> “'April Fools' Day' is not consistent with our cultural tradition, or socialist core values,”

Which is also an opinion. But opinions like that are frequently given the force of law, and that's why stories like these provoke strong reactions.

This is a relatively well educated and intelligent forum population. Simplistic Communist Party propaganda isn't persuasively here.

There are a few hundred too many billionaires in Chinese government for anyone to believe that honesty and integrity and socialism are Chinese government values.

And the Chinese Communist government has no tradition -- is it a decent tyranny imposed on the Chinese people.

Your rhetoric is in the style of propaganda/PR-speak. Are you implying that honesty and integrity are frowned upon in other countries? In any civilized place, the general consensus is that honesty and integrity are virtues and make a person better.

The argument at hand is that clearly the Chinese government can't take a joke (among many other things, including the whole controlling/oppression thing), and the people of many other countries laugh about it because we find it amusing. It doesn't make us dishonest or bad people, just because we don't talk about how these are our "core values" and part of "cultural tradition."

Is this post an April fool's joke? Cause it made me laugh the hardest.

That's the kind of language that every authoritarian state on the planet uses when they find something or someone politically undesirable.