This little Stück of piecemeal wordplay has been making the rounds on WeChat. It seems to be an amalgam of several little coronavirus memes that had appeared in isolation.
隔离人权没了 With the quarantine, there are no human rights.
不隔离人全没了 Without the quarantine, the humans will be all gone.
天上蝙蝠，地上川普 In the sky are bats, on the earth there's Trump.
一个有毒，一个没谱 One has a virus, the other has no clue/no plan.
不戴口罩你试试 Just try not wearing a face mask.
试试就逝世 If you try it, you'll die.
Thank you for your great explanation of the reasons behind the famous Kennedy "crisis" misquote. When I was in high school, I had a friend who was Chinese and spoke Mandarin fluently, who explained it to my US History class after the teacher quoted Kennedy. That was over 20 years ago and I remembered that his quote was wrong, but could not remember the explanation I was given well enough to explain it to someone else.
In the PRC, you'd best not say anything about COVID-19. It's more or less forbidden for citizens to talk about it, much less question the government's handling of the CRISIS (not a "dangerous opportunity"). Even the name and the very existence of the disease are highly problematic. Still, despite all the draconian censorship, people figure out various ways to circumvent the prohibitions and express their feelings and opinions.
"‘Noodles’ and ‘Pandas’: Chinese People Are Using Secret Code to Talk About Coronavirus Online". "'Vietnamese pho noodles,' anyone?", by David Gilbert, VICE (3/6/20)
In the struggle against Wǔhàn fèiyán 武漢肺炎 ("Wuhan pneumonia"), Taiwan has to fight the war on three fronts: (1) trying to stop the virus at its borders; (2) trying to join the WHO for world-wide collaboration and disease information; and (3) fighting against the Communist Chinese dictatorial linguistic policies. The linguistic policy on disease terminology is really weird; it smacks of George Orwell's 1984.
He cites this article in Chinese and this facebook page (also in Chinese). Here's another article in Chinese from Taiwan that sticks to "Wuhan pneumonia" despite the pressure from WHO and the PRC government to adopt a name that is not transparent with regard to the origin of the disease.
The people are outraged at what happened to a doctor named Li Wenliang at Wuhan Central Hospital who called attention to the outbreak of the coronavirus on December 30, 2019, before it became an epidemic. Instead of the government praising him, they sent police to threaten and harass him, as part of their effort to cover up the burgeoning contagion. While treating patients, he contracted the disease himself and succumbed to it on February 7, 2020. To add insult to death, the government first denied that he had died, then admitted it and began a propaganda campaign to promote him as a hero.
If you listened to the U.S. Senate proceedings yesterday, you may have been puzzled — as I was — by Jay Sekulow's discussion of "lawyer lawsuits":
And by the way, lawyer lawsuits? lawyer lawsuits? We're talking about the impeachment of a president of the United States, duly elected. And the members, the managers, are complaining about lawyer lawsuits? The consitution allows lawyer lawsuits. It's disrespecting the constitution of the United States to even say that in this chamber — lawyer lawsuits!
The following pictures are from Shatin mall last night. They show people lining up to get individually calligraphed Chinese New Year’s couplets that take up the key slogan of the protests: “Restore HK’s glory: revolution for our times.” On the way up to mass today, we saw new slogans spray-painted calling for HK independence as “the only way out”. “It ain’t over yet.”
