Trending in Beijing: Campus Cats Tracker App, and an Unconscious Girl Saved on the Subway

The fun, the strange, and the what-on-earth-is-this? Trending in Beijing is a wrap-up of top stories in Beijing as told by the trending hashtags, local press, and general power of the internet.

Want to keep track of campus cats? There’s an app for that.

For our past two trending roundups, we brought you nothing but bad news about the city’s cats. Fortunately for felines, the trends have reversed this week as Peking University students have created a WeChat mini-app to track all the cats living on campus.

For years, the Peking University Cat Association has fed the campus cats and tried to find them permanent homes. To help the effort, some of the students have apparently used their lockdown time to develop a veritable crowdsourced Pokédex – Eevees only, of course.

The mini-app, called 燕园猫 Yànyuán Māo lets users browse all the cats on campus, organized by color. It also provides a list of “graduated” cats who have been adopted, as well as deceased or missing cats. The cat profiles will tell you about the cat’s appearance, when it was first discovered, its sex (if known), whether it is neutered, and even its personality traits.

On Weibo, you can watch the progress of cat trackers using the hashtag ‘PKU kitty handbook Yanyuan Mao Archive’ #北大猫咪图鉴为燕园喵录档案#. One popular cat photographer posted their pictures and wrote, "I took these pictures of cats at PKU and now I can finally know their names!" before lamenting, "But I haven’t been able to find the two cats in the last picture."

Subway line paused during rush hour to save a little girl

Subway commuters were surprised when the Fangshan Line came to a temporary halt at 10am on Apr 21, but as it turns out, there was a very good reason for the delay: a seven-year-old girl had fainted onboard.

After the girl fell unconscious she was found to have a weak pulse. Luckily, a woman who had been trained in allergy response was witness to the fall and immediately began administering CPR. As the train pulled into the next station, an emergency response team was there waiting to treat the girl, and the train was stopped for seven minutes until the girl was revived.

Netizens commented on the video of the rescue using the hashtag ‘Beijing Fangshan Line stopped for seven minutes to save a little girl’ #北京地铁房山线为救女孩临时停靠7分钟#. A journalist from Hebei province wrote: "Although her CPR method was not standard, she dared to act and saved her from the hands of death. That is something worth admiring!"

Netizens suggested that the incident should spur greater public knowledge of CPR, and many hashtag users accompanied their posts with an educational video on emergency response.

READ: Trending in Beijing: TCM for Virus Treatment, Sexual Assault at Guomao, and a Stressed Tiger

Images: Velizar Ivanov (via Unsplash), Yanyuan Mao