Toad worship is the new sexy in China. Of course, the ‘toad’ here has nothing to do with the actual animal. It is a subtextual reference that Chinese Internet users invented to describe the former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader – Jiang Zemin, who was the most powerful man in the country between 1989 and 2002, because of the big ‘toad’ glasses he often wears.
Retired from politics two decades ago and kept a low profile since then, Jiang was suddenly placed under the spotlight again on the Chinese-language Internet in 2016. This year, Jiang turned 90. To celebrate his birthday, millions of Chinese Internet users invented a series of ‘toad worship’ rituals on social media, typically including creating and posting funny memes of Jiang, citing his famous quotations, and sending best wishes to him. According to toad worshipers, “every meme posted […] would extend [Jiang’s] life for one second, and that would make him immortal” (Fang, 2020, p. 38). Despite the government’s heavy censorship, toad worship went viral, becoming one of the most trending digital cultural phenomena on the Chinese-language Internet in the past few years.
Of course, you cannot take the ‘worship’ part of toad worship too seriously. Probably not a single Internet user would believe that their sharing of Jiang’s memes could really extend his life. Instead, their engagement with such rituals more reflects a playful way of political participation developed in a politically restrictive Chinese digital environment.
Based on a textual analysis of 100 toad worship-related memes, as well as interviews with 6 creators and 18 frequent sharers of them, Dr Fang Kecheng – an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong discovered that the toad worship culture is both political and apolitical.
On the one hand, Jiang’s era has witnessed the most rapid economic development in China’s modern history, with political restrictions being often perceived to be relatively looser back then. As such, Chinese people’s toad worship involves an implicit criticism of the current CCP leadership, despite the sarcasm encoded in the memes showing that toad worshipers do not completely agree with Jiang’s governance either.
On the other hand, playfulness is also an important apolitical incentive that encourages Chinese Internet users to share funny memes that mock Jiang. In this process, being able to decode these subtextual meanings embedded in the memes also constitute a form of cultural capital, which allows Internet users to show their political literacy within a shared Chinese digital community.
Dr Fang’s research is enlightening, offering us a narrative of Chinese digital culture that is much more dynamic than the regime-vs-people discourse popular with outside observers. If you were interested in toad worship, please go ahead and read Dr Fang’s interesting piece via this link.
References
Fang, K. (2020). Turning a communist party leader into an Internet meme: The political and apolitical aspects of China’s toad worship culture. Information Communication & Society, 23(1), 38–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1485722