Rogue preceptor
来自China Digital Space
yěshēng guóshī | 野生国师
noun
(1) Pundit who defends China with outrageous rhetoric, typically breaking with official argumentation. (2) Patriotic conspiracy theorist in the "chess party."
Rogue preceptors are academics and internet celebrities who shill for the party-state, such as Zhang Weiwei, an English interpreter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s who now extols China's success in books and vlogs, considered by some to be "the Chinese equivalent of Tucker Carlson or Bill O'Reilly."
Etymology
Literally "wild imperial preceptor," where "wild" (yěshēng) means "unofficial" or "non-standard," and "imperial preceptor" (guóshī) refers to a powerful advisory post to the emperor during the Yuan Dynasty.
Quotes from Notable Rogue Preceptors
- Chen Ping: "Setting the benchmark for China's development as becoming a high-income country is a Western fallacy. They want China to be just like them, and China isn't. So this high-income advantage doesn't actually exist."[1]
- Jin Canrong: "Aside from natural and man-made disasters, we must guard against another possibility—that hostile countries may attack us with meteorological weapons."[2]
- Li Yi: "COVID-19 is the worst for Europe and the U.S., and the best for North Korea and China. Four thousand people died in China, right? But compared to 220,000 deaths in the U.S., 4,000 is basically no one! We've had almost zero infections and zero deaths."[3]
- Zhang Weiwei: "This box lunch is definitely better than what the American middles class has."[4]
- Zhao Chengye: "If the U.S. and China fought, China wouldn't have to drop a nuclear bomb on U.S. territory. If we made thousands of nukes the secondary harm would destroy the world, which would indirectly destroy America. The end result would be the destruction of humanity." [5]
