Chinese choices for the best in dining

ON TUESDAY, Meituan-Dianping, China’s largest service-focused e-commerce platform, launched its first Black Pearl Restaurant Guide, highlighting 330 restaurants in 22 cities in China and five overseas. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

Some media outlets have referred to the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide as China’s version of the Michelin Guide. And it is true, the restaurants selected by the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide are put through a similar vigorous selection process by a team consisting of chefs, culinary experts, and special advisers.

However, the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide should not be considered as simply an imitation of the Michelin Guide. Rather, it is a strong competitor to the Michelin Guide, which included eateries in Hong Kong in 2008 and Shanghai in 2016 and is reportedly planning to cover more Chinese cities. As the first restaurant guide written by Chinese experts and Chinese diners that rates Chinese restaurants, the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide will definitely boost Chinese consumers’ confidence in the country’s rich food culture.

The launch of this guide also reflects the growth in dining consumption in China, as a result of the country’s steady economic growth plus the continuous rise of people’s disposable incomes, which has made it possible for them to spend more on dining out.

Data show that the domestic food industry had an income of 3.96 trillion yuan ($619 billion) last year, which is 10.7 percent higher than the year before and accounts for 4.8 percent of the country’s total GDP. With people spending increasingly more money on good, quality food, China’s food culture has been robustly rising, helping to boost the nation’s cultural confidence.

It is hoped that the guide will provide a unique Chinese perspective on the best in traditional and modern Chinese dining both in China and globally.

The sentences handed down to the parents by the local court in Xining has aroused fierce discussion as the girl’s mother was sentenced to five years in prison, while the father was found guilty but received no punishment.

The local court said it made the ruling according to Clause 260 of the Criminal Law, which states that those who maltreat a family member to such an extent it results in the victim’s death should be sentenced to imprisonment for two to seven years.

That’s also a common practice among many local judiciaries. Many of them tend to treat all violence among family members as “maltreatment” and sentence the suspects according to the above-mentioned clause.

That practice is debatable. Maltreatment means long-term spiritual and physical torment, and it mainly refers to low-level violence such as forcing someone to kneel. In the Xining case, the couple beat their young daughter so severely it killed her. The violence was obviously far more than maltreatment.

There were at least 30 wounds found on the girl’s body, which were caused by external force. This means her parents should have been charged with the crime of willful and malicious injury, which would result in a prison sentence of over 10 years for each of them if found guilty. Of course, that does not exclude maltreatment and they should be found guilty of both crimes.

That’s not only for justice in this particular case, but also for tens of thousands of children who suffer from domestic violence. Only with proper legal punishment can such a tragedy be prevented from happening again.

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