Saturday:

• Hundreds of “Naked Officials” Punished in Guangdong

Sunday:

• Here are Your 2014 Summer Blockbusters, China Edition

Monday:

• Explore Your Chinese Childhood with These Japanese Icons
• Shenzhen Residents Protest “Smelliest Landfill in History” By Giving it an Award

Tuesday:

• Getting a Green Card is Now Easier than Ever
• More Details as McDonald’s Cult Leader Gets TV Interview, Guangdong Woman Gets 5 Years in “Cult” Crackdown
• Opinion: Laowai is a Four Letter Word
• Record-Breaking Crowds this Past Holiday Weekend, Dameisha Beach Full of People and Trash (photo at top)

Wednesday:

• That Amazing Story About a Child Defacing a Chinese Passport Isn’t True
• Hong Kong Man’s Hides Corpses of His Second Family in Shenzhen Apartment for 14 Years

Thursday:

• Nothing Happened on June 4, and Here’s the Viral Story to Prove It
• Ultra Rich Asian Girls To Star In New Canadian Reality Show

Friday:

• “Long-Legged Foreigner Babe” Takes Lessons From “Dancing Auntie”
• Come to China, Get a Job, Work as a Government Bureaucrat

Saturday:

• Guangzhou, Shenzhen Gaokao Applicants Sent Off With Emotion and Pageantry

Photos: Nanfang

Those children! While we can’t stay mad at such innocent precociousness, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned here in trying to better take care of one’s own passport. Why can’t more news stories have morals to them?

It turns out, however, that this story may not be true at all. Purveyor of video games and fan boy mediator Kotaku recently pointed out that there are several anomalies seen in the photo of a passport defaced by a child that bring its authenticity into question, such as:

• all key identification (name, passport number) completely eradicated
• passport photograph also altered to hide identity
• ink lines retain same pixel width throughout
• ink drawings retain a flat plane inconsistent with the bending of the paper in a three-dimensional space (a la MS Paint)
• no smearing on a document with a gloss covering
• ink markings fly off right side of page into space
• immaculate detailing of a flower judged too advanced for a four year-old child

Have a look for yourself:

These all appear to be good points, though that last one seems a little harsh; after all, we are talking about Chinese children. Are children from other parts of the world able to detain their parents at customs with such artistic bombastic aplomb? We suppose we’ll need to allow an independent international body like UNICEF to settle that issue.

Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft points out the story may have been inspired by a similar case published earlier this year in which a Chinese man was also detained in South Korea when his passport was defaced by his son.

But if that is the case, and this story is proven to be a hoax, then how will people of the world learn this important life lesson?

Photos: Kotaku

From next month, passports will no longer be marked, and instead, travellers will be given a slip on entry outlining the terms and conditions of staying in the territory.

This will be a huge help, especially to laowai who frequently visit Hong Kong. It doesn’t take long to fill up a passport when Hong Kong issues two stamps on entry, and another on exit. Combined with mainland China’s entry and exit stamps, that’s five stamps per trip.

This writer’s passport was replaced within a year of living in the PRD. 25 trips to HK = a lot of stamps.

SCMP has more on how it will all work in the future:

The slip of computer-generated paper will carry the visitor’s name, travel document number, arrival date and the date the visitor permitted to remain until… Even if visitors lose the slip they will still be able to leave Hong Kong when they present their travel documents, because their information has been stored in the computer.

It’s a win for foreigners with more room for more travel in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

The Immigration Department, in a fine example of Hong Kong’s noted efficiency, says using the slip of paper will save each visitor 3 seconds when they cross the border.