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Cholera sucks: The beautiful, brutal honesty of vintage Chinese public health propaganda
10.03.2018
09:41 am
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Out of all the “things” that have developed over the last few centuries, public health and hygiene propaganda is probably one of the most fascinating. To me, at least. From Victorian advertisements that looked more like S&M show-and-tell than healing tools to the wild VD films shown in US sex ed classrooms throughout the late 20th century, America has certainly had a strong history with weird and wacky ways to promote well being. I’m sure as shit not going to knock our flavor of crazy “stay healthy” publicity works since I own a good amount of 16mm films on how to prevent STDs and what fruits and vegetables you need to eat to stay balanced and pooping good. Wall to wall actors in fruit and veg costumes prancing about on a screen are great Friday night fun! Who needs bars when you have talking tomatoes and dancing grapes??

On the international side, however, I’ve become quite interested in Chinese public health posters and their history. First of all, many of them are incredibly beautiful. Their design and composition is quite a thing to behold. Considering that they are discussing how not to die of fatal diseases or some such topic, many of these communally shared images are awfully detailed and aesthetically pleasing. Others…well, their honesty and bluntness is admirable! And if nothing else, this is something I probably respect THE MOST about public health propaganda materials: they are there to tell you that you should really not fuck with the bad shit. The problem is so bad that they had to commission a poster for it. You might die.  It’s all about extremes in public hygiene education. There really is no middle ground.

While these posters may make you laugh or giggle, there is a fairly serious element in much of the content—they meant what they said. It seems strange to us now in today’s technologically advanced world, but when these posters were the social media platform, this was how messages about health were communicated. So just as a warning to those with a weak stomach, there may be an image or two here that are not completely, uh, ready for prime time…

It didn’t surprise me to discover that the US had a hand in China’s medical structure, nor was I shocked to find out that it was the Rockefeller family that introduced Western medicine to China. Good ol’ John D. helped to establish the China Medical Board and the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in the early 1920s (a medical school that still exists and is still highly respected). THAT SAID, the PUMC was certainly not an accurate reflection of the Chinese people. Based on the US John Hopkins model, the medical facilities did not truly attempt to include traditional Chinese medicine and thus many saw the PUMC and its work as Western colonization and were not super stoked on Rockefeller’s “contributions.” The tech may have been more advanced but it managed to completely steamroll over Chinese health and medical culture in its attempts to “modernize” what they interpreted as an underdeveloped society.

But y’know that was Western colonial thought. Fun times.

Anyways, above and beyond the obvious issues that arose from Old White Dudes fucking up (as usual) and deciding to make medicine and life-saving procedures a political issue (sound familiar?), some really fascinating health propaganda material came out of it.  Let’s look at it, shall we? (I could have captioned these, but that would have distracted from the art of these things. Plus it’s more fun to just imagine what’s going on if you don’t read Chinese.)
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

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Posted by Ariel Schudson
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10.03.2018
09:41 am
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Smoker’s Delight: Vintage photographs of opium dens
04.07.2017
10:03 am
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Opium. The word conjures up a louche exotic world of artists, writers, low-life criminals and nubile young women out looking for kicks. The word alone is intoxicating. It imbues a feeling of both fear and longing.

According to the dictionary, the word opium comes from Middle English, via Latin, via the Greek word opion, from diminutive of opos meaning sap or juice. Apparently, the word “opium” was first used in the 14th century.

Opium is cultivated from the papaver somniferum, a poppy which has white or purple flowers and a globe shaped capsule containing yellow seeds. This plant has been cultivated in India, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and China. Its principal active ingredient is the alkaloid morphine or C17 H19 N O3.

Opium gained its notoriety in the 19th-century with the advent of global trade and mass migration. Across Europe, upper-class writers and artists indulged their fancies by taking laudanum or eating opium leaves and pellets. The calming, soporific qualities of the drug were used in numerous medicines to treat babies, children, and adults. From teething problems to nervous disorders—opium was the medicine of the masses.

The word opium has a complex history that can often be misrepresented to mask racist and xenophobic fears. In the 1920s and 1930s, many writers of popular pulp thrillers (like Sax Rohmer) regularly featured villainous oriental types who intoxicated innocent blonde damsels with opium before selling them on to the horrors of “white slavery.”

