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[The article has been published before the U.S. election took place. For the article's content, this is not relevant.]
In the eyes of these Chinese American election volunteers, Kamala Harris is the perfect daughter of an immigrant family. “She is a successful person who has entered mainstream society, a microcosm of the American melting pot: mixed race, a former judge, an attorney general, and finally vice-president,” one volunteer said. “Her CV is what all of us Asians want to foster in our kids, and we Chinese want our next generation to be exactly like her.”
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As we observed and analyzed simplified Chinese posts on X, WeChat Channels, and Douyin (TikTok), where discussions about Harris were concentrated, we found that Harris’s immigrant status and the life experiences of her parents remain important axes that “define” her on this side of the information ecosystem. Interestingly, however, we found that the very narrative that her supporters have tried to put front and center — that she is the exemplary daughter of an immigrant family — is entirely undermined in this ecosystem'
[Still, there are a significant number of Chinese Americans who do not speak English, and who might not have access to the “Harris Briefing” or to her campaign ads. For Mandarin speakers who use simplified characters in the US, if you are an X user, there is a good chance you will access election information sites in your native language].
In the vast majority of narratives we observed, the story portrayed was precisely the opposite: Harris is a disgrace to her immigrant family owing to her failure to excel, and to her alleged indiscretions in her private life. At the same time, the question of Harris’s femininity adds a further layer of complexity to these discussions. What does it mean to be the good daughter of immigrants? What makes a good politician? What makes a good woman?
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**In this world [of Mandarin-speaking Chinese social media], Harris is known by another name — wu ji (烏雞), or “the black chicken” Meanwhile, her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz, is called “Bai Feng,” or “white phoenix.” **Taken together, the first characters in these nicknames, “Wu” and “Bai,” allude to the fact the candidates are darker and lighter-skinned. Together, the two names also come very close to “Wuji Baifeng Wan,” the name of a proprietary Chinese medicine that claims to be “an all-purpose gynecological treatment.” To a certain extent, this coincides with Trump and his supporters calling Walz a “tampon man,” emphasizing the femininity of the Harris-Walz duo, while at the same time drawing the reader’s imagination to the female body and sexual organs. **The word “ji” (雞), the second character in this name for Harris, is even more obscene, directly linking it to the Chinese words for “chicken” and its homophone “prostitute” (妓). **
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When it comes to specifics about Harris, Chinese-language posts tend to be very sparse in terms of real information content. A portion of the posts are simply re-posts of opinion pieces, screenshots, cartoons, and other content from English-language accounts, while the Chinese comments added are at once implicit and quite explicit. They are obscure in the sense that any observer unfamiliar with labels like “the black chicken” (烏雞), “goose giblets” (鵝雜), “Harry crap” (哈里屎), “tampon man” (棉條男), “white duck” (白鴨), “yellow left” (黃左), “mackerel” (鮁魚), and “fox” (狐狸), will imagine these are just some form of local dialect, or a secret code.
These words are extremely derogatory to both Harris and Walz. The term “goose giblets,” for example, is a derivation of the slang term “giblets” (杂碎), which can suggest someone is trash. Its pronunciation in Chinese somewhat resembles “Walz,” and so in this case it is used to insult the Democrats’ candidate for vice president. The term “yellow left,” derived from the term “white left” (not unlike the insult “liberal snowflake”), is an insult directed online at Chinese liberals.
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Get past these odd words, though, and the messages inside these posts are the most basic and direct insults, ridicule and propaganda. A few are slightly more measured, like, “to reduce taxes and raise revenues, elect Trump; to increase taxes and get poorer, elect the cockerel.” But many are unmistakable personal and racist attacks: “If Columbus hadn’t discovered the New World, then there wouldn’t be a black chicken like her! Her father would have inherited his ancestral property and kept slaves in Jamaica, and her mother would have self-immolated and died for her husband.”
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[For example], the WeChat channel “Country Road America” focuses on American politics. [...] Quite a number of these posts are about Harris as a woman. Several, posted under the name “Amber Kite” (琥珀風箏), go on and on with stories alleging Harris has used sex for career advancement:
>“When she was just in her 20s she became the mistress of a 60 year old married man (my dad isn’t even 31 years older than me, by the way) as she was looking for the first pot of money in politics from a California establishment figure who was a married man a generation older — it’s just amazing that almost half of Americans tout her as a ‘feminist icon.’” — The Democrats are about to be devoured! The leaders have hand-picked themselves. A descendants of a master poses as a member of the slave class, and a mistress represents women’s rights.
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>“Brown himself admitted that he had helped Harris get two high-paying jobs in the California state government, and that she made hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue in a few years, and that was 30 years ago. She had no background in the field, and Brown gave her a fancy car, the California version of the BMW.” — The First Bucket of Money for Harris, California’s BMW Woman. [NOTE: “BMW Woman” was a contestant on a Chinese dating show a decade ago, who famously said: “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.” She became a symbol of frivolity.]
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[The article cites many similar examples.]