Police check foreigners’ identification in Sanlitun, a popular neighborhood among ex-pats in Beijing. Pic: Sina weibo

The government announced a 100-day campaign against “illegal aliens” two weeks ago, and all foreigners are now being advised to carry with them their passports and registration documents in case they are stopped and questioned.

CNN reported that during a live music show, the performance was stopped so that the manager could advise the crowd to stay inside the venue. The reason? Police were outside threatening to take anyone who did not have their passports and registration on them to the local police station.

In addition to being an inconvenience, the idea of carrying around their passport at all times has been derided by some foreigners, saying that the risk of losing their passports is not worth bringing it out to the bars with them. Nonetheless, it is advisable to carry copies of passport, visa and registration documents at the very least, to minimize potential hassle.

The official line is that China’s attitude toward foreigners remains friendly, so long as their legal status is on the up-and-up. However, foreigners have been grumbling about what sometimes feels like an increasingly hostile sentiment in a city that has in recent years been quite comfortable and convenient for laowai.

CCTV reporter Yang Rui drew mixed reactions for a heated anti-foreigner rant he made on his Sina Weibo account, the popular microblogging platform in China. Discussion about the Rui incident by Chinese netizens on the popular site ChinaSmack give a somewhat chilling — if telling — view of what some Chinese think of foreigners in their country.

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Ding Xikui says he received a message from a friend of Chen Guangfu that said Chen had returned to Dongshigu village. Chen had traveled to Beijing, where he sought legal advice from Ding this past week on how to protect his son from what the family’s supporters call retaliation by local officials.

Ding had no further information Sunday, and it was unclear if Chen returned to the village voluntarily.

Chen Guangcheng sought protection of U.S. diplomats last month after escaping abusive house arrest in Dongshigu. It sparked a standoff between Beijing and Washington that resulted in Chen being allowed to go to the U.S. to study.

A worker carries out radiation screening on a bus for a media tour at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) 's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, on Saturday, May 26, 2012. Pic: AP

The visit by Goshi Hosono, apparently aimed at demonstrating the safety of the facility, came amid renewed concerns about conditions at the plant’s No. 4 reactor after its operator reported a bulging of the building’s wall. Nuclear regulators ordered a new investigation and seismic tests of the building and its pool.

The building was damaged by an explosion and fire soon after the Fukushima plant was hit by a massive magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The pool, located at the top of the building above the reactor, remains one of the plant’s biggest risks due to its vulnerability to earthquakes.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has reinforced the structure and says it now can withstand temblors as strong as last year’s quake.

A small group of journalists was allowed to enter the reactor building for the first time with Hosono. Inside were piles of broken wall panels, pieces of cement and mangled equipment, showing the magnitude of the explosion.

Hosono, wearing protective coveralls and a full-face mask, climbed a narrow makeshift staircase to the fifth floor to see the pool, which was covered with a protective tarp. TEPCO officials lifted part of the cover to show the water surface.

He said he was not able to see the newly found 3 centimeter (1 inch) outward bulge in the building’s wall with his own eyes, but urged TEPCO “not to take an optimistic view and instead deal with it carefully in order to ensure safety.”

Hosono later told reporters that he could see that the pool had been sufficiently reinforced.

“I could see steady progress being made toward removal of the spent fuel (from the pool), which is the next major goal,” he said.

The fuel rods in the storage pool are not enclosed as they are in reactor cores and could cause a greater release of radiation in case of a loss of water.

TEPCO is preparing to move the fuel rods from the pool to a joint pool for all six reactors next to the building, but the process won’t start until late next year. The joint pool is located on the ground level and is considered safer, even though it already has 6,000 fuel rods in it, officials said. It is expected to take 40 years to decommission the reactors.

Akio Komori, one of the TEPCO executives who escorted Hosono, said the company will inspect the No. 4 building to ensure its integrity while continuing with the fuel removal. Komori, however, rejected growing calls to allow outside experts to inspect the plant’s safety.

“As the party with direct responsibility, it’s our job to carry out the necessary checks,” he said.

From early on, experts have raised concerns about the pool at the No. 4 reactor, where 1,535 fuel rods — the most of any of Fukushima’s six reactors — were stored because the reactor was undergoing major refurbishing and the fuel ordinarily inside its core was also kept in the pool.

U.S. nuclear officials feared the fuel rods would overheat and melt as water evaporated from the pool.

The pool had enough water to cover the rods, but officials recently said they might have been saved by chance.

When the disaster struck, two additional pools next to the fuel storage pool had been temporarily filled with water to store equipment used during the refurbishing. That water flowed into the fuel rod pool as its water level declined, though it’s not clear whether the rods would have been exposed otherwise, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official Masaru Kobayashi said.

A worst-case scenario envisioned by the head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission two weeks after last year’s accident warned that a melting of the fuel rods at the No. 4 reactor would require the evacuation of 30 million people just from the greater Tokyo area.

Officials in Yongcheng city referred queries Sunday to a statement by the city government that says Li Xingong confessed during a police interrogation to having raped more than 10 girls. It says Li was detained Friday.

Li was deputy director of the city’s Communist Party committee’s general office.

The statement says an investigation is ongoing and that Li will be “severely and swiftly punished” according to the relevant laws.

The case is being widely discussed on China’s popular Twitter-like site, Sina Weibo, with many users expressing outrage against the former official.