By XIAO YUNYU
Religion Correspondent

The Dalai Lama, pictured here in a recent dream by former Tibetan governor Qiangba Puncog

Lhasa (China Daily Show) — Fearing “a looming horde of separatist jackals,” the Chinese Ministry of Atheism today announced new measures intended to penalize religious separatists ad apocalytum.

The auspicious initiative comes just a week after the exiled Tibetan government named Harvard scholar Lobsang Sangay as their new elected Prime Minister. Sangay, 43, has never set foot in Tibet but announced yesterday that he is “looking forward to a warm welcome from the Chinese” when he pays his debut visit.

The Anti-theist Regulation officially defines unsanctioned resurrection, transubstantiation, heavenly visitation, divine investiture of authority and all other “acts of super-sedition” as state crimes, punishable by “eternal damnation to the eighteenth generation.”

“Those contemplating a return to mortality with the intention of undermining China’s territorial integrity should first consider the welfare of the eternal souls of their ancestors,” warned the newly appointed Minister of Atheism, Pei Gundan.

Chinese citizens seeking reincarnation or resurrection for legitimate purposes, Pei added, “must first apply in person at their local PSB with their national ID card, two to three hundred passport photos, a certificate of health inspection, handwriting sample and lock of hair.”

The applicant must then embark on a “transnational quest to the four corners of the Motherland” for the requisite chops, culminating with the bestowal of a post-mortem hukou in the secretive Holy Hall of Holies in the Great Hall of the People, Tiananmen Square.

Final approval of the permit requires “scientific proof of reincarnation” — an act which may itself contravene article 14 of the new regulation, Pei emphasized.

Since seeking retirement, the Dalai Lama says his new life, which sees him spend much of his spare time relaxing in a Thai beach hut-cum-bar between naps and massages, has “helped bring some perspective to my futile shenanigans,” according to His former Holiness.

Anxious Chinese Catholics, concerned that the new policy may affect the Eucharist’s transubstantiational power in their personal lives are now re-thinking their attendance at weekly services.

Beijing worshipper Augustina Feng, 33, said that, after a long chat with local police, she had come to agree that public worship, evangelism and other acts of religiosity are tantamount to “selling one’s soul to the foreign Devil.”

But she hasn’t lost her sense of humor: “Previously, when I took the Eucharist, I enjoyed eating the flesh of Christ in preparation for the world to come,” said Feng. “Now, I prefer to ‘human-flesh-search’ Chinese dissenters in exchange for a monetary reward on Earth.”

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By L WANG-HUBERT
Mental Health Correspondent

GENEVA (China Daily Show) — The World Health Organization today issued a warning to 192 nations after a report by UN inspectors concluded that the Chinese have been perpetrating “Weapons of Mass Delusion.”

Chinese students prepare to hear a full day's worth of bullshit

The news comes even as hundreds of thousands of world citizens flock to purchase plane tickets and black market visas for a quick traipse around the Middle Kingdom, or “God forbid, long-term expatriation,” said Tad Wester, chief inspector and lead author of the report.

The report detailed “no less than 43 classic mind control techniques deeply embedded within the Chinese school system, work environment and social and family structures,” prompting an immediate reclassification of the 5,000-year-old civilization from ‘culture” to ‘cult.’

Excerpts from the report include:

Hypnosis
Hypnotic techniques in Chinese classrooms starting as early as age five, resulting in a high state of suggestibility, often thinly disguised as ‘relaxation’ or ‘meditation.’ Repetitive music, usually around 60 beats per minute, most commonly employed during study sessions, with the teacher explaining that the music helps students relax and concentrate. Special lighting, usually fluorescent, as they are not too dim, nor too harsh, help contribute to the room’s feel and mood. Reduced room temperature, usually a little cooler than normal, keeps unknowing subjects relaxed, and close to a state of near-narcolepsy.

