Government and private tech have teamed up to create the first AI-generated sci-fi short-video series in China. “Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse,” released on July 8, imagines a world far in the future where characters travel back to the Bronze Age Sanxingdui (三星堆) civilization of southern China. The series consists of 12 three-minute clips — generated with human guidance, edited through Douyin’s “Jimeng AI” (即梦AI) algorithm, and then released on their short video platform. The company has already reported views of over 20 million.

The series combines the slickness of Douyin tech with the media know-how of the State Council’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and the Bona Film Group, one of China’s biggest production companies and a subsidiary of the state-owned mega-conglomerate Poly Group. At a press briefing, Bona executives explained how the Jimeng algorithm had generated video through the input of original images, responding to prompts on camera angles and movement speeds.

This production process is a convergence of trends that the Chinese Communist Party has been pushing forward for years to modernize the media. To look at the show is to look at some of the first sprouts of the Party’s long-term goals for communication.

Modernizing Messages

Since at least the “Three Closenesses” of the early 2000s, the Party has been saying that it needs to make its messaging more attractive to the masses. President Xi Jinping’s focus on a combination of virality and control is just the latest iteration of this. “Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles,” he told the People’s Liberation Army Daily in 2015, “and that is where we find the focal point and end point of propaganda and ideology work.”

Partnerships between private media companies and stuffy state institutions have helped breathe life into ideology. In 2023, “The Knockout,” released by iQIYI, managed to be a successful and gripping TV show about the mundane topic of grassroots corruption, produced in partnership with the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission under the CCP Central Committee. “Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse” is not even the first time Douyin, Bona, and the NRTA have teamed up on a project — they did so back in 2021 and 2022 for the “Battle at Lake Changjin” franchise, a tub-thumping war epic about Chinese soldiers fighting in the Korean War.

Then there is the content of this recent collaboration. In 2013, Xi Jinping urged cadres to adapt traditional Chinese cultural relics to modern realities — indeed, he said they had to “come alive” and be “promoted in a way people love to hear and see.” Since then, there have been multiple attempts across state media to bring traditional Chinese culture to life for contemporary audiences.

As for Sanxingdui, the Party has promoted education about the site ever since excavations began in 2021, as it is seen as a counterpoint to claims that southern China was simply colonized by Han people from the north — the People’s Daily credits the site with proving that “Chinese civilization” (中華文明) did not spring merely from the banks of the Yellow River. State media even set the relics to pop music back in 2021 in an attempt to raise their public profile.

Combining traditional Chinese culture with a forward-looking genre like sci-fi is a good way to bring the former up-to-date. Since 2020, the China Film Administration (CFA) has offered generous subsidies for domestic sci-fi productions through a series of initiatives. Merging the old and the new worked for author Hai Ya (海漄), who was awarded — under dubious circumstances — the Hugo Award for best novella earlier this year. His story centered on a Beijing cop who time-slips back to the Song dynasty, learning about a famous traditional painter in the process.

Harnessing AI

There’s no better way to combine sci-fi and cutting-edge modernity than with the hot topic of AI-generated video. In China, AI is both a byword for modernity and an official policy, with the government having set a progressive AI strategy back in 2017, gunning for technological breakthroughs and world firsts. This year, Premier Li Qiang announced the launch of the “AI+” policy at the annual Two Sessions, intended to integrate AI into all of China’s industries — media included. 

Recently, others have also tried to position themselves at the intersection of traditional culture with AI and science fiction. Take China Media Group, for example, whose “China AI Festival” in Chengdu last May featured a trailer for a TV show about kungfu set in modern Shenzhen, giving prominent billing to the show’s AI-generated characters. At the same festival, Alibaba’s AI studio made the terracotta army literally come to life — as per Xi’s instructions — and break into a rap for state broadcaster CCTV.

“Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse” will likely please the Party with its exclusive release on Douyin, embodying a push within state media to prioritize distribution via social media. Since 2014, Xi has made it clear that traditional media must integrate with emerging media to better reach audiences. Buzzwords such as “mobile first” (移动优先) started appearing in the late 2010s when officials noticed that the most effective channel to communicate with people was through social media apps. Years later, this has only become more pronounced: by 2022, 99.8 percent of Chinese could access the internet through smartphones, compared with 32 percent by laptop.

State media launched a coordinated campaign in the late 2010s to migrate to social media platforms, and have adapted their messaging to suit the medium, releasing short videos with cutesy aesthetics.

AI-generated content, however, still has a long way to go. The director at Bona’s AI-generation center told reporters that although AI sped up some parts of production, the algorithm tended to hallucinate. It struggled to maintain consistency between shots and accurately depict the human body in motion. It also couldn’t generate high-quality special effects, which had to be added in post-production. “The most difficult thing in real-life shooting happens to be the easiest thing for artificial intelligence, and the most difficult thing for artificial intelligence happens to be the easiest thing in real-life shooting,” she said. 

