maxiewawa

In the past few days, Briton Akmal Shaikh was executed in China for smuggling drugs into the country. Many outside China were disappointed in this, not only because some people are fundamentally against the death penalty, but they thought that not enough attention was paid to Shaikh’s mental health. Apparently he had bipolar disorder.

I’m translating something from a Chinese forum about Chinese netizens’ reactions to the case. One thing that no one in the western media has brought up is the role of history in Chinese attitudes to this case. In case you didn’t know, there were a whole series of wars in China between Britain and the Chinese, and drugs were significant in them. I won’t go into it since I don’t know much more than the Wikipedia article, but just wanted to point out that it’s a sensitive topic for China, and the fact that Shaikh was British probably made it even more sensitive. Prime Minister Brown, in all of his whinging about it, mustn’t have realised.

Anyway, someone felt sufficiently moved about the whole thing to write this as a reply to the article I’m translating.

英国首相布朗，你以为中国还是 鸦片战争时候吗？你是进化不完全的生命体，基因突变的外星人，幼稚园程度的高中生，先天蒙古症的青蛙头，圣母峰雪人的弃婴，化粪池堵塞的凶手，非洲人搞上 黑*的后裔，阴阳失调的黑猩猩，被诺亚方舟压过的河马，新火山喷发口，超大无耻传声扩音喇叭，爱斯基摩人的耻辱，和蟑螂共存活的超个体，生命力腐烂的半植 物，会发出臭味的垃圾人，“唾弃“名词的源头.

Luckily for those of you who can’t read Chinese, I’ve just now finished my English translation:

Prime Minister Brown, do you think that China is stuck in the times of the opium wars? You are an example of an undeveloped life form, an alien that has undergrown genetic mutation, a high school student with the development of a kindergartener, a mongoloid inborn frog head, an abandoned infant at the top of Everest, the turd blocking the toilet, a dark descendent of Africa, hermaphrodite gorilla, a hippo squashed by Noah’s ark, the erupting mouth of a new volcano, the shameless sound of a barking horn, an Eskimo’s disgrace, a superman living with cockroaches, a rotting vegetable, a person made of rubbish who smells, the etymological source of the word “spurned”.

I’ve done my best to translate the original, but some of them are just really confusing in Chinese and are just as confusing in English.