Day: October 29, 2022

Chinese sportswear brand Li-Ning has apologized after some of its latest fashion clothing sparked public anger in China over a perceived resemblance to Japanese World War II military uniforms.

The company, founded by retired Olympic gymnast and billionaire Li Ning, made the statement after being deluged with complaints that its “Chasing Dreams Airport Collection” of down khaki parkas, hats and hoodies looked like vintage Japanese uniforms.

Some items from the Sept. 20 fashion shoot were slammed as copies of Japanese war-time clothing, with users posting photos side-by-side for comparison.

The company described the collection, which included hats with earflaps commonly associated with Japanese uniforms, as being inspired by “ancient Chinese helmets.”

“Li-Ning sincerely apologizes for the perplexity and doubt caused by some of the products in its Chasing Dreams collection, the design and appearance of which have sparked online discussions in recent days,” the company said in a statement on its official Weibo account.

“The Chasing Dreams collection took aviation as its theme, finding inspiration in the clothing worn by pilots, to show how humanity continues to search the skies for its dreams,” the statement said.

“The inspiration from the pilot hat that sparked the most discussion came from an ancient Chinese helmet,” Li-Ning said. “We will continue to listen carefully to people’s feedback and suggestions.”

The statement didn’t appease everyone on Weibo, however.

“Shouldn’t the very first words be an apology?” @Big_head_girl_one commented, while @I_met_you_in_my_dream said it was an unacceptable response from a native of Nanjing, whose elderly population still remember the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 cases of rape.

“As a native of Nanjing, I can’t accept this … because I keep hearing the older generation talk about their experiences in that year,” the user wrote.

“I’m never buying Li-Ning again,” added @warm_winter_sun_cf566, while @small_windy_mud commented: “Speechless.”

Trolls at work?

Others, however, thought the complaints were far-fetched, and the work of trolls.

“It’s like people who can’t tell the difference between a Nazi [swastika] and a Buddhist [manji] criticizing Buddhists for using Nazi symbols,” @Yuanxi_21711 commented, while @half_a_catty_and_eightyli said the clothing looked nothing like Japanese uniforms.

“This isn’t a standard Japanese flight suit — the shape and color are different,” the user wrote. “Is Li Ning being trolled by his opponents?”

Ho Tsung-hsun, chairman of the Taiwan Citizen Participation Association, said the “fragility” of online comments were linked to Beijing’s authoritarian brand of nationalism.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last,” Ho told RFA. “If they hadn’t apologized, their business and public image could be affected.”

“This is a dictatorship, and its people are so fragile.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

It happened at a music festival in Houston, a soccer stadium in England, during a hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, in a Chicago nightclub, and countless other gatherings: Large crowds surge toward exits, onto playing fields or press up against a stage with such force that people are literally squeezed to death.

 

And it has happened again, during Halloween festivities in the South Korean capital Seoul, where a crowd pushed forward, the narrow street they were on acting as a vise, leaving more than 140 people dead and 150 more injured.

 

The risk of such tragic accidents, which receded when venues closed and people stayed home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has returned.

 

To be sure, most events where large crowds gather happen without injury or death, with fans coming and going without incident. But those that went horribly wrong shared some common traits. Here is a look at why that happens:

 

How do people die at these events?

 

While movies that show crowds desperately trying to flee suggest getting trampled might be the cause of most of the deaths, the reality is most people who die in a crowd surge are suffocated.

 

What can’t be seen are forces so strong that they can bend steel. That means something as simple as drawing breath becomes impossible. People die standing up and those who fall die because the bodies on top of them exert such pressure that breathing becomes impossible.

 

“As people struggle to get up, arms and legs get twisted together. Blood supply starts to be reduced to the brain,” G. Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England, told NPR after the Astroworld crowd surge in Houston last November. “It takes 30 seconds before you lose consciousness, and around about six minutes, you’re into compressive or restrictive asphyxia. That’s a generally the attributed cause of death — not crushing, but suffocation.”

What is the experience of being swept into a crush of people like?

 

Survivors tell stories of gasping for breath, being pushed deeper under what feels like an avalanche of flesh as others, desperate to escape, climb over them. Of being pinned against doors that won’t open and fences that won’t give.

 

“Survivors described being gradually compressed, unable to move, their heads ‘locked between arms and shoulders … faces gasping in panic,’” according to a report after a human crush in 1989 at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, England, led to the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool fans. “They were aware that people were dying, and they were helpless to save themselves.”

 

What triggers such events?

 

At a Chicago nightclub in 2003, a crowd surge began after security guards used pepper spray to break up a fight. Twenty-one people died in the resulting crowd surge. And this month in Indonesia, 131 people were killed when tear gas was fired into a half-locked stadium, triggering a crush at the exits.

 

In Nepal in 1988, it was a sudden downpour that sent soccer fans rushing toward locked stadium exits, leading to the deaths of 93 fans. In the latest incident in South Korea, some news outlets reported that the crush occurred after a large number of people rushed to a bar after hearing that an unidentified celebrity was there.

 

But still, the British professor who has testified as an expert witness in court cases involving crowds, pointed to a variation of the age-old example of someone shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater. He told the AP last year that what lights the fuse of such a rush for safety in the U.S., more than in any other country, is the sound of someone shouting: “He has a gun!”

 

What role did the pandemic play?

 

Stadiums are filling up again. During the pandemic, as games went forward, teams took some creative steps to make things look somewhat normal. Cardboard figures of fans were placed in some of the seats and crowd noise was piped in — a sports version of a comedy show laugh track.

 

Now, though, the crowds are back, and the danger has returned.

