In a short online video, a Chinese man with a round face and a buzz cut pops open a beer cap with a single chopstick.
After a sip, he quickly lifts the bottle to his mouth while giving it a few sharp turns.
A small “tornado” forms in the bottle, and Hebei Pangzai, or “Fatty from Hebei Province,” as the 34-year-old is known on Twitter, drinks it all in seconds.
Photo: Reuters
Hebei Pangzai’s real name is Liu Shichao (劉世超). The odd-job laborer hails from Zhengyuansi, a nondescript village where everyone knows everyone.
Thanks to the Internet, Liu now has more than 130,000 followers on Twitter, drawn to his beer-drinking clips.
This week, he even had three new US friends visit him in his village.
His claim to fame was an old video of Liu’s shared on Twitter in August. It went viral and gained 12 million views.
In the video, Liu opens a beer bottle with a chopstick, mixes the beer with several other liquors, including baijiu, a potent Chinese liquor made from grain.
He lights the concoction, uses his finger to carry off a bit of the flame to light his cigarette, then drinks the whole thing.
He said he knew something was up when he first gained hundreds of new followers on Kuaishou, a short video-sharing platform popular among people in small Chinese cities and the countryside.
All of them wrote their comments in English.
After some Internet sleuthing, Liu joined Twitter, which connected him to an audience outside of China.
He declined to say how exactly he logs on to Twitter. While software to circumnavigate China’s Great Firewall is not technically banned, it remains a murky legal area.
Liu first joined Kuaishou in 2016.
“One of the first videos I saw was a brick-breaking video,” he said. “Those videos looked fake, and I thought I could do a real one.”
So he did.
He also started making the drinking videos, and later, tried his hand at cooking ones.
At the peak of his fame on the Chinese Internet, he had more than 400,000 Kuaishou followers.
When he held live broadcasts, he could earn up to 300 yuan (US$42.78) on a good day.
As for his current fame, Liu remains skeptical about becoming a career influencer.
“You cannot depend on this for a living,” he said. “This is just for when I have some free time.”
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS