“Chuugoku” (中国), the Japanese name for “China”,¹⁾ was the derogatory nickname for the Touhou Project character, Hong Meiling, that was once prevalent during the 2000s. It would often be associated with this ill-treated, lazy depiction of the character, presumably for comedic reasons.

In the past, there was a time when Touhou Project fans couldn't figure out how to read her name, since it was the early 2000s and the profiles were buried in the omake.txt,²⁾ so the community had debates on whether her name was 'Kurenai Misuzu' (kun-reading) or 'Hong Meiling' (on-reading), then people joked that they simply call her 'Chuugoku' and the nickname managed to stick with the community for quite a while.

At one point, ZUN supposedly approved of the nickname,³⁾⁴⁾ then he forgot that he did this,⁵⁾⁶⁾ and some fans believe it was because he wasn't really taking the worldbuilding seriously. In the canonical fighting games, there was a running gag of characters forgetting her name, then they kept bringing the cast back, so Meiling had to have actual character development as they couldn't keep recycling the joke.

The nickname roughly died after Meiling became a main character for Touhou Hisoutensoku in 2008 and fans were simply fed up with the joke, similar to what happened with Head PAD. In addition, the Touhou Project series ended up introducing more Chinese-style characters with the direction that it was headed, like Seiga or Junko, meaning that the nickname would 'stick out' and wouldn't make any sense nowadays.

• In the Touhou Soccer fan game, Meiling was 'Jack' (ジャック) in reference to Super Chinese.

• Pad Chief
• Touhou Character Names (ZH)