While you may have been in your home these last few weeks watching Narcos from the beginning again, internet warriors from Thailand and China were engaged in a war, possibly a prelude of Asian geopolitics in the future.
Last week the Thai actor, Vachirawit Chivaaree aka Bright, retweeted something which made reference to Hong Kong as being a country. Now, sensible people know that Hong Kong is not a country, it in fact used to be my second favourite autonomous city of China but has recently gone down in my rankings below Tianjin.
Bright has recently become very popular in China because of his role in the Thai drama 2gether: the Series. Chinese netizens demanded he apologise, which he did. After all, nobody could expect Bright would be anything but a bit dim in real life.
But the story didn’t stop there. Bright’s girlfriend, who is a Thai influencer (a word I rate as belonging somewhere between gonorreah and abortion) called Weeraya Sukaram, or Nnevvy on Twitter, set the Chinese nationalist flame ablaze by querying why China won’t let foreigners investigate whether covid-19 was leaked from a Chinese lab and at the same time accusing foreigners of having brought the virus to China.
The Chinese netizens responded with a tsunami of insults against everything Thai (except ladyboys whom, to paraphrase Partridge, the average Chinese man does not find attractive but is definitely curious) and often using the acronym “nmsl” which stands for “ni ma si le”, or your mother is dead. This phrase actually comes from the longer sentence “fuck your mother’s cunt to death”. Indeed with 5000 years of civilisation behind them nobody can accuse the Chinese of wasting their time in honing their insults.
To their surprise though, the Thais responded with self-deprecation, not caring that their government and country was being insulted, and in fact quite enjoyed their government getting shit hurled at it.
One question being debated by netizens from Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and more was whether the Chinese netizens are wumao, supposedly paid 50 cents a piece by the Chinese government, or whether they are simply algorithms and not even people at all.
In China some people find the whole thing amusing, noting there was at least a grain of truth in many of the things the Thais were mocking the Chinese with.
And in Hong Kong, where people have had nothing to do for the last three months since their protests stopped, people laughed at the nmsl’ers in the daytime before their late night glass of Hennessy (with mineral water) brought on a wave of depression because in only another 27 years they won’t have access to Facebook and Twitter.
Everything about this story confirms my original idea at the beginning of covid-19 that all governments should have shut down the internet, anyway, I’m off to feed my pigs.
