In our newsletter 93, I translated a few jokes from a talk show /stand-up comedy competition that became very popular. Since then, the company that runs these shows, Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture and Media Co., became even more popular. They organize stand-up comedy shows with their fans in big cities, and even held a few shows in North America. Things swell for them.
But then…
One show in Beijing on May 16th, with a few hundred people in the audience seems to have upended the company, and possibly the entire business of comedy shows in China. And the incident that triggered the disaster is just 8 words in Chinese: “Very well disciplined, can win battles.” (Or as NYT translated: “Maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win.”) - 能打胜仗, 作风优良
It started shortly after the showed ended, someone on Weibo wrote a seemingly ordinary comment:
“I attended the shows of Xiaoguo Culture in Beijing tonight. It was quite good overall, just a small part made me uncomfortable.
“One comedian (I will not give the name here) told of two wild dogs he adopted. The two dogs impressed me a lot. When he encountered the dogs, they were chasing after a squirrel. Other dogs make him think of “cute”. These two dogs made him think of “Very well disciplined, can win battles.”
“If this joke is accidental, I advise you to delete it.
“If you meant it, you are asking for death.
“You are insulting the soldiers of PLA.
“Don’t ask me for evidence, I have none because it was forbidden to record the show.”
The Weibo account nickname is “A fan of Manchester United who does not want to reveal his name”. But of course, people know who he is, he is the Chairman of the fan club of Manchester United in China. People also found out his true identity — he got his master’s degree from the UK, and became a big Weibo account as a Manchester United fan while he was in the UK, often attending games in the stadium. Then he came back to China and was recruited by CCTV as its English news editor and producer. Many people say that this shows his family background — ordinary people can not get such a position in CCTV with just a master’s degree in the UK.
Soon other big accounts on Weibo followed the attack and someone even posted a recording of the joke by Li Haoshi, the comedian whose life was destroyed overnight. First Xiaoguo Culture announced that they will stop his performance to investigate. Then they announced that they are firing him and are educating the whole company.
But too late, Beijing government announced a fine of about 14 million RMB (about 2 million USD). All of their shows in Beijing are suspended indefinitely. Shanghai quickly followed suit. Soon, Xiaoguo Culture realized that their business in China is dead.
Not just that, Mr. Li Hoashi is also being investigated by Beijing police for criminal conduct.
What?! You may ask. Why?!
Well, because the phrase “Very well disciplined, can win battles” was created by our supreme leader Xi in 2013 to describe the PLA. How dare you used that to describe wild dogs?
If you are not convinced that this is a serious crime, it only proves that you are not a Chinese, yet.
And this is not all. Some Twitter user pointed out that the current censorship is already very tight. Publishing and performing jokes in China is like dancing with your hands and feet in cuffs:
A social media post detailed how censorship works in China’s stand-up comedy industry. Studios would self-censor performers’ scripts before submitting them to the government. Topics to avoid: political leaders, officials, extramarital affairs, gay, gambling, poverty and COVID.
Some asked: the jokes were approved by the Beijing government before they were told to the audience. Shouldn’t the government bear some responsibility also?
Others speculated that the demise of Xiaoguo Culture is not accidental. You can not destroy someone if the top of the government does not want you to destroy it. This joke and the deliberate interpretation of it is just a tool/opportunity to bring down the stand-up comedy culture that is getting too popular in China.
Yes, if you understand this, you understand China now, and you understand that this is not “cancel culture”, this is cultural revolution.
Meanwhile, the authority in China wants to be funny. They are almost envious of Xiaoguo Culture, which can create a cultural trend with commercial success. So they tried their version, a road safety education video with Indian characters performed by Chinese in Brown face. See them for yourself here and here, and there. They are so bad that after the uproar from the netizens, the Public Security Ministry has to delete these videos from Douyin, according to BBC.
I guess Vinicius will not be visiting China any time soon.
May 1st is a big holiday in China. People have a week of vacation. Many travel inside China, some go to the movie theatre.
In our previous newsletters 92 and 94, we mentioned “Born to Fly”, the movie that was to be released in cinemas on 30th September 2022, but got canceled on the 28th.
Well, it was finally released on May 1st. The government is serious about propaganda for the military.
