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Activists Adopt Pepe Memes in Hong Kong Protests

knowyourmeme.com/editorials/in-the-media/activists-adopt-pepe-memes-in-hong-kong-protests

August 16, 2019

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The controversial meme character Pepe the Frog has been adopted by demonstrators in Hong Kong opposing legislation that would allow extradition from the special administrative region to mainland China.

Over the weekend, a young woman was injured after being struck in her right eye during an anti-extradition bill demonstration. Video of the woman was widely circulated online, leading protesters to cover their right eyes with bandages as a sign of solidarity, according to the Straits Times.

Disturbing image. A woman got hit in her eye by projectile fired from the #TsimShaTsui police station. Reports said it was a bean bag round that went through her goggles. Online sources said her eyeball has burst & she might be permanently blind in one eye. #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/fuY2Ebvo53

— Frances Sit (@frances_sit) August 11, 2019

On Tuesday, a photograph of the woman holding a sign featuring a depiction of Pepe along with the words "Police Shot My Eye" reached the front page of Reddit, where many noted the illustration's similarity to the popular PepeHands Twitch emote.

Numerous photographs of other Hong Kong protest signs, in which Pepe is often shown wearing a yellow hard hat, surfaced online as well, leading some to claim that the character has become a "resistance symbol" among anti-extradition bill activists.

Protesters are using pepe as a resistance symbol in HK. pic.twitter.com/Sr651PPBuH

— Lulu🌈🍔⚡💪 (@luulubuu) August 14, 2019

During the 2016 United States presidential election, Pepe became widely associated with the alt-right following the circulation of racist depictions of the character, leading the official Hillary Clinton presidential campaign blog to publicly condemn the meme as a "symbol associated with white supremacy."

In a post submitted to /r/HongKong earlier this month, Redditor Chocobean claimed that Pepe was "not at all associated" with Donald Trump or white supremacy in Hong Kong, while calling for viewers to "take back" the character from those who would use it for distasteful purposes.

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Pepe the Frog Means Something Different in Hong Kong—Right?

wired.com/story/pepe-the-frog-meme-hong-kong

Emma Grey EllisAugust 23, 2019

If you’re a Very Online American but not alt-right, finding a Pepe the Frog meme in a comment section feels like finding a KKK hood in the back of someone’s closet. It’s objectively goofy-looking and the people associated with it have been banished by polite society, but the symbol is so saturated with hate and rage and fear that just the sight of it is a shock. Standards change, however, as you move about the globe. In Spain, pointed white hoods are an uncontroversial feature of Easter celebrations. In Hong Kong, Pepe the Frog is now a symbol of progressive resistance against an authoritarian state.

Pepe is popping up all over Hong Kong—in graffiti, on anonymous forums, in sticker packs for WhatsApp and Telegram. If you’re familiar with white supremacist Pepe memes, it’s clear that Hong Kong’s Pepe is a different animal: He wears the yellow construction helmets that have become a symbol of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, and he is often depicted as an emergency responder, or even more surprisingly, as a journalist. (Would lamestream media-hating alt-righters share a “Press Pepe” holding an iPhone? Hell no.) It would seem that exactly none of the meme’s racial animus made it to Hong Kong with the cartoon frog, and according to reporting from The New York Times, protesters are baffled by the very idea of Pepe as a racist symbol. In Hong Kong, the frog is about as sinister as Hello Kitty.

This is not the first time the Pepe meme has undergone a radical change in meaning. Matt Furie, the cartoonist behind Pepe, didn’t set out to craft a reaction image for racists. He was just drawing a high frog dude with an expressive, often petulant face. In 2014, before Pepe became a hate symbol, it was a generic and wholesome enough meme that bubblegum pop star Katy Perry shared it as a way to express her jet lag. For a Hong Kong-based Mandarin or Cantonese speaker today, it's still just that sad/smug/funny/angry/resigned frog.

Internet culture is global now, and images in particular have become nearly borderless. The more visual a meme is, the more likely it is to ping its way around the world, acquiring regional context and meaning. The most successful global memes tend to strike at human fundamentals. The South Korean mukbang (basically, a silent livestream of somebody feasting) went viral worldwide because everyone eats. China’s “Karma’s a bitch” meme—in which teens transform from shabby to glam in seconds, to the tune of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci”—ended up on The Tonight Show because everyone loves a glow up. America exports many a visual meme: This May, Chinese users were using Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet to talk about President Trump’s effect on their economy.

If Thanos is destruction in our emerging global symbology, Pepe the Frog’s visual meaning is something like sad resistance. It’s what he meant to white supremacists at first too

—regardless of the validity of their feelings of oppression. Despite sharply different cultural understandings, there’s a surprising conservation of emotional context in this global game of telephone. Pepe the Frog is more or less a young netizen's worldwide mood.