Society

Food delivered to the door every day, temperature taking twice a day, and not a single sound from the outside world... Zaobao correspondent Chen Jing documents 14 days in a hotel room, quarantined behind a yellow line. Did she find peace in solitude?

In a study conducted by academics from the NUS Business School surveying the China, India, and Singapore landscape, respondents often described the Chinese as disciplined and focused, Singaporeans as structured, fearing failure and sticking to the plan, and Indians as creative, flexible and frugal. While it is not the only or most pertinent factor, cultural traits matter when it comes to managing teams and maximising their potential to innovate.

Nothing is black and white when it comes to race debates, says Yu Shiyu. What if you’re not black but ‘brown’ as some term it, that is, a minority nonetheless. Some Asian Americans of Chinese and Indian descent have been labelled model minorities for largely rising through the ranks though they face some forms of discrimination. Question is, if they don't see the current protests as their fight and stay out of the fray, are they equally culpable?

Wearing PPE to the airport, going through a blood test and nasal and throat swabs, surviving a 14-day centralised quarantine… The pandemic has indeed changed the way we travel. With airtight preventive measures in place, Lianhe Zaobao Shanghai correspondent Chen Jing doubts her friends and family in Singapore will be coming to visit her in Shanghai anytime soon.

Hong Kong political columnist Chip Tsao makes his observations on an emerging group of people who lack sufficient job security and face a sense of uncertainty and precariousness — the precariat. This group is plugged in to social media, which means they have quick access to information, but are also able to make comparisons that might lead to dissatisfaction. Will the civil servants running Hong Kong be able to empathise with this increasingly marginalised group in society?

Close to 20 million people across 26 provinces and cities in the areas spanning China’s southwestern region to the midstream and downstream areas of the Yangtze River have been displaced due to severe flooding over the past few weeks. The Three Gorges Dam has long been held up as a bulwark against such massive floods in the area, but recent signs that it is literally buckling under the pressure cast doubts on its ability to be an effective flood control mechanism.

China’s gaokao began yesterday, with millions of students taking this national university entrance exam (gaokao). One phenomenon that got Zaobao correspondent Yang Danxu curious was students wearing purple underwear to the exams. She examines this and other superstitions that give students a mental boost in the exam, and says that the gaokao needs to remain fair.

Following the recent China-India border clash, Hong Kong columnist Chip Tsao takes a look at both countries and muses that even as some viewpoints converge, different systems and different national characteristics produce very different fates.

For years, poor Chinese peasants, especially girls, were led to believe that they had failed their college entrance exams. Little did they know that schemers had misappropriated their identities. With a greater number of cases coming to light, some justice is being done. But many more steps still need to be taken, says Han Yong Hong, to show that the rights of vulnerable groups in Chinese society cannot be trampled on.