The struggle with the English stiff-upper-lippers in our Chinadaily Forums
wchao37  Updated: 2004-01-01 04:55

Don't try to change our priceless forum into a monastery of celibate priests or a castle where everyone wears either armor or virginity belts, guarding against one another's prickly logs even as they are frolicking away feverishly on king-sized Serta mattresses.

Such hypocrisy belongs to the domain of stiff-upper-lippers in the English aristocracy where their collective outward appearance as ladies and gents are always accompanied by the most proper decorum, but where if you scratch beneath the surface you will see vermin afflicted with the most outlandish moral decadence this side of Andromeda Galaxy.

So to these gents I say: desist from telling us what is nasty and what is not when your own prickly logs are more hurtful than the worst of insufferable verbiage. To country ruffians like masterkung the only language they'll understand is gutter language. In my case I certainly don't use King's English or professional terminologies when speaking to these ruffians. When you go fishing you use worms and not ice-cream as baits, although you personally would much prefer ice-cream if you were the fish.

You should really go into some kind of celibate priesthood and end up in a Boston diocese asking to be pardoned by the Pope.

Let me explain the situation we are facing.

Before China opened her doors to the outside world with forums like ours, there were no Western forums which would allow a Chinese to unload his/her feelings on important political issues. There still aren't any that I know of. That's one of the reasons people like me started new forums on politics - so that our voice would not be denied further audience. And yet people like these stiffs still come around and tell the admin here how to run their business under a plethora of excuses.

It is entirely fitting in fact that we should be given more leeway to counter Western intrusions into our cyber-territory. We do not reject Western influences out of hand or else there wouldn't have been a Gaige Kaifang, but on the other hand there is no hard-and-fast rule saying that how the English stiffs' interpretion of the rules of engagement here ought to be accepted as sacrosanct.

We will pick and choose what's good for us and act accordingly. I don't go to the pricks' forums and impose my standards on them, and neither should they come over and impose their criteria on us.

What they are doing here is subtle but devious. They are associating negative words like "nasty," "jaundiced," "disobeying forum rules," "abusive," "loud" with people or political issues they frown upon because to them these utterances would be 'politically incorrect', and they would further label them as 'personal problems that should be argued somewhere else" when the issues involved are in fact very much political in nature.

For example, a fracas started when someone tried to be an apologist for Japan casting doubt on the officially sanctioned Nanjing massacre figures.

To them I say:

Yes, I do think you have a political agenda here. It is called espionage in some countries. If you dislike us so much, why don't you congregate in places like CNN, NYTimes and FP (Foreign Policy) forums instead of coming here and constantly trying to upstage the administration and second guess their mode of governance?

It is your fond dream of avarice to try to take over these Chinese forums when they are still in their infancy. You tend to cloak your specious political agenda in prickly language but would concentrate your firepower on folks like wchao37 by alerting the forum to so-called irregularities of which you were master perpetrators before your remarks were matched in comparable intensity.

Seems like we have had a good forum in the earlier, simpler format and no one was complaining much, and the only ones complaining now in our new house are people like you who are grammatically correct but politically alien with a mindset diametrically opposed to that of a majority of the Chinese people.

Is Chinadaily forum targeting a panorama of participants according to its own Chinese perspective on how a forum should be run, or is it going to be mangled beyond recognition by Westerners with ulterior motives?

Even though one of you hides behind a Chinese name "T.L" you are obviously a bona fide one-hundred-percent Caucasian with possibly enough hair on your chest to be named after an American president.

Let me repeat:

Are you coming here for a good argument with sufficient background knowledge of China (so that you don't waste our time talking to a clueless detractor) at your fingertips or are you working with a political agenda trying to take over our new forum moderated by our eager and bright-eyed college graduates who might have taken your words at face value while not necessarily familiar with your subtle way of subversion?

99.99 percent of the English-speaking forums in the world today cater to the needs of people like you. Yet you don't congregate over there. Instead, you choose to come here telling us what to do, using so-called 'forum rules' as a weapon to attack the Old Country's loyal advocates.

Should a forum like ours aim only to cater to the tastes and needs of your small segment of English-speaking forum hooligans and apologists whose motivations are never pristine clear to begin with, or should it appeal to a wider audience of the world's educated elite who have less hair on their chest? This is a question like Shakespearean Hamlet's "zu sein oder nicht zu sein" (to be or not to be). It is of momentous import to the future direction of Chinadaily English forums

Will future participants come to our forum and realize the caliber of our posters here and stick up their thumbs in approbation or would they shake their heads and go away complaining to themselves that they never realize CNN has so many branch offices in China?

Remember that we are not asking for "China is always right," "China one-hundred percent correct" type of superficial support. That is counter-productive. If you think China is good or great it is better if you give your viewpoint supported by facts and good reason, and not constantly ranting the mesmerizing mantra. If you think China is bad or wrong you must give commensurate reasons for your viewpoint, and not depend on cut-and-paste diatribes against China like what this clown masterkung has uploaded for us.

Personally I agree that our forums need to be upgraded for quality, yet I would be amiss if people like you should be given the right to interpret the forum rules for us.

Already, the evil root of all instability in the world today stems from this self-appointed right to interpret the daily news for us by the Anglo oligarchs who have become media moguls feeding news to the people of a majority of nations in the world, so that black is white and white is black, and invaders are called liberators, and defenders of their homelands are called insurgents or even terrorists.

Pretty soon the Nanjing Massacre might be renamed "Nanjing Liberation" by the Hirohito wannabes if they have their chance again, and that's something all Chinese people including wchao37 would never allow to happen. 

The above content represents the view of the author only.

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