In today’s Wumao Soup, we’ll tell you 15 things about the People’s Republic of China that you didn’t learn from TikTok, Douyin or DeepSeek.
1/20
This is our 2nd Wumao Soup. In the 1st one, we introduced how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) online propaganda works. Now we’ll cover some of the big topics they hide or lie about. Think of it as an antidote soup to their propaganda.
1 - Tiananmen Square massacre
Yes, it happened. Yes, it was a massacre. Vatniks, wumaos, and tankies in the West deny it, while China censors the slightest mention of it, even the date it happened.
3/20
2 - Mao Zedong’s democide
The founder of the People’s Republic of China is responsible for millions of deaths, yet he’s still revered by the regime, even more than Stalin by Putin. Imagine if Hitler were still celebrated in Germany and Hitlerism were its official ideology.
4/20
3 - Taiwan is a country
Taiwan was never part of the People’s Republic of China, so no, it can’t be “separatist” from it nor a “renegade province.” China wants to conquer it through a murderous process called “war”. But they’ll call you a warmonger if you’re against that.
5/20
Just like Russia, they deny their target’s legitimacy to justify invading them. Both invaders rant about their “historical mission” to expand their empire, and the same vatniks justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are already encouraging a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
6/20
4 - Free Tibet
As a precedent to China’s planned invasion of Taiwan: they invaded, conquered, and annexed Tibet 75 years ago. Notice how no one dares suggest a referendum on independence. Curious.
7/20
5 - Hong Kong
Hong Kong didn’t “choose stability.” Beijing broke its own treaty obligations, dismantled autonomy, jailed opposition figures, and criminalised dissent. Again, no referendum on self-determination.
8/20
6 - Uyghur genocide
The Chinese government has detained over a million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, imposing mass internment, forced labor, cultural and religious repression, and reproductive controls — textbook genocide.
9/20
7 - Ghost towns
Cities where no one lives, trains that no one rides, shopping malls where no one goes shopping. The “Chinese miracle” is debt-fuelled and a huge bubble of government-planned projects ignoring market demand and wasting resources.
10/20
8 - Ecocide
Caves filled with garbage. Overfishing the seas. Coal mining. CO₂ emissions. China is basically the biggest polluter in the world. But of course you’ll see cute videos of some isolated tiny green project somewhere.
9 - China just disappears people
Like in Russia, you can get rich or famous in China - as long as you support the regime. If not — public figures regularly “disappear” from public view. If they reappear at all, it’s to make public confessions or suddenly alter their views.
12/20
10 - Chinese police stations abroad
China is operating illegal overseas police stations to monitor, intimidate, and coerce Chinese nationals abroad, when threatening their families back home is not enough to silence them or force them to support the regime.
13/20
11 - COVID pandemic
When Chinese doctors tried to warn the world early, the authoritarian regime silenced them. And then switched to totalitarian controls once the virus had already spread.
14/20
12 - Authoritarian regime
China has no free elections and no independent courts. The hukou (household registration) is a de facto caste system, limiting where people can live, work, get healthcare, or send their kids to school.
15/20
The CCP regime even tries to control how many children people can have: first with the one-child policy, including the horrors of forced abortions, and now, predictably, with top-down orders in the other direction. Peak authoritarian central planning at work.
16/20
13 - Censorship: “the great firewall of China”
No free press, no freedom of speech, and like in Russia, Twitter is blocked in China. So basically, anyone tweeting to defend the regime that blocks normal people from tweeting: very suspicious, you can assume they’re a wumao.
17/20
14 - Imperialist hybrid aggression
China is bullying the Philippines and other countries with its fishing and military vessels, showing again its true colours.
Expect wumaos to somehow blame it on the US, or do their usual cringe comparisons and “whataboutism” about it.
18/20
15 - China is helping Russia
China is helping Russia invade Ukraine, and in return Russia could help China invade Taiwan. And it would be harder for the US to squeeze out of its obligations to defend Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan…
19/20
… than ignoring the Budapest Memorandum about Ukraine. It is also obvious that China is observing how the invasion goes in Ukraine and the world’s response to decide whether or not to invade Taiwan.
The only way to avoid World War 3 is therefore still to support Ukraine.
20/20
Chinese propaganda is less sophisticated than the Russian one, but… the amount of energy needed to refute wumao BS is still an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Fact-based research takes time and effort. Please support our work: vatniksoup.com/en/support-our…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
In today’s Vatnik Soup, made together with chef invité @Martinlaineolen, we discuss the extensive links between pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and how Western politicians reinforced these links.
1/23
While MAGA influencers remain silent on Epstein, pro-Kremlin propagandists and bot farms have expectedly launched an anti-Ukraine online operation, spreading fake narratives that connect Ukraine, its politicians, and the late sex trafficker.
2/23
But the emails paint a very different picture: in reality, Epstein had very close connections with Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and even built bridges and arranged meetings between MAGA figures and the Kremlin.
In this 5th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss something that sounds great in theory, but was completely turned upside-down by the tankie kind of vatnik: anti-imperialism. More consistent anti-imperialists call this the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. 1/5
“Anti-imperialism” was popularized by Lenin, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism. Ironically, the largest empire is now… Putin’s Russia, proud heir to both Lenin’s Soviet Union and to the Tsarist Empire. 2/5
Indeed, Russia is an empire that is still ruled by a de facto all-powerful Tsar, that still proudly flies its imperial flag, that still dreams of expanding its already huge territory through brutal conquest and colonization. 3/5
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal. 1/5
But when someone pulls some completely unrelated event, that happened to completely different people, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you know what you’re dealing with: a crass denial of the problem at hand, a bad-faith attempt to derail the topic. 2/5
Logic or chronology plays no role here, nor your opinion on these other topics. You could be the staunchest critic or supporter of these other actions thrown into the discussion, it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether these other things are true or not, or bad or not. 3/5
In this 3rd Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “ending” the war by surrendering or ceding territory.
Nearing four years of the 2-day “special military operation”, Russia is desperate to obtain through other means what they failed to conquer on the battlefield. 1/5
An endless army of vatniks therefore tries to demoralize both Ukrainians and supporters.
They sound noble: “anti-war” or concerned about the fate of Ukraine’s civilians, soldiers and cities. They claim that if we just stop fighting or helping, this horror would magically end. 2/5
What they never mention is… WHO started the war, WHO murders Ukrainians, WHO destroys Ukrainian cities: the same monsters they suggest Ukrainians be at the mercy of. Surrendering wouldn’t end the atrocities of the occupation, it would enable them. Surrendering wouldn’t even…3/5
In today’s Debunk of the Day (2), we’ll look at… nuclear blackmail. Vatniks love using Russia’s nuclear threats as a reason for surrendering or for not lifting a finger to help Ukraine: “see, they have nukes, we have to give them whatever they want”.
The argument is absurd: 1/5
Nuclear deterrence has been a reality for decades. Both the US and Russia have lost wars without resorting to nukes. We are not submitting to the whims of Pakistan or North Korea either. For vatniks, it’s just an insidious way of siding with Putin. 2/5
We can’t just give in to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, to the threats their officials and propagandists make five times a day to scare us into letting them have something they know perfectly well is not theirs, with no limit to their appetite. 3/5 vatniksoup.com/en/nuclear-thr…
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
1/20
Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
2/20
She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.