The video posted on Chinese social media last year showed more than 100 Japanese children supposedly attending a primary school in Shanghai and gathering in their schoolyard. Chinese subtitles quoted two students leading the group shouting: “Shanghai is ours. Soon all of China will be ours too.”
The messages were alarming and infuriating in China, where Japan invaded during World War II. Except the scene actually took place in an elementary school in Japan. And the students didn’t stir up hatred of China; They swore an oath to play fairly in what looked like a sporting event.
The video was only removed after it had been viewed more than 10 million times.
Xenophobic online content such as the schoolyard video is currently the subject of controversy in China. Last week, a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese mother and her son to death in eastern China. Two weeks earlier, four guest lecturers at a college in Iowa were stabbed to death in northeastern China. Some Chinese question the role of online speech in inciting violence in the real world.
China has the most advanced system in the world to censor the internet whenever it wants. The government sets strict rules about what can and cannot be said about politics, the economy, society and the country’s leadership. Internet companies employ an army of censors. Individuals censor themselves because they know that what they post could get their social media accounts deleted or, worse, land them in jail.
Nevertheless, the Chinese Internet is full of hate speech against Japanese, Americans, Jews and Africans, as well as against Chinese people critical of the government. False information about Japan and the United States regularly tops popular search lists and receives a ton of reposts and likes.
What happens online is influenced by the increasing nationalism that has been promoted in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has adopted a China-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality. One of China’s responses to rising tensions with its rivals has been “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term that describes an ultra-nationalist and often hostile approach to geopolitics.
Of course, online hate speech and disinformation does not only exist in China. But the Chinese government has a well-oiled public opinion machine that tolerates and even encourages these kinds of messages when they are directed at specific countries and their populations. Authorities silence voices that attempt to correct falsehoods or reason with their suppliers. The Internet companies benefit from the online traffic that the chauvinistic content attracts. And social media influencers, those at the grassroots and some of the most prominent intellectuals and writers of the Xi era, get traffic and income.
In February 2023, Chinese state media widely reported the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. Influencers have spread many conspiracy theories. One called the incident the equivalent of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 and said it had left most of Ohio uninhabitable. The theory was that the US government and mainstream media tried to cover it up, similar to what happened at Chernobyl.
Duan Lian, an online misinformation consultant who has 1.7 million followers on the social media platform Weibo, published an article about the tragedy in East Palestine in which he tried to separate fact from error. He urged the public not to fall for misinformation. The article was reposted more than 1,000 times – and then deleted. His Weibo account was suspended for about three months, with Weibo citing violations of online regulations.
“The space for free expression has become smaller,” he told me in an interview.
Mr. Duan has been active on Weibo since 2010 and is known for his insightful work fighting misinformation.
“In the past, if CCTV made a significant mistake in its reporting, it could be laughed at, right?” he said, referring to China Central Television, the state broadcaster. “But now there’s nothing you can do about it, even if they’re obviously lying.”
Liu Su, a science blogger in Shanghai, was censored for trying to clarify a coordinated government campaign against Japan.
In 2023, China spread disinformation about the safety of the Japanese government’s decision to discharge treated radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea. There was fear and outrage over what is known in China as “nuclear contaminated wastewater.”
After Mr. Liu wrote several articles questioning what he had said, someone reported him to the Internet Regulatory Authority in Shanghai. Mr. Liu deleted the article, posted an apology and promised not to comment on current events. Then his public WeChat social media account was suspended for six months.
Mr. Liu is one of several Chinese intellectuals who have expressed concern about online condemnation of foreigners. In another article on WeChat this year, he criticized the trend of praising traditional Chinese medicine while disparaging Western medicine. He was shown again.
“When the backbone of a society is completely swamped by the tide of nationalism, the future fate of the country is predictable,” he wrote.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesmen said the recent attacks on foreigners were isolated crimes. Local authorities have not shared much information. But many comments on social media praised the attacks and the perpetrators.
Another force spreading online hate is a popular genre of short dramas on Chinese video platforms such as Douyin. In the videos, influencers stage scenes in which Chinese people are humiliated by Japanese people and then beaten up with martial arts. Or sometimes an entire scene is just about insulting and hitting Japanese people.
Anti-American sentiment is also popular.
“During my more than two years here, I have been concerned about the Chinese government’s very aggressive efforts to denigrate America and tell a distorted story about American society, American history and American politics,” said Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to China The Wall Street Journal in an article last week. “This happens every day on every network available to the government here, and there is a high level of anti-Americanism on the Internet.”
It is instructive to look at the times when Chinese censors act quickly and effectively to remove something they don’t like.
After tennis player Peng Shuai accused a former senior national leader of sexual assault on her Weibo account in 2021, it took censors 20 minutes to delete the post and almost all other posts about it. This is a so-called blanket ban.
A year earlier, to prevent the Chinese public from talking about Mr. Xi, a social media platform censored 564 names that users had made up to refer to him, including “a guy in Beijing,” “a big deal.” and “the last emperor.” In 2016, a regulator provided a video platform with a database of more than 35,000 terms about Mr. Xi to monitor.
On Friday, the Chinese learned that a 52-year-old woman named Hu Youping, who had tried to stop the attack on the Japanese mother and son in eastern China, had died from her injuries. Many people mourned her on social media. Some said they wondered whether the crime targeting Japanese people had something to do with China’s nationalist online environment.
In a rare move, China’s largest internet platforms released notices over the weekend saying they were cracking down on hate speech that targeted Japanese people and fueled extreme nationalism. The questions are: How long will this last? How much can it change an ecosystem that has fueled hate? And what will happen if it is politically convenient for the government to use Japan and the United States as bogeymen again? The announcements themselves received many nasty comments.
“In this great drama that unfolds every day, some are directors, some are actors, some are setting the stage, while others are the audience,” wrote Peng Yuanwen, a former journalist. He called the attacker in last week’s incident a victim of nationalist brainwashing. “He got too engrossed in the piece and has a hard time getting out of it,” Mr. Peng said.
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2024-07-04 04:00:12
www.nytimes.com