Enjoy this review on Twitter:
I went to see ‘Born to Fly’ (长空之王) in HK the other day. It’s a wild ride. Yes, it’s a propagandist ripoff of ‘Top Gun.’ But if the propaganda is to be believed, the biggest takeaway for moviegoers is that the the PLAAF is really mostly a danger to itself. 1/
The premise is thus: China is besieged on all fronts by “enemies.” It needs a 5th gen fighter to defend its SCS claims, but it owes its inferior engines to a “tech blockade” (echoing a recurrent theme). Only an elite cohort of test pilots can gather crucial engine data…
But the movie itself is not about “revenge” against foreign “incursions,” as such. An engagement with US forces at the very end lasts less than 5 minutes. Instead, the pilots spend the other 123 minutes battling their own faulty equipment.
Pilots are selected through a bizarre series of tests: their ability to withstand extreme heat/cold, fly a plane blindfolded, cross narrow bridges, two sets of battle ropes… and even fight off wild attack dogs (?). No one passes the tests, but a handful are selected anyway.
The airframes (mostly J-11s) fare no better. Engines repeatedly flame out. Missiles get stuck on their hardpoints. One plane crashes near a school. There are at least three ejections. When a pilot pulls the ejection handle, nothing happens. A bird strike shatters a canopy.
The bulk of the movie is about installing a drag chute that will let the pilots intentionally put their aircraft into spins. They simply cannot get this to work. They even put it on a truck to test it. The truck flips. When the chute finally does function, they can’t jettison it.
It’s hard to say whether this is a propaganda movie, a slapstick comedy, or a veiled critique of the PLA. The graves of hundreds of dead test pilots are shown. The lead pilot’s parents disown him when insists on continuing after a second ejection.
Finally, they get the engine to work and use it to repel American “invaders.” In an apparent nod to @eriklg, the PLAAF shoots down a couple of USN drones and stops there, letting the F-35s escape
The J-20 hardly appears until the end, and the J-31 never does, although there are still some cool flight scenes. But the film is more “Hot Shots!” than “Top Gun”. Ultimately it understates the competence of the PLAAF — which is probably not the joke the movie makes it out to be.
“Very well disciplined, can win battles.”
Looks like comedy is hiding in propaganda movies.
ps: it was also released in a limited way in the US on 28 April, 2023. Rotten Tomatoes reviews
Maybe the Malaysian comedian Uncle Roger saw this as an opportunity to quit the Chinese market. He started posting a clip from his recent performance in Boston, “cracking jokes at China’s expense” on Chinese social media. You can see that at the 1:11 time mark, he started promoting his new show on sale.
Of course, he was promptly banned in China, on all platforms.
I guess he is just fed up with the censorship and has given up on the mainland. After all, not only dancing with hands and feet in cuffs is not easy, but it’s probably not profitable even.
Many people remember that he once cut ties with a partner who was deemed not pro-China to gain the market. Well, time has changed.
Do you know at the same time G7 was happening in Japan, Xi was hosting the China-Central Asia summit in Xi’an?
Here are some videos from CCTV: greetings, and performance.
The whole show looks like a Tang dynasty cosplay:
One overseas Uyghur explained:
Those central Asian countries: don’t you have any historian in your countries? Can’t they tell what message China has sent?
Or you SOOOO corrupt that your dignity meant nothing at all to you …
Look at the clothes, look at the soldiers, look at the flag … China is living in history
ignorance is not worth showing off
China’ Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) was an imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.
Chinese culture flourished and further matured during the Tang era; it is considered the greatest age for Chinese poetry. Two of China’s most famous poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, belonged to this age.
Besides political hegemony, the Tang also exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighbouring states such as those in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
The Silk Road was the most important pre-modern Eurasian trade route.
The Tang Dynasty established a second Pax Sinica, and the Silk Road reached its golden age, whereby Persian and Sogdian merchants benefited from the commerce between East and West.
At the same time, the Chinese empire welcomed foreign cultures making it very cosmopolitan in its urban centres.
So, it is the ideology of Imperialism of the Tang Dynasty that inspired this staging of the summit. Nothing can be more obvious.
And I, as a modern-day Chinese, can not be more ashamed!
Meanwhile, this picture that compares the G7 and the China-Central Asia summit is going popular among Chinese:
