Legal Commentary

"Chinese Pianist Plays Propaganda Tune at White House: US humiliated in eyes of Chinese by song used to inspire anti-Americanism."

Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie ?Battle on Shangganling Mountain."...

The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades....

The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, ?When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.? The ?jackal? in the song is the United States....

?In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S.,? says Yang Jingduan, a Chinese psychiatrist now living in Philadelphia who had in China been a doctor in the Chinese military. ?It?s like insulting you in your face and you don?t know it, it?s humiliating...

[One] Chinese commenting on a forum responded to the Lang Lang performance by writing, ?Defeat America, defeat Obama? (writing Obama?s name with the wrong first character, one meaning ?sunken? or ?dented.?)

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Full post as published by Althouse on January 23, 2011 (boomark / email).