New | Mainland business moguls, celebrities catch 'ice-water fever' at the weekend

The “ice bucket challenge” reached China and went viral on social media over the weekend, even though only a few celebrities have been soaked so far.

Because of the summer cultural phenomenon, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, TV celebrity Oprah Winfrey, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and thousands of others have been filmed while ice water was dumped on their heads to raise money for research on ALS, a disease of the nervous system that leads to paralysis and popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Videos of these challenges have gone viral in the US over the past month, but reached China only a few days ago.

Even so, the enthusiasm for the cause caught on. Pete Lau, founder of the Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus, shared what he called “China’s first ice bucket challenge” on Sunday. He called on three household names in the domestic information technology industry to either pour the ice water over their heads or donate US$100 for research on ALS. The hashtag “ice bucket challenge” went wild on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform, turning the challenge into the leading conversation topic there by the end of the weekend.

Two of those Lau challenged – the founder of the smartphone start-up Smartisan, Luo Yonghao, and the chairman of Huawei’s premium smartphone division, Liu Jiangfeng – accepted the challenge on Weibo and said they would pass it on to others by Monday afternoon.

The third person Lau challenged, founder of the Qihoo 360 search engine Zhou Hongyi, asked internet users to suggest names of people he should challenge. Among the hundreds of replies, many named the triumvirate of China’s tech industry: the nation’s richest man and Tencent founder, Pony Ma Huateng; Alibaba founder Jack Ma; and Baidu founder Robin Li.

Others called on Zhou to challenge actress Zhang Ziyi or internet celebrities Guo Meimei or Luo Yufeng.