When driving at night, there’s nothing quite as annoying as being blinded by the full-beam headlights of another vehicle. Recognizing this problem, the police department recently started punishing offenders by making them stare at their own headlights for a full minute. Hopefully, this will make them see the error of their ways.

On November 1st, Shenzen police took to Weibo, China’s most popular social network to warn drivers that anyone caught using their car’s headlights on the full beam illegally would be fined 300 yuan ($44),  lose points on their license and be made to recite regulations on the proper use of headlights. But what really drew people’s attention was the introduction of a new and unconventional punishment – making offenders stare into the high-beam headlights for 60 seconds, while sitting on a specially-designed chair.

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Students at Qingdao Binhai University, a private vocational university in China’s Shandong province, have recently been warned to avoid public display of affection with the opposite sex, including basic physical interaction, like holding hands or sharing earphones.

The learning institution founded in 1992 recently became a hot topic on Chinese social media, after adopting a set of controversial rules regarding public display of affection between male and female students. The new code of conduct forbids students from engaging in affectionate physical contact like holding hands or hugging, but also goes as far as banning couples from sharing trays at the campus cafeteria or earphones while listening to music. One male student told local media that they can’t even help carry their females friends’ bags without facing punishment.

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An Israeli entrepreneur who has spent a year designing a product that would make him rich, saw his dreams collapse after putting his product on Kickstarer to raise some extra production funding. Just seven days after the start of the crowdfunding campaign, copycats were already available on Chinese online stores like Alibaba.

With the popularity of selfies growing to epic proportions in the last few years, Yekutiel Sherman felt the infectious trend provided a lucrative business opportunity, so a couple of years ago he started working on an alternative to the common selfie stick. By December 2015, he had created prototypes of his innovative Stickbox – a smartphone case that doubled as a selfie stick – secured some funds from his family and even shot a promotional video of two lovers using the Stickbox to get a selfie with the Eiffel Tower. Everything was going according to plan, but that was until he launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for $40,000.

Just one week after starting the Kickstarter campaign, exact replicas of the Stickbox had appeared on Chinese e-commerce giants like Alibaba, at a fraction of the price set by Sherman. It turns out that even before he had had a chance to look for a factory to mass-produce his product, Chinese manufacturers had stolen his idea from Kickstarter and replicated it in record time. He had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at this point.

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Having to decide between saving your unborn child or your brother is a choice no person should ever have to make, but it’s exactly what a young Chinese woman recently went through. Her touching story has been doing the rounds online, leaving millions of people wondering what they would have done in her place.

24-year-old Yang Li, from Hangzhou City, was already three months pregnant when she received news that her brother, Yang Jun, 29, was going to die unless he received a bone marrow transplant. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma in September 2015, and had since undergone 5 chemotherapy sessions, 18 radiotherapy sessions as well as an autologous bone marrow transplant. The treatment was deemed a success, but in July of this year, an examination revealed the recurrence of the lymphoma. Doctors told Jun that his only chance of survival was a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, and that his sister was a perfect match.

Having to break the news to his little sister, knowing she was pregnant, was the hardest thing Jun ever had to do. But at the same time, he thought about his own 7-year-old daughter who would otherwise have to grow up without a father, and about his wife. With tears in his eyes, he told Li that she was his last chance.

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A naive restaurant owner in Guiyang, China, who thought that appealing to people’s inherent goodness would be a good way to attract customers to his new karst cave-themed restaurant, managed to lose over 100,000 RMB in just seven days.

Liu Xiaojun and his two business partners did the math, and decided that promoting their new restaurant by applying the now-famous “pay what you want” policy would be a good idea. Choosing to ignore the disastrous experiences of other restaurant owners who allowed customers to pay what they wanted for the food, the three simply assumed that the vast majority of customers would be rational and fair. They were wrong.

