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Developing stories from Chinese social media

"Recommend including AIDS in premarital checkups, with the result disclosed to the spouse — do you support it?" posted the blogger Xiao Lei on September 20. The post drew more than 28,000 likes, a comment section running to thousands, and a trending slot devoted entirely to the question.

Tell the Spouse: China Debates Mandatory HIV Disclosure in Premarital Checkups

A pollster's plain question — should HIV testing be written into premarital checkups, with results disclosed to the partner — drew more than 28,000 likes and a familiar collision: China's infection numbers are climbing, but its AIDS regulations make an infected person's diagnosis confidential, even from the person about to marry them.

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Xianyu, the flea-market app operated by e-commerce giant Alibaba, spent the day answering for a sex-trade pipeline that reporters from Hebei Television found operating in plain sight, listings disguised as "model photo shoots," "swimming lessons" and "door-to-door fitness training".

Xianyu Pledges Crackdown After Underage Prostitution Ring Is Exposed on Its Marketplace

A television investigation found coded listings for underage prostitution on Xianyu, China's largest second-hand marketplace, steering buyers off the platform onto WeChat. The company's answer — a special task force and 98,000 banned accounts — has turned a routine moderation scandal into a national argument over whether platforms can be held responsible for the trade they cannot see.

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Pang Dong Lai, China's Cult Supermarket, Posts 19.5 Billion Yuan in Eight Months www.trendingonweibo.com/hotwords/pan...

Pang Dong Lai, China's Cult Supermarket, Posts 19.5 Billion Yuan in Eight Months

Yu Donglai, founder of the supermarket chain Pang Dong Lai, published his company's sales dashboard on Weibo: 19.5 billion yuan in eight months, up 27 percent. In a cautious consumer economy, China is reading it as a verdict on how business could be done.

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The story spans twenty years of covert cat-and-mouse across the Taiwan Strait, and the early word from closed screenings is that it is unusually frank by the standards of the genre.

China's Spy Agency Co-Produces Its Own Prime-Time Drama, 'Jiao Feng'

'Jiao Feng,' a twenty-year cross-strait espionage thriller created under the leadership of the Ministry of State Security, premieres on CCTV-8 on September 6. Early screenings suggest a candor the genre has never had — and the author is the state's own spy-catcher.

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"Why is Douyin suddenly recommending me a pile of middle-aged and elderly content?" one user wrote in a post that drew more than 40,000 likes. "Health tips, babies, parents-and-children, AI short dramas — it was so ugly I scrolled a dozen posts in a row."

Douyin Users Say Their Feeds Suddenly Turned Into a 'Middle-Aged Channel'

A recommendation glitch served China's biggest short-video app a stream of health tips and AI dramas, then the platform crashed outright — a rare public look at what happens when the algorithm that knows you briefly stops.

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As of the end of July, China's installed solar capacity had reached 1.286 billion kilowatts, overtaking coal — at 1.285 billion kilowatts — for the first time.

Solar Overtakes Coal as China's Largest Power Source for the First Time

China's installed solar capacity has edged past coal for the first time — a historic crossover in the world's biggest power system that state media celebrated, then immediately qualified: capacity is not generation, and the sun still sets.

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According to the report, every expense claim above 100 yuan, roughly 14 US dollars, requires Wang's personal approval. Employees queue outside his office to get signatures; those briefing him are advised to talk quickly, because after two sentences they are likely to be interrupted.

Unitree Employees Say the Reward System Is 'Only Punishment, Almost No Reward'

Employees at Unitree, China's first listed humanoid-robot maker, describe a culture of 100-yuan expense approvals and punishment-only incentives — an inside look at the company behind the country's robot mania, two weeks after its blockbuster IPO.

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A Vocational-School Graduate Just Won China's Biggest Stand-Up Competition

Xiaoqi, who entered vocational school at 13 and worked as a hairdressing apprentice, carpenter and photo retoucher before taking up comedy, won the third season of "Stand-Up and Ta's Friends" — and thanked the audience for electing China's first vocational-school champion.

