Trump news: Spring Festival edition
Society & Culture
Top society and culture news for February 2, 2017. Part of the daily The China Project news roundup "Unrest along the New Silk Road."
- Trump and Chinese New Year 2017
Donald Trump was today once again a popular topic on Chinese social media for several reasons. First, he broke a long-standing American presidential tradition by not sending Spring Festival greetings to Chinese people. One internet user ridiculed Trump, saying (in Chinese), “Given his intellectual level, he might not know when Chinese New Year is.” Another subject of discussion was about a group of Chinese companies that rented a large digital billboard in New York’s Times Square to wish Trump and the American people a “happy Chinese New Year,” which one commenter described (in Chinese) as “rendering good for evil.” Chinese social media also lit up today over Ivanka Trump’s appearance at the Chinese Embassy’s New Year’s party and her recently posted video of her daughter singing a song in Mandarin. One of the most upvoted comments below the video reads (in Chinese), “It seems the only person in Trump’s family who knows nothing about politics and diplomacy is the president himself.”
In other Trump news, the president’s éminence grise Steve Bannon was the subject of media reports that quote recent radio shows he did for Breitbart in which he said, “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years.”
- Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua’s all-female bodyguards ‘quite unusual,’ say security experts / SCMP
- The parachute generation – Chinese children going to the U.S. for high school / NYT (paywall)
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The life of a football coach in China / The Guardian
- Yunnan village turns ‘Grapes of God’ into big bucks – a 150-year-old wine-making tradition / Sixth Tone
- Pearl River Delta Journal: On deck with China’s last junk builders, masters of an ebbing craft / NYT (paywall)
- Filmmaker Johnny Ma wants you to fall in love with ’90s Chinese cinema / China Film Insider
