Shanghaiist

Is Angry Birds, the popular iPhone app, based on an ancient Chinese Shang dynasty wine container? A Chinese microblogger thinks there is an uncanny similarity and tweeted it out for others to see.

BEIJING – An enterprising Chinese blogger this week posted the discovery that Angry Birds, the wildly popular mobile phone app, was in fact descended from a Chinese species 2,000 years ago.

(Thanks again to Shanghaiist for spotting the post.)

For those unfamiliar with ancient Chinese history, that’s a Shang Dynasty (16th-11th century B.C.) wine vessel.

The "discovery" coincided nicely with news that China now numbers 889 million cell phone users – many of whom also do most of their social networking, web surfing, and gaming on mobile devices.

That's the kind of statistic to make cell phone app developers sit up and take note.

Oh, wait.  They have.

Rovio Mobile, the Finnish company that developed the Angry Birds game, said Thursday that it's going to launch a Chinese version later this year.

The game has been downloaded 140 million times worldwide, but Rovio reckons it can get almost as many downloads (100 million) of Angry Birds in China this year alone, according to a marketing official attending the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing this week.  (The current version has been downloaded 10 million times in China already.)

And that's not all.

Rovio said it wants to build Angry Birds into a major entertainment franchise, encompassing merchandising, comics, and a tv show.

Basically endure longer than its Shang Dynasty ancestor.

SUZHOU – Wang Xiaofeng has spent 11 years working as a seamstress.  She’s employed by the Shanghai Unite Gold Textile Garment Company in Suzhou, which occupies a small site a few stories high in a building overlooking one of the city's many famous canals.

The tiny factory specializes in wedding dresses, which a handful of seamstresses can turn around in as quickly as ten days, depending on the amount of fabric.

But Wang’s spent the past seven months working not on a wedding gown but an engagement dress.

One that’s already been worn.

Five thousand miles away.

By a future princess.

“I like this dress very much,” said Wang, smiling shyly as she held up a nearly completed silky blue dress and showed me the boning.  “It’s a bit more complicated to make, because the design is involved.”

Adrienne Mong

Wang Xiaofeng makes a copy of Kate's engagement dress.

She’s produced ten of them, and most of the customers she says are overseas.

But the Jiangsu Province native stares blankly when I ask her about the owner of the original dress and its significance.

“I don’t know who Kate Middleton is,” she replied. 

Made in China
Wang’s not the only one to profess ignorance of two people about to be married in what’s being breathlessly billed as “the wedding of the century.”

Across China, most people have never heard of Middleton although they might have a vague idea that Britain has a royal family.“I think if people here got to know her, they would like her style very much,” said Wang’s boss, Rachel Liu, who started her garment business in 2008. 

But general Chinese ignorance of Middleton didn’t keep Liu – and countless other small businesspeople in China – from recognizing an opportunity to make more money when Kate and William’s engagement was announced last November.

“[H]er dress was very pretty, and we thought, let’s try making one,” she recalled. But although they’ve sold a few of the dresses, each one costs $70 to reproduce, according to Liu, who wouldn't disclose how much the dress retails, but did concede her profit margin isn’t very high.

A few hours’ drive southwest, in Hangzhou, Andy Sun has no such problem; he’s making a tidy profit mass producing commemorative coins.

Adrienne Mong

Hangzhou Cool Eagle Hardware has sold some 200,000 wedding commemorative coins.

The 36-year-old former postal worker launched his small operation last summer, the Hangzhou Cool Eagle Hardware Co., which began making the mementos just one day after the engagement announcement.

“We looked for a photo online of them together, but the difference in height was a problem,” he said. “So we found individual photos, the ones we thought were the best looking, and then put them together" for the coin design.”

Sun employs 12 workers who churn out 2,000 coins in eight-hour shifts inside a cavernous hangar-like space, where the noise from the machines in opposite corners echo everywhere.

Since November, the company has sold at least 200,000 coins – each one retailing for $5.49 plus shipping.

Stacks of coins are packed off every day and sent off to the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere. But “most of our customers come from Britain [who] just order online,” said Sun.

The Yiwu Unnar Ornament Co. has sold almost as many copies of Middleton’s sapphire and diamond engagement ring, which had belonged to Diana, Princess of Wales and is valued at $52 million.

Rows and rows of reproductions – made of a metal alloy, zirconia, and crystal – lie inside foam pads on the premises near downtown Yiwu.  A handful of employees work efficiently by hand to recreate the jewelry.

Adrienne Mong

This small factory near Yiwu has sold nearly 200,000 copies of the engagement ring.

