Wang Sulan, a 76-year-old woman in a rural village of Henan Province, has touched hearts online by paving a path to her small library by hand. Video shows Wang picking through discarded bricks in her village, carrying them home in a bag and stacking them in front of her house. She told media that she was bricking paths to her library of several thousand donated books to help local children reach it as seasonal rains often wash out the roads. Netizens called for local authorities to help with Wang’s charitable project.
Thirty-year-old Hongkonger Liang Anli has been running a poverty alleviation program in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province for three years. She settled in Hezhang County, one of China’s poorest areas, after her mother’s agritech company in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province was seeking to expand their market in western China. Liang found that Hezhang’s high altitude and climate are suited to cultivating flowers. She started a flower farming program there that has reportedly helped increase local annual incomes by 400,000 yuan (US$58,823.5).
Two men in Yixing, Jiangsu Province were sentenced for digging a 55-meter-deep hole in a bathhouse to extract clay. According to media reports, the suspects surnamed Jiang and She paid off the bathhouse owner, who had to close during the height of the pandemic, and dug the giant hole in one of the baths. They ultimately harvested 66 tons of purple sand clay, a sought-after material used to make the highpriced teapots for which Yixing is known. The excavation continued until urban management officials discovered the pit. Jiang and She were sentenced to eight and nine months in prison and ordered to pay around 380,000 yuan (US$55,880) in repairs, about three times the value of the clay they stole.
A Shanghai ice cream brand was recently fined 9,000 yuan (US$1,323) for false advertising. Launched in 2018, Chicecream’s ice cream bars are shaped like traditional Chinese roof tiles and sell for a maximum of 66 yuan (US$10) each. According to local market watchdogs, the brand made false claims about its ingredients, such as using tea imported from Japan and highquality cream. Netizens accused the brand of exploiting consumers’ interest in Chinese culture and said the fine was too low compared to the product’s high price.
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