Fang Binxing’s Holiday Greetings Spurned

The chief architect of China’s notorious “Great Firewall” Fang Binxing had his New Year greetings flung back in his face by hostile Sina Weibo users. From Didi Kirsten Tatlow at IHT Rendezvous:

Just how unpopular he is was demonstrated again over the weekend when his New Year’s microblog greeting was promptly bombarded with messages telling him to “go to hell,” according to netizens (it wasn’t possible to read each message, but Mr. Fang’s post had been forwarded over 23,000 times at the time of writing).

Pithily, in one word repeated again and again, the critics said: “gun,” or “滚.” (The word literally means “roll,” or, in an officially accepted slang variation, “beat it.”)

[…] He’s had eggs and a shoe thrown at him, and in 2011 had to close his newly opened microblog after thousands of users left comments within hours — almost all of them critical, the populist newspaper Global Times noted.

“I regard the dirty abuse as a sacrifice for my country,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Fang as saying.

See also an account of the egging and netizens’ reactions to it, and more on Fang Binxing via CDT.

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