Chinese Newspaper That Tried To Report On An Official's Luxurious Lifestyle

City Times, a newspaper in the Chinese province of Yunnan, was due to publish a controversial story recently about a local official, Fujian Communication Department director Li Dejin, and his controversial lifestyle — stating that he wears a watch worth 50,000 yuan ($7,930) and a belt worth 13,000 yuan ($2,000).

 The article was published in a paper in Yunnan, thousands of miles away from Fujian province, apparently in an effort to evade censorship. That effort failed, and the article was spiked after pressure from the local government, Shanghaiist reports. Thousands of copies of the newspaper were pulped.

A few years ago, this would have been the end of the story, but this being modern-day China, the article found a new home - Weibo. And pictures of Li's watches spread like wildfire: