Need a hug?

A group of Kunming students believe the city has become too unfriendly. On crowded afternoons by Cuihu Park they can be found offering hugs to strangers.

"Free hugs!" read the do-gooders' placards. One was written in English to attract laowai in need of affection. Chinese signs beckoned Kunmingers to "reject coldness" and hug a stranger.

GoKunming found its hug chaste, like a sustained pat on the back, but we like the idea. In spite of this call for public friendliness, not many passersby stop for an embrace. The students seem content to spread their message via their poster boards, standing passively by the waterfront with tireless smiles.

If you've been needing a hug, now you know where to go.

Tags: Cuihu Park, Free Hugs, Green Lake Park

Commemorating fallen students in Kunming

Last Friday, Kunming's grade school students descended on Yunnan Normal University for Kunming's own patriotic holiday, "12-1 Day", the remembrance of a professor and four students shot and killed by Kuomintang forces during on Dec 1 (12-1), 1945.

The YNU campus houses their bodies in a memorial that includes a museum and a garden. The street outside the main gate is named Yieryi Dajie, or 12-1 Street, in their honor.

Each class had prepared a recitation to honor the fallen and lay an offering before their tombs. The children then filed through the museum and wandered the grounds.

"My students come here to remember these heroes and learn our history," said Li Jun, a Chinese teacher at Middle School 30.

Every November teachers devote class time to preparing for the field trip. "It's a very important part of the school year," Li told GoKunming.

Wen Yiduo, 16, arrived early at the memorial. Later in the afternoon she would lead her classmates from Yunnan Broadcast School in a pledge commemorating the martyred communists.

"I'll read it in front of the class, but all of us at the school prepared it together," said Wen. The words had been written in carefully spaced columns along a sheet of red poster board.

A large number of noncombatants in Yunnan were killed while Kuomintang, Communist, and Japanese forces fought for dominance of the mainland more than half a century ago. Yunnan Normal University's campus was then the wartime refuge of three northern Chinese universities, including Beijing University.

Tags: 12-1, Yunnan Normal University

US-based aid foundation E+Co has recently invested in a hydroelectric generator manufacturing plant to be constructed near Dali. This is the first Chinese application of its market-based approach to supporting environmentally sustainable ventures. Instead of grants, the group provides seed capital to clean energy entrepreneurs who have created a business model under its aegis.

E+Co's Chinese partner in the generator project will abandon a facility that produced only two turbines per year.

E+Co hopes to mimic its success in Thailand, where it backed a company that installed biogas generators in rural homes to ameliorate poverty and deforestation.

"Energy breaks the poverty cycle," Laura Colbert, communications director for E+Co China, told GoKunming. The idea is the nexus of the group's "triple bottom line" of intertwined financial, social, and environmental responsibilities.

"Three hours of energy at night means you can have a sewing machine and operate a seamstress business," she said.

Colbert compared E+Co's work in China to reinventing the wheel; the market-based approach is an improvement over grants, but adapting it to the Chinese economy demands creativity. If small-business loans become the future of the country's international aid it will prove an apt analogy.

To conform to Chinese regulations on foreign investment, the Dali company and E+Co entered into a joint venture, officially registered as an independent consulting firm.

Through E+Co 537 entrepreneurs worldwide have received $128 million. Projects that receive loans from E+Co vary in size and scope and are tailored to local needs. In Uganda, a small business received a loan to produce just a few dozen solar energy systems. These surgical solutions are funded by commercial and private investment and the United Nations' Rural Energy Enterprise Development initiatives.

Tags: E+Co, environment, Laura Colbert

State-owned Guangming Company of China recently formed a partnership with German government aid group Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau to build 30 solar energy plants in Yunnan Province. The facilities will generate up to 300 clean kilowatts, enough power for 900 to 1,500 homes.

Dr Xie Jian

The central government tasked an advisory panel from the Solar Energy Research Institute of Yunnan Normal University with the project's success. Dr Xie Jian, deputy director of the Institute, was selected as chairman.

Dr Xie has worked with the Japanese, American, and German energy ministries during his 30-year tenure. He often lectures on the market viability of clean energy while on the conference circuit, invoking Kunming's reputation abroad as the Solar City.

"It's a bit more expensive, but people in Kunming want to use clean energy; they think it's a good choice," Dr Xie told GoKunming. "As the technology becomes more efficient, it will be used by businesses as well."

About half of the provincial capital's households heat their water with solar power, he said.

Beijing's financing of the international project may indicate that public funds, one possible catalyst for the broad application of solar energy, will be available for similar projects in the future.

Tags: environment, solar power, Xie Jian, Yunnan Normal University

Migratory Siberian seagulls have arrived at Kunming's Cuihu Park aka Green Lake Park. Saturday thousands of Kunmingese watched from the waterfront while others drifted among the birds in pedal boats.

According to a nearby monument, the gulls first appeared in the winter of 1985. Wu Qinghen, a Kunming native, became known as "Father Seagull" for devoting half his pension to feeding them.

"His spirit sets a model for man and nature living together in harmony," reads the inscription.

In a modern twist, opportunistic vendors circulate today's crowds hawking crusty sweetbread for feeding the gulls.

Tags: Cuihu Park, Green Lake Park

Chinese Gongfu Association of Yunnan Normal University invites nonmembers to study gong fu. Chairman Cheng Jian Guo leads daily classes drawing from Shaolin and Wudan Gongfu (aka Kung Fu).

GoKunming met with Cheng while he led thirteen students through calisthenics in the predawn chill of his classroom, a section of synthetic rubber next to Yunnan Normal University's track.

Backlit by the rising sun, Cheng traced a tao lu, or form, whose leaps and poses teach the foundation of Shaolin Gongfu. He walked through the ranks of his students while they mimicked the sequence.

For some there were corrections: a posture stiffened, a foot nudged outward. Cheng repeated the movements at half-speed before the beginners.

"Everybody can learn, you must only be interested," he said after the fifty-minute session.

Foreigners seem to shy from the early hours and Mandarin instruction. The attendance record for a foreign student is held by an Israeli who lasted a month.

Cheng, a third-year biology student, is quick to highlight the benefits of gong fu.

"This art is not only useful for the body; with careful study it creates a younger and stronger spirit," he said.

Classes run weekdays, 6:40 to 7:30 AM, and weekends, 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The cost of attending beyond a free trial class is a six-month membership for an affordable 60 yuan.

Tags: gongfu, kung fu, sports, Yunnan Normal University