But listing these problems is intended to help push the technology forward, not to dissuade others from using it. Since the very beginning of his leadership, Xi Jinping has been saying that traditional media and culture must be fused with modern technology. This is not just a futuristic show — it’s a taste of the media of tomorrow that the Party has been planning for at least a decade.

On July 2, the Beijing News kicked up nationwide health concerns in China by reporting that the state-run grain stockpiler Sinograin was using the same tanker trucks to transport both fuel and food oil products, forgoing any cleaning process between. Naturally, Chinese consumers were infuriated at the idea that their soybean oils and syrups might be sloshed together with coal-to-oil (CTL) products, which use coal as a raw material to produce oil and petrochemical products through chemical processing.

In a more active press system, Sinograin’s violations might have been revealed long ago. According to the report, the safety violations of the Sinograin oil truck fleet have long been an “open secret” in the industry — and it lays bare the fecklessness and ambiguity of national standards, which are treated as recommendations only, and routinely ignored by oil manufacturers and transporters.  

The Beijing News report, which was promoted on the front page and ran to over 5,000 words on the inside pages, closely documented the transport process of both chemical and food oils. Reporters, for example, trailed one tanker truck that loaded up with first-grade edible cooking oil in the city of Sanhe, in Hebei province, just three days after it had unloaded a cargo of coal-derived chemical oil at a port to the east — without any washing or sanitizing of the tank in between.

Investigative reports of this kind, many focusing on basic livelihood concerns such as food safety, were a common occurrence in China from the early 2000s through to around 2008, when Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post newspaper revealed that infant formula produced by China’s Sanlu Group was tainted with the chemical melamine, resulting in kidney damage and other serious health issues for infants. In the years that followed, Chinese authorities leaned more heavily on professional media in China, and investigative reporting became rarer and rarer.

Enterprising reports like that last week in the Beijing News, a state-run newspaper under Beijing municipal propaganda office that into the early 2010s was among the country’s more outspoken professional outlets, have become a true rarity in the Xi Jinping era, as the leadership has emphasized “positive propaganda” and the need for media to abide by “correct public opinion guidance.”

It goes without saying that such reports should be celebrated when they do appear. Below, we provide a partial translation.

_______________

An Investigation of Tanker Truck Transport Chaos in Unloading Coal Oil and Loading Edible Oil (罐车运输乱象调查卸完煤制油又装食用油)

Han Futao (韩福涛)

At 10 AM on May 21, an oil tanker truck slowly pulls in to an oil company in Yanjiao, [a town in central] Hebei province. One hour later, this tanker truck leaves the facility loaded with more than 30 tons of soybean oil.

What casual observers may not know is that just three days ago this tanker full of edible soybean oil transported a truckload of coal-to-oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao, [on Hebei’s coast]. After unloading, it was directly loaded with edible soybean oil for transportation, with no cleaning of the storage tank.

Like white oil moisturizer and liquid wax, coal-to-oil is a chemical liquid processed from coal. A tanker driver revealed to a reporter for the Beijing News that it is an open secret in the tanker transportation industry that food liquids and chemical liquids are mixed [during transport] without cleaning. 

From May this year, reporters for the Beijing News carried out an extensive follow-up investigation and found that the liquids transported by many general cargo tankers in China are not allotted fixed substances, but carry edible liquids such as syrup and soybean oil as well as chemical liquids such as coal-to-oil. In order to save expenses, many tankers do not clean the tank during the exchange and transportation process, and some cooking oil manufacturers do not strictly check whether the tank is clean according to regulations. As a result, edible oil is contaminated by residual chemical liquids.

In fact, there is no mandatory national standard at present for the transportation of edible oil in China. There is only a recommended Code for Bulk Transport of Edible Vegetable Oil, which mentions that special vehicles should be used for the transportation of edible vegetable oil in bulk. Because it is a recommended national standard, this means that it has limited binding force on manufacturers.

Professor Wang Xingguo (王兴国) of the School of Food Science and Technology told our reporters that although the current transportation norms are recommended national standards, they are also to a certain extent mandatory. “These are national standards,” he pointed out. “When formulating company standards, companies should rely on them. Generally, company standards need to be stricter than these standards, and certainly cannot be lower.” 

Mixed Tanker Transport

Once coal-to-oil is unloaded and before edible oils are loaded, no one checks to make sure the tank is clean.

Many tankers are piled up in the parking lot of the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Engineering Base, all waiting to load up and begin transport.

