Chinese Houston Rockets fan who taunted police with threat to burn national flag is detained
- Man who told police to ‘come catch me’ after posing in online image is one of seven people known to have been held for similar offences this month
- In Hangzhou, a man is detained for urinating on a Chinese flag after tearing it from a pole on his way home from a drinking session
Wang Haoda uploaded the image to Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service, on Monday with the comments, “I live and die with the team” and “Come catch me”, according to a statement released on the same platform on Tuesday by police in Liaoyuan, northeast China’s Jilin province.
The 25-year-old was detained for an unspecified period for “making insulting remarks about the national flag”, the statement said. His offending post was subsequently removed from Weibo.
Wang is one of at least seven people to have been detained this month for acts deemed offensive to the nation and its emblems or critical of the military parade staged in Beijing on October 1 to mark 70 years of Communist Party rule.
The scandal sparked by Morey’s comments continued to rage on Tuesday, with groups on both sides of the argument airing their views.
Another of the seven people known to have been detained was a 38-year-old man identified only by his surname, Xu.
According to an announcement made on Sunday by police in Suqian, a city in east China’s Jiangsu province, Xu described the troops who took part in the National Day parade as being “very serious about making nonsense”.
“A civilised country makes robots soldiers, and a rogue state makes soldiers robots,” Xu wrote as an accompaniment to three video clips of the troops practising for the event.