“When the situation is getting tougher, the humor is getting stronger. That has been always the case,” said Xiao Qiang, who runs China Digital Times, a website that follows news and web trends in China. He said in this past year, as Chinese authorities have tried to step up control in the wake of pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle East and Northern Africa, China’s online humor has, if anything, gotten sharper.

“Because especially when it comes to political and social matters, where there’s always a sense of repression there, speaking truth to power requires a lot of courage, and there’s risk involved,” Xiao said. “But humor can smooth that out.”

When two high-speed trains collided last summer, a former journalist named Liu Dongdong took a Chinese rock classic and rewrote the lyrics to create a satirical critique of government mismanagement – of the hi-speed train project, and of the accident.

The song quickly got millions of hits.

“These days in China, people are under a lot of pressure, and sometimes they feel helpless,” said Liu Dongdong. “I hope doing these songs helps relieve some of that pressure – and maybe even gets a little attention from the authorities so they do something about the problems.”

As a sidebar to the report, Magistad writes on her blog about her interview with satirical singer Chuanzi, who found the singer’s behavior, often at the behest of his professional handlers, to be completely incongruous with his sharp and witty work:

“I’m poking fun at the difficulties in our life, the difficulties we need to face,” he said. “By poking fun, we gain a certain amount of momentum or a certain amount of power to change our lives. But the system, I don’t think we can change… I think I’m a very small potato. I think I’m too weak by myself to change things. But if we stick together – we artists – it’s possible to change the society, and even the system, and to push it forward.”

[...]

Chuanzi’s agent was becoming agitated. She took her mobile phone and stepped out of the restaurant. She came back, and pulled Chuanzi aside. When he rejoined the interview, it was like a politically correct clone had taken his place. I asked what needed to change in the system to bring about the social change he desired.

“I think this is a question for the State Council (China’s main governing body) and the National People’s Congress (China’s legislature) to resolve,” he said. “We ordinary people have no right to speak on this.”

Read more about Chuanzi via CDT, including translations of two of his recent songs, Zheng Qianhua and People of July.

[This post was updated on Jan. 10, 10:10 pm PST to include Magistad's radio report.]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art censorship, chuanzi, freedom of expression, online culture, political humor, satire
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The following screenshot taken from CNN’s video clip shows what the guard looks like:

And below are some examples of the meme:

(“Let there be light” is one of the “Free Chen Guangcheng” campaign slogans.)

(Above is a photo of the first news conference held by the Ministry of Railways after the deadly Wenzhou Hi-speed train crash. Wang Yongpin, the former Railway Ministry spokesman, is on the right.)

(The photo above shows a news conference held for a fatal school bus crash in Jiangsu province on December 12–less than two month after the Gansu preschool bus crash that killed 18 kids and 2 staff. )

(A photo of  Wukan protest)

(Lu Xingyu, holding the pink poster on the right, is a second-generation rich and she is in charge of a charity called “China-Africa Project Hope.” A scandal had broke up since netizens started to question the legitimacy of the organization.)

(A township official was dismissed after he suddenly hugged Song Zuying (on the left) while she was performing on the stage. There was a heated debate among netizens over whether the dismissal was reasonable.)

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, satire
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Was the piece intended to stir the pot and provoke debate? Absolutely. If a piece is not provocative, it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get read, and it has no impact.

The primary point though of the piece is that our “economic security” is more important than our traditional view that military might trumps all. You can’t pay for military might without adequate economic security and a healthy economy. You can’t support allies without a purse full of coins and a treasury filled with gold. Is it not true that senior U.S. military leaders have said and fretted aloud that the single greatest threat to the existence of the American Republic is our national debt and spend-like-a-drunken-sailor-on-leave ways? No offense to sailors intended ….

Could we do a deal with China for debt and resolution of Taiwan’s status. Absolutely. Should we …?

No, that was a “modest proposal” along the lines of the master of satire Jonathan Swift’s solution for poverty in Ireland. Satire is not a joke, it is an extremely useful way to provoke new, original thought and debate.

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Post tags: new york times, satire, Taiwan relations, United States
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The cartoonist, who does not publicly reveal his real name, also launched the Dark Glasses: Portrait campaign to show support for activist Chen Guangcheng, who has been held under a particularly stringent form of house arrest in Shandong with his family. “Hexie Farm” appears in a recent list of terms that have been banned on Sina Weibo search, but the cartoons are still widely dispersed online. Some of his cartoons have been translated and posted on CDT, including this one mocking Fang Binxing, the Father of the Great Firewall. More of his cartoons can be found here.

The Italian magazine Post Internazionale interviewed Hexie Farm:

Hexie Farm is inspired by the allegorical novellas by George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm, but also inspired by the creator of The Far Side, Gary Larson, and by the Argentinian cartoonist, Quino. How can Hexie Farm, in a “great, glorious and correct era of harmony”, awaken the political and critique consciousness and change the course of events?

There are lots of political cartoons published in Chinese media every day. Unfortunately most of them are boring and meaningless. These cartoons never criticize the Party or the government, they do not question the system, and they do not make people think. This situation reflects the existence and consequence of censorship. You can criticize a local officer for his taking bribery, but you cannot criticize the government when it abridges people’s rights. This is one of the reasons that I started drawing Hexie Farm. I want to show the picture to the world by depicting the one Party dictatorship and censorship. I want to combine the history and reality together in my drawings, and figure out how ridiculous the logic behind the Party’s politics is. And I also hope my audience will get a new perspective and start to think differently when they read my cartoons. The cartoons turn bloody stories into hilarious black humor and sometimes even make readers laugh loudly. I am in fact sometimes confused about this effect. But I believe laughter is our strength, the Party has tanks, and we have laughter.

