Hundreds of thousands of users on Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like social media platform, have flocked to and followed the tw
o official Weibo accounts newly created on Thursday afternoon by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force.
PLA Rocket Force, formerly the Second Artillery Corps, was established on Dec 31, 2015, and serves as the strategic and tactical missile force of China.
It marks the first time for the PLA Rocket Force to open up official Weibo accounts, making the emergence of
two at once even more remarkable. One account shared the same name with the force, wh
ile another chose the funnier and more down-to-earth name Dongfeng Kuaidi, which means “Eastwind Delivery”.
Some netizens made a guess that the former one would be used for releasing official and formal news and the latter for communicating with the sea of Weibo users.
At the time of writing, the account PLA Rocket Force had over 82,000 follo
wers and Dongfeng Kuaidi had 180,000 fans, despite the fact that neither of the a
ccounts had posted any content yet. Meanwhile, the number of followers continues to surge wildly.
Most fans are surprised by the PLA Rocket Force’s move to “land” on a social m
edia platform with hundreds of millions of users, due to its air of mystery.
Many of them have said “welcome” to the PLA Rocket Force and could not to wait to le
arn more about and interact with it on the social media platform they often use in daily life.
The PLA is comprised of the Ground Force, Air Force, Navy, Rocket Force and Strategic Support Force.
hinese internet search giant Baidu Inc inked an in-depth partnership with China’s largest online travel agency Ctrip, in its latest efforts to drive the development of intelligent tourism in China.
Under the agreement, Baidu will deploy its cloud services and artificial intelligence capabilities to provide Ctrip with solutions tailor
ed to tourism scenarios and businesses. Baidu Cloud, the cloud unit of Baidu will help Ctrip impr
ove operational efficiency and customer experience and reduce costs in marketing and sales, customer acquisition and online traffic conversion.
The two companies will also continue to explore a variety of smart services in more scenarios
based on Baidu’s AI capabilities, such as speech technology and autonomous driving.
“The tourism industry is growing rapidly and Ctrip is the industry leader. Baidu looks forward to working wi
th Ctrip to upgrade tourism services with ‘cloud plus AI’, enhance customer experience, and ex
plore a viable path to intelligent tourism for the entire industry,” said Zhang Dongchen, vice-president of Baidu.
“With the vigorous development of tourism, consumer needs are more and more diversified. To better serve our customers, Ctrip
needs to be enabled by advanced cloud computing and AI technologies,” said Xiong Xing, executive vi
ce-president of Ctrip and CEO of air ticketing business unit and international business unit of the company.
Xiong said they hoped to collaborate with Baidu to create smarter customer service and more value for users.
This partnership is not limited to IT infrastructure. With Baidu Cloud’s capabilities, big data
analytics can be conducted on users’ interests, habits and preferences. Different tourism products can
be packaged by Baidu’s AI and machine learning technologies to offer every user customized solutions.
Over the past three years, Baidu Cloud has collaborated with more than 2,000 partners in
over 30 industries, such as finance, security, transportation and education, and created over 100 solutions.
Imax box offices set a new record over the Chinese New Year period starting on Feb 5, grossing 217 million yuan ($32.3 million) across its 599 theaters in China.
Imax Corporation and Imax China said in a news release on Feb 11 that the results were driven by the
strong performances of three local-language films – The Wandering Earth, Crazy Alien and Peg
asus. The sales figures marked Imax China’s best Chinese New Year performance ever, up 40 percent year-on-year.
The Wandering Earth, China’s first big-budget sci-fi film, led the pack by grossing more than
185 million yuan in Imax theaters to become the highest grossing local-language film in Imax hi
story, surpassing Mojin: The Lost Legend. Imax screenings accounted for more than 9 percent of the film’s gross ov
erall takings. The film also set new Imax records for the biggest opening week, surpassing Avengers: Infinity War, as
well as the biggest single day and best three-day performance for a local-language title.
“We are very pleased with these record-breaking Chinese New Year results, which are particularly significant when com
pared to 2018’s record performance that was up 80 percent over the previous year,” said Imax CEO Richard L. Gelfond.