For whatever reason, Yang Rui felt it necessary to apologize to Melissa Chan yesterday, even though this apology comes about five months late, not to mention totally out of the blue. Via Shanghaiist:

Yang Rui’s post at 12:09 on 16th October:

I do not agree with demonizing [other journalists], in mid-May on several different occasions I inadvertently hurt the feelings of former Al Jazeera English’s [Melissa Chan] and I express my sincere apology. As for the attitude of the Chinese government towards her, this has nothing to do with me. Microblogs are the personal responsibility of their authors. China should not be afraid of being confident and candid, nor of being criticized by others.

Yang again defended his use of the term pōfù:

Term “bitch” was used accidentally, foreign correspondents in China launched a collective counterattack, proved once again the influence of our program. Public figures should be cautious, in the face of criticism from Western media, not to demonize the other side but engage in a public opinion battle with grace.

There you have it. Melissa Chan is not a bitch (though she could potentially still be a “shrew”), and Yang Rui would like to express his “sincere apology.” There are no losers here.

Except Yoichi Shimatsu. That guy was, is, and always will be a huge loser. See for yourself.

You should stop whatever you’re doing and go read this. I’ve copied and pasted all the text to a notepad and saved it on my Desktop. I feel like I have just bottled a rainbow for a rainy day. This man, Yoichi Shimatsu, is possibly the funniest columnist on the face of the earth, and lest you think I’m hyperbolizing, please realize he wrote all of the below, presumably without the help of manatees:

“Yang Rui criticized some Jews not all, and do not some Jews support the bombing of civilians in Gaza? … Yang Rui is harsh on anti-China elements, who do in fact act in a conspiratorial manner, just as the Senators who assassinated the populist Caesar … self-centered yuppies who came to exploit China and follow lifestyle choices inappropriate to Chinese morals, and by that I mean taking lots of drugs … I am equally disgusted by young Asian-Americans who pathetically act like a bunch of bananas, aping their white classmates. You not only fail as journalists, you fail as humans for your racial self-hatred.”

Yoichi Shimatsu is identified as a former editor at The Japan Times Weekly and Pacific News Service. He is also editor-at-large of 4th Media, for whom he recently wrote, “Why CCTV Yang Rui Must Not Quit Despite Criticisms Mostly From The West.” Yes, I just linked the same article twice. It begins:

William Shakespeare is the world’s greatest playwright ever, and that he is for sure, but surprisingly there are certain interest groups who loathe the Bard:

Brace yourself. This is just getting good.

Yang Rui criticized some Jews not all, and do not some Jews support the bombing of  civilians in Gaza? Are Jews above criticism? And on what grounds – that they were chosen by their God? If so, God has chosen to treat quite badly at times, which presents a major ethical questions about the Jewish God. No, the fact is Jews are not better than the rest of us and not above criticism.

Take a breather. Here is his very next paragraph.

Yang Rui is harsh on anti-China elements, who do in fact act in a conspiratorial manner, just as the Senators who assassinated the populist Caesar in the name of democracy, but in reality did it for their own self-interest and privileges – which is the real reason why the Roman Republic failed.

Please keep your bearings:

Most of this critics are – and this is my opinion, if I am free to say it -  self-centered yuppies who came to exploit China and follow lifestyle choices inappropriate to Chinese morals, and by that I mean taking lots of drugs, encouraging drug use among Chinese friends, promoting dissent with no well-founded philosophy or legal grounds as foreigners, and often engage in promiscuity with locals without consideration of sexual transmitted diseases.

Let’s return to the part where Yang Rui is implicitly linked to Shakespeare. Could you be a little more subtle?

Thus, it turns out that Yang Rui, like Shakespeare, has captured an unpleasant part of the social reality and describes it appropriately…

Great. How bout some good ol’ racism?

While white young adults should learn a modicum of humility in the “real world”, I am equally disgusted by young Asian-Americans who pathetically act like a bunch of bananas, aping their white classmates. You not only fail as journalists, you fail as humans for your racial self-hatred.

And some anger?

And then go home, and see what a crap place it’s become for the majority of American, European and Japanese citizens – and try to blame that on the Chinese, you pack of whingers.

Love the Briticism. This guy, ladies and gentlemen, is Yang Rui’s friend. Yang Rui keeps this man company. They are buddies. They probably do Teppenyaki together. They think on the same wavelength, I can only presume, unless Yang Rui is the type to befriend the people he hates the most (is that why he hosts a show for and about foreigners?). Think about that.

I feel like I have just waded into a swimming pool of jellybeans, such is my giddiness and delight.

I feel like I am being tickled by a feather from the hen that laid the golden egg, and the yolk of Svarga is washing over my tittering soul!

I feel like the flowers of the world are coloring our very seconds with the florescence of a thousand colors!

Please, Yoichi Shimatsu, don’t stop.

For me, Yang Rui has been a professional peer and a challenger across the interview table, and he has fired many a shot at me and we have often been at great odds.

But after the vile abuse he has endured in reaction to some frank statements he made on his personal blog, which do reflect some of the unpleasant realities of contemporary society – and the contempt shown toward HIS freedom of expression – I now see him as both a friend and an important and incisive voice in the international dialogue.

Hang on.

Hang on one second.

I have to use the bathroom.

…

OK. Well now, Yoichi Shimatsu, this has been fun and all, but I think it’s time for your final words. They’re all yours. What say you?

When the rest of you grow up, you might understand what I am saying.

Global Times’s Shan Renping used his pulpit to defend Yang Rui today, writing:

We think Yang’s wording was too harsh. He only stressed the problems of illegal immigrants in China without mentioning the contributions other foreigners have made to the country. He slammed many foreigners, which made it a media sensation and led to misunderstanding among foreigners.

No, we don’t misunderstand. We’re not upset at Yang because we think he hates all of us. And we certainly don’t need Yang to pat those “other” of us on the back or expose the assholes in our group (we can do that just fine ourselves). The problem with Yang Rui’s remarks right now is what the problem has always been: he is a public figure with incredible influence — that rare ability to promote understanding and a better world — and he’s lived — is living — way, way down to that potential.

That’s disappointing. But you know, everyone has lapses of judgment; what everyone does not do is look upon their mistake and think, You know what? Upon further review, it wasn’t my fault that I wrote this offensive rubbish; all these problems lie with your misunderstanding. It lies with that damn translator, traditor — traitor — who used the word “bitch” instead of “shrew” — hussies and strumpets, all of ’em (that’s what I say when I’m really angry).

At the risk of conflating Shan Renping and Yang Rui (we know they’re not the same), Shan wrote in defense of Yang, “The anti-foreigner campaigns seen in some Western countries will not be staged in China.” Huh? RELEVANCE?

With every further word that Yang Rui utters that is not an apology, he loses that much more professional credibility, which moves him that much closer toward deserving a sacking. His apologists have yet to understand the reason for this. They seem to not care that high-profile people, like a host on CCTV, especially one who makes a living talking to foreigners, should be held to a higher standard, or at the very least, held accountable for their actions.

Let’s just take a glimpse at the kind of response Yang Rui has inspired. Here are some comments underneath Shan Renping’s column:

Foreigners from non-English-speaking countries are much less racist. At most, they might be xenophobic, but if you are not in their country, then you don’t need to worry about that. It is the ones from English-speaking countries that have an innate impulse to expand and conquer.

I think Rang Rui should be praised for his good deeds. Many foreigners are here because they  want to money and a lot of the guys are after our Chinese girls.

I wonder what would have happened if someone had used the same language, but directed it at the Chinese government?

Granted, the chances of all three being from the 50-Cent Army are exceptionally high, but these are the type of reactions that Yang Rui and Shan Renping are incubating. There’s something wrong with that. Disappointing, one might say.

Last night’s Dialogue, embedded after the jump, was about the NATO Summit in Chicago. The two foreign guests were Einar Tangen (“Biz Times columnist & author” [Biz Times is a business paper in Milwaukee]) and Francesco Sisci, Sole 24 Ore columnist.

They misspelled Mr. Sisci’s name.

Maybe it’s time to lighten up on the chaps who produce Dialogue, the comically unwatchable show on CCTV… including Yang Rui. Because if they can’t even get a man’s name right — this is the difference between Francesco and Francesca, by the way:

– what hope do they have in the arena of public opinion?

Oh, and Dialogue is seeking news editors. Don’t fret about the “minimum of 10 years experience working in the media industry” requirement. If you think you’re able to correctly spell a dude’s name, you just might be qualified.

Yang Rui is the Managing Editor and Host of Dialogue on CCTV News, which endeavors to present news about China and the world from a Chinese perspective and in a balanced way. He is responding to an article posted May 18th on the website of Wall Street Journal, which was published without his knowledge or comment.

If you care to read on, here it is. The penultimate paragraph:

The more serious part of the accusations against me is the mischaracterization of what I said in Chinese; “Po Fu” if you look it up on Jin Shan Ci Ba, one of the most popular Chinese translation sites, and A Chinese-English Dictionary, the third edition published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in January, 2010, means “shrew.”

UPDATE, 1:48 pm: Yang Rui was not writing for Global Times; the text comes from an email he first sent to the Wall Street Journal, later copied by GT with slight edits and published under Yang’s byline.

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.

|To Serve People Archives|

Until I figure out how to embed javascript, here’s the Storify link [UPDATE, 8/7: I've figured out how to embed Storify]. Basically, Yang Rui is upset at China Geeks‘ Charlie Custer, who has decided to lay low instead of engaging in a true flame war on Sina Weibo with the CCTV host. Yang could use a healthy dose of crow as well, but then we would be deprived of this entertainment:

Powered by Wordpress Plugins - Get the full version!

Once again, the full quote:

Cut off the foreign snake heads….foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage… that foreign bitch.

Yang Rui — who makes a career out of speaking to foreigners on the show CCTV Dialogue (where I pulled the above image) — posted this on Sina Weibo (Chinese after jump) on Wednesday evening, translated by WSJ:

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.

I’ll just go ahead and let that simmer. If you’re looking for reactions, see: China Geeks, Sinostand.

公安部要清扫洋垃圾：抓洋流氓，保护无知少女，五道口和三里屯是重灾区；斩首洋蛇头，美欧失业者来中国圈钱，贩卖人口，妖言惑众鼓励移民；识别洋间谍，找个中国女人同居，职业是搜集情报，以游客为名义为日本韩国和美欧测绘地图，完善GPS；赶走洋泼妇，关闭半岛电视台驻京办，让妖魔化中国的闭嘴滚蛋