The young man in question insisted he took up the challenge of the punishment simply to catch up with everyone else at the party who had been drinking for some time. But the next day, it was reported a video online showed someone drinking two- 500 milliliter bottles of Baijiu in the same amount of time.
Baijiu is a commonly sold white wine with an alcohol content of 40 to 60 percent. The video challenge has had quite a number of participants, with some videos purporting to show challengers drinking up to three bottles of Baijiu at one time. Yibada News reports that a number of participants admitted to immediately throwing up the wine after the camera was turned off.
The Baijiu challenge is different than the Neknominate drinking trend that was going on in February 2014. In that game, if one wants to call it that, someone drank down an alcoholic beverage and then “nominated” someone else to do the same, all on video. A young man in Ireland paid the ultimate price when he died from the game.
The Baijiu challenge seems to have no rhyme or reason, other than to prove some guy is “macho.” But sadly, the original video has lead to some serious attempts at one-upmanship, and government officials are none too happy that so many videos are being posted on Chinese social media.
Beijing Today is calling the new drinking game an “ugly mix of machismo and commercial promotion.” And as the news site points out, in Chinese media, reality may be blurred a bit. They cite one man who was “ratted out” by his friend after filming the challenge. Zhang, the friend said, “We secretly poured out a lot of the liquor when we moved the lens.”
In another video slight-of-hand, an employee of a distillery in Nanyang, Henan Province told reporters his company had hired a man to pretend to drink six bottles of the Baujiu in a promotional video.
But this kind of drinking is very dangerous, and not just because of the alcohol content of the wine. Dr. Cao Jiwang, with People’s Hospital of Hubei Province said, this “serious binge drinking puts participants at a severe risk of alcohol-induced coma or death by alcohol poisoning.”
