whether it will be a underwater tunnel or a bridge or a combination is still in planning stage, definitely it has lower priority than another tunnel which connect Hainan province and the mainland, so this bohaiwan one will never come into true before 2020.
I am a native Chinese and I must say this is something considered very abnormal in China.
The college entrance examination is one of the most important exam hold in the whole country level. If anything happen in this exam, the governor whom in charge of the area will lose a lot of score in their KPI performance.
There are a few people buying those privately-built house(literally it is called small-property-houses in China) because it is much cheaper compared to market price.
However, there are some big flaws of those house:
1, It is not protected by law, the house can't be registered under buyer's name. It has been reported that some people living in those house was driven out by the government or the land owner.
2, As a buyer, you can not bind house-registry(namely hukou) with those house, so, children will not have the right to attend nearby school because those house are not belonging to any school district.
3, Also the land owner will be punished for building those kind of houses.
In all, although there are a few private-built house near to big cities like Beijing, generally it is not an option.
>I'm a little skeptical a "revolution" will ever improve things (in the short term). Revolutions are generally costly in almost every way possible.
I am not promoting the idea of revolution. In fact, I think it is bad for almost everyone. My point is that any wise man in the current administration should stop it before too late.
>China's growth and prosperity don't seem to justify one (at this point in time).
Maybe I am too pessimistic. Last year, the riot-control budgets( literally called stability-maintaining in China) is almost the same as the military expenditure.
>How do villagers sell their land now? I thought market sales were already being done?
By constitution law, in China, urban lands belong to government, and rural lands belong to villages, however, it is not allowed(by a policy made by government) for villages to sell their land to real-estate merchants directly, they can only sell lands to the government in a price made by the government. In this way, governments become the only provider of available lands, and they can charge as much as they want.
Public housing, allow villagers to sell their land to market directly... there is a lot of way to achieve it and many other countries have done it successfully before.
It is a technical issue which can not be solved because of corruption/inequality/unfairness under the current political system.
Political reform is needed, or a revolution may come instead sooner or later.
Given the poor education that most Chinese graduate school provided, it is really a big waste-of-life for many young guys pursuing it.
The good thing is that it only cost two years to get a master degree now. 10 years ago, I spent 3 years for it. I wish I had the courage to quit it that time.
It is always tough for new graduates to find a good job in recent years. Given the housing cost got really high in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou, there is a so called "flee-away-from-tier-1-cities-campaign" word made up by new graduates.
When I graduated a decade ago, there are a lot of proud new graduates whom sincerely believed that they have a bright future ahead. But nowadays, most young people seems not thinking so anymore.
It is difficult to change your social status by education and hard-working. That is something really bad and it is more than faltering economy of this year, it is about the meta-rules of how society running. Most of the traditional Chinese dynasties failed because same kind of problems.
singles day is kind of kidding among young people. Blogger will write articles/poets this day to comfort people whom is still single, also merchants will give a discount for the same reason...
The 1st-Jan is considered to be small singles day, then "11th-Jan" and "1st-Nov" the middle singles day, and "11th-Nov" the ultimate singles day.
My friends and I do online shopping a lot, so far as I know, Taobao is better than all other competitors in China, such as Amazon China / DangDang / JinDong...
There are a lot of stories about Shop-owners begging customers to change their bad review, and some shop-owners goes further trying to bribe Employees inside Taobao company (to cheat on the review system), last year Jack Ma (the boss) fired quite a few people because of this.