China This Week: Crime and Punishment

China This Week, March 12-18, 2016

Want to know about the hottest trending topics in China, you won’t see on TV or newspapers? Follow the weekly updates from U.S.-China Perception Monitor, “China This Week”. We are providing you with the most talked-about topics, most interesting points and must-know information of Chinese culture and society.

1. Paper-Thin

In an era of excess and glut, health is in vogue! And what better way to celebrate health than by… starving yourselves?

This week, Chinese women on the Internet shared the latest (un)health(y) trend: celebrating waist lines so small they hide behind a sheet of paper.

Sound crazy to you? Well, it sounded crazy to many other Chinese netizens as well, many of which mocked the challenge through their social media.

Weibo user Joe Wong mocked the challenge by posting a selfie of himself covering his face with an A4 paper with a caption saying: “I have A4 face.”

Another commenter, going by the name Saque, insinuated that her cat stood a better chance at having the ideal waistline than women did.

It is actually unfair to say this is a health trend, as the women who do the challenge probably recognize that the trend is less about health and more about aesthetics. However, seeing how far these netizens are willing to contort in order to conform to imposed beauty standards, it seems some aspects of life are international.

2. Dropped by, but logged out: Mark Zuckerberg in China

Mark Zuckerberg is in China, and there have been pictures posted of him running at Tiananmen Square.

Despite Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s chief source of income, being blocked in China, Zuckerberg is well-known there, and mainstream media called him the “Chinese son-in-law” due to his wife, Priscilla Chan, being a Chinese American.

Zuckerberg has shown enormous interest in China, not just for his business, but admiration for the culture as well.

Zuckerberg also had a meeting with the CEO and founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma this morning to discuss the possibility of cooperating on virtual laboratory and others.

Fun Fact: Beijing’s air condition that day was rated as “heavily polluted”, a.k.a. not a good day to go for an outdoor run.

3. Pharmaceutical crime in China

A mother and her daughter have been selling deadly and fake vaccines since 2010 in Shandong Province, China.

The illegal vaccines worth 570 million yuan (US$ 88 million) of 25 different kinds have been sold in 18 provinces in China. “This is like killing human beings”, a deputy director from the immunology department of the medical school of Peking University said.

The mother, named in the report as Pang, who is a former doctor, and her daughter, Sun, a medical school graduate, have been detained on suspicion of illegally selling 25 different types of vaccine, the report said.

As reported, Pang is well-respected in the circle of vaccine trade.

Related legislatures and government departments are under investigation of corruption and discontent.

4. Go to your room and think about what you’ve done!

Four college students in Guizhou Province were caught playing mahjong and gambling at the dorm. Their punishment? To draw the bird icon of a mahjong tile 100 times.

Those students said the pictures were “so hard to draw “and they are “traumatized” from drawing and seeing the bird image over and over. They said they don’t want to play mahjong ever again.

I hope they learned their lesson better than this fellow.

By AARON WALAYAT, compiled by YAO SUN Mar. 18, 2016 on USCNPM