It is always worth pointing out that the Chinese had grown the poppy for twelve centuries and used it medicinally for nine centuries before the middle of the seventeenth-century when “the practice of mixing opium with tobacco for smoking purposes was introduced” into the country—most likely by the Dutch or the Portuguese. Foreign opium was first introduced by the Portuguese via Goa at the start of the 18th-century. By 1729, opium’s deleterious effect led Emperor Yung Ching to issue an edict making opium smoking and the sale of all foreign opium illegal. It had little effect.

By the 1790s some 4,000 chests of opium were being imported into China. An all-out ban on the importation of foreign opium followed in 1796. Again, it had little effect. By 1820, 5,000 chests were imported. By 1830, 16,000. By 1858, 70,000. What was forced on China inevitably spread throughout the world.

From the 1850s on, the opium den spread across the world as a seedy place of refuge for commoner and lord. In Europe opium was viewed as a potentially liberating and creative touchstone. In America, it was seen as an evil and degenerate drug that led to vice, squalor, poverty, madness and death.

However, it should be noted that when the use of opium and the opium den was most prevalent or most virulent—depending on your view—that both America and Europe were at the peak of an industrial, social and cultural revolution. Opium did not appear to make people slackers. Even a fictional hero like Sherlock Holmes indulged in the occasional pipe—all in the line of duty, of course.

By the 1900s, the opium den was no longer quite so ubiquitous. There were dens still to be found in most cosmopolitan cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris, but opium was now mainly a fashionable prop for the bohemian, artistic, and literary class to indulge. Those who wanted a real kick sought opium in other forms—first as morphine then as heroin.

In a rather horrific twist of fate, morphine was originally considered to be the cure for opium addiction. In the late nineteenth century, morphine pills were introduced to China to help cure opium addicts. These pills were called “Jesus opium” as they were given out by missionaries. This “cure” was also sold in America right up until the 1906 U.S. Pure Food and Drug Addict which meant drug content had to be specified and banned the sale of products with false claims.

Opium addicts and opium dens became a fixture of Hollywood movies and pulp fictions. In Hollywood, these low-rent places were often depicted as some kind of exotic harem, with scantily-clad women draped over cushions, while eunuchs looked on and a nefarious hand-rubbing villain cackled. The reality was far more disappointing and seedy. Dens were airless, usually windowless spaces with air vents and doors sealed with blankets to prevent the telltale smell of opium smoke from escaping. They were also makeshift, as they had to be easily dismantled or rearranged in case of a police raid.

The following selection of pictures show opium smokers in various locales—from seedy boarding house den to salubrious book-lined apartment.
 
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Opium den 1920’s New York.
 
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More opium dens, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.07.2017
10:03 am
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Beautiful panoramic Cubist drawings of China’s urbanized landscape
02.20.2017
08:53 am
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Panorama of Tuan Jie Hu.
 
I spent twenty minutes looking for Waldo but was too overawed by the sheer magnificence of these panoramic drawings that I gave up looking for the stripy little fucker.

Not that I would have ever found him in these stunning, breathtaking, incredible, ___ [fill in the blank with your own adjective] architectural drawings of Beijing’s downtown districts. These massive, painstakingly created drawings are the work of artists/architects at the Drawing Architecture Studio, China. The images form part of their Urbanized Landscape Series.

Awesome, aren’t they?

Just take a look at the panorama drawing above (and its details below) of Tuan Jie Hu—“old residential area located by the East 3rd Ring Road in Beijing”—which “vividly depicts the views from the daily life in this busy local community.”

At the same time, the piece also shows some new exploration in architectural drawing techniques. Some 45-degree axis from different directions allow the viewers to constantly change their viewpoints, which is like a Cubism painting.

The Drawing Architecture Studio was founded by architect Li Han and designer Hu Yan in Beijing. Their intention is to offer a “creative platform integrating architecture, art, design, urban study, pop culture, and aiming to explore the new models for the creation of contemporary urban culture.”

Sounds good to me. They also sell a variety of products which you check out here. Click on the images below for a closer look.
 
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Detail of Tuan Jie Hu panorama.
 
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More gorgeous panoramic maps of downtown Beijing, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.20.2017
08:53 am
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This super creepy ‘It’s a Small World: Zombie Apocalypse’ ride in China will give you nightmares
10.31.2016
08:56 am
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Located at the foot of Mountain Lion in the center of China’s Suzhou New District lies “Suzhou Amusement Land,” a 540,000 square meter Disneyland knock-off theme park complete with Pirate World, and a Jungle Ride where you can actually shoot at the animals with a gun. Most worthy of note is “Small World,” a ten-minute dark ride which at first glance is almost a perfect copy of Mary Blair‘s design for the 1964 World’s Fair. When the boat ride begins the familiar “It’s a Small World” theme eerily echoes out of sync throughout the tunnels and that’s when you notice that something isn’t quite right. The colorful sets are dimly lit with store-bought Christmas lights, the audio-animatronic children aren’t moving at all (in fact they are all pale, blue and green-faced apocalyptic zombies) and half the equipment isn’t working. With a chilling atmosphere and supposed strange smells you can’t help but imagine just how terrifying it would be if you were to get stuck on this ride and forced to find a way on your own.
 
