Satirizing China with the ‘China Daily Show’

BEIJING â€" As China watches the spread of a new type of a deadly bird flu with unease, there’s a chicken farmer in Henan province who’s feeling lonely.

Well, maybe.

“It started about a month ago,” Zhao Chunlu tells the, er, China Daily Show.

“All of a sudden, the weekly telegrams stopped coming. My pager stopped beeping,” and “even the hermit has stopped making the two-hour journey by horseback to shoot the breeze,” Mr. Zhao says in an article on its Web site, called: “Poultry farmer has the distinct impression people avoiding him these days.”

“Alone in his yard, Zhao gazes thoughtfully at a pristine biohazard warning, hanging from a nearby tree. ‘You know, I really get the impression that people are now avoiding me for some reason,’ Mr. Zhao says. ‘Maybe it’s something I did?’ he continues. ‘I mean, I got drunk at a dinner a few weeks back and said a few things. But I assumed everyone else was blind drunk too, and wouldn’t remember.’”

There’s the China Daily, the government’s straitlaced, censored, flagship English-language daily, now sold widely overseas too.

There’s The Daily Show, America’s popular satirical TV show that is proving increasingly popular here too, its host, Jon Stewart, has discovered, to his delight, as the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wrote recently.

Then there’s the China Daily Show, a “fake news” Web site in a country that is crying out for satire, where reality is so skewed by propaganda and inadvertent humor that it can be hard to tell the difference, says its creator, an Englishman and Beijing resident who asked to be identified as “Mr. R.” In his early 30s, he asked for the anonymity for reasons of cultural and political sensitivity towards his host, the Chinese state. (Warning: some of the language and comical images on the site may be considered by some to be offensive, so click at your own risk.)

A slogan underneath the newspaper’s red masthead makes its stance clear: “The only news source visible from outer space,” it says, spoofing the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from there; as does its Chinese-language translation, “Madman’s Daily”.

Traditionally, authoritarian states resent satire - laughter is powerfully subversive - and China is no exception, carefully controlling critical chuckles in the media with a wide range of technological tools including tens of thousands of online censors who can, and do, wipe satirical Chinese-language jokes, comments or videos within minutes.

That leaves a true gap in the market for “fake news” in English, which the government may care about less since far fewer people can read it. And about two years ago Mr. R. stepped up.

In two interviews, Mr. R., who works in the media, last lived in London and says he is an admirer of the British satirical publication Private Eye, said he was inspired to do it by “affection for China, as much as anything else,” adding: “People unfamiliar with the country can realize that, however strange it might sometimes seem, China is a place like any other. It, too, can be explained and seen for what it is. You can’t really have satire without understanding.”

In story after story, the China Daily Show pummels the political fixation or social scandal of the day, whether that’s the “China Dream” of Xi Jinping, the new president; thousands of pigs found mysteriously dead in a Shanghai river; or the chronic secrecy of a state that recently told a lawyer who asked for information on the condition of the country’s soil that even that was a “state secret.” “Answer phone at Chinese Ministry denies Everything,” ran a recent story.

“A new answering service from the Chinese government has already issued a series of firm denials, sources confirmed yesterday,” the spoof ran.

“Reporters who dial the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Hacking are now greeted with an electronic message asking them to press a specified button to direct their inquiry.”

“Press One if your call concerns ‘purchase of organs harvested from executed criminals,’ Two for ‘mysterious deaths linked to Chinese-owned tech firm abroad,’ Three for ‘kid got crushed by official,’ Four for ‘inexplicably banned from Twitter…’ the 47-minute message begins.”

Mr. R. makes fun of everyone, including non-Chinese who develop a sentimental attachment to the country and talk about it endlessly after they leave.

The New York Times has been the butt of his jokes too, with a recent story about an “ace reporter, Chase Ketterman,” who was “found crushed under 40 tons of incriminating documents”, a reference to a story by the Times about the wealth of the family of the former prime minister, Wen Jiabao, which won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

I interviewed Mr. R. by email about what he’s doing, and about Chinese-language satire, too.

DKT: Is China surreal? More so than elsewhere?

Mr. R.: Yes, often and (it) will probably remain so for years to come - it’s always bedazzled and befuddled foreigners, after all. Step out of any high-speed rail station today and find steaming pork intestines being hawked from a donkey, next to a branch of ‘Star*****.’ Just relatively speaking, there are always going to be more weird things happening because there are so many more people. And the state itself is both authoritarian and lawless; the government pays so much attention to keeping a grip at the top that it effectively has to let the rest take care of itself. So there are a lot of institutions and people who are effectively running wild.

Q: What inspired you to start doing this?

A: It’s one way to express thoughts that couldn’t be properly articulated anywhere else. The site was actually born out of affection for China, as much as anything else. When you like a place, you want to see it get better. But many of the engines of social improvement, like a free press or independent judiciary, simply don’t exist here. Instead, China retains a feudal culture of deference towards officials or bosses, however incompetent. People are waiting for someone to point out that their emperors have no clothes - and I’m more than happy to be that person.

Q: Is there a lot of satire in China, do you feel â€" in English or Chinese?

A: In English, not much that I’m aware of. In China, there is, but it’s almost nothing like the ruthless, Swiftian take-no-prisoners definition, unlike you count Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, which is often pretty puerile. A mainland comic might perform a spooky, dead-on impersonation of Mao or Deng but that’s as far as it usually goes - the voice and mannerisms. He couldn’t possibly do a ruthless critique of Maoist policy or Tiananmen; I daresay he wouldn’t even want to. On television, you have the likes of Zhou Libo and Guo Degang, who are hugely popular stand-up comics. Naturally, they do topical jokes. Zhou does softball stuff for the older generations, who seem to have a taste for that stuff. Guo has a coarser northern style, and that has actually gotten him into trouble. A couple of years back, he was the victim of a politically motivated ‘Three Vulgarities’ campaign, which saw Guo’s BTV show cancelled and his DVDs yanked from shelves.

Away from the mainstream, you’ll find a lot of stuff on the Internet that’s funny and edgy by local standards - memes, jokes about bacon-flavored water, that kind of thing. Pictures of Jiang Zemin yawning and gawping at waitresses at the Two Sessions are always popular.

Little Rabbit, be Good: a satirical video about abuse of power in China

The best satire usually comes from well-channeled fury, like the allegorical ‘Little Rabbit, Be Good’ video, a South Park-esque animation that depicts ordinary Chinese as rabbits being systematically suppressed by tigers (Communist thugs) in a variety of scenarios based on real-life incidents, until they finally rebel in a gory uprising. It’s shocking because you so rarely see that kind of savage venting here: it’s just a hint of the emotions swirling beneath the surface. But the system currently won’t allow it - that video was wiped from the Chinese web very quickly - even though allowing such outlets is probably more beneficial for ‘stability’ than not.