Trending in Beijing: Air China Emergency Landing, Elevated Cycling Road, and a Merry Drunk Driver

The fun, the strange, and the what-on-earth-is-this: a wrap-up of top stories in Beijing as told by the trending hashtags, local press, and general power of the internet.
 

1) Air China emergency landing in Russia

On Monday, the Air China flight CA983 carrying passengers from Beijing to Los Angeles was forced to land in Anadyr, Siberia after experiencing a fire alarm in the cargo compartment. Following a thorough check, no evidence of a fire was found, indicating that the alarm may have been triggered by a malfunction. The flight originally took off from Beijing at 9.13pm on Monday and made the unscheduled landing at Anadyr at 2.55am.

There are no reports of any of the 188 passengers on board being injured. That, however, did not stop netizens from posting the videos of the emergency landing, accompanied by the world's most dramatic music. In the video from inside the cabin, the flight attendant can be heard shouting for passengers not take their belongings but just to exit the plane. 

The video also shows passengers sliding out of the aircraft via emergency slides, but instead of standing up upon reaching the bottom, they appear to land quite painfully on their bottoms and continue sliding on an icy path. "How many broken tailbones did this flight inflict?" asked one concerned netizen. Air China promptly apologized for the incident on its Weibo page, to which one user cheekily responded: "This is the first time the government was faster than the media [to respond]."
 

2) Beijing prepares for its first bike-only expressway

We tend to take the announcement of construction projects here in Beijing with a grain of salt given that many of them never end up getting completed. However, one project that seems to be pushing through (and which we're super excited about) is the Shangdi to Huilongguan "bicycle highway." First announced in 2017, the six-meter-wide cyclist paradise should aid faster commutes between in northwestern Beijing. The road is expected to serve up to 1,000 bicycles per hour. According to Beijing's 13th Five-Year Plan, the government aims to build 3,200 kilometers of bike lanes within the city's Third Ring Road by 2020.

Construction of the bike lane began in September 2018 and is set to open at the end of June 2019. The expressway is only to be used by pushbikes, with no electric bicycles or scooters allowed. Despite that, some netizens are wary of how such a restriction will be enforced. One of the most popular comments reads: "I can already imagine the delivery drivers pushing and shoving their way onto this special expressway."

Weibo users are discussing the bicycle expressway under #北京第一条自行车专用道# (Beijing's first bicycle designated road).
 

3) Beijing police encounter a merry drunk driver

Drunk driving is anything but fun but when a proud Shandongese man was caught by police driving under the influence of "some beer" in Beijing's Chaoyang District, he tried to make the best of the dire situation. The video of the driver's goofy encounter with the police officers has been watched almost 4.5 million times.

The young man seemed unbothered by being stopped and held by the police car, attempting to butter up his captors by demonstrating his deep respect and deep knowledge of Beijing: "I drank Yanjing beer! We drink Tsingtao in Shandong, you drink Yanjing here." Upon initially asking the officers not to film him, a request they refused to comply with, he later gave up, saying, "I am an internet celebrity, anyway."

Netizens were not too impressed by the driver's antics, with one presumably Shandongese commenter saying he should be "officially exiled" from the coastal province. While the driver was not taken into custody, he was fined RMB 1,500 and had his driving license suspended for six months.

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Email: tautviledaugelaite@thebeijinger.com

Images: Weibo, Unsplash