“How the NSA Caught the Lanxiang Hackers”

One hopes that the US’s National Security Administration agents are smarter than they come off in the translated post below, but you never know! In any event, this joke has been being passed around the Chinese internet, and can be found here, among other places. Some netizens have interpreted as fact, which I discuss and dismiss in my analysis, below the translation. But, if nothing else, it sheds some light on the amount of derision the US’s hacking accusations against Lanxiang, a poorly-regarded vocational school, have been met with in China.

Translation

Actually, the American NSA agents made themselves up as Chinese netizens and asked around [about the hacking] on internet forums about military affairs: ‘who were the hackers behind Google?’ A Chinese netizen became aware of their identity, and cursed, responding, “Stupid c**t American spy, LXJX”, and after that all the replies below it were similar to that one.

[LXJX is an acronym for 楼下继续, or lou xia ji xu, i.e. “the next person (person posting next on an internet forum) continue”.]

The American department, having found a rare treasure, researched all day but couldn’t understand what LXJX meant. So they searched on Google, and the first result was Lanxiang Vocational School, so they went with that!

If you don’t believe, you can try it:

Google search for LXJX, Lanxing is the first result

Thoughts

Some netizens, including our own commenter Wrath, seem to be taking this post at face value, but it is rather obviously a joke. The lack of a link to the original thread makes it dubious enough — certainly, if it had actually happened, someone would be able to find it online. More damning, though, is the fact that “LXJX” isn’t actually a particularly common acronym on Chinese forums. It’s nowhere to be found on the rather exhaustive ChinaSMACK glossary of internet slang, and Baidu returns precious few results (5,140) for the term, most of which have to do with this joke specifically. For comparison’s sake, “LZ” (an internet slang term for 楼主, equivalent to OP in English internet slang) returns over 35 million results. But perhaps the strongest evidence against it being real is that many Chinese netizens clearly don’t get it: the first result for “LXJX” on Baidu is by a netizen who had read the joke asking what LXJX meant (and he wasn’t the only one). In fact, pretty much everything Baidu turns up for “LXJX” is a reference to the post translated above, not a usage of LXJX as actual online slang meaning “next poster, continue”.

It seems infinitely more likely that the joke was reverse-engineered. Netizens figured out what search term would lead to a #1 hit on Google.cn and designed the joke from there, settling on LXJX as it is Lanxiang’s URL address and also easily converted into a short acronym.

In short: interesting, yes. Amusing, yes. But true? Not even a little bit.