Trending in Beijing: Headlines from the Mid-Autumn Holiday
The fun, the strange, and the what-on-earth-is-this? Trending in Beijing is a wrap-up of top stories in Beijing as told by the trending hashtags, local press, and general power of the internet.
Animals eat mooncakes too!
The Beijing Moon made Mid-Autumn Fest special this year, with zookeepers preparing mooncakes the orangutans, pandas, rhinos, and other animals using fruit, veggies and other natural ingredients.
“Did our national treasures [pandas] eat bamboo mooncakes?” asked one netizen.
One treats, pink and shaped like an animal paw, didn't fit the mooncake shape profile, but many comments under the Weibo post indicated that netizens found them the most appetizing.
Transformer gets the bird, netizens shame the offender
As Universal Studios Resort Beijing opened to the public over the holiday, one naughty tourist decided he was going to get his money’s worth for the trip – by flipping off a transformer.
In the park’s Transformer Land, a performer comes out on a small outdoor stage every so often, decked out in a full robot costume, to give a speech. Whenever this happens, the attention of passersby are inevitably drawn to the performance – giving attention-seeking deviants the moment they’ve been waiting for.
As caught on video during one such Transformer speech, a young man hopped up on stage with the performer and shoved his middle finger in his face. Quick to react, the transformer asks in his robotic voice, “Didn’t your parents raise you better?” Unrepentant, the man takes off his mask as if to take a bow before the audience.
The video is half-pixelated to give the man anonymity, but eager to cancel him, netizens called for his identity to be revealed. As the top comment on the Weibo post reads, “Please don’t pixelate this piece of trash.”
Mooncake beating sees its day in court
Turning back to mooncake-based news – this is, after all, a post-Mid-Autumn roundup – Weibo has lit up with headlines about a manager at a Beijing farming company who ended up in the hospital for failing to send mooncakes to their staff.
However, shrewd netizens were able to parse out that this was a bit of sensationalist headline writing – in fact the case in question occurred in 2012, and is in the headlines again only due to a lawsuit surrounding the case. Additionally, while numerous news sources have claimed the scuffle resulted when the manager declined to send mooncakes to staff, in reality, the case involved a security guard confronting the manager after he was denied mooncakes, after realizing he alone did not receive the gift.
The guard was swiftly relieved of duty, and the lawsuit involves his claim of wrongful termination in which he sought RMB 22,400. The court has denied his claim, finding the company was (surprise, surprise) fully within its rights to fire someone for physically assaulting the manager.
READ: Trending in Beijing: Beijing's Poop Bank, Fake Officer Facetimes the Real Police
Images: Weibo
