Netizen Voices: Online Anti-Japanese Sentiment Leads To Woman’s Arrest, Festivals’ Cancellations

After a photo of memorial tablets for Japanese war criminals in Nanjing’s Xuanzang Temple went viral, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs ordered religious groups across the country to conduct self-inspections and undergo patriotic education. The photograph touched off a wave of online anti-Japanese sentiment as well as reflection on the process of healing from atrocities like the Nanjing massacre. An official investigation conducted by Nanjing municipal authorities discovered that the tablets were placed there by former nurse Wu Aping in 2017 in an effort to rid herself of recurring nightmares about the massacre. Authorities say that Wu was under the “incorrect impression” that she could “resolve grievances” and “get rid of suffering” in accordance with her Buddhist faith by erecting memorial tablets for the five Japanese war criminals and American missionary Minnie Vautrin, who saved untold Chinese lives during the massacre before dying of suicide upon her return to the United States.

The tablets were discovered in February of this year and had already been removed by the time the photo went viral earlier this month. Wu has been charged with “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. The temple was temporarily forced to stop operations, its abbot was dismissed, and municipal officials overseeing religious affairs were also punished. At Sixth Tone, Ye Zhanhang reports that the effort to ensure temples’ adherence to “core socialist values” has gone national:

“Regional authorities should urge religious organizations to conduct a comprehensive self-inspection and correct irregularities at once if any are found,” the National Religious Affair Administration said Tuesday, ordering the whole sector to conduct patriotic education and “practice core socialist values” to stamp out questionable incidents in the future.

“I am very ashamed of myself and apologize to all for this unforgivable mistake and the tremendous trauma it has caused,” the abbot told local media.

Together with the supervision of the National Religious Affairs Administration, the Buddhist Association of China on Monday ordered all Buddhist temples across the nation to conduct a self-review, claiming it has “zero tolerance of any behavior jeopardizing national interests and hurting national feelings.” [Source]

A hashtag about the city’s investigation received over 600 million views on Weibo and attracted over 100,000 comments. Former Global Times Editor Hu Xijin said Wu had “brought too much harm” to be forgiven and urged she be punished according to the law. A People’s Liberation Army-affiliated Weibo account warned that: “the incident has once again sounded the alarm for the nation: the struggle against militarism and historical nihilism is still long and complicated, and we must be vigilant and resolutely defend the spiritual highland of the Chinese nation.” Yet a number of other commentators took more nuanced views. Were Wu Aping’s actions really so egregious, they asked? One WeChat essayist argued that Wu’s actions were entirely in accordance with Buddhist practice and asked: “Does loving one’s country not require loving actual people? How does this madness [nationalist fervor] differ from superstition [belief in Buddhism]?” Another lamented that remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre is no longer tied to calls for peace. They wrote that during the 65th anniversary memorial activities in 2002, the word “peace” could be seen everywhere: “we were not simply massaging historical wounds but also calling out for eternal peace.” By 2012, they wrote, that atmosphere was gone, and remains missing today. 

The public outcry and national-level response to a seemingly minor incident are in line with increasing anti-Japanese sentiment online. In the wake of former Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe’s assassination, ghoulish posts celebrating his violent demise proliferated across China’s heavily regulated internet. In December of last year, a Shanghai professor was fired for pointing out that the exact death toll of the Nanjing Massacre remains unclear, while acknowledging that the incident was a “crime against humanity.” A Hunan elementary school teacher who spoke up for Song’s right to question was subsequently “mentally-illed” by local police. At Global Times, Chen Qingqing and Liu Caiyu report that a number of Chinese cities have canceled long-running Japanese-style summer festivals in response to fears over digital nationalist mobs:

In recent days, a number of exhibition halls and hotels have denied holding Summer Matsuri, especially after one scheduled for Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province, was canceled as a growing number of netizens called for the boycott. The activity A-3×ComicDawn18, which was originally scheduled for July 17, was canceled due to the special location and the special meaning that the festival could convey, which aroused strong dissatisfaction among netizens.

[…] Following the cancellation in Nanjing, a number of exhibitors and hotels in cities such as Dali of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, and Zaozhuang in East China’s Shandong Province announced one after another plans to cancel the Summer Matsuri.

[…] Though the Summer Matsuri is a carnival-type event in Japanese culture, which usually sees people dressing up, eating and gathering together with friends and families, the possibilities of some religious people using it as a platform to advertise religions or stretching it beyond the culture to other historical elements cannot be ruled out, [Liu Jiangyong, vice dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, told Global Times]

[…] “Also the name Summer Matsuri could cause some controversies. The activity could become sensational under the overall environment,”[Zhang Yiwu, a professor at Peking University,] said. However, the Chinese public generally accepts Japanese culture as long as it’s not involving any element about World War II. [Source]

Online, many ridiculed the cancellations as nationalism run amok, drawing comparisons to the Cultural Revolution and sarcastically wishing those responsible for the cancellations a “lifetime of happiness”: 

DC-非凡大陆 ：Some people ask, “Why give the summer festival such a Japanese name?” BECAUSE IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE AN IMMERSIVE JAPANESE EXPERIENCE, DUH. Like, imagine if Americans loved hanfu so much that every year they held a big ceremony in D.C.’s Chinatown, but then some people started saying that it must be a front for mainland spies because it’s called “Chinatown” so they burned it down.

蕴藉0817：Got it, going forward we’ll call them “temple fairs.”

糨糊最后一个大佬：This is what you’d call “the elevation of minor faults to the level of principle.”

