Hu Xijin | Yasukuni Shrine is hateful, but should we praise urinating there?

Tie Tou, who urinated and scribbled “toilet” on the pillars of the Yasukuni Shrine, has safely returned to China. Fortunately, he didn’t get into legal trouble, and the matter became a pure consumption event on the Chinese internet. The Yasukuni Shrine is very hated, and a “former anti-fraud hero” who was banned in China for self-reporting prostitution did such a thing at the Yasukuni Shrine. This makes people feel a bit awkward whether they praise him or mock him. Tie Tou took advantage of this loophole and became very popular while being banned.

Lao Hu just wants to say, our patriotism should emphasize quality. Like Tie Tou, who performs “patriotism” by violating local laws and disregarding public place rules, giving everyone some fun and creating an online consumption gimmick, it’s okay if he didn’t get into legal trouble, but it is definitely not a patriotic approach that deserves encouragement and promotion. More accurately, it has nothing to do with patriotism. Mixing this kind of online traffic-seeking hype into patriotism will only pollute patriotism, making many rational patriots unwilling to associate with it, thus leading to internal discord and conflict within the patriotic camp, it cannot bring about the unity of the patriotic masses; on the contrary, it can only create division.

These people who use the banner of “patriotism” to stir up trouble and seek traffic online are too calculating, because if they use other pretexts to gain traffic, they are easily ridiculed, and the risk is too great, but if they put on a “patriotic” label, doing extreme and excessive things in the direction of the public’s patriotism, it’s not easy for people to scold them, for example, if you scold Tie Tou for urinating on the pillars of the Yasukuni Shrine as “uncivilized”, do you support the Yasukuni Shrine? This kind of risk of being scolded in return will come. Like Lao Hu now, at least it shows that Tie Tou’s actions have undermined the foundation of our legitimate patriotism, and opposing support for his behavior is to take some risks in the online public opinion field.

Some time ago, I also saw a post, a person claiming to be an international student, claimed that before returning to China from the United States, he maxed out his credit cards, overdrawing more than 1 million yuan, “giving the United States a heavy blow”, and thus earned his “first pot of gold”. I don’t know if this is fabricated. If it’s true, what kind of patriotism is this? This is a serious breach of contract and lack of credit. When this kind of person returns to China, the country also has to guard against him. If he maxes out several credit cards here and runs to Taiwan, or runs to Japan or the Philippines, saying “giving mainland China a heavy blow”, what should we do? In addition, what he did in the United States, how much it damages the collective credit of Chinese students studying abroad, this is not patriotism, it is clearly harming our country.

Finally, Lao Hu wants to say that China is no longer an era of poverty and weakness. We are now very strong and are promoting the rule of law, carrying out comprehensive social civilization construction, and external competition also relies on strength, emphasizes rules, and is done in a serious and meticulous manner. Please don’t use those things like urinating abroad and running away after maxing out credit cards to hitch a ride on our patriotism.