The base is located in the city of Lingwu, in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It has the largest coal-to-oil project in China. In the coal-oil factory area covering an area of thousands of mu, it is possible to “transform black coal into oil" and produce liquid wax, white oil and other downstream products through a series of complex processes involving high temperatures and high pressure. 

Public information shows that this "coal-to-oil" project belonging to Ningxia Coal Industry (宁夏煤业) has an annual production capacity of 4 million tons, ranking it first in the country. Most of the coal-to-oil output here is shipped to economically developed regions on the east coast, where it can be used as raw material for chemical products, or as fuel.

A tanker driver told our reporter that tankers [at the facility] are generally divided into dangerous goods tankers and general cargo tankers. Dangerous goods tankers transport products such as gasoline, diesel and other flammable and explosive liquids; as the term suggests, general cargo tankers transport more ordinary coal-to-oil products such as liquid wax and white oil that are not regarded as dangerous — meaning that they cannot be ignited by an open flame (white oil burns with the use of a special gas cooker). Those products not regarded as dangerous can be transported by ordinary transport tanker trucks.

In mid-May this year, at the Coal Oil Plant operated by Ningxia Coal, the reporter observed that both sides of the road were jammed with transport vehicles of all kinds. Many of these were transport, tankers for coal oil and general cargo. Their outsides displayed information such as their volume and the “medium” (介质) [they transport]. One tanker truck driver explained that “medium” generally refers to the substances that tanker trucks transport, and coal oil is regarded as a “common liquid.“

“Right now is the low season, and there are fewer trucks than usual,” said a driver resting in the parking lot. “During the peak season, the lot can accommodate well over a hundred trucks.“ The driver told reporters that most of these tankers are usually parked close by in the area, and once they receive a transport order, they enter the plant to queue up and load up with oil. After that, the coal oil is transported to its destination according to the buyer’s needs. “Many tankers rely on the coal oil plants year-round to make a living,“ he said.

On May 16, a tanker truck with the license plate number “Hebei E××65Z” departed from the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base [in Ningxia]. It arrived two days later in Qinhuangdao, Hebei, more than 1,000 kilometers away. The tanker truck drove into a small courtyard on the outskirts of town, and set out again just over an hour later. The tanker did not leave immediately, but stopped on a nearby roadside. The driver opened the door as he rested inside the cab of the vehicle, the journalist from the Beijing News observed.

Pretending to ask about how business was going, the reporter from the Beijing News spoke to the driver, who revealed that he had just transported a load of coal oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao and unloaded it in a small yard. “They use the oil her to burn and use as kitchen fuel,” he said. He told the reporter that his tanker is one in a fleet of trucks, and that he is a full-time driver. There are more than 10 such trucks in the fleet. After unloading of coal oil, he said, he had not yet received new transport orders, so he was parking on the side of the road to rest. “Generally, we need to get [new] dispatch orders close to where we unload, and we can’t head back with empty vehicles,” he said.

After this [conversation], the Beijing News reporter remained close to observe the movement of the tanker. On the afternoon of May 20, the tanker restarted, and that evening it drove to the town of Yanjiao, just outside the city of Sanhe, in western Hebei province. There it drove into a parking lot belonging to a grain and oil company. According to guards at the facility, the parking lot belongs to Sanhe Huifu Grain and Oil Group, (汇福粮油集团). The tanker truck parked outside the facility and prepared for the transport of edible cooking oil.

At around 10 AM on May 21, the tanker drove right into the production area of the Sanhe Huifu Grain and Oil Group. The tanker had not been cleaned since unloading its cargo of coal oil [from Ningxia on May 18]. One hour later, the tanker was loaded with product the plant. According to the transport document maintained by the factory gatekeeper, the product loaded into the tanker at the factory was first-grade soybean oil, and the net weight of the load was 31.86 tons.

Over the past two years, China’s central government has pressed provinces and cities to join the national push for more effective external propaganda, which it sees as essential to building the country’s international soft power. This week, it unveiled one of the first mechanisms to measure and track progress on this strategic goal — an annual ranking to measure the relative success of cities in building their image abroad. 

The “China Cities International Influence Report 2023” (中国城市国际传播影响力报告),  announced on Monday, claims to take a global perspective, “synthesizing media reports and internet user responses” to determine how effective various Chinese cities have been in communicating internationally. It was jointly created by a think-tank affiliated by the official China Daily newspaper, under the State Council, and the journalism and communication departments of both Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

In practice, researchers compiling the report seem to have taken a relatively basic measure of presence across traditional media, internet and social media. How often are cities mentioned in mainstream news reports outside China? How often do social media users mention a given city in comments, and how often are these liked or shared? The result is predictable. Beijing and Shanghai top the rankings, with Hangzhou and Shenzhen following in the third and fourth places. 