永恒时空的归来者：You’re even freakin’ able to associate this [with Japanese war crimes]? Impressive, you glorious nationalists. I wish you a lifetime of happiness. The people will remember you. [Chinese]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/netizen-voices-online-anti-japanese-sentiment-leads-to-womans-arrest-festivals-cancellations/

Photo: Shadowing, by Gauthier DELECROIX

Shadowing, by Gauthier DELECROIX (CC BY 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/photo-shadowing-by-gauthier-delecroix/

Little Space for Unmarried Women in CCP Demographic Policies

Last week, China’s National Health Commission admitted that the country is expecting negative population growth over the next few years. Declining birth rates across several provinces this year suggest that China’s population has likely already peaked, and the UN recently projected that India will overtake China as the most populous country as early as next year. China’s accelerating demographic crisis of plummeting birth rates has forced the CCP to grapple with the side effects of its strict reproductive policies. Howard French examined the “powerful but regularly underappreciated” weight of China’s population dynamics at Foreign Policy on Friday, noting that while the country’s apparent demographic course may have some positive effects for the country, it will likely deny it the overwhelming economic and geopolitical dominance that have been widely assumed to lie in store for it.

During the period of China’s sharpest ascent, the country benefited immensely from what experts call a “demographic dividend,” meaning a population structure strongly skewed toward young people of prime working age as opposed to older adults. Now, with astonishing speed, the balance of China’s population ratios is shifting in the opposite direction, and the dramatic effects of this are increasingly coupled with a secular decline in the country’s overall population. A newly released revision of the United Nations Population Division’s demographic projections estimates that by the end of this century, China will no longer be the most populous country in the world. Perhaps even more surprising, according to the U.N.’s newest projections, China will be almost exactly half the size of India, which is expected to have 1.53 billion people, by 2100. To those who object that 2100 is too far off to be of practical relevance, by 2050, India, with 1.67 billion people, will already have around 300 million more people than China.

For those skeptical of this kind of modeling, it is worth pointing out that many experts consider the U.N.’s median scenario, which this data has been drawn from, is (if anything) overly cautious and understates matters. This seems to be borne out by the U.N.’s own periodic revisions. The newly issued projection, for example, says China’s population has begun to decline this year, nine years earlier than it had predicted in 2019, and that India’s population will surpass that of China in 2023, seven years earlier than predicted in that three-year-old revision. Yi Fuxian, a longtime analyst of China’s population dynamics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that even this does not go far enough and cites what he says are leaked Chinese documents that show the country’s present population to be 1.28 billion people rather than the 1.41 billion people that is officially claimed. [Source]

While part of China’s rescue plan has entailed gestures towards greater rights for women, the government has stopped short of pursuing full practical gender equality. Instead, its focus on fertility has prioritized traditional family structures, leaving many single women unable to freely exert their reproductive rights (an issue women face in many other countries, as well, including the U.S.). The government has continued to insist that personal family planning must be dictated from above. 

As a case in point, last Friday a Beijing court ruled against Teresa Xu, an unmarried woman seeking the right to freeze her eggs. The decision ended a three-year court battle that drew national media attention. Hospitals in China typically require proof of a marriage license in order to freeze eggs, so when Xu first sought the procedure in 2018 at the age of 30, she was denied. Nonetheless, Xu intends to appeal the court decision. “[I]t’s a temporary setback,” she said, adding “There will definitely be a day (when) we will take back sovereignty over our own bodies.” Martin Quin Pollard and Roxanne Liu from Reuters reported on the reasoning behind the court’s decision: 

The Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing ruled last week there was no clear law on the specific application of assisted reproductive technologies in China, while saying they must be provided for medical purposes, according to a copy of the decision verified by Reuters on Sunday.

[… Xu’s] challenge cited two Chinese provinces that have eased certain barriers for single women to access some assisted birth technology and a statement by the national authorities that China’s laws do not deny single women’s right of birth. But the court found these did not establish that the Chinese health authority allows egg freezing for non-medical reasons.

[…] The hospital argued that egg freezing has various health risks and that delayed pregnancy or single motherhood may lead to other social problems, the court decision said. The hospital said it would reject any request to freeze eggs simply to delay parenthood. [Source]

This month, Alexandra Stevenson from The New York Times described how single women in China are left out of government perks for childbearing: 

With China’s birthrate at a historical low, officials have been doling out tax and housing credits, educational benefits and even cash incentives to encourage women to have more children. Yet the perks are available only to married couples, a prerequisite that is increasingly unappealing to independent women who, in some cases, would prefer to parent alone.

Babies born to single parents in China have long struggled to receive social benefits like medical insurance and education. Women who are single and pregnant are regularly denied access to public health care and insurance that covers maternity leave. They are not legally protected if employers fire them for being pregnant.

[…] China’s national family planning policy does not explicitly state that an unmarried woman cannot have children, but it defines a mother as a married woman and favors married mothers. Villages offer cash bonuses to families with new babies. Dozens of cities have expanded maternity leave and added an extra month for second- and third-time married mothers. One province in northwestern China is even considering a full year of leave. Some have created “parenting breaks” for married couples with young children. [Source]

While the government pushes for marriage as a means to boost fertility, systemic and largely unremedied issues of gender inequality have dissuaded some single women from the prospect of wedlock. Studies have shown that in China married women suffer larger gender pay gaps than single women, and the country’s gender pay gap has been increasing over the past two decades. Record youth employment may exacerbate these inequalities. Other recent studies have shown that married women spend twice as much time doing housework as their husbands.

