China has its own Pepe. It’s a toad, it’s been around for a decade, and the government banned it.
It’s called 膜蛤, “Moha”, literally toad worship. The toad is Jiang Zemin, president of China from 1993 to 2003. Thick square glasses, trousers pulled up to his chest, a wide grin. Look at a photo once and you can’t unsee the frog.
The name started as an insult. Around 2004 his enemies used “toad” to mock him. Then after 2013, when Xi took power, Chinese internet flipped it. Young people began posting Jiang’s old clips with love instead of hate. The man who used to be the joke became the mascot of a generation that missed a leader with personality.
The lore is deep:
“Too young, too simple, sometimes naive.” Jiang said it live on camera to a Hong Kong reporter who pushed him with a question. He also told the press they “only want to make big news”. Every line became a meme template still used today.
“+1s”. Fake reports of his death kept circulating, so fans started typing +1s to “add one second” to his life. Millions of +1s under every post. The elder must live forever.
He sang Elvis in front of foreign leaders, played piano, spoke English, Russian and Romanian, and scolded journalists like a grumpy grandpa. Compared to today’s stiff officials he looked like a rock star.
It spread across Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, fan accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, a whole coded vocabulary, frog emojis everywhere. By 2016 it was so big that around his 90th birthday the censors stepped in. “Moha” and “+1s” got scrubbed, topics locked, accounts shut. Fans switched to code words and kept going.
So you have: a frog, a decade of memes, a cult following of hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users, a legendary quote library, and a government ban that only made it bigger. Pepe never had any of that.
Chinese meta is here. The toad was always the OG.
MOHA - 膜蛤🐸
academic.oup.com/isagsq/arti…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moha_(…