Identify
Weird nazi-like flag in a Chinese video background
Saw at a background of a video on BiliBili of a guy in fursuit talking about his birthday. Recreated it in Krita, it looks like a nazi-like red with white circle but instead of swastika its “问”.
My only theory right now is that this character 问 (question) is pronounced "wen", and 卐 (swastika) is pronounced "wan". So this might be a subtle phonetic dog whistle cuz they sound alike?
Tell that to half the people on this sub, every time someone posts some blatant nazi alluding shit there're lots of comments like "maybe he just likes falcons" and "this german colonized rhodesia is just for funsies" type people
How about the tones? This is Chinese we are talking about after all. If the tones are different I think Chinese speakers would not view them as too similar.
Character 问 alone is a verb and would never be used as a noun. If the flag is designed to mean “the Jewish question”, then 犹 (Jew) would be a much better choice, even though “the Jewish question” is not even a well-known term in China.
My guess is that this flag is used as a decoration for Q&A videos.
Wordplay with characters which have the same sound but different tone is actually very common in Mandarin. One of the first Chinese poems I learned in school is an example of that.
yes but without the tone, wan and wen still have different sounds. The vowel is different. Wonder if different vowel + different tone would still be percieved as similar.
Wèn and wàn are definitely similar enough to be interchangeable in wordplay, but how easily people "get it" depends on the whole context and who is reading it.
I don't know how many Chinese speakers immediately think of "wàn" when they see a swastika, or if it's just perceived as a familiar symbol with no common, standard name.
If you wanted to do wordplay, the character 万 is right there, and it has a more positive meaning and a very conveniently swastikafiable shape. Choosing 问 strikes me as satirical, like "question" as opposed to "obey". But whatever the intended meaning of this flag is, it doesn't come across very effectively.
It could be, but not as a dog whistle. To my understanding (might be wrong) Asians don't see Hitler as the 'evil guy' but instead see people like Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Un as the bad guys of their concern. I've even heard that the NSDAP aesthetic is even seen as the aesthetic of punk culture over there.
I've seen a very similar meme one but with 乐: origin at https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mL411S7FT starting 00:30, I think they used it to avoid potential censorship from the platform. It can totally be a unserious meme flag, I don't remember any serious alt-right Chinese people use anything like this.
There are multiple versions of this, mostly for fun or implications of it.
If it's 乐, the general idea is 乐子人, or basically "trolls" that do anything for a laugh, often in very questional and ambiguous moral standards and propagation of misinformations, often resulting in online abuse as consequences of their actions. Thus, the adaptation is, in a way, a tongue in cheek joke and condemnation for their ego-centric and socially apathetic attitude.
If it's 观, it refers to a private Chinese news outlet 观察者网. Their news are often seen as industrialist, nationalist, and occasionally populist, henceforth the adaptation of it onto the nazi-flag by people opposing their news agenda.
问 On the other hand, it is not clear given a lack of context and how I don't really recognise any current trend regarding this word and how it might be related. But the general idea still falls in satirical adaptation of a character that describes a group and parodying of that concept with the adapted nazi-flag.
This character in this flag 问 (pronounced Wen) in this flag means “to ask” or “question”.
In china as part of its internet subculture there are people called “question nazis” referred to as “ 问卐” people call them this to troll them due to them getting into passionate debates online. This is an especially popular phrase on Zhihu which is like a Chinese version of Quora, Yahoo answers or 4chan. Where people post questions or topics of discussion and a thread is started.
Essentially this flag is a troll flag, kind of like how some westerners have Pepe flags or Kekistan flags from 4Chan.
There are many variations of the flag you have posted, with different characters.
Tl;dr: it’s a troll flag from a Chinese message board much like us westerners have pepe or kekistan flags. It comes from an online insult in Chinese internet subculture.
I’m not 100% sure. I got this information from a friend of mine who lived in China for 8 or so years but has recently moved to Japan. I sent him a screen of this and he told me has seen this before and I pretty much wrote down what he told me about it.
The source is a bit ‘trust me bro’ but he seemed pretty confident with what he said and the fact he could tell me the message board he saw it on and everything in my eyes gave it a bit more credibility.
They have a much different history with Nazi Germany then we (westerners/Europeans) do. It's similar to the perception of Imperial Japan in Europe or America, if you saw a Rising Flag sun on the street you (statistically speaking) wouldn't really care or balk at it.
Chiang Kai Shek flirted with the idea of creating the “Blue Shirt Society”, a civic/paramilitary group based on Mussolini’s fascist black shirts.
However Chiang’s China was too corrupt and incapable for the blue shirts to be anything substantial, and with the civil war and Japanese invasion, the idea went away
...Because a cornerstone of Nazi ideology is the idea of racial hierarchies with Germans/Germanics at the top and every other race below them to a greater or lesser degree?
Because he famously disliked Asians, so much that he disliked most slavs because he considered their blood stained by the asiatic hordes (he called russians asiatic hordes, as in Mongolians)
Well, it’s essentially an ethno-state that’s gone out of its way to forcibly assimilate non-ethnic Han Chinese (Uyghurs, Tibetans, and so on) as well as increasingly aggressive militarism, state-directed capitalism, and a pervasive xenophobia (directed at the Japanese, and westerners particularly) also its attempts to seize land based on vague historical claims (in the South China Sea, but also in the Himalayas, and even Vietnam) and the literal concentration camps
non-ethnic Han Chinese (Uyghurs, Tibetans, and so on)
Forced assimilation is when minorities have 99% fluency in their native language and can be seen everywhere within their communities. Forced assimilation is when every sign in Xinjiang is in Uyghur, when the currency is in Uyghur, when you can go to court and testify in Uyghur.
