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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A 29-year-old man from Guangzhou, China experienced sudden paralysis of all four limbs after spending two consecutive days playing on his mobile phone. The man reportedly spent a lot of his time looking down at his handheld, but this latest gaming marathon was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Late last month, the yet unidentified gamer spent two consecutive days trying to advance as much as possible in the mobile video game he was so passionate about. In the early hours of the third day, he felt a sudden pain and stiffness in his neck. Within moments all four of his limbs went numb, and he found himself paralyzed. His family rushed him to the emergency department of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, where, after an MRI and other tests, Shen Huiyong, the orthopedic specialist, diagnosed him with cervical spondylosis hematoma. That meant that his paralysis was caused by blood clots in his cervical spinal tube pressing against his spinal cord.

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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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A new Chinese app called Miao A or “Seconds” allows celebrities and socialites to sell their time to fans, by the second. The unusual service has recently come under scrutiny, however, as investors are also able to buy and trade celebrity time, causing the app to operate as an illegal stock exchange.

The Beijing-based app describes itself as the first time-trading platform that helps fans get access to their favorite celebs. The company buys time in bulk from stars or their agents and then sells it in one-second packets to the public. The platform charges a 3% service fee on all exchanges, and all transactions managed through the Chinese online payment platform NetEase. An average month sees an exchange of 300 to 400 million yuan ($45-60 million) worth of celebrities’ time.

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The untimely death of a 20-year-old video game streamer from China who used to play an insanely popular online game for 9 hours straight every night recently brought the addictive nature of video games into debate.

“Lonely King” was one of the most successful streamers of “King of Glory”, an incredibly successful mobile game with 200 million monthly active players. The 20-year-old reportedly had over 170,000 fans on his streaming platform, and used to showcase his gaming sessions for many hours on end, every single day. Lonely King’s last live playing session occurred on November 2nd, after which he simply disappeared. Used to watching his live streams at least once every 24 hours, Lonely King’s fans started speculating about his well-being several days after noticing his continued absence. Many of them anticipated that he might have succumbed to exhaustion, seeing as he had drastically altered his video game playing schedule – streaming from midnight to 9 in the morning, every night – since July.

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A mysterious condition has left a 30-year-old man in rural eastern China looking and behaving like a small child. He cannot speak, can only stand for short periods of time and needs round-the-clock care that his loving mother is happy to provide.

Looking at Wang Tianfang, you would swear that he couldn’t be a day over 4-years-old, but he was actually born in 1987, which makes him 30. His mother, Chu Xiaoping, says that both Wang’s physical and intellectual development stopped when he was between 2 and 3-years-old, and that despite being consulted by several doctors, the reason for his stagnation remains a mystery. The 30-year-old man is only 80-cm-high and is unable to speak or feed himself.

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Chen Ming, a young video-game designer from Shenzen, China, recently sparked the envy of iPhone fans all around the world, after buying 25 brand new iPhone X smartphones and arranging them in a heart shape to propose to his girlfriend.

To pull of the over-the-top marriage proposal, Chen Ming pre-ordered 25 iPhone Xs, and, on November 3, when the newest Apple handheld officially launched in China, he arranged them all in the shape of a heart on a bed of red rose metals, with an engagement ring in the middle. To make sure that his girlfriend didn’t suspect a thing, Chen enlisted the help of her friends, asking them to bring her to the specified location of the surprise.

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Four sophomore students at the University of Hefei, in eastern China, recently proved that you don’t have to spend a small fortune on a designer dress to look stunning. You can make it yourself, for free, using only plant leaves.

Photos of the four students’ stunning leaf dress have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media for about a week, and people still can’t stop gushing over them. And who can blame them, really? Just take a look at what these kids were able to do with about 6,000 leaves, some thread and mountains of patience.

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Cheese and ice tea doesn’t sound like a particularly tasty combination, but just try telling that to the thousands of people all across China standing in line for up to five hours to get their hands on a cup of it. Cheese tea is a nationwide sensation, making it hard to believe that it was created by a guy in his early 20s with no real knowledge of tea.

Only a few months ago, Hey Tea, the company behind China’s insanely popular cheese ice tea, was a small street-side shop in Jiangmen, Guangdong, but today they have over 50 branches in Guangdong Province alone, as well as new venues in bustling urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing. They are growing at an astonishing rate, but it’s still not enough to satisfy demand for their bizarrely-sounding cheese tea. People still have to spend at least 2 hours, and, in some cases, up to 5 hours in line to get their hands on a cup. It’s apparently so good that busy people pay others to wait in line for them, and the company sometimes has to hire private security to keep the lines moving and hustlers from cutting in line.

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In an attempt to tackle obesity on its campus, a university in Jiangsu, China, is offering overweight students the chance to enroll in a special weight-loss program, where they will receive their grades based on how much weight they shed and on how well they do in class.

Zhou Quanfu, a lecturer at the Nanjing Agriculture University, came up with the idea for the accredited weight loss program after learning that most of his overweight students didn’t exercise because they thought it was pointless. So he decided to motivate them by having their grades depend more on their physical shape than on their actual performance in school. Sixty per cent of each student’s grade is determined by how much weight they lose in a set period of time, with their curricular activity only accounting for 40 percent of the total score. Students enrolled in the program have to lose at least 7 percent of their original weight by the end of the semester in order to receive full grades.

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Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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Photos of three Chinese women allegedly stuck in a South Korean airport, because their passports no longer match their faces following plastic surgery, have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media.

South Korean plastic surgery clinics are renowned as some of the best in the world, so it’s no surprise that women from other Asian countries, like China and Japan, regularly fly to South Korea to get work done on their faces. The problem is that few of them stop at nose jobs, face lifts and Botox injections. Instead, they completely remodel their faces, making it difficult for airport personnel to identify them from their passport photo.

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A 21-year-old woman from Dongguan, China, was recently diagnosed with with retinal artery obstruction in her right eye, after playing a popular smartphone game almost non-stop.

The woman, known only as Wu, apparently noticed that she couldn’t see anything with her right eye on October 1st, while playing her favorite mobile game, King of Glory. Thinking she was just tired, she went to bed, but when she woke up the next day, she was still blind in her right eye. Her parents took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a serious condition known as retinal artery obstruction. This usually only occurs in older patients, but doctors said that Wu’s eyes were incredibly fatigued by the stressed of constantly staring into the small smartphone screen.

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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Luo Dengping has become famous as the only woman in a group of “spider men” who climb vertical cliffs of up to 100 meters high, without ropes or safety equipment of any kind, for the entertainment of tourists in China’s Guizhou Province.

Men of the Miao people, in Southwest China, have been free-climbing steep cliffs for centuries. They originally developed this skill as part of a burial custom, to lift coffins of relatives up the cliffs and place them in small caves or just hang them on the cliffside, like the Tana Toraja tribe, in Indonesia. This practice fell into obscurity, but the Miao spider men continued climbing the perfectly vertical cliffs of Ziyun, in order to collect rare medicinal plants said to cure asthma and rheumatism. However, as Western medicine started taking precedence over traditional Chinese medicine, spider men found themselves struggling to support their families. Today, only a few members of the Miao people still practice this ancient tradition, and one of them is a woman.

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