"The Wandering Earth" Hit Chinese Movie Theater

Last year, Chinese cinemas took in Rmb5.8 billion ($913 million) in ticket sales during the first seven days of the Chinese New Year holiday – the most ever in a single week.

Comedies are traditionally the biggest crowd-pleasers during the holiday, but sci-fi could secure a greater share of ticket sales this time round. That’s because this Chinese New Year week sees two sci-fi blockbusters hitting the big screen. Admittedly, one is a sci-fi comedy – filmmaker Ning Hao’s Crazy Aliens, starring actor Huang Bo. The other is The Wandering Earth, which many in the foreign press have hailed as the first proper sci-fi film made in China.
Both movies are adapted from stories by Liu Cixin, the first author from Asia to win best novel at the Hugo sci-fi and fantasy literary awards.

Information Times felt the need to clarify the claims of a ’first’, however. “The Wandering Earth is definitely not the first sci-fi movie China has ever made, but it is the first sci-fi film that’s garnered so much attention in China.”

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Internet Firm YY Wants To Revolutionise Online Education

The Financial Times calls YY “one of the hottest tech companies you’ve never heard of” and Forbes says there’s “nothing quite like it” in the United States. Investors in YY probably agree. The live broadcasting platform’s stock has more than quadrupled since listing on Nasdaq in late 2012.

As WiC reported in issue 175, YY started out in 2005 as an online portal for China’s gamers. Three years later, it developed a voice-based service allowing gamers to chat over the internet as they slayed monsters or coordinated their Navy Seal missions. The company then added video streaming.

With more than 100 million active users, YY now provides voice and video sessions for a wide range of audiences in music, fashion, sports and personal finance. Tens of thousands of people participate concurrently in some of these online sessions.
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But one of the most popular uses of YY is for karaoke, where one person sings and others follow along or chat together as a group. The best of these amateur singers can actually make money. One of the site’s largest revenue streams is selling virtual roses. Fans can purchase the flowers (Rmb1, or 16 cents, per rose) for the performers they like the most. The roses can then be cashed in for real money, with YY taking a share of the flower fee.

Singers thus have even more incentive to deliver stirring performances. And it can be lucrative. After building up expansive fan bases, some singers have scheduled live concerts on the site. According to YY, the most popular musicians can make $20,000 a month (although admittedly, most people just earn pocket change).

Now YY has a new mission – to teach Chinese to speak better English.

Last month YY announced the launch of 100 Education (100.com), a dedicated portal that focuses on education. The company says it will spend as much as Rmb1 billion on the platform over the next two years. Part of the investment will go towards attracting instructors to take their lessons online, while some will fund video lectures (predominantly English language classes) which will be offered for free at beginner level. Please read more at Week in China.

Monkey King: Vol. 1: Birth of the Stone Monkey

Currently, there are a surprising number of sequential adaptations of prose works, faithful and otherwise, available to readers seeking something other than the super-heroic serial adventures that have dominated the American market for the past half century. One could even argue that we’re in the midst of a Renaissance, if not a dawning Golden Age, of graphic novels based upon titles drawn from the Western canon and genre literature. However, the key term—and primary emphasis—in that statement would have to be upon the word “Western,” since the majority of these books were inspired by works originally written in English.
Fortunately, there are exceptions to every rule, and the release of JR Comics’s Monkey King Volume 1: Birth of the Stone Monkey readily proves that the great tales of any culture can be transformed into accessible, entertaining, even enlightening comics intended for a Western audience.
Monkey King is based upon one of China’s most famous novels, The Journey to the West by Cheng En Wu. Set in a mythic prehistory when men shared their world with gods and demons, Journey focuses on the escapades of the Stone Monkey, a creature born in the explosion of a boulder atop Spring Mountain.

Please go to Forward Reviews to read whole review about Adventures from China Series.