Unexpected side effects

to Chinese genetically engineered babies

And facial recognition technology—

it's not just for humans anymore!

That and more on this week's China news headlines.

This is China Uncensored.

I'm Chris Chappell.

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This week's China news headlines.

A video game is causing tensions

between China and Taiwan to get...

even more tense.

This is Devotion,

a Taiwanese psychological horror game.

You can tell it's really scary

because you have to do math.

It's set in the 1980s,

in a creepy run down apartment

of a family of religious devotees.

And you need to figure out what happened.

Speaking of figuring out what happened,

people were trying to figure out why the game

suddenly disappeared on Steam.

That's a website where you can buy video games.

It has to do with an ancient curse.

The ancient curse being China's plan to take over Taiwan,

by force if necessary.

You see, sharp-eyed Chinese gamers spotted this.

Spooky, eh.

It's called a Fulu talisman.

Daoist priests

would draw talismans to ward off evil spirits

or give instructions to spirits.

This one is a curse spell.

In traditional Chinese culture

this is considered very evil.

It's the equivalent of stabbing a voodoo doll.

And this one has written on it,

Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh Moron.

Chinese players were not happy.

If you don't know,

Xi Jinping has often been compared with

the lovable Pooh bear,

which oddly makes Xi Jinping, not happy.

So Chinese players responded by flooding the game's page

with thousands of negative reviews.

And then at some point,

it was taken down from Steam.

By the way, Valve, the parent company of Steam,

is trying to open a local Chinese version.

Though apparently Chinese netizens aren't happy about it.

They can already access

the global version of Steam with a VPN.

And they're concerned that if there's

a separate Chinese version of Steam,

it would have all the good games censored.

Really?!

Well, anyway, after the Devotion game

disappeared from Steam,

the company that made it wrote a public apology.

And they said the game was pulled

because of technical issues.

Well, I guess in a sense that's true,

since this did cause the game to crash and burn.

Now Red Candle Games is creating a patch

that will remove the cursed talisman,

but there's another problem.

“Chinese players have downloaded

a pirated version of Devotion

that couldn't be patched

and still continued to offend Chinese users.”

LOL.

So yes, US warships just recently

sailed through the Taiwan Strait.

But it's a video game that's really upsetting

cross-strait relations.

But the youth of China might have

a bigger problem to worry about—

internet censorship.

Of themselves, not of others.

This year alone WeChat has blocked

more than 40,000 accounts.

Pretty good for only two months.

And a new target is sang culture.

According to Tech in Asia,

“It loosely translates to funeral or mourning,

but it can also mean hopeless or dispirited.”

Working 12 hours a day at a job

that won't even cover rent in Beijing?

That's sang.

Weibo has also blocked accounts

that “peddle anxiety.”

So don't look to these web platforms

as an outlet for your existential angst anymore,

Chinese millennials.

Because you can't have Communist Party spirit

if you're so sad.

Not to worry though!

Teenage angst

will soon be a thing of the past in China!

Because, well, teenagers may also be

a thing of the past.

Birth rates are falling in China.

Like, a lot.

Even though the Communist Party ended the One Child Policy

by implementing a slightly more liberal Two Child Policy,

“There were 15.23 million new births in 2018,

down by more than 11 percent from the year before.”

And the downward trend has been going on

for a couple of years now.

In fact, birth rates started dropping in the 1960s,

well before the One Child policy even started.

So why was the One Child Policy necessary in the first place?

Good question.

China's overall population growth is slowing,

but it hasn't yet started to actually shrink.

But China is rapidly becoming a country of old people,

as birth rates go down and life expectancy goes up.

Now to be fair, old Chinese people can be amazing.

But they're also not necessarily economically productive—

especially when a lot of jobs

like farming or factory work are physically demanding.

So this puts more of a burden

on those young people who do work.

And according to the New York Times,

“Should China increase welfare benefits

in line with high-income countries—

a stated aspiration of the Chinese leadership—

[welfare benefits] could take up to 32 percent of

the gross domestic product by 2050.”

But hey, it's the same Communist Party

that felt just fine with a One Child Policy

that resulted in hundreds of millions of abortions.

So I'm sure they could “solve” the problem

of too many elderly people with a brand new snack food

that's truly of the people—Soylent Red.

One more reason not to eat food that's made in China.

So birth rates are down.

But there's been a dramatic increase

in the number of genetically engineered super babies!

There were zero a year ago,

and now there are two.

In November,

a Chinese scientist announced

he had successfully created GMO babies,

which was very against the rules

according to Chinese authorities.

The scientist behind the experiment, He Jiankui,

deleted a gene in the fetus's DNA.

And in doing so,

he may have granted the twin girls immunity to HIV.

But there could be another upside, too.

According to this MIT Technology review,

this may have also enhanced their brains.

New research seems to show that removing that gene

not only makes mice smarter,

but also improves stroke recovery in humans

and has been linked to success in school.

So...the genetically modified twins

will do better in school

because part of their DNA was removed?

I feel bad for all of their schoolmates,

whose parents will ask them why they didn't have

their genes illegally edited to be smarter.

In other tech news,

the Chinese Communist Party has created

an unparalleled surveillance state,

complete with AI facial recognition technology.

So that's done.

What next?

Turn it on the pigs!