Can you imagine an official edict telling you that you must kill your beloved dog? Or,
what about getting interrogated by secret police just because you like
a certain type of flower? It’s happened in China, and you’ll soon know why. But first…
No porn please, we’re Chinese November 2021. Police in Shanghai
were knocking down the door of a 38-year old man while he was frantically deleting files from his
laptop and phone. Pornographic movies were on those devices and in China that’s a big no no.
The man was actually an award-winning movie director named Shen Juhui.
His media company had fallen on hard times during the pandemic and so he
decided to try his hand at making porn movies. According to media reports,
for each film he made around 30,000 yuan ($4,700), but since he’d started his enterprise,
he’d got around 1,000,000 yuan ($157,000). He’d made that in the space of a year,
so as ventures go, making porn wasn’t too bad. He did actually manage to get rid of much of
the evidence, but the cops found details about shooting costs on one of his devices.
One of the actresses told the cops that she’d only agreed to take part in the movies if the
director agreed that he’d only release them outside of China, but of course they managed
to make their way into China. In fact, the police found out about them because the mother
of a 12-year old boy had found porn files on his laptop and gone to the cops to complain.
The kid wasn’t arrested, or at least the reports don’t say he was, but we did find
some other reports which said some Chinese people have been arrested for merely watching
porn. To do that, they used a VPN to get around China’s infamous Great Firewall.
You have to ask, why is China so down on porn when in most countries its accepted,
if not frowned upon by some parts of society. It’s actually been illegal in the country for
decades with the reason being the communist government says it wants to “protect minors
and maintain public morality.” That doesn’t mean people don’t make homemade porn or watch it.
All you pornography afficionados out there will know that there is
a lot of Chinese porn available online. Still, if you are found to be making it,
you could get in trouble. As for just watching it, most Chinese people would not worry too much about
getting that knock on the door. One Chinese man was asked online about the consumption
of porn in his country, and he replied: “If you just watch some sex, take it easy,
as long as you do not spread it and download too much, nothing! Yes,
nothing will happen to you! And my roommate has 5 GB of these movies to watch at night.”
This next bit of information could save your life one day.
Cross at your own risk In most countries in Europe
and in North America, if you see a pedestrian crossing the road, sometimes on what’s called a
zebra crossing, you kind of expect cars to yield. Not so much in some countries in Asia. For
instance, if you’ve ever been to Thailand and you think you can just walk over a zebra crossing and
everyone will stop, you could end up being one of those “tourists killed in Thailand” statistics.
Looking at forums, it seems there are a lot of foreigners asking why this is also the practice
in China. Cars just don’t stop, even though those black and white blocks seem to suggest
they should. One American writing about this said, “After living in China for 5 years I have grown
annoyed with this behavior so now I cross the street and avoid eye contact with the driver.”
This guy has a death wish and we really don’t suggest you follow in his tracks when you’re
in China. They might just be bloodied tracks. There are lots of cultural reasons why some
people won’t stop at zebra crossings in this country, but we actually found a website that
stated drivers in Beijing “are forbidden to stop at pedestrian crossings or they risk a 5RMB fine.”
We looked into this, because to be honest, we were skeptical about this so-called law.
Thankfully, we actually found a website that published the traffic laws for Beijing Province.
Article 40 of the law does say this, “When the lane is rather free and the visibility is good,
motor vehicles shall keep on passing through the road at high speed in
accordance with the provisions of road traffic safety laws and regulations and
shall not hinder the passing of vehicles behind.” But that doesn’t mean cars should keep on going
if they see a person. In fact, article 92 (4), says cars should give way to pedestrians. So,
in conclusion, even though some people have said by law Chinese drivers won’t
stop or even slow down for a pedestrian, it’s just an unwritten informal rule. Bear
that in mind the next time you travel to China. Here is some advice from a Chinese travel website,
“Even at pedestrian crossings traffic often doesn't slow down,
even if you start walking across. Some will even speed up to show that they want to go first!”
This next one will surprise you all. The government owns all the land
In China, you can’t actually own land. You can own a house on that land, but the land is the
property of the government or the property of a collective. Under the Property Rights Law, you
can get a lease on the land and that could last 70 years and then be renewed. If you sell the house,
that lease is then transferred to the new owner. To make this clearer, here’s what a Chinese
landlord said about owning property in China: “You can’t own land, but you can own a land use
right... Once you have a land use right, you can sell it on the open market to whoever wants it,
and the land use right is good for 70 years. No one is quite sure what
happens once the land use right expires.” He also talked about something interesting,
and that was why China has so many so-called “ghost cities.”
