With 22 million signatures and counting, according to the IHT, the petition circulating online to block Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council has been linked from the major online portals Sina, Sohu, and Tom, generating interest both on and offline.
As with any petition, the signers are sometimes less than honest, submitting phony names or trying to inflate the results. The petition hosted by the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War contains the note “With the agreement of your family, friends, or colleagues, you may sign the petition for them. There is no restriction on the number of signatures from a single IP.” While this may be necessary to allow people to sign from web cafes, it also acts as an invitation to jokesters.
Some of the fake names are clever. Some are vulgar. Some are meaningless. Here are a few collected from the various petition sites (unfortunately, given the rate at which new signatures are submitted, a permanent link to the page containing these signatures is not available).
俺反对 I object
强烈反对 Strongly object
xx ri本 (expletive) Japan
侵日华军 Chinese army invades Japan
八路军 Eighth Route Army
解放军 People’s Liberation Army
中华 China
中华儿女 Sons and daughters of China
美国 America
FK小泉 (expletive) Koizumi
狗小犬死倭寇 The dog Koizumi, Jap pirate (the characters for Koizumi in Chinese are a near-homophone for dog)
小犬狗心狗肺 Dog-Koizumi has a dog heart and dog lungs
中国人民很行 People’s Bank of China
郑伊健 Zheng Yijian – pop star Ekin Cheng (with Hong Kong listed as a location)
….and an assortment of random letters
The APTSJW site lists IP addresses too, so one can follow, say, a poster from Jilin as he methodically signs “The Communist Party”, “workers”, “Farmers”, “mortals”, “immortals”, “whites”, “blacks”, “high school students”, “elementary students”, “Changchun residents”, “Brazilians”, “Germans”, “Jews”, “Arabs”, “Russians”, “Africans”, “Europeans”, “Asians”, “non-humans”, and “Australians”.
Note: These are by no means representative of the majority of the signatures.
LINKS:
Danwei’s previous story on the petition is here, and has links to more petition sites. The IHT article is here.