What’s hot in China this week
Each week, we handpick the most trending topics on Chinese social media. Get to know what’s hot right now with us!
Fake fans mourn Kobe Bryant’s retirement
This week, Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in his final game, ending his 20-year career with the Lakers. His fans in China give him a hero’s send-off by posting to express gratitude for all the good memories. Something unexpected occurred. In a screenshot from someone’s WeChat Moments, someone posted about Kobe, saying: “Farewell. R.I.P. Hope there is no pain in heaven.”
Netizens all replied: “Wtf??! Kobe is not dead, dude!” Other netizens mocked fake fans by posting photos of other basketball players and saying “farewell Kobe”.
This week, 90% of netizens on WeChat and Weibo are talking about capsizing boats
A cartoon titled “The boat of friendship capsizes in a flash” flooded China’s largest social network WeChat. Drawn by a cartoonist named @喃东尼 on Weibo, this cartoon makes fun of friendship.
In the cartoon, two chubby penguins sit on both sides of a little boat called “the boat of friendship”, acting out several scenarios under which this boat can capsize. First, when one of them loses weight; second, when one is eating snacks and doesn’t share with the other; third, when one of them has his girlfriend sitting beside him.
It may have originated from the sitcom Friends, in which a conversation goes: “What’s the one kind of boat that can never, ever sink? “Friendship.”
The original cartoon has been adapted for people in different walks of life. Here is one for journalists. If you have a journalist friend, your boat of friendship might capsize if you ask her out for dinner and she refuses because she has to report breaking news. Then you ask her out for dinner the next day and she refuses because an assignment is due. You think she would be available on weekends, but she tells you she has scheduled an interview during the weekend. How true.
Buddhist temple builds robot
“What did you have for lunch?”
“Robots don’t have to eat, don’t you know that?”
“My wife always loses her temper, what should I do?”
“You can only live with it. You know that I can’t tell you to get a divorce.”
“Life sucks so much that I don’t want to live anymore.”
“You are not the only one that feels that way.”
These are conversations between someone and a robot. The robot is a novice monk named Xian’er, made by a temple in China.
Longquan Temple, located on the outskirts of Beijing, is famous for the academic achievements of its monk. Just to name a few, one has a PhD at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, another has a PhD in nuclear energy and thermal energy from Tsinghua University, and yet another is a gold medal winner in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
This robot is the fruit of the cutting-edge IT team at the temple. It’s making efforts to connect the public to Buddhism using modern means of communication. The temple not only has an animation center, which created the design for Xian’er, but also its website and Weibo account.
(Courtesy to Coollabs)
He ain’t no critic, but this guy got famous by making comments
A guy named Zhou Hetai is rising as a hot WeChat influencer.
On subscription accounts in WeChat, there is a page where people can write to the account. There is a function where the editor can choose comments from readers to display at the bottom. Zhou’s comments always appear on the wall of comments of popular WeChat accounts like Huxiu, People’s Daily, Yitiao, etc.
Newrank, a new media content ranking platform, found out that he has registered three accounts with the same name, in order to make more comments. So, is he doing this for fun, or is he after the fame?
Yuanmingyuan gets rebuilt in Minecraft!
Yuanmingyuan, the old summer palace in Beijing that was famously destroyed by the Allied Forces in 1860, has been rebuilt by a team of Chinese gamers in Minecraft.
Minecraft is a video game where gamers can build anything they want using blocks. This video, which took 14 months to make, is the latest Minecraft project from the team at EpicWork.
EpicWork, founded in 2012, is a team of over 100 gamers that come together to build splendid ancient Chinese buildings on Minecraft. Team members vary from people in their thirties to junior school students. Some of them are painters and video producers. This team has squads in charge of composition and post processing.
Originally published at allchinatech.com on April 17, 2016.
