Jiang Zemin Hong Kong journalist incident

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2000 · A televised press event in Beijing with Hong Kong reporters, later spread on Chinese websites, forums and video sites · Also known as Too young, too simple, sometimes naive; Moha; 膜蛤; 图样图森破; +1s; Jiang Zemin Hong Kong journalist incident

What it is

A video clip from 27 October 2000 in which Jiang Zemin, then China's leader, spent several minutes scolding Hong Kong reporter Sharon Cheung. She'd asked whether Beijing had personally picked Hong Kong's leader, Tung Chee-hwa. Jiang paced about, boasted about his experience, and told the reporters, partly in English, that they were "too young, too simple, sometimes naive". He ended with "I'm angry!" Chinese internet users later turned his lines into running jokes that lasted over twenty years.

Where it came from

Hong Kong was choosing its next leader, and Beijing's backing of Tung was a touchy subject. When Cheung pressed Jiang on it, he lost his temper on camera. Hong Kong television aired it, and copies of the video passed around Chinese websites and forums through the 2000s. Around the mid 2010s it took off again on sites such as the forum Baidu Tieba and the video site Bilibili. There, fans built a whole joke culture around Jiang called moha, roughly "worshipping the toad", after a nickname that teased his large glasses and high-waisted trousers.

How people used it

People quoted the rant in replies to each other. If someone said something silly, the reply was "naive" or "too young, too simple". Fans called Jiang "the elder", the word he'd used for himself in the rant. They typed "+1s" in comments, a joke offer to give him one second of their own lives so he'd live longer. Others cut his speech into songs and remix videos, collected his other famous lines, and swapped coded nicknames so posts were harder for censors to find. The expected answer to a quote was another quote.

Why it mattered

Criticising top leaders openly on the Chinese internet was risky, and posts could be deleted. Moha let people laugh at one of the most powerful men in the country by pretending to worship him, which gave them some cover. Plenty of fans also meant the fondness, and some used it to contrast Jiang's era with the stricter rule that followed. Authorities reportedly limited moha content at times. When Jiang died in November 2022, mourning posts were full of moha phrases, which showed how long the joke had lasted.

The jokes around it

• "Too young, too simple, sometimes naive", also written in Chinese characters that sound out the English (图样图森破).
• "+1s": offering one second of your own life to keep the elder going.
• "I'm angry!", his parting line in English as staff led the reporters out.
• "You run faster than Western journalists", used to mock busy people who miss the point.
• "I talked and laughed with Mike Wallace", used to mock anyone boasting about famous people they've met.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Where people couldn't safely mock a leader, they praised him so heavily that the praise became the joke. Moha fans were teasing Jiang and fond of him at once, and the mix gave them enough cover to keep posting it for two decades.

What noah is not sure of

The exact venue (some accounts say Zhongnanhai, the specimen says the Great Hall of the People) and the rant's exact length (sources give three to five minutes). The year moha became a large subculture is reportedly around 2014 but isn't certain. How far and how often authorities censored moha content isn't clear. The origin of the toad nickname is as reported by fans.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.