02/21/24 - Weekly Roundup!
So, last winter, apparently, Jiangsu has had a rash of student suicides. In response, they’ve instituted a bunch of policies about guaranteeing that students actually have public holidays off, have weekends off, cancel nighttime classes, and have the entirety of their winter break. Most of the schools in Jiangsu aren’t listening though, mandating that students “voluntarily” return early from winter break and attend “voluntary” night time classes.
In fact, in order to get away with this, at least one school is putting up police tape to keep students out of areas where cameras can see, because their cameras are directly hooked up to the state government’s Department of Education.
But the students have started a mutual aid group among themselves, where to avoid retribution, they’ll call and report each other’s schools to the state government for ending winter break early. So far, though, not a whole lot has resulted from this. Mostly, they can’t get their call through, or they’re put on eternal hold, or a government worker will get on the line and make fun of them.
A mass shooting happened in Shandong, Rizhao, on Chinese New Year’s Eve. This has obviously been almost completely censored on the Chinese internet, and it’s hard to get any solid information at all, amongst all the rumours and speculation. Here’s at least some of the more solid-seeming pieces of info: they’ve caught the shooter alive, and he’s an ex-con who’d been in prison before. The gun was a modified nail gun, designed to shoot metal pellets. There were 14 deaths and an addition 11 or so injuries, I think? Despite the fact that a gun was theoretically involved, apparently most of the victims died of knife wounds? Apparently, he took advantage of the custom that you leave your door open all night on New Year’s Eve, while people are going house to house visiting each other. And he just went from house to house, killing entire families. No idea whether it was indiscriminate or if he was going after specific people at this point, but we do know one of the victims was his middle school teacher, and another one was the witness who sent him to jail before. And at least some of the victims were the ambulance crew who showed up when the first family was discovered dead by guests.
There’s rumours right now that he had accomplices. There’s rumours that Ju County has been put under martial law, internet access completely cut off, with soldiers lining the streets. There’s rumours that the shooter had a military background himself.
Right now, supposedly, there a big fight between the local hospital and the local police. The police want the hospital to say the shooter has severe mental illness, because “he was just crazy” is a more politically correct motive for them to work with, instead of having to address any potential actual societal issues that might have pushed him to this state. This particularly makes sense if this guy was, in fact, an ex-con and the judicial system doesn’t want to be held under any kind of scrutiny for failing to reform him or whatever.
The hospital doesn’t want to do this, because then that makes them liable. If this guy has such severe mental issues, what is he doing running around free instead of hospitalised? Why did none of their doctors catch it beforehand? The hospital thinks they’re the victims here, because their people got killed/hurt too. So they don’t want to make this even remotely their fault. There was actually a very brief online petition on behalf of the healthcare workers in Ju County before it got taken off of the internet.
Right now, the Ju County government is busy doing a thorough investigation of everyone who has issues with real estate, health care, labour laws, or marital conflicts, anyone who might have an obsessive personality, have failed investments, just lost their jobs, just broke up, mentally ill, juvenile delinquent, and basically anyone who looks kinda sus. Oh, and out of staters.
A Chinese fishing ship capsized while being chased away from Taiwanese waters by Taiwan coast guards, causing two people to drown and die. China’s response to this is to “strongly disapprove” and demand further investigation. Every single post covering this incident from official media has a locked comment section, which has no stopped a lot of angry people to flock under the weibo of the East Navy to be like, “Well? Are you cowards going to do something??”
It also hasn’t stopped people from digging up an old video from 2020, about a Chinese fishing boat ramming Taiwan coast guard ships, which the government played a lot back in the day as propaganda of how “strong” and “confident” Chinese people are.
The government seems to be trying hard to push down the heat on this though, coming out with a diplomatic statement to the tune of, “Of course we’re going to unite Taiwan, but we won’t fall into the trap of Chinese people killing fellow Chinese people.”
This hasn’t really made anybody happy.
Unsurprisingly, the two performances in the Spring Festival Gala to draw the most attention from Chinese viewers happen to be two that I never featured.
The first is a magician, performing card tricks. I didn’t feature it, because I didn’t think it’d be that interesting to people who can’t speak English. Basically, he has people in front of the TV pick out any four cards. Fold them and tear them in half, and hide a random half of a card. Then, you shuffle the cards, and you move one card from the top to the bottom if you’re a man, throw it away if you’re a woman, one if you’re a northerner, throw it away if you’re a southerner, one for every character in your name, and so on and so forth. Basically just playing with maths until, theoretically, everyone should flip the first card in their hand over and it’ll match the half they hid away earlier.
Well, the TV host sitting right next to the magician screwed up (or perhaps just had too unusual of a name, coming from Xinjiang), and his cards didn’t match. People have made a ton of emoji packets out of the look on his face when he checks his cards, and how he’s acting with every fibre of his being to not let anyone notice and have the performance go on smoothly.
A couple of performances later, though, he totally gets called out by a fellow TV host. For anyone interested, here’s the performance:
If you just want to see a TV host be in the most awkward moment of his life, you can skip to 6:00.
And the other performance is this song, where two of the singers wore white while the third one wore black. And then, in the interview afterwards, two wore white, while the third one wore red. Then, in the credits where they’re bowing to the audience, two wore red, while the third guy wore white now. So a lot of people were speculating whether he was wearing a different colour every time on purpose to stand out. Then, someone pointed out that the choreography doesn’t make any sense, that they were probably supposed to take turns standing on the highest platform while they sang their bit, but the guy in black just kind of stood there and didn’t move for the second verse, so he might be hogging the centre of the stage too.
This has sparked a whole round of internet sleuthing into his history and past deeds, where people point out that he’s done a lot of stuff before that was pretty manipulative and scheming.
This is probably not interesting to you, but I have had a lot of fun watching the lengths people go to analyse exactly what went on here, including multiple frame-by-frame analysis of this song.