By WO KOU
Japan Correspondent

Abe afterwards visited the nearby Unit 731 Canteen for a light lunch

TOKYO (China Daily Show) – Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last defended his unusual decision to pose next to a gruesome new World War II mural, while grinning broadly and flicking multiple ‘V’ signs.

The recently unveiled mural, which depicts in painstaking detail the massacre of a platoon of Chinese soldiers surrendering to a marauding troop of Japanese war criminals in Manchuria, is likely to cause offense in China.

But the right-wing leader, currently riding high in the polls, said he was the victim of a misunderstanding.

“I am of the view that visiting this mural, which enshrines the souls of those who fought in the service of their country, is just the same as popping to 7-Eleven to buy a bottle of sake,” Abe later told a journalist.

“This is really no different from what other world leaders do,” Abe said, referencing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s undocumented pilgrimage last year to a Nazi shrine and former US President George W. Bush’s non-existent weekend retreat at a former cotton plantation in Mississippi, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Abe said that the Japanese government had done everything it could to acknowledge previous war crimes, and the media was not reporting the full story.

“I have said before we’re, you know, sorry about some of the stuff we did,” said Abe. “How many more times do I have to say we’re, you know, sorry?”

How exactly one should define the term ‘sorry’ was another matter entirely, Abe added.

Learn more or less about China by following @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By WO KOU
Sovereignty Correspondent

Aggrieved at Japan’s clear flouting of international maritime law, four-year-old Li locked himself in his bedroom yesterday and wept

SHENZHEN (China Daily Show) – The parents of plucky toddler Li Beibei say he’ll be showing his patriotism the only way he knows how this week: by refusing to eat raw fish.

As demonstrations against the Japanese nationalization of the Diaoyu Islands spread across China, young Li spent much of his weekend angrily playing Playstation 3.

Incensed by what he sees as Japan’s violation of China’s sovereignty, the plucky four year old began his sushi boycott on Sunday.

“Please, Daddy, I don’t like that stuff,” Li protested, his heart burning for the motherland and nose wrinkling at a plate of uncooked seabass, wasabi and raw, dripping mackerel, wielded by his 46-year-old father.

Little Li’s distaste for Japan’s national cuisine demonstrates an unflinching support of the motherland, his parents claim.

“Look how much he cares about ancient sovereign territory,” beamed proud mother Mrs Zang, watching her four-year-old son begin to wail and cry as his father thrust a live, wriggling squid – dripping with soy sauce – into Li’s mouth. “That’ll show the dogs.”

“The boy’s hatred of sushi will certainly foment and harden into a rational loathing of the Japanese nation,” grunted Mr Li, as he later dangled a glistening slice of sashimi in front of his terrified son. “Just give it a few more hours.”

Declare support for Diaoyu! Follow us at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By SHA DUI
South China Seas Correspondent

The islands are an increasingly popular holiday destination for rabidly nationalist tour groups

DIAOYU ISLANDS (China Daily Show) – A Japanese man puzzled by recent unexplained activity on his island chain was surprised to discover a Chinese woman living there without his permission, police said yesterday.

The woman was found in her pajamas on a beachhead of the Senkaku Islands – known as the Diaoyu in China – four of which are owned by a Japanese private citizen.

“She was clearly kitted out for an extended stay: she had several Chinese flags, a compass, an 1892 maritime map, blankets, everything,” said a spokesman.

Police said they also found 12 empty packets of instant noodles nearby, indicating the woman had been there several hours already.

“We think she moved in this morning,” the spokesman said. “She told us she intended to reclaim the land for her motherland, then get some sleep.”

The woman – identified as 27-year-old student He Ting – was discovered living on the northernmost point of the island, sheltering under a rock shelf five metres from the southernmost point.

“The woman told us that she could not afford an apartment in Beijing, and that living on an uninhabited rock in the middle of the ocean was much the same as living outside the Fifth Ring Road,” said Yashimoto Kawashira of the Japanese Coast Guard.

“She was logging onto Facebook when we found her.”

Follow exclusive China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

Dear Japanese AV Star,

Hey, wanna hear a secret? I never actually finished ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’!

Fragrant greetings! I am Da Peng Jr, son of successful fruit-produce seller Da Peng. A robust Chinese man who has followed your sustainable work through its many stages of scientific development, from Bangkok Booberella to Hot Sushi and Orgy Camera 6. But for me, underrated independent US production Fuck Me Hard 2: Fuck Me Harder is still “Oscar’s Choice.”

Of course, I have noticed the many secret and admiring messages you have delivered to me through medium of film.

