Jia Junpeng: A Common Boy Known by the Entire China Internet in 6 Hours

A forum thread with no content but only a title gets 120,000 replies in less than 30 hours.

A lightning fast grassroots viral miracle that could only happen in China.

As the indisputable leader of MMORPG, World of Warcraft has been a 4-year online sensation attracting tens of millions of players worldwide, of which a large percent are addicted youth.

Jia Junpeng (or Junpeng Jia), an ordinary Chinese boy who seemed to be an addicted WoW player, whoever he actually is or whether it’s totally made up, has become known by the entire China Internet from an unknown quantity in just 30 hours, all because of a random nonsense thread posted at post.baidu.com.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the thread was started with merely a title: Jia Junpeng, your mum is waiting for you to come home for dinner. And that’s it. The thread content consists of only 2 letters, namely RT which simply means as the title suggests.

It was posted just one day ago on July 16th, but less than 30 hours later, it is now gaining 115,987 responses and still increasing at 3 per second. You can view the original thread at here. And almost every major online media in China is covering this viral miracle in news:

SINA: http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2009-07-17/040715966046s.shtml
SOHU: http://news.sohu.com/20090717/n265274914.shtml
QQ: http://news.qq.com/a/20090717/000232.htm
MOP: http://society.news.mop.com/qw/2009/0717/08312008542.shtml

Hemingway once wrote a thought provoking novel in just 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Few words, but a lot to imagine.

Lots of WoW players in China who cannot afford a home PC pays $0.2 per hour at Internet cafes to play the game. Jia Junpeng apparently appears to be one of them. Not only that but he loses himself in the game for so long that he forgets to go home to join the family dinner. His mum asks his brother or one of his friends where he’d be. His brother or friend unable to find him, figuring he must be playing the game from one of the cafes with access to the Internet and very possibly viewing the WoW message boards right now, decides to post a thread message at one of the most popular WoW forums in China, at Baidu Post.

It may have been like that or must be close but no one can be sure. That’s why it has attracted so much attention and imagination. Everyone seems to be rather interested in it and tries to come up with their own versions. Some even try to ridicule the thread and make it more hilarious by pretending to be Jia Junpeng’s mother, grandpa, uncle or sister-in-law. A marvelous short novel itself that tells a good story with so many suggestions in it:

1. WoW is incredibly successful in China.
2. He’s just one of 5 millions WoW players in China, an ordinary boy who’s addicted to that game. A common youth player that sympathizes with millions.
3. Internet Cafe is one of the pervading ways to play the game, because most of the junior players cannot afford a computer.
4. Whoever posted this message has a very good catch of Chinese humor or he was actually hoping to reach Jia Junpeng in this way and deliver the dinner message from his mum. He must have never thought that this would turn into a crazily successful press campaign for Jia Junpeng.
5. The mother is one of tens millions of common Chinese housewives who are doing their best to take good care of the family.
6. …

This story has now been completely popularized across the Chinese WoW community and it sure will be much more widely reported across the nation in the next few days when more and more media covers it. Many are currently trying to identify the person so named as Jia Junpeng and there are already several candidates that have been located across China.