IN CHINA, the talk is of Lin-sanity. Jeremy Lin is an ad man’s dream, but is also sure to appeal to everyone’s inner Tiger Mom – an ethnic Chinese Harvard graduate, but also a basketball star setting the US game on fire with the New York Knicks.
Already a star in the US, now millions of Chinese are following the 23-year-old online and he is seen as a role model for young people – the biggest international Chinese figure since the retirement of fellow basketball star Yao Ming.
Lin was rejected by many teams in the highly lucrative US National Basketball Association (NBA) league, but finally landed as a guard in the Knicks. Last week, in the absence of stars Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire, he came off the bench and helped the Knicks to five straight wins.
China is the NBA’s biggest market outside North America and the league is the country’s most popular sporting import despite the retirement of former Houston Rockets centre Yao.
Since his storming performance against the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday, the number of followers of his Chinese Twitter-like Weibo microblog has shot up, reaching nearly 850,000.
As one Weibo user, Yue, wrote: “This is the advantage of American education. This is a boy who is able to go to Harvard and play in the professional basketball league as well, only in the United States! A chinese boy who created a miracle! Would this be possible in China? That’s a laugh.”
Not all the postings were praising. Some criticised him, calling him a “banana”, a common term of abuse for overseas Chinese – “yellow on the outside, white on the inside”, wrote one. Others were less enthusiastic because he is Taiwanese by background, which is a self-ruled island, even if mainland China claims it.