China society

A man in northern China’s Hebei province can keep a poker face while bungee jumping, and has filmed himself doing so repeatedly. Tian is a retired paratrooper and now works as a bungee jumping coach. 

A seven-year-old girl in southern China’s Guizhou province has become an internet star for her slick martial arts skills. Yang Zixuan started practising cartwheels and flips when she was just three years old. She now has more than 600,000 followers on the country’s social media platforms. 

A father in central China’s Henan province designed a human-powered roller coaster for his child. The roller coaster is powered by pedalling an exercise bike connected to it. By building this ride, he hopes to improve the relationship between parents and children.  

A man and a monkey in a zoo in northeastern China’s Liaoning province were filmed mimicking each other’s movements. When the man was about to leave, the monkey kept hitting the window, so the man returned and spent more time with it.  

Wang Fuchun, who garnered worldwide attention for his sensitive portraits of life on Chinese railways, died in Beijing on Saturday at the age of 79 of an undisclosed illness. Wang, who worked on the railways in the 1970s, won domestic and international awards in photography for taking pictures of people from different walks of life as they traveled across China via trains.  Covering the decades when China rose from an economic backwater to a global superpower, his work also offers an insightful portrait of Chinese society during a time of radical transformation.  From steam locomotives to bullet trains, images taken by Wang showcased the cultural, economic, and social changes that took plac

What would life be without people being weird, wonderful and wacky?  Sure, dreams and goals are important, but life will be terribly dull if we don’t take a breath to enjoy the whimsy surrounding us.  These people China have completely embraced this ethos, making waves by mastering a slingshot, a street workout guru who makes the natural environment his gym and hotels in Hangzhou that installed computer chips to clean clothes.  They brought joy to millions of people along the way.  The Chinese slingshot master A Chinese man named Zhu Liang could hit moving water droplets from a distance with a slingshot. Zhu has developed a special type of slingshot to hone his precision chop and plans to t

A 34-year-old street workout guru from southeastern China’s Fujian province can turn anything into his training equipment. Huang Haimu does push-ups on bricks, uses bamboo as an ab wheel, jumps over obstacles made of tyres and can clamber across a wall with his bare hands. He started doing livestreams of his workouts in 2016 and now has almost 3 million followers on social media.

Once deemed the “most beautiful” teacher in her school, an educator in the eastern Chinese municipality Tianjin can no longer teach after discriminating against students based on the social status of their parents.  The teacher, surnamed Xiao, was reassigned after an audio recording emerged of her telling a student, “If I told you that the annual income of [the student] Zhao Ting’s mother is equal to what your mother earns in 50 years, do you think your qualities can be the same [as hers]? They can’t be!” The incident happened when students were too talkative during exams, which Xiao blamed on parents who had lower incomes than previous classrooms she had taught.  She said her previous stud

A firefighter in eastern China’s Shandong province saved an elderly man who was hanging from a fourth-floor window after he locked himself out and tried to get back in through the window.  

An 86-year-old grandpa from China’s Sichuan province has finished more than 300 video games in the last 20 years. Yang Binglin spends his morning practicing ping pong, but afternoons are reserved for video games. He plays for 3 hours every day and loves horror-themed games the most.