Halfway through, the ride takes another strange turn when you are greeted by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who are haphazardly thrown in alongside characters from Voltron. Copyright laws have been very difficult to enforce in China, however, it should be noted that “It’s a Small World” is the only Disney song that is of fair use. At the request of UNICEF, Disney left the song copyright-free as a gift to the world’s children. Strangely enough, there is yet a second, equally terrifying “It’s a Small World” knock-off in China which includes a dead baby hanging from the ceiling just eighteen miles away from the official, newly opened Disneyland park in Shanghai. Enjoy these video stills and ride-through courtesy of the website Theme Park Review and good luck falling asleep tonight.
 

 

 
The nightmare continues after the jump…

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Posted by Doug Jones
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10.31.2016
08:56 am
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Gruesome and bloody Chinese torture methods from the distant past
07.28.2016
11:46 am
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Execution of a Chinese prisoner by beheading
 
In China, over many, many centuries, dating back more than two thousand years, two philosophies known as Confucianism and Legalism have played out an extended battle in the public realm as to the nature of human beings. Confucianism, which is fairly well known in the West, emphasizes virtue as the key to a healthy society—its counterpoint, Legalism, argues that human beings, motivated entirely by self-interest, are more inclined to do wrong than right. In a general way, the Western analogues for Legalism are Machiavelli and Hobbes, although those two men lived many centuries after the original Legalist writers such as Han Fei and Li Si.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the pessimism of Legalism led to Chinese dynasties practicing punitive measure of torture that were almost comically exaggerated, including the practice of lingchi or “death by 1000 cuts,” which actually meant anywhere from 100 to 3,000 cuts depending on what century it was happening. Yikes!!

Here’s Li Si arguing in favor of extraordinarily harsh punishments for even very lenient crimes:
 

Only an intelligent ruler is capable of applying harsh punishments to light offences. If light offences carry heavy punishments, one can imagine what will be done against a serious offence. Thus, the people will not dare to break the laws.

 
Amusingly, the two great Legalists Han Fei and Li Si knew each other, and their relationship ended in a manner reminiscent of a Tarantino movie: Han Fei was poisoned by his envious former classmate Li Si, who in turn was killed, according to the law that he had introduced, by the aggressive and violent Second Qin Emperor that he had helped to take the throne. Oh well!

The remarkable thing about these incredibly severe punishments is that they lasted for centuries. The bizarre images found here all date from the 1850s, but they document practices that had scarcely changed over the previous thousand years.
 

A Chinese torturer disembowels a decapitated man
 

A Chinese woman being tortured by two men
 
Many more of these ghoulish images after the jump…..

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.28.2016
11:46 am
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University building sure looks a lot like a toilet
07.06.2016
02:41 pm
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In February the State Council of the Chinese central government released an “urban blueprint” calling for buildings that are “suitable, economic, green and pleasing to the eye,” and putting the kibosh on those that are “oversized, xenocentric, weird.”

One wonders how the officials behind that directive reacted when they saw the building recently unveiled by an educational facility in Hainan, China. It bears a striking resemblance to a certain plumbing object that most of us use every day.
 

 
Here’s the kicker: the school in question is actually the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power, leading some to suppose that the commode-ish design of the structure is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the purpose of the university. That it was deliberate!

This new toilet-building arrives in a year when many people are saying that Zaha Hadid’s design for the airport in Beijing, scheduled to be completed in 2019, looks suspiciously like a vagina.
 

 
via Mashable

Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.06.2016
02:41 pm
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The unhappiest places on earth: Nightmarish playground structures from around the world
06.16.2016
09:59 am
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A strange reverse “human centipede” style playground sculpture.
 
Many of the images in this nightmare-fueled post were taken in playgrounds around Russia, and they are about as bleak as a vodka shortage in Moscow in the middle of winter.
 

The “peeing rainbow kids” of Kiev, Ukraine.
 
