Authorities in the Chinese city of Xi’an recently inaugurated a special sidewalk lane designed for “phubbers” – people who walk while staring at their smartphones and ignore everything around them.

Painted red, green and blue and featuring pictures of smartphones, the special lane is located on the busy Yanta Roan, in Xi’an, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Chinese media reports that a large shopping mall overlooking the smartphone-user lane had been asking authorities for it over a month, which suggests that it’s just a marketing scheme. However, it turns out that the special sidewalk lane is actually a safety precaution for “phubbers”. Cars often come onto the pavement in front of the mall, sometimes barely missing pedestrians who have their eyebvalls virtually glued to their smartphones, so the lane is supposed to keep them out of harm’s way.

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Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention.

Called a “smart classroom behavior management system”, the new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhou’s No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students’ facial expressions and general behavior and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering.

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Authorities in Hejiang county, China’s Sichuan province, have come up with a controversial method of convincing borrowers to pay up their debts – showing their faces and names during short clips played in cinemas before the main movie starts.

Called “Reel of Shame”, the clip features an animated character who tells the audience “Come look at these laolai” before showing the borrowers’ faces, names and other details on the big screen. The derogatory term ‘laolai’ refers to borrowers who fail to pay their debts on time. To maximize the technique’s effectiveness, authorities show the borrowers’ faces in cinemas in their local area.

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A family in Yunan Province, China, recently had to give up the pet puppy they had bought two years ago after it grew into a 250lbs black bear.

Su Yun, who lives near the city of Kunming, bought the animal two years ago, while on vacation. At the time, she thought she had paid for a Tibetan Mastiff puppy, one of the most highly-regarded dog breeds in China, and didn’t much care that it was sold by a random man on the side of the road. The price was good and the puppy certainly looked like it was going to grow up to be an impressive specimen. Little did she know that the “puppy” would exceed all her expectations, at least in terms of size.

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It sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but according to recent news reports, Chinese companies are using special helmets to monitor workers’ brain activity in order to reduce stress, manipulate break times with the ultimate goal of increasing productivity.

The South China Morning Post recently reported employee brainwave monitoring in China is used on an unprecedented scale. Sensors concealed in work helmets and lightweight hats constantly monitor and collect workers’ brain activity, which is then fed into computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms that detect “emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage”. This data is then used by management to adjust the work schedule and pace of production or to change working conditions in order to increase productivity.

Hangzhou-based State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power  is one of the many companies relying on employee brainwave monitoring, and according to Cheng Jingzhou, the official in charge of the “emotional surveillance program”, it has definitely paid off. The company’s 40,000 employees manage the power supply and distribution network to homes and businesses in Hangzhou province, and this program has allowed them to that to a higher standard.

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In China, health insurance companies apparently offer discounts to people who can prove they get enough exercise every day by using their mobile phones to monitor their movement. Only instead of actually going for walks, some people use ingenious perpetuum mobile devices to cheat the system.

I first learned about China’s “mobile phone cradles” a few days ago, after seeing a picture of a strange perpetuum mobile device with a smartphone attached to it, tweeted by Chinese comedian Dashan (@akaDashan). He had spotted it in a restaurant in Harbin, where patrons were invited to use it to trick their phones’ pedometer apps into recording thousands of steps artificially, while they relaxed, and had a bite to eat or a drink. Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Well, that’s where it gets interesting.

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A young Chinese doctor was recently set free after spending three month in jail for claiming that a certain brand of medicinal wine was toxic and couldn’t cure heart disease and arthritis, as the manufacturer claimed.

It all started last December, when Guangzhou-based  physician Tan Qindong published a short article on Chinese social media platform Meipian, stating that the popular Hongmao Medicinal Wine was not only toxic, but also ineffective in treating serious heart conditions and arthritis, as advertised by the manufacturer. His post apparently drew a lot of attention, as Hongmao soon filed a defamation lawsuit against the 39-year-old doctor, claiming that it had “maliciously discredited” the brand’s reputation and had caused “significant financial losses” of as much as 1.4 million yuan ($223,000).

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Zhang Shuai, a 22-year-old senior at the Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, in Harbin, recently made news headlines in China for his six month transformation from overweight and out of shape to regional bodybuilding champion.

Shuai had been a star player on his college basketball team, but a couple of years ago, a serious injury forced him off the court and into a state of depression. Due to excessive eating and an almost complete lack of physical exercise, he put on a whopping 40 kilograms in only six months, which caused all kinds of inconveniences for the once athletic teen. However, six months ago, Zhang Shuai decided that enough was enough and it was time to get back into tip top shape. He started exercising again, adhered to a strict diet, and within half a year, he was in the best shape of his life.

