The single, male employees at Chinese tech startup Lianlian can be forgiven for being hard at work. Or at least it seems that way after their boss decided to change their annual bonus payment. In the past, most employees at the company received money, with some bonuses equivalent to six times their monthly salary. The appropriately named Wang Yuzhu, CEO of Lianlian, decided to take a more innovative approach this year and handed out sex dolls during the company’s early Chinese New Year celebration.


Based on the images circulating on Weibo, Twitter, and WeChat, these sex dolls would not have made the cut for the Chinese man who married a sex doll last year. Female and married male employees at the Guangzhou based company did not receive adult toys as their bonus. Instead, they were handed an assortment of goods, ranging from T-shirts, hot sauce, slabs of pork, beach sandals, and dehumidifiers. The dehumidifiers, an equally strange gift as an annual bonus, are in response to the humid climate in southern China.


While the distribution of the sex dolls was unusual, the holiday party quickly turned even stranger when Wang insisted upon a demonstration of how to inflate the plastic women. Two unlucky men, and one confused woman, were asked to stand at the front of the dining hall and use a pump to inflate the doll. An even more unlucky single man was then asked to lie down and demonstrate how to use the sex doll. Fortunately, he kept his clothes on, or at least he kept them on long enough for someone to take the photo.


Weird as this annual bonus was, it is not unprecedented in China. Last year, Qihoo360, a tech firm based in Beijing, offered an end of the year incentive to its male employees that included a night with Julia Kyoka, a Japanese porn star famous for her J-cup breasts. Going back to 2014, a chat appeared on Weibo where contributors could share their strangest company bonus. Items listed in the chat included Gingko tree saplings, spicy candy, lengths of rope, soy sauce, and apples. Compared to some of those items, a sex doll doesn’t sound so bad.