At dinner, we watched the news. Two major rivers (the Yangzi and the Song Hua Jiang) had their 100 year floods this (1998) summer, and flood coverage dominated the news (over 50% of the news time), with patriotic shots of soldiers (over 165,000 of them worked the floods) rushing to the flood waters carrying sand bags, of soldiers forming temporary human dikes while sand bags walls were built, etc.
Of curious interest were some of the commercial spots - they have 5 second commercials (longer commercial are also shown, presumably at cheaper advertising times), mostly advertising VCD, with the same voice booming out five VCD commercials in a row for competing products.