If there is any surprise in the report, it might be that Chongqing, China’s most populous city and a leader of inland commerce, just manages to make the Top Ten. The municipality has been one of the most active in pushing its image and that of China externally through its Chongqing International Communication Center (重庆国际传播中心), which operates the external communication platform iChongqing.

Chongqing was one of the earliest out of the gate with an “international communication center,” or ICC, putting out a call for foreign talent in February 2021 — months before Xi Jinping’s address to a collective session of the CCP Politburo that was meant to recalibrate China’s approach to external propaganda. 

China’s provincial and city-level international communication centers, or ICCs, are spearheading efforts promoted by the leadership since 2018 — but accelerating since the May 2021 Politburo session — to “innovate” foreign-directed propaganda under a new province-focused strategy. This allows the leadership to capitalize on the resources of powerful commercial media groups at the provincial level, and also to take advantage of richer story resources — as Xi Jinping has made “telling China’s story well” the heart of the country’s external push for propaganda and soft power. 

To date, provincial-level ICCs have been established in 26 provinces and municipalities across China, and the number of city-level ICCs is steadily rising. 

Your Partner, China Daily

The involvement of the China Daily in the new ranking procedure is another feature of how the ICC push has unfolded. As the Chinese government’s flagship external media outlet, published through the State Council Information Office — the same office as the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department — China Daily is a critical and well-funded layer of the country’s international communication array. It seems to be serving as a media partner for many newly-created ICCs, particularly at the city level, where there may be less media savvy, and fewer resources, to handle external communication. 

As the local Weifang Bohai International Communication Center (潍坊渤海国际传播中心) was launched late last month in Shandong province, China Daily took part in the launch ceremony as a partner, and signed a related framework agreement with the propaganda office of Weifang city. The media group has also signed such framework agreements for international communication with various official think-tanks and cultural institutions, suggesting that it is being tasked with directing broader external propaganda efforts — and is perhaps also capitalizing commercially on this policy from the top. 

In May last year, China Daily signed a similar agreement with the city of Wuhan and its Changjiang International Communication Center (CICC), which involved working closely with the city’s state-run Wuhan Media Group (武汉广播电视台), which administers the ICC under the local propaganda office, on various external promotion activities, including an account called “Wuhan Plus,” which has a special sub-domain on the China Daily website.

The social media brand currently has 2 million followers on Facebook,  more than 2,000 subscribers on YouTube, and more than 43,000 followers on Twitter. None of these accounts are labeled as being state-affiliated. 

As the annual city influence rankings were released this week, Wuhan came in right at the middle of the Top 10, at number five. The website of the city government quickly pounced on the news as a point that needed publicizing: "Number Five! Wuhan Makes the List of Internationally Influential Chinese Cities," read the enthusiastic headline.

More than five years ago, the top bosses at several US media companies, including the Associated Press (AP), were taken to task by lawmakers in Washington for partnerships with Chinese state media. They expressed concern that such cooperation might compromise the integrity of news and information outside of China as the country’s leadership pursued greater influence over global public opinion. 

For all the criticism such partnerships have caused, they show no signs of abating. This was evidenced last month as the president of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which sits directly under the country’s State Council, made a whirlwind tour from New York to London, meeting with top executives from AP, Reuters, and PA Media Group. 

The deal between Xinhua and AP, which involved cooperation on the distribution of photos, videos and press releases, was finalized with a handshake and the exchange of signed copies. It was covered enthusiastically by Xinhua. For AP, meanwhile, the story was apparently not news — no reporting was available. The same pattern held for Reuters and PA Media Group: enthusiastic coverage from Xinhua, silence from its partners. 

These deals with Xinhua should invite tougher questions about how international media companies with a stated commitment to professional standards should deal with Chinese media giants whose sole commitment — crystal clear in the country’s domestic political discourse— is to strengthen the global impact of Party-state propaganda. 

These partnerships are part of a broader effort by Xinhua to deepen its global media influence, curtailing criticism of the Chinese government and shaping international discourse that portrays the CCP in a positive light. And yet, year in and year out, Western media executives insist, even against the substance of their own statements, that this type of cooperation is just normal business. 

The Politics of the Purely Commercial

In 2019, as AP faced blowback from members of the US Senate for cooperation with Xinhua, the global news wire’s then-CEO, Gary Pruitt reassured the lawmakers that the cooperation was “purely commercial in nature,” and that “AP’s business relationship with Xinhua is completely separate and firewalled from its journalistic coverage of China.” 