Even when you are pretending to enjoy fruitful congress with multiple foreigners, you give look to camera and I see message. Having wondered often when you will decide to “take things further,” my heart jumps out of chest when I see you have accepted invitation to lecture on safe procreation at Central China Normal University – only 607.27 kilometers away!

This is surely a moment I wait for. I and my Long March Rocket DZ-5 are coming for you, my love, and only request one thing. Why do you not now proclaim your commitment for me in a more public manner, such as you professed the love to pizza takeaway boy and his three classmates, as they violated your sanctuary in lieu of payment for “large salami”?

Number Four Fan

A Japanese AV star says:

I’d like to respectfully refer further questions on the Nanjing Massacre to Takashi Yoshida’s well-balanced study of the conflicting narratives to this tragic event since 1937.

Dear Japanese AV Star,

After watching one of your movies, my boyfriend suggested we try anal sex. That was six weeks ago, and we’ve nothing done else since. In his words, ‘Once you’ve gone back… you never go back.’ Fine for him, but my bum feels like a 24-hour saloon; I can’t sit comfortably without a Hello Kitty cushion and a heavy sigh; and our recently reupholstered cream sofa is now heavily stained with santorum.

What’s a girl to do?

Numb in Ningbo

A Japanese AV star says:

So I’ve been keeping busy doing retakes for a reverse cowgirl DP bondage shoot currently in post-production in Tokyo. But next week, it’s off to the Native American Navajo Tapestry Rug-Weaving Expo in Window Rock, Arizona. As it’s the heart of the “Navajo Nation,” I’m quite nervous about showing off my attempts at the Two Grey Hills style (and the more ornate Teec Nos Pos) in public!

For group fucking, though, there’s no question: I prefer the Two Grey Hills rug every time, preferably with a bootleg of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s sadly unreleased “Apollo Live Backstage”  playing alongside. The Two Grey Hills is much easier to clean, due to color and dye issues.

OK, gotta go: Haruki Murakami keeps bugging me for lunch. Wanting some feedback on a enigmatic Lolita-like character with troubling sexual and adolescent issues, I expect… maybe I should refer him to my classic academic entry, Suzi Bungholeeo Does the Cambridge Dons!

Follow authentic China voices at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

Last week: Ask a dissident who can’t get arrested

Next week: Ask a Chinese Olympic silver medalist

Follow China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By LAO SHOUXING
History Correspondent

Lord Shang (390-338 BC) enjoyed the occasional slay ride

XIAN (China Daily Show) – He may be as American as apple pie and as much a part of Christmas as the latest Call of Duty but according to one scholar, the real Santa Claus was actually Chinese.

Using information found in his attic, and backed-up by extensive research online, historian and sanitation worker Lin Kang has traced Santa’s history to 223 BC – and the Middle Kingdom.

Lord Shang Ke was an ancient figure, famous as the first man to codify China’s legal system in his Book of Law. Santa Claus is most likely a Roman bastardization of ‘Shang Ke’s Laws,’ Lin believes.

Said to have roamed the country during the early Qin Dynasty, dispatching “bribes to those who were naughty and punishments to those who were nice,” Shang is revered in schools today as the father of Chinese autocracy.

But the draconian Shang was also famed for ramming dissenting scholars into chimneys and roasting them alive, and enslaving Japanese tourists – or “dwarf people” – to do his bidding.

Lin says these traditions were spoilt by Westerners, who instead made Shang – or “Santa” – an avuncular figure, whose elf-run workshops deposit Japanese-made electronic goods on the hearths of well-behaved children.

“Shang ran a sweatshop and he ran it good,” said Lin. “The irony is the tradition has now come full circle. We churn out cheap, lead-based goods to be consumed by gullible foreign children. As a consequence, we’re  the world’s number-one export economy. Shang would probably have approved –but if he didn’t, he’d have chopped your head off.”

The real-life Shang was eventually executed after falling out of imperial favor, and supposedly torn asunder by horses. Lin speculates this might explain the “reindeer thing.”

The tradition was most likely stolen during the chaotic civil war that followed the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Lin says. Visiting executives from the fledgeling Coca Cola Company allegedly paid 400 taels for the recipe to an ancient medicinal brew called kela – the story of Lord Shang was later appropriated by the firm’s Shanghai advertising department.

“Foreigners stole our land, our precious artifacts and our tyrannical historical figures,” Lin lamented. “They can keep the vases but we want the good stuff back.”

Shang’s modern ancestors have announced they intend to sue Coke for copyright infringement but IPR lawyers suggest the family may be willing to settle the case for a large quantity of Sprite.

