James Fallows writes:
On his Sina Weibo account, Dialogue host Yang Rui let loose with an anti-foreigner rant so extreme that on first reading I was sure it had to be a parody. Only it wasn't. It's as if you heard a Stephen Colbert "in character" riff on his show -- and then suddenly realized he wasn't kidding. To put it further in context, it's as if a well-known figure whose trademark was urbane earnestness -- again let's say Ted Koppel, or Charlie Rose -- let rip with a David Duke-style diatribe and evidently meant it.
The paragraph below was all one tweet from Yang Rui -- you can really say more in 140 Chinese characters than 140 English letters! -- as translated in a dispatch by the WSJ's Josh Chin:
The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can't find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera's Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.
The "foreign bitch" he refers to is Melissa Chan, a U.S. citizen working for Al Jazeera, who did really impressive work from China over the past five years and then was expelled.
Comments