The Spoofing Culture of Chinese Internet, Starring Baidu and Google

The ‘Spoofing Culture’ (恶搞文化) has become one of the have-to-be-mentioned Chinese Internet activities in China. This type of Chinese Joke2.0 in fact has more breadth than a practical joke, and it might not be easily understood by the foreigners.

There is no doubt that Spoofing Culture is being loved by most of the Chinese netizen which also include the employees from Baidu and Google China. You probably know both web search giants are fighting hard in the Chinese battlefield, but probably you don’t know that they are also using the way of Spoofing culture.

I was watching a video-clip directed by the employees of Google China days ago, it is quite fun. In this Google News, Google China gives Baidu (百度) a very interesting new name 百毒 which has a very similar pronunciation but in Chinese it means One Hundred Virus. I was so surprise that there are quite a few actors involved in this video-clip, they play as the reporters, Google users, Google’s partners and even the webmasters whose sites are banned by Baidu for no reason are now fans of Google.

Even more interesting, actually it is not Google who starts the virtual fight against Baidu. Months ago, the staff from Baidu released a shorter video-clip titled I Know and teased Google about its not understanding Chinese. If you give a sentence in Chinese without any punctuation, its meaning could be very ambiguous. In that short movie shot by Baidu, the post on the wall reads in Chinese something like 我知道你不知道我知道你不知道我知道. Since the same character 我 can be used as both a subject and an object, so the sentence can read as ‘I know (that) you don’t know me,  know you don’t know, I know (it)!’, or ‘I know, you don’t know. I know (that) you don’t know (that) I know (it)’. Obviously, the ‘foreigner’ in that video know nothing about it. At the end of the video, it says that Baidu Knows Chinese More.

The two video-clips are followed.