“It takes us 12 days to make a ring, and then another four to five days to send it by DHL, [and] we sold 3,000 pieces in the first month,” said Fisher Sam, the company’s sales manager.  “We’ve now sold about 200,000.”

The ring retails for up to $40, but it only costs the factory $3 to produce.

“A history in our memory"
Despite – or because of – the tidy profits generated for these small start-up businesses, the managers expressed great enthusiasm for the royal nuptials.

“I think it will be…a history in our memory,” said Sam. 

“The wedding will be a world event,” agreed Sun.  “I saw the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana when I was younger, but I’d love to see this wedding on television live.”

For workers like Wang, the garment worker, however, watching the wedding isn’t a must.  It’s a luxury.

“If there is time, I will watch the wedding on television,” she said.

Otherwise, she said she’ll be busy working.

After all, Liu’s garment business may decide to try to make copies of Middleton’s bridal gown as soon as the earliest pictures are available.

Related links:
Royal wedding fever? Some Britons are just sick of it

SLIDESHOW: Wacky royal wedding memorablia 

For all things Royal Wedding-related, read msnbc.com's Windsor Knot blog.

AP

In this photo taken on April 16, 2011 and released by Capital Animals Welfare Association, dogs rescued by animal lovers are released from their truck at a shelter in Beijing, China.

BEIJING – Traffic was running smoothly on a highway just outside Beijing last Friday – until a man noticed an enormous truck carrying stacks of caged dogs.

Mr. An, an animal rights activist and volunteer at Beijing-based China Small Animal Protection Association, saw the cramped, whimpering dogs and decided to do something. His decision ended up saving the lives of 580 canines, who were on their way to the northeastern city of Changchun, where they were to be slaughtered and eventually served for dinner.

An, who refuses to reveal his full name or profession, swerved his car several times to intercept the truck, forcing it to slow down and stop. He then called a friend for help. The friend published a plea on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform popular in China, and soon more than 100 animal rights activists had gathered with water, medicine and food for the dogs, who the truck driver later admitted were headed for restaurants in Changchun.

They sprayed water on the truck to cool the dogs down and fed them, while others argued with the truck driver and requested to see his quarantine license, which is required for transporting live animals. One dog gave birth to five puppies through the metal bars of her cage. Many of the dogs were wearing collars or chains, making the volunteers suspicious that they had been stolen from their owners, which the driver denied. 

The scuffle attracted the police, who said the animal lovers had no right to stop the truck or traffic. But the dispute over the dogs’ fate continued for another 15 hours. Finally, around 1 a.m., a solution was reached: Two groups there, pet company LeepPet Holding Corp. and animal rights group Shangshan Animal Fund, agreed to buy the dogs from the driver for $17,690. 

Most of the dogs are now at the China Small Animal Protection Association, in the western suburbs of Beijing. Many are not in good condition though – a few have already died, and 68 were in Dongxing Animal Hospital Tuesday and being treated for dehydration, various physical injuries and canine distemper, a highly contagious virus. 

‘It’s cruel to eat dogs?’
The animal rescue has sparked a debate in China.

Lianyue, a renowned newspaper columnist and an active blogger, said on his Twitter page: “I love dogs, and I don’t eat dogs. But laws do not prohibit other people’s freedom or rights to eat dogs. As a matter of fact, pigs, cows, sheep and all the plants we eat, are all our good friends. It’s repulsive to eat dogs, but it’s more repulsive to force others not to eat them.”

Another Twitterer agreed with his comment: “I actually don’t understand, why can people eat pigs and chickens so openly but it’s cruel to eat dogs?”

Eating dog meat has been a long tradition in China. Ancient Chinese medical books say dog meat keeps the body warm in winter and many Chinese people still believe that. Although dog meat is not seen at dinner tables as much as pork, beef or other kinds of white meat, some parts of China still favor the canine dish – especially in the northeast along the border with Korea and in the southern provinces of Guizhou and Guangdong, which are known for eating practically anything that moves.

Many people view less superior breeds of dogs as edible “meat dogs,” even while having pet dogs themselves. In vast areas of the Chinese countryside, free-roaming dogs are often snatched and slaughtered for food.

Dogs in China also face the chance of being beaten to death in small remote cities where limited public budgets makes local governments unable to provide rabies vaccination. As a result, when there is a rabies outbreak, locals often use what seems to be the simplest method to address the problem: kill all the dogs.

“When talking about animal rights laws, China is behind over 100 countries in the world. This is hard to believe,” said Grace Gabriel, Asia regional director of International Fund for Animal Welfare.

