By HUI JIA
Hurt Feelings Correspondent

Stateside Jeremy Lin fans are seen to urgently lack PRC flags

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – As “Linsanity” continues to sweep both sides of the Pacific, an increasingly heated territorial dispute concerning the “rights” to Jeremy Lin has embroiled China, the US and Taiwan.

Lin, point guard for the New York Knicks, became an overnight sensation after scoring 25 points and leading the Knicks to victory against the New Jersey Nets on February 4.

Only hours after Lin’s astonishing performance, a top military panel – known as the People’s Liberation Army General Assembly Guarding against Americanism, or PLA-GAGA – met in a secret bunker outside Beijing.

Six hours later, a confidential memo was issued, asserting Lin was now ancient Chinese property. Within days, a team of experts had compiled the appropriate response: a well-worded editorial, published on Xinhua, offering Lin the Holy Grail of Chinese citizenship.

“We’re not the Americans. We don’t shoot first and ask questions later,” a source revealed. “We ask questions – then start shooting.”

Beijing suspects the star player is being held at an undisclosed Las Vegas location. A source told China Daily Show that Lin is under constant guard by US agents disguised as cheerleaders.

Yesterday morning, a special session of the United Nations Security Council saw Chinese and US delegates lock horns over exploration rights to Lin, with the Chinese representative at one point removing his slip-on loafer and banging it on the table, screaming, “We will bury you!”

Meanwhile, the British – completely in the dark as to who Jeremy Lin was, and why he mattered – are being urgently briefed on the matter.

Today, the unsightly turf war threatens to go public, as each side offer their own version of events.

Taiwan’s government has waded into the debate, claiming the breakout star belongs to Taipei. “He’s the child of Taiwanese immigrants. A pure-blooded son of our glorious island,” diplomat Ch’en Ch’ing-Chiew told reporters. “We have plans to name a food street after him. It’s a done deal.”

The US State Department responded with its own soft power in the form of an attractive Times Square advert, lushly directed by Tom Hanks.

“Why, hush my mouth… ol’ Jeremy’s as American as apple pie,” actress Kathy Bates coos over alternating scenes of a shirtless Lin draped with an American flag and footage of steaming, fresh-baked pies at a small-town Fourth of July parade. “If some no-good railroad-buildin’ varmints want him, why, they are welcome to come on over ‘n’ try!”

With reports that Lin, a devout Christian, has been in talks with religious organizations aimed at securing citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven, the controversy shows no sign of abating.

Analysts suggest the tough US stance could be in response to the Bush administration’s unpopular decision to cede sovereignty over Jackie Chan to China. The deal was struck in 2007, in exchange for mutual assurances that Chan wouldn’t make another Rush Hour.

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By LIN ANE
Health Correspondent

According to Ms Wilson, Jeremy Lin is 'such a nice young man' but never calls

CHARLOTTE (China Daily Show) –A woman in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s disease has surprised doctors with a newfound enthusiasm  for NBA player Jeremy Lin.

Sarah Mae Wilson, 69, had long been considered a lost cause at the Carolinas Medical Center (CMC) in Charlotte, and her family had been making preparations to transfer her into full-time care.

But that was until last Tuesday night. According to eyewitnesses in the CMC community room, the New York Knicks’ Lin had just made a three-point jump shot to give his team a 90-87 win over the Toronto Raptors when a normally sedate Ms Wilson unexpectedly reacted with a series of expletive-filled remarks.

Since then, Ms Wilson’s intimate knowledge of the Asian-American point guard has shattered almost everything the medical community believes it knows about a disease that claims nearly 30 million sufferers worldwide.

“In her condition, there’s no expectation of even basic motor skills, much less the cognitive plasticity to take a word like ‘winning’ and combine it with the surname ‘Lin,’ to form the neologism ‘Linning,’” explained Dr Frank Jeffries, head of the geriatrics ward at CMC.

Indeed, perhaps even more inexplicable than Ms Wilson’s recovery is her enthusiastic embrace of the bizarre phenomenon known as ‘Lin-guistics’ – the relentless quest for puns on Jeremy Lin’s name.

“Super Lintendo –she claims to have coined that one,”said duty nurse Elizabeth Madison, who has been looking after Ms Wilson the last four years. “Her newborn enthusiasm and love of wordplay is both incredibly inspiring and highly irritating.”

Ms Wilson’s improvement has reportedly been as rapid, and just as dramatic, as Lin’s own rise to superstardom. The morning after the Raptors game, she reportedly asked a nurse, to open a “Lindow” and at lunch that day asked fellow diners to pass the “condlinments.”

“That one maybe wasn’t so good,” admitted Nurse Madison. “But to give her  credit, when Sarah saw me struggling with another patient yesterday, she called out, ‘Betty, don’t be so goddam Linient! Just shove those pills down her throat.’ I laughed so hard, I nearly dropped my armlock.”

