Ram Madhav writes: How social media is making us all clowns

Ren Chonghao is a commentator on Chinese geopolitics on social media platforms like Bilibili and Weibo, the Chinese equivalents of YouTube and Twitter. At a recent online conference, Chonghao — known by his pen name Ma Qianzu (foot soldier) or Ma Dugong (foreman) — delivered an interesting speech calling Chinese people clowns. "We are all clowns in different makeup", he observed. He argued that as China has become industrialised, the gap between the elites and the ordinary citizens has narrowed and more and more Chinese are able to look at industrialised societies, domestic as well as foreign, on equal footing,…