United States President Donald Trump’s daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump on Monday tweeted a ‘Chinese proverb’ to mark the historic meeting between her father and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un.
The only problem is, no one knew where the ‘proverb’ came from.
Chinese net users are left scratching their heads over the so-called proverb which read: ‘Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.’
Ivanka Trump’s family has a lot of fans in China. But her mysterious ‘Chinese proverb’ published on her Twitter account was panned by Chinese net users on Weibo (file photo)
Ivanka Trump on Monday tweeted a ‘Chinese proverb’ to mark the historic meeting between Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un. But no one seemed to know where it came from
Ms Trump attributed the quote to ‘Chinese Proverb’ along with her post on Twitter, published hours before her father came together with Mr Kim to seek an end to a tense decades-old nuclear stand-off.
China’s Internet quickly lit up, puzzled rather than flattered by the reference.
‘Our editor really can’t think of exactly which proverb this is. Please help!’ the news channel for Sina – the company behind Weibo, China’s largest Twitter-like platform – wrote on its official account.
In thousands of comments on Weibo, users proffered scores of different suggestions without arriving at a consensus.
Some suggested the proverb ‘the foolish old man removed mountains’ – a common phrase used to signify perseverance.
It refers to a fable about a man who persisted in his attempt to level a mountain he found inconvenient by dogged digging.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un (left) and US President Donald Trump (right) shake hands following a signing ceremony during their historic summit on Tuesday in Singapore
One website suggested it originated in the United States itself at the turn of the 20th century. A pseudo-Confucian version was fabricated in 1962 – perhaps explaining why Ms Trump believed it was a Chinese proverb.
Ivanka Trump’s family has a lot of fans in China. Her six-year-old daughter, Arabella Kushner, became an online sensation by singing ballads in Mandarin and reciting Chinese poetry in a video that was shown to President Xi Jinping during Mr Trump’s visit to Beijing last year.
But her mysterious proverb was panned on Weibo.
‘She saw it in a fortune cookie at Panda Express,’ one user wrote.
Another said: ‘It makes sense, but I still don’t know which proverb it is.’
‘One proverb from Ivanka has exhausted the brain cells of all Chinese internet users,’ a commenter admitted.
Bill Kristol, editor of the US political magazine the Weekly Standard, tweeted a guess that the phrase ‘seems in fact to be American from the turn of the 20th c.- which makes sense, since its spirit is can-do Americanism’.
‘But why are Trump WH (White House) aides giving our proverbs to China, increasing our proverb deficit?’ he quipped.