A word of warning to all foreigners “telling China’s story well”: be careful not to tell your own country’s story well — at least, not in China. This is the cautionary tale that unfolded last week as Navina Heyden (海雯娜), a German influencer based in Shandong with 80,000 followers on both X and Weibo, published an article on Weibo discussing the partial decriminalization of marijuana in her home country.

Heyden explained that the policy, which took effect on April 1 and legalized recreational usage of cannabis by adults, aimed at reducing use by eradicating the black market. Countries without China’s historical sensitivities around drug use may think about the issue differently, she said, adding that, in her opinion, alcohol was more damaging to one’s health. 

Though she took pains to emphasize that she was not advocating a similar approach in China, Heyden was subsequently attacked by netizens who accused her of “promoting drugs”, with some clamoring for a police investigation.

In a post directed at the firestorm around Heyden’s article, but not mentioning the influencer by name, “Beijing Anti-Drug” (北京禁毒), an official account operated by the drug enforcement division of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, warned readers against misguided opinions on drug use. “Do not be misled by the practices of individual Western countries, or fall under the influence of drug subcultures in the West,” the post read. “And do not, irrespective of the national conditions, talk about the legalization of drug abuse, or the bizarre theory of drug legalization.”

Comments below the post mostly expressed outrage: “Our country’s attitude towards drugs is one of zero tolerance!” said one.

In a statement on April 10, the day after her original post, Heyden said she had carefully looked over the post with “journalists, editors, and police” before publishing, implying that no one had foreseen this degree of blowback.

While she did not exactly apologize for her remarks, Heyden did signal her readiness to leverage her influencer status for anti-drug messaging. “I [have] contacted some police officers . . . and expressed my willingness to participate in the production of anti-drug popularization videos, especially for the international student community and the foreigner community in China, to remind them to abide by Chinese laws,” she wrote.

Friend or Faux Pas?

To be the focus of accusations of negative foreign influence in China is a strange turn of fortune for Heyden, who since at least 2021 has frequently expressed opinions that align with the messaging of the Chinese Communist Party — for example, denying Taiwan’s right to self-determination and defending human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Although she has worked with state media outlets like the People’s Daily and CGTN, however, she claims to be neither “pro-Germany” nor “pro-China,” and even sued Die Welt in 2021 for publishing an article that said she was covertly spreading propaganda for the PRC. However, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK ran a report on her Twitter feed, which found evidence that her account was being boosted by inorganic traffic and retweets from PRC diplomats and Huawei bigwigs (several of whom just happened to retweet her at exactly the same time).

Heyden has built a career off providing a German perspective for Chinese readers. She writes a column for nationalist website Guancha (观察) commenting on German affairs, and has often been touted as a friend to China, with Beijing Daily (北京日报) saying she is “loved” by Chinese and foreigners alike, and a perfect template of what the Party-state asks of foreigners who “tell China’s story well.” Weibo labeled her a “German girl who stands up for China.” Heyden commented below asking Weibo not to label her account as such — but this has apparently been ignored. 

Attacks on Heyden are not what Beijing would like to see. They’ve taken great care to nurture foreign personalities willing to promote official viewpoints abroad. Former Global Times editor Hu Xijin argued when he weighed in on Weibo that Heyden’s stellar record of “defending China in the field of international public opinion” should earn her more tolerance, and that having her attacked from both sides would only make “Western public opinion applaud gleefully.”

When it comes to useful foreigners, however, “love” is far from unconditional.

Footage of a woman wailing on her knees before a memorial to a Song-dynasty official went viral on the Chinese internet last week. Despite popular demand for more information, a lack of any press follow-up has instead let rumors fill the void. The question of why she would be kneeling before the image of an official who lived almost a thousand years ago goes to the heart of present-day questions of corruption, malfeasance, and social justice. 

Bao Zheng (包拯), the historical figure at the heart of this mystery, who can also be referred to as Lord Bao (包公) or Justice Bao (包青天), was famed for his honesty and upright ways following his death in the 11th-century. Bao Qingtian (as he has come to be popularly known) served as magistrate for the Song capital in present-day Kaifeng, Henan province. Bao initiated judicial reforms that let petitioners lodge complaints against corrupt local administrators — and for this reason his name has become a byword for justice and good governance.

