Another sign of soaring xenophobia in China. A cartoon imagines foreigners as trash to be sorted. It invents their crimes against the virus response, mixes it with their malign motives in China, and fantasizes about committing violence against them. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BiOzO4snKit4…
In Hefei two weeks ago I was called 洋垃圾/foreign trash while quietly eating at a restaurant. These cartoons inflame already nasty sentiment. Below we have a guy who has been in China a long time, but secretly criticizes the country online.
It's depressing to see xenophobia and racism all over the world in response to the virus. China's brand of it harvests nationalism and broad suspicion towards foreigners, and then mixes it with fears over the virus. Here's a nasty one about a foreigner tricking Chinese women.
I really do wonder how much of the expat population will return to China after all this, given visas no longer work to get in. The xenophobia tends to subside over time. But this plays on a new ethno-nationalism/Han chauvinism that propaganda has been stoking in recent years.
A final cartoon of the worker kicking away the trash can. The xenophobia is ugly and revolting, and has been flourishing online in various forms. Not a ton of government effort to walk it back. Wonder how much they can walk back when it's all over.
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China's digital manhunt goes global: The final piece in our series on China's outbound propaganda and censorship shows how police use ever more sophisticated tech to find and silence those overseas. They target Chinese students and Chinese Americans alike. nytimes.com/2021/12/31/bus…
For a sense of what that looks like, here's a video of Chinese police harassing a Chinese student living in Australia. They summoned her father in China to the station, called her on his phone, and demanded she delete a Twitter account that mocked Xi Jinping.
One contractor who unmasks critics in the US for security authorities uses open-source investigation tools, databases leaked on the dark web, and other records, like voting and license registries. He has been assigned journalists and Chinese-American policy analysts.
All year we’ve been tracking what Chinese influence campaigns look like on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. A new remarkable document gives us an inside look at how it works: local governments buy global internet manipulation as a subscription service. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The bidding document from Shanghai police lays out with remarkable clarity what they want. The first order of business is fake accounts. They need a company that that can provide 100’s of accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Sometimes they need it quick.
Then they want a special set of accounts that are camouflaged as real people and have their own following. Aware of the bot purges on sites like Twitter, they demand the contractor be able to keep the account up for long periods of time.
In the Cold War there were useful idiots. In the internet era, we now have useful influencers. Check out our deep dive into a new crop of social media personalities that get major support from China to boost its image overseas. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The rise of the influencers dates back to the protests in Hong Kong, when China first began to more aggressively push its narratives on global social media. It has returned to them again and again, to defuse criticism over Xinjiang and the early spread of the coronavirus.
So what did we find? State media and local governments pay influencers to take trips around China. They also offer payment for content sharing. The influencers say they are creatively independent.
As Chinese state media worked to shift the narrative around Peng Shuai, they got help from a familiar resource: a big old bot network. We turned up 97 fake accounts amplifying and claiming to believe the creepy proof-of-life posts from state media: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Twitter took down the ones @nytimes and @propublica identified and likely 100s more. It says it's investigating. The accounts mostly pretended to believe Peng was safe and free. Some echoed state-media attacks against foreign media and governments that had expressed concern.
They were part of a broader network of 1,700 accounts we found that pushed other propaganda points, linking #StopAsianHate to articles critical of China and hitting out at usual targets like Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon. They posted mostly during China work hours:
China's Gilded Age is over: riding high off Covid-19 success, Xi Jinping is upending China's private sector. It's about control, to varying ends: guiding innovation, reducing the wealth gap, managing debt, sculpting culture, building self reliance: nytimes.com/2021/10/05/bus…
All of this has been long in coming, but the policies/casualties keep piling up. It's a huge story and there's been tons of great coverage, but the world seems just to be waking up to it, so here are some thoughts with links to good stories.
Why now? A Chinese professor said it's about Xi's popularity: "At this point, the public would support whatever the government does. So in terms of the reforms, it’s a very important window." The hit to capital markets shows the potential dissatisfaction:
To recap the past year: Beijing cut IPO of Ant Financial, suspended apps of Didi, fined Alibaba. Created new data and algo rules, but exempted gov't. Shut down tutoring sector. Banned foreign textbooks. Declared war on celebrity fandom. Cut kids to 3 hours of games per week.
Also...likely some ban of foreign IPOs. There are some interesting ideas in Beijing's regulations. Some sectors badly needed controls. But what is happening should unnerve all. Silly parts of private tech fund serious innovative parts. Foreign investment has been critical.
Not to mention this is happening as large state-backed monopolies go untouched. I do wonder if 2021 won't go down as the year everyone realized China's era of reform and opening up (and likely the economic successes that came with its embrace of private business) truly ended.