And while some experts have questioned the veracity of the claims, Lin says documents proving his theory have been authenticated by none other than historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gavin Menzies.

Follow this and other breaking China news @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By RONG REN
Economics Correspondent

Chinese shoppers patiently queue for salt outside one of Lu's stores this weekend

SHANGHAI (China Daily Show) – “When I said I was quitting university to start my own salt-and-vinegar concern, my parents thought I was mad. They tried to disown me,” smiles Lu Yun, 27. “Now I’m the most filial son in the village.”

Lu was speaking at Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s spring auction, where he paid 80 million yuan for an ornate white-jade  seal that may have been used once by Emperor Yongzheng.

Until just last week, however, Lu subsisted on a diet of instant noodles and thought that the Qing Dynasty was a band.

That was before Japan’s East Coast was devastated by a tsunami and earthquake, causing near-meltdowns at several nuclear reactors and sending Chinese consumers in their droves to supermarkets in search of salt, consumption of which is widely – but erroneously – considered to protect the human body from absorbing radiation.

Iodized salt from Macau and Hong Kong to Beijing, Shanghai and as far west as Xinjiang has since sold out, with prices rising by over 1,000 percent – despite government warnings that consumption increases blood pressure and has no discernible scientific affect on radiation poisoning.

China’s latest billionaire has acquired his new-found wealth practically overnight; in 2003, Lu’s salt-and-vinegar business sold out of every range of vinegar stocked, after locals became convinced the condiment provided protection from the SARS virus.

Lu invested all the family money in huge quantities of salt and vinegar, but by then, the crisis had passed and the vinegar craze was over.

“I was on a stopover in London and very hungry,” Lu recalled the origins of his unexpected success story. “The only thing I could buy at that hour were a traditional English delicacy: salt-and-vinegar crisps.’”

Lu was quickly hooked. He dropped out of college in 2002 and formed a business promoting the dish – but found fellow Chinese didn’t share his passion. Until last week, business for Lu’s ingredients was almost non-existent and Lu faced bankruptcy– but on Tuesday, trade began to pick up sharply.

By the weekend, Lu had sold the company to a Hebei-based conglomerate for a billion-dollar figure, invested in several coal mines, blown a million yuan on a Charlie Sheen-themed KTV-and-mahjong bender and established himself as a serious player in China’s burgeoning art market.

“I will pay any price for my health,” said customer Chen Yueli, 23, who admitted she had previously ignored warnings about tainted Henanese pork, toxic milk powder, recycled hogwash oil and chemically enhanced hotpots but took the iodized salt alert seriously.

Chen paid 2,000 yuan for an iodine-rich salt lick, available for 12 yuan only the day before. She paused to lick off another 50-yuan’s worth of “life-saving” salt, adding, “This shows the Chinese are really starting to understand things better.”

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By RONG REN
Economics Correspondent

Street fights in Japan are commonly settled with the use of infant sumo proxies

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – New statistics have revealed China surpassed Japan on the Gross National Weirdness (GNW) scale last quarter, capping the nation’s 30-year rise from Cold War isolation to an emerging kitsch superpower.

Within the next few years, people going shopping in their pajamas, idolatry of talentless Korean boy bands such as Super Junior, and Internet videos of mothers filming daughters nude as they shower will be considered the norm by many, analysts predict.

“China’s combined GNW factors now surpass Japan’s GNW index by 1.4 percent for the last quarter. That includes Japan’s hentai and gay manga predilections  and other, by now passé so-called ‘weird’ indicators such as an obsession with Doraemon-robot spritzing toilets and ‘first-born white puppy-scented Hello Kitty panty liners,’” said Bakshir Rosmand, a senior fellow at the Asian World Weirdness Institution (AWWI).

“It’s a marker of China’s increasingly dominant role in the weird global economy. Only North Korea ranks higher on the unofficial GNW scale  but that is due almost solely to the ruling Kim family regime and can’t be considered valid without independent AWWI confirmation.”

While the GNW growth was deemed “impressive” by the AWWI, other analysts pointed out that it was confined to a relatively small amount of China’s overall 1.3 billion population and centered largely in major cities such  as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, as well as some second-tier cities such as Chengdu, where “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf Happy Happy parties” have become inexplicably popular among stressed-out male white collar workers and job-seeking college students alike.

Meanwhile, China’s vast rural population remains mired in what one expert called “a disheartening cesspool of mediocrity and near-normalcy.”  Doubts about China’s ability to sustain the Weird Index growth were also voiced.

