For those not inclined to read the whole thing, it’s a comic piece from “The Onion,” inspired by sports franchises that are always crying poverty, and threatening to move to new cities if the taxpayers don’t build them luxurious new stadiums. In this case, the Onion fabricated a “news story” in which Dick Gephardt and other politicians are threatening to move Congress to Charlotte, North Carolina if the city of Washington doesn’t build them a new Capitol.
Cute joke. Rather OBVIOUS joke, I’d have thought. But I was wrong! The Beijing Evening News, a Chinese newspaper, picked up this “story” and printed it verbatim, as if it were fact!
This just makes me wonder- do you suppose this was a mere cut-and-paste job that the editors simply didn’t pay attention to? Or is the concept of outrageous satire so alien to the Chinese that they’d swallow ANY story, however absurd, if it were presented in what seemed to be a serious format?
Oddly enough, I was thinking about this same question the other day while pondering my parents.
But no, IMO Chinese people know sarcasm about as well as other cultures do. They just don’t use it as much as Westerners, at least if my family is any indication (we’re more into put-downs and “snaps”, as the folks in the streets call 'em ).
It only sounds absurd to us because we are able to pick up on all the cues. To those familiar with American excesses but not its true political structure, I don’t think it’s nearly as obvious that it’s satire (which is what makes it so damn funny).
Anyhow, credulity is hardly limited to Chinese. Just look at the pages-long thread filled with people who honestly believed that Asian mothers give their sons oral sex as a reward for good grades. The Boards are slow enough that I can’t search for it, but I’ll post a link when I can. Scads of people here, despite the reasoned protests of Dopers living in Asia, took the story seriously.
Anyway, if the Star-Tribune were to unwittingly pick up a satire piece about Chinese government from a Chinese satire paper (which I very much doubt exist), I don’t think I’d have the background to discredit it, no matter how many clues in it made the satire obvious to the Chinese.
Is the concept of satire alien to Americans? After all, The Onion’s piece about J.K. Rowling the Satanist has been widely circulated out of context, and believed, within the US.
If anything, I think Chinese have a much richer vocabulary of satire than Westerners when it comes to the more gentle, Horatian type of satire where the artist gently lampoons human foibles. This is especially notable in genres like the “cross talk”. On the other hand, I’d venture to say that harsher, Juvenalian satire (think A Modest Proposal) has had a much lower profile, and when it has appeared in the works of artists like Cao Xueqi and Lu Xun, it has been misunderstood or deliberately ignored.
Harsh social satire has traditionally been a more dangerous business in China than in the West, and when it has shown up in literature or other arts it certainly hasn’t been taught in schools while it is still relavent–because it’s simply too dangerous in a society that’s still highly centralized and authoritarian. Note also in this case, China has had very little experience with checks and balances in government, so readers might feel hesitant to dismiss the OP’s story out of hand–maybe that’s really how those wacky Americans do things over there.
I think the OP actually poses a very good question here–one that could be the basis of a thesis or dissertation, if anyone wanted to take on that kind of punishment. For readers who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and whose parents remember the Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers campaign, it might seem wholly credible that a government entity could act in such a capricious manner.
I heard the Onion’s editor (or was it publisher?) interviewed on NPR about this this afternoon. Less savvy American readers are duped by the stories (I’ve personally seen the one about the “gay agenda” rabidly circulated amongst homophobes), but they expect journalists to be a little more savvy.
When The Beijing editor was asked why his fact checker didn’t pick it up, his response was something like “What makes you think we have fact checkers?” This was the Onion editor’s favorite part. Really smacks of Pravda-esque communist newspapering.
Still, who did they think Congress was petitioning for the money, I wonder?
(Wow, the thread title reads so much funnier in a stereotypical Chinese accent!)
But for cripes sake, this story is about the credulity of one Chinese newspaper. It’s massively unfair to extrapolate this mistake into doubting the ability of the Chinese people to grasp satire.
When Bill Clinton was in Australia, NPR had him leaving “Sydney, the capital of Australia.”
So, should this Australian enquire: is concept of “geography” alien to American? :rolleyes:
Isn’t this a bit tired, like the way so many of my fellow-Brits, forgive their sweet ignorant souls, still maintain (perfectly seriously) that “Americans have absolutely no sense of irony”.
Doghouse Reilly has already addressed Chinese satire. Lu Xun being probably the most famous writer for his satire. These satiric writers of the May 4th movement helped the Communists to victory over the Nationalists. Also probably a reason why the Communists cracked down so hard on writers after the revolution.
My point was just to give a stupid example to answer the OP’s claim that the Chinese don’t have a sense of hunor. I used an idiotic playground joke people made in elementary school. Unless it’s refering to something other than putting “pee pee in your coke” I didn’t think it really meant anything other than what it was: juvenile humor.
If you were offended, I apologize. That wasn’t my intention.
I get the feeling that sarcasm and satire doesn’t always translate well between cultures. I think within a group there’s a lot of linguistic and non-linguistic cues that let the listener know the speaker or writer is being sarcastic. Although all cultures probibly have sarcasm the cues may be different. For instance german friends of mine only seemed to understand my sarcasm if I was sarcastic in the way they were but never understood what i was talking about when joking with american friends. German sarcasm to me was a little bit more vicious and direct than american sarcasm. Iv’e even had a lot of trouble with Australians who never seem to realize that I’m joking. On the flip side i never seam to realize when they are kidding. My girlfriend once tried to explain to me how sarcasm was different in Chinese than it was with Americans. She couln’t quite put her finger on it but she said it revolved more on playing with words. I didn’t quite understand but such differences are often hard to but a finger on.
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