 According to the arrangement, Pruitt said, Xinhua and AP had agreed only to an optional arrangement by which the partners could share five text stories and five photos per day. “In practice, AP uses a fraction of those photos and publishes none of the stories,” said Pruitt. As for regular meetings on cooperation, Pruitt said, these are “often a formality.” 

If it is true that AP “publishes none of the stories,” this raises the obvious question of why the arrangement is necessary or commercially viable at all. What is the point of such empty formalities? Read the fine print of Pruitt’s reassurance letter and the truth about the arrangement becomes clear. “Like most major news agencies,” said Pruitt, “AP has an agreement with state-run media in China that allows AP to operate inside the country.” 

And there we have the crux. AP’s relationship with Xinhua, in place since 1972, is not commercial at all — not really. Instead, it is the political foundation on which AP and other major news agencies, including Reuters, are able to operate in China. 

It should be obvious such conditionality has no place in any “purely commercial” arrangement. And as they obscure the true nature of the arrangement, news executives like Veerasingham and Pruitt do a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts. 

Again and again, international news executives lean into the act of the ostensibly commercial Xinhua deal. As Pruitt’s successor, Associated Press CEO Daisy Veerasingham, met with Xinhua President Fu Hua (傅华) last month, she spoke encouragingly of deepening cooperation. “We have seen many changes in the world,” she said, “but I think the relationship that the two organizations have forged together for so long is a really important indicator for how we can strengthen our relationship in the years ahead.”  

What does it mean to strengthen a relationship that AP has consistently minimized in the face of scrutiny, and that it does not even care to disclose?  

It bears emphasizing a simple, incontrovertible fact that no one in these instances is making clear — that Fu Hua is not merely a news agency executive but a senior Chinese official with a full ministerial rank, or zhengbuji (正部级), effectively giving him the same ranking as the country’s foreign minister. Fu was elevated three years ago to his current position from his previous role as a deputy minister of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Fu is not a champion of shared media values, or a partner in tackling the information challenges of the future. His agenda is that of China’s ruling CCP. Plain and simple. 

Meanwhile, this monstrous charade underwrites Xinhua’s credibility as a news agency as it seeks to work across the world, and even to place itself at the center of global media cooperation through a mechanism called the World Media Summit (WMS) — launched in 2009 under an explicit Central Committee directive and headquartered at Xinhua. 

As Xinhua signed its MOU last month with PA Media Group in London, it even reported that this cooperation was to happen “under the framework of the World Media Summit.” At CMP, we called it clearly on the WMS 15 years ago. It is time for news executives to catch up. 

Fortunately, there are signs of sobriety elsewhere in the international media. On Monday this week, Christoph Jumpelt, the head of the international relations unit at Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, said in a keynote speech here in Taipei that all independent news outlets across the world that uphold democratic values must cooperate to counter the growing threat of propaganda and censorship. “Together, we stand a far better chance of stemming the tide of propaganda,” he said. 

“What [authoritarian] regimes have in common is their fear of a well-informed public,” Jumpelt added. “This goes to show the power behind free media.”

International media like AP, Reuters and PA Media Group that claim to uphold professional values need to decide where they stand. If they insist on the charade of standing with Xinhua, shaking hands and signing on the dotted line, they should at least be forthcoming about what exactly it is they fear.

A violent knife attack against a Japanese woman and her child late last month in the city of Suzhou, the second such attack against foreigners in the space of several weeks, unleashed a torrent of xenophobic comments on Chinese social media — some even celebrating the attacker as a hero.

In what Chinese state media portrayed as a full-scale effort to grapple with the problem of violent xenophobia, several platforms issued statements last week condemning the “extreme nationalist” comments users had left under news stories about the Suzhou attack. They included Weibo, Tencent, Phoenix Media, Baidu, and others. But this moment of supposed reflection ignored the deeper roots of extreme nationalism in the public discourse of the Chinese party-state, which for years has nurtured a sense of nationalist outrage over the imagined slights of foreign countries, including Japan in the United States, and has turned the blind eye to extreme nationalist sentiment online. 

In its statement on June 29, Tencent said it would “strike out” against language that “incites confrontation between China and Japan and provokes ultra-nationalism.” In language that echoed frequent statements from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet control body, Phoenix Media pledged to combat extreme nationalism, distortion and exaggeration, and “maintain favorable and orderly information content, and create a clear and bright online environment.” 

State media feted these statements of apparent self-reflection and resolve, even as they chastised online platforms for their past lapses. The state-run Global Times, an outlet under the CCP’s official People’s Daily that for decades has made nationalism its primary selling point, condemned social media platforms that have “not only tolerated such content, but have even encouraged it” in a bid to boost views and revenue. 

