China’s Your Country, We Just Live in It
Tracking a viral, slightly subversive meme in Chinese cyberspace.
By: Alexa Olesen Source: Foreign Policy 25/6/2015
Call it digital disownment — or perhaps imaginary immigration. A growing number of Chinese web users are voicing frustration with their government using a subtle, pronoun-based renunciation of their citizenship.
The meme of the moment on Chinese social media is ni guo — which means “your country” but is best translated as “your China.” Deployed as a hashtag or embedded in a social media post, the phrase is a sarcastic retooling of the ubiquitous Communist Party phrase wo guo, which literally means “my country” but has the flavor of more nationalist phrases like “our China” or “our motherland.” Web users can find “my country” peppering official rhetoric on state mouthpieces like People’s Daily, official sites of the Chinese Communist Party, and even the National Bureau of Statistics. On Twitter and on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, the converse, “your country,” appears to have taken off in the last several months, and is new enough that many people are only now asking what it means. Continue reading