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Dear [[name]],
Here's the latest Buzz from Youku, China's leading Internet video site. You can also check our English-language blog Youku Buzz (daily), where we'll be putting up new selected videos from Youku every day Monday through Friday, subscribe by RSS to have the Buzz Daily sent to your favorite reader, or follow us on Twitter for links to cool videos throughout the day.
Please let us know if you have any suggestions! (Email: steven@youku.com )
Best regards,
Kaiser Kuo & Steven Lin
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 December 2008
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| Video Pick of the Month |
 Chinese Hilarity
In November, a video of hilarious dance brought to you by employees of the Tianjin Post Office drew almost 150,000 clicks on Youku. The overactive performance had lots of girls asking online, "Anybody know who the guy with long hair in the first row is? He's a superstar!" The long hair guy is not alone. In the past few years, we've seen lots of online videos of collective dances organized by companies - from NCL Insurance's recruiting dance, Century21 China's morning dance, to this massive dance called "blooming lives". Playing the same role as Chinese students' "recess exercises", the collective dances help the big bosses to build a uniform ideology on employees' minds, no matter how silly it is. |
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How Fast Can You Type in Chinese?
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Natalie Lantos, who was a college student back in 1998, set the World Record in typing - 192 English words per minute. So, how fast can human beings type in Chinese, the language with approximately 47,035 different characters? Here's the answer: 502 Chinese characters per minute, or even more. |
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A Short Animated Film: Yuan
This is an excellent short animated film called "Yuan" (元, Origin) produced by Youku user Zhang Peng, who's spent three months on this masterpiece as his senior year project for college. "Yuan, the origin." According to the opening caption, this film was inspired by The Changes of Zixia. Its basic idea: everything that has a beginning has an end; while something ends, something new begins. Sound familiar? The Matrix Revolution poster had borrowed this philosophic concept. |
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| The Month's Most Viewed |
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A University Principal Who Loves Singing
At graduation ceremonies, Chinese university principals always do nothing but prattle on in endless clichés like "it's time for you to serve our great motherland" or "the people will be proud of you" for hours and drive graduates crazy. What makes Xu Zhihong, the principal of Peking University, outstanding is that he doesn't speak. He sings. Xu Zhihong, who will retire soon, went to PKU student residence on November 11th and sang his favorite pop song "Invisible Wings" again with the crowd. This Youku video has been selected by CCTV's nightly news. |
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A "Shanzhai" Street in Nanjing
In Cantonese, "shanzhai" means fortifications on mountains defending invaders from outside world. (So what's a "shanzhai" product?) When the Volkswagen Santana dominated Beijing in the 1990s, factories in Guangdong had already manufactured tons of rip-off BMWs, Chevrolets, and Mercedes, which are very popular in local families. Today, it's no secret that "shanzhai" has been an important part of Made-in-China phenomenon. This video would bring you the scenes of a "shanzhai" street in Nanjing: Bucksstar Coffee, Pizza Huh, 1-Eleven… It's definitely a new achievement of human imagination. |
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| Hot Topics |
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Fresh Air For Sale
Because of the terrilbe air quarlity, some smart Chinese street vendors have found a new way to make money: selling fresh air. This is a scene captured by Youku's user. The white board reads, "Air cans, cleaning your lungs. RMB 50." But seriously would you pay US $7.30 for a bottle of air tagged as having come from some unpolluted places in China like "Inner Mongolia", "Yangshuo", or "Shuixiang"? Since the street vendor wore a funny Monkey King mask, we'd be inclined consider this as a kind of performance art. But Youku's users couldn't stop expressing there fury on this "black-hearted merchant". |
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Meet Meizu M8, The Shanzhai iPhone Delayed for 2 Years
Please meet the Meizu M8, the big aspirational gadget-of-the-month for Chinese consumers, the greatest iPhone clone you've ever seen, and still, the biggest mystery in China's mysterious shanzhai world. In January 2007, Jack Wong, Meizu's CEO, claimed that the original M8 design for a massive-touchscreen cellphone debuted four days before Macworld, where Steve Jobs wowed the whole world with iPhone. That the M8 shared an almost identical user interface with Apple's invention of the year was, he said, coincidental. And then, M8 has been delayed again, again, and again, and made the angry Chinese netizens called it as "the biggest lie in Chinese mobile phone market." |
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| Viral Ad of the Month |
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| Youku Search Toppers |
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Top Searched Individuals
1. Bruce Lee – The American-born martial arts actor is all the rage again recently because of a new Chinese TV show called "The Legend of Bruce Lee."
2. Steven Chow – Hong Kong funnyman megastar, who westerners may know from his chop-socky spoof "Kung-fu Hustle."
3. Guo Degang – China's most popular xiangsheng (crosstalk) artist, he still performs regularly in small venues in Beijing.
4. Dong Bang Shin Ki & ndash; The latest Korean boy band sensation
5. Andy Lau – Hong Kong singer and actor who sang next to Jackie Chan at the big Olympic send-off
6. Huang Guangyu - China's richest man, an electronics tycoon worth more than $4 billion, who is under investigation for alleged insider trading
7. Barack Obama - The President-elect of the United States.
8. Chen Yunlin - The chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) who visited Taiwan early this month.
7. Xie Jin – The Chinese film director who came to prominence in 1957 directing the film Woman Basketball Player No. 5 passed away last month.
8. Li Ka-shing – Hong Kong billionaire and idol to a generation of would-be moguls.
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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. College – Everyone's back to school now, and young Chinese are trying to figure out what this whole "college experience" is supposed to be about.
3. 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.
4. Chen Shui-bian - The former political leader of Taiwan, who was arrested on November 12 and faces a potential five-year sentence for his involvement in the money-laundering scandal.
5. Financial Crisis – One of the hottest topic in Chinese Internet is the ongoing crisis that started with mortgage-backed securities and is now in full meltdown mode. Everyone is wondering how it's gonna influence ordinary people's daily lives.
6. Fuel Oil Tax - Chinese government intends to raise fuel oil tax, which will be renamed "fuel consumption tax", to replace road and waterway tolls and fees and some road charges.
7. Terrorist Attack - A series of ten coordinated terrorist attacks occurred across Mumbai (Bombay), India's financial capital and largest city, on 26 November 2008.
8. Paralympics – Much more than just a denouement to the spectacular XXIX Olympiad, the Beijing Paralympics were an inspiration to many and greatly improved awareness of the need to provide better accessibility.
9. Cholera - An outbreak of cholera in Hainan province during October 18-27 which was rapidly responded to. A total of 30 cases were reported.
10. Sanlu Milk Powder – The biggest scandal to rock China in years is naturally near the top of searches on Youku this month. Suppliers to one of China's largest infant formula manufacturers added melamine to make protein levels test higher, but it's caused kidney stones in infants, and so far six have died while over 52,000 are reported ill.
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