When Chinese people take to a new online medium, Western journalists and analysts rush to infer the yearnings of imprisoned souls longing to break free. But it is a truth too seldom acknowledged in foreign coverage of China that the internet is for screwing around—and that a major attraction of new, unrestricted platforms is that they provide new venues for fun.
The unofficial motto of the Chinese government is: “No surprises.” Humor of the officially approved variety, like the woeful skits that will air this Friday as part of CCTV’s annual Lunar New Year gala, is invariably safe, predictable, and inoffensive. Actual fun must be sought elsewhere—as on Monday, when an audience of 4,000 people gathered on the freshly banned app Clubhouse for a thorough Mandarin-language curb-stomping of one of the government’s most reviled mouthpieces, Global Times editor and Xinjiang atrocity-denier Hu Xijin. (Thanks to the ban, they were either overseas or using illegal VPNs to access the chatroom.)