Peer or Group Pressure
Pressure from peers and family members replaces inner doubts and resistance to new ideas with the need to belong, often destroying the sense of individual identity altogether, or eschewing ‘individuality’ itself as a human evil. Excessive bonding with school classmates and work colleagues is thus heavily promoted.

Blind Obedience
Demanding acceptance through complex lectures on incomprehensible subjects, rejecting ‘logic’ as a ‘foreign construct’ or overly obtuse method for obtaining truth without all the facts.

Meta-communication
Subliminal communication through the stressing of certain key words or phrases (e.g. ‘harmony,’ ‘stability,’ ‘Chinese characteristics’) amid long, confusing lectures so as to stifle private contemplation.

Disinhibition
Child-like propaganda films or multimedia, such as those seen in theaters or subway systems, which orchestrate child-like obedience and unquestioning allegiance of authority. Complex issues are usually reduced to a matter of ‘feelings,’ providing subjects with a ready acid test of the rightness or wrongness of an issue based on a sudden curvature of the lips.

Uncompromising Rules
Inducing regression by soliciting agreement to seemingly simple rules, such as the proper time for a meal or bathroom break, or the proper use and types of medication.

Usurpation of Familial Language
Creating intense emotional longing for leaders or geopolitical boundaries by applying familial terms such as ‘Grandpa Wen’s’ insistence that ‘little brother Taiwan’ has wandered astray and requires the protection of the ‘Motherland.’

Sleep Deprivation
Creating disorientation and vulnerability through prolonged mental and physical activity in place of adequate rest and sleep, such as excessive after-school homework, weekend work requirements, team building exercises and mandatory attendance at late-night KTV sessions.

Chanting or Singing
Eliminating non-cult ideas through group repetition of mind-narrowing chants, phrases and memetically calculated pop songs.

Finger Pointing
Creating a false sense of righteousness by pointing out the shortcomings of failed peers (“Foucault’s panopticon”) and the outside world (“Goering’s gambit”).

Us vs. Them Mentality
Creating the false illusion of unity by emphasizing references to the Chinese as ‘we’ and non-Chinese as ‘you.’

Information Control
Inducing a loss of reality by discouraging the asking of questions, restricting access to opposing information and limiting the amount of time teens may spend at internet cafes.

Ambiguous Systems of Reward/Punishment
Maintaining emotional vulnerability and mental confusion by alternately rewarding and punishing different subjects for the very same action, usually limited to class and status distinctions, but sometimes shaken up for the hell of it.

Dietary Regulations
Creating increased susceptibility to emotional arousal by depriving the nervous system of necessary nutrients, particularly dairy products, through the use of addictive, often pepper- and MSG-based, diets.

Psychological Games
Inducing paranoia and suspicion by introducing childhood games with obscure rules that rely on chance, bluffing and fast, hypnotic finger movements and/or the loud, continuous shaking of dice.

Fear
Maintaining loyalty and obedience to the group and its leadership by threatening life or limb for the slightest negative deed, tweet or thought.

Repetition
Covering the same subject over and over again, usually by rote repetition or closed-circuit television networks, until the material is known by heart and even viewed by the subject as his or her own legitimate opinion.

Embassies responded immediately by posting travel warnings of their own, with some offering free psychological counseling to embassy workers and expatriates who have stayed in China “for a period of 6 months or longer.”

“We’ve even seen some tragic cases of foreigners drinking the tea and returning to their home countries forever changed,” Wester told China Daily Show, referencing the recent high-profile case of Geoff Berman, 42, of Cleveland, Ohio.

“They spout the slogans, sing the songs and are forever neurologically unwilling to see more than one side of, say, the Tibet dilemma, or the origin of the noodle.”

In response to the report, various ‘cult watch’ organizations and Christian groups around the world have started including China on their list of suspected cult organizations. Germany, meanwhile, has issued a ban against Chinese people and Sino-phernalia.

“China is not a country or culture,” said German Foreign Ministry Spokesman Helmut Krause in a strongly worded press release that echoes that nation’s stance against Scientology, “but a commercial enterprise with a history of taking advantage of vulnerable individuals, and an extreme dislike of any criticism, whose totalitarian structure and methods may pose a risk to Germany’s democratic society.”