In China, you might come across lots and lots of buildings that are empty. The reason is
if you win the right to build on some land, the government wants
you to build on it within two years or you will lose that right. The thing is,
some of the developers seem to have been hasty and the properties have stayed empty.
Ok, now back to the weird and wonderful. Don’t eat that!
In 2020, news reports surfaced that said the Chinese government was in
the process of a big crackdown on the crime of…making videos of yourself eating stuff.
Yep, Chinese folks who’d turned into social media influencers by way of eating were apparently not
to the taste of the communist government. The types of videos were something that originated in
Korea and there they got the name “Mukbang”, which translates into English as “eating broadcast.”
The BBC reported that the government wanted to outlaw food broadcasts in the country. Apparently,
President Xi Jinping was upset about seeing Chinese citizens waste food in those videos.
The BBC wrote, “Anyone searching for terms such as ‘eating show’ or ‘eating livestream’
is now being served with warning notices.” The main reason, again, is because the
government saw such videos as breaching China’s good morals laws. Some members of the public
have also called the videos “wasteful” and “vulgar”, especially when the eaters try and
scoff down as much food as possible in a short amount of time, which is a pretty popular kind
of video right now in the US and the UK. As you’ll now see, eating animals typically
kept as pets is also becoming unlawful in some parts of China.
Don’t eat that, part II During Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap
Forward” millions upon millions of people died during a terrible famine. In the disturbing book
“Mao’s Great Famine”, author Frank Dikötter’s talks about what people resorted to back then.
After going through the Chinese archives, he discovered that folks ate tree bark.
They sometimes ate each other. They often tried to eat leather after
boiling it. These were harsh times indeed. So, you won’t be surprised to hear that pets
were fair game. Eating cats and dogs wasn’t uncommon, and still today, some folks in China
might be partial to a bit of grilled poodle. But in 2020, news reports stated that Shenzhen
became the first city in China to ban the eating of cats and dogs. The city said it
had done so in line with the “spirit of human civilization.” Animal Rights activists across
the world were happy about this, saying it could become a trend. Still, one of them told the BBC
that in China today about 10 million dogs and 4 million cats are killed for food every year.
But don’t go thinking everyone is on board with this in China. Most people are in fact
very much dead against it. In a survey taken in 2015, 70 to 80% of Chinese respondents said eating
cats and dogs was totally unacceptable. This next one is out of this world.
Say yes to drugs Like many countries these days,
China has a lot of anti-smoking campaigns going on in various parts of the country.
But in 2009, Reuters reported that in a place called Gongan county in Hubei province,
the local government had issued an order to make officials smoke at least 23,000
cigarettes per year. You heard that right. The reason was to stimulate the local economy,
seeing that the brand of smokes had to be locally made. Reuters explained, “Those who failed to meet
smoking targets or were caught smoking brands from other provinces would have been fined.”
Not surprisingly, there was a bit of an uproar about the smoking quota,
so as soon as the law went into action the local government rescinded it.
Say yes to more drugs In 2009, the New York
Times wrote about something similar to the cigarette quota, which as you know,
really annoyed a lot of Chinese people. So, when officials in Hanchuan, also in Hubei
Province, created a law to drink more booze, it was also decried by many folks in China.
In this law, state workers had to meet a quota of drinking a kind of liquor known as “baijiu.”
Again, the government wanted people only to drink the kind of baijiu made locally.
They said that at least $300,000 of the stuff needed to be consumed in a year, which the Times
said would have meant every adult drinking three bottles a day - enough to cause liver damage over
time. Yet again, the government rescinded the rule after many Chinese citizens criticized it.
Hmm, what else could people be forced to do? The answer is travel.
Forced travel plans In Guizhou Province in
the south of China, government officials wanted to report inflated numbers of tourists visiting
a certain tourist hotspot. To do this, they ordered all state workers to visit that place,
which was apparently some ancient ruins. These weren’t easy to get to, though,
with news reports saying workers had to take a number of buses, after which they had to travel
down dirt roads on the backs of motorcycles. Guizhou Commercial News reported that so many
employees had to do that trip that at times government offices were totally emptied.
