Midway through a news briefing Tuesday, the blue-clad reporter had enough. A fellow journalist in a red jacket beside her was asking how Beijing would keep tabs on overseas investment under President Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road infrastructure program.
Her query meandered. “The transformation of the role of state-assets supervision, centered on capital management, is currently a subject of widespread concern,” she said, then kept talking.
The clock ticked.
Disdain appeared to creep across the face of the woman in blue as she listened to the roughly-45-second softball.
When the woman in red finally got around to her main question, the woman in blue had raised a fist to her chin and furrowed her eyebrows. She cast sideways glances at the speaker and around her. Then, with a toss of the head, she executed an eye-roll to make Miley Cyrus proud.
For viewers, it was a rare flash of unscripted emotion amid stage-managed tedium. “It was like she was expressing frustration on behalf of the rest of us” over the scripted nature of the event, says Zhang Lifan, a Beiijng-based independent historian who has written critically about the government.
A meme was born, setting phones vibrating around China.
.. The eye-roller, Liang Xiangyi, a television reporter for Shanghai-based Yicai Media Group, emerged as a kind of folk hero for those tired of the turgid pageantry.
.. A Tuesday column on Chinese online-media firm Sina Corp.’s technology news portal attempted to explain why people roll their eyes: “Human eyes feature more white areas than those of other primates, therefore we have a special ability to communicate through eyeball rotation.”
.. Ms. Liang “was like an innocent child who blurted out that the emperor has no clothes,” Mr. Qin says, adding that the incident allowed “ordinary people with no opportunity to participate in politics to express their scorn and discontent in a roundabout way.”
.. “It means that what we crave in these sham, everything’s-great events is something real.”
“Schrodinger’s Immigrant” Is No Paradox: Welfare and Work Go Together in Today’s America
the American welfare system has become increasingly focused on buttressing low-wage workers rather than supporting non-workers. Put more simply, welfare and low-wage work go together. Just as natives with low levels of education and large numbers of children are apt to consume welfare, immigrants with those same characteristics are also likely to be on welfare. A strong work ethic does not change this reality.
To repeat, immigrant-headed households consume more welfare than native households not because they don’t work, but because they have fewer skills on average and, as a consequence, have lower earnings. As long as we pursue a policy that encourages low-skill immigration, many more “Schrodinger Immigrants” will come across our borders.
Trump: The Man, the Meme
Yet while the frank demagoguery of Trump’s most incendiary statements makes these historical comparisons particularly tempting, he is just the most recent in a line of American politicians to be, in effect, Hitlerized. Hillary Clinton has been reimagined as “Hitlary,” and when Barack Obama, with his plans for extended health coverage, wasn’t being portrayed as the Joker, he was shown made up like the Fuhrer. Before that, it was George W. Bush who was Hitler. This may just be a particularly potent example of what is known as Godwin’s law, which has it, more or less, that every argument will eventually devolve into one side referring to the other as Nazis.
.. If every politician is like Hitler, than what do you call someone who isreally bad? Rosenfeld emphasized that he disagreed with Trump on nearly every issue, but said that there were plenty of homegrown versions of Trump’s kind of rhetoric readily at hand in the history of the United States, including the nineteenth-century Nativist movement, making a reach back to Berlin in the nineteen-thirties not only historically inaccurate, but unnecessary.
.. “The idea that Donald Trump is a Fascist or a Nazi artificially distinguishes him from the rest of the Republican field,” he said. “A claim that he is a Fascist means that the others are somehow qualitatively different. And while Trump is clearly more rhetorically extreme, he shares much in common with the nativism and nationalism of the other Republican candidates.”