超级女声 is probably the most popular TV show here in China right now. The name of the show means "Super Girl Voice", where the "Girl Voice" part is a play on the word for female student; the show is like American Idol, but it's all teenage/college-age girls. As I understand it, they are doing local versions of the show all over China as a run-up to a grand national contest. The show is very girly and dramatic, ergo very very popular.

I put up a new ThingImWondering because I saw this used in a newspaper headline about the show...

What the "PK" in 超级女声PK赛 stands for (not what it means).

But then a Google search turned up a quick answer, which was as I suspected:

超级女声最残酷也最吸引的地方就在于它的PK赛。每一位被淘汰的选手都是在PK赛中被PK掉的，这里顺便回答一下病毒的问题，PK, 作为目前最流行的词汇之一，我是真的真得很喜欢，以至于喜欢得爱不释手，胡乱引用，词不达意，这是我常干的事情，想来你也不会怪罪于我；这词本来缘于网络游戏中的名词“Player killer”，当然是个名词，后来也可以做动词，大约是“搞掂”、“杀死”、“末位淘汰”诸如此类的意思，含义比较丰富，根据上下文可以衍生出不同的妙味来。而且以后我们对某些故事也可以稍微改头换面些些，比如把“杀死爱情兽”改成“PK爱情兽”，就增加了不少喜剧效果。

The PK stands for "Player Killer"! It turns out that the part of the show where the two bottom singers (or something like that; anyways two girls) have to sing a song, make an emotional plea with the audience, and then stand behind their own ballot boxes and cry as selected members of the audience come up and cast their votes for either girl, the one with less vote being eliminated.

Here's a rough translation of the Chinese above:

Chaoji Nüsheng's most cruel and yet irresistable part is the PK contest. All the girls who are PK-ed have to be eliminated in a PK contest. Here I'll quickly answer a question that's probably bugging you. PK is one of the more popular words in use today, and I really really like to use it; I like it so much, I could hug it. I recklessly use it right and left, to the point where it loses all meaning. But I think you won't blame me; see, it's something I do all the time: originally, PK comes from online games where "Player killer" was first a noun, and then a verb which approximately means "to do somebody in", "to kill", or "to decisively eliminate". The range of meanings it can take is pretty broad, so depending on the context it can be used in clever ways. So we can use it to switch up some familiary phrases, like making "love killer" become "love PK-er", to heightened comedic effect.

Reminds me of the Korean real-life PK. Yikes!