Perpetual pandemic lockdowns have also made marriage more dangerous for women trapped at home with abusive husbands, as reports show an increase in domestic violence during the pandemic. As one anonymous anti-domestic violence volunteer in Shanghai wrote in Sixth Tone, “the country’s strict lockdown and quarantine restrictions often work to sever victims from the protections and services theoretically available to them,” adding “the system can make getting help seem harder than simply putting up with the violence.” Moreover, in addition to weathering the mandatory 30-day “cooling off” period imposed by the government, women seeking to divorce have had to suffer further delays in obtaining appointments at local civil affairs bureaus due to major backlogs.

Adding to these pressures is the social stigmatization against unmarried women. In a story that recently went viral on Chinese social media, one 27-year-old woman was hospitalized with difficulty breathing and numbness, and was later diagnosed with severe anxiety stemming from relentless demands from her parents to get married. Faced with such obstacles, many women have decided to carve out their own safe spheres of singledom. Cai Yuqi described in Sixth Tone how young Chinese are organizing to defend the rights of single people:

Singles’ groups are mushrooming on every major Chinese forum site. On Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform, the “unmarried clan” tag has more than 20,000 followers. On Baidu Tieba, there are multiple singles’ forums, some of which have tens of thousands of members. On Douban, nearly 25,000 people are part of the “no marriage, no kid mutual aid group.”

[…] Many young Chinese, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly interested in the concept of singles’ rights. In January, a group of feminist activists organized the country’s first singles’ rights event: an online forum titled “Single-Unmarried People’s Rights in China.”

Attended by 108 people, the forum featured talks by legal professionals on issues including adult guardianship and the legal risks singles face when having children via a surrogate. The event also named the top 10 singles’ rights news stories in China. (“Safety issues for women living alone,” “Shanghai tightens home-buying rules for people out of wedlock,” and “single mother struggles to access government maternity benefits” led the list.)

Other activists are forming online groups focused on specific singles’ rights issues. Pata, a game designer from Guangzhou, runs a group for unmarried women trying to have children. [Source]

Offering real rights for married and unmarried women may cultivate broader support for the government’s pro-natalist agenda. Writing about China’s population crisis in Disruptive Asia this month, Mei Fong and Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch called on the CCP to apologize for its decades of paternalism and abuse towards women seeking their own reproductive choices: 

Say sorry for blaming them for the country’s negative population growth. Say sorry for stigmatising unmarried women in their late 20s by calling them “leftover women.” Say sorry for violating their rights to make their own choices on marriage, work, and reproduction and, in general, not doing enough to take down patriarchal systems that put the burden for having more children and caregiving squarely on women’s shoulders.

In March, for example, the Jiangsu provincial authorities partly attributed their negative population growth – occurring for the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 – to “the significant increase in women’s educational level.” The tone of the announcement – as if women’s education is to blame for China’s population problems – riled many. “So, no more foot-binding, but brain-binding now?” a netizen commented on social media platform Weibo.

[… T]he government’s long history of restricting women’s right to reproductive choice and bodily autonomy through abusive, and sometimes violent means has instilled a deep fear and suspicion among many women in China that genuine attempts at reparation – however unlikely this might be to happen – would help alleviate. [Source]

The CCP’s past abuse of reproductive policies remains relevant decades later. In early July, health bureau officials in Quanzhou, Guangxi dismissed a couple’s request to investigate the disappearance of their toddler in the 1990s, admitting that the government had taken him away according to a “social adjustment” policy and that there is no record of his whereabouts. The couple shared the government notice on Weibo, prompting a huge public outcry, with the hashtag #QuanzhouOverBornKidCaseBeenReportedtoGovernment gaining nearly 60 million views. Days later, the Guilin city government announced that the director and deputy director of the health bureau would be suspended for ignoring the couple’s petition. Highlighting the government’s euphemistic language in justifying its family planning and gender equality policies, one Weibo user commented: “Children being aborted by the government is called ‘family planning,’ children being trafficked by the government is called ‘social regulation,’ women being trafficked is called ‘being given shelter,’ and the lockdown of Xi’an is called ‘implementing temporary control measures.’” CDT Chinese collected other netizen comments calling the government’s “social adjustment” policy nothing less than baby trafficking:

Weylen：A new term for human trafficking: “social adjustment.”

事先张扬的减肥事件：Since they didn’t keep any records, how can they prove that it wasn’t trafficking?

羽田共 ：A child was taken away, but no records were kept—state-sanctioned human trafficking?

欣喜巨蟹：How much blood and tears stain those four characters? [社会调剂, “social adjustment,” a euphemism for removing children from families that exceeded birth-control quotas.]

树杈上的柯希莫：Turns out the human traffickers were all working for the Family Planning Office.

