Throwback Thursday: When Boris Johnson Flubbed Weibo
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Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is often compared to that other blond, crazy-haired world leader with a jarringly improvisational speaking style, but the similarities between the two are limited. For example, Donald Trump had already "mastered" social media by 2012, while Johnson’s bumbling entrance to Weibo showed that he was a relative late-comer when it came to cutting his microblogging chops.
As our blog reported eight years ago this month, Johnson, then mayor of London, logged onto Weibo with the account @BorisJohnson in what British commenters called a move to “woo Chinese voters in London.” They were likely correct, given that Ken Livingstone, the opposing mayoral candidate, registered an account ten days later.Johnson flies over Beijing in a helicopter. (It's not the wind, his hair just looks like that.)
But like his visit to Beijing during the Olympics, Johnson’s initial posts were not particularly well-received by netizens. In his 2008 visit, the mayor had invited criticism from Chinese bloggers due to his now world-famous casual attitude. The problem on Weibo, at least at first, was that he was posting in English.
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"I can’t understand this sentence," wrote one commenter in an English response. Another highly upvoted comment read in Chinese, "Old man~ Can you speak a little Chinese? We are Chinese people, we are on Chinese soil."
But using English wasn’t the only misstep. Johnson also failed to use Weibo’s double-ended hashtag (writing the unclickable #BackBoris instead of #BackBoris#), and more egregiously, somehow managed to copy-paste irrelevant replies from his Twitter account to Weibo, effectively littering his own page with nonsense.Boris "Ringo" Johnson shared this picture on his Weibo account in 2013
Soon afterward, Johnson’s team finally got a grasp on Weibo, and after he won re-election, the account even started translating his posts into Chinese in preparation for his next visit to Beijing. He answered netizen’s questions in Chinese, like what his favorite British food was (lamb curry), who his favorite James Bond actor was (Christopher Lee, because he had met him recently), and how to deal with traffic congestion (build more railways).
But the mayor apparently lost interest in Weibo following his 2013 visit to China. After uploading a few pictures from the trip, the account never posted again. Johnson apparently forgot the password as well, because when he reappeared on the site this year to share a video of himself talking about how he somehow contracted COVID-19 (from which he has since recovered from), it was via a new account, once again in English, and embarrassingly handled @realBorisJohnson.READ: Throwback Thursday: The Budding Days of Beijing's Urban Farming Movement
Images: China.com.cn, Weibo
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