Some nine and half centuries later, the unknown woman appealing to Bao at his memorial temple in Kaifeng is believed to be a petitioner herself, eager to present some grievance to a higher official who can help her seek justice — and what higher official than a celestial one? 

But the highest appeal here may also be to the internet and social media. 

From the 1990s through the 2000s, as a new generation of media programs like CCTV’s “News Probe” (新闻调查) experimented with hard-hitting programming about current affairs, petitioners came to see media as a possible vehicle for justice — a new form of Justice Bao. The joke in media circles was that two lines would regularly snake outside the offices of CCTV, the national broadcaster. The first were petitioners bringing evidence of local malfeasance. The second were local officials hoping to press the network not to run damning investigative programs.

The attention our contemporary Kaifeng petitioner has since received on online social media platforms has already inspired her fellow petitioners to follow suit and go over the heads of all earthly authorities, filing their complaints directly to Justice Bao. One video shows a group prostate at the same spot. When news spread that the site had been closed for maintenance, it looked like authorities were desperate to prevent any more repeat demonstrations.

Official media have only carried news from the municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, clarifying that the woman was not an actress, as some netizens initially suspected, but likely a pilgrim crying merely because she was ”deeply moved” by the site. They also emphasized that the temple that had been closed was in fact another with the same name in a different city.

But despite heavy speculation about the woman from netizens, her identity remains unknown. One Weibo user known as “Judicial corruption fighter abc” (司法腐败斗士abc) claimed she was the mystery woman, and that grievance was against a court in northeastern Liaoning province that did not handle a legal case she was involved in properly. Earlier posts by the user, whose account has now been disabled, accused other provincial and municipal courts of corruption, so it’s also plausible this account was run by a whistle-blower using the event to amplify her cause.

We’ve written before in CMP about how stricter regulation of local media by provincial authorities means even the most trifling of incidents can become a black box, leaving rumor and misdirection to fill the void where verifiable facts should be. It means those trying to seek redress or publicize injustice at the grassroots have an even harder time getting the word out.

One of China’s most celebrated modern authors is in the firing line, and the ammunition is a hardline 2018 law on the protection of heroes and martyrs. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Mo Yan (莫言) has irked extreme nationalist bloggers on the internet, one of whom, writing under the account name “Mao Xinghuo Who Speaks the Truth” (说真话的毛星火), filed a court order late last month to remove Mo Yan’s books from circulation and force him to pay 1.5 billion RMB in damages to the Chinese people and “stop infringing on heroes and martyrs” in his fiction.

The blogger’s four-page indictment, submitted to the Beijing Procuratorate, meticulously lists Mo Yan’s supposed offenses, including portraying members of the Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War as sexually abusive, “beautifying” Japanese soldiers, insulting Mao Zedong, and saying that the Chinese people have “no truth and no common sense.”

“Such words and deeds have greatly hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” Mao Xinghuo solemnly claims. “As an upright and patriotic young man, I feel very angry. How does the country allow such behavior to exist?” The blogger has been trying to bring a case against Mo Yan for months, and has asked publishers not to work with him. Fellow nationalist bloggers rallied to the cause, pointing to the more sexually explicit parts of his oeuvre as pornographic.

The incident shows how the active efforts of China’s leadership in recent years to enforce nationalist sentiment around the sanitized history of the Party can backfire and turn on cultural figures who are seen as a source of national pride. 

Son of China

Since his Nobel win, Mo Yan has frequently been lauded and upheld by the government and the party-state media as a sign of China’s rising prestige in the world. Upon receiving news of the win in late 2012, Li Changchun (李长春), the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of ideology, sent a letter of congratulation to the semi-official China Writers Association hailing the news and calling it “a manifestation of the steady rise of our country’s comprehensive national power and international influence.”

The prize immediately transformed Mo’s life and legacy into a public resource for national pride, to the extent that one local official in the author’s hometown reportedly told Mo’s father: “Mo Yan is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house.” 