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Wang Mingqing’s daughter went missing 24 years ago, but even if the chances of finding her became lower with each passing year, he never gave up hope. After decades of tireless searching, the nearly-impossible happened – Wang received confirmation that his daughter had been found thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country.

Wang’s life was forever shattered on January 8, 1994. He and his wife were serving customers at their their fruit stall in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan province, and their 4-year-old  daughter Wang Qifeng was playing nearby. All the man remembers is that they both lost site of the girl for a little while, and she was gone. When they realized she was missing, both parents started looking for her, calling out her name and asking passers-by if they had seen her. They spent all day searching for Qifeng, but when they finally went home at 1 a.m., all they could do was weep.

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44-year-old Yang Dan has been a weather girl at China’s state broadcaster CCTV for over 22 years, but what’s most remarkable about her long career is that she doesn’t seem to have aged a day during that time.

Yang’s incredibly youthful looks have always fascinated her fans, but after the producers of her weather program released a compilation video of her 22-year career for International Woman’s Day, everyone started calling her an “ageless goddess”. Watching the video, it’s easy to see how people came up with that pompous nickname – at 44-years-old, Yang Dan looks as young as she did when she was 22.

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You probably didn’t even know your shoes needed sandals, did you? Well, that’s because you’re not as avant-garde as Sankuanz, a Chinese fashion label that knows just what you need to keep your brand new sneakers looking flawless for longer – sandals, of course.

Now, we’ve featured commercially-available sneaker protectors aimed at sneaker-heads before, but they looked more like artistically designed plastic bags, whereas Sankuanz just went with the “shoes for shoes” idea. They just came up with these bulky plastic and Velcro that can fit your already “sneakered” feet and protect them from, well, wear and tear, I guess, because I don’t see these sandals doing anything if it starts to rain. They made quite an impact at the recently-concluded Paris Fashion Week, but let’s just say the feedback wasn’t 100% positive. Either people are too conservative or they just don’t get the practicality of the idea.

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A 49-year-old man in South West China has spent the past decade living rough under a bridge trying to break the lottery code.

Wang Chengzhou used to work construction in Sichuan Province, but moved to Chongqing in 2008 after suffering a work-related injury. Instead of using the $50,000 yuan he had received as compensation from his former employer to start a new life, Wang spent it all on his obsession – cracking the lottery code. He cut off all communication with his family and settled under a bridge where he has been working hard on figuring out the algorithms behind the lottery. After 10 years of hard work, he claims to have finally cracked the secret to getting filthy rich overnight.

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A Chinese divorced mother-of-one was left shocked and devastated after her live-in boyfriend of more than a year vanished without a trace. What she uncovered a short time later stunned her even more – her “boyfriend” was, in fact, a woman in disguise.

Wang Qi, 41, from the Zhejiang Province of China, had met the younger “man,” surname Qian, online in 2016. Although they hit it off, Wang initially resisted Qian’s advances, explaining that they would not be compatible because he was too young for her and she was divorced with a child. Qian would not be dissuaded, however, and by June of 2016, the two were officially dating. By 2017 the pair had moved in together, and Qian had even brought Wang to “his” home city of Haikou to introduce her to his parents. Qian insisted that although they could be affectionate and sleep in the same bed, that they should hold off on intercourse until they married.

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If you still have any doubts that mobile devices have taken over our lives, this should make you a firm believer: smartphones and QR codes have become tools of the trade for Chinese beggars. If you’re feeling generous, you can simply whip out your phone, scan a a printed QR code and transfer some money to the beggar’s account.

Local media have spread news of mobile-savvy beggars in the city of Jinan, in China’s Shandong province. They gather in areas popular with tourists, holding begging bowls that contain a QR code printout. Anyone with Alipay, WeChat Wallet, or some other mobile payment app can scan the code and make a donation. Wait, beggars in China have mobile phones? Well, according to state media outlets, that’s not actually a rare thing.

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It’s the stuff fairy tales are made off: parents are parted from their child, years or decades pass, and then chance or fate reunites them. This, however, is no fairy tale but a very real one and involves a Chinese couple and the daughter they had to give up to ensure her survival. And as it happens in real life, things don’t always go smoothly. Qian Fenxiang and her husband Xu Lida finally met their daughter Jingzhi, 22 years after they left her as a newborn baby in a vegetable market. The girl was adopted by an American family and grew up as Catherine Su Pohler, or Kati for short.

The Kodak moment reunion was made possible by the note Qian left with her baby girl. Kati’s adoptive parents, Ken and Ruth Pohler of Hudsonville, Michigan, were deeply moved by the contents and decided they would tell the girl one day if she wanted to know. When the day of the revelation came in 2016, Kati was 21 and a college student. It took another year before she got to meet her birth parents on the famed Broken Bridge in Hangzhou.

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