Viral Week is our weekly round-up of the weekend’s trending memes, humor, rumor, gossip, and everything else Chinese netizens are chatting about.

This week, Taiwan legalizes same-sex marriage, a gang boss on death row is found running free (then re-arrested), bureaucrats are ignorant about art, and a 20K phone number brings bad luck to its buyer. But first…

Blown off

Four people died in the Category 8 gales that swept the capital in on Sunday, which also dislodged the outer paneling of a seemingly poorly built apartment complex in Changping district, damaging the roof of a nearby kindergarten (fortunately, nobody was hurt):

Weibo

Celebrating love

To celebrate May 20,, or “Internet Valentine’s Day,” a beauty salon in Henan province asked all employees who are not single to post a photo with their significant other in Wechat Moments, or  “be advised to resign.”

Love was also in the air for Mario Ho, son of Macau casino king Stanley Ho, who proposed to supermodel Ming Xi in Shanghai’s L’Avenue Mall—with an all-pink mise-en-scène widely mocked by netizens.

Weibo

With gay couples now able to marry in Taiwan, many are wondering when the mainland will follow suit, where there is are willing officials but considerable conservative opposition.

In the doghouse

An Anhui breeder who joked about naming his two dogs “Chengguan” (municipal enforcers) and “Xieguan” (traffic assistants) has been controversially detained for “insulting law enforcement personnel.”

Numerical disadvantage

Mr. Shen, a Zhejiang businessman, says he has been getting calls from strangers since his number appeared on a recent episode of TV series Skynet Action—a reasonable complaint, but what really grabbed netizens’ attention was that he’d paid 20,000 RMB for this “lucky number” in 2011.

Artless dodgers

A Sichuan neighborhood committee broke into the studio of well-known painter Liu Keyin on Sunday, and police are still searching the dump for three cases’ worth of valuable paintings and calligraphy that the bureaucrats sold for scrap, apparently confusing art-collection with hoarding.

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Who let the crook out?

Amid nationwide crackdowns on gang violence, Yunnan police re-arrested nightclub owner Sun Xiaoguo, who had been sentenced to death 21 years ago for rape, causing the public to wonder how he got out in the first place (and who let him)

Baby bluff?

A four-month-old baby, said to been snatched from his mother in a park last week in Zhoukou, Henan, has been found in Zhengzhou. However, latest police reports—which didn’t name any suspects, and described the boy as “missing” instead of “abducted”—are rousing suspicions of a repeat of last year’s Yueqing case, in which a mother kidnapped her own child in order to test the father’s “devotion.”

Struggle bus

A foreign passenger in Zhengzhou threw a tantrum on the bus after he missed his stop, then jumped out of the window before police arrived.

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Mobile ban

A new regulation from the Jiangxi Province Department of Education prohibits undergraduate students from bringing mobile phones or tablets to class, unless they are relevant to the lesson

Cover image from Pexels and Pixabay