The Trolls Who Divided China | Chapter 1 | "The Trolls Divided China"

In the year 2036, when the electric firmament of mankind had swollen into a hideous and ever-watchful nervous system stretched across the continents, there arose from the phosphorescent abysses of the internet a species of malice so pervasive and infernal that no healthy mind could wholly apprehend its dimensions without some gradual loosening of sanity itself. The thing spread not as plague alone, but as philosophy — a bleak and sneering contagion born from anonymous multitudes whose faces no man truly knew.

The trolls.

I employ that vulgar modernism only because no older tongue contains a term fit for so loathsome a phenomenon.

They came chiefly from regions of Spain and the greater territories of Europe and the United States, though in truth they soon ceased to possess nationality in any meaningful sense. Their allegiance belonged instead to the monstrous current of mockery itself — an amorphous psychic entity dwelling within the humming catacombs of the world-machine.

In those latter years, one could scarcely distinguish man from algorithm.

The old debates concerning Chinese physiognomy — eyes, cheekbones, skin, the inherited architecture of faces — were exhumed from the digital sepulchers of prior decades and vivified anew like cadavers stirred by galvanic profanities. Ancient advertisements and commentaries circulated endlessly through the luminous void, each repetition acquiring greater venom than the last.

Among these relics was the image of Ruòlán.

She was possessed of the long phoenix eyes common in certain northern provinces of China — eyes celebrated in elder paintings and antique poems; eyes once likened to orchid petals drifting upon snow-fed streams beneath forgotten dynasties. Yet by 2036 those same eyes had become, through some monstrous inversion of cultural memory, objects of universal fixation and hatred.

There survives in my notes a statement issued to her by a modeling concern after several commercial campaigns had collapsed beneath orchestrated outrage:

“Western Chinese people do not like when we have our own race in our media if the woman has slanted eyes, and you have small eyes, meaning people will not only hate your depiction but hate us as well for hiring you.”

One observes in this declaration the unmistakable cadence of civilizations surrendering to psychic decomposition.

The comments multiplied thereafter with fungal rapidity:

“Ugly as fuck to be honest.”

“She is absolutely gorgeous.”

“Stop trying to be white!”

“Her eyes are beautiful.”

“Chinese still believe in Phrenology.”

“Just because my eyes are small, I'm not good enough to be a Chinese person?”

The words became liturgical.

Not discourse, but incantation.

No man any longer remembered who had first spoken them.

Chinese women possessing naturally narrow or slanted eyes found themselves assailed from every direction at once. In the cities of China, schoolgirls struck one another in lavatories whilst livestream audiences exulted. In the western districts of the United States, expatriate influencers proclaimed such faces “genetic humiliations” and advised women to “breed out the ugly” through European marriage.

Others praised Eurocentric countenances with almost theological fervor.

Surgeons prospered.

Models vanished.

Employers trembled before the mob-consciousness.

Yet the most dreadful aspect of the affair was the impossibility of determining where authentic opinion ended and artificial agitation began. Vast swarms of trolls posed as Chinese nationalists whilst simultaneously masquerading as anti-racist western reformers, each side inflaming the other with fabricated screenshots and counterfeit atrocities. The resulting confusion possessed an almost metaphysical quality, as though truth itself had suffered gangrene.

Tourists arrived to witness the spectacle.

They wandered Chinese districts like anthropologists examining a doomed civilization. Some laughed openly at women with phoenix eyes. Others recorded assaults for amusement. The atmosphere became one of ceaseless psychic abrasion.

Then came the beatings.

I hesitate to recount the particulars surrounding Ruòlán’s assault in Los Angeles, for the surviving footage — though widely circulated before its eventual suppression — retains a quality singularly calculated to disturb even hardened observers. A male white assailant, accompanied by jeering male Chinese companions without such facial features, forced her against a concrete embankment while repeatedly uttering the phrase:

“Slant eyes.”

The recording spread across the globe before dawn.

Afterward, riots erupted in both China and the United States with a ferocity not witnessed since the early network insurrections decades earlier. Entire districts burned beneath advertisement drones and shattered augmented billboards. Women with narrow eyes marched carrying banners painted with archaic Chinese depictions of phoenix-eyed passions while counter-mobs screamed accusations of racial betrayal.

Some were driven from cliffs by roaming extremists.

Others disappeared into camps of ideological “reeducation” erected unofficially by online movements that had ceased to distinguish between meme and doctrine.

At last many Chinese communities abandoned the cosmopolitan centers entirely. In secluded inland territories of China they constructed isolated municipalities inaccessible to most foreigners. Cameras were prohibited there. Networks restricted. Ancient aesthetic traditions revived in deliberate defiance of the outside world.

Ruòlán herself vanished into one such settlement after many months of convalescence.

Only a final photograph endured.

In it she gazed toward the viewer with those ancient orchid-eyes while beneath the image the endless electronic chorus continued its ceaseless disputation:

“She’s gorgeous.”

“She’s ugly.”

“She looks Chinese.”

“She looks racist.”

No conclusion was ever reached.

For by then the trolls no longer sought victory.

Only continuation.

And somewhere beneath the electric oceans of human thought — beneath the screens, the servers, the transcontinental cables trembling in their lightless trenches — there stirred a vast and nameless appetite which had discovered, at last, that mankind could be induced to devour itself merely through the manipulation of mirrors.

To be continued...