Some of the other perplexing playground structures that you’ll see, such as a rock climbing “thing” that looks like a giant dick, and the reverse human centipede sculpture (pictured at the top of this post) were photographed in China, Tokyo and some European locations. Each of them has one thing in common: they appear to have been created by people who don’t like children at all. Of course there are plenty of demented looking clowns as well as depressed looking bears (because, Russia), and other odd animal-themed slides and such that are just too inexplicably odd for words. Unless those words consist of the triple-threat known as “WTF.”

If you need me, I’ll be under the bed.
 

Moscow.
 

Tokyo.
 

‘Goblin’ merry-go-round.

More images of strange playground structures that need to be put out of their misery, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.16.2016
09:59 am
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‘I am a Sunflower’: Amazing Chinese children’s propaganda record
06.09.2016
07:58 am
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On some level, a lot of the music we play for kids—and the music we teach them to sing—is propaganda. Not necessarily overtly so, but beyond learning the alphabet and numbers, the music we offer children is always going to serve as some manner of cultural value metric. And such music originating from a hypernationalist, militaristic culture is sure to seem utterly nuts to cultures that don’t go so completely all in for that kind of thing.

Case in point: China. A friend of mine with the dually cool distinctions of being both a university librarian and a badass sludge/doom bass player turned me on to some Chinese children’s (and other) records, dating I think from the early ‘70s, which had recently arrived in her employer’s collection via a donation. They were all pretty amazing—just the song titles alone sound alien enough to underscore incredible cultural differences:

THE PEOPLE IN TAIWAN LONG FOR LIBERATION

PATROLLING ON THE GRASSLANDS

THE OIL WORKERS ARE FULL OF ENERGY

CHAIRMAN MAO IS THE RED SUN IN THE HEARTS OF ALL NATIONALITIES

The killer item, though, was an 11-song 7” children’s record called I am a Sunflower, with wonderful cover art of smiling children marching with shouldered rifles and songs expressing totally overt themes of youth para-militarism:

LITTLE RED GUARDS GROW STRONGER IN THE FIGHT

GROWING UP AT THE SIDE OF CHAIRMAN MAO

LITTLE RED GUARDS ATTEND A REPUDIATION MEETING

I’LL GO TO THE BORDER REGION, TOO, WHEN I GROW UP

Now, it’s maybe easy to be cast aspersions at all that, but we have our school kids sing “The Star Spangled Banner” which is forthrightly a war song, and the differences between the Young Pioneers/Little Red Guards and the Boy Scouts are surely more a matter of degree of fanaticism than of kind

CRITICIZE LIN PIAO AND DISCREDIT HIM COMPLETELY

OK, holy fuck, WHAT? That’s pretty disturbing: Lin Piao was an officer in the People’s Liberation Army, and was instrumental in the communist victory in China’s civil war. He died in 1971, in an iffy plane crash. After decades of enjoying high rank in the party—I mean HIGH rank, at the time of his death he was Communist Party vice-chair and Mao’s presumptive successor—he or his son led the Project 571 coup against Mao. The family was attempting to flee after the coup failed, and it’s been pretty widely speculated that the plane crash may have been an assassination. He was branded a traitor posthumously; his name was scrubbed from the Little Red Book, and there was a goddamn children’s song about how hard he sucked. Here it is. I will fully cop to having ripped this from the record and uploaded it myself. Ordinarily that’s a HUGE no-no, but I’m making an exception in this instance because I’d quite enjoy the comic irony of a DMCA copyright takedown coming from China.
 

 
That’d be really cute if you had no idea what it was about, right?

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.09.2016
07:58 am
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China bans live streams of women ‘eating bananas seductively’
05.09.2016
11:11 am
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Lately it’s become a trend in China for live streaming websites to feature women eating fruits—especially bananas—in an “erotic” manner. The authorities in China, however, are not amused, and have moved to block distribution of the images.

As part of the Chinese government’s crackdown on “inappropriate” online content, Chinese live-streaming video services are banned from showing images of women filming themselves while eating bananas “erotically,” China’s state-run CCTV news reported last week. The details of what is and isn’t legal have not yet been set, but people featuring themselves in live streams are henceforth barred from eating “bananas seductively” in front of the camera.

On April 14 China’s Culture Ministry announced an investigation of popular live-broadcast websites for “allegedly providing content that contains pornography or violence and encourages viewers to break laws and harms social morality.”

On Thursday, CCTV reported that the targeted websites had already moved to restrict the behavior of some of the most popular hosts, which were “predominately attractive women showing their cleavage.”

