Turning a communist party leader into an internet meme: the political and apolitical aspects of China’s toad worship culture

ABSTRACT

A cultural phenomenon called ‘mo ha’ (toad worship) has been increasingly popular on the Chinese Internet since 2014, with ‘the toad’ referring to former Party and country leader Jiang Zemin. His memes have gone viral. To examine the toad worship fever, I propose a two-dimensional framework: on the one hand, it differentiates the political and apolitical aspects of the content, and on the other hand, it draws from James Carey’s two views of communication to examine the functions. I collected and analyzed more than 100 toad worship memes, interviewed 24 creators and sharers of the memes, and conducted participant observation in two toad worship online communities. The framework yields four aspects of the phenomenon: implicit criticism toward the current leadership and the regime, ritual satire among groups of dissidents, playfulness, and a shared community with cultural capital and rituals. The motivations of participants are not only multi-faceted, but also fluid. This study contributes to the study of Internet memes and online expression in authoritarian regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet memes
• Chinese internet
• political expression
• digital culture
• authoritarian regime
• Jiang Zemin

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jessa Lingel, Guobin Yang, Rory Truex, Qi Wang, Jasmine Erdener, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article. A previous version of this article was awarded the Top Paper Award of The Association for Chinese Communication Studies at the 2016 NCA annual conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kecheng Fang is a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include political communication, journalism, and digital media. He has published in academic journals including New Media and Society and Journal of Contemporary China.

Notes

1 I collected 14 articles, 108 images (including GIFs and posters), 17 audio clips, and 12 video clips. Keyword searching yielded 98 artifacts, experienced users provided 46, and 58 came from my own collection (some were repetitive). Most of the artifacts can be found in the Tumblr site ‘Toad Worship Archive’ I set up (http://toadworship.tumblr.com).

2 ROC now governs the island of Taiwan. But in Mainland China’s official discourse, ROC only refers to the period from 1912 to 1949.