Yang Yuan is a young woman who was recently disqualified from the Miss Intercontinental beauty pageant after the organizers discovered she had had plastic surgery. She said she was going to sue the pageant which caused little media storm.

But now it seems she has found a better way to make back the money she spent on plastic surgery: shilling for the company that put her under the knife in the first place. The pictured advertisement, complete with before and after photos, says that Yang is 'China's first artificial model' (click on the image for a larger version).

There's more on Danwei about Yang Yuan here and plastic surgery here.

Unrelated but somehow relevant: the turgid China Daily reports:

A rare, intelligent humanoid robot soccer player, currently the most sophisticated of its kind in China, will participate in the Ninth FIRA Robot World Cup this October in South Korea.

The Federation of International Robot-soccer Association Cup will be held on October 27-31 in Busan of South Korea.

FIRA has had venues for its annual FIRA Robot World Cup in Australia, Brazil, China, France and South Korea since 1996.

The "bi-ped" robot, developed by the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, won a championship at the five-day Fifth National Robot Soccer Tournament and 2004 FIRA Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament, which concluded on Tuesday in Wuhan Engineering University in Central China's Hubei Province.

This robot, designed by the Robot-football Player Research Group of HIT, bears the same name of its mother institute.

"Although China has more than 10 years of history in bi-ped robot research history, the experiment remained unsuccessful," said Dr Hong Bingrong, a mentor at the Computer Science and Technology Department of HIT and also a renowned forerunner in the soccer robot field in China.

More than one year's hard work finally paid off. Headed by Dr Hong, the group eventually made great breakthroughs in the arithmetic of walking and kicking of bi-ped robots and therefore solved the problem of keeping robot's balance while moving. Thus "HIT" was created.

"HIT" is about half a metre high,and consists of 17 joints. It is connected by hundreds of bolts. With two digital information processors installed in the middle, "HIT" can walk steadily on flat surfaces as well as rugged ground.

The article is on the China Daily's website here