There’s even evidence to suggest Ms Wilson may not be alone in having suddenly heard of Jeremy Lin. Professor Karl Snieder, a longtime Alzheimer’s researcher, says he learned about the curious case of Sarah Mae Wilson last Thursday. Failing to find any medical literature to explain her revival, he visited other patients he knew to be New York basketball fans.

Sure enough, some had also shown marked improvements.

“Lin’s dunk against the Washington Wizards last week has prompted a remarkable response from several otherwise-senile Knicks fans,” Professor Snieder told China Daily Show.

He cited Anthony Scagnetti, 82, an Alzheimer’s sufferer for 15 years. “The doctors were ready to pull the plug on him – the last rites had been administered by the family priest – when he suddenly asked them to ‘turn up the damned TV.’”

Apparently Lin’s dunk had made Scagnetti remember a fifty-dollar bet he had on the game.

Medical professionals in San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis have also reported  improvements in patients, all with late-stage Alzheimer’s and almost all of them white.

Ms Wilson reacts to news that Jeremy Lin has never heard of her

“It’s as if Jeremy Lin has awaken something primal, something primitive in the human brain,” Professor Snieder said. “What these cases demonstrate is that the medical community, despite billions spent on research, really knows very little about the way the mind works. If a sport can rescue lost souls and allow them to wallow in infantilism, injecting them with purpose, what can’t be accomplished? ‘Linpossible is nothing,’ if you will.”

It remains to be seen whether these improvements have staying power. So far, however, the evidence is mixed. Ms Wilson, for example, remains unable to recall the names or recognize the faces of anyone in her immediate family.

Worse still, a day after the Knicks lost to the New Orleans Hornets, Ms Wilson told fellow residents they “can’t Lin ‘em all.”  Doctors say they didn’t have the heart to tell her the phrase was now utterly devoid of originality, having been used twice that morning in an Associated Press lede.

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By Fu Xi
Futurist Correspondent

Gordo: Chang you can believe in (Image: Forbes)

NEW YORK (China Daily Show) — In his famous polemic The Coming Collapse of China (2001), Gordon Chang predicted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would implode within a decade.

Ten years later, Chang admits he was wrong — but blames the calculation on a faulty Mayan calendar.

“It was made in China. What can you expect?” Chang joked.  Now the Sinologist has gone back to the drawing board and come up with an ironclad set of new predictions.

“Depending on which calendar you use, China will collapse in the late half of the twenty-first, according to the Roman, or sometime next century if you believe the one this monk drew up for my astrology chart,” he told China Daily Show.

In his original book, Chang blamed a number of factors – including a spiritual vacuum, religious persecution, over-leveraged state banks and unbridled corruption – and pointed to a military confrontation over Taiwan as the likely tipping point for the CCP’s demise.

But for his upcoming tome Fear of a Yellow Planet (2011), Chang posited three fresh possible doomsday scenarios.

“While superficially China continues to grow,” writes Chang, “the nation faces many structural and developmental issues, as yet unaddressed, that will likely bring disaster in the next millennium.

“These include a vast and growing wealth gap, an outdated and poorly regulated banking sector, an inability to pay basic medical or education expenses, a dearth of graduate jobs, endemic corruption, constant censorship, an ongoing and unstoppable ‘brain-wealth drain,’ as well as chronic pollution and environmental degradation, all fueled by rampant inflation and a relentless provincial focus on GDP growth.

“Add rampant augmentation technology that will render many citizens unthinking lethal weapons and the ever-present threat of the Predator, and it’s a recipe for fresh government.”

In Chang’s chilling second scenario, China’s ruling party will simply decide it’s no longer worth it and wander off elsewhere.

“You first started to see this kind of political ennui  set in when Hu [Jintao] came to power and called off plans to renovate Zhongnanhai,” he said, referring to the Central Beijing eco-dome where most of China’s politicians are bred.

According to Chang, the CCP compound hasn’t been updated since Deng’s day,  its harem is  down to 400 girls from Qinghai and most buildings are in dire need of a fresh lick of paint.

But construction of a new 30-slide water park and brick-for-brick reproduction of Sanlitun Bar Street was halted in 2004, Chang says. China’s cadres are in real danger of growing bone-weary of constantly having to “save” China and its economy.

“Many of them want out. They look at Africa, at places like Niger and Somalia, and think: ‘That’s what I’m talking about’.

“Nor,” Chang added, “is China positioned to take full advantage of the upcoming Singularity.” This concept, beloved among tech-geeks, promulgates scientific advancement reaching such a point in the near-future that  humanity is essentially rendered godlike.

“The increasing speed of technological advancement will see Man transcend mere physical form to live as immortal beings of a digital universe.  But Anhui’s still going to suck.”

Chang’s final throw of the dice is the most likely scenario, and will probably  happen “before 4012.”

“There will be a ‘solipsism failure’ – call it a glitch in the matrix,” Chang postulated. “Everyone will finally become self-aware.

“If none of that happens, though, something else will,” he added. ” Of that we can be certain.”

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