Hong Kong’s unpopular Beijing-backed leader, known to many as “the wolf”, has called on residents of the city to be more like “mild and gentle” sheep in a clumsily worded appeal for citizens to consign the tensions behind the pro-democracy protests of 2014 to history.

Leung Chun-ying made the appeal in his lunar new year message to welcome in the year of the sheep, which begins on Thursday.
Tensions continue to simmer after the protests ended in December without Leung, the city’s chief executive, having offered any concessions to the student-led demonstrators.
“Sheep are widely seen to be mild and gentle animals living peacefully in groups,” said Leung, who has been nicknamed “the wolf” by critics who see him as cunning and untrustworthy.

The reason is that the word for the eighth animal in the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year cycle of creatures, yang in Mandarin, does not make the distinction found in English between goats and sheep and other members of the Caprinae subfamily. Without further qualifiers, yang might mean any such hoofed animal that eats grass and bleats. And so Chinese news outlets have butted heads for days on what to call this year in English, recruiting experts to pass judgment.