Word: kong
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TSIM SHA TSUI, Hong Kong — They bought flights for it, booked tours, braved injury, and shirked work. Some bathed in holy water; others prepared for a tsunami. Many waited on lines that stretched around the blocks that they always rushed by without a glance. A few bought welder’s plates and punched holes in cardboard. One woman forced her entire family out of the house at 5:30 a.m. to join the queue...
...metro tunnels out into the (possibly) blinding sunlight. I knew all about the dangers of “solar maculopathy” and was determined to not make eye contact with my subject—and usually, archnemesis—the sun. A hotline had been established in Hong Kong for the symptoms of eye damage—blurred vision, holes in visual field, afterimages, and reddened perception. Most people didn’t own the proper solar filters for dealing with the situation. If you look straight at the sun during a partial eclipse—like...
...Despite its status as only a partial eclipse in Hong Kong, people ooh-ed, aah-ed, clapped, and sighed with every rogue movement of a cloud or surreptitious inching forward of the moon. It was a show with no language and no tickets. I imagined, across the strip of land that was experiencing total eclipse, people turning in unison as the sky went dark and the sun billowed out at them around a deep black hole. There may be nothing tangible that can unite every person across that strip of land from Varanasi to Shanghai except, perhaps, the fact that...
This is all grist for the China skeptics' mill. If low-interest loans meant to keep businesses humming are being diverted to stock speculation, how sustainable is China's recovery? An asset bubble may already be forming. The initial public offerings (IPOs) of Chinese companies in China and Hong Kong are being bid up to eye-popping heights. The $7.3 billion IPO of China State Construction Engineering, which debuted on the Shanghai bourse last week, soared 90% on its first trading day. The property market is sizzling too. New home sales in Shanghai shot up 70% in the first half...
True, the bulk of bank lending is going to things like roads, bridges and high-speed-train lines that, in theory, should stimulate economic activity and enhance productivity for years to come. But some high-profile works such as the $10.7 billion Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai Bridge have been criticized as unnecessary vanity projects, while others are said to be wastefully duplicative - some 300 km of the Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and the Shanghai-Beijing Express Railway, for example, are overlapping routes. Some local governments have also been discovered to be faking documentation and even entire projects. (See pictures...