Top 10 Dangers Unique to China

As an important part of traditional Chinese medicine that has strangely failed to catch on in America, eating various dried animal penises (or drinking wine fortified with animal penises) is considered to increase energy, heal athletic injuries, and “enhance male performance.” Of course, they actually do none of these things, and many animals (including some endangered species) suffer greatly for the needs of superstitious and horny men, especially since the best penis wine requires the penises to be removed while the animals are still alive.

On the other hand, penis food and penis drink can get pretty pricey. A glass of Three Penis Wine (typically a mixture of dog, deer, and seal penis, with subtle notes of merlot and snake penis) is 12 bucks a pop. A dose of rare endangered-tiger penis can set you back around $2,500, and is rarely covered by your health insurance. Still, if you’re staying with wealthy and gracious Chinese hosts who think that you seem a little drained after spraining your ankle jogging, you might want to be more careful than usual about what you’re having for dinner.

With Western governments enacting newer and more restrictive copyright laws like SOPA, PIPA and ACTA as fast as media companies can pay them to do so, it’s sort of refreshing to see how huge and inventive the Chinese bootleg and counterfeit industry has become. Books, phones, computers, even entire cars are broken down to the blueprint stage and then copied with cheaper components and occasional changes in spelling, resulting in products such as the ePad, Hongda motorcycles and the confusing but intriguing book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Harry Potter.” Western companies trying to protect their copyright receive little help from the Chinese government, which generally sides with the bootleggers.

China’s exponentially growing industrial sector requires a lot of power to keep it running, and a lot of roadways to keep it supplied with raw material. That means at any given moment, an existing part of China is being knocked down, blown up, flattened or flooded to be replaced with eight-lane freeways, international airports, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams and Angry-Birds-themed amusement parks. Sometimes, such as in the case of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam, that means hundreds of thousands of people wake up to find a polite note on their door informing them that everything they’ve ever loved or cared about is going to be under 50 feet of water in a week’s time unless they hustle it down the road about 20 miles. Three Gorges also flooded and destroyed a number of irreplaceable archeological and cultural sites, but hey, you can’t put an HDTV together by candlelight, can you?

China is the world’s biggest market for cars, outselling even India as Chinese society seeks to mobilize its citizens. China also has some of the most relaxed safety standards for cars in the world. Pictured here is the result of European-standard crash testing on the Brilliance BS6 luxury sedan, which failed the tests so badly that the German engineers monitoring the video actually started laughing (disastrously poor automobile design being the only thing that German engineers consider funny). When you combine this with extremely permissive or nonexistent traffic laws and driver’s-ed programs, you get a driving environment where the World Health Organization estimates that traffic accidents kill 250,000 Chinese people a year, and that the leading causes of death for Chinese citizens from ages 15 to 45 are being hit by a car as a pedestrian or motorcyclist, hitting someone or something in your own car, or merely being in the vicinity of two cars hitting each other and taking shrapnel from the resulting collision.

For people visiting China for tourism or business, the most common advice given on how to learn how to drive on Chinese roads is “don’t even try,” as for a relatively small fee you can easily hire a native driver who is already very experienced in dealing with runaway buses, traffic coming down the wrong side of the road, and the occasional horse-drawn cart making its way down the highway.

If you look at photos taken on the streets of many Asian cities, you often see a lot of people wearing surgical masks. In most countries, this is typically because the person wearing the mask has a cold or other sickness, and is considerate enough to not want to spread it to others. In major Chinese cities like Beijing, however, it’s because the air is so thick with smog from all those millions of cars and hundreds of factories that you can practically dig chunks of it out with a spoon.

Periodically, the local government gets embarrassed enough about the sky-gravy to institute temporary driving bans or severe limits on industrial production, so sometimes you get situations like the one shown here by advocacy site “Beijing Air,” where a period of three days can change an apocalyptically smoggy hellscape to a relatively pleasant urban skyline after aggressive air-quality restrictions. Before the 2008 Olympics, Beijing halted all local construction, banned all heavy trucks from local roads, permitted driving only by certain license-plate numbers on certain dates, and even seeded clouds with special chemicals to precipitate all the gross stuff from the local air in order to make sure athletes from countries with less ruined atmospheres wouldn’t just take two steps past the starting line and die (although that would certainly have helped Chinese Olympic efforts).

Toxic smog wasn’t the only thing that the Chinese government cleaned up in time for the Beijing Olympics. There were still plenty of whiny spoilsports who selfishly wanted to use the international focus directed towards Beijing to try and draw attention to poor housing conditions, violent suppression of political protests or the fact that the massive and lethal Sichuan earthquake from barely three months prior had been handled ineptly and led hundreds of thousands of Chinese people into homelessness and in need for food and medical attention. Ugh, don’t these guys know the discus competition is coming up?

Chinese police and military units carried out a massive and ultimately successful campaign to prevent any pesky human-rights concerns from distracting the media from the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony, an event uniformly described as “spectacular” by the world’s governments and news organizations, even after it was revealed that the adorable girl singing “Ode to the Motherland” was in fact lip-synching, that the majority of the fireworks seen on TV were computer-generated, that the original chief dancer and gymnast for the event had suffered an accident that left her a paraplegic for life, and that the children who were supposed to represent many of China's minority ethnic groups were in fact of Han Chinese descent, just like the majority of the ruling party. Still, that was some great discus throwing.

For an information-sharing system originally designed to transfer targeting information between NATO nuclear missile bases in times of war, the Internet sure has a lot of silly crap on it. Now that the Cold War has semi-officially ended, the Internet has spread into China and the post-Soviet republics so that citizens of those nations may have easier access to amusing pictures of cats. Russians and the other former subjects of the Soviet Union have contented themselves with spreading pornography, obscure jokes and malware across the Internet, but there are many Chinese people who use the Internet -- even the heavily monitored and censored Internet that China maintains behind what’s popularly known as the “Great Firewall” -- to express unpopular opinions through political cartoons, anonymous videos and, in many cases, puns.

Chinese Internet nerds aren’t always directly concerned with government censorship and control, and are as easily distracted by ridiculous and funny things as Western memesters, but unlike most other Internet users, they are always at some degree of risk of tanks driving through their front doors and taking them away to rot in prison for life. That’s not a situation 4Chan is likely to get you out of no matter how often you post a "V for Vendetta" mask.

One thing that may contribute to Western “culture shock” while visiting China might be the propensity for many Chinese to just hock up a huge loogie on the sidewalk or floor or carpet like it was no big deal. While people of every culture have to spit out the occasional chunk of horrible goo, it’s usually reserved for wastebaskets or toilets or construction sites. The Chinese, on the other hand, typically see nothing out of the ordinary with blasting out a nasty chunk of lung chowder in the middle of a conversation, as traditional Chinese medicine classes phlegm as a “pathogenic product” of “elemental dampness” that should be gotten rid of at the earliest opportunity.