To be honest, their idea wasn’t a total failure. The news that they could order as many dishes as they liked and pay whatever they wanted for them attracted lots of customers, but many of them paid only 10% of the cost of their meal, while a few even dared to leave just 1 RMB (¢15) on the table. In just seven days, the restaurant had incurred losses of over 100,000 RMB ($15,000) and the promotion fell apart. Following the disastrous result, the three owners got into a serious argument and one of them left the city, vowing never to return again.

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Faced with a shortage of eligible women back home, China’s successful businessmen are apparently turning their attention to Russia. They are apparently paying thousands of dollars to go on ‘wife tours’ in Siberia, hoping to find the brides of their dreams.

Elena Suvorova, head of a marriage agency in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, organized the first ‘wife tour’ for six Chinese bachelors last year. The event was apparently a success, with some of the men actually starting relationships with a few of the 25 girls invited to compete for their affection. So this year, Suvorova’s agency, OSD Center, held another wife tour for five Chinese men, aged 25 to 46, who came all the way from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, in search for a suitable life partner.

“For them, a Russian woman is like a present,” Elena told the Siberian Times. “Men want to get married, and are committed for serious relationships.”

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The male boss of a company in Beijing, China, has recently come under fire for forcing female workers to line up and give him a kiss every morning, claiming that it enhances the corporate culture and improves relations between manager and employees.

Women working at a company that sells home brewery machinery, in Tongzhou District, Beijing, are required to line up between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning to kiss their boss. And we’re not talking about a little, innocent smooch on the cheek, although that would be pretty weird as well, but a kiss on the lips. China Press reports that while the women were initially reluctant to accept the bizarre daily ritual, they eventually gave in to the boss’ demands in order to keep their jobs. Only two of the company’s female workers refused to kiss their boss on the mouth and chose to resign instead. According to Chinese media reports, over half the unnamed company’s staff members are women.

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Convinced that women have more job opportunities than men, a 30-year-old Chinese man decided to get breast implants to increase his odds of finding employment.

The man, surnamed Ho, had been struggling to find a job for months, when he became convinced that looking more like a woman would make things a lot easier for him. News reports kept mentioning that women had better career opportunities than men, so he somehow got it in his head that getting breast implants that would make him appear more feminine would convince employers to give him a chance, despite his limited work experience.

Unable to afford the breast enlargement surgery, Ho borrowed over 39,000 Yuan ($5,850) in August and traveled from his home city of Zhuzhou to the Ruilan Medical Cosmetic Hospital, in Changsha, for the operation. Everything went according to plan until he came back home with his new pair of perky breasts. He hadn’t told his family about his intentions, and when they laid eyes on his chest for the first time, they got the shock of their lives. Read More »

Students at the Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, south-west China, are apparently studying harder and sitting in on extra classes just to see their ‘impossibly beautiful’ female educators.

Photos of 16 attractive female teachers from Sichuan Normal University have become a hot topic on Chinese social media websites, after they were uploaded online by their school. The good-looking teachers, who specialize in a variety of majors, including singing, dancing, artistic design, theater and English, were apparently selected to pose for the photos in a bid to change Chinese people’s views on successful female teachers, who are often perceived as old, ruthless and cold. The campaign was a big hit, and after the success of the first batch of photos posted in May, the university published a second series of photos on September 19.

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Unable to afford a proper home after getting married, a Chinese couple moved into a mountain cave near the city Nanchong, and have been living there for the past 54 years.

81-year-old Liang Zifu and 77-year-old Li Suying found the cave three years after their wedding, and since they couldn’t afford to buy a real house, decided to make it their home and start a family there. In the beginning, they shared the unusual abode with three other families, who have since moved out, as have the couple’s four children, but the two elderly cave-dwellers won’t even consider leaving. After their story went viral in Chinese media, local authorities tried to persuade them to move out and even offered to provide them with a more comfortable house, but they flat-out refused.

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Faced with the adoption of trendy foreign hairstyles by a growing number of students, Chinese schools are coming up with desperate measures to enforce their strict haircut policies. The latest of these measures involves posting barbers at the school gates to trim long or dyed hair on the spot.

Chinese students returning from their summer break with new haircuts to show off to their colleagues were greeted with a really nasty surprise right at the school entrance – a barber ready to trim any hairdos that didn’t comply with regulations. Photos posted by students of the Qinhan Secondary School, in Xi’an, China’s Shaanxi province, show kids walking by piles of freshly cut hair and a scissors-wielding barber working his magic on an offender.

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62-year-old Zhang Jianxing has been scouring the ancient forests of the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve for over two decades, in search of the mythical Yeren, or Chinese yeti, and says he will not give up until he comes face to face with the creature.

Zhang began living as a hermit in the 3,200-square-kilometer mountain range in 1994, after becoming fascinated with the Yeren, a 6-foot-tall humanoid creature covered in thick red-brown fur. References of the so-called Chinese Wild Man date back to the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BC) in the works of classical poet and statesman Qu Yuan, mentions of its existence in the pristine forests of Shennongjia, China’s Hubei province, have been popping up throughout history ever since.

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In a bid to give their children a head start in life, wealthy Chinese parents are enrolling them in all kinds of early education programs, including CEO training courses.

Chinese state media reports that an early education institute in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong province, is offering a ‘CEO training course’ for kids aged between 3 and 12, at a price of 50,000 yuan ($7,500) per year. Kids attend two classes per week, during which they engage in activities such as filing in missing words in sentences and stacking up toy bricks. That doesn’t sound like anything special, but according to a promotional brochure released by the institute, the course “enables young children to become a powerful, competitive leader”.

There’s no denying that China probably has the most competitive educational environment in the world, which means parents would do almost anything to make sure their children don’t get left behind, but experts believe such extravagant courses ultimately benefit the parents rather than the children. They regard their kids’ attendance to such classes as evidence of the family’s social status, completely disregarding the fact that the syllabus they offer is of no real value.

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An expectant mother from Tianping City, China’s Hunan province, may have set a new world record for the longest pregnancy. She claims that she was supposed to deliver her baby in November of last year, but eight months past her due date she was was still pregnant because her placenta was underdeveloped. The woman finally gave birth in her 18th of August.

Local media reports that Wang Shi became pregnant in February 2015, but when she turned up at the hospital nine months later hoping to have the baby delivered, doctors informed her that she was not ready to give birth due to an underdeveloped placenta, also known as placenta previa. Worried about the condition, Wang and her husband went to the hospital every 7 to 10 days after her due date passed for check-ups. By her 14th month of pregnancy, the woman was more than ready to welcome her baby into the world, but doctors once again told her that she needed to wait because the fetus was not developed enough for a C-section operation.

“I feel ashamed of being pregnant for so long. I hope I can successfully and safely deliver my baby next month,” Wang recently told reporters. “It has cost us more than 10,000 yuan ($1,500) just for the check-ups alone, and we’ve now lost our patience.” Because of her prolonged pregnancy she had gained around 26 kilograms, going from 52.2 kg to 78 kg, but she was otherwise in good physical condition.

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When 18-year-old Liu Dawei ordered 24 toy gun replicas from a Taiwanese website, in July 2014, he never imagined the purchase would soon land him in prison for the rest of his life.

Liu never even got the fake firearms he paid 30,540 RMB ($4,600) for, as his mail order was held at customs. Instead, police soon arrived at the front door of his home in Quanzhou city and arrested him for arms trafficking. According to the official police statement, they had intercepted his package and found that 20 of the 24 gun replicas were actually real guns. That sounds like a perfectly good explanation for the boy’s arrest, but only until you learn about what qualifies as a real gun in China.

Chinese law classifies any weapon with a barrel that can fire an object at 1.8 j/cm2 as a real gun. During Liu Dawei’s trial, his lawyer argued that that is roughly the speed at which he could throw a handful of beans at someone’s face, and that the country’s current definition of an actual firearm simply makes no sense. Liu himself claimed that he had no idea that he would be breaking the law when he ordered the replicas, and that he thought he was merely buying a bunch of toys.

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