In a post to Weibo, former Global Times editor-in-chief and public opinion leader Hu Xijin said he considered the release of the platform statements as proof of the government’s resolute stance on the issue. He dismissed the forces of extreme nationalism as fringe elements working against cool-headed international engagement: “Right now there are certain extreme voices online that work together to create momentum in public opinion, and this has bewitched some people at the grassroots.” 

Grassroots, or Political Roots? 

The suggestion by Hu Xijin and others that extreme nationalist voices are noisy exceptions shows an extreme lack of self awareness at the exact moment we are being told that China is in a moment of self-reflection. 

In its coverage of the platform statements, Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao (聯合早報) questioned the assertion from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) that the incident in Suzhou was “incidental.” The outlet noted that there has been an upsurge in anti-Japanese rumors on China’s internet since last year in particular, and these have followed a broader pattern of xenophobic nationalism. Specifically, rumors were rampant last year that Japanese schools in China are engaged in malicious activities against China’s national interests, including cultivating spies working for Japan.

Despite the talk of incidental nationalism, any regular user of Chinese social media might have the sense that it is awash with nationalist sentiment. And while much of this has no direct affiliation with the state, China’s government has constantly peddled nationalism from center stage. On June 28, as Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning responded to a question about the Suzhou incident, she held up the tragic death of Hu Youping (胡友平), the Chinese bus driver who died defending the Japanese woman and her child, as evidence of “the spirit of the Chinese people to act bravely and help others.” This remark set the tone for state media coverage that day. 

In the question immediately preceding the one about Suzhou, however, Mao Ning was asked by a broadcast reporter for state media what the government’s response was to the latest release of treated nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Mao responded with typical sternness on an issue that the Chinese government has played up endlessly to its public, despite findings from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and others that the release meets with international safety standards. “The Japanese side’s insistence on transferring the risk of nuclear contamination to the whole world through the discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea constitutes a blatant disregard for the health of all humankind,” said Mao. 

But the most important indication that China’s soul-searching over extreme nationalism is a momentary ripple in the ongoing pattern of state-driven nationalist sentiment comes in the continued coverage in the country’s state media. 

On June 30, the day after Tencent’s pledge to strike out against those “inciting confrontation between China and Japan (煽动中日对立), China’s flagship state broadcaster CCTV promoted a story on Weibo about Japan’s use of counterfeit currency to destabilize China’s economy ahead of its invasion in the 1930s. While the broadcast report was not particularly sensational in its approach, it drove forward a theme familiar to media consumers in China — that the indignities committed by Japan nearly a century ago are clear and present for all Chinese today. 

If any Chinese Weibo users were in doubt about what they should feel in response to the CCTV story, the post from CMG Global News (总台环球资讯) — an official account for the CCP’s China Media Group that has more than 48 million followers — was enough to get any user steaming. “Ironclad evidence!” it began, before adding a bright red angry face emoticon, and the hashtag: “Japan printed counterfeit banknotes during its invasion to devastate China’s economy!” 

Social media platforms may be feeling the heat over the recent outpouring of extreme nationalism. But the real lesson here is one of moral confusion — that nationalism is to be encouraged until it embarrasses the leadership.

“Our country is crumbling,” American influencer Jackson Hinkle says in a YouTube video from March. “The working class have terrible jobs. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government is spending hundreds of billions on wars in Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, everywhere else, and we’re letting all these 7 million illegal migrants come into our country in one year.”

Hinkle is attempting to explain the meaning of “MAGA Communism” to Zhang Weiwei (張維為) of Fudan University’s China Institute, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s favorite propagandists and public intellectuals. The ideology he espouses is a chimera born of two seemingly irreconcilable belief systems: the right-wing nationalism and nativism espoused by former US President Donald Trump — represented by his campaign slogan “Make American Great Again” — and the ostensibly far-left authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party.

“What we’re trying to do as MAGA communists,” Hinkle says, “is show the American youth that yes, communism is good… China is the embodiment of it and we should respect them and also try to work with them rather than go to war with them.”

The exchange, conducted at a forum in Moscow and uploaded to Zhang’s YouTube channel, was just one of several Hinkle joined in affiliation with the Guancha Syndicate (觀察者網), an online news portal and China Institute partner closely associated with China’s “new nationalist” movement. At Guancha’s invitation in February, Hinkle also joined a forum in Shanghai attended by some of the country’s top intellectuals.

This strange spectacle begs a simple question: Why is China platforming — indeed, treating as a renowned expert — a 24-year-old whose ideas more closely resemble edgy conspiracy-theory memes than any coherent ideological alternative?

