A recipe for fried rice shows the absurdity of China’s speech limits

The United States is embroiled in an emotional debate over anti-Semitism and freedom of speech on college campuses. The latest speech debate in China is about a chef’s video of how to make fried rice with eggs.

Egg fried rice is a staple of Chinese home cooking and one of the first dishes that many Chinese learn to cook. Think mac and cheese in America. That was probably why Wang Gang, one of China’s most popular food bloggers, did this multiple recipe videos about the dish in the past five years. Are “perfect‘ Fried rice recipes attracted reviews, and reviews of those reviews.

Then one of those videos drew the ire of the official Chinese media and the Internet.

His transgression? He posted a video of fried rice on November 27, two days after the anniversary of the death of Mao Anying, son of the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. Mao Anying was killed in the Korean War while, according to legend, cooking fried rice.

For more than a decade, the liberal-leaning crowd in China has been doing just that celebrated November 25 is Thanksgiving Day in China. They believe that if the young Mao had lived, China would have become a hereditary dynasty like North Korea. The Chinese Internet and official media have disputed the account of his death, which was based on memoirs by retired generals, considering it an insult to both Mao Junior and Mao Senior.

It is a precarious time for every Chinese who engages with the public: academics, writers, journalists, entertainers and social media influencers. Cooking is one of the safest topics, and Mr. Wang, who started working in restaurants at 15, sticks strictly to food on his show. Yet he was drawn into a political vortex.

On social media sites, Mr. Wang was called “a traitor,” “a troublemaker” and “the scum of society.”

Daily life in China is becoming politicized. Public expression has become impossible when too many things are taboo. It is difficult to know, and sometimes impossible to know due to censorship, what can and cannot be said in the country.

The “egg fried rice” meme emerged more than a decade ago when the Chinese Internet, though censored, was freer. Now there are hardly any dissenting voices.

To circumvent internet censorship, Chinese people are resorting to code words – so much so that academics and writers are lamenting the decline of the Chinese language. Young people often use abbreviations of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling of Chinese characters, for anything that could be perceived as sensitive or taboo. I have seen Chinese people criticize my columns about the Chinese government by saying that they loved their “zf,” short for Zhengfu, or government. Even as they defended the state, they knew they were treading on treacherous territory.

China’s sophisticated and effective censorship system paradoxically leaves people in the dark about what they are not allowed to say.

After Hu Jintao, the former Chinese leader, was abruptly escorted out of a highly choreographed meeting of the Communist Party elite last year, many people who posted about it had their social media accounts suspended. They were mostly people who did not usually talk about politics and did not know the limits of state censorship. Several people with experience in politics told me they knew to use code words or abstain altogether.

I’ve written about how new recruits at a censorship factory had to learn history, such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in June 1989, in which hundreds of innocent people were killed, so they knew what to look for. for.

Around the anniversary in 2022, Li Jiaqi, China’s top livestreaming salesman, pitched his viewers on a tank-shaped ice cream cake. He was cut off in midstream and remained silent for three months.

The symbolism of the fried rice meme is much less known than that of tanks in Chinese online discourse. It does not exist in the consciousness of the vast majority of Chinese, who have been taught by their government and their parents to keep their heads down and not worry about politics.

Mr. Wang, also known as Chef Wang, was born on June 11, 1989, a week after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He grew up in a village in Sichuan and left school at fifteen. Mr. Wang, who declined to comment, likely did not have much access to information beyond what the government wanted him to know.

Mr. Wang begins each video with a greeting: “Hello, I’m Wang Gang,” speaking Mandarin Chinese with a Sichuan accent. He combines his farm boy persona with professionalism as he works behind his wok stations and cooks dishes like one farm style breakfast and Mapo tofu. His following has grown to tens of millions on Chinese social media sites, plus two million subscribers to his own YouTube channel.

He calls himself a ‘grass-roots chef’, as evident from his intros. “I am grateful for every experience, grateful for this era and sincerely hope my videos can help everyone, allowing them to step into the kitchen and fall in love with cooking.”

“Grateful for this era” is the politically correct way of saying that he does not attribute his success solely to his personal talent and efforts, but that he sees it as part of China’s success as a nation. That shows that Mr. Wang is aware of the rules to stay out of trouble.

Some nationalist bloggers pointed out that Mr. Wang had posted egg fried rice videos in the past around the same time. They said he also posted the recipes around October 24, Mao Anying’s birthday.

The fact is that Mr. Wang has posted several fried rice recipes over the years, and he is not the only one who is being attacked for it.

The Weibo report of The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, was criticized for reposting Mr. Wang over fried rice on October 24, 2018. Around the same time in 2021, the Weibo report of a state-owned telecommunications company posted the dish; his account has been suspended. Last month, two primary schools in the southeastern province of Zhejiang held a fried rice competition with 1,000 participants on the same day Mr Wang posted his recipe. The schools were attacked on social media by nationalists and their posts were deleted.

The consequences can be much worse. In 2021, police in southern Jiangxi province locked up a man for 10 days after posting a comment on Weibo that read, “Thanks, fried rice.”

Mr. Wang’s experience shows how far China will go in restricting freedom of expression.

The Chinese Academy of History, a state institution, called anything that links Mao Anying’s death to the justice ‘particularly evil’.

Hu Xijing, the former editor of The Global Times, the Communist Party’s tabloid, advised everyone to avoid the topic of fried rice completely. “In the future, especially around the birthdays of the martyr Mao Anying, public debate should avoid touching the topic of fried rice,” he wrote on his Weibo social media account.

Some people pushed back on the proposal. Banning any mention of egg fried rice in October and November, they noticedis both ridiculous and scandalous.

Mr Wang deleted the video recipe and apologized.

“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again. I won’t make videos about it either,” says Mr. Wang with a sour face said in his apology video, which ended with a deep bow. But he also had to delete that video. Commentators said his tone was coy and sarcastic.