03/14/24 - She even showed the baby’s vaccine records, and indeed, Mrs. Guo was listed as the baby’s “biological mother”.
A chemicals factory exploded in Yanjiao lately, and Phoenix News Network posts, “A comment about CCTV reporters not being allowed to report on the Yanjiao explosion:
“PR” used to be a neutral word. Whenever there’s a lot of discussion about something, and everyone’s minds are on it, it might just be noise, it might be criticism, it might be praise. You have to look at the actual problem. But for a while now, in the eyes of quite a lot of government officials, “PR” has become a negative word. It’s become an undesirable phenomenon. Perhaps the worst thing that could happen to them.
Some media has concluded before that some government officials seem to have caught PR-phobia. A lot of areas make “whether there is a lot of internet discussion” as a major KPI by which government officials are judged by. If something happens and everyone is talking about it, the first government officials to go down for it are people in charge of “managing PR”. So in order to avoid such a situation, these local governments will do everything in their power to make sure these public events are known by as few people as possible.
This is why they obstruct reporters from doing perfectly normal reporter. But reality shows us that the more you want to direct attention away, the more curious people get, and the more discussion it sparks. This Yanjiao incident is another data point.
If you can’t avoid it, then you should face it bravely and purposefully redirect the discussion to your purpose. That’s the proper way of dealing with these things. And government officials should get used to dealing with problems while the public is discussing it and continuing their work regardless.
“Controlling public opinion” is not an easy task, for sure. But for various local governments, something needs to be emphasised: those officials who manage public opinion well should be given kudos. But after something happens and everyone is talking about it, before you ask, “Why are these people talking?” you should ask, “Why did this incident happen to begin with?””
Comments say, “No government official want to air their dirty laundry.”
“Powerful people are only held responsible by the source of their power.”
“Public opinion can become an effective check and balance on power…that’s the biggest problem.”
A blogger posts a screenshot of a tiktok video, where the captions reads, “Certain villages in Yunnan sees 80% early marriages and young mothers, which has a huge impact on the mental and physical health of both mother and child. Many areas of Yunnan are actively combating early marriage, turning families into their first line of defense.”
And posts a compilation of comments underneath: “Anyone from Yunnan? Is this true? How early can it get?”
“This is why my aunt is a grandma at 35.”
“Back in the day, for Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, it’s common to marry around 17-18. I got married at 20, which is pretty late. Got divorced at 25.”
“I just stumbled onto a video the other day of a girl born in 1998 just like me. She’s preparing to get pregnant for her fifth child. My first child is only getting born at the end of the month.”
“Even 12-13 years old is pretty common.”
“They’re still children themselves! How could this happen?”
“Because they don’t study anyways. They just date around at school. So their parents withdraw them and marry them off. They sleep with their MIL before they get their first period, and sleep with their husband after. I only learned this after coming here for work. I was blown away. It’s mostly Miao people.”
“I was born in 1996, and my kiddo is 10.”
“You guys’ll make fun of me, but I was born in 1992, and my son was born in 2008.”
“I taught in Yunnan around 2012 or 2013, and 12-year-old little kids would come to school with their babies on their back. I was fucking terrified. They told me everyone marries early around here, that you can buy a wife with a cow. Their parents are super young too.”
“I married at 26 and was a famous old maid in my village.”
“Last time I went and got my nails done, the little girl doing my nails told me I was the same age as her mom. I was absolutely furious until I learned her mom was literally born in the same year as me, 1989. She’s 17-years-old.”
“The most triggering metaphor I’ve heard in my life came from a bunch of fanfic writers after Russia invaded Ukraine. They’d characterise Russia as “the mad woman in the attic” who had been driven to madness after years of oppression and abuse.
I just want to say, wake up. Your “Russia in the attic” not only has a dick, but he’s plenty manly, been draining his sister’s blood for half of his life. Then one day, when his sister refused to keep giving him money to buy a house, he went to his sister’s house and stabbed her seven-eight times, and wants to chase her out of her own home. He’s making up sexual rumours about her to everyone they know, and is now beating the shit out of his severely injured, bleeding sister.”
Comments say, “These braindead Putin fans aren’t even as good as Hetalia. Even the author of Hetalia knows that historically, Ukraine is the older sister.”
“I just saw someone in your comment section who’s a fan of Chun Doo-Hwan? Ahhhhhhhhhh go die”
A tiktok video of a dog harassing a mother and child. OP says, “This is so scary! If this didn’t happen on a crowded street, I can’t even imagine how it might’ve turned out!”
Comments say, “I love dogs and I have dogs of my own, but I think this kind of dog needs to be beaten to death.”
“No one helped her for such a long time T_T”
“That’s a Belgian Malinois. Both the breeder and owner should be beaten to death too.”
City Channel posts news that a 53 year old woman magically got a new daughter. #29-year-old girl refuses to have kids so her father gets a surrogate to continue his blood line. On the 13th of March, in Hunan, 53-year-old Mrs. Guo was returning home, only to see a female stranger standing in front of her door with a baby in her arms. Mrs. Guo thought she was at the wrong apartment for a moment, but this female stranger claimed that this baby was Mrs. Guo’s “daughter”. She even showed the baby’s vaccine records, and indeed, Mrs. Guo was listed as the baby’s “biological mother”. Mrs. Guo was utterly confused. And that’s when her husband revealed that this was his child by surrogate. Although she’s not blood-related to Mrs. Guo, they’re mother and daughter legally speaking. Mrs. Guo claims that she’s considering divorce, because her husband wants to surrogate a boy too.
Comments say, “No wonder she didn’t want to have a kid in this kind of family atmosphere.”
“What an awful headline, drawing all the attention to the mother and daughter.”
“I don’t understand your hashtags. What does the 29-year-old daughter got to do with Mrs. Guo?”
“Was it surrogacy or cheating? That needs to be investigated.”
“A lot of people have been asking about my neighbour. The one who listed his unit for sale at 6 million RMB and kept raising the price until it got to 8 million RMB. He raised it one final time to 8.5 million, and the potential buyer backed out, so he never ended up selling his house.
This is a post just for covering what’s up with this grandpa.
Let’s talk about the conclusion first: his unit is still not sold. Last year, the real estate agent suggested he sell it for 5 million and he refused. It’s fallen to 4.5 million this year.
That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is, he really can’t keep living in this unit anymore.
Both he and his wife are almost 80. He’s got a bad back, and she’s got bad legs. The unit is on the 4th floor and there is no elevator. The reason they wanted to sell it to begin with 3 years ago was because they couldn’t handle the stairs anymore, and their problems have only gotten worse. It’s visible how little they come down the stairs now. I haven’t seen his wife in 1-2 years now.
My dad is a little more close to this grandma and he chats to him a bit. Every time, he’d encourage my dad, “Housing prices are sure to rise, just you watch and see!” And my dad would offer him some comfort, “Take care of yourself and collect a few more years of social security!””
Comments say, “My coworker owns a house in Nanjing, and she also had an offer right around the peak of housing prices, and they’d negotiated everything out with the buyer. And literally last minute, her husband demands that the buyer also buy their parking spot, and the buyer didn’t agree. To this day, they haven’t sold their house.”
“Wow, I finally get the saying that “Generals don’t chase rabbits while on the march.” He already decided to sell his house at that price point, but he just kept hesitating over a tiny little difference in expected price. This is a little rabbit standing in his way in reality.”
“4.5 million is still enough to buy a new unit with an elevator or a second hand unit in the city.”
“I’m not even joking, this case with Nongfu Springs [bottled water and tea company in China being boycotted for including “Japanese designs” on their bottles] should be in textbooks. It’s a very unique case of a consequence of a developing influencer economy.
Let me ask you a question: Zhong Sui Sui thinks he was randomly internet bullied out of nowhere. He thinks he’s been wronged. So who should he be mad at?
