Tzu Chi Foundation (慈济, CiJi) often travel (via hired chartered buses) to rural outskirts 50-150km (or farther) from Kunming to provide supplies & assistance to those in need.

This Kunming-based charity organization may welcome foreign English teachers for their frequent missions. Not sure. You'll have to touch base with the Tzu Chi volunteer leaders (info end of post).

Many of the members are Buddhists, but you don't have to be one to join. Compassion & time, all that are required. Tzu Chi has world-wide reach. Their members consist of retired or active professionals with day jobs who find free time to help the impoverished, the sick, the foster children, or the elders.

For reference, here's an old English article published by their foundation, titled "Tzu Chi Delivers Winter Aid to Thousands Across China - Yunnan:"

tw.tzuchi.org/[...]

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Their recent charity works in Yunnan, updated today and three days ago. Posts are in Chinese, but with pictures:

www.tzuchi.org.cn/[...]

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Contact:

云南省昆明市五华区 人民中路傲城大厦 B座7楼200号房

TEL(0871)63622629

@michael

Then POTUS Bill Clinton couldn’t dissuade the caning of American graffiti kid in Singapore. Granted punishment strokes were reduced as a show of diplomatic goodwill.

The most infamous among Singapore's laws was forbidding gum chewing. If memory serves right, the gum ban was the city-state's response to a bygone social protest of sticking gum all over the transit system.

That said, officers eschewed enforcement of gum chewing. Trivial restrictions are regularly overlooked to avoid reigniting social unrest. Outside Orchard Road, locals chew gums (smuggled from Malaysian border) or spit regardless. After all, they're just gum, not guns.

@AlPage

Department store bathroom smokers will annoyingly persist. Cameras won't be installed in WCs anytime soon...

but outside smokey water closets, the advent of A.I. surveillance w/ automatic social credit deductions may pick up the slack in the cat & mouse enforcement game.

Newly developed machine learning cameras will be upgraded with capabilities of identifying civilians by their walking gait and body shape in the event faces are concealed from view. Detection accuracy will be in question, but incrementally fine-tuned. That’s the neural network power of machine learning.

This harks back to the discussion from another thread on why vehicles have begun yielding to pedestrians at intersections.

Rules are abided when laws are strictly and automatically enforced. Civility ensues when drivers receive instant text messages of ticket penalties as caught by automated traffic cameras. Just don't read the messages while driving.

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In regards to popular online gaming, which Chinese youths are seemingly addicted to these days. It’s my understanding Tencent Holdings Limited (parent of WeChat/QQ) monopolizes the gaming industry in China.

Piggyback off the omnipresence of smartphones, Tencent’s multiplayer online battles such as role-playing Honour of Kings harbor 200 million monthly subscribers. This and other popular blockchain esports require players to login and verify age in order to connect with the vast online community of gamers in real-time. These aren’t the standalone, offline games one would download from torrent magnets.

Like Alipay/Wepay cashless payment services @tiger mentioned, players’ personal records and transaction history are logged. Gaming accounts with mandatory age verification are linked to police database. So for the vast majority, they can and will be traced.

Tencent will readily hand over jurisdiction of user profiles if called upon from higher power. Minors or adolescents who play nonstop would be automatically logged off from the games. The "nanny" eyes of T.J. Eckleburg will be watching your child.

For those heading northwest next month, you're in luck!

The new high speed rail section from Dali to Lijiang is scheduled to run in December. The 161 km public maiden voyage will only take 50 minutes. Hence, approximately 3 hours from Kunming to Lijiang (vice versa) via the high speed rail.

Bon voyage!

@dolphin

You're right. Stand corrected.

Not cool when people are uncivilized...

which begs the question. When is surveillance too much?

Like Ray Bradbury, dystopian novelists paint doom & gloom not to predict the future, but to prevent it. Figuratively & literally speaking, firefighters create burnout control lines to prevent the flames from escaping the boundaries...

apparently the downwind of surveillance and societal control is blowing faster in our direction than anticipated.