US pastor Terry Jones is not surprised. “Leave it to the communists, Muslims and homosexuals to beat you over the head with their never-ending propaganda,” Jones told China Daily Show in a telephone interview, shortly before a planned event outside a Tallahassee mosque.

Chinese spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, has issued a stern warning to the UN team responsible for the report.

“It is no surprise that the Western imperialists, bent on hurting the feelings of the Chinese people, would manufacture such false reports with their ‘psycho logic’ and close-minded view of the world,” said Jiang. “The Chinese people will not be swayed by Western threats to the stability or territorial integrity of their Motherland.”

Elaine ‘Bingbing’ Baines, 22, a Harvard political science major and Ph.D. candidate on a semester exchange program at Beijing Normal University, admits to feeling emotionally unsettled by the report as well.

“Whenever I see you Westerners engaging in these sorts of political attacks against Mother China, I can’t help but cry,” pouted Baines in Chinese over a spicy bowl of street-side dandan mian.

“I’d like to see your so-called ‘democracy’ create the same unity of harmony in a land with over a billion people and 56 ethnic darlings. You don’t understand the deep historical complexity of the issues at which you so easily point fingers.”

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Higgs's attempts at photography (here, at the Forbidden City) displayed the total lack of talent that is his forte.

By HUI JIA
Foreign Correspondent

SHANGHAI (China Daily Show) – A foreign traveler who arrived in Shanghai two years ago, hoping to discover his untapped potential, spoke yesterday of his pain at coming to terms with the brutal realization that he was almost entirely without talent.

“As it happens, just going to a country which is in the limelight doesn’t make you special,” William “Bill” Higgs told China Daily Show. “Turns out, I’m actually kind of a waste of space.”

Higgs reluctantly concluded he possessed absolutely no potential whatsoever at approximately 8:30 on Saturday morning, after a set of shelves erected only minutes before collapsed, smashing an entire collection of jade  Zodiac animals he had spent months sourcing from various antique markets in Yunnan Province.

But Higgs admitted the realization itself came after a string of failed endeavors.

“Bill first moved to Guangxi Province to work as an ESL teacher and, while the profession does play host to some very interesting and professional teachers, Bill was not one of them,” Yangshuo English Corner deputy principal Michael Watson recalled with a sympathetic smile.

“He didn’t know what he was doing and just sort of read textbooks aloud. Didn’t really matter though; parents don’t know the difference,” Watson added.

Higgs said he spent many days dreamily cycling and hiking through Guangxi’s beautiful karst landscape.

Despite bringing a notebook and set of paints on his travels, however, Higg’s muse yielded nothing more interesting than a series of insipid watercolors and banal written observations on China, that even he admits to being “sophomoric.”

The latter, published in a now-discontinued blog, caught the attention of Beijing Normal University literary expert Mao Mashan, who retweeted Higgs’s unqualified musings on politics and local cuisine on his Weibo account.

The resulting torrent of derisive comments forced Higgs to abandon to any artistic ambitions and instead attempt to go into business.

Higgs then tried his hand at translating, IT work and venture capitalism – but failed to make a single fen.

Many expats suffer “potential shortage,” says Beijing-based life coach Atkins Peiterman.

Maria Sharie, originally from Manhattan, came to China in 2002 already speaking fluent Chinese, but now works as a “freelance marketer and journalist” in Dalian. Yesterday she declined to give China Daily Show details of her recent commissions or published articles.

In fact, Peiterman estimates that around 60 to 70 percent of all expats have absolutely no potential or talent whatsoever.

“People like Mr Higgs often can’t seem to figure out that, despite their ability to pick up and move to another country, they are still just as pointless here as they were back home,” Peiterman noted. “Bill seems to have just twigged this. That’s good. It won’t help him in the slightest but at least he knows that now.”

Higgs, and foreigners like him, face an uncertain future in China– but will likely still remain for a long time. “I’ll probably stick around a few more years,” said Higgs. “Just to be sure.”

Tylenol contributed to this story

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By XI MEITI
Western Media Correspondent

Snow thrust an autographed snap into one startled secretary's hands before rushing off to 'wire a telegram'

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Attempts by the Chinese government to attain international journalistic credibility by cloning legendary former US reporter Edgar Snow four years ago went horribly awry, according to CIA disclosures yesterday.

The redacted documents refer to a highly confidential 2006 project to replicate various deceased Western journalists who had expressed sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years.

But the experiments, which took place in China’s northeast Heilongjiang Province, were said to have misfired badly, with reports of the “Snow 2.0” clone rampaging through Propaganda Bureau offices in search of a 1937 Remington typewriter and attempting to file “hot copy” to US publications that no longer existed.

“Sweetheart, get me a rewrite!” the author of Red Star Over China (1937) reportedly screamed into a telephone on the desk of an uncomprehending female Propaganda Bureau clerk. Her game of Happy Farm was instead interrupted by “a strange foreigner babbling about an exclusive interview with Mao Zedong in something called the ‘Saturday Evening Post’,” according to the report.

Edgar Snow, who died in Geneva in 1972, was an American journalist who achieved “foreign friend” status in China for his flattering portrait of Mao Zedong’s early leadership. He faced growing criticism from Western peers after other works, including 1963’s The Other Side of the River, dismissed the idea of a famine in late-1950s China and increasingly presented a romanticized view of that period. The Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) saw some 70 million Chinese die of starvation as a result of misguided agricultural policies enforced by the government.

Snow 2.0 was reportedly cloned with DNA extracted from remains taken from his grave at Peking University. Its headstone calls Snow “An American friend of the Chinese people, whose feelings he rarely, if ever, hurt.”

The project was part of a long-running experiment that included several failed attempts to reproduce deceased Western Chinese sympathizers, such as Canadian doctor Norman Bethune and US writer Pearl Buck, as well as a panda with “US characteristics.”

A refined version of Thomas Friedman, known as ‘Friedman MK 4,’  was believed a partial success after extensive testing. However, MK 4 then went “seriously off-message” during a mock studio debate about green-energy policy and had to be shot by the host, one of six Tian Wei clones, all believed to be “highly stable, handy with a pistol but otherwise useless.”

“Despite very much effort to bring him into the 21st century, it seems Snow 2.0 was unable to advance anywhere beyond the Long March era,” said Professor Lin Yifan, a former expert at the secretive Cloned Foreign Friends of China Studies department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who defected to the US in 2007. Much of the CIA report is based on Lin’s testimony.

“It seems he was very much always wanting to publish interviews and insight regarding old events, and also shamed many when he naughtily referred to both Soong Mayling [Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader’s wife] and Jiang Qing [Madame Mao] as ‘hot tomatoes with the cat’s pajamas’ with whom he wanted to ‘hold the presses,’” Lin’s testimony concludes.

The Snow clone is no longer believed to exist, having been humanely destroyed after referring to a visiting intelligence officer’s wife as “toots Tantan.”

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By HAO FENQING
Feelings Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Gracious Chinese givers were shocked and appalled yesterday when a passerby exposed Lao Pei, one of Beijing’s longest-surviving beggars, as a fraud and a charlatan.

Li Yuanyuan, 21, an erhu major from China’s Central Conservatory of Music, was transversing the under-pass with friends from Guomao to Jianwai Soho when she heard the sweet strains of the beloved traditional instrument and was nearly moved to tears.

“But when we arrived to see his playing,” said Li, “I had become angry by his useless posture and offensive declamating.”

According to witnesses, Li pressed the man for the name of his teacher and, after determining that he had received no classical training whatsoever, slapped him in the face, overturned his money table, and dashed his instrument to pieces.

An angry crowd dragged the beggar up to the street for a classical beating, with several people demanding their money back.

