organization:university of hong kong

In China, rise of Salafism fosters suspicion and division among Muslims
▻http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-saudi-arabia-20160201-story.html

Meanwhile, Saudi preachers and organizations began traveling to China. Some of them bore gifts: training programs for clerics, Korans for distribution, funding for new “Islamic institutes” and mosques.

“This exposure to Saudi discourses actually caused a momentary implosion within the Salafi community in the 1980s,” said Mohammed Al-Sudairi, a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong who spent years researching Salafi Muslims in China.

“The new generation, which was much more engaged and influenced by Saudi Arabia, began to contest the knowledge of the older generation. You had a lot of excommunication within the [Muslim] community, people were saying to each other that they were not real Muslims.”

(via Angry Arab)

Le poisson le plus cher du monde est en voie de disparition.

Yet More Endangered Species On Sale In Hong Kong, This Time The ’Large Croaker’ Fish... | Alex Hofford Photography
▻http://www.alexhoffordphotography.com/node/2303

http://www.alexhoffordphotography.com/temp/files/ChineseBahaba-08.jpg

According to Yvonne Sadovy, a marine biologist at the University of Hong Kong, “most of the large croakers that we know about are over-fished”. And the ’Chinese Bahaba’ (bahaba taipingensis), otherwise known as a ’Giant Yellow Croaker’ is teetering on the verge of extinction. This fish’s native habitat is in estuarine waters along the coast of southern China, so over-fishing and loss of habitat are the major challenges it faces in its daily struggle to survive. Click here to find out more about how last month one of these huge fish, a 135 kilogram, fifty year old ’Chinese Bahaba’, was caught in China’s Zhejiang Province, and sold for over US$500,000.00. That’s right, half a million dollars. Half a million U.S. dollars, not Hong Kong dollars.

Downcast : Critically endangered bahaba caught and sold for $500,000
▻http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2010/02/16/downcast-critically-endangered-bahaba-caught-and-sold-for-

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/322633/slide_322633_3047787_free.jpg?1382720925094

According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the Bahaba’s swim bladder “is highly appreciated for its medicinal properties and as a general tonic for health.” Its use in traditional Chinese medicine resulted in the species being heavily overfished, to the point where any catch is widely reported in China’s media.

Bahaba are endemic to the East China and South China seas. According to the IUCN, no spawning populations of the fish are known, and “there are likely to be few or no refuges remaining for recovery.”

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02315/Bahaba-taipingensi_2315599b.jpg

New H7N7 bird flu strain discovered that could pose threat to humans | World news | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/new-h7n7-bird-flu-strain-discovered-china
Un nouveau #virus contamine la volaille en #Chine

The new strain poses a potential threat to people, according to lab tests which found that the virus, called H7N7, caused severe pneumonia in ferrets, which are used as proxies for humans in flu research.

An international team led by Yi Guan, a flu specialist at the University of Hong Kong, took samples from chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, partridges and quail at markets in Shandong and Zhejiang provinces to the north and south of Shanghai, and further samples from markets in Guangdong. They found H7N9 in chickens in Rizhao, Shandong, and the new H7N7 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang.