Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Chinese political satire

I would venture to guess that American viewers of The Colbert Report would understand the satire of the Chinese Twitterers (Tweeters?) writing under the name @relevantorgans.

The Communist Party of China is not amused.

Real Communist Mouthpiece Rages Against Fake Communist Mouthpiece

The official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party is in a rage over a parody Twitter account that for years has poked fun at the foibles of the Leninist state.

In a statement that read as if it were itself a self-parody, People’s Daily demanded “immediate rectification” from @relevantorgans, demanding that it stop using the official emblem of China on its Twitter account and directing viewers to the newspaper’s English-language website…

“Rectification” is a word used in Communist Party purges…

The Relevant Organs, a Twitter account whose name plays off a stilted and perhaps inadvertently salacious term sometimes used by the official Chinese media to refer to “appropriate government agencies,” issued a quick retort on Twitter:

“Relevant Organs hail @pdchina’s “e-rectification” campaign. This is no time to go soft on Twitter’s black elements!”

And then it added, parodying frequent statements from China on its enduring civilization and large population:

"We have over 5,000 years of history and 1.3 billion followers once you get rid of a bunch of girls. Which news source would YOU trust?"

The Relevant Organs posts acerbic tweets often playing off the themes of sex, corruption and authoritarianism…

The Relevant Organs has more than six times the followers of the People’s Daily official Twitter account…