“It’ll still be a long time before we see real growth, such as buying used panties in subway stations in Beijing. China is still too conservative for that,” said eminent Oxford University historian, philanthropist and Sinologist Sir William Buckfast. “Though recent indicators, such as the boom in Internet sales of artificial hymens and vials of alleged virgins’ pubic hair, are encouraging signs of sustainability.”

“’The per capita GNW is still small,” cautioned AWWI economist Ravi Singh.  “There are hundreds of millions of peasants and farmers living in seriously dull conditions, with lifestyles that we would officially call ‘vanilla.’ There’s not a lot else to do in many of these villages except sleep, eat noodles, bicker endlessly with relatives and possibly fuck a pig.”

Indeed, the growing Weird Gap between China’s rich and poor is reportedly causing concern at the highest levels of government.

Some Chinese economists and sociologists are calling for a rural subsidy package, similar to efforts following the 2009 world financial crisis that saw China pumping several billion yuan into the countryside to encourage peasants to buy discounted and discontinued appliances and computers, even while  many had no electricity to power the devices.

There were proposals being floated during this year’s Two Sessions to reward villages in  “Strike Hard, Magnificent Weird” campaigns, such as one pilot project recently enacted in  impoverished Henan Province, where residents were encouraged to “let their red freak flags fly.”

Sadly, said one observer, the project was a flop, with witnesses reporting scenes no odder than the sight of several inebriated farmers donning their wives’ oversized faded baggy nylon panties over their trousers and toasting each other repeatedly with baiju before passing out.

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By XING CHOUWEN
Entertainment Correspondent

The ending of the ban is good news for both pornographers and fishermen

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Servers crashed and internet connections slowed to a crawl yesterday, after Japan ended its recent ban on Chinese exports of specialist pornography, in what is being seen as a diplomatic gesture of seasonal goodwill.

But the move, part of a thawing of diplomatic relations after an unsteady few months, left millions still without proper access, as Internet providers buckled under the strain of the sudden pornfall. Some users were this morning being told that “holiday hand-relief” was effectively canceled until after Chinese New Year.

Senior Chinese ministers were last night demanding to know who was responsible for the lack of preparation, which they said embarrassed China and left it looking like a “developing country, like Vietnam or Great Britain or something.”

Lack of access to porn is seen as a major potential cause of social instability in China. In November, Japanese officials blocked all exports of so-called “rare” pornography as part of a tit-for-tat controversy between the two nations over a sovereignty dispute in the Diaoyu – or Senkaku –  Islands.

Japan, fondly known  in China as “Nipporn”, has long specialized in such erotic exports but the November ban left to an upsurge in fake or shanzhai product, which many described as lacking the production skill and high cinematography values of the real thing.

User Yao Ten, 23, downloaded a copy of Calamari Co-eds 5 only to find it was an inferior Chinese knock-off.  “I found myself watching a group of Shandong women awkwardly rubbing each other with dead eels. A total turn-off,” Yao told China Daily Show.

Since the prohibition was lifted, schools and universities across the country have reported widespread truancy, which is expected to last well into late January.

Undergraduate Yu Men, 24, describes himself as an angry, bitter nationalist to the point of almost total ignorance. Yet he was quick to praise its adult cinema industry: “Japan is highly superior in the quality of their adult videos compared to China, mainly because they are perverted, barbarian running dogs,” he said, adding, “I’ll give them their due, though: their porn is top-notch.”

Search engines and forums pledged this morning to put their engineers on full alert to maintain connectivity, while UNAIDS ambassador and TV personality James Chau has promised those unable to download authentic squid porn free access to an infamous full four-hour bootleg sex tape, featuring Chau, that recently surfaced on the web.

In a public ceremony yesterday attended by international media, Japanese Foreign Minister Yamata Hatanzi handed Politburo representative Li Fu a specially commissioned copy of Conger Conga 4, featuring AV star Erika Sato with a cast of thousands of fish and underage schoolgirls.

Accepting the gift on behalf of senior Chinese officials, Li said: “Our countries may disagree on some things but fundamentally see eye-to-eye over the need to maintain a constant balance of trade between cheap, disposable plastic goods and 90-minute DVDs of Japanese women being molested by octopi.”

Follow this and other breaking China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By XING CHOUWEN
Entertainment Correspondent

China is said to only have enough squid porn to last two weeks

TOKYO (China Daily Show) – The dispute over the Diaoyu Islands showed no signs of abatement yesterday, after Japan was reported by domestic media to have taken steps to ban the export of specialist pornography to China.

The move, believed to be in retaliation for China’s unofficial limits on “rare-earth” exports, is said to have “devastated” netizens across China.

