Some very nice from the National Day parade, celebrating the big 60 in Beijing, from Dan Chung of the U.K.’s The Guardian. Edited with the obligatory, ominous slow-motion for the tanks. Numerous comments here, many of which note how much better this footage was than what ran on Chinese television. I don’t really know, personally: I watched the CCTV-9 video stream online from a crappy computer in my friend’s apartment in Chicago.

A “Mr. Wu” of Lishui in Zhenjiang province hit the brakes when the light turned red at the intersection he was approaching. Next thing he knew, he says, some shadowy form fell onto the windshield of his car. Then he noticed that it was a person. A traffic camera captured what happened. Don’t worry, nothing too gory here, and everyone’s going to be okay, but the footage is pretty remarkable.

As you can see from the video above, Liu Xiang ran an unbelievably close race at the Shanghai Golden Phoenix Grand Prix. 13 months after his heartbreaking withdrawal from competition at the Olympics in Beijing for an injured Achilles tendon, China’s star hurdler is back in fine, fine form. With a time of 13.15 seconds in the 110 meter hurdles, he was behind winner Ryan Brathwaite of Barbados by just .01 second.

Some very impressive military discipline on display here in a BTV report from Tian’anmen Square, where the three branches of the PLA are parading in rehearsal for the big day, now only 10 days away.

I’ve heard that they actually had sharp tacks in the collars of their uniforms to make sure that they kept their necks perfectly erect; leaning even a centimeter or so off perfectly straight would deliver a painful prick.

If you didn’t happen to be in downtown Beijing around 11am yesterday, you missed a preview of the mini air show planned for the Party’s party, the October 1 60th b-day celebration. Never fear, you can see the highlight reel above.

I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, near a huge U.S. Air Force base called Davis-Monthan, so the sight and sound of planes overhead is so familiar and unremarkable that I forget how rare it is to see anything of the sort in Beijing. I was surprised by the reaction of people in the office building I was in, and by the excitement of lots of Beijingers — of which you can get some sense on the video.

Can anyone identify the planes and attack helicopters from their silhouettes? Was a time I had the U.S. planes all down pretty well…

Hong Kong hearthrob Andy Lau (Liu Dehua) admitted yesterday to having lied about his marital status. He is, as it turns out, married to his Malaysian girlfriend Carol Chu, and has been for a year. The information came to light when reporters, who are always trying to dig up shit about those poor Hong Kong celebs, managed to find Clark County (Nevada) Recorder’s Office marriage records last week. Lau, who at 47 ain’t no spring chicken, said on his website over the weekend that he wanted to have kids, and apparently the difficulty’s on Lau’s side of things. Unfortunately, rules in Hong Kong required that he and Ms. Chu be married before they could try artificial insemination.

As if that weren’t enough, it was also alleged earlier this week that Lau was already married, secretly, to Taiwanese star Yu Ke-Xin back in 1985. It’s not clear, however, whether this was an official wedding or what’s being described as a “private wedding” — simply an agreement between the two parties.

I feel sullied just writing about this stuff.

This clever little ad is making the rounds and garnering lots of praise: over 17,000 thumbs-up votes to only 200-odd thumbs down in the week or so since it was first posted — and this despite the fact that it never pretends to be anything but an advertisement. We’re entirely unclear as to where this came from, what creative agency made it, or anything else about it.

Probably no figure to have emerged recently in Chinese pop culture has been more widely reviled than Zeng Yike, the singer dubbed “Brother Zeng” by detractors for her supposedly androgynous appearance (I don’t really see it). Her somewhat anemic voice and tendency to wander off key stirred up indignation from many watching Hunan Satellite Television’s Super Girls vocal competition earlier this year, after judges Gao Xiaosong and Shen Lihui insisted she go on to final rounds despite her obvious shortcomings as a singer. By now you’ve probably read how her few remaining defenders, most of whom praised her originality as songwriter, have had their case undermined in recent days as it has emerged that one of her signature songs, “Leo” (as in the astrological sign), seems to have been plagiarized from another tune–a song called “Horizon.” There’s no doubt that the chord progression is the same and the melody uncannily similar, though both are to my ear so insipid that it’s entirely possible they could have been stumbled upon separately.

Before the whole Zeng Yike phenomenon passes on, as it so richly deserves to, to the Land of Forgotten Internet Memes, here’s a little reminder of how preposterously ubiquitous it had become. Yesterday someone uploaded the video below, taken of Shanghai’s Jiaotong University’s incoming class in their military training session, singing the song that’s become so controversial now. There’s also a solo megaphone performance of her other big (s)hit song, “Most Angelic.” Enjoy.

This seed ad from Hyundai — they make little effort to disguise its intention — is part public service announcement, with a list of driving no-nos, and part plug for the Elantra. It’s been viewed about a half-million times in the 24 hours since it was posted, with the overwhelming majority of votes going thumbs-up, so I’m sure Hyundai’s been pretty happy about it. No need to explain what’s happening in this highly visual advert, but I’m guessing something like this wouldn’t fly in the U.S. or elsewhere in the developed West, where feminist sensibilities would almost certainly be offended. We have your stereotypically dizzy good-looking female driver who makes about every mistake in the book during a routine traffic stop: not wearing her seat belt, wearing high heels while driving, forgetting to put her parking brake on, all that.

Interestingly, in the comments section, no one seems object to the fairly blatant sexism in the ad. In fact, one comment I glimpsed said something like, “Female drivers are all like this. Especially the ones who’ve just started driving.”

The uploader of this 94-minute documentary titled it, “If you are younger than 18, no need to watch this. But if you’ve been through Gaokao [college entrance exams], take a look. Documentary: Senior Year (高三).”

On Youku Buzz, we’ve talked about what Gaokao is and how Chinese students feel about it before. But the 50 second catharsis of flying paper wasn’t enough to convey the extent to which millions of Chinese students suffer before going on to college.

Thanks to the English subtitles, you can follow the storyline easily. Senior Year was produced by Zhou Hao in 2005. With a class president from a poor village, parents who have been farming for decades, and high school students from different families fighting for the same goal in life, the documentary recorded the last year of a class in No. 1 High School of Wuping, Fujian Province.

This film won the best documentary award at The 30th Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2006.