AP

In this photo taken on April 15, 2011 and released by Capital Animals Welfare Association, animal lovers use their cars to block a truck transporting dogs from Henan province to Jilin province as its passes a toll booth near Beijing, China.

Raising alert
Still, attitudes towards animals are changing and the Chinese public is becoming increasingly aware of animal welfare.

China doesn’t have laws against animal cruelty, but animals like pandas or tigers that are threatened by extinction are legally protected.

Animal protection organizations, despite some not having government permits, are being founded and people are more willing than they used to be to join them and discuss them in public. 

Celebrities are getting involved in public service messages – for instance, NBA basketball player Yao Ming is featured in advertisements all over the country telling people to stop eating shark fins. And bear farms, which have been used to harvest bile from live bears and sell it as a valuable ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, have come under increasing scrutiny and do not get licenses from the government anymore.

“Just a few years ago we didn’t even have this concept of animal protection. Now we have such a wide range of attention and support. Overall, I’m not pessimistic about the future,” Gabriel told NBC News.

And Friday’s truck wasn’t the first one chased by animal lovers. Wang Qi from the China Small Animal Protection Association told NBC another van crammed with dogs was found and followed by volunteers just days before Friday’s rescue, but they lost track of it.

When asked about future plans to save dogs, Wang admitted there’s not too much more they can do.

“What we can only do is appeal for the attention from the government and the society, and hope everyone cares about it,” said Wang. “We have to help raise the alert for animal welfare. This is the best we can do.”

RONGZHUANG, Jiangsu Province, China — It’s the kind of rural village where there are no cars, only small motorbikes or bicycles.  The courtyard houses, made of stone blocks and cement, are neatly arranged in grid formation.  In front of almost every home, chickens wander around or pigs are crowded into pens. 

Most people are farmers — at least the elderly are; the able-bodied young become migrant workers, going to cities to find work.  It’s a monochromatic place that feels desolate in the winter; the only flash of color is a woman’s scarf.

In short, it’s a village much like any other in the Chinese countryside.

Except that this one briefly entered the limelight in February when it was discovered that one of the families had abducted a child.

Six-year old Peng Wenle — Le Le as his biological parents call him — was living in one of these homes for half his young life.  He spent his days like the other village children: going to school, playing in the narrow dusty lanes, and pursuing his studies diligently.

Life appeared normal.  But the little boy never forgot he had been taken from his parents in Shenzhen three years ago.  He had been playing outside their apartment building one early evening in March 2008 when a man from Rongzhuang named Han — believed to be a factory worker at the time — picked him up and walked off. The scene was caught on nearby security cameras.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Villagers in Rongzhuang.

We covered the kidnapping two years ago for Nightly News.

Kidnapped for half a lifetime
The details of Le Le’s life under Han’s roof 800 miles away from his real parents are unclear.  But one thing seems certain.  The boy was well looked after by Han’s wife — the woman who became his adoptive mother— even after the 40-something Han himself died of intestinal cancer last year.

“[Han] told everyone that the boy was his from a relationship with a mistress,” an elderly man who lived down the road from Han’s house told us.  He was one of three neighbors who appeared to speak freely with us but did not give their names.

It seemed incredible that the neighbors didn't find it strange that Han appeared suddenly one day with a child. 

But another villager piped up, filling in more details.  “He told [his wife] that his mistress was going to marry another guy so she didn’t want the boy anymore,” he said.  “He said his mistress cried, and the boy cried, too.  [Han] completely made up this story as if it were real.”

“The wife didn’t believe him, but what could she do?” the neighbor continued.  “He insisted until his death that he had fathered the boy.”

A destroyed life
Han’s wife was nowhere to be found.  The home she and Le Le had shared until a few weeks ago was shut up with a lock on the gate.  Red Chinese New Year banners wishing 1,000 years of prosperity still fluttered in the wind. 

Then we heard she was inside a house around the corner.  By the time we’d arrived, she had gone, leaving behind a prayer group of women singing hymns. 

It turns out Rongzhuang is unusual for another reason; most of the 200 families populating it are devout Christians.  Alongside the new year banners were long red strips of Chinese calligraphy, “The Lord Protects His Believer’s House,” decorating the front gates of many homes.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

This was Le Le's home for three years in Jiangsu Province.

“Han is dead now, but he’s completely destroyed her,” said another neighbor.  “She can’t eat, she can’t sleep.”

Another stolen child?
No one knows why Han stole Le Le away from his family.  But in China, many of the children who go missing are boys.  Families, especially those in the countryside, still value boys over girls, because sons are expected to look after the parents in their dotage.  Sons also carry on the family line. 

