In other news, a sad-looking toy from China with a frown has captured what’s left of the global zeitgeist. An aggressively cute, plush fire-red horse with an upside down smile has become a viral bestseller ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations this month for the year of the horse in China.
If you have yet to kick into gear with your New Year’s resolutions — as is the inevitable case for much of the population on January 1 — fear not, mid February gives you an opportunity to ditch those good intentions once more. I don’t know how this astrological phenomenon is landing for you, but I feel like the horse has already bolted and is presently charging across a field with a manic glare in its bloodshot eye ... and a not-insubstantial kick. I’m holding onto the reins for dear life, gamely trying to sit in the saddle but really just calculating the costs of bailing before the ‘crying horse‘ reaches the fence.
A mistake on the factory production line which, unsurprisingly, no one is prepared to own, has turned a piece of speculative tat destined to hit the ever-growing piles of trash in 2027 into the passive aggressive symbol of the moment. “Turn that smile upside down” is probably not what the marketing gurus would call a genius tagline — but boy, does it hit the mark.
In China, of course, no one is unhappy, ever. They can’t afford to be. The police state surveillance system makes sure you turn that frown into a billion-yuan smile sooner rather than later. Because, well ... Uyghur or Tibet, never mind high-ranking military officers —need I say more? When the aforementioned marketing gurus talk about the gamification of society and how to exploit our innate desire to win points in games to marshal our cash into pockets deeper than our own — I’m not sure they were thinking about the inherent opportunities for authoritarian regimes.
But gaming is the system in China. Lose points on your state-sanctioned player’s ID and you could spend the rest of your days on a chicken farm in Dehui locked in with the poultry on an infernal production line, until the whole place burns down with you in it. And that’s game over.
How do you lose the points? Well, spit on the pavement and you’ll soon find out. It’s really great in the People’s Republic, which is why the sad ‘crying horse’ sold out and the owner of the Happy Sister factory, Zhang Huoqing, told Reuters: “People joked that the crying horse is how you look at work, while the smiling one is how you look after work” — and promptly laid on more production lines to keep up with demand. When your average work day as a white collar worker in China is 9am to 9pm, I don’t know if you really have a moment to use the 43 muscles involved in the uptick of your physiognomy.
Still, the proliferation of all this facial recognition technology is working out well for people at high risk of being removed from their long-standing positions of power by unruly citizens who’ve taken against them — daring to protest once again in the streets whilst threatening their God-given hegemony.
Take the mullahs in Iran. They now have a brilliant system of facial recognition cameras and clever AI plus some higher grade training for their own enforcers at at China’s People’s Public Security University. Add that to a 25-year deal between Iran and China to build up the surveillance state — and total internet blackout — and you’re left questioning: is it any wonder that we haven’t heard much from those parts since January, other than some leaked pictures of numerous body bags containing the troublesome civilians that nobody seems to much care about.
The thing that gives me peace of mind about our warm relations with these okes is that we’re such a bunch of reprobates in SA that they’d find it hard to train us up on surveillance of any kind - let alone the kind of stuff they’re imbibing in Beijing. Nobody wants anybody looking too closely at our business — despite our completely insane reliance on our phones and, consequently, our wholesale subscription of our identities to the highest dollar billionaire.
Cognitive dissonance aside, I’m definitely ordering a grumpy ‘crying horse’ from Temu as soon as I’ve finished writing this column. It’s the perfect mascot to carry me through this clearly insane year we’re obliviously riding into our collective future.
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
