I only heard of Teshi (grand master) a few days ago, because of a tweet. I did some research, and his writing is quite interesting. He has a following among people who are critical of the Chinese government. More importantly, he has an important influence on Chinese pop culture.
There is only a Chinese Wikipedia page about him. No one knows his real identity. He describes himself as a middle aged bald man, with 2300 yuan (330 USD) monthly income, living in Baoding (a city of 11 million people about 2-3 hours car ride from Beijing). He has been active on Chinese social media for a long time, starting with the Hi!PDA forum. He tried a few other forums and had a column on Douban, until Douban’s censorship made it impossible to use. He is currently on Weibo. Most recent posts are about the World Cup games.
He invented/popularized many words. For example, his fans think that he made “Little pink”(小粉紅) popular. Another one I see very often is “Niguo”(你国): your country, as the opposite of “my country”.
Teshi had a paragraph on Niguo:
Niguo and Woguo (Your country and my country)
People of your country don’t have the concept of Others, they can not sense their surroundings, they can only sense “me”, at any moment in any location
when they are doing anything, they can only sense “me”, others don’t exist, so your country is also called my country, people of your country is people of my country.
Teshi’s writing style is marked by his very very sparingly usage of period. Only one period at the end of the paragraph.
There are many more examples of his neologisms in the Wikipedia page: many are indeed used by Chinese on a daily bases to express themselves.
Another example on how Teshi influenced Chinese language: Global Times used his sentence to criticize the COVID reaction in the USA in March 2020 in a title of its report:
Trump is telling the American people: you are, in your own country, living a secondary life.
This sentence originally appeared in Teshi’s short essay:
You are, in your own country, living a secondary life. The great project will last three hundred years, but it does not know a snow storm is coming.
The “300 year project” refers to a pop song by Taiwanese singer Zheng Zhihua, “The great citizen” 大國民. The song was written in 1993, but became very popular in China recently because the nationalist propaganda described in the song is considered a prediction of China today. The politicians promised a grand future in the name of a 300 year project, while requiring ordinary people to sacrifice their daily lives.
You can listen to the song on YouTube here.
For most Chinese internet users, Teshi’s original paragraph was obviously targeting China. But Global Times masterfully used it on the USA.
On December 16, someone tweeted out:
The latest observation is: the cat finally shit out the plastic wrap it ate after three years, and the people in the house held their breath as they shovelled the shit and continued to perform “nothing-to-see”. (Teshi’s essays are never dated.)
On December 16 this year, state media reported that the Central Government held economic planning meeting and plan to revive three industries that was almost destroyed. We described it in our last newsletter. The turn of policy is as abrupt and stunning as the government turn on COVID policy.
This is how I heard about Teshi. His original story about the cat eating the plastic wrap was published three years ago. It describes how a cat (aka Xi Jinping) ate a very high end cake (aka, business and economy of China), and swallowed the plastic wrap (aka, the three industries Xi destroyed). Teshi’s reader thinks that the reversal of Xi’s economic policy is equivalent of the cat shitting out the plastic wrap. The plastic wrap has been totally destroyed, of course, and the cake is gone.
It is such a masterful allegory of China that it deserves my best translation.
Today I visited my friend, something happened, the house cat ate a plastic wrap, it must be the wrapping bag, a very high end cake, it was supposed to be a cake from the British royal family, with handwritten note, (I learned from my Wechat moment that it was very high end, very expensive), the cat saw it, it felt that the cake was very high end, must be very tasty, so it went to eat it, the cat has a very high position in my friend’s home, if it says one, there can not be two, it normally does not speak, mostly because it can not speak, but its style is like that, if it says one, there can not be two, it does what it thinks, whatever comes to its mind, it will realize it right away, it does not give you time to adapt, it dares to think and dares to do, it is quite strong, and does not care how my friend’s family think because they don’t relate to it, it is really in its own home, it does whatever it wants, the moment the cat saw the cake, its first feeling was, this is a cake, and looks very high end, is a good thing, the second was to decide that it is going to eat the cake, and proceeded to eat, it ate good things by itself, so it walked to the cake and started eating, without a pause, whatever it thinks it does it, by the speed of the primary stage of socialism, but it took a look before eating, it might be that it never ate cakes before, had no experience with the packaging, and it started eating, the reasoning of the cat is, this is a cake, it does not matter how should one eat it, the most important thing is that “I eat it” happens, not others eat it, I eat it, it is very important, it took the first bite, and it did not went well, it seems that there was a wrap or something that can not be eaten, it needed to be unwrapped, but the bite was too in a rush, too big, the wrap went directly to the throat, it was impossible to spit it out, the image can not be tarnished, there was a guest here, that was me, if it spat out in front of a guest, that meany that the cat acknowledged that it made a mistake, that was very ugly, absolutely no spitting, after this reasoning, the cat swallowed the cake with lots of effort, its face looked very sick, it turned to have a look, my friend looked very horrified, he knew the cake had a wrapping, but he could not say anything, for one, the cat moved too fast, he had no time, for two, he could not warn the cat because the cat had a very high position in the family, if my friend spoke up without thinking, the cat would lose face, and after the guest leaves, my friend would be punished, and I did not really know the situation well, in fact, I knew a little bit, the cake had a wrapping, but there was nothing I could do or say, I was just a guest, I should not comment on other families domestic affairs, the cat turned to look at me, I turned my eyes to look at the TV, I dodged it, the cat saw that everyone was pretending to be stupid, it got really mad, and it was about to lash out, but then it thought that it had no justification, it went to eat the cake all by itself, it did not consult anyone, it ate the plastic wrap, it can only blame itself, normally it can lash out, but today there was a guest, it had to act as a great cat, its basic image can not be tarnished, so in the end, everyone pretended to be stupid, appearing that no one was paying attention, in reality, everyone was watching, looking at the cat via the corners of their eyes, to see what the cat would do, would it make a fool of itself, the Cat saw it, now, it had to eat it even if it did not want to, so it quickly devoured the cake with the wrapping, and after it finished, it was full of anger, but it could not lash out, and it could not retreat to its room because that meant it lost, how would the friend think, how the family would gossip it, after some thought, the cat settled on the sofa, started to watch TV, pretending that it did not eat the cake with the wrapping, even though in fact it just eat a cake with the plastic wrapping, just so stupid, at this moment, my friend could not say anything, pretended to watch TV, I also could not say anything, and I could not leave, it was too sudden, so I sat there watching TV, it was about the birth of an Actor, the actor was indeed born, it was most difficult to perform normalcy, and we all did it.