Mao Xinghuo’s attack on Mo Yan is not the first time the author has been criticized for his work. But as one commentator with the username “Princess Minmin” (敏敏郡主) noted on WeChat, this time felt like a “large-scale siege” by a younger generation of internet trolls. An informal poll on Weibo asking netizens if Mo Yan should be criminally prosecuted received over 8,000 affirmative votes.

The use of the country’s law on the protection of heroes and martyrs, introduced five years after his Nobel win, also adds a new twist. 

Red Hokum

Mo is just the latest creative threatened with legal action by Chinese citizens for supposedly insulting the nation’s martyrs. In 2013, historian Hong Zhenkuai was ordered by a Beijing court to issue a public apology for his factual deconstruction of the apocryphal story of the “Five Heroes of Langya Mountain” — a ripping yarn about five soldiers holding out against the might of the Japanese army in 1941 to buy their retreating comrades time, before hurling themselves to their deaths. The case was brought against Hong by the sons of two of the five men, lauded as communist heroes.

Such cases are now easier for citizens to bring to court. The Mao Xinghuo blogger seeks to prosecute Mo under the 2018 Protection of Heroes and Martyrs Law (英雄烈士保护法), urged for by the descendents of the Langya Mountain braves. There is also an amendment added to China’s Criminal Law in 2021 stating that “whoever insults, slanders or otherwise infringes upon the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs” can be imprisoned for up to three years. 

Xi Jinping has repeatedly urged the nation to fight “historical nihilism” (历史虚无主义), a catchall euphemism for any interpretation of the past that runs counter to the patriotic, CCP-approved version of events. Xi believes that the West is trying to use “historical nihilism” to undermine faith in the founding myths that underpin Chinese Communist Party rule, and has argued it contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Since 2021, these two laws have led to the arrest of a number of people, including a former investigative reporter for Economic Observer (经济观察报) who challenged the Chinese casualty numbers in a border skirmish with India earlier that year, and a former deputy editor for the finance and current affairs magazine Caijing (财经杂志) who commented on WeChat that few Chinese today have ever questioned the official justifications for China’s intervention in the Korean War.

But these laws also make it more likely for any acts framed as protecting Chinese “heroes” to receive serious attention, regardless of merit. In Mo Yan’s case, his accuser claims the court has not accepted his indictment against Mo Yan because he does not have the author’s address. 

But there also seem to be serious problems with Mao’s grasp of the facts. On page three of his indictment, for example, he lists comments made by the Chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee in 2012 when introducing Mo Yan, such as that the Chinese live in a “pigsty,” as something that Mo Yan should somehow be punished for. He neglects to mention Mo Yan’s own speeches were patriotic in tone — in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, Mo Yan claimed that if it weren’t for China’s “tremendous” development since reform and opening up, “I would not be a writer today.”

The case against Mo Yan might have languished in relative obscurity if not for former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin (胡锡进), who brought the case against Mo Yan to the attention of his 24 million followers by defending Mo. Mao Xinghuo successfully goaded Hu into a spat on the meaning of patriotism, and threatened to sue Hu as well. Hu has since posted a recording of Mo Yan at a public forum in 2013 praising Mao Zedong’s achievements and writing style — saying that “so-called ‘public intellectuals’” who criticize the former leader’s work are “ridiculous.”

That a Weibo celebrity like Hu Xijin felt it necessary to engage with a hitherto obscure blogger with just 219,000 followers could show a level of panic, as some netizens noted in comments under Hu’s posts. There are distinct echoes of the systems that underpinned the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution in this tale of a grassroots fanatic adopting the messaging of the central Party leadership to punish prominent intellectuals for their past work. In 1966, not even prominent writer Guo Moruo, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and author of toe-curling sycophantic odes to Mao, was safe from accusations over his pre-Communist “bourgeois” work. Hu was standing up not just for Mo Yan, but all Chinese public intellectuals.

This blogger seems not to have been taken seriously or to have gleaned a large following. But by making it easier to prosecute for slandering heroes and martyrs, China’s leadership has made witch-hunts against anyone who has discussed them more likely — even against one of their own. 

