Earlier this month, the People’s Daily astonished millions of online readers in China by weighing in on a petty dispute between two celebrities. The article, which accused an actress of grabbing publicity by slandering her ex-boyfriend, was an odd change of character for the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. Speculation raged about what this aberration could mean.

There was just one problem — the article was a complete fake. And within hours, a new question loomed: How did this happen?

In fact, convincing as it was — with an apparently genuine People’s Daily Online URL, look and layout — the piece wasn’t written by People’s Daily at all. The next day, the media group weighed in to disavow the article, saying it was a “copycat” (套牌) that had cloned its news pages. It went on to say this was not an isolated incident, and voiced concern that the impersonation of official news outlets, apparently a rather widespread phenomenon, could “trigger a crisis of trust” in the country’s Party-run news outlets. 

In fact, the issue has little or nothing to do with trust — and everything to do with power. The lesson: monopolize access to speech and information, and those eager to be heard will find a way to borrow your privilege. 

To Fake It, Officially Make It

In this case, the actors doing the borrowing seem to have been “fan circles” (饭圈), or “fandoms,” a repeated source of trouble on China’s internet. These fan groups can become tribal in their devotion to the celebrity figures they have rallied around, and go to great lengths to defend them. In July 2020, after two fandom camps started a disruptive online war, the government really did step in, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) promising to stop fan circles “tearing each other apart.” 

This time, the trigger seems to have been a trivial matter of a celebrity couple splitting up, the woman alleging her partner had cheated on her multiple times. In a post on Weibo, the woman accused her partner’s fan circle of being behind the fake People’s Daily article, trying to get revenge for her accusations.  

When investigating these accusations, a reporter from The Beijing News (新京报), one of the country’s most-read commercial newspapers, unearthed a thriving underground industry where clients could pay for a clone of any website they wanted — and noted that 200,000 clones of Chinese websites were found in 2020 alone. 

As some of these pages are hosted on servers outside China, there is not much the authorities can do, apparently, to remove them. The reporter found multiple fake websites of official government platforms, including one based in Singapore posing as a Hubei government portal. The site (which is still active) looks similar enough to the real thing to fool people. 

In an official commentary, The Beijing News went on to say that websites of government institutions and official media “have become the hardest hit” by counterfeit websites, given their position of authority within China’s information flow. They don’t seem to be wrong. The CAC’s “Joint Rumor Refutation Platform” (联合辟谣平台) documented eight cases of netizens forging official government websites or documents to release false information in September, and five so far for October. 

Guiding Pains

In China’s news environment, the copycat phenomenon risks damaging a carefully curated system, official media say. “At worst, they undermine the credibility of authoritative institutions and disrupt the public opinion ecology,” explains The Beijing News, an outlet that, while commercial in outlook, is also directly under Beijing’s propaganda office. 

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has taken great pains to shape the country’s public opinion ecology so that it is the only authority for information (and, as in the case of the joint rumor refutation platform, gets to dictate what is and is not accurate information). The party also set the tone for how events are to be viewed — and how they are subsequently covered by domestic media. In the case of the stabbing of a Japanese child in Shenzhen this September, for example, state media waited until the Ministry of Foreign Affairs MFA) spokesperson had passed judgment on the incident — dismissing it, essentially, as having any systemic cause in government-fueled anti-Japanese sentiment — before directly parroting the statement. 

The Chinese government is known itself to peddle misinformation, or to allow it to thrive online, if it suits their domestic or geopolitical agenda. As official outlets are still considered a source of (at least official) truth by many Chinese, their words are an effective tool to sway public opinion — a textbook definition, in fact, of how the leadership has defined the media’s role since 1989. 

When Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespeople and official news outlets alleged in 2020 that Covid-19 had originated from the US-run Fort Detrick (in reaction to accusations Covid had originated from a lab in Wuhan), this was taken on faith as fact by many ordinary Chinese citizens. 

Given the increased reliance on official sources as the core of information flow in China, it only makes sense for netizens to tap into this source of authority — which has taken the place of genuine trust. How can netizens not resort to official copycats when this is the most surefire way of being taken seriously and having an impact? 

So long as the confusion of power and trust is endemic in China, with the CCP defined as the only possible source of truth, the problem of official copycatting will likely persist. 

For its part, the People’s Daily, the victim of the fraud in this latest instance, remains in self-denial about the fact that what it calls “trust” is actually power — and that this is the root of the problem. “Once this kind of trust crisis is there,” the outlet said ominously the day after the spoof went viral, “it will be difficult to go back, and there will be long-term negative impacts on the network ecology.”