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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 09 2017, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the these-boots-are-made-for-walkin dept.

NewsChina http://new.newschinamag.com/newschina/articleDetail.do?article_id=2414 is running an article titled, "The Walking Dead - The lack of public sport facilities and sites have seen a growing number of urban residents take to public roads for exercise"

Xu Guilin has been restless and anxious of late. As the head of the Outdoor Sport Association of Lanshan District in the city of Linyi, Shandong Province, he's used to organizing hikes and walks in an urban landscape increasingly hostile to pedestrians. But now he's facing a media blitz after tragedy struck his group – while also handling members who are keen to take to the roads again.

In the early morning of July 8, 2017, a taxi rammed into a crowd of walkers on the highway in the city, killing one and injuring two. After the accident, more than 20 teams of walkers were told to halt their activities.

"I am under mounting pressure," Xu told NewsChina. He doesn't know how to cope with his thousands of members. "They want to exercise and walk, where could they go?" He's very worried that some walkers will strike off on their own, risking another accident, and he's facing massive criticism online where netizens flocked to condemn walkers for their alleged intrusion onto public roads.

It seems that with all the new urban construction in China, they haven't built sidewalks, parks or sports fields. Meanwhile, people that want to walk for exercise have banded together in groups and take to the streets for lack of anywhere else to walk. These are not small groups -- one founder started in 2010 with a few friends and by 2015 his group had grown and split many times...10,000 people were engaged in group walking in Linyi city.

We may think that groups of road cyclists are blocking the roads in a few places, but walking in China appears to be in a whole different league. Some groups taking a lane have been run over by cars (there is a picture in the article that purports to show this) and other groups banned.


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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:12AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:12AM (#579605)

    . 1. Wars -solved.

    Huh? I'm in the USA and we've been at war, often multiple wars at once, almost continuously. This has been for my whole life (starting in the 1950s). I think there was a brief gap after Vietnam? True, these wars were undeclared by Congress--but I doubt that the casualties can tell the difference.

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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:53AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:53AM (#579631) Journal

    I'm in the USA and we've been at war, often multiple wars at once, almost continuously.

    Not with another developed world country - not even by proxy.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:32AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:32AM (#579650) Journal
      While that might sound glib, I just looked up European conflicts to see if I could find any between developed world powers in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Needless to say, there's not much there. There's the cod wars [wikipedia.org] between Iceland and the UK (over a two decade period from 1956-1976) which mostly involved net cutting and ramming boats and ended up with Iceland being the victor (and establishing control over commercial fishing up to 200 nautical miles out from Iceland's shores). While there were a number of injuries over the years, only one person died in this stretch.

      Proxy conflict is a little more serious, with private US support, for example, for Northern Ireland paramilitary groups versus the UK over a several decade period. But it's still far more minor involvement than anything that happens outside that sphere.

      That's the sort of conflicts the developed world engages in with each other over a 70 year period and hence, why I consider the matter of war solved in the developed world.