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, a silent official is sacked, a monk misbehaves, a water park makes waves, and melons cause much misery:
Green rocks
Staff at an illegal quarry in Xintai, Shandong, painted the surrounding mountains and rocks an unnatural greenish-blue to pass environmental inspection—and somehow fooled officials for a year.
Swell vacation
Forty-four tourists were injured by a rogue “tsunami” inside a malfunctioning wave pool at a water park in Longjing, Jilin.
Speechless outrage
A Shandong official has been suspended from his post, after allegedly feigning being mute to avoid reporters’ questions while inspecting a company accused of supplying substandard cement for the construction of a school dormitory.
Mobster monk
The leader of a criminal gang that police busted in Yanshi, Henan, has turned out to be Shi Yongxu, allegedly a high-ranking monk at the famous Songshan Shaolin Temple and a 33rd-generation disciple of Shaolin kung fu (one Shaolin employee says that Shi simply ran a shop at the temple).
Face off
Douyu has banned the account of live-streamer “Qiao Biluo” after an alleged publicity stunt in which the celebrity broadcaster’s face-sticker turned off mid-stream to reveal herself as an older and plainer-looking woman.
Melon madness
After a watermelon farmer in Henan was asked to pay 300 RMB to a melon thief, whom he injured in attempt stop the theft, outrage from the local TV station forced police to ask the thief to return the money—which then led the People’s Daily to criticize the police’s blasé attitude about the theft (as well as their calling it “freely picking melons” in the police report).
Map mistake
Popular TV drama Go Go Squid is under fire after it used a map which didn’t indicate Taiwan, Hainan, southern Tibet and part of Xinjiang as China’s territory.
Cover image from VCG
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