小狗好乖·：Very soon, there will be a cover-up of this matter. They won’t allow anyone to delve too deeply into family planning policy during that era: there’s too much dirty laundry. [Chinese]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/little-space-for-unmarried-women-in-ccp-demographic-policies/

Language Log, UPenn – Typos as a means for circumventing censorship

source https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=55382#new_tab

ASPI’s Daily Cyber Digest (July 21) – Mention of CDT’s “CCP Seeks Control Over Xinjiang Narrative as Xi Visits the Region”

source https://www.aspi.org.au/program/international-cyber-policy-centre?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#new_tab

Sinocism (July 25, 2022 newsletter) – Taiwan and Pelosi; Vaccinations; Real estate bailout; Xi Thought on Diplomacy

source https://sinocism.com/p/taiwan-and-pelosi-vaccinations-real?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#new_tab

Politico (China Watcher Newsletter) – Xi’s Online Nicknames Spark Censorship Spree

source https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-china-watcher#new_tab

Nature – New deepfake regulations in China are a tool for social stability, but at what cost?

source https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00513-4#new_tab

Chinese Diplomacy and Soft Power in an Era of “Great-Power Competition”

Tensions between the U.S. and China have risen further over the past month. In late June, NATO named China as a security challenge for the first time. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s mooted visit to Taiwan has prompted prognostications of a potential fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. Adding fuel to the fire, some American lawmakers and former officials have urged Pelosi to “show strength and not cower to the bullying of the Chinese Communist Party,” cautioning that “timidity is dangerous.” Last week, Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang delivered an unexpectedly ferocious performance at the Aspen Security Forum that many participants described as a potential “prelude to World War III.” All of this recent trans-Pacific saber-rattling has generated media articles invoking the “Thucydides Trap” trope and stoking fears about China seeking to “replace the U.S. order.” Such escalatory rhetoric confirms one thing that officials and analysts from both countries can agree on: great-power competition has become the dominant frame of reference in Sino-American relations. 

On Sunday, Beijing hosted a symposium on “studying Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy,” a philosophy that the keynote speaker, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, praised as having “provided the fundamental guidance and the guide to action for conducting China’s foreign affairs in the new era.” Earlier that week, in a Foreign Affairs article calling for more guardrails in the U.S.-China relationship, Asia Society President and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described how China’s current ideological framing of the great-power competition, even if it is not publicly acknowledged, has locked its foreign-policy establishment into a hawkish stance: 

Beijing’s unwillingness to explicitly characterize the relationship as one of strategic competition stems from the fact that doing so would confirm that China is indeed in a real-world contest for regional and global preeminence. And that would run counter to Beijing’s official line that its global ambition is only to develop a “community of common destiny for all humankind,” not to maximize Chinese national power.

Nonetheless, China appears to be edging toward accepting the reality (if not the language) of managing its competitive relationship with the United States. Beijing might, for example, be able to accept a combination of peaceful competition and constructive cooperation within a framework of necessary strategic guardrails. In the Chinese system, far more than in the American one, the actual words used to describe a strategic framework matter because they can authorize substantive action on the part of working-level officials otherwise trapped within a linguistic cage of ideological dogma. This phenomenon is especially visible among Chinese diplomats, who have been pushed by domestic political incentives toward nationalistic “Wolf Warrior” rhetoric. An ideological reframing from above is needed to authorize less ideological and more pragmatic diplomatic activity from below. [Source]

Writing for Foreign Affairs, Michael Brenes and Van Jackson described how China’s aggressive style of diplomacy has mirrored hawkishness in the U.S., and how America’s anti-China foreign policy agenda may threaten to undermine democracy at home and abroad:

Like its American cousin, Chinese ethnonationalism is a problem because it begets belligerence. The CCP’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy—the aggressive style of diplomacy adopted under Xi’s administration—is less a sign of insecurity than it is a symptom of nationalism being stoked for deliberately political ends. And ethnonationalism rationalizes the expansive modernization projects of the People’s Liberation Army, just as the same jingoistic, racially tinged sentiments in the United States are used to justify massive Pentagon budgets. Reactionaries in Washington and Beijing are mirror-imaging each other, and benefiting politically from the negative synergy of rivalry.

Recent history has also made it evident that great-power rivalry does not help efforts to weaken autocrats, and may end up doing the opposite. […] Rivalry between countries is not a viable framework for democratic improvement within them. Instead, geopolitical competition compels the United States to make undemocratic moral compromises in the name of democracy. In a rush to convince everyone that “America is back” as leader of the “free world,” the Biden administration has drawn hypocrisy-riddled distinctions between dictatorship and democracy as an ideological basis for great-power rivalry. But it is self-defeating—and logically contradictory—to enlist foreign governments in an anti-China, anti-Russia foreign policy agenda when the same mindset justifies U.S. backing of despotic, demagogic leaders from Turkey to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines and beyond. The United States’ limited political influence could be much better spent. [Source]

In the Washington Post newsletter “Today’s WorldView” on Tuesday, Eurasia Group’s Ali Wyne warned of dangers in aligning U.S. policy around great-power competition and the risk of overstating the competitive challenges that China presents: “Formidable, multifaceted competitors though they are, Beijing and Moscow are not as strategically skillful as U.S. commentary sometimes suggests; China’s diplomacy has increasingly estranged it from the advanced industrial democracies that still wield the balance of global power.” Elaborating on that point at The Diplomat, Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that China’s global image has deteriorated, partly due to its “poor diplomacy” and “failing soft power efforts,” notably in the media sphere:

China’s negative image is also undermining its soft power, making it harder to repair its negative reputation in the next five years. A lack of soft power in the zero-COVID era – visitor programs, journalism training programs, Confucius Institutes, programs for students to come to China – makes it harder for Beijing to spread its developmental model. Beijing’s image has become so toxic that countries are closing Confucius Institutes, banning or reducing the reach of Chinese state media outlets, and limiting other potential sources of Chinese soft power. Many universities in the U.S. and Europe have shut down Confucius Institutes and also begun cutting links with sister programs in China, sometimes moving the sister programs to Taiwan instead. [Source]

Recent public opinion polls revealed mixed international perceptions of China’s image. A survey published last month by the Swedish National China Centre revealed that the Swedish public have a largely negative view of China, potential cooperation with China, China’s respect for democratic rights, China’s potential investment in Sweden, and China’s model for society. However, polls in Hungary have revealed the opposite. A survey this month by Central and Eastern European Center for Asian Studies revealed that a majority of Hungarian voters were optimistic about China’s expanding footprint in the country, with about 80 percent of Fidesz voters (those of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s governing party) supporting Chinese influence in Hungarian politics and its institutions of higher education. 

