Taiwanese TV guest says 'Beijing has no refrigerators' — the internet replies with laughter

A clip from a Taiwan talk show became a top trending topic on both Weibo (#台湾节目嘉宾说北京没有冰箱引群嘲#, "Taiwan program guest says Beijing has no refrigerators, drawing mockery") and Baidu's hot search list.

According to the circulating summary, a program guest claimed Beijing's summers reach about 42°C but that the city "has no refrigerators," that restaurants don't have cold drinks, and that the guest found it "very inconvenient" when trying to pick up frozen goods during a visit to Beijing.

The backlash was immediate and largely incredulous. On Weibo, the hotword itself became the punchline: mainland users treated the remark as the latest example of how some Taiwanese media depict everyday life on the mainland through wildly outdated or outright fantastical lenses. The implicit joke — that a megacity of more than 20 million people, with one of the world's largest consumer appliance industries, would somehow lack fridges — needs almost no further commentary.

The moment is part of a familiar pattern in cross-strait discourse. Mainland social media users frequently circulate clips from Taiwanese variety and talk programs containing bizarre or exaggerated claims about mainland life, from poverty stereotypes to transportation and food myths. These clips tend to go viral precisely because they feel so detached from everyday reality, and commenters respond with a mix of mockery and exasperation rather than anger.

On Baidu, the story ranked in the top 40 hot searches by late morning, a sign that the gaffe had broken out of its original segment and into the wider Chinese-language internet. The Weibo hotword itself did not need much elaboration: for many users, the phrase "Beijing has no refrigerators" was already the entire story.