“I had often given him several maos freely,” said Jia Yisong, English teaching assistant at Dell English school. “But when I realized his deceptive, I had felt cheated by him.”

A nearby police officer responding to the shouts and murmurs was unable to restore order. “I had hoped to satisfy the crowd’s bloodlust by asking the man for his public performance certificate from the Ministry of Culture,” said the officer. “After he failed to respond, the crowd took this as a sign of his guilty.”

Lao Pei, 93, who is blind and deaf, and suffers from cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer, utterly refused to comment.

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An angry crowd exacts street justice on Lao Pei (facedown, center) for hurting their feelings.

By SUN WUKONG
Entertainment Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) — A woman claiming to be one of Dashan’s mistresses has revealed that, contrary to popular Chinese feelings, Dashan “isn’t really that clever.”

In her soon-to-be-published memoir, Wei Tingting, 56, from Heilongjiang, reports that Dashan is unable to perform such basic tasks as, “taking taxi, extending visa, and washing feet before go to sleep.”

According to sources, Dashan, also known as Mark Roswell, met Ms. Wei in a bathroom stall at White Rabbit in 2007, where they promptly “shared a bump and got busy with the rooster.”

Authorities at the PSB confirm that Dashan was recently denied an F visa extension, adding that “he is notorious for failing to register the resident slippery.”

In an interview with China Daily Show, the cute female laowai from Dashan’s unpopular Chinese learning television program revealed that Dashan has, “for as long as I’ve been there, employed a language double for all of his Chinese dialog.”

The news comes as a shock to 1.3 billion subscribers of Dashan’s weekly newsletter, “Clever Like Me.”

Comments online from fans range from supportive (“hang on there big brather” -shally87) to macabre (“rape his ancestors mercifully [sic] to the last generation!” -henfenqing).

Twittering witnesses tagged Dashan at the airport purchasing a ticket for Pyongyang, where the media icon has reportedly been offered a 30-picture deal with Dear Leader Productions worth well over $380 Candian dollars.

Calls placed to Dashan’s agent were not immediately returned.

By CAO PIHUA
Protest Correspondent

BEIJING  (China Daily Show) – Just two days after protesting outside Korean bakery Tous Les Jours, French-embittered Chinese mobs took to the streets and burned a Yugoslavian flag, “as punishment for their ignorance!” in the words of one protester.

Angry mobs gear up for the Olympics by burning some flags

“Just think of it,” said Tang Jingjing, “How much about Chinese history did they really know about it, yet we were experts of most of foreign language and culture? For example, French love romance and German love beer.”

“We will not tolerate Chinese actions against our Motherland,” an anonymous official of the Yugoslav government-in-exile said in a press release issued hours later. “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia were, are and always will be part of Yugoslavia.”

Sarcastic chants of “Allo, allo” and “Salut” could be heard over dance mixes of the song Dragostea Din Tei, by Molodovan pop band, O-Zone.

“I used to love that song,” commented Tang Jingjing. “Those days were gone.”

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BY TALLULAH JANE

Olympics Correspondent

BEIJING — In a move baffling the international community, hundreds of angry Chinese students in Beijing’s college district gathered outside Tous Les Jours, a Korean bakery, and stared at each other.

Hundreds of Chinese college students demonstrate their right to do whatever the fuck they're told

“We are standing to show our power against the Franch,” said Beibei, 20, French major at Beijing’s Cultural Relations University.

“This time Franch have really hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” said Jinging, 20, psychology major at the Metal and Mining Institute of Beijing.

“Actually, I don’t really know why we are here,” said Huanhuan, 20, Chinese history major at the People’s University.

“Because I received the short message from my friend,” said Yingying, 20, Information management major, “so I came to show my participation.”

“I think it is because of Olympics, but I did not know it clearly,” said Nini.

Dozens of police were dispatched to break up the gawking, which the Chinese communist party has had difficulty trying to curb for the past year.

“Though some French have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people in recent attacks, these events should not be politicized or used as an excuse to hurt the games,” said a Chinese official. “Beijing welcomes you.”