Meme China (Internet Culture from the Middle Kingdom)

Meme China (Internet Culture from the Middle Kingdom)

Jia Junpeng

Jia Junpeng (Simplified Chinese: 贾君鹏; jiǎ jūnpéng) is an internet meme and popular catchphrase within the People's Republic of China.

Origins

The post with the title, in Chinese, "Jia Junpeng, your mother is yelling you to go home for your meal" (贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭) appeared on the Chinese portal Baidu for the game World of Warcraft) forum at 10:59 a.m on July 16, 2009. The thread content consists of only 2 letters, namely RT (pinyin: Rú Tí) which simply means "as the title suggests". The poster has only been identified by his IP address of "222.94.255.*".

Amazingly, after only six hours, it attracted more than 400,000 viewers and 17,000 replies, most of which were posted by young people. Some who posted replies pretended to be Jia's relatives, teachers or friends. Netizens who replied to the post even changed their user names to be "Jia Junpeng’s aunt", "Jia Junpeng’s grandpa", "Jia Junpeng’s sister" etc. formed a huge Jia family. They doctored photos and started cyberhunts, posting several thousands of replies per second.

Effects

World of Warcraft stopped being accessible and the host, Netease, claims it is suffering heavy losses due to competitor's attack. Five million Chinese WoW players have been waiting and are angry. So "Jia Junpeng, your mom tells you to go home to eat" has been interpreted by the WoW players as "Netease hurry up and start the World of Warcraft service".

According to analysis that the newly popular internet phenomenon reflected some characters of popular culture, such as anti-intellectualism, an unwillingness to care about something's original value, confusion, a willingness to follow the crowd, decadence and immaturity. The meme has sparked various Photoshop contests throughout internet forums, where the catchphrase is often photoshopped into various places, such as banners, signs in public places, or as a caption to a humorous image.

Some people also expressed that the reason why the phenomenon is so popular, arousing the people because of childhood memories in heart. But there are also comments that these depth analysis was not accurate, as other networks, like popular culture, "Jia Junpeng Phenomenon" is an only kuso culture from internet.