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Five weeks after a lengthy chronicle of his sexual encounters with a woman went viral on the Chinese Internet, Yi Junqing, a high-ranking official, was fired for “improper lifestyle,” according to a terse news dispatch from the state-run Xinhua News Agency on January 17. Yi Junqing, director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, has [...]
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Chris Toepker is a contributor to Ministry of Tofu. He hails from the United States, has been living in greater China since 1990 and has recently relocated to Beijing. After so many years in greater China, I thought I had things straight. Sadly, my first-time, full-time working in Beijing apparently presents many new opportunities to learn. [...]
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Note: Gil Hizi is Ministry of Tofu’s contributor. He is also the chief editor of website Thinking Chinese. Numerous elder Chinese have a desire to remain fit and to nurture health. Some of them even fulfill this need by swimming in icy lakes and pushing the body to efforts that it had doubtfully met even in [...]
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Statistics show that at least 13 million abortions are performed each year in China, which makes it the country with the highest number of abortions in the world. That does not include the 10 million abortion pills sold or the unknown number of abortions performed at underground or unregistered clinics. Against the backdrop of the country’s One Child Policy, abortion in China is not only legal but casually done. Besides, to unmarried women, the social stigma of raising an illegitimate child and the lack of adoption services means that having an abortion after getting pregnant is almost the only way out.
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Jazza John, Ministry of Tofu contributor, helped with the story. On the same day, tragedies descended upon both a Chinese and an American elementary schools. Chinese news media, like their American counterparts, blanketed their front pages and prime-time news programs with coverage of the Connecticut shooting on December 16, while playing down or even clamming [...]
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In a talk show aired on Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV Monday, Jackie Chan, the world-famous actor and show-biz star, said that China is not the country with the most serious corruption problem; the United States is. He also called on Chinese people to refrain from criticizing the China, especially in front of “outsiders”. The remarks [...]
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North Korea declared the launch of a satellite a success, and state television KCTV ran a brief report confirming as much on Wednesday morning. The video channel of Sina.com, one of China’s biggest internet portals, posted a segment of the news program, in which an anchorwoman in traditional Korean dress announced the news in a [...]
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Jazza John, our contributor, is currently a student at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Taiwanese students have been making headlines on the island off the South-Eastern coast of mainland China as they protest against Want Want China Times Group’s bid for the acquisition of Next Media Group. If the take over is permitted by the [...]
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The term “nail house” has been frequently used to refer to homes whose owners refuse to relocate and make room for development, for their homes jut out stubbornly like “nails” from the ground, where their neighboring structures are torn down or crushed unimpeded, and pulling out these “nails” seems like a mission impossible. Such homeowners [...]
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From 3rd December 2012, governments have been meeting in Dubai to take part in the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU’s) meeting where officials from around the world have been discussing possible changes to international Internet governance. The ITU, the 147 year-old organisation, which is now a branch of the United Nations is often a forum where developing countries, sometimes with [...]
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From Sina Weibo and Beijing Times A female TV host in northeast China revealed on the Internet that she had been forced to be in an extramarital sexual relationship with a party cadre and was even raped by him when she was seven-month pregnant. In return, the official used his power to register her unemployed [...]
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On November 23 and 24, over 1.12 million Chinese across the country flooded to universities and schools to take the annual national civil service exam and jostle with one another for 20,839 positions. China Central Television interviewed a bunch of people in the street for their impressions of civil servants. Some answers really go home.
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From Weibo On the afternoon of November 28, the first hand job race ever in China was held in a small town in Shenzhen. According to the organizers, the event was to raise awareness of AIDS prevention, although it seems from the news photos and video that only seven men participated in the contest. All [...]
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Ding Xiqiao, 25, registered for the 5,000-meter race at Guangzhou Marathon 2012 with nearly 200 of his coworkers at a real estate agency, hoping to challenge himself. However, on the morning of November 18, soon after he started to exert all his strength for the final 800 meters, he fainted 300 meters away from the [...]
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Jazza John, our contributor, is currently a student at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. You can found a political party of your own, but calling it ‘Jeremy Lin Party’ is not acceptable, not even if you are named Jeremy Lin yourself, Taiwanese authorities ruled. Jimmy McMillan must have felt lucky that his Rent Is Too Damn [...]
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Either People’s Daily has woefully made a fool of itself, or, as a handful of netizens conjectured below, they did this on purpose: The Communist mouthpiece dedicated a 55-photo slideshow to Kim Jong-Un on its website when it seriously reported that the North Korean leader was named by “U.S. website The Onion” as the Sexiest Man Alive of the year.
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Below is a list of the so-called hottest English words on Twitter posted onto Sina Weibo by Gao Xiaosong, famous songwriter and media commentator. Some of them, such as niubility and shitizen, have already entered the Internet vocabulary and come into wide use by Chinese netizens. Others are rather new, but the social phenomena they [...]
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China successfully lands the first carrier-based fighter jet – J15 – on its newly christened aircraft carrier. But instead of the news itself, it is a rather trivial detail in a television news segment about it that has held Chinese netizens enthralled and inspired a new geeky and warped Internet meme. This is a screen [...]
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The hideous sex tape scandal involving a Chongqing official and his mistress turns out to be a small tip of the iceberg. A local construction company bribed Lei Zhengfu, among other officials in Chongqing, with young attractive women. Then Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun might have suppressed its information to protect them. On November 23, 63 hours after the sex tape scandal was exposed, Lei was deposed and handed over to the police.
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Sex, lies, videotapes…when the three things are interwoven together with Chinese bureaucratic life, it is always fun to watch. In the past two days, a number of pictures that show a man and a woman having sex in a hotel room have been viral on Chinese social media. These are the screen grabs of a sex video of Lei Zhengfu, the party boss of Chongqing’s Beibei District, having sex with his 18-year-old mistress. Initial investigation of Chongqing’s Discipline Inspection Commission reveals that the video was not fake or manipulated.
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