Baiting China

The glorious motherland is so ridiculously easy to wind up these days. All you need to do is wave a couple of colonial flags around, and even before the pepper spray hits your eyeballs, the cadres up north are foaming at the mouth. So what else can we do to get China all riled up?

• Beat the Chinese national team at ping-pong

• Take photos of those gnarly squat toilets you saw in outback Guangxi province and post them on Pinterest

• Come out of the closet as a Falun Gong practitioner

• Steal Chairman Mao’s corpse and have a “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style hilarious misadventure

• Say stuff like “Diao-yu?! I just met you! Nyuck nyuck!”

• Couch-surf at the Dalai Lama’s place

• Hold a war games exercise

• Self-immolate

• Claim your Italian grandmother invented the noodle

• Politely point out that man has already landed on the moon

• Claim an uninhabitable sand bank in the South China Sea for Team Buttercup

• Aggressively tweet that Jeremy Lin is better than Yao Ming

• Wait till China goes to the bathroom, then subtly hit on its girlfriend, Kazakhstan

• Post content on the internet

• Repeatedly point out that the concept of Communism was actually invented by evil foreigners

• We know this is going to sound complicated, but maybe create some manifesto about how Hong Kong should be some kind of Athenian city-state… no, not like completely independent, but a place that has a sort of weird suzerainty relationship with the mainland, and—what? You’re staging war games against me?