Zhang Dongning, an Anhui woman, was charged with “insulting China” two years ago for creating a series of “pig-headed” cartoons, and was later sentenced to prison. Recently, Zhang was again involved in a series of cartoons that satirized a murder case involving Chinese people in Japan. The court found her guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and sentenced her to one year in prison. (By Gao Feng)
In November 2016, Jiang Ge, a Chinese student studying in Japan, was killed by her roommate’s ex-boyfriend outside her apartment. Liu Xin, the roommate, locked herself inside the door and was accused of not saving her life and deliberately avoiding Jiang Ge’s mother, not even attending her funeral.
Liu Xin posted on her Weibo account after she returned to China. Some netizens accused her of clearing her name and using Jiang Ge’s case to collect “reward”. Some netizens also questioned her for hiring a water army and regularly posting comments attacking Jiang Ge’s mother. Jiang’s mother, Jiang Qiulian, later filed a lawsuit against Liu Xin.
The dispute, which rocked the Chinese community in Japan, became the subject of a cartoon written by Anhui girl Zhang Dongning, but it also brought her back into trouble with the law. The case was recently adjudicated at the Tianjiaan District Court in Huainan, Anhui Province. According to the verdict, after seeing the information about the murder case on the Internet, Zhang Dongning drew a cartoon insulting and satirizing Jiang Qiulian and her daughter to vent her emotions, and posted the cartoon on the Internet with several microblogging accounts, which was viewed more than 10 million times, causing “bad influence” on the victim’s life and confusing the public, seriously disturbing The court held that Zhang Dongning used the information network to post the cartoons.
The court held that Zhang Dongning’s use of the Internet to abuse others constituted the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. He was sentenced to one year in prison for his behavior, which was contrary to both national law and human feelings.
In fact, Zhang Dongning was sentenced to prison on the same charge two years ago when she returned from Japan. The 22-year-old was described by the prosecution as a lover of Japanese cartoons, a great admirer of Japanese culture, and a clear “elitist” anti-Chinese tendency. In order to increase the influence and attention of the “elitist Japanese” group, Zhang Dongning created a series of more than 300 “pig-headed” cartoons, which were said to be “cartoons insulting to the image of Chinese people” and “with the theme of satirizing and scandalizing the habits of Chinese people”, and sent them to Chinese people in Japan to publish on the Internet.
Yang Haiying, a professor at Shizuoka University, said Zhang’s work is well known in Chinese circles in Japan and is likely to have struck a nerve with the Chinese Communist authorities.
Her style of drawing is very much like that of some Japanese satirical cartoons, Yang Haiying said. Many of the cartoons she drew in various media were expressed in Japanese. Her Japanese cartoons are mainly published in “Tong Ren Magazine,” a circle of people who share the same interests, on Weibo or Twitter, and from Twitter they can be transferred to WeChat. (Her manga) especially influences young people from mainland China to Japan. China is likely to fear that young people will follow Zhang Dongning’s path when they arrive in Japan.
It is understood that in mainland China, “Jing-Ji” is a derogatory term, meaning extreme worship of Japanese militarism and hatred of one’s own nation.
Yang Haiying said: China, on the one hand, considers her to be an “elitist”, and there must be a Japanese rightist or reactionary faction colluding with her to insult China and oppose China. Now that Sino-Japanese relations continue to go in a bad direction because of the Hong Kong issue, the Uighur issue, the Southern Mongolia issue, and the Taiwan issue, (I believe) some Japanese arrested by China will be sentenced next, and even a few new Japanese may be arrested.
The “pig-headed person” cartoon series has become a label for Zhang Dongning’s alleged insult to China, so how does commenting on a murder of a Chinese in Japan relate to provoking trouble? Beijing Songzhuang artist Wang Peng explains it this way.
Wang Peng said: she returned to the country and take this approach, in fact, is linked to the original deterrent. It’s hard to control the scale of the CCP’s foreign propaganda, so Zhang Dongning may have hit their bottom line. They think you’re “saying the right thing but saying the wrong thing”. If you are targeted, no matter what language you use, they will think you are teasing them.
It is understood that Zhang Dongning is not the only one who has been prosecuted for commenting on Jiang Ge’s case. Last year, a netizen was convicted by a Shanghai court of insult and defamation for posting articles and cartoons about Jiang Ge’s case on Weibo, and was sentenced to one year and six months in prison.
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