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The word doing the work is qu mei (祛魅), literally "removing the enchantment" — borrowed from Max Weber's "disenchantment of the world" and repurposed on the Chinese internet for the moment an idealized thing loses its aura

Why 'Disenchantment' Is the Word Young China Uses for Growing Up

The question "What did you first stop idealizing after growing up?" sat near the top of Weibo on Saturday, and the answers — family, friendship, elite degrees, prestige jobs, even adulthood itself — sketch a generation talking down its own expectations.

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A big-data engineer identified as Mr. Wang received an offer from a major tech firm, then watched it collapse when his background check lit a 'yellow light' over a lawsuit involving a traffic accident — a case whose judgment was never published and in which his name was never fully disclosed.

China's Background-Check Industry Is Selling Job Applicants' Private Records for 30 Yuan

An investigation by Southern Metropolis Daily found firms offering marriage, loan and social-insurance lookups — even court records that were never public — turning China's hiring background checks into a gray market for personal data.

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Leukemia Is No Longer 'Incurable,' China's Health Commission Declares

At a rare press conference on cancer outcomes, a Peking University hematologist said most leukemia patients can now be fully controlled — and credited a Chinese-developed arsenic regimen that became a world standard.

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China's Memory Chip Champion Sues the Pentagon as Its New Chip Reaches Mass Production

CXMT, the DRAM maker that broke Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron's grip on China's memory market, has filed suit in a Washington court against its 'military company' designation — the same week it began mass-producing LPDDR6 memory and reported a half-year profit of 77.6 billion yuan.

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China's Memory Chip Champion Sues the Pentagon as Its New Chip Reaches Mass Production

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A Hunan Woman Was Killed a Month After Filing for Divorce, Renewing the Argument Over China's Cooling-Off Rule

Xiaomin ran a wedding-planning business in Hunan; her husband, relatives say, had no steady job and asked her for money again and again. She raised divorce, and a month later she was dead. The case has put China's 2021 divorce cooling-off period back on trial — and the argument over whether separation is the moment of greatest danger.

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China's Births Fall to 7.92 Million, a 17% Drop That Erased the Dragon-Year Bump

Figures showing 7.92 million births in China in 2025 — 1.62 million fewer than the year before, and barely three-quarters of the 2016 total — raced to the top of Baidu and Weibo, dragging along an argument about whether any policy can stop a fall that young people themselves describe as an answer, not an accident.

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Jay Chou Lookalike Pancake Vendor Closes His Last Shop After a 50% Rent Hike

Zhou Binglun, a street vendor who went viral for resembling Jay Chou while making 10-yuan pancakes, is shutting his Tianjin shop after his landlord raised the annual rent from 130,000 to 200,000 yuan — the third store his fame has failed to hold down, and a national argument about who profits from a small shop's popularity.

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Volkswagen's Answer to China's Price War: An X3-Sized EV From 135,900 Yuan

FAW-Volkswagen opened pre-sales on August 28 for the ID. AURA T6, a 4.81-metre electric SUV priced from 135,900 yuan — the size of a BMW X3 at a fifth of the cost — built on a China-led tech stack and aimed straight into the market's bruising price war.

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China's AI Actress Is Landing the Country's Biggest Fashion Magazine Covers

Fang Taozi, the AI-generated star of a short drama with more than 200 million views, is covering China's major fashion magazines — a first for a virtual performer. Her rise shows how China's short-drama economy and its glossy magazine industry are converging on faces that no photographer ever shot.

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Made to Pose Beneath the Word 'Shame': A Sichuan County's Teacher Photo Draws a State Media Rebuke

Teachers whose pupils scored lowest in a Sichuan county's exams were lined up on stage beneath a giant screen reading 'shame' — a photo officials confirm is real, an investigation is now examining, and CCTV says amounts to public humiliation that violates national policy.

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Zhipu Says Its GLM 5.3 Flash Model Served a Week of Record Traffic Entirely on Chinese Chips

The Beijing AI startup Zhipu revealed that its new GLM 5.3 Flash model, which topped third-party leaderboards all week under the anonymous alias Ox Alpha, ran its public test entirely on domestically made chips — a live demonstration that frontier-class AI inference can be served at scale without foreign hardware, timed just before Guiyang's data-industry expo.

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Ghost Festival Is Not a Night of Taboos: How Chinese Web Users Reclaimed a Holiday of Remembrance

Millions of Chinese internet users rediscovered the real Zhongyuan Festival this week, as posts explaining that the traditional holiday was never about hiding indoors after dark went viral. Behind the taboos, they found an older tradition of river lanterns, night markets and ancestor worship, and a distinctly Chinese way of thinking about memory and death.

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Korea Murder: Suspect Admits Killing Chinese Student Over 'Marriage Dispute' as Court Issues Arrest Warrant

The lecturer accused of killing Chinese graduate student Wen Wen admitted the killing during police questioning, saying a dispute over marriage led to the attack. A Daegu court issued an arrest warrant on August 27, citing flight risk, while police reconstruct how he disguised himself in women's clothing to flee and then walked into a police station to report her missing.

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China's Retail Gold Price Tops 1,400 Yuan as Bangle-Buyers Cash Out After Months in the Red

Retail gold in China has climbed back above 1,400 yuan per gram, and consumers who bought jewelry during the recent high-price run are rushing to sell. Some are turning wedding bracelets into a profit; economists warn the run may not last.

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Young Chinese People Are Beating Scammers by Not Answering the Phone

A viral Weibo thread has distilled China's best anti-fraud advice into a single habit: keep the phone on silent and never pick up an unknown number. Behind the jokes about 47 missed calls is a generational gap that scammers still know how to exploit.

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What China's Male-Channel and Female-Channel Web Fiction Reveals About Its Readers

A viral Weibo thread asks for the difference between 男频 and 女频 — the two poles of China's web-fiction universe — and readers answered with a flood of comic examples. The jokes double as a map of two very different fantasies about power and love.

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A Chengdu Startup Wants to Rent Your Face to Advertisers for 500 Yuan a Scene

An app in Chengdu lets ordinary people list their portraits for AI and advertising use, with sellers taking 70 percent of each deal. A bank employee's face was licensed seven times in three days — and made him about 2,500 yuan — a glimpse of a market that lawyers say has outrun the rules.

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Landslide at Tibet's Gyirong Port Cuts the Himalayan Border After Heavy Monsoon Rains - Trending on Weibo

A mudslide that began on Nepal's side of the Himalaya swept across the Gyirong (Kyirong) border crossing into Tibet on August 26, leaving people dead and missing and cutting the road, power and commun...

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How 'Only I Dress Sloppily at Work' Became China's Workplace Wardrobe Meme

A Weibo user's post comparing her own casual clothes with the crisp outfits of colleagues and delivery riders went viral, churning up a quiet conversation about workplace dress codes, professional 'face', and the uniforms that structure Chinese working life.

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China Is Betting $1 Trillion on 'Six Networks' of Water, Power and Data

China says it will invest more than 7 trillion yuan this year upgrading six interlocking networks — water, electricity, computing, communications, urban pipes and logistics — as the 15th Five-Year Plan begins. The program is both a growth measure and a long-term bet on the physical and digital foundations of the economy.

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The Ocean Winner went down on August 21, about 240 nautical miles from the Indian port of Paradip, according to Indian maritime officials cited by Beijing News. The crew included 20 Chinese nationals, three from Myanmar, and one from Bangladesh.

A Chinese-Crewed Bulk Carrier Sinks in the Indian Ocean, With 18 Crew Missing - Trending on Weibo

Two Chinese sailors have been rescued but 18 remain missing after the Ocean Winner sank in the Indian Ocean, about 240 nautical miles from India's Paradip port, prompting Fujian maritime authorities t...

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