Here’s an interesting post on Virtual China regarding “spoofing,” a rough translation of a Chinese word that describes the phenomenon where people re-edit some internet meme, e.g. the millions of Zidane head-butt videos on YouTube.

“Egao” 恶搞 is a neologism that the Chinese media is spending some time trying to dissect and understand, and as such is a bit hard to translate. Roland Soong of ESWN suggests “spoof/ing” and I’m going to go with that. It refers to the sudden emergence over the past year of online video clips and photo-shopped stills such as Hong Kong’s now world-famous Bus Uncle, or the Bun Murders series based on Chen Kaige’s film The Promise.

The post translates a couple of articles regarding this; excerpt from the translation:

…With the development of Chinese society and an increase in the amount of protein and vitamins taken in by young people, students on campus are no longer so quiescent. [note: this is a strange characterization of Chinese campus culture, which has been a center for social and cultural change for the last century.] They’re in a restless adolescence where they’re looking for all kinds of ways to express how they’re different from their peers. Spoofing is naturally an important method for doing this. This is different from the students of the 1980s and 1990s who basically didn’t mature as early, and if they did they just started dating earlier but didn’t have much talent for spoofing.

“an increase in the amount of protein and vitamins” leads to “restless adolescence”. Hahahaha.

trying to understand 恶搞文化 spoofing culture in Virtual China