The Beijing News
June 22, 2009

An Educated Youth Wheat Harvest Festival was held yesterday in Jinzhan for more than one hundred Beijing residents.

All of the visitors are former zhiqing (知青), also known as "educated youth" or "rusticated youth," who once spent years working and living with local farmers in Jinzhan, a township located on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. As part of a national campaign, millions of urban students were sent to the countryside to participate in agricultural production starting in the late 50s and early 60s and turning into a flood in 1968.

According to The Beijing News, which featured the story with a big cover photo, the old zhiqing visited their peasant friends and held a wheat harvesting competition.

The second headline above the big photo reports that 30 students at an elementary school in Dongguan, Guangdong Province were diagnosed with A(H1N1) flu. The school was shut down and people who had close contact with the patients are now under medical observation.

A sidebar headline reports on a six-year-old who drowned in a public toilet yesterday in Magezhuang, Chaoyang District. The landlord may be held responsible for failing to clean out the pit appropriately.

Like most of the rest of today's newspapers, The Beijing News covered an explosion in Fengyang, Anhui Province. The explosion, which collapsed the workers' dormitory building at a local quartz sand factory, has killed at least 16 people and wounded another 43.

And China welcomes its youngest big-city mayor, Zhou Senfeng. The 29-year-old was elected to be the mayor of Yicheng, a county-level city in Hubei Province. Zhou, who holds a master's degree in engineering from Tsinghua, is said to be the youngest civil servant in China to occupy a position at that level.