The draconian new regulations require live-streaming sites to monitor their output 24 hours a day to make sure that explicit material is not broadcast.

Some Chinese social media users think that the new regulations can be circumvented by dispensing with bananas. “They will all start eating cucumbers, and if that’s no good, yams,” one user commented. (I am reminded of this song. Wait for the punchline)

Here’s an example of the kinds of streams that will no longer be allowed:

 
via Dazed

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Pretty girls sexy-eating döner kebabs are the new ‘thing’ on Russian social media

Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.09.2016
11:11 am
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Watch six bulldozers battle it out in a batshit fight on the streets of China
04.19.2016
10:39 am
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The short story here is that there was a contract dispute between two competing construction companies and that these six guys—like low tech Transformers—really went for it. That’s probably all the backhoe backstory you need to be armed with to thoroughly enjoy this clip of these duelling KILLDOZERS on the streets of China.

The moral of this story? Never piss off a man driving a bulldozer, even when you are driving one yourself…
 

 
via io9

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.19.2016
10:39 am
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Wailing babies and children projected onto clouds of smog in horrifying message about air pollution
06.17.2015
09:26 am
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China’s air pollution is a serious issue, one that can be downright deadly, especially for small children. Predictably there is a lot of brutal Chinese environmental art out there, but this is one of the most legitimately creepy stunts I’ve ever seen—projections of wailing children and babies on columns of smog. My first impression of the spectacle was, “Oh, it must be a Chinese artist making an environmental message!” Nope, the installations and associated video are actually an advertisement for air purifiers. Yes, despite all those nifty overtures to communism, China is very much a country that runs on capitalism. The company’s statement on the ad:

Xiao Zhu wanted to stand out in a market that was almost as congested as the air. A market where half a million people, mostly children, have died due to air pollution related illnesses. So we decided to put a spotlight on air pollution’s biggest culprits—the factories—by using the actual pollution from the factories as a medium. People took notice, and the word spread.

Clear the air. Let the future breathe again.

Oh wow, I feel so hopeful about the future now that there’s a product to remedy this problem!

Remember kids, if capitalism caused the problem, you can certainly count on capitalism to solve the problem! (Right?)
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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06.17.2015
09:26 am
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Unemployed Shanghai ‘booth babes’ protest for the right to be sexy on top of cars
04.28.2015
02:27 pm
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Automotive culture and scantily clad women seem to go together. We’ve all been in garages where the primary form of decoration is a pinup calendar or an old Playboy centerfold. Even if you have never heard the phrase “mudflap girl” before, you could probably figure it out, even sans context. The commodity the babes on The Price Is Right probably stroke the most often is “A NEW CAR!!!!” (in the voice of Johnny Olson or Rod Roddy). Cars. Ladies. Two great tastes that go great together.  And it’s as American as apple pie for a nubile lass to pose in her short-shorts on the hood of a bitchin’ Camaro.

But—well, not only American. Turns out, in China the practice surpasses even our own salacious limits. Apparently automotive conventions there are positively teeming with the so-called “booth babes,” but the central government in Beijing considers the idea vulgar, taking a dim enough view of the practice that it recently banned it outright. To be fair, it was a bit out of control—it wouldn’t occur to Americans to present a car in the following way, where you, ah, can’t even see what the car looks like:
 

 
It’s odd because China’s move is actually supposed to be a blow in favor of gender equality, but with a repressive, heavy hand that would never be tolerated in the U.S.

The 2015 Shanghai Motor Show, which is happening right now, is the first major automotive event affected by the ban and the “booth babes” who are now out of a job have decided to use it as the perfect platform for an organized labor protest. They’re out on the streets of Shanghai masquerading as unemployed beggars and getting the word out about the injustices that have befallen them. (I guess you do a “beggar” costume the same there as here—you put a little charcoal on your cheek.)
 

 

 

 

The large sign reads “The world’s a big place, shouldn’t we be allowed to survive?”
 
Apparently this year’s Shanghai Motor Show is hardly bereft of beautiful women, they’ve just been re-classified as “sales representatives,” “shopping guides,” “stand attendants,” and “car cleaners,” among other titles. Reuters spoke to one of these newly-renamed woman named Dai Jun: “I’m not called a ‘model’ here because they banned models this year.”
 
via RocketNews24
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.28.2015
02:27 pm
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Weird Gollum-looking creature photographed in hills of China
06.27.2014
12:47 pm
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A Chinese tourist is claiming he spotted an odd Gollum-looking creature lurking in the rocks of Huairou, in the north of Beijing. If you don’t believe him, he has a photograph to prove it!

