Waiting for Uncle Fat: History and Key Facts

Waiting for Uncle Fat is a Hong Kong Internet slang term and an internet meme; “Uncle Fat” is the nickname of rural patriarch Lau Wong-fat. The expression is derived from the 2015 Hong Kong electoral reform vote, when the 31 pro-Beijing camp lawmakers walked out of the chamber just before the vote in order to wait for Uncle Fat to arrive and vote to show their unity. The voting results turned out to be an embarrassing eight votes supporting the reform package. The pro-Beijing camp parties’ reason for not attending the vote – to wait for Uncle Fat – has sparked an intense discussion about the method the pro-establishment parties had used among Hong Kong citizens. Even more, "waiting for Uncle Fat" has become Internet slang and many derivative works or parodies have been created by Hong Kong netizens according to this slang.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Waiting for Uncle Fat by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.