your esteemed city at the dawn of the 2026 Spring Festival.
The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Zibo’s engagement in international friendship city exchanges. Over these four decades, our friendship network has spread across five continents, embracing 40 cities in 25 countries. This year we successfully hosted the “40th Anniversary Exhibition Activity for International Friendship City Cooperation”, attended by more than 300 guests from 28 countries and yielding a wide range of on-site cooperative achievements. The friendship and collaboration between Zibo and its international friendship cities have entered an era of even greater flourishing.
In 2026, the Year of Horse begins under the Chinese lunar calendar. In Chinese civilization, horse is not only an auspicious symbol, but also embodies the spirit of unceasing progress and steadfast, reliable partnership. Standing at the threshold of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan period, Zibo stands ready to work side-by-side with your government to consolidate deeper mutual trust, broaden cross-sector trade and economic cooperation, and foster more diverse cultural and people-to-people exchanges, jointly painting a new picture of mutual benefit and shared development.
Hebei’s Villages Are Freezing - by Zichen Wang
Over the past several years, winter air quality in North China—especially in Beijing—has improved markedly. “Beijing blue” is no longer a rare indulgence. Beijing’s municipal authorities said the share of days with “good or moderate” PM2.5 levels reached 95.3%, up from 55.9% in 2013.
One major (and socially consequential) ingredient behind those cleaner skies has been the rural “clean heating” campaign in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region: banning dispersed coal burned in household stoves and replacing it with natural gas or electricity. Beginning around 2017, millions of rural homes in and around the capital were ordered to dismantle small coal furnaces and switch to “cleaner” heating, with generous subsidies at the outset—and with strict administrative enforcement to prevent households from reverting to coal.
This winter, however, the policy’s fault line has become impossible to ignore in parts of Hebei. Subsidies were designed to taper, and in many places they have fallen sharply or disappeared. Villagers near Beijing have been reported keeping their gas meters barely moving—bundling under quilts rather than switching on boilers—because they simply cannot afford the bills…
Li Xunlei: one billion people in China have never been on a plane
… many readers …. argued that since so many people have never been on a plane, it shows domestic demand is still huge, and China’s growth potential remains vast. But if that logic holds, wouldn’t it imply that the more underdeveloped a country is, the greater its growth potential, and that the future global order must therefore see developed nations decline while less developed ones rise?
Therefore, it is essential to distinguish between latent demand and effective demand. Latent demand describes people who want to consume but do not have the income to do so, whereas effective demand comes from people who have the purchasing power to buy goods and services they need.
On Environment, Chinese companies may be the model student
Chinese companies abroad are defying the stereotypes: operating under intense scrutiny, many … are raising standards rather than lowering them.
“They called it the flower that changed the whole world.”
The phrase appeared beneath a photograph on the social-media page of a local newspaper in Bor, a small mining town in eastern Serbia. The image showed a modest garden of red tulips in bloom, improbably set against the steel-gray outlines of a copper smelter. It was early 2024, and over dinner that evening, Guozhu Qiu—then in his late forties—slid his phone across the table so I could see it for myself.
The Caffeine Crisis: CHAGEE and China’s Anti-Drug Nerve
The controversy began on December 23 with a post on Zhihu, China’s Quora-like platform, by influential blogger Ma Dugong. In the context of a separate, heated national debate over a revised law due to take effect on 1 January 2026 that will seal certain police records, including minor drug offences, he wrote that some high-caffeine drinks, including those sold by BaWang ChaJi— branded overseas as CHAGEE—were “skirting the edges of being a quasi-drug”.
Once the line was extracted and circulated on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter/X, on December 25, it spread rapidly. By December 26, “#BaWangChaJi caffeine#” had rocketed to the platform’s top trending topics.
The panic quickly spilt into financial markets. On December 26, CHAGEE’s U.S.-listed stock (Nasdaq: CHA) plunged as much as 14% intraday, wiping out an estimated $200 million in market value. Although shares later rebounded somewhat to close down about 2.5% at $11.90, the scare still dragged the stock to its lowest point since the company’s April 2025 IPO—more than 50% below its debut price.
A Hong Kong court has sentenced a man to four weeks in jail for secretly taking upskirt photos of a woman on a Cathay Pacific flight from Osaka last year.
Japanese IT manager Onishi Ryu, 46, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to unlawfully recording a woman’s intimate parts on the flight on November 24. He was en route to India on a business trip with a stopover in the city.
The West Kowloon Court heard in mitigation that the defendant was merely an “opportunist” who had “accidentally” captured the victim’s intimate parts while taking pictures of Hong Kong’s scenery through a plane window.
In a tradition popularly known as duodeng, which literally means “hiding from the lantern”, a newlywed daughter-in-law is not allowed to see the lanterns lit at her husband’s home on the night of the festival.
Instead, she must either return to her parents’ house or stay at a neighbour’s home during that time.
The custom is mainly practised in Shaanxi province, northeast China, and other parts of northern China, with some areas even requiring the ritual to be observed for three consecutive years after marriage.
A nine-year-old boy from northwestern China who bravely confronted bullies during a class meeting has received praise online and apologies from his tormentors.
According to the mainland media outlet, Shanshi News, the boy, Mao Shilin, is from Xian in Shaanxi province and is a primary school class monitor.
His mother, surnamed Zhang, described him as a brave, upright and responsible leader despite his shy nature.
Recently, during a cruel prank, someone wrote “2B”, meaning “fool”, on the back of Mao’s uniform.
How does Beijing really see Maduro's capture?
…
First of all, although the Jan 3 operation is a massive gold mine for Beijing’s PR efforts, Beijing does not need a “green light” from Mar-a-Lago before making moves in its own neighborhood….
…What is really at stake is what kind of power the US is and what type of image the US wishes to project to the world. China is, by and large, only a bystander watching this show.
Then there is also the usual refrain that China is giving up on its “ally”. Once again: China has no allies and is not seeking alliances. There has never been a Chinese version of the Warsaw Pact, and there will not be. China does not like the idea of fighting other people’s wars.
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