For some, attacks against cultural figures like Mo Yan are a sign of the spread of an intolerant anti-intellectualism in China. Responding last week to what some have called “the Mao Xinghuo phenomenon” (毛星火现象), Lao Dongyan (劳东燕), a professor at Tsinghua University School of Law, called such attacks “ignorant,” saying they showed that “an anti-intellectual culture has spread, reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge.” 

Given China’s own experiences with violent anti-intellectual convulsions such as the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution, Lao might have found examples much closer to home than Cambodia’s radical communist movement. But this is now very much beside the point — the professor’s post has already been deleted.

To the surprise of no one who understands the Chinese leadership’s obsessive control of ideas, news broke last week that a prestigious international book award was subject to censorship when held in China last October. File 770, a science fiction blog, revealed in a special report how the selection panel of the Hugo Awards in Chengdu had obeyed local laws and regulations, vetting the eligibility of finalists based on their stance on sensitive political issues. The blog also found evidence that Sichuan’s propaganda bureau had conducted “strict checks” on works at the convention.

For those paying closer attention, the red flags had flown at least six months before the awards were held, as rules published by Chengdu WorldCon said content considered for awards would only include works and individuals “that comply with local laws and regulations.” In China, local laws and regulations always abide by the political discipline of the Chinese Communist Party. Foreseeing trouble did not require a vivid imagination.

In media coverage outside China, the most obvious focus has been those writers excluded by Chengdu’s skewed process — including the likes of R.F. Kuang, Neil Gaiman, and Paul Weimer. But what about those writers who were boosted?

Plaudits and Put-Downs

The winner of 2023’s Best Novella category was the hitherto unknown Chinese author Hai Ya (海漄), whose quick read, The Space-Time Painter (時空畫師), revolves around a tough-as-nails cop who investigates spooky reports of a ghost in Beijing’s Palace Museum, known worldwide as the Forbidden City. The cop traces the spectral source to a real-life treasure of the museum — an ancient scroll painting by Song dynasty artist Wang Ximeng (王希孟), whose ghost is trying to make contact with contemporary China.

Hai Ya has said openly that the story came to him after watching a documentary series on China’s national treasures produced by the China Media Group, the media conglomerate directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department — a touch of background that has delighted state-run English-language media and prompted a wave of favorable coverage.

The author’s novella has not fared well, however, on Chinese rating sites, where readers have sometimes been scathing with their remarks. On WeRead (微信讀書), Tencent’s book-reading app, The Space-Time Painter scores a poor 16.4 percent. Meanwhile, on the film and publishing networking service Douban, the novella earns a lackluster 5.5 out of 10. Readers point to clunky writing and clichéd plot points, expressing disbelief that the work is a prize-winner. “Could it be that the award was forcibly given because the home turf is in China,” one user posted. “With so many better works than this one, how did they pick something so unappealing?”

In a commentary on the video site Bilibili, one online influencer said Hai Ya’s novella had the quality of a decent topical essay by a high school student. The work was not meant to satisfy Chinese readers, he said, but “to swipe an award from the English-speaking world.”

While there is no evidence that The Space-Time Painter was nudged by event hosts in Chengdu, this possibility cannot be ruled out. As the File 770 report points out, there was a lot of money riding on publishing and distribution deals being negotiated by Chinese publishing companies at the event. The prestigious international award would certainly drive a boost in sales, and drum up interest in the film rights.

As The Space-Time Painter is so far available only in Chinese, votes in its favor at the 2023 WorldCon would have come exclusively from Chinese members. Moreover, the novella’s path was substantially cleared by the exclusion early on of politically sensitive works. As one Chinese sci-fi reader who attended the conference has pointed out, membership in WorldCon was prohibitively expensive for many, and the voting process was abnormally opaque.

Prize-Winning Themes for the Party

It is also impossible to ignore the fact that the storyline of The Space-Time Painter, with its reference to the now politically popular theme of China’s deep cultural roots, would have endeared it to friends in high places.

Ever since the Republican era in China, science fiction has been treated as a vehicle for public education, and this tradition has continued since the early decades under CCP rule. Writers like Zheng Wenguang (鄭文光), who published the PRC’s first sci-fi novel, Flyto Centaurus, at the outset of the reform era in 1979, helped popularize science through works woven with patriotic purpose, giving young people a vision of what fantastic things a “modern” China could achieve under socialism.

