The Guinness World Records on Monday disqualified what was to become the record-breaking fried rice dish after criticism that the food, cooked by 300 people in Yangzhou, southeast China, was used as pig feed.

The primary purpose of the Guinness World Records is meant to be encouraging people to challenge themselves and to surpass human limits. However, with more and more Guinness Records reported in China, most of them are meaningless: A group of thousands on the Ice Bucket Challenge; Tens of thousands people on the footbath challenge; The world’s biggest leather shoes, sofa, hotpot or even steamed bun. Some of them were made out of huge-crowd tactics; some of them were just money wasting.

This kind of Guinness Records is meaningless, because they mark no real breakthroughs in human history. A lot of challengers who are so keen to challenge the Guinness World Record Book are merely after wealth and fame. Many just want to do it for fun. This trend of boastful and childish behavior is unhealthy and useless to our social development.

What’s worse, many of the Guinness World Records challenges in China are organized by local governments. They support the activities with public funding for the sake of building up their own images and impressing others. Of course, the officials of such may add all these record-breaking achievements into their resume as part of their achievements. However, what they are doing not only damages the image of the government but also the mainstream social culture and values. We must stop these meaningless Guinness World Records challenges.

(This article is translated from 《没有意义的吉尼斯纪录该停停了》by Qiao Shan, originally published on Beijing Youth Daily on October 26, 2015.)