SpongeBob in China

Mix Lynx

Ha!  Get it?  Links/Lynx?  (Alright, I'm done.)  A batch of links today, because I know if you're reading this you're probably bored.  Or a fan of my bad jokes.

• They just found a woman in southern China that's been pregnant with a miscarried baby for 60 years.
• China has fake everything.  Including Disneyland.  (Though the real Disneyland is apparently coming to Shanghai soon.)  Watch a crazy Japanese video about it here .
• Some crazy guy called Matt Mayer made it his mission to hit every subway stop in Shanghai (all 9 lines) in one day.  It took him 10 hours, 14 minutes and 42 seconds.  Let's see him do that in 2020.
• Starting June 1st this year, the human flesh search engine will be outlawed in the city of Xuzhou.
• Some poor Chinese kid has been laughing for 12 years straight.  He can't even talk.  This is straight out of a "would you rather...".
• The transcript of Obama's inauguration speech was apparently censored on some Chinese websites.  Apparently it's not cool to say "communism" in China anymore.

China: crazy as ever.

Bruce Lee Can Kick Your Ass. In Ping Pong. With Nunchucks.

What can't he do?

China's Stolen Children

"I think there must be something wrong with treating children as goods, but I can't figure out what it is."

100% twisted.  According to the 2007 documentary China's Stolen Children, 70,000 children are kidnapped every year.  Police just recovered five children and arrested their 13 abductors Wednesday; the kids were apparently sold for anywhere between $126 and $3,800 USD.  The price, I'm sure, depends both on the new family's ability to pay and the sex of the baby (boys go for more).

Cynics will blame the One Child Policy for the existence of this warped child-trade, and well, I guess I can't really disagree.

The World's First Plug-in Electric Hybrid...

...is Chinese.  And the most impressive thing about it is its battery: half-charge takes only 10 minutes, while a full charge is 8-9 hours and allows the driver to go 100km before it taps into its fuel reserves.  The car made its North American debut at the Detroit Motor Show this week, and is expected to be available in the Western world by 2011.  It's already been on sale for a month in China though, and Business Week has already gotten the chance to take it out for a test drive (video).

The F3DM is built by BYD ("Build Your Dreams"), a Shenzhen-based, HK-listed company that used to specialize in batteries.  If you've heard of BYD before, it's probably because Warren Buffet bought a 10% stake in it for $230 million last September.

China's Moneyboys

What's kind of funny is that in Chinese, girl prostitutes are called 鸡女 (ji nu), or "chicken-girl", while (heterosexual) guy prostitutes are 鸭子 (ya zi), "little ducks".

The Human Flesh Search Engine

It's not really all that well named, but man does it work well.  Basically, if something you do gets posted online and the Chinese netizens really want to find out more about you, the picture/video of you will get passed around different message boards, with everyone chipping in just a bit of information, until someone can track down exactly who you are.  Takes a few weeks maybe, but it almost always gets done, whether you're a kitten killer (warning: it's pretty graphic) or a faceless hottie (warning: not so much of a hottie).  Pretty amazing and scary all at once.  And yes, Chinese people can be very nosy.  (Especially the women.)

Wang Fei, the adulterer in the video, actually won his court case against the woman who identified him online and the website that hosted the message boards, and collected 8,000RMB in damages.  It's the first successful lawsuit of its kind, and it's prompted the Chinese government to start looking into just how they can crack down on this kind of thing in the future.

Perhaps in response to the threat of punishment, the ""Human Flesh Search Informal Alliance" just released the "Human Flesh Search Pact version 1.0 beta". It states:

In order to reinforce the Internet moral awareness of netizens and to improve understand the proper meaning of human flesh search so that it will progress in the right direction to serve the people, this pact was written.

1.  Love the motherland, love the Communist Party, obey the laws, follow the regulations, support and love each other, maintain Internet harmony.
2.  Human flesh search should be follow the principles of honesty, safety, openness, fairness and justice in the pursuit of knowledge that will benefit people.
3.  Internet morality should be abided and the privacy of individuals should not be intruded upon.
4.  Exposure of privacy should be protected with the utmost effort and not disclosed to the public.
5.  Anything related to "corruption," "graft," "praising the good" and "denouncing the bad" is not restricted by articles 3 and 4 above.
6.  Human flesh search must yield accurate and trustworthy information, and the persons who provide the information must assume responsibility for its accuracy.
7.  Civilized language should be used and malicious human flesh searches should not be highlighted or distributed; under suitable circumstances, the affected principals and the websites should be informed about what is happening.
8.  Continuous effort will be made to increase proper awareness of human flesh search.

Update: The flesh engine is now busy at work looking for the killer of "Garfield".