The Horseshoe Game

On the face of it, this appears to be an incomprehensible and out-of-touch choice. But Hinkle’s meteoric rise on social media and his wide target audience seemingly offer authorities in Moscow and Beijing access to swathes of the US population they may have once found unreachable. He appeals both to the left — through his pro-Palestine stance, his identification as a “communist,” and his frequent denunciations of American imperialism — and also to the right, with his anti-“woke” nationalism peppered with invocations of the “deep state” and “globalist” conspiracy theories.

Over the past two years, this approach has earned Hinkle 2.6 million followers on X, plus a few in the Kremlin. More recently, PRC media have also begun to see him as royalty. He has appeared on panels and in interviews alongside well-known figures like Zhang, venture capitalist turned Guancha founder Eric X. Li (李世默), Russian government officials, and Aleksandr Dugin, the far-right political philosopher dubbed “Putin’s brain” by some foreign media.

In March, Hinkle announced, in English and simplified Chinese, that he was opening his own Weibo account. “I’ll be collaborating on content with some of China’s most influential academics & largest social media influencers. Looking forward to building this bridge between our people,” he wrote in a post sent from Moscow. There, his account has become a source for content on Israel-Palestine and US anti-war protests, both for ordinary users and media like RT News, the state-controlled international network funded by the Russian government.

With an election approaching and the US entrenched in two wars increasingly unpopular with the general public, Russia and China are using Hinkle and others like him to further discredit the US government and elicit sympathy for their own regimes.

From Zero to Hero

The fact that any government is assigning so much importance to Hinkle would have been inconceivable just a couple of years ago.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Hinkle was essentially a nobody. He began his foray into politics as a left-wing environmental activist who ran a failed 2019 campaign for city council in San Clemente, California. It’s unclear when or why, exactly, he took his radical turn, but as Russia’s war on Ukraine pressed on, Hinkle saw a steady rise in visibility for his pro-Putin views as he became part of a network of Western propagandists helping to legitimize Russia’s invasion to foreign audiences.

But his popularity truly took off on Elon Musk’s X thanks to his posts about Israel and Palestine. Since October 2023, Hinkle’s following has grown from about half a million followers to 2.6 million. His personal account has become akin to a content farm, where he mostly shares photos and videos of world leaders or injured Palestinians with short, emoji-laden captions like: “Israel is a TERRORIST STATE,” (31 million views) or “DROP A LIKE if you stand with IRAN!” (3.9 million views). He also engages regularly in homophobia, antisemitism, and denial of the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, and has circulated numerous false claims.

His virality and bizarre ideology have earned him interviews with right-wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, as well as former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who as suspended by the network in 2021, and left-wing British MP George Galloway, plus a recent profile in The New York Times. Hinkle has not disclosed how much money he makes from his posts, but the social data intelligence company Notus estimates he collects more than 4,000 dollars per month in advertising revenue.

Despite its profitability, MAGA communism “at its core is a working-class movement,” according to Hinkle. “It’s the first time we’ve had class consciousness reintroduced in the American political debate for decades.” Its target demographic is the “MAGA movement” itself: “working-class individuals that feel as though they’ve been screwed over by the establishment, whether it’s the warmongers, whether it’s big pharma, whether it’s Wall Street.”

At an event announcing a new think tank earlier this year, “MAGA communism” founder Haz Al-Din explained that America is failing because it is run by “a small cartel of American capitalists” who represent “foreign interests.” In a similar vein, Hinkle says that America should instead look to countries like China and Russia, which are “much nicer, much cleaner, much safer, have no homeless, [and] have better infrastructure” while at the same time “are not waging imperialist for-profit wars.” They discuss the dream of a “multipolar world” to replace American “unipolarity” with the help of financial institutions like BRICS. Though MAGA communists stress that they disagree with some of Trump’s positions, they have recently become bolder in advocating for him, claiming he is “the only candidate working to build global peace.”

Strange Bedfellows

Hinkle seems to be an extreme example of “tankie” leftism, referring to Marxist-Leninists who support acts of violent repression as long as they’re done by regimes in their camp. Others have called him a right-wing grifter exploiting the crisis in Gaza to spread misinformation and gain an online following. But what Hinkle echoes most familiarly, as Ben Lorber explains in a recent piece for Jewish Currents, is a long tradition of conservative nativism and “America First” nationalism gaining ground in pockets of the MAGA right among figures like Carlson, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon.

“There’s this sort of horseshoe dynamic going on where the further left or the further right you go, you sort of meet in the middle and the CCP seems to be comfortable dealing with either extremity as long as it aligns with the CCP’s view,” said Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

English-language media in the PRC, particularly the generously-funded CGTN, have been platforming foreign “tankie”-esque figures like Galloway, Calla Walsh, and Jeffrey Sachs with increasing regularity. Andy Boreham, a New Zealander who hosts the English-language show “Reports on China” with the Shanghai Daily, seems lately to be increasingly comfortable espousing far-right views, expressing sympathy for Trump and praising far-right commentator Andrew Tate for “helping China spread the word.” Boreham also recently released a 37-minute interview with Hinkle. In Europe, China has succeeded in courting both the far-right and far-left, with Hungary’s Viktor Orban emerging as a close ally.

