Labour hours follow projected turnover, skills follow course checkboxes, one person must do 1.1 to 1.2 people’s work – in former Shift Manager Jiang Ke’s store, when the system’s roster falls out of step, managers can only carve out unpaid time from their own duties to fill the gap.
Typhoon Bavi brought record-breaking rainfall, submerging about a third of Dunhua’s urban area and devastating ginseng fields and farmland. Shopkeepers fought chest-deep floods to save stock, villagers were stranded for days, ginseng farmers lost heavily—yet the threats of a wetter climate and encroachment on floodways endure.
Jiang Ke, a Shift Manager for seven months, says fryers are held at a constant 160°C, lettuce arrives as vacuum-cut strips, and there is not a single knife in the kitchen—yet every order must reach the customer within 90 seconds.
The New York State Attorney General’s Office and the Environmental Working Group sued Brazil’s JBS and the US-based Tyson Foods over allegedly misleading “climate-friendly” beef labels. Both cases settled in 2025, yet “natural”, “recyclable” and “zero additives” claims still flood the shelves.
A government-endorsed agricultural mini-program: suppliers were perfunctory, operations in name only, and those who truly sold the goods relied not on the platform but on WeChat groups and a group-buy leader network. Later, its name disappeared from district government reports.
Since suburbanisation in the 1930s, motorways, fertiliser agriculture and plastics have welded American life to oil — a dependence that feeds, and is fed by, successive military operations. After the bicycle, is there another road?
The sixth round of the Lianhe Programme received 58 applications. After initial screening, online interviews and expert review, 12 localised solutions focusing on ecological restoration, community composting, smallholder disaster risk reduction, women’s empowerment and other topics were selected.
A Chiang Mai chef running a Shanghai pop-up dinner, driven to tears in the kitchen by Dianping’s ratings and the pressure to waive bills to keep the peace; Maizi, rated a mere 3.8 yet running his bar eight years without any platform, reveals another face of the system.
Liulan Reservoir breached; Typhoon Maysak’s floods swallowed jasmine fields, fish ponds and rice paddies in Hengzhou. Flower farmers who expanded planting amid the “new-style tea beverages” boom met downpours beyond the flood defence standard—insurance came up empty, and they can only start from scratch.
A month of hoeing, carrying water, huddling by the fire through downpours to mountain folk songs at Baicao Garden — Sister Yan Ping’s ecological farm, Guigang, Guangxi — metres from a chemical-fertiliser orchard. The body into the land’s rhythm, until April’s heat sent a nature-hungry graduate back to the city.
