Weihan Zhang

About

Weihan Zhang (@liangweihan4) is a Twitter user who gained notoriety online due to his racist tweets towards interracial couples and mixed-race children in broken English, as well as being a fanatic Chinese nationalist, praising the accomplishments of the Chinese diaspora and promoting a traditional, hard-working lifestyle. The account was suspended in late 2020 due to its continuous violations of Twitter's policy on hateful conduct. It is unknown whether Zhang is a real person or a troll who was parodying the behavior of Chinese netizens via a gimmick account.

Origin

Zhang joined Twitter in October 2017, and by early October 2020, he had gained at least over 29,600 followers.^[1] The account was suspended on October 10th, 2020, for violating Twitter's rules against abuse and harassment.^[2] While Zhang was publicly located in California, he never released any personal information, details about his life or any other photo of himself other than his iconic profile picture, which shows him wearing a college graduate outfit and hat (shown below, left). Zhang's name and appearance match with a bioinformatics Ph.D. candidate at Huazhong Agricultural University, in Wuhan, China (shown below, right),^[3] meaning that even though the account might have been a fake, its name and profile picture were likely taken from a real person.

Spread

Screenshots of posts, retweets and comments from Zhang's account started spreading on Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, iFunny and other websites, gaining virality between 2019 and 2020. On January 22nd, 2019, one of Zhang's tweets with his signature phrase "I am not allow" with the images of a mixed Chinese-African family was posted on iFunny by user Asturian.^[4] The post gained 30 smiles in two years (shown below, left). On November 16th, 2019, another screenshot of Zhang saying "Grand parent cry" on an image of a Chinese woman holding her mixed-race child was posted on iFunny by user MingMingDuckling, which gained over 40 smiles in one year (shown below, right).^[5]

More screenshots of Zhang's Twitter post started spreading on 4chan's /pol/ board, which showcased him saying "allow" to same-race Asian couples, "not allow" to AMWF couples and "NOT allow" to WMAF and BMAF (Black Male Asian Female) couples (shown below).^[6][7]

On April 5th, 2019, a screenshot of Zhang commenting "I am NOT allow" to Asian-American politician Andrew Yang officiating a marriage between his cousin and a White man (shown below, left) and another one of a BMAF couple (shown below, right) were posted by the Facebook account Charismatic Chinese Memes.^[8] The post that contained both screenshots received over 165 likes in two years.

On October 4th, 2019, a Yes Chad version of Weihan Zhang was posted by Twitter user @LycanVisuals (shown below, left), which gained over 150 likes in two years.^[9] On November 24th, 2019, a screenshot of Twitter user @PunishedAd saying "Imma tell my kids this was Confucius" over Zhang's profile picture was posted by Dank Daoist Memes on Facebook, gaining over 55 likes in two years (shown below, right).^[10]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References