Photos and videos of unmanned vending machines selling live animals like cats, small dogs, and rodents installed in various Chinese cities have been going viral and sparking outrage among the general public.

The significant technological developments of the last decade have created a fast-growing “unmanned economy” that continues to spread into almost every sector of the global economy. However, there are still some industries that are incompatible with unmanned, self-service devices. The pet-selling sector has so far been considered incompatible, but things are apparently very different in China, as more and more unmanned vending machines selling live pets are being spotted all around the country. One such video showing a pet vending machine in a busy part of Beijing recently went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate around the ethics of this controversial business model.

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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.

On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.

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A Chinese man recently lost his life while performing a controversial type of exercise that requires practitioners to hang only by their chins to relieve neck and spine pain by reducing pressure on nerves.

Over the past decade or so, a bizarre form of exercise has been getting traction throughout China. It basically involves swinging one’s body while hanging in the air supported only by a leather chin strap. Reportedly invented around 2017 by Shenyang native Sun Rongchun as a way to relieve back pain, neck swings quickly became a familiar sight in parks and outdoor gyms all over the country. Although hanging in the air by one’s chin doesn’t sound like the safest thing in the world, paractiotioners swear by it, claiming it does wonder for neck and back pain. Still, doctors have been warning about the dangers of neck hanging for years and a recent tragedy suggests that when performed incorrectly, this type of exercise can be lethal.

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The Hongyancun subway station in Chongqing, China is 116 meters deep and the difference in air pressure will often leave users with clogged ears when accessed via its elevator.

When the air pressure outside of the eardrum becomes different than the pressure inside, you experience ear barotrauma. It occurs most often during steep declines and descents and is usually associated with plane takeoffs and landings, or driving up or down mountains. Most subway stations don’t usually cause ear barotrauma, because they aren’t deep or steep enough for your ears to register a significant enough difference in air pressure. But using the elevator to reach the world’s deepest subway station might actually clog up your ears. That’s because it is located 116 meters below the surface, the equivalent of about 40 floors underground.

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The backbend is considered a crucial move in Chinese folk dancing, but it is also the main cause of severe spine cord injuries in children as young as five, leaving thousands of them paralyzed for life.

Ironically, the vast majority of parents pushing their beloved children towards folk dancing have their offspring’s best interest in mind, hoping to improve their physical fitness and overall health, but studies have found that one particular move taught in folk dancing schools is putting children’s lives at risk. Data analyzed by the Chinese Orthopaedic Association showed that the percentage of spinal cord injuries caused by the backbend exploded from just 4% between 1992 and 2002 to a whopping 33.9% of all pediatric spinal injuries between 2015 and 2019. Other reports show that, since 2005, over 1,000 children have been left paralyzed after doing backbends in dance classes, making this move the single greatest paralysis threat for young Chinese children.

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During the month of May, camel riding is such a popular pastime at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots in China’s Kumtag Desert that local authorities use camel traffic lights to avoid traffic jams.

One of the last things you would expect to find in the middle of a desert is a functional traffic light, but you can find several of them in the sand dunes of the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Nature Park, in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. During the annual holiday at the beginning of May, thousands of people flock to these natural tourist spots and engage in a variety of activities, the most popular of which is undoubtedly camel riding. In 2023, there were around 2,400 camels available for riding, as well as tens of thousands of tourists per day at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots alone, which resulted in serious traffic congestion problems. Luckily, local authorities came up with an ingenious solution – camel traffic lights.

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Ox Horn, a sprawling research and development complex built by Huawei in Shenzen, China, features 12 towns and 100 separate buildings, all inspired by European architecture.

If someone were to be teleported in the middle of Ox Horn and made to guess where they were, China would probably be at the bottom of their answer list. That’s because the Chinese tech giant’s new campus is heavily inspired by European architecture, including both replicas of well-known Western landmarks and buildings heavily influenced by various European architectural styles. Completed in 2019 at a cost of a whopping $1.5 billion, Ox Horn houses Huawei’s main research and development offices and features its own tram transportation system, but has come under fire for its obvious European inspiration.

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A Chinese nanny has been forced to take care of a toddler for months without any compensation after the child’s parents disappeared without a trace with money they had borrowed from her.

Ms. Yu, the victim in this bizarre case that has been making headlines in China for over a month, claims that she was hired by a couple in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, to take care of their newborn son for a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan (around $1,000). Shortly after striking a deal, the parents told Ms. Yu that they needed to travel to Tianjin to receive a sizeable inheritance, including property and luxury goods, and asked if she could help them out with a loan for lawyers and paperwork. As insurance that they would pay her back, the couple showed her photos of the goods they had allegedly inherited, as well as of the ownership papers for a hotel. Furthermore, they decided to leave their child with the nanny while they sorted everything in Tianjin, so Ms. Yu assumed that there was no reason to worry. She was wrong!