You can’t be mad at Wahaha [competing company], right? Neither the late Mr. Zong nor his daughter [the owners] ever came out and said anything.
You could blame international politics, sure. With the tension between China and America right now, companies on both sides are getting impacted. But you can’t change anything about that yourself. This is the turning of an era. Whether you’re a peasant or a billionaire, you’re not more than a grain of sand. None of your anger means anything.
Should you blame influencers? But the problem with this case is that no big influencers have come out to lead the charge on boycotting Nongfu Springs, unlike anything predicted by Sima Nan [economics blogger].
Are you going to blame millions of netizens? But how are you even going to fight them? Honestly, weibo is one of the better platforms. Weibo is pretty centralised and relatively transparent as far as the algorithm goes. It’s easy enough to get attention, so all the big influencers are pretty toned down. But there aren’t truly any big influencers on tiktok. A lot of people might have millions of fans, but if they post a video no one’s interested in, their own fans will never even see it.
Because tiktok consumers swipe onto videos recommended by the algorithm. They just keep swiping down. Very, very, very few people bother to search up their favourite influencers and watch everything on their channel.
With this incident, almost all the videos and images came from tiktok, and tiktok videos can easily get tens of thousands of reposts and comments. Look around on weibo, and it’s rare to find a post with more than a couple thousand reposts. Even if a lot of people are interested in a topic, you’ll get at most a couple dozen comments.
Even a completely unknown smalltimer on tiktok bullshitting on this topic could get thousands of comments so long as he’s covering a hot issue.
You can’t blame your competitor, you can’t blame politics, you can’t blame any specific influencer, you certainly can’t blame countless randos, and this isn’t about the quality of your product, so you can’t even do better.
As a prominent billionaire who came from social media himself, Zhong Sui Sui’s lead an overwhelmingly successful life where there was no problem he couldn’t solve, and yet he’s stumbled upon an unsolved world-class problem.
If he had to blame somebody, then he only has tow targets. One is himself. Nongfu Spring’s three responses to this incident have been catastrophic every time. Posting on his social media that his mother has died from stress due to the internet bullying? We don’t know exactly what went down, but after that post, everyone started talking about this case again, and not only was there not any sympathetic voices, but the bullying seemed even worse.
The second person he can blame is Zhang Yiming [owner of Tiktok]. If you have to point out one cause of Nongfu’s downfall, it’s tiktok. There was an absolute avalanche of content that buried you. Zhong’s mom was 95 years old. Nobody that old actually hang out on weibo. She probably can’t even see the screen of her phone. Most older people I know mostly watch tiktok videos.
If tiktk had banned all the videos mentioning Nongfu or Zhong Sui Sui, then all of this public discourse would have dissipated into nothing.
As far as the future goes, overall, influencers on weibo tend to be much more rational and logical. Tiktok makes rumours, while weibo breaks them down and refutes them. All the hullabaloo about red bottle caps [that it looks like the red circle on the Japanese flag] came from tiktok. Almost all the influencers I’ve seen on weibo were condemning these rumours. I think for the sake of the future, we should make all big weibo influencers get tiktok accounts and direct traffic their way. That way, maybe we’ll have more sane public discourse.”
Comments say, “Wow, he exploited his own mom’s death for this? Is he even human anymore?”
“After I saw his social media post, I just thought, “we’re not in the same class, we can never agree with each other.” And my first instinct was to never buy his products again.”
“I didn’t boycott Nongfu Springs over anything I read on the internet. It was just because his son is an American citizen, so I don’t want to buy from him. I never urged anyone else to boycott him either. This is just how I go about making purchase decisions as an ordinary human being.”
“Next time someone asks, “Why can’t you find any girls nowadays willing to work for their future alongside a man?” You can show them this guy’s post.”
OP posts a screenshot of a post seeking advice, “My girlfriend has done a lot for me (supported me through uni and postgrad), but I’ve been overthinking a lot of things since I started working. How do I adjust my mindset?
