[In November, photos by a Chinese journalist of a golden pheasant with a blond pompadour and a red body circulated widely on social media and were published online by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper. The bird, which lives in a safari park in the eastern city of Hangzhou, became a star attraction there and a muse for Hsiaohan Chen, a political cartoonist in Taipei.]
By
Mike Ives
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A giant rooster sculpture
resembling President-elect Donald J. Trump outside a shopping mall in Taiyuan, China.
The statue was built to celebrate the coming Year of the Rooster in the Chinese lunar
calendar.
Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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HONG KONG — President-elect Donald J. Trump’s
golden quiff, bushy eyebrows and preening gestures were immortalized this week
in China — though perhaps not in a way that he would like.
They appeared on a giant rooster statue, just
above some three-toed feet and a blood-red wattle that hangs below a gilded
nose and mouth.
The statue, which was installed outside a
shopping mall in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, was built to celebrate
the coming Year of the Rooster in the Chinese lunar calendar and comes less
than a month before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. It is 23 feet tall.
Relations between Washington and Beijing have
been especially jittery in recent weeks. The tension is due in large part to
Mr. Trump, who belittled China during his presidential campaign and caused a
diplomatic stir this month by making clear that he views the central basis for
diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing — known as the One China
policy — as up for negotiation.
But reaction to the rooster on Chinese social
media was light and full of positive emoji.
Global Times, a state-run tabloid, said on
Tuesday that onlookers in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, had praised
the statue as a “perfect blend of Chinese and Western cultures.”
“It’s not bad looking,” Zhang Guoqiang, an
employee at the Yihui Japanese Restaurant at the North America N1 Art Shopping
Center, where the statue is, said by telephone on Thursday.
Inflatable “Trump chicken” replicas were on
sale at Taobao, an online shopping bazaar, with a 32-foot version advertised
for $1,725.
Casey Latiolais, an illustrator and animator
in Seattle, said in a telephone interview that he completed the design in early
November for Beijing Reliance Commercial Land, a real estate company that had
contacted him through Behance, a website where artists post their portfolios.
Mr. Latiolais said the company had asked only for a statue to commemorate the
Year of the Rooster and did not mention Mr. Trump.
Mr. Latiolais, 30, declined to comment on why
he had given the rooster Trump-like features. But he said he had been surprised
by the size of the final product, which is made of fiberglass.
“This was way more yuge than I expected,” he
wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Latiolais said that he was also surprised
when the statue was “sort of bipartisanly looked at as funny” by his friends
and family — including his parents, who voted for Mr. Trump.
It was not the first time since the American
presidential election that people in China had likened Mr. Trump to a bird with
notable hair.
In November, photos by a Chinese journalist
of a golden pheasant with a blond pompadour and a red body circulated widely on
social media and were published online by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s
main newspaper. The bird, which lives in a safari park in the eastern city of
Hangzhou, became a star attraction there and a muse for Hsiaohan Chen, a
political cartoonist in Taipei.
Mr. Trump has a penchant for lashing out at
his critics, however minor, on Twitter. But as of Thursday afternoon, he had
not commented on either bird.
