Chinese Bloggers Say, ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish, North Korea!’
On Dec. 19, not long after news of Kim Jong Il’s death went public, the Chinese Communist Party issued a note of condolence reminding the North Korean people that he was “a close friend of the Chinese people.”
It’s an innocuous phrase, the sort of thing that the party says about its allies all the time. But unlike past expressions of sympathy and friendship, this one has found little to no support among China’s microblogging masses. As of Dec. 21, they have tweeted 8 million comments related to the Dear Leader on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging platform, and nearly all of them are scathingly negative. Indeed, rather than join party leaders in literally bowing down to Kim Jong Il, China’s microbloggers seem far more intent on mocking him and his impoverished country.
Feng Hongping, an editor for Vista Magazine — a glossy, state-owned general interest publication — took early offense to the Party’s expression of friendship with Kim Jong Il. On Dec. 20, in a Weibo post that has been forwarded (or re-tweeted) nearly 400 times, he wrote:
I do hereby declare that, as a member of the Chinese people, I have never authorized any organization to send a message of condolence regarding Kim Jong Il’s death on my behalf. Kim Jong Il was not my close friend. Please reconsider using phrases like “close friends of the Chinese people” in such documents in the future. Thank you!
On Dec. 20, Weibo microbloggers began to generate what some on the service quickly labeled China’s joke of the year. They took the line from Steve Jobs’s now-famous 2005 Stanford University commencement address — “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” — and applied it to North Korea: “Kim Jong Il’s last words to the Korean people: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’”
By late afternoon on Dec. 21, the joke had gone viral. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of arguably better versions of it. For example: “The entire Korean people have achieved the wishes of the famous Steve Jobs: Stay hungry. Stay foolish!” Or, more cutting: “Jobs’s greatest legacy is Kim and his son and a country where 24 million people do stay hungry, do stay foolish.”
This is in stark contrast to the somber exhibitions of Confucian respect that China’s leaders have displayed to North Korean diplomats in Beijing. On Dec. 21, President Hu Jintao, accompanied by other Politburo members, bowed three times before a portrait of Kim, according to an account published by Xinhua, the state-owned newswire. Hu also expressed his — and the Chinese people’s — deep grief:
Hu said the CPC, the Chinese government and the Chinese people experienced deep grief over comrade Kim Jong Il’s death. He said comrade Kim Jong Il was a great party and state leader for the DPRK, as well as an intimate friend of the Chinese people. Kim dedicated his entire life and rendered his immortal service to the DPRK’s socialist revolution and construction.
The next morning, Premier Wen Jiabao and four additional members of China’s Politburo also stopped by the North Korean embassy and bowed in respect to the deceased Dear Leader.
Some Chinese Communist Party officials with Weibo accounts are expressing wonder at the microbloggers’ lack of pity for Kim and his people. One of them is Chi Susheng, a lawyer and member of China’s National People’s Congress. She tweeted:
From the time I heard about the death of Kim Jong Il until now, I randomly asked dozens of people around me about how they felt. All of them are very happy. Honestly speaking, no one grieved, even a little. …Why don’t we share a drop of pity on a person who died because of heart attack?
A day later, a Weibo user with the handle “Shenzhen and Hong Kong Legal Services for Business,” responded with a question: “If Hitler dies, do you feel compassion?”