Pornography is commonly found across the Internet but Japan has cornered the market in the refinement and production of so-called “rare” pornography, a vital ingredient in modern web-viewing habits.

Reuters reported that Japan was declining exports in the 2 Girls, 1 Cup series to Chinese ports, though customs officials were quick to claim the stoppage was in fact due to “stringent quality-control issues.”

Rare porn is also manufactured in China, mainly in the autonomous Hong Kong region, but is widely agreed to be of a much lesser quality than that produced in Tokyo.

“Connoisseurs of so-called faux snuff, coprophilia tapes and barely legal schoolgirls consider Japan indisputably superior producers — and rightly so,” Sinologist, historian and noted philanthropist Sir William Buckfast told China Daily Show. “If exports are blocked, this could have a serious effect on the domestic tissue industry, as well as causing potential social unrest. One shudders to imagine how Beijing will retaliate.”

Buckfast, who was the first to notice the alleged freeze, added that he will be monitoring the situation extremely closely.

Stay on top of China. Follow @chinadailyshow on Twitter

Michael Gove (far left) enjoys his third glass of the morning as the UK's trade delegation toasted a new round of sell-outs

By RONG REN
Politics Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – China’s ruling Politburo has called for the UK to embrace political reform.

The move came as David Cameron addressed students in Beijing today and urged them to “embrace human rights and democracy”.

“The UK’s democratic rights record is appalling,” said an official speaking to China Daily Show on condition of anonymity. “David Cameron’s Conservative Party won just over a third of the total vote [in the May 2010 general election] but were allocated not quite half the seats in Parliament. Once again, the British people were denied their right to a democratically elected parliament.”

Wang Ting, a mid-ranking bureaucrat and member of the CCP, pointed to numerous widespread scandals of  voting fraud reported in British media over the last three years, as well as recent accusations that voters were denied ballots in some constituencies when voting booths closed for afternoon tea. “It pains China to see its foreign friends treated so shabbily by their governments,” Wang added.

Chinese politicians have long expressed their wish for UK lawmakers to hold a referendum on their electoral system. Under the current method, the UK is divided into about 650 regional areas, known as constituencies. Whichever candidate gains the most votes in any single area becomes an MP and sits in the Houses of Parliament.

An alternative proportional representation (PR) system involves each party being allocated the same percentage of seats in parliament as they won in the popular vote.

“PR is a properly democratic system. Not this first-past-the-post shit,” Wang scorned. But some have questioned the timing of the remarks.

“Every time the UK tries to do the something positive on trade, or even civil liberties, in China, PR is thrown back in our faces. People have got to realize the UK has got a very different history to China and can’t be expected to develop at the same pace,” said Vince Cable, a UK treasury spokesman. As a Liberal Democrat, Cable was one of the leading beneficiaries of the current system at the last election.

“China must stop meddling in the UK’s internal affairs,’ Cable added. “I can’t imagine how hurt the feelings of the British people will be right now. I don’t even want to think about that.”

Surprisingly, some Chinese historians have come out in support of Cable’s comments.

“Vince Cable has really put this into perspective: China has over five billion years of history, whereas the UK has only really had a national identity since 1941, when they helped the Americans in destroying the foreign ghost devils of Japan (and some other countries) during the War Against Japanese Aggression [sometimes known as World War Two]. How could they possibly compete politically?” asked Wo Bei Bei, founder of the China Real History Society.

Despite pressure from China, the UK is likely to ignore demands for change, as the system has been successfully propping up unpopular UK governments for decades. “The system works,” one high-ranking British civil servant told China Daily Show.

Sociologists on both sides agree, pointing to research in their respective countries analyzing political dissatisfaction. Independent polls carried out in the UK show between 40-70% of UK voters disapprove of their government at any given time.

Those conducted by China tell a completely different story. Over 92.2% of potential voters in China are “greatly pleased” by the Chinese government, with the remaining 7.2% “completely fucking cock-a-hoop. Anything those muthas say or do is alright by me”.

Premier Hu Jintao enjoys a personal approval rating of 96.6%, all of which is cited as strong evidence for the UK to embrace political reform.

British Prime Minster David Cameron was at pains to sidestep the debate last night. “It’s all very well using buzz words like real democracy and people power,” he told reporters. “But where is the trade-off in all of this? Trade is what can really enrich the communication between our two nations.”

Cameron is also said to have  warned  Chinese officials not to raise the issue of Cornish independence during the talks, saying that it was an “internal matter” and “the British people will never be divided.”

Follow this and all UK- China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter