I really don't mind this sort of thing unless it becomes one-after-another, but I think a simple polite refusal or acceptance is the proper form. As for the appropriateness of the exercise, I think the form ("Hello my name is Joey I'm 7 I live in..." etc.) is a bit primitive, but the fact that real kids get to talk to real English speakers is good - all too many people in China have a nervous kind of feeling about 'foreigners' that is a result of bits of xenophobia in Han culture that stresses a 'They are REALLY DIFFERENT who knows what they'll do or say?' attitude, which often demonstrates or results in inappropriate this that or the other ('Welcome to China!' 'But I speak Chinese and have been here for 15 years.' Never mind, welcome to China!' etc. - after which it begins to be about face rather than real communication). Young kids, especially, can be talked to simply like real kids from anywhere, will respond to kindness even though it comes from a funny-looking guy whom they otherwise might be taught to fear as an ogre, and will be delighted. I really don't have much of a problem with this, unless, obviously, some parent simply uses you inconsiderately for a long period of time. The value of the exercise is not really in teaching method/learning more language, but in learning that people who look different and speak different languages are people too - as good a lesson as I know for people of any age, and a good one to acquire while young.
Around Town: Flying Tigers Museum
发布者The great thing in the Kunming Museum is the pillar from the Nanzhao Kingdom, which shows clearly that it is much too simple to consider that 'Yunnan' was simply one part of 'China' 1300 years ago.
New taxi placards target 'civility'
发布者Magnifico is right - the main concern is profit, and to this end brains are cheerfully twisted through advertising that preys on insecurities derived from the past: "Buy a car and be modern, with a face larger than the moon!" - minor alterations in this message have made it work everywhere; locally the traffic-jam situation in Kunming is the result (almost magically created within a mere 5 years or so - those who have been around awhile can tell you that there were then no taxi or bus problems 5-6 years ago). Now profits can be made by building an underground train system at enormous cost, to relieve the problem that served the competitive greed of corporations and nations (Game of Thrones: You win or you die) rather than the needs of the population.
Interview: Economic ecologist Yi Zhuangfang
发布者I don't understand '...absolutely a capitalist venture, depending on how you look at it.' Also, the article mentions that the rubber was started in the mid-50s, but expanded greatly in the mid-90s - e.g., with government aid to privatized smallholders.
On a grander scale, it's all about capitalism - rubber first planted in time of competition with globally-capitalist world of nations armed to advance their own economic interests; Communist movement was an attempt to break with that, didn't work; the solution, if there will be one (quite likely not - no guarantees from evolutionary theory) cannot simply be 'capitalist', since that's what's brought us to the current state of mutual planetary destruction, which continues to be advanced with every private car sold.
Yunnan county cooks the books for $850 million
发布者Peter99 - "hundreds of years"? I think it's been going on since agriculture was invented and class society came into being, built on the possibility of creating, and 'privatising', a surplus.
Workers' Cultural Palace imploded in Kunming
发布者'the crap that China builds are not made to last' - perhaps an overstatement, and I don't think there was anything structurally wrong with the workers cultural palace. I always liked the building/institution because it represented something from the earlier heavy-'socialist' period that was not at all a bad idea - ie, we hear of the inefficiencies and over-the-top political campaigns etc. of that period all the time now, but it wasn't ALL bad. And now sometimes the baby goes out with the bath water (e.g., rural health arrangements, once based on scarcity of health facilities and personnel but with a real impetus for equality and decent across-the-board development).