Citizens classified by Chinese authorities as “rural” or “peasant” are exempt from the one-child policy.  They are permitted to have two if the first-born is a girl.  But for many, it’s cheaper just to “buy” a boy.  It’s a guarantee that someone will be there to take care of them later in life.

Perhaps Han knew he was sick when he grabbed Le Le off the streets of Shenzhen.  He already had a daughter, now a teenager.  At the very least, he knew at the time that his wife was unable to have any more children.  Years ago, during a procedure to remove her appendix, the doctors cut her tubes by accident.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Christian banners like this decorate many of the front gates of homes in Rongzhuang.

He had also considered Le Le’s future.  Not long after the boy joined the household, Han brought home a baby girl.  She was to be Le Le’s childhood companion and later his bride.

“She was three months old when she was brought here,” recalled one of the neighbors.  “Now she’s almost three.”

Han was believed to have adopted her for $137.

Weibo: the power of the people
It was a fluke that Le Le was found.

A Chinese journalist who had reported extensively on child kidnappings, including that of Le Le, had been posting the boy’s photograph on a Chinese version of Twitter.

“I knew at the time that traditional media couldn’t do much to help [locate missing] children,” said Deng Fei, who writes for Phoenix Weekly.  “So I started to use Weibo [China’s most popular microblog] to do this.  I first posted a photo of the child with a message: Can the Internet create a miracle and save this abducted child?”

Finally, just as the Chinese New Year festival began on 3 February, someone claiming to be a student spotted Le Le in Rongzhuang and recognized him from Deng’s Weibo post.  He contacted the boy’s real father, Peng Gaofeng.

At first, Peng didn’t believe the caller; he’d chased up fruitless leads for three long years.  But the student sent him a photograph of Le Le.  Peng immediately contacted the police and Deng, who accompanied him to Rongzhuang.  Days later, with the help of local authorities in Shenzhen and Rongzhuang, Peng enjoyed a tearful reunion with his son.

He and Deng also met the adoptive mother, Han’s wife.

“I always thought people who buy children should be punished severely,” Deng said later.  “Until I saw her.  She was such an old woman.  No matter what, she tried very hard to take care of the boy.  She sent him to school and gave him the name, Wei Cheng, which means ‘Go on to have great achievements.’”

Remembering but moving on
Since we last saw her in the spring of 2009, Xiong Yini — Le Le’s real mother — is still very slight but her face is fuller, less angular.  She and Peng had another son, Peng Wenbo, who is just over a year old.  She still has the same gentle, warm manner, but it's now tinted with the glow of joy at having Le Le back.

"He does look different now. When I saw him, I felt a bit strange," she said.  "But when he moves and smiles, I know for sure, everything is familiar again [although] he still has a little bit of a Jiangsu accent when he speaks."  

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

A family reunited: Peng Gaofeng holds Le Le while his wife, Xiong Yini, carries his baby brother.

Standing over Le Le as he watched a Japanese tv show on a computer in the family’s Internet café, Xiong falters once in our conversation.

“We used to comfort ourselves by imagining he was living a good life,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears, as she recalled the pain of losing him and of feeling responsible for his disappearance.  “And it looks like those people did take care of him.  He looks healthy.  He looks well.”

Xiong has not broached with her son the subject of his kidnapping, but she hopes he will forget the experience.  “He remembers how he was kidnapped,” she said.  “He says he hates the man who took him away.”

Peng said he will not press charges against Han’s wife.  “I’m doing this for my son. I don’t want him to hate me later,” he explained to us.  “It’s complicated.  He’s emotionally connected to that family.”

Both Xiong and Peng say they want to move on.  For them, all that matters is that their family is complete again.

Another mother waits
Back in Rongzhuang, Han's wife waits.  The little girl who had been her "daughter" is still in official custody.

In March, she sent Peng a text message: I can rest because Le Le is being looked after his real family, but the daughter has still not found her parents.

The woman has asked the police to let her look after the child until the authorities can locate her real parents.

“The police said if they can’t find them, they might return the girl to [Han’s wife],” said a neighbor. 

“She’s not an unreasonable woman,” said another.

With additional reporting from Bo Gu.

Related stories:

Chinese tackle child abduction issue with social media

Missing child found after three years

 A short amateur video of two kids smoking on a train was uploaded to one of China’s You Tube-like video sharing web sites Tuesday, quickly igniting an outcry and a lively discussion about China’s smoking problem – which seems almost impossible to tackle.

In the minute-long video, two young boys – probably three or four years old – are seen puffing and giggling while standing in the space connecting two cars on a moving train. (Such connections are usually a default smoking section on Chinese trains, although the doors connecting the cars are normally open.)  

