Mocked in the tube "Fragile", China tries censorship and comes up against a Streisand effect

What annoy Beijing to the highest point, victim of a formidable Streisand effect.

With more than 30 million views on YouTube, the song "Fragile" has achieved a feat.

In addition to denouncing the authoritarian Chinese rulers, this tube has become, despite Beijing's attempts at censorship, and even a little thanks to them, an immense commercial success.

A few days after the syrupy pop-like song was released in October, Beijing censors kicked it off the Chinese internet, blacklisting it in the world's main Mandarin market.

But the title censored in the Middle Empire has become a hit elsewhere in Asia and in the Chinese diaspora on the planet.

In the Mandopop sector, the pop sung in Mandarin, making fun of Beijing can break a career.

The two performers of "Fragile," Malaysian rapper Namewee and Chinese-Australian singer Kimberley Chen, both of whom live in Taiwan, made it their selling point.

They make fun of China in stylized, tangy turns of phrase.

A rosewater song that doesn't fool anyone

“Fragile” sounds like a rosewater ballad but the authors accompany it with a clearly political warning: “be careful if you are a fragile rose”.

A reference to the expression "small roses" in China designating the army of nationalist Internet commentators who wage war on anything they perceive as an affront.

Another feature of the song is the acronym NMSL.

In an empty pink swimming pool, Namewee fights with the giant panda chanting "you tell me NMSL when you get angry".

"Ni ma si le" - understand "your mother is dead" - is ubiquitous in online feuds between Chinese nationalists and their targets.

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In 2020, the sentence was hijacked during a pitched battle on the net between Thais and Chinese after remarks by a Thai celebrity on the coronavirus.

Thai Internet users had created a series of viral memes caricaturing Chinese nationalists as automatons instantly typing "NMSL" as soon as they spotted a subject of disagreement online.

Apples and pineapples for a political message

Namewee explains that the character in his song "swallows the apple and chops the pineapple".

The first fruit refers to the pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, closed after its assets were frozen and its leaders arrested in the name of a national security law.

The second alludes to Beijing's recent decision to ban pineapple imports from Taiwan, an island with its government but claimed by China, as the harvest approaches.

The giant panda in the clip offers Namewee a pot of soup with a stuffed bat floating in it, a clear allusion to the widely denied idea that eating bats is the cause of the coronavirus.

The origin of the pandemic remains unknown and has been more difficult to pin down, according to the World Health Organization, due to China's official opacity.

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But the cliché of "bat soup" was often used against Chinese and Asian communities around the world during the pandemic, in racist attacks and slurs.

Enough to allow the Chinese authorities to blacklist this song that the state media, like the daily Global Times, deem bluntly "malicious".