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A Chinese woman who had an affair with a married businessman who died in a car accident used frozen embryos to conceive a child she claimed was his and then sued his family for inheritance.

In a case that sparked a heated debate in China, a Guangdong woman surnamed Leng sued her deceased lover’s wife for part of his fortune as inheritance for her baby boy, who she claimed was her lover’s heir. The unusual dispute began in 2021, soon after the tragic death of the man, surnamed Wen, in a car accident. Leng claimed to have frozen some of her eggs prior to the accident which were later fertilised using Wen’s sperm at a private fertility clinic. In December of 2021, she gave birth to a healthy son she named Xiaowen, and in August of last year, she sued her former lover’s family, asking for a part of their estate as an inheritance for her son.

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In many cultures, ears protruding too much from the skull are considered a physical defect, but in China, people are more than happy to go under the knife to attain this physical trait known as “elf ears”.

China’s ‘elf ears’ cosmetic craze received worldwide attention in 2021 when it was covered by some of the world’s largest news outlets after becoming a trending topic on Chinese social media. It all started with a before-and-after photo posted on Weibo, China’s version of X (Twitter), by online influencer Chen Jianan who had recently undergone a procedure to make her ears more visible from the front. Chen was of the belief that this minor change made her face look slimmer and younger, and judging by the number of Chinese cosmetic clinics offering the ‘elf ears’ procedure, she is definitely not the only one. Many people are willing to go under the knife and pay big money to get protruding ears.

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An 18-year-old Chinese girl who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she tracked his every move and called him 100 times per day was eventually diagnosed with a condition called “love brain”.

Chinese outlet Yueniu News recently reported the case of Xiaoyu, an 18-year-old girl from Sichuan province who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she made both their lives a living nightmare. The girl’s unsettling behavior began in her first year of university when she became romantically involved with a boy whose name has not been revealed to protect his privacy. According to Du Na, a doctor at The Fourth People’s Hospital of Chengdu, Xiaoyu quickly became unnaturally obsessed with her boyfriend, wanting to know his whereabouts at all times and freaking out when he didn’t immediately reply to her texts. Sounds like your average control freak behavior, but according to the doctor, Xiaoyu suffered from a rare mental disorder called “love brain”.

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A Chinese woman was recently sentenced to prison for kidnapping an 11-year-old girl whom she planned to raise into the perfect wife for her 27-year-old son.

The woman surnamed Yang met the underaged girl on February 13, 2023, while visiting a village in Liupanshui City in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Convinced that she would make a great bride for her much older son, she asked the girl’s parents if they would allow her to come back with her to Qujing City, Yunnan province. The girl’s father refused the proposal, but that only made the woman go ahead with her backup plan. She conspired with her 27-year-old son to kidnap the girl, and on February 14 they waited until the target was home alone and abducted her.

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A video doing the rounds on Chinese social media these days has gone viral for showing how easy it is to use AI-powered deepfake technology to transform into virtually anyone online.

App filters and deepfake technology have been around for years now, but the advent of artificial intelligence has elevated them to a whole new level, one which makes it almost impossible to tell what is real on the internet. Take this recent video shared by a Chinese engineer where he demonstrates how easy it is for him to pass as an attractive young girl. All he has to do is put on a wig, enable a piece of software and the AI takes care of the rest. It is able to replace the man’s face with that of an attractive girl but otherwise mimics all of his actions, including eating with chopsticks, pinching his own face, and speaking with the appropriate mouth movement.

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Chinese runner He Jie’s victory at last week’s Beijing Half-Marathon has been overshadowed by a scandal involving three Kenyan runners who appear to let the Chinese competitor win the race.

Sunday’s Beijing Half-Marathon saw 25-year-old He Jie crossed the finish line first, in 1:03:44, under a second ahead of an African trio of runners who collectively claimed second place. It was an impressive achievement for the Chinese runner, especially since one of the runners-up was former 5km world record-holder Robert Keter of Kenya, but his win was quickly called into question on social media after suspicious videos recorded during the race made their way online. The fact that He seemed to be the only one sprinting as he approached the finish line was bizarre enough, but one clip shows Kenya’s Willy Mnangat signaling his countryman Keter and Ethiopian runner Dejene Hailu Bikila to hang back and waving He Jie to overtake them.

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A Chinese woman is being accused of trying to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by poisoning her water to prevent her from taking maternity leave and thus avoiding a higher workload.

In one of the most shocking cases of work-related incidents reported in China, a worker at a government-affiliated institution in Hubei Province allegedly tried to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by repeatedly poisoning her water in order to avoid the higher workload caused by her maternity leave. The nefarious plan reportedly came to light when the victim noticed that her water kept tasting strange, regardless of its source. At first, she was convinced that it was the office’s water supply, but the taste persisted even after she switched to bottled water. That’s when she decided to investigate further.

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