“The Communist Party doesn’t have any political principles so they have no difficulty identifying with people identifying as far right or far left, even people as being avowedly anti-Chinese. They are extremely practical to a fault in thinking about who their collaborators might be,” says Eli Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University who studies labor and social movements in China.

The CCP’s ethnonationalist tendencies and positions on issues like immigration and gender make its positioning closer to that of Russia, Trump, and the Republican party than the American right may like to admit, “a big exception being how they approach this question about empire,” Friedman says. It was for those issues and his nationalistic, “strongman” style that Trump gained his share of Chinese fans during his presidency.

In China, Hinkle is so far being platformed only by the tight-knit circle of propagandists surrounding Zhang’s China Institute and Guancha, which is not directly controlled by the CCP but abides closely by government narratives. It is unclear who invited Hinkle to China and who is translating his posts into Chinese for Weibo, but The New York Times reported that he “visited Russia and China this year at the invitation of organizations close to the governments.”

“The combination of him having such an influential account on X and him already being sort of vetted in a way by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Dugin would help make any decision by this Guancha Syndicate group to invite him onto panels,” Ryan said.

Engagement is Everything

The appeal to more extreme voices in the Chinese media reflects its commercialization and a growing need for more engaging and controversial content, says Maria Repnikova, a researcher of China’s political communication at Georgia State University. In that way, it may be taking notes from Russia.

“[It’s] interesting to consider how much RT is a model, is an inspiration of an alternative propaganda platform that has been arguably more successful. This matrix might have influenced this approach as well in China,” she said.

Israel’s war on Gaza has become a useful tool in bolstering China’s existing narratives that position the US as a hypocritical warmonger in contrast with China as a peacemaker. And as a particularly contentious election approaches, Israel and Gaza are featuring prominently Chinese “Spamoflage” campaigns, according to findings by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). These efforts have pivoted from standard “Spamoflauge” activity — first detected in 2017 in connection to China’s Ministry of Public Security — toward a more explicitly right-wing, pro-Trump “MAGA” perspective, posting real and AI-generated photos and videos on “culture war” issues alongside pro-CCP narratives. Many of these accounts have shared posts from Jackson Hinkle and related influencers.

Researchers say these campaigns aim to amplify existing divisions rather than sway the election in either direction. Some such posts have garnered significant engagement. In one notable example, Alex Jones shared a post by what ISD identified as a Chinese “Spamoflauge” account on X claiming that “Biden and the CIA had sent a neo-Nazi leader to fight in Ukraine with the Azov Battalion,” a claim that originated on Russia’s RT News. However, that strategy appears to have been largely ineffective.

Hinkle’s ideology would appear to align well with that of Chinese nationalists, but he hasn’t achieved popularity within China. Many see straight through his grift: when the false claim that Hamas had killed an Israeli sniper circulated on Chinese social media last November, state-backed The Paper traced the claim to Hinkle and called him a “spreader of false information.” “I get high blood pressure just watching Jackson Hinkle for one minute,” one Weibo user commented. “I don’t know why every site is pushing him.”

His long-term resonance among Americans is up in the air, too. Some tech research companies have found that a significant number of his followers are likely fakes and that his posts have been amplified by networks of inauthentic accounts, some of which have previously posted unrelated content in Chinese. A look at his presence on other platforms reveals much smaller followings; after Hinkle was kicked off YouTube, he moved to Rumble, where view counts on his videos rarely surpass the tens of thousands. Offline, he remains relatively unknown.

His ideology, too, leaves much to be desired from both the left and the right. A left-leaning audience may be fooled by his seemingly pro-Palestine viral posts, but a deeper look into Hinkle’s ideology exposes no more solidarity for Palestinians than a strategic placement of a Palestinian flag during a speech in which he makes a clear reach to the right in focusing almost exclusively on Israel’s crimes against Christians. What CCP media attempt to portray as solidarity with Palestine, too, is negated by China’s close economic relationship with Israel and exchanges on “anti-terror” strategies and surveillance technology.

In the end, Hinkle seems to be a much dearer friend to the Kremlin, which has been far more successful in courting the American right. China seems as though it wants to replicate that success, but it has a problem: Russia, unlike China, does not pose a credible threat to American dominance. “For people on the right in America, it’s a question of the ordering of principles. For them, the preeminent principle is American dominance. Then they can’t compromise with China,” says Cornell’s Friedman.