Jiang Zemin, born in 1926, served as President of the People's Republic of China between 1993 and 2003. On the 27th October 2000, during a press conference with Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, Jiang got riled up by the questioning of a local reporter and stood up, delivering a colorful rant that has become an endless wellspring of Chinese digital folklore. Almost two decades later, many of Jiang's zingers remain enshrined in Chinese internet vernacular as 梗 gen ('stalk', punchline): one example is the saying 搞个大新闻 gao ge daxinwen, or 'making a big news', with which the former President complained about the journalists' distortion of his words in order to criticize him – today, 'making a big news' is a gen used to tease and taunt social media users who always want to attract attention in forums and comment sections.
Another popular Jiang Zemin gen is related to his nickname zhangzhe ('the Elder'). While he was very active during his presidency, Jiang has progressively retired from politics; the nostalgic memory of many internet users, combined with his sparse public appearances, have resulted in the belief that he somehow still operates behind the scenes of Chinese governance. Regular rumors about his death are warded off via the practice of 许一秒 xu yi miao (‘adding one second’): by posting a simple "+1s" message, internet users symbolically extend Jiang's life for one more second, helping the Elder to hang around while conveniently also bumping up BBS threads or giving more visibility to agreeable (or disagreeable) social media posts.
Besides making big news and adding seconds, the Jiang Zemin gen repertoire includes evergreen catchphrases like his English-language evaluation of Hong Kong journalists ("too young too simple, sometimes naïve"), but their online exegesis is often hindered by the political sensitivity of the leader's figure – as you can experience first-hand, some of the nine entries under the #moha tag on this website dedicated to popular catchwords are visibly censored. The most generative gen related to the Elder is undeniably the practice of 膜蛤 moha, or 'toad worship'. Jiang's iconic look – black-rimmed glasses, large mouth, and high-waisted trousers – has warranted him the nickname of 蛤蟆 hama ('toad'), and humorous expressions of affection or endearment have come to be known as toad worship. Moha reportedly emerged around 2011 on a Baidu Tieba forum board and boomed in 2014 as a full-fledged online subculture.
Moha is a paradoxical genre of digital folklore, sustained by a consistent practice and yet largely obfuscated by censorship. Most major Chinese social media platforms keep the term on a keyword blacklist, and search queries return only few results – for example, this Weibo user dryly noting that someone reported him for toad worship and concluding that the practice might have to be limited to private online contexts. Hahu, a popular discussion board dedicated to moha, recently went offline; Mohu, a toad worship parody of the Chinese Q&A website Zhihu, is hosted outside of China and remains widely used. As for any other genre of digital folklore, discussing moha is central to its circulation: "Is toad worshipping really out of love for Jiang Zemin?", asks one Mohu user in 2019, eliciting a range of responses ranging from "of course not" to intimate personal accounts of this practice.
It is interesting to note that political sensitivity and censorship efforts have resulted in moha and other Jiang Zemin gen to find a safer harbor on non-Chinese platforms and online repositories. The Instagram account @mcjiangzemin, the Facebook page @Mohamemes and the Twitter account @XinHaNewsAgency, for example, all regularly post and archive humorous images and videos related to the Elder. In keeping with the second-adding tradition, the Twitter bot @1secpls offers daily updates on the leader's condition, while a rich repertoire of parody video remixes are collected on video-sharing platforms like Niconico and YouTube.
+1s.
Note: Despite the life-extending efforts of millions of internet users, Jiang Zemin passed away on November 30, 2022, three years after this essay was written.