Shanghaiist has a post featuring a picture of "Cha-Cha", China’s latest effort to put a happy face on political repression. [The Shanghaiist website no longer seems to be working. Click the link for the archived page on the Wayback Machine.]
(Y’know, give her a baton and a pair of handcuffs, and Cha-Cha’d kinda have a little S&M thing goin’ on there. Just saying, is all.)
Shanghaiist doesn’t show us Jing-Jing, Cha-Cha’s male partner, but does manage to ask us:
"what’cha gonna do, what’cha gonna do when they come for you?"
Hat tip to AsiaPundit for pointing this one out. [This page on the Asia Pundit website no longer exists. Page was never crawled by the Wayback Machine.] And in case you missed it, check out my post on China’s Olympic Mascots. It’s got links to a few pretty good satirical cartoons.
UPDATE (Feb 19/06): The Financial Times had a good piece on the topic. One of the veterans of the Chinese Cybercop Corps said that:
Only one in 50 internet users wants to break the law, and they are the only ones to complain about a lack of liberty…the [Chinese] web is “completely free” for those who stay within the “legal framework”.
That’s absolutely true. The Chinese web is completely free – so long as you don’t actually try to MENTION freedom.
Or liberty…or democracy…or…
One thing I didn’t know, though. If you click on the Jing-Jing or Cha-Cha icons, your computer’ll play the smash hit, "Song of the People’s Police."
Oh, oh, I think I know that one! It sounds a little bit like that Horst Wessel tune, doesn’t it?
UPDATE (Feb 25/06): The China Digital Times has pictures of both Jing Jing & Cha Cha. [This page on the The China Digital Times website no longer exists. Click the link for the archived page on the Wayback Machine.] Meanwhile, AsiaPundit has the story of a Chinese web surfer who nearly sh*t his pants when the Digital Brownshirts came a-callin’. [This page on the AsiaPundit website no longer exists. Click the link for the archived page on the Wayback Machine.]