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Searching for 'Fatty Kim the Third' banned on Chinese social media

Fatty who? That's North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un to the rest of us

If you're in China today and feel like doing something futile, try searching for “Fatty Kim the Third” or the Chinese equivalent "Jin San Pang" - Google translate says that's "金圣庞" - on social media.

The delightful epithet is a colloquial term for the supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Un.

Kim's unpopular in China because North Korea is seen by many Chinese citizens as a destabilising influence. He's therefore mocked for various reasons, including having put on weight, earning the nickname “Half-moon Kim” among others.

China's official position is that North Korea is a valued ally. Indeed, the Middle Kingdom sends food and energy-a-plenty across its common border with the hermit kingdom. So terms like 'Fatty Kim” have been deemed disrespectful and banished from Chinese social media oufits like Weibo, the local Twitter clone. State-controlled media have also been pointing out that online discourse should be respectful to China's neighbours whenever possible.

And perhaps also respectful to the plight of the North Korean people, who the United Nations high commissioner for human rights found in 2014 are subject to human rights violations including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” ®

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