There are issues in China, coming from a linguists point of view the way they disregard non-Mandarin Sinitic languages for instance (but even there is following the same policy as the Japanese, the French and the Italians of flattening down distinct, but related languages into "dialects" to be assimilated but you never hear about Japanese suppression of the Ryukyuans or Italian suppression of the Neapolitans or Ligurians), but when it comes to non-Sinitic minority languages they are the gold standard. Like I wish those of us who work with (my specialization) Hawaiian got as many resources as they recently poured into efforts to revitalize Manchu.
ETA: Its also hilarious that folks pushing this shit are the same people saying there's no genocide in Palestine. Makes you really think.
Love a genocide where there’s no anti-genocided group propaganda and the central gov’t takes pains to promote their culture. Also funny how all the Uyghur stuff falls apart with closer scrutiny, like how folks were spreading that pic of supposed victims that contained kpop idols.
I dont really think its a genocide - I was just being glib about people who, as you say, wont say it for both sides.
Apparently, my own people are being genocided as well, according to the US government... so I dont really give much weight to any judgements on human rights abuses coming from the US government anyway.
I deal with so many otherwise well meaning people who parrot the propaganda that it’s hard to tell. And again, I’m speaking on my perspective as someone who’s studied and dealt with this field irt indigenous peoples in the US.
Not to mention that literally no Muslim country has come out like they did for Palestine and the only ones pretending to care about this “genocide” are the countries that spent the last 20 years bombing Muslim countries.
Are there oppressive practices in China. Abso-fucking-lutely. Do they commit human rights violations against people and groups. 100%.
It may not be genocide, but re-education camps using torture is still more than enough for alarm bells.
And the muslim country thing doesn't track - Chechnya saw most Middle Eastern nations maintain good ties with Russia; but then they did get involved with Bosnia. In the cases of Dagestan and Chechnya, its highly improbable that they were gonna upset a superpower by openly accusing them of targeting Muslims and challenging them in public. The China situation is the same. Palestine is a trifecta of being Muslim, ethnically tied to the region and the surrounding nations, and is located in their backyard with a very direct impact upon them (refugees, sovereignty, etc.). They aren't comparable situations when it comes to middle-eastern outrage concerning the treatment of muslims in China.
Either way, i dont see it as a genocide, but still as a highly problematic situation.
I was making a joke but, funnily enough, every communist country to exist did better than the US in numerous ways, and fell due to US efforts in many ways as well. For an example of a communist country doing better than the US currently, look at China
So you know absolutely nothing about it because China isn’t even communist anymore. It’s closer to national socialism, than the socialism you think you support. And it’s NOT doing better than the US. And I hate to break it to you, neither Cuba, nor Laos, nor Vietnam are doing any better. Where do these leftwaffe types keep coming from?
yeah, its actually common, they use nazi sykmkbols because they look tough and there isnt alot of education on them, happens in both taiwan and mainland china, chinese websites like their counterparts to ali express and temu that i cannot spell sell them, flags, temorary tattos, books you name it, its mainly because nazism gets swept under the rug and is only briefly taught and they normal on educate on the bad crimes imperial japan did
No, currently China is a genocidal expansionist Totslitarian dictatorship. Currently they are the closest thing Asia have to the Nazis since the end of the Japanese Empire.
China is expansionist, they are openly claiming territorial watters of surrounding nations, even when international organisms have explicitelly told them that those watters do not belong to them. The easiest example are the Chinese ships violating Philipinese watters, and ramming Philipinese patrol ships even after international organisms confirmed that those watters belonged to the Philipines.
There is also the situation with Taiwan were China refuses to recognize them as independent and any attempt at such policies must be done carefully because China always retaliate.
That's not to mention their openly agresive behaviour toward orher nations that refuse to support them in their Taiwaneses claims.
I just said it’s used to bypass online censorship regarding nazi symbols. Trying to avoid a particular symbol can only deepen people's fear or make them forget history.
Anti-fascist flag. Ironic it looks like a Nazi one. It is used against the Taiwanese government. The symbol means “question!” And is to illicit a “question everything the fascists (Taiwan) tells you.
I'm going to take a HUGE shot in the dark, this MIGHT be the Chinese version of the grammar Nazi flag or something along those lines, I'll ask some mainlanders if they know
Probably just a very explicit way to show the Nazi flag without getting taken down, kinda like how Western creators replace the swastika with the YouTube logo
This is so random so I got really invested. I found the video on Bilibili and DM the guy himself. He made it while he was learning Photoshop. The “问” at the centre （meaning Ask/Question) is part of his name. And that's it.
But it's indeed based on the Nazi flag tho, just not that deep.
I thought of it while look around online for something similar, but it does look kind of like some of the Samurai crests banners. Not sure if that is what it could be or something similar. Just an list of examples I found online.
Yes, but the flag could be something from a work of fiction that the person enjoys. I'm not even sure if my guess is close, but it was what I thought of. I don't know enough about Chinese history to know if they may have something similar, but they very well could.
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u/CelestialCaesar Apr 03 '26
Genuinely have never seen this one before.