A Pew Research Center global survey published one month ago mapped the contours of China’s public diplomacy. The survey covered 19 advanced economies in Europe, North America, and Asia, almost all of which displayed increasingly negative opinions of China. However, citizens in all but one country believed China’s influence was growing more than that of the U.S., and young people in numerous countries were more positive towards China and less positive towards the U.S. than were older adults. Singapore and Malaysia stood out as the only two countries that were more favorably inclined toward China than toward the U.S. Malaysia was the only country surveyed that is still considered a developing country. Since perceptions of China’s image may diverge between the developed and developing world, Western analyses of great-power competition that focus exclusively on developed countries may skew their assessments of Chinese public diplomacy. In much of Southeast Asia, for example, other polls show that China’s image has surpassed that of the U.S. due to China’s early COVID-19 outreach.

Mixed results have not stopped the Chinese government from pursuing its soft power efforts across a variety of regions. During the symposium on Sunday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that Chinese diplomatic missions “have been calling upon nations to […] constantly boost the influence and charm of Chinese philosophy and Chinese solutions.” This push by diplomatic missions to boost China’s image has been particularly apparent in regional media. Chinese officials have written two of the last five articles about China in EU Observer, a leading online newspaper about EU affairs. One from the Chinese Mission to the EU on July 18 was titled “Ensuring global food security: what China says and does”; the other was written by the head of the mission’s economic and commercial office on July 22 and titled “For China and EU, cooperation is our only right way forward.” In Euractiv, the other leading source on EU affairs, the same articles were published on the same days, meaning that two of the last six articles in Euractiv were authored by Chinese officials. Earlier this month, the Chinese mission to the EU penned a third article in Euractiv about NATO, touting Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative and closing with a familiar warning: “For our friends, we have fine wine. For jackals or wolves, we welcome with shotguns.” Around the same time, almost every major Kenyan newspaper ran a column by the Chinese ambassador to Kenya that refuted American accusations about Chinese “debt-traps” in Africa (which have also been criticized by Chinese and Western scholars alike). 

In his Discourse Power newsletter, Tuvia Gering highlighted a recent article by Lin Sixian of the School of International Journalism and Communication at the Beijing Foreign Studies University that outlined countermeasures to the West’s “public opinion warfare” against China: 

“First, it is necessary to accurately grasp the current international public opinion struggle, distinguish between “friends and foes” on the international public opinion front, and struggle 斗争 with the Western anti-China mainstream media while seeking sympathy and feedback from friendly international media.

“In the current international environment, the Western anti-China media should undoubtedly be our struggle’s primary target, while many media stakeholders in Russia and neighboring developing countries can be regarded as a foreign backup.

[…] “Therefore, China should try to unite as much as possible the international media stakeholders that it can win over, while doing its utmost to isolate and strike down 打击 the remaining anti-China media outlets in the United States, Britain, and other countries that hold unto their hard-line positions. [Source]

Lin’s call for China to struggle against Western media and coordinate with friendly international media in developing countries aligns with China’s broader diplomatic efforts to court the developing world. Many of these efforts are seen in the context of great-power competition, wherein China has attempted to rally developing countries to form a rival bloc against the U.S., notably through the UN and the Global Security Initiative, while U.S. diplomacy with developing nations has often come up short. As far back as 2019, China overtook the U.S. as the nation with the most diplomatic outposts around the world, and almost three years later, the U.S. continues to face chronic understaffing in its embassies in Africa. Commenting on this dichotomy for Foreign Policy this month, Howard French described how China’s engagement with the Global South is driven out of self-interest and presents a missed opportunity for the U.S.:

What is new is that the developing world has more of an alternative to the West than any time in the recent past. Language out of Washington shows that U.S. leaders at least implicitly understand that China is not in the charity game either, but they fail to grasp a more important insight: China has gotten into the global public goods game with both feet during the last three decades for a variety of reasons, but most importantly, out of an understanding that the future of the international economy lies to a great extent in the global south.

This is where future global growth will occur. This is where a huge, coming change in global demographics will take place. This is where the trading partners, talented and energetic labor, and customers of the future will come from. Beijing understands that this is an opportunity for China—not some falsely construed charity operation and certainly not a rathole.

[…] The West is great at generating slogans and names for economic partnerships with acronyms that will be quickly forgotten, but in the meantime, because of its failure to change the way it thinks about the opportunity the global south represents to the West and the world, it risks seeing the future pass it by. [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/chinese-diplomacy-and-soft-power-in-an-era-of-great-power-competition/

Photo: Gansu, China, by Lei Han

Gansu, China, by Lei Han (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/photo-gansu-china-by-lei-han-2/

How Xiaohongshu Censors “Sudden Incidents”

A leaked internal document from Xiaohongshu reveals how the Instagram-like social media and e-commerce company deals with censoring discourse about  “sudden incidents” on its platform. The document is part of a hundred-plus-page trove that details how the company censors its users in compliance with Beijing’s commands. Last week, we published a partial translation of 546 derogatory nicknames for Xi Jinping, compiled over the course of two months, that was included in the leak.

