Viral Week is our weekly round-up of the weekend’s trending memes, humor, rumor, gossip, and everything else Chinese netizens are chatting about.
This week, bureaucracy is shown to be blind, a Hunan court makes errors, a tycoon is unsympathetic to overwork, and kiting and haircuts both prove traumatic. But first…
#IAMLES
A year after the announcement of Sina Weibo’s controversial gay content “clean-up,” the #我是les# (“I am les”) hashtag has found itself on the censors’ chopping block: the discussion thread under the topic been closed
The now-closed “super topic” had over 7,000 posts (screenshot from Douban)
Blind Bureaucracy
Zheng Rongquan, a blind candidate for a teaching position at the Nanjing Municipal School for the Blind, was disqualified for failing an eye test, in spite of a top score in his qualifying exam and an excellent interview. The school said they were just following the government’s rules for recruiting teachers—blindly, it would seem
Blessings of Overwork
Amid protests against China’s “996” work culture, popular tycoon “Jack” Ma Yun (founder of Alibaba, a company infamous for long working hours) defended the practice, declaring that the “opportunity” to work 12 hours a day is a “blessing,” and not a problem if workers find a job they like
Caution While Kiting
One Nantong man found that flying kites can be a dangerous sport—three of his fingers were severed when his craft got caught in a particularly powerful gust of wind
Haircut of Horrors
One Chongqing man became so enraged with his bad haircut that he threatened the hairdresser with scissors and forcibly shaved the latter’s head, before being detained by police
The Wedding Crasher
It looked like a scene out of Hollywood, but there was no happy ending for the ex-girlfriend who crashed a wedding in a wedding dress and begged the groom to take her back, causing the angry bride storms off
Mistaken Decision
A Hunan court decision regarding a land dispute was found to contain 317 mistakes, or on average 9.6 errors per page—including punctuation and syntax problems, and adding four zeroes to both the size of the land in dispute and the amount of the defendant’s debt
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