One thing you have to remember when trying to understand this is that when you live in
a collective kind of society, you’re expected to do your bit. This was sometimes disastrous
in the past when local officials were trying to please the communist party hierarchy.
As you’ll now see, even in modern times, some local bigwigs have gone way too far.
Kill all dogs In what was also a temporary
law that was heavily criticized in China, one municipality one day ordered that all dogs had
to be killed. This happened in Heihe, which is in Heilongjiang province on the border with Russia.
The New York Times said though unconfirmed, the probable reason for the canine cull might
have been because of an official getting bitten while he was out on a walk. He
was fearful of getting rabies, so decided it was time to exterminate all the dogs.
The Times wrote, “Town leaders organized teams of police officers and ordered them to beat to death
any dog who ventured into a public space.” Obviously, this didn’t go down well with
the many dog lovers in China. One person talking on a radio show about the order said,
“When we need to walk our dogs now, we have to first go out and look for cops.”
The phrase, “You couldn’t make this up” springs to mind, but according to the China Daily website,
it was 100 percent true. It reported that if people were found with dogs, very much alive dogs,
they ran the risk of being fined 200 yuan ($30). This caused an outcry all over China,
but the government fought back, saying there were too many people getting bitten by dogs
and there was way too much dog poop on the streets. One official said, “We are very
worried that if the dog situation gets out of control, it could hurt the city's image.”
Nonetheless, China’s animal rights activists and the country’s dog lovers won
in the end and the ban was repealed. This next one is just as strange.
Only virgins, please Experts say that in parts of China which we might
call the boondocks, some officials are way out of touch with modern times. Thankfully, when these
overzealous officials instate a ridiculous law, public outcry often makes them change their minds.
Such was the case in the municipality of Chongqing in southwest China when
officials created a chastity law for women. We can’t find much information about it,
but it seems the local government was saying that if unmarried women weren’t proved to be virgins,
they couldn’t make a compensation claim on land that had been appropriated by
the government. The news media simply said that non-virgins didn’t deserve the money.
At least this next one might make some sense. What’s in a name?
We found quite a few news reports over the last few years that talked about government
officials banning the use of foreign names for buildings. Some of those names were said
to be too “exotic” and not Chinese enough, such as calling a place “Venice”, which might sound cool,
but apparently, it isn’t Chinese enough. In some parts of China, the government
said using such foreign names is “damaging the country's sovereignty,
the ethnic unity and social stability.” In the city of Zhengzhou in Central
China's Henan province, the local government announced it was time to change a few names.
It said a commercial square called “Manhattan” had to go as did two residential buildings
named “Provence” and “Venice.” A Chinese government official said
names such as those were “over-the-top, West-worshiping, weird and duplicative.”
Now you’ll see government paranoia as it’s most frantic.
Don’t you even dare mention this flower In 2011, the Communist Party started a
ban on one of China’s most cherished flowers, the jasmine flower. It didn’t even want people
saying the word jasmine. And this is in a country where people are used to seeing
jasmine everywhere, including in their tea. The clampdown on jasmine stemmed from the
pro-democracy movement in Tunisia which got the name the “Jasmine revolution.”
China’s state officials didn’t want anything like that happening in China, so they went
through the web blocking the word jasmine. They then started banning the sale of the
flower in certain markets in the country, even though many people made their money from selling
jasmine. Prices dropped and so jasmine sellers were out of cash. One of them
told the New York Times that he’d never even heard of a revolution in Tunisia. He said,
“I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t have time to watch television.”
The ban was somewhat secretive, with Beijing’s Public Security Bureau not wanting to talk about
it. Still, many folks whose lives involved the flower reported that they’d received a
visit from the cops. One woman said she’d been made to attend a meeting in which she
and others were told to stay away from jasmine. She was also told to report the
license plates of any cars whose occupants had come to the market to buy some of the flowers.
Since all this was shrouded in secrecy, no one really knew what the jasmine thing was all about.
A jasmine seller at the Jiuzhou Flower and Plant Trading Center in Beijing said she’d
been told that the crackdown was something to do with Japanese radiation contamination. Another
woman who sold the flowers not far from the US Embassy had been told it was related to poison.
We think that’s significant proof of government overreach.
Now you need to watch “Crazy Laws That Still Exist Around The World.” Or, have a look at…