Do you still remember the fuzzy agent in the Get Smart the movie? Well, it seems that some high school graduates from Jilin province are much better than him: They used the latest cutting-edge equipment to cheat on the Gaokao exams.

Honestly, as a former journalist, I’ve never seen stuff this unbelievable before - a mini camera hidden in a ruler that sends a video stream to a distant place outside the examination room, so that “experts” can send back the correct answers via the invisible earphone — the kind of thing you only see in 24.

China Youth Daily (中国青年报) was the first news outlet to reveal the dark secrets of Gaokao in Jilin province this year. There is a really huge industry behind all this — RMB 300 equipment sold for RMB 10,000! Unbelievable.

A bunch of amateur film makers from Guangdong province brought us this semi-professional video, the first part of their “Guangzhou Asian Games Video Tour”. From 00:32, you can get a sense of the amazing design, tranquility, and beautiful views of Xiaozhou Village (小洲村), a small town in Guangdong.

The chase scenes through the alleyways is obviously imitation (or homage) to the opening of Slumdog Millionaire. But the film makers made them a lot of fun. If you’re expecting more videos from this series, please subscribe to this video album by 嘻嘻TV (similar pronunciation as “CCTV” in Chinese).

In the past two days, more than 10 million Chinese graduates joined this year’s National Higher Education Entrance Examination, a.k.a Gaokao exams. For most of them, they’ve sacrificed countless weekends and holidays for this glorious exam, because they’ve been told that to enter a top university (and join the Party) is their only way to attain a bright future in China.

The above video recorded a graduation ceremony in Hantai High School, Hanzhong, Shanxi. The students tore up their books and papers and threw them into sky. Besides hormone and tears, you can also smell some deep desperation.

Wenzhou-based Meters/Bonwe Group, the down-market clothing brand who invited Wentworth Miller to star in their TVCs, now has Optimus Prime on their side. Here’s Meters/Bonwe’s latest video ad for their special edition of Transformers t-shirt product line. Hope this stupid clip doesn’t destroy any affection you might have for the Autobots.

Seriously, someone just started a copycat version of HotForWords. I think there’s no need for me explain why I call it “terrible” and “shanzhai”. It seems that the girl in the video comes from a cheap bar in Sanlitun or a store in Xiushui. As for her English… well, it makes her even more Xiushui style.

I still remember the collective singing contests called “Every Class Sings” (班班有歌声) in my high school days. Google “班班有歌声” and you will find almost every Chinese high school organizes this kind of events, where students stand on the stage like zombies singing ancient patriotic songs, over and over, year after year. Here’s a hilarious example we’ve posted.

Today’s video features some boys and girls from Class 8 Grade 11 of Beijing No.12 High School. When the sexy dancing girls walked through the crowd in school uniforms, you can see the surprised faces and hear screams from everywhere in the hall. Honestly, I’m also shocked by all these amazing post-90s.

BTW, the familiar dance music is Nobody from Korean singing-and-dancing group Wonder Girls. The cross-dressing boy named “o♂Kitty♂o” also danced to this song, which seems quite popular these days in China.

Li Ning, the major Chinese supplier of athletic shoes and sporting goods, released a viral video for its line of badminton rackets. In the video, Olympic gold medal winner Lin Dan, the handsome and notoriously arrogant bad-boy of badminton, strikes shuttlecocks into a tiny shuttlecock bucket over the net.

But the basic idea — extraordinarily accurate shooting skill- - has been used recently by Adidas (Li Ning’s imaginary competitor) and Nokia. Even though Li Ning isn’t copying them, it might have been wiser to steer a bit wider of these two brands.

And the worse part of this viral video is, you can barely see what Lin Dan is doing. If it’s made especially for online audience, the production team should count the resolution of online video players, not 1080i HDTVs, into consideration.

This started making the rounds on the social networks like Kaixin001, where my wife first saw it and showed it to me just yesterday. Easily one of the most creative and side-splittingly funny videos I’ve seen. Hats off to the creative team behind this. If someone knows who they are, please let me know! Personally I’m very encouraged that this seems to be the new way of things in advertising.

This is absolutely today’s hottest video on the Chinese Internet.

In the video, we see a chubby high school girl engaged in online audio chat on her laptop, with a erect textbook as her cover. Presumably all this is being shot by a classmate with a phone camera. After she sneaks out of the classroom, her classmate unplugs her headphones and the following words from a boy are heard through the speakers:

We both agreed we’d be together for a while longer, right?
You’re silent. You told me frankly, are you seeing him?
I just don’t understand, is he any better than me?
Do you know how depressed I am these days?
I can’t do anything, you know?
Hey! Hey! Say something! Are you there?
Can’t you talk to me about anything? Don’t be so cold-blooded, ok?
Hey! Hey! Say something!
I can’t live if you keep being this way. You know that?

Then when the girl comes back, the teacher says to her:

The issue seems very serious. You’d better call him back.

Crazy, huh? People who’ve commented on the video are all severely critical of the girl who made VoIP calls in class.

BUT… did you notice something a little weird? Hey, come on, could there possibly be a WiFi signal in a high school in China? That wouldn’t even be likely in the US, right? Or is it possible at all that the girl’s parent had bought her a 3G netbook? What’s more… The high school girl used Microsoft Live Messenger and not QQ, and nobody laughed or even got excited when such a hilarious event happened during class! That hardly seems likely.

So we double-checked the information of this video, then found a “G3″ tag on the video page and “G3 speed” in the page’s title. G3 is China Mobile’s brand for its new TD-SCDMA 3G mobile service in mainland market. So it’s pretty obvious that, this is a viral video produced for China Mobile.

And on the video owner’s profile page, we found two other viral videos for China Mobile - a Taobao vendor showing underwear on a bus, and a college boy doing video chat in a changing room, both of which are just too risque to spread online.

After raising this question on Twitter, I got the answer that these viral videos were made by Hylink Advertising to promote China Mobile’s series G3 netbooks. What a brilliant local viral campaign!

We posted earlier today about Afterquake, a music relief project to commemorate last year’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan. Here’s a terrific music video that Luke Mines just sent us. This is what he has to say about it:

The song is called “Sala”. It is a traditional Qiang minority song, but all the kids in Wenchuan seem to know it be they Han or other minorities. The kids called it a guo zhuang song (锅庄) which apparently means you dance it around a fire. The main girl is named Luo Shuang (罗霜), a 14 year old first year middle school student from Wenchuan County. She is Han zu. Her mother appears at the end of the video. Produced by Abigail Washburn and Dave Liang. Shot and edited by Luke Mines.

Luke tells us that you can download the Afterquake tracks from China Mobile Music here.