Teshi (grand master) is, of course how his fans call him. Some people have collected his past publications and published it as a gitbook]. If your Chinese is good, you can read more of his writings.
The Chinese government has an official daily report on statistics of COVID on their website. I checked each daily file, since Dec 7th, there have been only 7 deaths. Two died on Dec 18th and 5 died on Dec 19th. The number of positive cases is also very low. For example, the new positive cases in Beijing for Dec 21st (published on Dec 22) is 471. Meanwhile, Weibo published its estimation, about 70% of Beijing residents have been infected.
The extremely low death number is due to the very strict classification of “COVID-death”, reported by FT: one has to be COVID positive and die of pneumonia or respiratory failure,
Meanwhile, people are spreading news of grieving parents whose young child died of high fever after having COVID-symptoms. While in big cities, medicines start appearing in hospitals, people in rural area still have no basic medicine for fever or cold symptoms.
We may never know the real death toll of COVID in China, but why such blatant lies? Some people on Twitter explained: in a year or two, it will be these “official number” that stay as the record of this time, as history, not the current flood of individual stories and social media commentaries. The CCP always think a hundred steps ahead for its own image, anything else, it is as stupid as the cat.
Meanwhile, China is so big, there are always people who are enjoying life. Even in Beijing, with COVID raging, cinemas that are showing Avatar 2 are full, with people coughing throughout the entire show. In Chengdu, massive turn out for the football game, while Sichuan province (Chengdu being the capital city) has more COVID infections than Beijing, according to Weibo estimates.
On social media, there are very disturbing videos reminded me of Wuhan in early 2020:
For the past few days, seeing more and more videos on Chinese social media of sick people collapsing on street, in shops, or at home. Besides those videos shared by netizens, some Chinese media are now also posting some of these videos, and they pop up all over the timeline.
Our old friend Hu Xijin, former chief editor of Global Times, announced that he got COVID a few days ago, and he kept having fever. Many Twitter users were cheering for the virus, unfortunately, the virus did not win, Hu came back on Twitter to announce recovery.
The Chinese government had successfully stopped the spread of protests in China by the end of November. Now the public’s attention is focused on the COVID cases. What happened to the young people who took to the street?
Many were invited to chat with the police. Some were detained briefly and let go. But a few of the young people have disappeared into police custody, with their families waiting in anguish for information on their cases.
An independent (underground) news media in China published a report: “The arrested, those youths”, to profile these young people.
The report includes one young woman living in Guangzhou who wants to study social sciences, one tattoo artist and her husband who is a practising lawyer living in Chengdu, and a young Uyghurs man also living in Chengdu. All the parents travelled from their hometown to find where their children were detained, tried to send clothes to their children, and none of them have seen their children.
People don’t know exactly how many were arrested in connection to the Blank paper revolution. But people think they are the best and brightest of Chinese youths, and now they are swallowed by the darkness.
Chinese state media cares a lot about the failing political system of the USA, you know. They are very worried.
Xinhua New Agency: Political dysfunctional, Economic unbalanced, Societal disorder — exposing the political system of the USA that is failing.
In comparison, China is always going from victory to another victory:
Xinhua News Agency: Woguo (or Niguo) has always been in control of COVID, now is time to summarize our winning experience.
One Chinese living in Germany described her experience as an oversea Chinese, and it reflects the experience of many:
I don’t usually pay much attention to German news, but I listened to the radio on my way to work yesterday and I can say that it was all bad news. The news reported extensively on Germany’s lack of medical care in this wave of colds and fevers, and the feeling was that the government is incompetent, children are dying of illness, and if we don’t do anything, the country will die. All around me: all planning holiday reunions to eat, drink and be merry.
China news: strong strong strong. My Wechat moments: get up early and queue for 1 hour to buy 6 pills.
This experience taught me that a country with all negative news when you turn on the radio is a more livable and normal country.
I had lunch with a German colleague who is also city councillor and asked him to give me, a citizen, a year-end summary of his work. After asking him two or three things I cared about, he was quite upset to find that I was not keeping up with the media: Don’t you usually follow local news?
So I briefed him a bit about recent Chinese news: Do you think I still have the time and energy to follow the local news?
He fell into silence.
I said with emphasis: when you do things, although I am not totally relaxing, I can not worry about this (referring to his work as city councillor in Germany), because there are things in this world that make me much more worried. Both of us are not paid to contribute to the democratic causes of people (city councils, although elected, is also a sideline job, volunteer in nature), a brick here and a tile there, they are all contributions. Let’s not belittle each other.