Trend alert: Losers take it all

The phrase "Chinese-style" was popularized by the late leader Deng Xiaoping. Nowadays, it is applied indiscriminately, such as "Chinese-style road crossing", which means you ignore the traffic light and cross the street with a crowd who equally ignore the traffic lights.

"Chinese-style pickup" refers to another crowd - of parents who wait outside schools in their cars, tricycles and bicycles to pick up their kids, hence forming a traffic bottleneck.

We Chinese may have congenital deficiency in the genes of humor, but we are making up for it in abundance with our rise in wealth and stress. At the beginning of the year, a Tang Dynasty poet was featured in a torrent of cartoons, doing things a great poet is rarely portrayed to do.

But Du Fu holding a machine gun or riding a motorcycle or a white horse - but not Gangnam Style, mind you - made him the busiest literary celebrity of the year.

Until Mo Yan surpassed him with his Nobel prize in literature.

Du Fu would not have won the coveted prize if he were living in contemporary China. He had great compassion for the downtrodden, sure, but his style is the opposite of "hallucinatory realism", a description that may fit Li Bai better if you search among his contemporaries.

The author of Red Sorghum is big on sex and violence - in contrast with Du Fu, whose depiction of "silvery light on her arm" made readers blush. Suffice it to say, subtlety is not a virtue in contemporary arts and literature. For one thing, subtlety would have put to sleep those aversive to cultural specifics.

Just like the Nobel jury, Chinese filmgoers are into bright colors and exaggerated characters. The year's biggest movie is set in a country where men who changed sex to women are more alluring than women - or men.

The slapstick comedy Lost in Thailand has convulsed tens of millions in guffaws - to the tune of almost 1 billion yuan in box-office gross. The central character is someone with an IQ lower than Forrest Gump but an uncanny ability to elicit laughs with dim-wittedness.

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