Better not to piss in diaper in space, says China’s first spaceman

“Better not to piss in diaper,” said China’s first man in space, “Baby doesn’t like it, neither does an adult.”

Senior Colonel Yang Liwei of the Chinese astronaut brigade told a curious audience who questioned Yang about his experience in the country’s first space mission, Shenzhou-5, in October 2003.

So far, Yang and other two Chinese astronauts who flied the second space mission in October 2005, had never pissed in a diaper, though they all wore it at the time. There was a toilet in the spaceship, but it could not be used before the spaceship entered the orbit.

“Astronaut does a very hard job, but it is also a job that makes us feel very proud,” said Yang, at a seminar of the current 36th Committee on Space Research Scientific Assembly on Wednesday.

Full text of the article is here. The rest is just propaganda, although not without its amusements (To wit: “When the spaceship entered the outerspace, I saw my beautiful homeland,” he said to recall his first space mission, “I was shocked by the view”).

On Friday, three protesters from the United States, Canada and Britain were detained after unfurling a banner at Beijing’s main train station reading, “China’s Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy.”

Never mind that the train left from a different station. According to a fellow journalist I talked to yesterday, the sign they displayed was in English, not Chinese. They apparently climbed to the top of the station to display it, but no one noticed them because they didn’t say anything. Just stood there silently. And when the calvary arrived—a single policeman, according to my source—they submitted with equal aplomb, quietly rolling up the banner and walking obediently behind the cop to be interrogated.

Real protests have been going on elsewhere, to which the government has responded predictably:

The official Xinhua News Agency lashed out at critics, calling them hypocrites who want Tibet to remain undeveloped and a “stereotyped cultural specimen for them to enjoy.”

Yet one detects just the slightest enjoyment of Tibet as a “stereotyped cultural specimen” in effusive coverage of the trip from the Chinese press. Take the the Beijing News (新京报). The once-rebellious but lately compliant paper led this morning with a front page photo of a 54-year-old Tibetan woman named Qiangba Dama (Chinese transliteration) riding the train in a full complement of traditional garb, smiling beatifically as she eats from a boxed lunch, so so happy to be on her “first ever” train ride!

For those who want to see for themselves what a happy minority are the Tibetans, Duncan Peattie has just produced a fine English translation of the train timetable with prices for major destinations. The less user-friendly Chinese original is here.