Elementary School Girl Lambasted for Comments About "Yellow and Violent" Website
To: the Chinese internet public
Explain me this.
A Chinese elementary student, Zhang Shufan, told a CCTV reporter that the last time she went on the internet, she was unexpectedly greeted by a pop-up window with “erotic and violent” images (i.e., an advertisement for a porn site). For that admission, Zhang incurred the wrath of thousands of netizens.
Many accused her of lying. A cartoon spoof of a sobbing, bare-shouldered Zhang Shufan circulated the Internet. An anonymous user posted her grades, academic awards, birthday, and even the name of the hospital where she was born.
The controversy seemed to hinge on the girl’s credibility. From the EastSouthNorthWest blog:
Several days later, a post titled
That post contained the screen capture of the searches for Zhang Shufan. This included the 1 minute 26 second video clip from
as well as a short essay titled which said: "I'm perplexed as to how a single web page could be both yellow and violent? How does a lolita (namely, a cute girl under 15 years of age) know what is yellow and violent? Poor lolita, this interview will change her whole life”… …Since Zhang is an excellent student, some netizen thought: "She faced the CCTV reporter and lied to a national audience without blinking. Isn't she accountable for what she said? If she is lying when she is so young, how far will she go when she grows old? For children, academic grades are important. But if her thinking and morals are rotten, then academic grades are useless no matter how good they are."
Perhaps there is something about the word "yellow" (黄) that I don't understand...
Comments
黄色 (huang se), while meaning yellow colored, can definitely mean pornographic. The word “huang” on its own may also have that connotation.
Yes, but the question is would a young girl understand the dual meaning of such a word?
I can explain. The reason is, we have an internet catchword “很好很强大”, which is the same format of what the girl said. And the tongue of the sentence sounds very unlikely from a 10 years kid as well as it’s ridiculous. So that is… hard to explain in English. Anyway, It incurred the phenomenon “集体无意识”.
For all of us who read Chinese, that was very helpful, thanks! In my limited experience being interviewed by television news media, I know that reporters often “prep” their interview subjects before the camera starts rolling. In some cases, the result is the reporter literally feeding the interviewee words, which may be what happened in this case. Still, I can’t believe some people were so mean to her!
TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!