Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain."...
The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades....
The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” in the song is the United States....
“In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S.,” says Yang Jingduan, a Chinese psychiatrist now living in Philadelphia who had in China been a doctor in the Chinese military. “It’s like insulting you in your face and you don’t know it, it’s humiliating...
[One] Chinese commenting on a forum responded to the Lang Lang performance by writing, “Defeat America, defeat Obama” (writing Obama’s name with the wrong first character, one meaning “sunken” or “dented.”)
IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says:
The media in general will make less of this than they did of Michaele and Tareq Salahi.
This is "fuck you, ignorant barbarians" crashing.
William says:
Didn't the Red Chinese lose tens of thousands of men in the Korean War in order to insure the prolonged rule of one of the most fucked up regimes in that region's long history of fucked up regimes? I would think that playing that tune is more likely to remind the world of the stupidity of Communist rulers than humiliate the United States. I think Obama should get Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen to write a commemorative song about Carter's failed rescue mission to Iran. He should play that song at all state functions. Same deal as this.
While Mr. Richardson’s trip was approved by the State Department, he was not traveling as an official envoy. Television footage showed him arriving at the Sunan airport outside Pyongyang on Thursday. Mr. Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, was greeted on the tarmac by a North Korean official who said, in English, “So nice to see you.”....
The latest inter-Korean crisis erupted three weeks ago with an artillery barrage from the North that targeted Yeonpyeong and killed four South Koreans.
“The puppet warmongers are contemplating staging madcap naval firing exercises,” said the news agency, K.C.N.A., which also called the new South Korean defense minister “a war maniac keen to ignite a war” and “a puppy knowing no fear of a tiger..
[The] pardon petition [is] based on the widespread belief that New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace had promised the famous gunman a pardon in exchange for his testimony in a murder trial but reneged on the deal....
¶ Gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States. ¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”
Via Roger Ebert, who tweets it as a joke: "And we complain about our mobile phones." I try to understand the motivation toward comedy. Is it our great distance and alienation from North Korea? Or should I be charitable and say that was never meant to seem amusing?
