Editor’s note: Yang Rui is the Managing Editor and Host of the CCTV News puppet-show Monologue, which presents news about China from a Chinese perspective and in a balanced way.
Yang is responding to an article posted May 18th on the website of the Wall Street Journal, which was published without his consent.
“For a long time now, many young Chinese have taken it for granted that every Westerner is the same: same face, same funny names (“Randy” LOL), same language, same obsession with the concept of rights.
But we put up with them, you know? We welcome them into the country and gladly receive their advice, their expertise, their technology – but not their “rights”!
A lot of them I actually quite like. But last week I made a horrible discovery – I watched a number of videos [Editor’s note: two], involving the apparent attempted rape of a young Chinese girl on the streets of our capital and a “dissing” shown to a middle-aged woman on a train.
The sensational nature of the empowered news media means that some isolated events can trigger strong public reactions. And I wasn’t going to miss out on that.
I came up with the clever term “foreign trash” and suggested, quite reasonably, that they should all fuck the fuck off back to their homelands.
Since then, many have chosen to misrepresent my words. Wall Street Journal, I’m looking at you.
Of course, when I said, “people who can’t find jobs in the US come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration” what I meant was “the majority of foreigners are friendly. They travel, do business and make an honest living.”
At the time of writing that May 16 post, it was late on a Wednesday and I was, naturally, pretty loaded at the time. Things often get confused, blurry and emotional around 7.30pm of a mid-week evening and this was no less of the case here.
I’d like to make one thing clear, however, and that is the mischaracterization of what I said in Chinese regarding expelled journalist Melissa Chan. “Po Fu,” if you look it up, does not mean “bitch.” It means “shrew.”
The shrew is the most noble of the field mammals. Its kind, inquisitive and furry features often bring delight to my heart when I see one scurry through the corn, its cute snout twitching on its way to store more nuts for winter. In short, what is wrong with being called a shrew?
I hope I’ve got away with that.”
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