The document on “sudden incidents”—an official designation for accidents, natural disasters, and political disturbances—is titled “Public Opinion Monitoring System & Management Procedures,” and reveals both what Xiaohongshu considers sensitive and the process by which it censors it with “no omissions.” It begins with a detailed and expansive list of incident types likely to require special treatment. The list include carjackings, landslides, the “Two Sessions,” illegal cult activity, outbreaks of disease among livestock, labor strikes, geographic discrimination, public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, student suicides, and even the introduction of products that might compete with Xiaohongshu for its user base’s eyes—seemingly blurring the line between censorship and anti-competitive practices. Sudden incidents that occur in Shanghai and Beijing are treated with extra scrutiny. A note underneath the list reads: “If a sudden incident is confirmed to have occurred in Beijing or Shanghai, report it to the Government Relations Team [1] immediately.”

The document goes on to detail the precise mechanisms by which Xiaohongshu quashes discussion of the potential incidents listed above, a process that differs depending on where the censorship order comes from. Censorship directives issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China are to be implemented in “real-time,” whereas internal censorship directives require a response within a comparatively lax five-minutes. In both cases, Xiaohongshu builds new lexicons of “sensitive” words that it keeps on an internal server and “banned” words that it reports to a higher authority, either its Shanghai Operation Security Group or a separate Shanghai-based organization. The lexicon includes derivative variants of both “sensitive” and “banned” words.

CDT has translated the document in full:

Public Opinion Monitoring System & Management Procedures

 

(1) Definition of Public Opinion Monitoring Incidents

• Content that is likely to incite public panic and impact social stability, such as a catastrophic fire at a sensitive location, “mass incidents”, violent criminal cases targeted at specific populations (fatal stabbings, student stabbings, student suicides, child abuse, etc.).
• Incidents that affect public health or safety, such as chemical explosions, terrorist attacks, outbreaks of food poisoning, major industrial accidents, traffic accidents, and other accidents that result in large-scale loss of life or other damages. 
• Major natural disasters and epidemics, including catastrophic earthquakes, floods, landslides, cave-ins, and severe outbreaks of disease among people or livestock.
• Trending topics that supervisory departments have ordered to be deleted and that are likely to stir up public sentiment online, such as geographic discrimination (i.e. the “Beijing Grandpa Incident”).
• Major mass incidents, chiefly large-scale illegal gatherings, petitions, appeals, illegal assemblies, marches, demonstrations, labor strikes, student strikes, teacher strikes, merchant strikes, etc.; obstructing railways, highways, bridges, or roads; besieging or physically attacking government employees; breaking into Party, governmental, and other critically important administrative offices; incidents involving beating, smashing, looting, burning, fighting with weapons, and other incidents, including major illegal activities by cults and other outlawed organizations. 
• Major criminal and public security cases, including arsons, poisonings, murders, explosions, hijackings, carjackings, shootings, jailbreaks, riots, and large-scale brawls, looting, or property destruction.
• Sensitive societal incidents and expressions of public opinion. Societal incidents that could trigger political or social unrest and threaten national security. Widespread public criticism or suggestions targeted at the Chinese Communist Party and government institutions. 
• Competitors’ products (that could impact our platform)
• Regulatory departments (policy-related, exposés about counterfeit cosmetics, etc.)
• Periodic major events (The Two Sessions and the China International Import Expo, for example)

Note: If a sudden incident is confirmed to have occurred in Beijing or Shanghai, report it to the Government Relations Team immediately. 

 

(2) Management Procedures for Sudden Incidents

1. Xiaohongshu Internal Procedures for Managing Public Opinion on Sudden Incidents
   

 

Note: Report all high-risk incidents to community managers and the Shanghai Operation Security Group within five minutes. For periodic incidents, submit daily reports to community managers and the Shanghai Operation Security Group.

 

(3) Sudden Incident Response Time

Internal Public Opinion: five-minute response
CAC Directive: real-time response

 

(4) Requirements for Adding New Keywords 

1. Quickly extract keywords to add to the sensitive- and banned-words lists (report to Shanghai headquarters) and lexicon of popular terms (for example, place names such as Beijing). Words related to periodic events can be adjusted as events progress.
2. Conduct a secondary review to identify derivatives of sensitive keywords, add them to lists, and report to supervisors. 
3. After keywords have been added, confirm that keyword filters are working during the review process. Report any ineffective filters to the censorship team and provide feedback to the relevant department in a timely manner.

 

(5) Emergency Review Procedure 

•  Sudden Incident Management Procedure Following a Directive [from CAC]

 

Step-by-Step Crisis Response Following a [CAC] Directive
	Action	Measures
Step 1	Quickly Take Offline	1. Unified review of standards. Team leader designates reviewing personnel.
		2. Team leader assigns personnel to conduct immediate review of search-results list for the original title, text, tags, and related videos.
		3. Team leader orders a review of popular or widely-used keywords.
		4. Apportion keywords among reviewing personnel to avoid duplicated effort.
		5. Team leader assigns personnel to add keywords (both sensitive and banned) to the backend.
		6. Reviewing personnel begin synchronous review on the backend using Athena.
		7. Conduct a secondary review to extract derivative words, and report back to team leader.
Step 2	Detailed Screening	1. Apportion derivative words among reviewing personnel to avoid duplicated effort and add to backend keyword warnings.
		2. Conduct synchronous review on Athena backend. Search and retrieve based on granular sorting, default sorting, popularity, and time-stamp. Screen based on the number of keyword hits.
Step 3	Final Review	1. Perform a secondary review of front- and backend, check results to confirm that keywords are working and that there are no omissions on backend.
		2. Compile review data and prepare to report data to supervisors.
		3. Summarize review status, iron out any problems, and improve work efficiency.