The Party continues to take an interest in promoting the genre. In 2020, the China Film Administration published a list of measures to bolster Chinese sci-fi films, including tax relief, and preferential loans to promote studios, talent, and innovative scripts.

Hai Ya’s win may have been given additional impetus by the more recent intersection of political and cultural priorities in China. The newcomer’s tale of communication between a present-day cop and a prized Song dynasty painter echoes a speech Xi Jinping delivered to a study session of the Central Committee back in 2014, in which he urged cadres to adapt traditional Chinese culture to modern society and sensibilities. This way, said Xi, the Party could “bring the cultural relics located in the Forbidden City to life,” and create a new culture “transcending time and space.”

A “space-time painter” indeed. Seen in this light, the novella is a near-perfect reference to the political framing of culture that only in early October 2023, less than two weeks before the Hugo Awards Ceremony in Chengdu, was presented through a grand new buzzword that was splashed across the Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper: “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” (習近平文化思想). This followed a major conference on propaganda and ideology at which Xi urged officials at all levels, including a visiting delegation from Sichuan, that they should promote the “innovative development of China’s excellent traditional culture,” and thereby “improve the country’s cultural soft power.”

Sometimes science fiction can become political fact.

Since ChatGPT was unveiled to the world just over two years ago, prompting what some have called an “artificial intelligence revolution,” China has been playing catch-up. But when it comes to applying AI to super-fuel the media control and propaganda objectives of the government, both at home and overseas, China may be ahead of the game — even if the results so far are mixed.

For a closer look at China’s plans for AI-driven propaganda and messaging, we spent a bit of time with Zhongke Wenge (中科闻歌), a company touted in China Daily as having “established a panoramic international communication” system, integrating AI-based news gathering, content production, editing, and impact analysis. Zhongke Wenge is one of a growing number of companies in China offering AI-based communication services to answer the call of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Back in 2018, President Xi Jinping identified it as a “necessary” mission for the CCP “to develop artificial intelligence systems suitable for government services.” Two years later, a set of opinions from the Party’s Central Committee urged media specifically to use AI to improve the quality of their content, innovate new ways to tell the news, and integrate the Party’s messaging into both domestic and international outlets. Last year, CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily highlighted how AI can use big data to generate images, text, and in-depth analysis “in seconds,” and this month urged the development of “AI-aided translation software” to assist with outreach overseas.

Established by three researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chaired by a member of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhongke Wenge is turning this call into an enviable revenue stream. As of August 2023, it claimed total assets worth 1 billion RMB ($140 million), with an array of shareholders including state-owned funds and enterprises.

What exactly can Zhongke Wenge do, and what are its limitations?

Using AI to “Tell China’s Story Well”

The company says it offers “long-term services” to the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Public Security, CCTV, Xinhua, and People’s Daily. Chinese media have noted that it offers “technical services” such as “data analysis and modeling of countries along the Belt and Road” and has provided “minority language modeling” and “external publicity modeling” for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China Daily, and Hong Kong’s CCP-backed Ta Kung Wen Wei Media Group. It claims its tools to “assist content creation” have shortened production times at news companies by 15 percent, while its “assisted decision-making” tools allow platforms to gauge how their stories are being received, both at home and abroad.

Zhongke Wenge also claims its multi-lingual monitoring system caters to government and state media that face “difficulty [in] guiding international public opinion.” It does this by harvesting information from both domestic and international media, as well as prominent individuals, in 42 different languages. This allows the “timely warning of China-related public opinion” and recommendations on how to “tell China’s story well.”

People’s Daily has collaborated with Zhongke Wenge to create a “People’s Public Opinion Cloud” that the newspaper claims has been used by local police to help them quickly spot “sensitive data” and trace its origins, while provincial media have used it to spot news leads. Zhongke have also teamed up with Xinhua to create a “News Statistics Monitor” showing how often a certain article has been published domestically and abroad, how often it is liked on WeChat, and how many times the article was “commented on” online. Zhongke claims to have saved Xinhua’s Statistics Department 10 million RMB.