“I walked far away to have a pee, and suddenly saw a monster. I took a few pictures of it, but I am now terrified.”

According to someone online who saw this photo making the rounds and wrote in a comments section:

“Over the weekend I and my friends went to the mountains to take a mini sci-fi film. And when I was having a pee, a person popped up and took pictures of me and shot away.”

I’m going to have to go with the monster here being a “she” ‘cause the creature is squatting to pee…

Update: So different websites are debunking the mini sci-fi movie claim and saying the “creature” was for a Chinese video game photoshoot. You can read more about it here.

Via Telegraph and h/t Boing Boing

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.27.2014
12:47 pm
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The Orgasmatron is here at last! Chinese hospitals install hands-free sperm extractors
06.19.2014
09:00 am
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The Orgasmatron was a device in Woody Allen’s classic comedy Sleeper. It was a cabinet one (or two) could enter to induce instant orgasm, a necessity in the film’s fictional future were everyone is impotent or frigid, except Italians. And, like videophones and space travel before it, this sci-fi conceit seems to be coming (sorry, I had to) closer and closer to reality as technology marches on! Well, for men, at least.

Via ScienceDump:

Chinese hospitals are introducing a new machine which can extract sperm for donors.

According to China’s Weibo social platform the automatic sperm extractors are being introduced in a Nanjing hospital, capital of Jiangsu province.

The pink, grey and white machine has a massage pipe at the front which apparently can be adjusted according to the height of its user.

Kissless creepers with more money than allure will surely be having this technology installed in their harem of RealDolls by the time I’m done typing this sentence.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Scientific American explains jerking off

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.19.2014
09:00 am
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China’s plans for a floating city are breathtakingly futuristic, cool, possibly unworkable?
05.20.2014
11:11 am
Topics:
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AT Design
 
We’ve all seen some of the silly projections from earlier decades for future lifestyles that never panned out, most prominently the space age home of the Jetsons and similar inventions from the postwar era. We know how hard it is to envision with any accuracy genuinely transformative ways of living, and yet the yearning to be authentically impressed by visions of the future powerfully remains, a yearning most concisely captured by the name of the Scottish band We Were Promised Jetpacks.

These images here, of a floating city that may actually happen in the relatively near future, gives me that Jetson-y tingle like few things I’ve seen in a very long time. Whether these plans ever get realized or not, these images are just cool as fuck. I sure hope these self-contained cities come to pass in my lifetime.

The China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) has commissioned AT Design Office to design a floating island with an area of four square miles. The cities make use of technologies that CCCC is already using to build a 31-mile bridge to connect the cities of Hong Kong, Macau, and Zhuhai.

AT Design Office’s proposal involves a series of prefabricated hexagonal modules that “tesselate” to create the infrastructure needed for a city on water, including a transportation network of yachts and submarines and a floating hotel and entertainment complex. Apparently AT Design is waiting for “its newest blueprint” to get “approved,” which sounds like the project may be impressively far along, but who knows, it could just be hype. Here’s a useful summary by the My Modern Met blog:
 

The Floating City will have an above ground layer and an underwater layer. There are two designated areas for greenery and gardens, plus a network of walkways and tunnels that will allow people to traverse the city. AT Design Office is opting for electric cars to reduce pollution and they have ports for submarines to dock. They also have a series of canals and waterways that will allow boats to operate as a means of transportation. The city will have a farm, a hatchery, and a waste disposal center in order to be entirely self-sufficient. AT Design Office has plans for a hotel and an entertainment hub that will appeal to residents and visitors alike. The city’s link to the outside world will be an enormous cruise dock that will facilitate travel and tourism. If this plan becomes a reality, then floating cities may very well be the wave of the future.

 
The next two images demonstrate the modularity of the city’s sections as well as the multiple systems that the deceptively simple components would encompass:
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
Part of the rationale for the city is green thinking; the city is conceived as “a possible eco-friendly city expansion alternative to continuing on land. With the amount of pollution, deforestation, and other detrimental environmental impacts that are a part of our current city development system, the Floating City was created as an attempt to minimize our carbon footprint for a sustainable future.”

Looking at the images, it’s difficult to imagine too many people actually choosing to live in this city; the pictures of the people living in the idyllic underwater environment particularly smack of a world that just can never be, but again: who knows? Is there any way this thing could survive a hurricane? Are sheep ever actually going to live on something like this? 
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 
AT Design
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.20.2014
11:11 am
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