 

•  Internal Management Procedures for Sudden Public Opinion Incidents

 

Internal Procedures for Handling Sudden Public Opinion Incidents

Review Procedures

1. Monitor sudden public opinion incidents.

2. Report to supervisors and define standard scale of operation.

3. Team leader sets operational criteria and assigns personnel to conduct immediate review of search-results list for the original title, text, tags, and related videos.

4. Team leader orders a review of popular or widely-used keywords.

5.  Apportion keywords among reviewing personnel to avoid duplicated effort.

6. Team leader assigns personnel to add keywords (both sensitive and banned) to the backend.

7. Reviewing personnel begin synchronous review on the backend using Athena.

8. Conduct a secondary review to extract derivative words, and report back to team leader.

9. Apportion derivative words among reviewing personnel to avoid duplicated effort and add to backend keyword warnings.

10. Conduct synchronous review on Athena backend. Search and retrieve based on granular sorting, default sorting, popularity, and time-stamp. Screen based on the number of keyword hits.

11. Perform a secondary review of front- and backend, check results to confirm that keywords are working and that there are no omissions on backend.

12.  Compile review data and prepare to report data to supervisors.

13. Summarize review status, iron out any problems, and improve work efficiency.

[Chinese]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/how-xiaohongshu-censors-sudden-incidents/

Zhengzhou Flood Anniversary: Censored Memorials and More Extreme Weather

This Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of floods in Henan on July 20, 2021, when historic levels of rainfall left almost 400 people dead and caused billions of dollars in property damage. Despite a January 2022 State Council report that chastised local officials for covering up the death toll, many residents were dismayed by the government resistance and censorship that met their attempts to publicly commemorate those who perished a year ago. The anniversary also coincided with a series of record-breaking extreme weather events across the country and around the world, bringing renewed attention to governments’ efforts to address climate change and citizens’ creative calls for greater climate intervention.

In Henan’s provincial capital of Zhengzhou, citizens were thwarted in their efforts to commemorate the hundreds of people who died or disappeared last year when flood waters inundated road tunnels and subway stations. Local residents reported that florists had received notices forbidding them from selling flowers to anyone intending to place them near metro stations where people had drowned, and that plainclothes police officers were forcibly removing such displays of bouquets. “Flowers are allowed to bloom, but not to be seen,” wrote one netizen. Other online reflections on the anniversary conveyed fury at official negligence and vowed to never forget the disaster. CDT Chinese recently archived a popular WeChat post about “Raincoat Dad,” who sat for hours outside a metro station waiting in vain for his deceased daughter, with a sign that read: “Niuniu, your dad is still waiting to take you home.”

Flowers are forbidden today in Zhengzhou on one year anniversary of the catastrophic flooding when unknown number of people were drowned in submerged subway trains and cars. https://t.co/Qfh8elpzVb

— 周锋锁 Fengsuo Zhou (@ZhouFengSuo) July 21, 2022

In rural villages west of Zhengzhou, vestiges of the flood remain—waterlines are still visible on walls, and ruined water-logged furniture litters yards. But online, commemorations of the floods were muted or scrubbed. WeChat blocked several accounts that posted articles questioning who was responsible for the floods, and Weibo censored the hashtag “#One Year Anniversary of July 20th Torrential Rains in Zhengzhou, Henan Province# (#河南郑州720特大暴雨一周年#). Reacting to government censorship of flood videos shared online, one netizen wrote: “What can’t be seen online can only be kept in your heart. What sorrow cannot be expressed can only form an undercurrent, roiling beneath the surface.” CDT Chinese collected other netizen reactions to censorship of those attempting to pay tribute to the lives lost during the flood: 

@修勾刷刷碗：The media shouldn’t remain silent, or prohibit people from commemorating the absurd and the grotesque: “Many people feel that repeatedly talking about suffering has no practical function, but I maintain that seeing, listening, speaking, and remembering are inherently meaningful. Society doesn’t suddenly change for the better because of orders from the high and mighty. We ordinary little people have our duty, too. A single spark can start a prairie fire. Rest in peace, and remember.”

@Eddie-crush：This sucks … it’s just rotten to the core. Some people don’t want you to remember, but there are others who will always remember.
@Jonathan翟：The media’s reaction makes me doubt whether there even were torrential rains on July 20, 2021!!! Forgetting is just as terrible as a natural disaster …

@啦啦啦啦我不想佛了：This “stability maintenance” is a low blow. Clearly this would be a good opportunity—through communal tributes, communal mourning, and communal commemoration—to sum up the lessons we have learned and to better plan for the future. A warmer, more sentimental atmosphere would give everyone a sense of unity and hope, and might even teach society important lessons about respect for life and fear of death. But to do this would be tantamount to actually admitting that mistakes were made, so …

@炫_迈_男：The Internet may only have a one-month memory, but the people will never forget! Good and evil will have their comeuppance or reward!

@千秋o_O：There are no media reports, no voices, no memorials, but this day last year remains vivid in my mind. How did we lose our right to mourn it? Is it because it was a man-made disaster? So now we don’t even have the right to commemorate it? What’s the point of deluding yourself and others?

