SHANGHAI - A recent Internet forum called "Who is the Most Beautiful Girl at the Expo?" has received widespread attention online and sparked heated debate about litter louts.
A visitor to the Expo shot footage of a young girl picking up a discarded soft drink bottle and placing it in a trash can after it had been kicked along the ground by a number of visitors.
After it was posted on Sina.com, the 15-year-old Tibetan girl, who was referred to online as "the most beautiful girl at the Expo", was soon being manhunted in cyberspace by netizens across the country.
The girl, Drolma Chutso, from quake-hit Yushu county in Qinghai province, was among 300 underprivileged teenagers on a free trip to Shanghai and the Expo.
Once Drolma Chutso's identity was revealed online, many netizens began commenting on her looks. "Look how this young girl from a disaster area makes our urban life better. "Better City, Better Life' shouldn't be just a slogan," heiguozi123 commented on the forum.
But others were more measured in their responses: "As a matter of fact, there are disaster areas in Shanghai," responded mobilewolf. "The state of emptiness and the sense of cold detachment is our moral disaster area."
According to a sanitation worker, surnamed Chen, one of the 7,000 workers responsible for cleaning the Expo Garden, he often asks visitors to throw trash in nearby waste bins, but is ignored and people discard empty food and drink packaging on the ground.
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Gu Ping, another Expo cleaner, spends 14 hours a day walking around the Expo Garden picking up rubbish. "I pick up around 30 bags of trash per day, most of them are empty cans, bottles and maps," Gu said. "The provision of more shady places for visitors to rest during the summer heat means more work for us."
The situation outside the Expo Garden is no better. Zhang, 29, who did not reveal her full name, is a volunteer who collects trash outside the Expo Garden. "I collected 20 kilograms of trash in just one afternoon," Zhang said.
Yu Ran contributed to this story.
