Back in the day, we had Woody Allen and Soon Yi. Just recently, actor Doug Hutchison married teenager Courtney Stoddard. You can witness it with Madonna right now, and The Hef does it all the time.

What is it? A story as old as showbiz itself: Members of the entertainment industry taking the easy way out and preying on very young starstruck wannabes who may or may not be seeking their ticket to fame.

But has one 24-year-old Chinese pop star gone too far? The Ick-O-Meter is pinging -- hard.

Fans are happily (!) abuzz over singer Zhang Mu Yi’s relationship with a 12-year-old. That’s right. Twelve. Ten fingers and two toes.

The skin-crawl factor on this one tells us that, yes, he's taken the May/December thing a few steps too far. It’s one thing for a romance to have an age disparity between the participants -- it happens to many of us -- but someone might want to tell Yi that "May/December" doesn't mean your girlfriend was born last May.

The prepubescent in question is Canadian model Akama Miki, and yeah, she's adorable, but she should be out selling cookies, not exchanging swoony preteen messages of love on Chinese social site Weibo with a guy twice her age.

But is the whole thing just a publicity stunt? The media seems to think so. Miki is launching a music career of her own, and the two revealed their “love affair” with suspicious timing -- right when they debuted the video of a duet that will appear on her first album.

Of course, we're not cynical enough to believe that this is some sort of marketing ploy. Because nobody in America ever uses their love life to get attention for professional projects. Ever.

Right, Kim?

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