This video shows a gun battle with characters from the popular game Counterstike, in Beijing’s yuppie office and apartment complex Jianwai Soho. It’s from Youku’s monthly roundup of interesting web videos, which you can read in the extended entry:
Youku Video Buzz
by Kaiser Kuo
It’s no surprise that Counter-Strike, the wildly popular tactical first-person shooter that started off as a modification to the game Half Life, has been a huge hit in game-crazed China ever since the beginning of the decade. The creators of this video, who call themselves “Ugly Old Duck,” have taken their appreciation for the game to an entirely new level with this brilliantly executed video, shot in Beijing’s Jianwai Soho. The email the kid receives toward the end of the video chides him for overdoing it with the games and for shutting off his mobile, and summons him home to supper. His virtual teammates, of course, aren’t quite ready to let him go home. Nice to see that a kid who obviously spends a lot of time peering down gun sights still has a sense of humor.
Dancing in the Street: B-boys Breaking in Chengdu
Viewers are calling it an “advertisement for trendy Chengdu,” and you can see why. This group of young Hip-Hop dance artists show off their impressively athletic break dance moves along downtown Chengdu’s Chunxi Road – in front of shops, on public art works, and in some of Chengdu’s trendiest shopping centers. This action-packed six-and-a-half minute video, shot on August 2, is really bolstering Chengdu’s reputation as a very hip city for youth culture. It’s an outstanding example of some of the best urban street dance talent the city is producing. The end of it features a call for would-be B-boys to get involved.
Wushu master Chen Shixing of the Wudang (“Wu-Tang”) Mountains in northwestern Hubei Province demonstrates his breathtaking abilities in a montage of video clips shot over the last five years. He claims to have mastered Qigong, Tai-chi, Bagua, Xingyi, and even Qinggong—the method that allows you to defy gravity without the help of Zhang Yimou or any wires. The video purports to be an internal recording for practitioners of the Wudang Jueshi (or “Peerless”) style. The martial arts traditions of Wudang are Taoist inspired, in contrast with the Buddhist-inspired martial arts of the equally famous Shaolin Temple in Henan. Now if the IOC would only recognize Wushu as an Olympic sport…
On August 1 of this year, a total eclipse—a phenomenon that occurs when the moon passes directly between the sun and the earth—was visible from numerous cities in Western China. The shadow of the moon “moved” across from West to East roughly along the path of the ancient Silk Road, ending at the fabled trade route’s eastern terminus in the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, where this video was shot between roughly 6:30 and 7:30 pm. The eclipse was the first visible in China in this century so far. I really hope the guy who shot this was using some kind of filtration, or he’s probably burned some serious holes in his retina…
Inner Beauty Outside the Bird’s Nest
This simple moment of Olympic kindness was captured on video, set to Yael Naim’s tune “New Soul,” and uploaded to Youku. When the rain came down on a crowd of event-goers and journalists outside the National Stadium, two ordinary Chinese girls instinctively offered their umbrellas to a foreign female journalist. Something about this ordinary act of altruism touched the heart of Youku viewers, who watched this more than a million times in just ten days.
Schwag Nation: The Grabbing Class
This amusing little video offers a peak at a new youth subculture in China, the qiangqiang zu, or “Grabbing Class.” Born mostly in the 1990s and made up, at least in the case of the girl featured in this video, of kids from wealthy families, the Grabbing Class lives off schwag—freebies, commercial promotions, contest prizes and the like. What they don’t keep, they sell: “Check this out! I got all this stuff for free,” she says, and walks us through a whole lot of goodies: an MP3 player (one of only three being offered in a free giveaway), a Nokia phone from a campaign, shampoo from Anna Sui, a digital camera, and a red Dell notebook, a Spidey mask from the premiere of Spiderman 3, a sofa worth more than ￥10,000. “I want to clarify some things circulating on the web,” she says. “We’re just normal people with ordinary jobs to do, but we just like being part of the Grabbing Class because we like going through the process getting all this stuff for free.”
