![]() “I created this page for fun back in 2015, while progressive groups like the Hong Kong Indigenous were using Pepe in their flyers and on social media around the same time,” they said. The 25-year-old moderator, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Pepe has been a fixture on Hong Kong social media since at least 2014. ![]() “I guess you can say it shares the sense of powerlessness that the Hong Kong people feel,” they said. The moderator of the Hong Kong–based Rare Pepe Party Facebook page explained to BuzzFeed News why. Recently, LIHKG users doxed a group of Diba trolls, leaking their identity card numbers, bank records, and home addresses.Īny hint that the movement’s mascot could be co-opted is being taken seriously. Members of China’s nationalist messageboard Diba regularly go on “ battle expeditions" across the Great Firewall to spread pro-CCP propaganda. Only weeks before the Pepe pop-up, the LIHKG messageboard - Hong Kong’s equivalent of Reddit - was attacked by a Chinese cyberweapon. “While you’re living a tough life, Pepe serves as a genuine reflection of your true self - someone who is poor and gloomy, someone who smirks with cunning thoughts, someone who is mad with your arms held up, and someone who is eager for the meaning of life while reading a book.”Ĭoncern about the Chinese Community Party or Chinese nationals working in the party’s interest had precedent. The promotional text is decidedly apolitical. Its domain was registered in Panama and links to a Facebook and sparsely populated Instagram page. The website for the pop-up doesn’t offer much information. Nothing about the promotion of the Pepe pop-up made it seem as though it had anything to do with the protest movement. Local businesses are being categorized by which side they’re on - yellow businesses support the city’s protest movement and blue ones support the police. But that calm was relative - on the second day of the store’s four-day run, police clashed with pro-democracy protesters less than a mile away. The Pepe pop-up followed the installation of a new police chief and a peaceful six-month anniversary march of an estimated 800,000 Hong Kongers in early December. As protesters challenge Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems," this is what happens when there’s one frog meme, two meanings. Pepe’s dual life as a symbol of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and a quirky-but-apolitical meme on the mainland encapsulates the cultural tension between mainland China and Hong Kong. But the struggle over Pepe in Hong Kong reveals a city on edge, in which even a cartoon frog is cause for suspicion. Instead, it appears to have been a politically insensitive stunt from a Hong Kong–based PR firm.Īs the protest movement enters its seventh month, the city’s activists have resisted fracturing apart. It turns out the Pepe pop-up wasn’t actually any of those things. Was this Pepe store a nefarious tactic by the Chinese government to undermine the protests? A mainland company trying to profit off their newfound symbol of resistance? A cash grab from Furie? The frog is so important as a revolutionary icon that some businesses have put up pictures of him in their windows to signal their support of the protests - and some businesses that haven’t have been vandalized. Pepe is a regular fixture at the #antiELAB pro-democracy protests and in graffiti around the city, which exists as a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China with its own governing and economic systems. Online, however, rumors swirled - accusing the shop of being connected to a shady mainland Chinese Amazon storefront, diluting the revolutionary iconography of Pepe with tacky garbage.īut in the United States, the struggle over the meaning of the cartoon character Pepe, first created in 2005 by cartoonist Matt Furie, is split between white nationalists and meme enthusiasts, while in China, his double life is between an apolitical mainland Chinese emoticon and a pro-democracy mascot in Hong Kong.Īfter the frog went viral last summer as a symbol of the city’s protest movement, bootleg Pepes, knockoff products featuring the cartoon frog, have been a common sight in Hong Kong’s open-air markets. You could buy Pepe T-shirts, socks, phone cases, and stickers. Last month, crowds snaked their way down a tiny side street of Hong Kong’s hip Sheung Wan neighborhood as people lined up to get inside a small bike store hosting a Pepe the Frog pop-up shop.
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