SF Mayoral Candidate Makes Awkward Mao Reference

Despite bristling against unfair `red-baiting` of Ed Lee, the incumbent`s mayoral campaign has made central to its Chinese-language poster effort an only slightly-altered quote from Mao Zedong, the reddest communist of them all.
SF Mayoral Candidate Makes Awkward Mao Reference
Matthew Robertson
9/22/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img class="size-medium wp-image-1797358" title="San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attends Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 13, in San Francisco, California. (Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch)" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/124856907.jpg" alt="San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attends Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 13, in San Francisco, California. (Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch)" width="320"/></a>
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attends Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 13, in San Francisco, California. (Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

<a><img class="size-medium wp-image-1797360" title="On a poster in San Francisco's Chinatown, the face of Rose Pak has been pasted on top of the Chinese word for 'you', on Ed Lee's campaign poster. That makes the poster say 'With him handling things, Rose Pak can take it easy.'  (Matthew Robertson/The Epoch Times)" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/paklee.jpg" alt="On a poster in San Francisco's Chinatown, the face of Rose Pak has been pasted on top of the Chinese word for 'you', on Ed Lee's campaign poster. That makes the poster say 'With him handling things, Rose Pak can take it easy.'  (Matthew Robertson/The Epoch Times)" width="320"/></a>
On a poster in San Francisco's Chinatown, the face of Rose Pak has been pasted on top of the Chinese word for 'you', on Ed Lee's campaign poster. That makes the poster say 'With him handling things, Rose Pak can take it easy.'  (Matthew Robertson/The Epoch Times)

The slogan also inadvertently became an occasion for drawing attention to Ed Lee’s behind-the-scenes backer, Rose Pak.

On a couple of campaign posters adjacent to Portsmouth Square in the heart of Chinatown, an enterprising activist had made color print-outs of Rose Pak and stuck them on two posters.

In one, a picture of Pak and Lee was pasted below the words “A sagacious election choice” in Chinese.

On the other, Pak’s grinning mug is pasted atop the Chinese character for “you” in the second part of the campaign phrase, making it say: “With him in charge, Rose Pak can take it easy.”

A few days later someone had ripped off the Pak pictures; faint shreds of torn white paper were the only vestiges of that short-lived prank.

 

Matthew Robertson is the former China news editor for The Epoch Times. He was previously a reporter for the newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 2013 he was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for coverage of the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.
Related Topics