A video posted on Chinese social media last year showed more than 100 Japanese children, apparently attending a primary school in Shanghai, gathered in a schoolyard, with Chinese subtitles showing two students leading the group yelling, “Shanghai is ours. Soon all of China will be ours too.”
The message has sparked fear and outrage in China, which was invaded by Japan during World War II, though the scene actually took place at a Japanese elementary school, and the students were not stoking hatred towards China but instead pledging fair play in what appeared to be a sporting event.
The video was not removed until after it had been viewed over 10 million times.
Xenophobic online content like the schoolyard video is currently a topic of discussion in China. Last week, a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese mother and her son in eastern China, and two weeks earlier, four visiting lecturers from a university in Iowa were stabbed in northeastern China. Some Chinese are questioning whether online rhetoric is playing a role in inciting real-world violence.
China has the world’s most sophisticated system for censoring the internet when necessary. The government has strict rules about what can and cannot be said about politics, the economy, society and the country’s leaders. Internet companies deploy armies of censors. Ordinary citizens censor themselves, knowing that what they post could get their social media accounts deleted or, worse, jailed.
But China’s internet is filled with hate speech against Japanese, Americans, Jews, Africans and Chinese critics of the government. Misinformation about Japan and the United States frequently ranks high on popular search lists and receives large numbers of reposts and likes.
What’s happening online is influenced by the growing nationalism that has been fostered in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has adopted a China-versus-the-world mentality. One of China’s responses to worsening tensions with rivals has been “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term that describes an ultranationalist and often adversarial approach to geopolitics.
Of course, online hate speech and disinformation are not unique to China. But the Chinese government runs a well-functioning public opinion machine that tolerates and even encourages this kind of messaging directed at certain countries and peoples. The authorities silence voices that try to correct falsehoods or debate with the sources. Internet companies profit from the online traffic that patriotic content generates, and social media influencers, grassroots people, and the most prominent intellectuals and writers of the Xi Jinping era reap the traffic and the revenue.
In February 2023, the derailment of a train loaded with toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, was widely reported in Chinese state media. Influencers spread a number of conspiracy theories. One person called the incident comparable to Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear disaster that left much of Ohio uninhabitable. The theory claimed that the US government and mainstream media were trying to cover it up, similar to what happened in Chernobyl.
Duan Lian, an online misinformation consultant with 1.7 million followers on the social media platform Weibo, posted an article about the tragedy in eastern Palestine attempting to separate fact from fiction. He urged the public not to be fooled by misinformation. The article was reposted more than 1,000 times and then deleted. His Weibo account was suspended for about three months after Weibo cited it as violating online regulations.
“The space for free speech is shrinking,” he said in an interview.
Duan has been active on Weibo since 2010 and is known for his insightful work in fighting misinformation.
“In the past, even if CCTV made serious mistakes in their reporting, we could still ridicule them,” he said, referring to state broadcaster China Central Television, “but now, even if they blatantly lie, there’s nothing we can do.”
Shanghai-based science blogger Liu Su was censored for trying to reveal the truth about a coordinated government campaign targeting Japan.
In 2023, China spread disinformation about the safety of the Japanese government’s decision to release radioactive treated water from the abandoned Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean, spreading fear and anger over what was known in China as “radioactive wastewater.”
After Liu wrote several articles disputing what he said, someone reported him to Shanghai’s internet regulator. Liu deleted the articles, posted an apology and promised to refrain from commenting on current affairs. His public WeChat social media accounts were then suspended for six months.
Liu is one of several Chinese intellectuals who have expressed concern about the trend of blaming foreigners online, and was in the headlines again earlier this year for another WeChat post he wrote in which he criticized the trend of praising traditional Chinese medicine while disparaging Western medicine.
“When the spine of a society is completely engulfed by the wave of nationalism, the future fate of the country can be predicted,” he wrote.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said the recent attacks on foreigners were isolated crimes, and local authorities have not shared much information. But there has been a flurry of comments on social media praising the attacks and their perpetrators.
Another driving force behind online hate is the popular genre of short dramas on the Chinese video platform Douyin, where influencers stage scenes in which Chinese people are humiliated by Japanese people and then beaten with martial arts moves, or sometimes entire scenes are dedicated to insulting and beating Japanese people.
Anti-American sentiment is also widespread.
“For more than two years since I’ve been here, I’ve been concerned by very aggressive efforts by the Chinese government to denigrate America and tell a distorted story about American society, American history and American policies,” U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. “This is happening every day on every network available to the government here, and anti-American sentiment is on the rise online.”
This is best illustrated by the swift and effective action taken by Chinese censors to remove content they don’t like.
In 2021, after tennis player Peng Shuai used her Weibo account to accuse a former national leader of sexual assault, censors removed the post and nearly all related posts within 20 minutes, known as a total ban.
A year ago, in an effort to stop Chinese people from talking about Xi, social media platforms censored 564 names that users had thought up to refer to him, including “Beijing man,” “tycoon” and “last emperor.” In 2016, regulators gave video platforms a database of more than 35,000 terms related to Xi that they wanted to monitor.
On Friday, Chinese citizens were informed that a 52-year-old woman named Hu Youping had died from her injuries after trying to stop an attack on a Japanese mother and child in eastern China. Many mourned her on social media. Some questioned whether the crime targeting Japanese people had anything to do with China’s nationalistic online environment.
In an unusual move, China’s largest internet platform issued a notice over the weekend to crack down on hate speech targeting Japanese people and inciting extreme nationalism. The questions are: How long will this last? How much can it change the ecosystem that has nurtured hatred? And what will happen when it becomes politically convenient for the government to demonize Japan and the United States again? The notice itself drew a number of malicious comments.
“In this grand drama that unfolds every day, some are directors, some are actors, some prepare the stage, and the rest are spectators,” wrote former journalist Peng Yuanwen, who called last week’s attacker a victim of nationalistic brainwashing. “The perpetrator has immersed himself so deeply in the drama that it is becoming difficult for him to break out,” Peng said.