Here is another of Hexie Farm’s works:

“The Politburo members in the mysterious stability maintenance dance.”

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Post tags: cartoonists, Chen Guangcheng, satire
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No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. “Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”

To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”

So pervasive is this irreverent subculture that the Chinese have a name for it: egao, meaning “evil works” or, more roughly, “mischievous mockery.” In its simplest form, egao (pronounced “EUH-gow”) lampoons the powerful without being overtly rebellious. President Hu Jintao’s favorite buzz word, “harmony,” which he deploys constantly when urging social stability, is hijacked to signify censorship itself, as in, “My blog’s been harmonized.” June 4, the censored date of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, is rendered as May 35 — or “535.” There are also more complex forms of egao, like Hu Ge’s 2010 film spoof, “Animal World,” in which a rare species of Internet users is “saved” from “compulsive thinking disorder,” i.e., the urge to think freely.

Satire is sometimes a safety valve that government might grudgingly permit. Better a virtual laugh, after all, than a real protest. But being laughed at, as Orwell found during his stint as a colonial police officer in Burma, can also be a ruler’s greatest fear. And the Chinese government, which last year sentenced a woman to a year of hard labor for a sarcastic three-word tweet, appears to suffer from an acute case of humor deficiency.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: GMH Lexicon, Hu Yong, online culture, satire, Wen Yunchao
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Update: Another related joke is also circulating among Chinese microbloggers. It goes like this:

Q: What if President Fang microblogged a “help” message on his cellphone from the toilet for his “404 problem”?

A: The Men’s Room would be locked tight within 20 minutes.

Read more about the Great Firewall and Fang Binxing via CDT.

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Post tags: cartoons, Fang Binxing, Great Firewall, satire
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Local officials in Huili, Sichuan have been the target of mockery and satire after a clearly-doctored photo of their inspection of a highway was posted on the government website. From the Guardian:

The saga began on Monday when Huili’s website published a picture showing, according to the accompanying story, three local officials inspecting a newly completed road construction project this month. The picture certainly portrayed the men, and the road, but the officials appeared to be levitating several inches above the tarmac. As photographic fakery goes it was astonishingly clumsy.

The outraged – or amused – calls began to the county’s PR department, which immediately apologised and withdrew the image. The explanation was almost as curious as the picture itself: as other photos showed, the three men did visit the road in question, but an unnamed photographer decided his original pictures were not suitably impressive and decided to stitch two together.

“A government employee posted the edited picture out of error… The county government understands the wide attention, and hope to apologise for and clarify the matter,” a Huili official told the state-run Xinhua news agency.

ESWN translates an article from Southern Weekend:

On the evening of June 26, an Internet user made a post titled at the Tianya Forum. “I had nothing to do today so I visited the website for our county government. The headline story was about the upgrade for the road to the countryside. I looked at the photo and I almost coughed out half a liter of blood! Even a rank amateur like myself can tell that this was a PhotoShop job, and they had the nerve to put this on the home page!” The post included a screen capture of a photo, in which three men were “floating” over a road. There were clear indications that this was a composite job. According to the caption: “County mayor Li Ningyi and vice-mayor Tang Xiaobing are inspecting the newly constructed country road at Lihong Town.” This post drew plenty of readers, and the Huili County Government website was even down for a while because of the heavy traffic volume.

On the afternoon of June 27, our reader interviewed the Huili County Government publicity department director Zhang Yongzhi. According to Zhang, several county leaders went out to inspect the road. An accompanying worker took some photos for the record. But when it came to posting onto the website, the worker decided that “the background of the original photo did not look very good” so a decision was made to crop the leaders onto a different background. The Huili County Government has removed all relevant information and reprimanded the worker who handled the photo. The Huili County Government issued an apology at the Tianya Forum and the Sina.com Weibo.

Netizens have responded with their typical humor and creativity by disseminating photos of the officials in any number of dramatic locales. See below for some examples:

For another recent example of netizens using technology, creativity and humor to mock local officials, see this YouTube clip, “Hitler Responds to Chinese Microblogging Scandal“.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: political satire, satire
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Someone posted their conversation screenshots on a Chinese online discussion forum, and the scandal was thus widely spread.

This video parody was originally created by a Chinese netizen and was later translated and edited by CDT staff. It is taken from the often-parodied film Downfall about the end of Hitler’s life.

*Note: The term “fart people” used in the video is an Internet slang term that references a local official accused of harassing a young girl who later yelled at her parents telling them, “You people are worth less than a fart to me.” Read more on the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: microblogging, satire, videos, Xie Zhiqiang
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Like its media cousin, Apple Daily (which has been banned in mainland China for years), NMA doesn’t shy away from tackling material politically sensitive to Beijing.

The team covered the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo and has been contemplating “doing something on Ai Weiwei,” a high-profile Chinese artist who hasn’t been seen or heard from since he was detained on April 3.

“With stuff like that, it’s about striking the right tone,” said Logan. “[Ai’s detention] is such an important topic that we don’t want to take it too lightly.”

Everything else, however, they do thumb their noses at—an approach that given their popularity seems to be succeeding.

“Certain themes work well on the Internet,” said Logan, outlining narratives that portray a sense of affronted justice; are celebrity-driven (“I call it celebrity plus misery”) and are not already captured on video; or employ their newest experimental format, like the rap battle.

“We’re working on one about Obama versus Gadhafi,” he continued. “We’re still trying to figure out who will voice Gadhafi.”

See two of NMA’s hits below:

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: next media, satire, Taiwan media, video
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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: gas prices, NDRC, satire
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