Eye-roll

fān báiyǎn 翻白眼

"It's the people who chose me." Liang Xiangyi emphatically rolls her eyes as reigning emperor Xi Jinping celebrates a constitutional amendment that could allow him to hold his official titles indefinitely. (Source: Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒/RFA)

Reference to reporter Liang Xiangyi’s televised reaction to a fellow reporter’s apparently scripted question at a press conference during the March 2018 “Two Sessions” top political meetings in Beijing. Liang’s eye-roll became a much discussed event online and birthed memes expressing frustration over China’s tight political controls, prompting Chinese censors to target discussion and news coverage of it.

Amid the annual plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, collectively known as the Two Sessions (两会), journalist Zhang Huijun of the California-based Chinese-language American Multimedia Television delivered a meandering, softball question about the role of state-owned enterprises in Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative project at a March 13 press conference. The question, typical of the sort that have come to be expected at the many news conferences that accompany each Two Sessions, drew a dramatic reaction from Zhang’s fellow reporter Liang Xiangyi, standing to her immediate right and in full view of the state television cameras broadcasting the event. Liang, of financial news organization Yicai Media, appeared increasingly perturbed as the long-winded question unfurled, sighing by its mid-point, then taking a good look at Zhang before frowning and executing a dramatic eye-roll. The pained reaction, which The Washington Post’s Simon Denyer described as perfectly summing up “how many journalists, and viewers, were surely feeling, not only about the question but about the whole two-week set-piece event in general,” was broadcast live on CCTV for the nation to see. Clips quickly spread across Chinese social media, netizens reenacted the scene, and commentaries were posted.