First, to clarify, I love my girlfriend very much. I adore her. But I’ve been really troubled after I graduated. I’m still feeling really torn right now. I want people to give me directions on how to adjust my mindset so that I don’t end up breaking up. I’m still with my girlfriend in real life and we are still very lovey dovey.
Both my girlfriend and myself come from single-parent households. I don’t have my mom. She doesn’t have her dad. After her mom remarried, she’s never cared for my girlfriend, so my girlfriend was raised by her grandma (who passed away while I was in my junior year of uni). We met each other in middle school. She was gorgeous and quiet, and I pursued her first. We’ve spent 12 happy, loving years with each other. I think we’ve had less than 5 fights total, because I’m super sweet to her. She has bad grades, though, so she didn’t get into high school. My grades were great, but my family was really poor. My uncle had been paying for all of my schooling, and he’s looking to have a second baby, so he’s pretty stretched thin too and stopped paying when I got to my final year of high school. She said since she’s not going to school, she could make money to support me. I was totally against it at first, but it was my only option in reality.
Later, I got into uni, and since we log onto each other’s social media accounts all the time, I discovered that she had a hidden alt account, and I found out she was working in clubs. I was absolutely furious. I felt betrayed and lied to. She promised me that she’s just there to set the mood. She doesn’t even drink. She quit after a few days, saying that doing takeout delivery makes just as much money, and that’s what she’s been doing ever since. Sometimes, I’d order take out just to see if she’s delivering. For four years of uni and 2 years of my postgrad degree, she was working various jobs to support me. She’d usually work five and a half days a week, and spend a day and a half with me. We had a little apartment off campus and it was really nice and neat. I could’ve lived that life for the rest of my life. But then I graduated.
I got into a really good company. I work a lot of overtime, but I get paid a ton too. My girlfriend quit once she saw that I had graduated and was making money now. We rented a house, and we were really hopeful about our future. But as time went on, I felt like we had no common language anymore. I’d complain about things afterwork, and she wouldn’t be able to contribute anything and could only listen quietly. I’ll talk about some topics that she can’t follow either. I’ll try to play co-op games with her, and she’s even bad at those. She can’t even play It Takes Two competently! Ever since she quit, she’d just play around with recipes at home, and scroll around on Xiao Hongshu or Titkok, which I never pay attention to. She seems like she has a ton of stuff she wants to talk about with me, but I’m not interested in any of it. I feel like our lives are drifting farther and farther apart. And with no degree, I’m the only source of income for our family, so that’s super stressful. I still love her, but I can feel my feelings towards her changing. I’m only 26. Am I really going to spend the rest of my life this way?
Lately, we’ve went back to her hometown for her grandma’s death anniversary, and she brought up frequently when we were going to get married. I haven’t actually decided yet (but I haven’t got cold feet or anything. I give her my bank card and everything), so I told her that I wanted to save up first. That she deserved everything that other girls get out of marriage. She said that we could have a baby first, since we’d had to get rid of two babies because we weren’t prepared for it. For the past 12 years, she’s always said that her world was grey and dark. I was her only source of light. Without me, her world would be pitch black.
How should I adjust my mindset and thoughts? I still love her very much. Love is attraction and passion and she still attracts me very much. I’m just really worried about our future. Neither of us have families. But I can’t talk about this kind of thing with her. Every time I bring it up, she can only comfort and encourage me, but what I need right now isn’t comfort or encouragement.
I tried to talk with her tonight after dinner, and not only did it not solve my problems, but it’s just made me even more guilty and sad. She told me to touch her face, touch her skin, and asked me if that’s the skin of a young girl. She said she knows that working by yourself is very exhausting, because she’s done it for 8 years. She’s felt the winter wind cut her face like blades. She’s felt on the verge of passing out under the summer heat. When other girls were enjoying her youth, she was fighting for our future. She just wants to rest for a couple of years. I said I wanted to save up money, and she believes me, because she has my bank card. But she doesn’t need marriage right now, she wants to have a baby. She couldn’t keep her last two babies. Now that she’s resting, she might as well take care of a kid at home for a couple of years. Although she’s not making money anymore, she can help me save money. And she showed me the budget on her phone, where she was keeping track of every expense throughout the day in painstaking detail.
A little more explanation about the two babies:
I admit, this was my biggest mistake. I wronged her, and I’m deeply regretful over my mistakes. So no matter how harshly you tell me off about this, I’ll accept it. But a lot of people are reading this really maliciously, like they think I did it on purpose? No! It didn’t happen how you think at all! I still feel guilty about this, and every time we talk about it, I get sad and tear up. You can attack me over this, but please don’t assume such awful intentions from me, thank you.
The first we, we were both just kids, only a year after we started dating. I remember the date and time and everything, but we hadn’t gotten any sex education, so we have no idea about protection, and we were both virgins, and we got pregnant on our first time…
The second time was 7 years afterwards. She had started taking emergency contraception (I was against this, but she said she’d read PSAs about how emergency contraception isn’t just for emergencies. It’s actually much less damaging to the body, and I looked it up online and educated myself too, and stopped being against it). And with emergency contraception + withdrawal method + condoms, we still got pregnant. After the second time, I wanted to go get a vasectomy, but she violently disagreed (very violently! You can’t imagine how adamant such a gentle girl got over this!). After that, I just had to rely on condoms.
I’m not trying to shift responsibility. I’m not trying to whitewash my mistakes. It’s just it’s not what you think it’s like at all. Please stop assuming bad faith on my part.”
Comments say, “This girl is his lucky charm. Without her, he wouldn’t be where he is! And he thinks he’s better for her?”
“If you’re not planning on marriage, why would you get her pregnant twice!? Are you too poor to afford birth control?”
“You’ve eaten her up, bones and all, down to her last drop of blood.”
On the 19th of February, there was an accident at a Guangzhou pet hospital, where the hyperbaric chamber for pets exploded and hurt a female customer. She was sent to the hospital for the injury on her head. Based on reporting by Jimu News, workers from relevant departments say that the hyperbaric chamber didn’t explode, but it broke and shot out a part, which hurt the customer’s head. On the night of the 13th, the victim’s husband and good friend posted to social media that she has passed away.
Morning of the 14th, Shangyou News has contacted the pet hospital involved, where an employee explains that they are following this case closely and confirms that the victim is need dead. Guangzhou’s local police department says that they can’t reveal anything about any cases, but if the worst comes to the worst, they hope the pet hospital will step up and take responsibility.”
Comments say, “How did the original report go? That she knocked herself on the head? Lol.”
“That’s not what the pet hospital said the first time around. They even found “witnesses” to absolve themselves of responsibility.”
“Pet hospitals should be featured on 315 too.” [15th of March, Knockoff Awareness Day, when news focuses on stories of companies making shoddy, unsafe products.]
“An old question back in the day for Microsoft interviews. At the time, nobody could solve it.
You’ve got 1000 bottles, 999 of which are water, and 1 of which is poisoned. They all look the same. You’ve got 10 mice and an unlimited supply of clean test tubes. How do you find the poisoned bottle?”
The reply, “This question’s been solved years ago. You pour out a bottle, and kill a mice, and say that you’ve already disposed of the poison. Then if anyone dies from drinking any of the water, just say it’s all rumours.”
Comments say, “Two to the power of 10 is 1024. Just keep dividing the samples into halves and 10 mice is more than enough for you to find the poison.”
“I just need one mice. Just feed it one bottle of water. If it doesn’t die, then it’s safe. If it dies, it’s poisoned. Repeat until the mice dies, and that’s the guilty bottle.”
“Pour all 1000 bottles out and mix them up and dilute the poison by 999 times. Then kill a mice and tell them you’ve found the poison.”
I don't know which one was worse the psychotic Malinois who was really determined to maul that kid or the guy who wants to dump his girlfriend after she supported him since high school.