Zhou is butt of online jokes and games
WeChat users' ability to have fun over a web of corruption shows former security chief's fate is no longer a taboo subject
Brave enough to touch the tiger’s butt?
That’s the challenge in a game featuring the image of a tiger on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat messaging app regaling users since a corruption investigation into retired security chief Zhou Yongkang was announced on July 29. Zhou is the highest-level official to fall in China’s bid to sweep away both “tigers and flies” in an anti-graft campaign.
The mere fact that WeChat’s almost 400 million users can access the game reflects how discussion of Zhou’s fate is no longer taboo, and may even be encouraged, as the Communist Party builds support for a case against him. The game highlights the shifting censorship landscape in China where leaders and sensitive topics may be off limits to ridicule for years – until they’re not.
“It’s OK if you play the game with Zhou Yongkang, but when the characters start to change, and someone figures out a way to swap it and gets someone else’s name on there that they don’t want to get after, that’s when they will end the game,” said David Zweig, a professor of political science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The risk is that budding online humorists may crack jokes publicly about China’s current leaders, who remain off limits. So do retired ones – earlier this month, web users circulated jokes that a giant inflatable yellow toad at a Beijing park bore an uncanny resemblance to former president Jiang Zemin, and one even photoshopped a pair of thick black glasses like Jiang’s onto an image of the animal.
The official Xinhua News Agency later deleted a picture of the toad from its website, while comments about its likeness to Jiang were also removed, according to the Daily Telegraph.
WeChat users are invited to touch the yellow-glowing butt of the black-and-white tiger to access Zhou’s web of corruption.