A weekly column in which Chinese media is taken to the stocks.
By TAR Nation
What a cunt.
This is Yang Rui. You can’t really see it, but I have it on good authority that his tie is the foreskin for his head. You may have glimpsed him on TV. I haven’t. Because if I ever did see him on TV, I would own a TV with a shoe in it.
This was strictly out of my sphere of awareness… that is, until the Global Times covered it. The Global Times, as one might suspect, was pretty liberal with their translation of his Weibo rant, making him sound a little less like a mad person in a special room of an insane asylum where patients vote to put the maddest person, with “Caution: Crazy Bastard” smeared in human waste on the door.
Let’s get this out of the way and jump to the WSJ translation in case anyone forgot:
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] Wudaokuo 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.
One of the most glaring differences was the Global Times referring to Melissa Chan as “crazy” rather than “foreign bitch.” The Global Times also opted for the “and target those who frequent the areas and its event organizers” rather than “cut off the foreign snake heads.” The rest is pretty similar.
Let’s learn a little more about Yang Rui. He worked at China National Radio and then moved on to CCTV, where he was on Focus, which no one watched because it was rubbish. However, while there, he played host to very influential people with funny names like Bhotros Bhotros Ghali and Hou-Hou Hua. To continue, the CCTV site brags that “They also devote many profound and interesting discussions to sensitive issues such as human rights, religious freedom, the death penalty, political reform, the rise of critical journalism in China.” They didn’t. The issues weren’t anywhere near sensitive, and CCTV is using a version of the word “interesting” with which I am not altogether familiar. In 2001, Yang won an award for an interview with a Falun Gong practitioner, and in 1939 he invaded Poland.
I tried. But his life is a boring jaunt through party-line fields of rubbish. I give up. Let’s get into the meat of his madness.
Yang Rui has a Bachelor’s degree in English literature, so let’s deconstruct his work.
The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash…
Well, he doesn’t really mean “foreign trash,” does he? No, he means not-Asian trash. He didn’t suggest going after the Koreans in Wangjing. The ones that will be stopped and asked to show their passport and housing registration, speaking very broadly, will be people who don’t look Asian.
To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls…
Thugs? I have never seen a foreign thug in Sanlitun. I see rude douchebags. I see self-righteous hipster tweed-wearers. I see older sunglasses-wearing men trying to be cool. I see cute girls putting on the Ritz for the gawking Sanlitun Chinese tourists. I see fathers holding Angry Birds balloons, and I see girls-nights-out and business meetings held over Tsingtao. I don’t see thugs. Not one thug.
As for the “innocent girls” part, the entire world needs to take better care of abused women, without exception. The Chinese authorities have, so far, been pretty shit at this, seeing as how I remember covering a story on a domestic violence law in China in 2008 before the Olympics and read a similar editorial recently. Also, these photos were all the rage last year. So, maybe, before protecting Chinese women from their foreign husbands, pass that damn law already.
Next:
Cut off the foreign snake heads.
Apparently the mad bastard suffers under the cruel delusion that foreigners report to a… I don’t know… Foreign Surgeon General? Foreigner High Council? Foreigner Mafioso? I’m not sure really. Oh, I’ve got it. The Foreign Helmsman:
The next bit:
People who can’t find jobs in the US and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration.
Encourage emigration? Seriously? This is a hate-filled angry post about how unbelievably deplorable foreigners are, calling them thugs, filth and all manner of garbage, but now they’re witty ambassadors encouraging emigration like smarmy travel agents?
As to the human trafficking bit, well, readers can get information here. China is what is termed a Tier 2 Watch List country in terms of human trafficking and have shown no significant movement in that area in four years. China does face problems of women being tricked abroad to places like Taiwan (which is totally part of China), Japan and Malaysia. But it should also be noticed that domestic human trafficking is a massive concern. According to the World Development Indicators database, “women and children are trafficked to China from Mongolia, Burma, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam for forced labor, marriage, and prostitution.” This is one of the most deplorable crimes that can ever be committed by anyone, and to put that on the shoulders of the foreigners in Beijing is shameful scapegoating.
The next bit is pure fiction, the product of a severely diseased mind:
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.
What he has done here is confuse reading maps with making them. I would shout at him, but he’s probably wearing an aluminum foil hat by now. Also, I think foreigners in China, especially those in Sanlitun and Wudaokou, would be the worst spies ever.
I went to the Beijinger Bar and Club Awards this weekend, where I was annoyed by the constant beach balls hitting my face and the sight of drunken expats dancing in the summer heat. It was almost enough to make me vomit in their inconveniently placed trash bins. Not exactly the espionage types.
And the last bit, concerning Mellissa Chan and kicking out all the foreigners, well, good luck with that. You see, I, like many other foreigners, have made a life here; not a great life, but a good one. And it will take a hell of a lot more than Chinese lynch mob politics and dimwitted cops to “send me packing.”
I always hate how people try to use their own fear in arguments like these. Yang, apparently, is scared of foreigners. Well, yeah. He should be. They’re not scary because they’re scary. They’re scary because he’s a dick to them. Ever since I read that post of his, I have been having wet dreams about smashing his skull open with a wrench, something I would never do in real life. And I certainly don’t advocate violence of any kind towards anyone for their political opinions, however poorly informed.
The heart wants what the heart wants, but the brain knows best. Still, the dreams are nice.
One important thing to point out is that it is not right to condemn one man for his moment of nationalistic bigotry. People are all too quick to say that this single move is important enough to condemn him, but that’s not right.
People should condemn him because he is a genuinely horrible person.
One of the greatest days of my life was the day I typed “people walking into glass doors” into YouTube. Typing Yang’s name into YouTube was the opposite of that. Every interview is coated in CPC smarm. He either invites someone on the show to agree about how wonderful everything is or how Westerners ruin everything, or he simply talks over them in a condescending fashion. Basically, he’s like Bill O’Reilly with slightly more class.
But beyond that, there was a wonderful blog post at Rectified.name where Brendan O’Kane highlights Yang’s madness since his hate-filled ejaculation. Yang has not moved one step back. If anything, he’s gotten worse.
Here are some highlights:
On May 18, two days after his initial paroxysm of crazy: “I first came across Americans who were foul-mouthed in Chinese ten years ago. It’s important to sweep away all the foreign trash, but we must be cautious of xenophobia and new variations on the Boxer Uprising… [Chinese people] bow and scrape before white people while being more than a little dismissive of colored peoples.”
The same day, he basically urged China to go to war with… everyone: “So far as the ‘peaceful rise’ of China and how China will be similar to the United States in terms of overall power in another 20 years: the more I think about it, the more I feel like the word ‘peaceful’ is just being f-ing exploited by people. We keep quiet and swallow our anger; we keep our heads down and build our country; we do everything we can to treat our neighbors well, and our malicious neighbors encroach on our islands and reefs one nibble and bite at a time. We choose to hide our capabilities and bide our time, and they take that as a sign that we’re afraid to start things and as license for them to run rampant! Peaceful rise or not, we must make a statement: don’t try to break our peace; don’t try to mess with us; or it’ll be no more Mr. Nice Guy!”
Later that day, he railed against the WSJ for calling him xenophobic. Then he masterfully proved their point: “Why does the Wall Street Journal care so much about cleaning up foreign trash? Implying that I’m xenophobic? Bullshit! There’s no shortage of foreign scum in China, and there are also plenty of outstanding, friendly foreigners who respect Chinese law. So filter them out, clean things up, and let’s coexist rationally. Chinese people are extremely hospitable — sometimes so hospitable that they worship foreigners to the detriment of their own personal and national nature. Have a good weekend, buddies, have fun on weekend.”
On May 19 he woke up with a vision of himself as some sort of heroic journalist rather than the douche-nipple he truly is: “Philippine soldiers forced Chinese fishermen at gunpoint to take off their shirts under the baking sun. If the [Chinese] maritime patrol boat hadn’t gotten there in time to stop their humiliation of China, these Chinese people who had been fishing near their own country’s territorial waters might have been arrested, fined everything they owned — some of them might even have been killed and thrown into the ocean to hide the evidence. Western media doesn’t report that. I tell the truth, and they accuse me of engaging in monologue, not ‘Dialogue.’”
Then he got onto Vietnam: “Our navy isn’t there, so our brothers in CNOOC have no choice but to pull out! To leave in defeat! Vietnam has also deliberately encouraged fishermen to provoke Chinese [vessels]; if they get arrested, Vietnam will fan the flames of anti-Chinese and racist sentiment.”
Later that same day, he was still in a maritime mood: “Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario may hold a US passport and US nationalist. For the past month he’s been delivering impassioned speeches like a wannabe martyr — doubtlessly because he thinks his motherland the US will unconditionally protect his right to live abroad in the Philippines? In 2008, using the same reasoning, the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his troops to suppress the nearby Russian autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He graduated from Harvard and worked as a lawyer in the US. In the end, he lost badly: Russia paid no attention and America ignored him!”
(Many thanks to Rectified.name for the grueling and accurate translations and collection of this rubbish.)
After this, things run headlong into Charlie Custer, and I’ll leave Tao to report on that.
So, remember: don’t attack people for an instant fervor. Remember to take into account their entire life and then judge them to be useless, half-witted, opportunist dick holes bringing nothing but pain and strife into the world.
That’s all this week. Stay tuned for what I hope will be a scathing indictment of Jonathan Kos-Read’s entire life. Yang was business, but Kos-Read will be personal.
That was a cathartic read. Ive been having the same skull smashing-wrench dreams. Now I feel a little less crazy.
A few years ago I caught an episode of Dialogue in which Yang Rui discussed Deng Xiaoping’s impact on China and the world. I couldn’t help but laugh because the “interview” seemed more like a segment from the Colbert Report than anything resembling real journalism.
“Deng Xiaoping: great leader, or greatest leader?”
Instead of defending the press freedom and a professional colleague, he used vulgarity to call name on a lady reporter. Such a gentleman and educated he is!His comments show how arrogant Chinese have become about the success of their powerful economy and how much contempt view of the economic crisis in the West. He represents the best face of China, educated, gentle and soft-spoken, well-mannered and civilized. I guess that the best that China can offer to the world.
Best Face of China: Prominent Chinese TV host Yang Rui’s Incendiary and Racist comments
http://www.eyedrd.org/2012/05/prominent-chinese-tv-host-yang-ruis-incendiary-and-racist-comments.html
Had those inappropriate and insensitive comments made in USA, the anchor would have packed his or her office boxes home the next day.
It is somewhat ironic the new CCTV building in Beijing has been dubbed “Big Boxer Shorts” – the “nationalist” politic espoused by Yang is not “soft power”, it is soft headed. He sat there listening to Timothy Ash and didn’t get anything Ash was saying. Broad-brush scapegoating of “foreigners” to be rounded up by the PSB is the kind of retro-grade thinking that led to some of the worst episodes in Chinese history. Considering Yang is a poser leads to the conclusion his personal view is being encouraged by extreme elements whos objective is distracting the population’s attention from the failures of the “slow reformers” who aren’t interested in reform in the least- they have too much money to lose. Nationalism in the form of ethnic cleansing – this is “socialism with Chinese characteristics”? Feels more like facism, but maybe those like Yanker would say we “foreigners” just don’t understand how nice they really are.