12/13/23 - Weekly Roundup!
[I think I’m going to put my weekly roundup on Wednesdays now, where I’m going to cover all the posts I thought was super interesting this week but never could stay long enough to make it into one of my daily doomscroll posts. Since this is the first one, I’ll be covering more incidents than just what happened in the past week. Basically, anything that my brain can recall as happening recently is gonna make it into this one. But from here on out, I’ll just be keeping a note throughout the week of anything interesting that comes up. In the case that nothing I think is too interesting comes up, I’ll just skip a weekly roundup for the week.
Since by necessity, this is going to be curated by me and biased by what I think is interesting enough to keep a note on, please let me know what kind of topics you guys are interested in, so I can keep an eye out! And if you’re interested in any of these incidents, let me know, and I’ll try to do some internet archeology and dig up a more detailed account for you!]
Gao Yaojie died this week, a lady who made it her career to speak out about the AIDS epidemic in rural China as a result of unsanitary blood donation procedures. She passed away from old age at 95-years-old, in New York, where she’d fled to after threats and silencing by the CCP. There was a Time article on this, but of course, it’s not really catching much attention inside of China.
A man won a 220 million RMB lottery this week. More specifically, he bought 100K RMB’s worth of 2 RMB lottery tickets, 50,000 lottery tickets in total, all of them with the exact same number. That number turned out to be the winning number, and he won the entire pool of 220 million. And because Chinese laws say that you don’t have to pay taxes on lottery winnings if it’s less than 10K per ticket, and his win turns out to be little more than 5K per lottery ticket that he bought, it means he doesn’t have to pay a cent of tax on any of that 220 million.
Obviously, there was an immediate outcry on the internet about how mind-bogglingly obvious that this was totally rigged. Who buys 50,000 copies of the exact same lottery ticket? A lot of theories have subsequently emerged about exactly *why* it was rigged. Everything ranging from the super ordinary, “He has relatives that work in the lottery bureau and this is corruption”, to complicated, “The government’s been spending too much money out of the lottery pool and now it’s empty and they can’t explain it, so they had a goon go “””win””” the lottery so no one would notice, but he isn’t getting to keep any of that money”, to outright, “TIME TRAVEL IS REAL.”
The man himself has accepted interviews where he claims it was all fair and above board, that it’s not unusual for him to buy 100K of lottery tickets at a time, because this is, in fact, his weekly routine. He’s been doing this every week for the past 4-5 years. I don’t think he’s said whether he always buys tens of thousands of lottery tickets of the exact same number though.
An influencer who posts videos teaching people how to cook has gotten himself banned for posting a video in November about how to make egg fried rice. The reason this is controversial is because some early memoirs by PLA veterans about the North Korean war describe that Mao Zedong’s son died in Korea when he made himself some egg-fried rice and the smoke from cooking drew in American planes who bombed him to death. And this all took place on the 25th of November. The CCP has since declared that all of this is rumours made up to slander a war hero, and that he was in the base instead of the air bunker where everyone else is in order to protect vital documents. Nonetheless, among Chinese people who are anti-CCP, a lot of them keep a tradition of celebrating “Chinese Thanksgiving”, where they eat egg fried rice on the 25th of November—to give thanks and celebrate the fact that this foolish decision ensured Mao didn’t have a legitimate heir, which they think is the only reason China didn’t turn into a family dynasty like North Korea.
The influencer was banned because this was the third year in a row now that he’s posted a video about egg fried rice some time in the month of November, and the censors think that he’s dogwhistling anti-CCP sentiments. The influencer defends himself by saying that he barely even graduated middle school, he has no idea about this history until now, and that he posts daily videos, and just about every month, he does an episode about egg fried rice. So yeah, he posted about egg fried rice on three Novembers in a row, but he posts about it in June and December and March too.
A young couple in Zhengzhou bought a presold house which never got built, and when they went to the real estate developers to ask about what the hell is going on, they were beaten up by goons. They’ve been making vlogs of their life for several years now, from getting together, to saving up money for a downpayment, to eagerly waiting for their house to be delivered. So although they’re far from the first couple to get beaten up, they’ve definitely received the most attention for it as big influencers with millions of fans.
After they posted the video of themselves getting beat up, a couple of days later, they posted a new video saying that “Everything’s been resolved now, don’t worry about us.” Someone in the comments posted a picture and said, “If you’re being forced to post this video, change your profile pic to this.” And they did. And that’s caused a new round of controversy. Shortly after, their account was banned entirely. Last people know, they were told by Zhengzhou government to leave and go back to their hometown.
About a week after this happened, a different young couple was arrested by police in Zhengzhou for walking down the street with one of them collared and leashed and crawling on all fours, for “immoral displays”. The internet proceeded to have another field day about how, “Oh wow. I didn’t know Zhengzhou even had police! Since, you know, nobody cares about people being beaten up there.”
November’s CPI numbers are a lot lower than most economist’s projections. China’s basically got deflation as bad as Japan’s financial crisis in the 90s ever got, and most people think this is only the beginning.
It’s the one year anniversary of the White Paper Revolution! A lot of people chose to have low-key celebrations of the anniversary. By which I mean, in order to avoid police attention, people gather in the name of mourning the anniversary of the fire in Qiqihar that sparked the White Paper Revolution, or in the name of mourning Li Keqiang, or in the name of mourning the school children who died in a gymnasium collapse lately. The excuse is all something different, but there’s been a lot of public gatherings on this day.
CCTV has announced the official mascot for this year’s Chinese New Year, Long Chen Chen, a dragon for the Year of the Dragon! This sparked immediate controversy as people pointed out right away that this dragon was probably generated by an AI, because all three of its visible feet have different numbers of toes on them, and the perspective of its claws are all off. And also, people think it’s ugly and look like a caterpillar.
CCTV tried to defend itself by posting “proof” that it was drawn by a real artist, by showing files of previous drafts and the artist working on this dragon in his software. This defense has turned into absolute proof that the dragon was generated by AI, because people noticed that the “previous drafts” in the artist’s documents are only about 5-8 MB in size, and the video of the artist working on this dragon shows it only has one layer.
And then someone pointed out that the Bank of China, a sponsor for this year’s Chinese New Year show, also has a page on their website promoting Long Chen Chen, and they have it written on their website that he’s the first “AI-generated Chinese New Year mascot!” And now everyone’s making fun of CCTV for showing their ass.
So um, apparently, in China, who gets financial aid isn’t based on, like, your economic circumstance. No, apparently, everyone who wants financial aid has to get up in front of everybody in their year, and read out a speech about why they think they deserve it more than everyone else, and at the end, people vote on who should get money. Which is…that fucking blows my mind, forcing the poorest kids to not only out themselves as being poor, but to have to stand up in front of all their peers and friends and describe in intimate detail how poor they are and beg for money.
Anyway, a student in Tianjin made a post to the internet about how a much wealthier classmate of his is more popular with his classmates, and thus got more votes than he did, and now he’s not going to get any financial aid, and all the money is going towards his classmate, who doesn’t need it. He’s an orphan who’s living below China’s poverty line, with no one in his life who can help him, whereas the classmate who won wears the latest fashion and spends thousands on designer sneakers.
He protested this result and insisted they do a re-vote, and all this accomplished is that everyone is really mad at him for making them listen to all these speeches again and waste their time voting, so he got zero votes this time instead of few votes. Now he’s appealing to the internet for justice.
There are followup posts from his classmates saying that they don’t think he’s poor enough to qualify for financial aid either, because he bought himself a new laptop, and he buys spotify subscriptions and snacks.