 

“As soon as you add people into the mix, there will always be a risk,” Steve Allen of Crowd Safety, a U.K.-based consultancy engaged in major events around the world, told the AP in 2021.

 

Source: Voice of America

For Cambodian American residents of Lowell, Massachusetts, the upcoming midterm vote is chance to voice concerns on a list of local concerns familiar throughout the U.S. — potholes, schools and housing costs.

 

Sreang Heng, the Cambodia-born owner of Heng Heng Auto Repair near Lowell’s Koumantzelis Park-Roberto Clemente Baseball Field, said potholes are taking a toll on his customers’ vehicles, which come to him with damaged tires and tie rods. While this means more work for auto repair shops like his, he’d rather not have it because of the social cost, especially to those who cannot afford to make all the repairs needed at one time.

 

“Most of them complain the spare parts are expensive because taxes are already included, so they bargain for the reduction of service charges,” said the 46-year-old who arrived in the U.S. in 2016.

 

Located on the Merrimack River, Lowell is 50 kilometers north of Boston. An early center of America’s once-thriving textile industry, Lowell has attracted European and Latin American immigrants since the 19th century. In the 1980s, Cambodian refugees fleeing civil war and the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge began arriving. Today, the city of about 115,000 residents is nearly 25% Asian, home to the nation’s second-largest Cambodian community in America after Long Beach, California.

 

But in a city where minorities are close to the majority, according to U.S. Census data, white residents held most of elected positions until recently.

 

The change came when a coalition of Latino and Asian American residents filed a civil rights suit in 2017. Their attorney, Oren Sellstrom, argued Lowell violated his clients’ voting rights by electing officials on a citywide basis. The plaintiffs and the city settled in 2019, agreeing to establish districts that better represented the city’s diverse neighborhoods.

 

The changes in Lowell mirror those rippling through the U.S., which the Census has projected will have a population with a majority of minorities within decades. And the evolution of the Cambodian community as one that has progressed from nominal representation to exerting political power in the city and state is a path to assimilation well-worn by earlier immigrant groups.

 

Lowell now has eight districts, two of them with a majority of non-white voters. The city elected a Cambodian-born mayor, Sokhary Chau, in 2021. He took office in January along with two Cambodian American council members who were also born in Cambodia.

Mony Var, 56, is the first Cambodian to work for the Lowell Election Commission. In the 1990s, the city had 30,000 Cambodian residents, but only 123 Cambodians were registered to vote. Now, about 2,000 Cambodians are registered to vote. He said midterm and primary elections are as important for the community as the general election.

 

Mony Var, who arrived in the U.S. in 1980, said while voters may be disinterested in the midterms, “All elections are important. We must take the opportunity and fulfill the duty to vote in every election. Don’t only come to vote on the presidential election.”

 

The midterm focus of the Cambodian community on issues like potholes and schools suggests the validity of the oft-repeated maxim of U.S. life, “All politics is local.”

 

Sovann Khorn, who arrived in the U.S. from Cambodia via the Khao-i-Dang refugee camp in Thailand, runs a party-service business that also provides video and still photography for weddings, and dress rentals. The 57-year-old wants Lowell schools to crack down on students’ misbehavior and limit their video-gaming time.

 

Rodney Elliott, a former Lowell mayor and city council member, is a Democrat running to be state representative for the 16th Middlesex District against Republican Karla Miller. The district is home to many Cambodians.

 

Elliott, who is not Cambodian but who has visited Cambodia twice, said when he was mayor in 2014 he raised $300,000 for victims of a fatal fire, some of whom were Cambodians. He also commissioned a statue of Cambodian refugees for City Hall’s front yard.

 

Miller, a first-time office seeker, said there are few Cambodians in Chelmsford, her home base.

 

“I would love to reach out to the Cambodian community. … This is my first rodeo, so I don’t know a lot of people in different communities,” she said.

 

State representative for the 17th Middlesex District, Vanna Howard, 52, arrived from Cambodia in 1980.

 

In 2020, she was the first Cambodian woman elected to be a state representative in the U.S., motivated by “the need to give back to a place which has been so good to me,” according to her website.

 

Howard is running unopposed for reelection this year. She told VOA Khmer that voters ask her for help with a variety of issues, including unemployment, and improving schools, roads and bridges.

 

“And another one is housing,” said the Democrat. Lowell faces a housing shortage and the available options are expensive, she said, adding, “They want [my] help to keep prices on housing from going up too much, [to find] funds for housing.”

 

Insurance company owner Mony Var, 56, arrived in the U.S. in 1981 and now lives in the 18th Middlesex House District. He said local representatives “should listen to businessmen in the area to write high-standard business law that help local business[es] prosper and to bring in other businessmen to our area.”

 

Veteran state representative Rady Mom, 54, who arrived in 1982, is a Democrat and running unopposed after defeating two Cambodian-born challengers for the 18th Middlesex House District in the September 6 primary. According to U.S. Census data, the district population is about 41% white, 32% Asian, 17% Hispanic and 7% Black. Thirty-one percent of the residents are foreign-born.

John Cluverius, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, told the Boston public radio station WGBH before the primary that the race among three Cambodian-born candidates showed how the community was moving beyond just seeking representation.

 

“It’s not that this coalition and this community is fighting for its political existence anymore or its simple representation,” Cluverius told WGBH. “But, instead, you see a community that looks like any other community with political power, which is that the divisions within start emerging more, and so you start seeing challenges within that community to incumbent representatives in that community.”

 

Or as Rady Mom, who in 2014 became the first Cambodian American state lawmaker in the U.S., put it, “My role is listening to people, convey their messages. If I don’t work for them, every two years, voters can vote me out and pick my challenger. That is democracy.”

 

Source: Voice of America