(Hong Kong) Viewed over 30 million times on YouTube, the song Brittle achieved a feat: to become a commercial success while denouncing the Chinese authoritarian rulers.
In the Mandopop sector, the pop sung in Mandarin, making fun of Beijing can break a career. Malaysian rapper Namewee and Chinese-Australian singer Kimberley Chen, both of whom live in Taiwan, made it their selling point.
Days after the syrupy pop-like song was released last month, Beijing censors kicked them off the Chinese internet, blacklisting them in the world’s main Mandarin market.
But the title has become a hit elsewhere in Asia and in the Chinese diaspora on the planet.
Here are the five ways the two artists make fun of China.
Little rose
Brittle sounds like a rosewater ballad, but the authors accompany it with a clearly political warning: “be careful if you are a fragile rose”.
A reference to the expression “small roses” in China designating the army of nationalist commentators on the Internet who wage war on anything they perceive as an affront.
Pink dominates in the clip, including for Namewee and Chen’s clothes. A giant panda, an explicit reference to China, dances in dungarees in a pink lattice print.
The heady chorus asks forgiveness from a person who is fragile and accepts no criticism.
NMSL
In an empty pink swimming pool, Namewee is seen fighting with the giant panda and chanting “you tell me NMSL when you get angry”.
The acronym, ubiquitous in online feuds between Chinese nationalists and their targets, comes from “ni ma si le” (“your mother is dead” in Chinese).
Last year, he was hijacked during a pitched battle on the net between Thais and Chinese after remarks by a Thai celebrity about the coronavirus. Thai Internet users had created a series of viral memes caricaturing Chinese nationalists as automatons instantly typing “NMSL” as soon as they spotted a subject of disagreement online.
Apples and pineapples
Namewee explains that the character in his song “swallows the apple and cuts the pineapple”.
The first fruit refers to the Hong Kong newspaper prodemocracy Apple Daily, closed after its assets were frozen and its leaders arrested in the name of a national security law.
The second alludes to Beijing’s recent decision to ban pineapple imports from Taiwan, an island with its government, but claimed by China, as the harvest approaches. Taiwanese and Japanese consumers alleviated the ban by buying the surplus.
Bat soup
The song evokes the Chinese and their “desire for dogs, cats, bats and civets”.
The giant panda in the clip offers Namewee a pot of soup with a stuffed bat floating in it, a clear allusion to the widely denied idea that eating bats is the cause of the coronavirus.
The origin of the pandemic remains unknown and has been more difficult to pin down, according to the World Health Organization, due to China’s official opacity.
But the cliché of “bat soup” was often used against Chinese and Asian communities around the world during the pandemic, in racist attacks and slurs.
It was one of the elements raised by the Chinese state media when this song, deemed “malicious” by the state daily Global Times, has been placed on the blacklist.