There’s no information about anyone’s identity or where the train was headed. It’s also not known whether the adults standing next to the boys are their parents, but they clearly do not try to stop the kids and joke around when one boy puffs smoke into the other one’s face. “Does he know how to smoke?” asks one passenger. Another man replies, “Yes, you see he can inhale!”

The clip sparked outrage from viewers in the video sharing section of Netease.com, one of China’s biggest web portals. “The two kids would be lucky enough to make their 30th birthdays,” one commenter wrote. “Their parents should be executed,” and “Will their parents be happy when their kids contract lung cancer?” were two other comments from angry viewers.

Smoking has long been one of the greatest health threats facing China – it is linked to the deaths of at least 1 million people in China every year. Smoking is entrenched as a social norm: an estimated 30 percent of adults in China smoke, that's the equivalent of about 300 million people – almost equal to the entire U.S. population.

In fact, cartons of cigarettes are considered a standard gift for men since 53 percent of the country’s adult men smoke. Banning smoking in public was brought up by legislators as early as 1995, but the efforts haven’t made any great progress despite new rules that are promulgated every year. 

The latest initiative, announced last month, will ban smoking starting May 1 in all indoor public areas. But the tobacco industry is a major tax contributor in China, which may help explain the government’s sloppy control of the centuries-old habit.

AP

American folk-rock icon Bob Dylan, right, performs with his band in Beijing on Wednesday.

BEIJING — It was a performance that many didn’t think would happen, particularly not in the current climate.

The musician who exemplified 1960s counterculture in America, Bob Dylan, performed live for the first time ever in China on Wednesday night.

Dylan had been slated to tour in Beijing and Shanghai last year but the stops were canceled, apparently because of a financial disagreement with the concert promoter.

But after weeks of speculation about whether he would still come to China, the Ministry of Culture last month gave its nod of approval.

Although the cheapest tickets for his concert at the Workers’ Gymnasium in central Beijing sold out immediately, the venue -- which normally seats 12,000 -- looked only to be 65 percent full.  (Your correspondent forked over nearly $150 for her nosebleed seat, a hefty price for the average Chinese university graduate who might earn three times that a month in Beijing.)

Nevertheless, Dylan was warmly welcomed by the audience -- a mix of Chinese and Western fans who cheered and whistled to crowd favorites like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Forever Young.” 

Today.com: Dylan gets rapturous reception in China

Though there was high energy in the nosebleed area, Dylan and his band seemed to power through their set, and the two encores seemed perfunctory.  There was no banter in between songs and certainly no allusion to the detention of outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.  (Rumors had widely circulated on the Internet that Dylan might pull a Bjork.  The Icelandic pop singer created a stir when, at the end of her Shanghai concert in 2008, she appeared to support Tibetan independence.)

There wasn’t even a “Hello Beijing!”  (Although some fans who have attended previous Dylan concerts have argued on Twitter that his performances tend to be minimalist.)

It was still somewhat surreal to be watching an icon of social unrest perform in the capital of this increasingly repressive state.

As the Global Times newspaper, which is published by the Chinese Communist Party, noted in its Wednesday English edition, “Bob Dylan is playing in Beijing, an iconic voice of dissent in a nation that values harmony.”

In that very same newspaper was an editorial that lashed out at critics of China’s government, specifically Ai — who was prevented from boarding a flight to Hong Kong from Beijing’s airport on Sunday and who has not been seen or heard from since. 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News file

Ai Weiwei during an interview with NBC News in 2009. By Adrienne Mong/NBC News File

The man best known amongst the mainstream for consulting on the design of the Bird’s Nest Stadium is the highest-profile intellectual to have been detained in the continuing roundup of independent thinkers, artists, activists and lawyers across the country.  His disappearance has sparked alarm about just how far the Chinese government is willing to go to prevent dissenting voices from being heard.

Dubbing Ai “a maverick of Chinese society (who) likes ‘surprising speech’ and ‘surprising behavior,’” the Global Times piece went on to say:

“Ai Weiwei chooses to have a different attitude from ordinary people toward law. However, the law will not concede before ‘mavericks’ just because of the Western media's criticism.  Ai Weiwei will be judged by history, but he will pay a price for his special choice, which is the same in any society. China as a whole is progressing and no one has power to make a nation try to adapt to his personal likes and dislikes, which is different from whether rights of the minority are respected.”

That is familiar language that doesn’t suggest “the times they are a-changin’.”

If anything, they appear to herald a return to an era of disappearances, arrests and severe authoritarianism.