{"id":41741,"date":"2014-08-23T15:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-23T15:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=41741 "},"modified":"2014-08-23T15:51:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-23T15:51:00","slug":"41741-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=41741","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Cartoonist Fears Return Home Amid Online \\’Traitor\\’ Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014-08-21<\/div>
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People fly Chinese and Hong Kong flags as they take part in a pro-government rally in Hong Kong, Aug. 17, 2014.<\/div>
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Political cartoonist Wang Liming, known by his online nickname “Biantai Lajiao” (in English, Perverted Chili Pepper), said he is considering remaining in Japan after his China-based social media accounts were closed following a smear campaign in state media.<\/div>
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“I have lost income since my microblog account was shut down,” Wang told RFA from Japan, where he is on a business trip. “I think it might be pretty risky to go back home, although my ticket was booked for [Thursday].”<\/div>
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“If I go back, they might use my cartoons as an excuse to detain me,” he said. “I’m looking around for opportunities that might enable me to stay here.”<\/div>
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Wang dismissed the online campaign against him, which came after he posted a cartoon of mainlanders bussed to Hong Kong to oppose a pro-democracy movement, as “ridiculous.”<\/div>
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“It’s laughable that they are turning all of the powerful machinery of state propaganda onto a lone cartoonist like me,” Wang said. “All I did was put some of my thoughts and feelings onto social media.”<\/div>
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Wang’s cartoon depicted red-skinned mainland Chinese, replete with shopping bags, patriotic banners and portraits of Chairman Mao, showing Hong Kong people how to kowtow to the government.<\/div>
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Soon after it appeared, Wang was slammed as a “traitor” by an unsigned post on discussion boards run by major state-run media outlets, including the People’s Daily, titled “Seeing the pro-Japan stance of Chinese traitor ‘Biantai Lajiao’ for what it is.”<\/div>
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Overreaction<\/div>
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Wang, who has a following of some 550,000 on Tencent’s Twitter-like Weibo service and 340,000 on Sina Weibo, said the authorities appeared to him to be overreacting.<\/div>
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“I think they’re going to too much trouble,” he said. “I have no idea why they would want to call me a traitor to the Chinese people. I think I’m a long, long way from being that.”<\/div>
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“If they want to criticize my cartoons, then they should come out and say so, but if they did, they’d get laughed at in turn.”<\/div>
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“That’s why they have to resort to so-called patriotism … to smear me. That post is written like something out of the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976],” Wang said.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>. <\/div>
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<div>Wang's cartoon depicted red-skinned mainland Chinese, replete with shopping bags, patriotic banners and portraits of Chairman Mao, showing Hong Kong people how to kowtow to the government.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}