You want the Confucius? You can’t handle the Confucius! At least, you aren’t likely to be able to when you’re staring down this particular 32-foot behemoth. Built by Zhang Huan of An Yang City, China, Confucius here is made primarily out of silicone, steel, carbon fiber, and acrylic. His features are so surprisingly lifelike, you almost expect him to wake up and start trying to escape the floor he appears to be encased in, dispensing wisdom all the while.

China’s Internet is notoriously censored. Former Geekosystem Managing Editor Robert Quigley once visited China and attempted to hold a conversation with me over GChat. He got kicked off for five minutes at a time for every thirty or so minutes of usage. So, if you want to experience what Internet censorship of even the most bland sites and services like GMail and GChat feels like, install this China Channel extension, and be happy you didn’t have to shell out the money to go to China and be annoyed by actual Internet censorship.

The Chinese construction company Broad Group have one-upped their previous record of building 15 stories in one week with this 30 story hotel built in just 15 days. Erected near Dongting lake, in Hunan Province, the hotel was assembled from pre-fabricated sections shipped to the work site. The finished product has all the comforts you’d expect from a modern hotel, and is also expected to be extremely earthquake resistant thanks to its unique design. Of course, one wonders how “complete” the building is with that crane still standing in the middle of it. Read on after the break for a longer, more in-depth look at this lightning fast construction project. 

If  you’re looking for an excuse to visit China, here’s a great one: At the city of Erlian, near the border with Mongolia, there is an enormous statue of two dinosaurs. And they are totally making out. The whole complex was designed to draw attention to the nearby Dinosaur Fairyland park, but that pales in comparison to the site of two long-necked dinos tongue wrestling.

Residents in Luoyang, China were surely surprised when the nearby Jian River recently changed a brilliant blood-red. The shocking color change apparently has nothing to do with the end of days, but with chemical dyes dumped in the river from so-called “illegal workshops.” As startling as the appearance of the river, more troubling are reports that it is still unknown if the dye poses a health risk or even how long the Jian will remain red. I certainly wouldn’t go near it, that’s for sure.

See a video of the blood-red river, after the break.

Chinese furniture worker Wang Yongjun had the misfortune of cutting off the tip of his middle finger after a less than pleasant encounter with an electric saw. Naturally, he was immediately rushed to the hospital where doctors surveyed the damage and tried to figure out what they could do to save the digit. The finger was pretty mangled. All the muscle and skin were completely gone from the tip; only the bone was showing. In a bid to save what was left of the finger, Doctor Huang Xuesong came up with a novel solution. In his words: “We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach.”

In 2007 and 2008, two U.S. satellites experienced strange interference on several occasions. The anomalies didn’t last, the longest period being just twelve minutes. However, a draft report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says that what the satellites experienced was an attempt to take control of the spacecraft by hackers on the ground, and names China as the most likely candidate.

The two satellites were Earth observing craft and were not involved in any national security operations. The first, the Landsat-7 satellite operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, encountered interference in October 2007 and June 2008. The second craft, the NASA operated Terra AM-1, had its bout of interference in June and October of 2008. The commission’s report claims that this interference was a failed attempt by a ground station to “lock on” to the satellite in order to send it commands. According to the report, the attack utilized the Svalbard Satellite Station in Spitsbergen, Norway.

While the claims made by the report are quite troubling in their own right, the report itself is disconcertingly short on information.

This shocking video from a Chinese airshow captures the heart-wrenching seconds before an FBC-1 “Flying Leopard” (Xian JH-7) nose dives straight into the ground. If you watch closely, you can see a pilot eject before the plane crashes. Chinese news sources are reporting that he is recovering, having suffered only mild injuries. However, the FBC-1 is a two-seater aircraft, and the second pilot is reported as “missing.”

This is the second crash of an FBC-1 since 2009.

Last week, China successfully placed the Tiangong-1 spacelab into orbit, giving the country its first foothold in space. The name of the module, launched aboard a Long March 2 rocket, translates roughly to “heavenly palace.” Expected to last around two years, the module will function as a testbed for automated docking procedures and will eventually support up to three astronauts for short stays onboard.

The entire Tiangong program has the potential to leap the Chinese space program forward by decades. It should be noted that although U.S. and Russian space agencies mastered docking about 40 years and have both operated space stations since the 1970s, China plans to accomplish all of these tasks within the lifespan of Tiangong-1. The first unmanned mission, Shenzhou 8, is expected later this year. Two manned missions, Shenzhou 9 and 10, will follow in 2012.

The ever famous game, Angry Birds has been ported to a nearly infinite amount of different platforms including Kinect, Google+, reality and cake, but this is the one you’ve all been waiting for: Angry Birds is coming to moon pieOS. The Angry Birds moon pies are an official, Rovio endorsed product for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival and are being sold at the Hong Kong Angry Birds/Rovio store, a thing that also apparently exists.

The pies come in chocolate, mango, and pomelo flavors and are being sold in pairs for the equivalent of $5 U.S.. For the moment they are, sadly, available exclusively in China. Kiki Au, a young girl interviewed about the new product put it this way:

I’ve come here to buy the moon cakes because I like playing the game.

A poetically apt explanation of merchandising if ever there was one.

Video coverage after the jump.