These seven young men from the Anshan soccer fan group in Northeast China’s Liaoning province are lamenting the Chinese national team’s 2:0 loss to Belgium on August 10. Anshan is apparently home to one of China’s most ardent soccer fan organizations. They sing to the tune of a song called “The Strong Spirit of Youth Does Not Speak of Worry,” and though their version might be titled, “The Strong Spirit of Youth Does Not Speak of Soccer,” it expresses their unflagging faith in China’s footballers.
Regional accents are the basis of a sizeable portion of Chinese humor. In this user-generated ad, we’re treated to a parade of individuals from different walks of life, all speaking in comical regional accents. They’re engaged in conversations on a park bench with what some invisible other. First a coy, innocent pig-tailed Shaanxi girl in a bright floral print sits down and says, “My parents say you’re safe and reliable, and you’ll protect me.” An aggressive, quick-tempered Northeastern girl shoves past her as she leaves, sits down and says, “My people say you check out okay, that you’re frugal, and that being with you will ignite my passion. So they told me to come check you out. Okay then, tomorrow I’ll take you home to meet my family.” A guy from Shanghai drives up, gets out of a car and, as though breaking up with his woman, starts yelling at his vehicle in Shanghainese: “We men are out there making big deals! You’re not giving me enough space! So now you have nothing to say? A minute ago you wouldn’t quit your commotion! I’ll take you to meet her.” Then an old man with a thick Henan accent tells the invisible party, “I lost my life-long partner a couple of years back, and my son told me to come meet you—that he’d met you, and you’re really not bad! He likes you. Okay then, that settles it!” It turns out that they’re all talking about the new generation Honda FIT.
Youku Search Toppers
Top Searched Individuals
1. Lin Miaoke – The little cute little girl who lip-synced her way to notoriety in the Opening Ceremonies
2. Li Ka-shing – Hong Kong billionaire and idol to a generation of would-be moguls
3. Shao Yifu (Run Run Shaw) – Hong Kong filmmaker-cum-philanthropist who has generously endowed a number of Chinese universities and donated a whopping HK$100 million for the Sichuan Earthquake
4. Steven Chow – Hong Kong funnyman megastar
5. Zhao Pu – a CCTV newscaster known for his off-script wit. Zhao started off as a security guard at CCTV and worked his way up
6. Guo Degang – China’s most popular xiangsheng artist
7. Li Yapeng – Actor married to songstress Faye Wong, who recently sent Sean Penn on Hong Kong paparazzi hounding his family in Thailand to the acclaim of Chinese netizens
8. Andy Lau － Hong Kong singer and actor who sang next to Jackie Chan at the big Olympic send-off
9. Jackie Chan – He’s broken as many bones as Evel Knievel, but he’s still popular as ever, singing at the Closing Ceremonies and still making his brand of comic martial arts films
10. Dong Bang Shin Ki – The latest Korean boy band sensation.
Top Searched Terms
1. Tony Leung – the Hong Kong actor who most recently starred in Lust, Caution, has been in the news for marrying his longtime sweetheart, the singer/actress Carina Lau, in Bhutan in July.
2. The Olympic Games – They brought an unprecedented level of international scrutiny and no small measure of controversy, but in the end XXIX Olympiad was a smashing success
3. Liu Xiang – China’s sensational hurdler, widely expected to repeat his gold medal performance at Athens, who withdrew from 110 meter hurdles competition for an Achilles tendon injury
4. Beijing Welcomes You – the inescapable but somehow endearing theme song to the Beijing Games, sung by a star-studded lineup
5. Torch – China’s relay may have stirred up controversy in some Western cities, but it seems to have stirred up only patriotic passion everywhere it passed in China
6. College – It’s back to school soon, and young Chinese want to know what they have in store
7. Yang Liwei – China’s Taikonaut hero, who orbited Earth in the Shenzhou VI in October 2005
8. China Football (Soccer) – They broke hearts losses to Belgium and Brazil that took them out of competition after high Olympic hopes
9. Runner Fan – The nickname given to Fan Meizhong, who was for a while the most reviled man in China. This schoolteacher took off to save his neck when the earthquake struck in Sichuan, but has since defended his actions effectively and won some sympathy online
10. Attack on Police – A lone man armed with Molotov cocktails and a knife entered a Shanghai police station in early July, and killed five cops before he was apprehended. A sixth died of injuries sustained in the attack the following day