@Rock5891：Heaven sees what humans do. Deleting photos cannot delete the public’s memory. History and suffering should never be forgotten. [Chinese]

The hashtag "One year anniversary of July 20 Zhengzhou super storm" is banned for violating "relevant laws, regulations and policies" by Weibo https://t.co/nMskwp2wfZ

— 杨涵 Han Yang (@polijunkie_aus) July 21, 2022

Meanwhile, new floods and extreme weather continue to wreak havoc in other regions. In late June, floods in Jiangxi and Guangdong damaged the homes of about one million people, as authorities issued the first red alert of the year, indicating the most severe level of weather warning. This week, a tornado killed one person and injured dozens more as it swept through 11 villages in Jiangsu. On Monday, The Guardian reported on deadly flash floods in Sichuan and Gansu:

In the south-western province of Sichuan, at least six people have died and another 12 are missing after torrential rain triggered flash floods, state-owned news outlet CGTN reported on Sunday.

About 1,300 people had been evacuated as of Saturday, the report said.

Meanwhile, in Longnan city in the north-western province of Gansu, another six deaths were reported and 3,000 people had been evacuated, state broadcaster CCTV said. Rainfall over 1½ days was as much as 98.9mm in the worst-affected areas, almost double the July average. [Source]

Accompanying these floods and tornadoes is a widespread, record-breaking heat wave. Liu Zhao, an assistant professor in the department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University, described in Sixth Tone how heat waves in China are becoming hotter, longer, and more frequent:

For more than a month, much of China has been blanketed by extreme heat. From June 16 to July 9, local governments issued 1,372 high-temperature “code reds,” indicating temperatures are expected to rise above 40 degrees Celsius within 24 hours. Nationally, 71 meteorological stations have reported record highs since the start of June, including many in regions not traditionally associated with high heat. In one blistering stretch, surface temperatures measured by a station in the central province of Henan reached 74.1 degrees Celsius.

[…] This year, deaths from hyperthermia have already been reported in Zhejiang, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces; many of those who died were workers on construction sites and in factories. One construction worker in the northwestern city of Xi’an reportedly worked nine hours in high temperatures before succumbing. [Source]

Extreme heat has proven similarly deadly. Just this summer, a nurse in Jiangxi fainted while conducting COVID-19 testing in hot weather; a courier in Guangzhou suffered heat stroke and fell into a coma, regaining consciousness over a month later; a sanitation worker in Zigong fainted, suffered a cardiac arrest, and was later diagnosed with heat stroke; and a factory worker in Zhejiang died of organ failure due to heat stroke. Such extreme heat is particularly dangerous for frontline workers, who have been toiling in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius across numerous cities over the past few weeks. In Xi’an, a construction worker died from heat stroke this month, and his family was initially denied financial compensation because the worker had not signed an official contract (a common practice among migrant workers). It was only after a national outcry online that the company agreed to pay for the worker’s funeral.

Beyond the human toll, China’s extreme weather events also exact a financial cost. The South China Morning Post reported that last year floods cost China about $25 billion, the world’s second-highest total after Europe, while only one-tenth of those losses were insured. Nectar Gan from CNN calculated China’s particular vulnerability to these extreme weather events: 

For China, the sheer size of its population and economy means the scale of damage caused by extreme weather events is often massive.

Tropical cyclones, floods and droughts are estimated to cost China about $238 billion annually — the highest in the Asia Pacific region and nearly three times the estimated loss suffered by India or Japan, according to a report released last year by the World Meteorological Organization.

Heat wave-related mortality in China rose by a factor of four from 1990 to 2019, reaching 26,800 deaths in 2019, according to a Lancet study published in 2020. [Source]

In June, the Chinese government released a national climate-change adaptation strategy, acknowledging that climate change and global warming make the country more vulnerable to “sudden and extreme” weather events. While the plan called for modernizing climate-related disaster prevention systems, some scholars worry that governance and coordination issues are more important in preventing disasters than the science of prediction alone. Despite the ongoing and serious threat of climate change, successful government efforts over the past few decades have added to a downward trend of deaths from flooding in China.

However, as government attention to environmental issues has gradually increased, so has government-led censorship of environmental activism. In a recent Bloomberg profile, a Chinese environmental activist who goes by the moniker Nut Brother, or Brother Nut (坚果兄弟), described a narrowing space for protest and an increased level of police harassment. “The changes in the past decade mean we need to have projects that are more creative if we are determined [to] solve the environmental problems,” he said. One of his most recent projects took place in Huludao, Liaoning Province, where toxic fumes from factory pollution have fueled official scrutiny and public anger. This week, China Dialogue reported on Nut Brother’s creative project to raise awareness of the pollution in Huludao:

Over the weekend of 9–10 July, a public phone booth on a busy Beijing street, long underused in the era of smartphones, became a “hotline” for pollution victims in the city of Huludao, Liaoning province, to share their sufferings with total strangers.

It was set up by the artist and activist Nut Brother, well known for his creative tactics in exposing pollution problems. On his Weibo account, Nut Brother recruited members of the public to visit the phone booth, pick up the phone and listen to pollution victims deprived of other channels to air their grievances. Those conversations were recorded as part of a documentary project.

[…] Meanwhile, in Beijing, another “hotline” session at the phone booth ran for about 30 minutes on 16 July before being called off by authorities. [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/zhengzhou-flood-anniversary-censored-memorials-and-more-extreme-weather/