Fed-Up Chinese Residents Blast Dancing Grannies With $42,000 Sound System Where verbal abuse, sand and buckets of human waste have failed, a warning message blasted over and over again through a $41,900 speaker system appears to have succeeded. Aggrieved residents in the coastal Chinese city of Wenzhou declared victory this week after successfully routing packs of public dancers that had been gathering in a nearby park, according to state media reports. As WSJ detailed last week, dancing in public — a form of exercise that boasts roughly 100 million adherents in China, most of them middle-aged and retired women — has become a flashpoint in the country’s drive to urbanize. Squeezed by development, China’s happy-footed seniors have been forced to take their dancing to parks, public squares, parking lots and other areas where sound from their portable sound-systems often carry over into the homes of nearby residents. Some beleaguered residents have decided to fight noise with noise. At Wenzhou’s Xin Guoguang apartment complex this weekend, 600 residents launched a tit-for-tat “counterattack,” pooling 260,000 yuan to buy six professional-quality speakers. According to the Communist Party-run Hangzhou Daily, they set the speakers up on a fourth-floor balcony across from the park and used them to blast an ear-splitting message — “Please respect the noise pollution laws of the People’s Republic of China and immediately cease illegal activities!” — over and over again for hours at a time.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 10:16:21 +0000