There’s not much info about this video, posted on YouTube by ThePiXNet yesterday and flagged by Reddit, but the description claims the young man is a study abroad student who doesn’t want to return to Taiwan to finish his compulsory military service. Can you blame him? Conscription has been called “prison for the innocent,” and since we’re... Read more »
Three days after retiring, Southern Weekly in-house censor Zeng Li is dead. The story via SCMP:
Zeng Li had become a prominent figure during the weekly's protest against censorship in January. His farewell letter has been shared on Weibo thousands of times on Thursday and caused widespread soul-searching about the state of the media in China.
Chengdu recently hosted the 88th National Food and Beverage Fair (糖酒会), the seen-and-be-seen pimp show for anybody who’s anybody in China’s F&B industry. My own Belgian beer company basically ruled the catwalk with our four phallises of draft beer, freely pumping to more than 50,000 attendants who will now go about thinking that Belgian beer... Read more »
A third death has been confirmed from H7N9 avian influenza: a man from Zhejiang province perished yesterday after falling sick earlier in the week. In light of that, Xinhua has issued a public advisory urging people to not slaughter poultry during Tomb-Sweeping Day, which begins today:
A professor at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University is soliciting tapes, poems, plays, and songs about masturbation as part of a research project-cum-contest called “New Media Contest on Masturbation.” As SCMP reports, “The rules are simple: submit your masturbation videos, poems, plays, or songs,” and the winner gets 10,000 yuan, with hefty cash prizes for second,... Read more »
Of course Chinese media was going to fall for an April Fools joke. But we expected Beijing News to bite it, or People's Daily, or 21st Century Herald (similarity: they've all been duped before, e.g., here and here). But CCTV, a television channel that, presumably, has researchers, copyeditors, producers and news anchors? That is to say, a terraced newsroom of professionally trained reporters and de factor fact-checkers?
How many ways should this guy have died?
1. Electrocuted because he was dangling from high-voltage wires
2. Ceased to exist after plummeting 20 meters to whatever's below
3. Alcohol poisoning
Miraculously, he's not only alive and well at the end of his adventure, but uninjured
Alec Ash’s April 1 joke about fixed gear bikes being banned around the Drum and Bell neighborhood, that roost for Beijing hipsters, was closer to truth than we imagined. As Abe Sauer of Brand Channel points out in his recently published piece: China’s brewing war on fixies, the ubiquitous accessory of US hipster culture and an... Read more »
The woman in the video, reportedly pregnant, would have had her wallet (or something) wrested out of her hand if not for the guy who walks out of a nearby store and intervenes just as she's calling for help. The mugger, dealing with someone his own size and gender, succumbs quickly.
Good on you, man.
Enoch Lam, a very high-profile pastor-comedian in Hong Kong, recently asked his fans on Facebook, “How should (Christians) respond to the recent controversial comments made by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz regarding the company’s support of gay marriage?” This is the same Pastor Lam who once equated homosexuality with drug abuse and theft. Lam also said that... Read more »