Gauging international opinion on China is a top priority for China’s propaganda apparatus, but never before have these been combined with big data on single online platforms, accessible to any official or editor in the country. Zhongke also offers a content creation suite for overseas audiences, giving AI-generated video scripts and filming directions from a single prompt and the click of a button.

On Zhongke Wenge’s content creation platform, we did just that. After we input a text prompt in Chinese to their “short video copywriter,” we got a full script about the electric car industry in the inland megacity Chongqing, complete with suggested camera shots. The site also offers AI anchors, who will read out (in a selection of different voices and with a variety of different gestures) whatever you type. China Media Project took the system for a test drive, producing this video in under 15 minutes:

Quantity Over Quality

One of Zhongke’s listed clients is iChongqing, part of the city’s international communications center (ICC). These centers, which respond to instructions issued by Xi Jinping in August 2018, are central to China’s latest efforts to restructure its external propaganda apparatus. According to our research at CMP, at least 20 ICCs have opened in various provinces and other jurisdictions in China since 2022. iChongqing’s AI anchors now front the outlet’s anti-US explainer videos on their app “Bridging News” (which, at the time of writing, has been downloaded over 100,000 times on Google Play).

Zhongke Wenge’s unsettling AI anchors are a testament to the difficulty of manufacturing creativity, innovation, and “lovable” messages by machine. Ultimately, its products are more useful in turning the propaganda mill up a notch, pumping up the sheer quantity of positive messaging, and in giving crucial feedback to create more targeted messaging that is more likely to win hearts and minds abroad.

And this is just one company. Separate investigations in January into video content in French, and in Chinese ahead of the Taiwanese elections found a trove of videos posted on Western social media that used AI-generated voices and anchors to spread pro-China and anti-US disinformation in a way designed to sway public opinion. At least 100 videos using AI-generated content appeared on YouTube about “The Secret History of Tsai Ying-wen” (蔡英文秘史), a 300-page book filled with disinformation about the Taiwanese president’s personal life. Some of these videos were being shared 100 times a minute.

While these investigations have not directly implicated Zhongke, its content-creation software does present a double threat: It is both highly accessible — freely available for any WeChat users to create and share videos — and difficult to trace, since videos do not include any markers. These features make it a valuable tool not just for state-level actors but also for individual internet users looking to smear China’s perceived enemies and further muddy the waters of online discourse, where the line between what is and is not real continues to dissolve.

State media have had a field day this month with the cover of the January 13 edition of The Economist, “China’s EV Onslaught,” which depicted an in-bound meteor shower of China’s latest electric cars, poised to strike the Earth. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), state media, and their affiliates on Twitter re-posted the image in quick succession as an example of the hypocrisy of how China is portrayed by Western media, comparing it to the magazine’s cover from 2013, which painted China as poising the globe on Armageddon as “The World’s Worst Polluter.”

The idea is that no matter what China does — pollute or invest in green energy — Western media inevitably find a way to attack the country. “The self-contradicting reports reflect a consistent narrative,” wrote the Chinese Consulate General in Sydney’s official account. “China is the bad guy.”

But not so fast.

Such posts entirely bypassed or omitted the content of the article, which argued that although the West fears Chinese expansion into electric vehicles (now making them the world’s largest car exporter), it should in fact “welcome them.”

The original tweet pointing out the contrasting covers came two days before state media, and apparently from outside the state media machine — from Sun Sibei, a PhD candidate at Macau University. Sun has made previous posts contrasting Western media reports or positions from experts over time to suggest hypocrisy in their stance on China. Sun has also co-written a paper on how Chinese diplomats use Twitter to push “well-structured narratives” about the country abroad as a “PR tool.” He has claimed that although state media “copied” his tweet, nonetheless The Economist’s “sensible commentary is obscured by sensational cover art and headlines, which is what most people see.”

Leaving aside pointless arguments about whether this meteor shower was meant to look awesome, apocalyptic, or both, it’s not the first time a sensational headline from international media has come across to the Chinese as biased, insulting, or racist. The Economist came under fire in June 2022 for a tweet from their official account that could be inferred to compare Chinese to pigs. A Wall Street Journal op-ed title from 2020 calling China “the real sick man of Asia” led to the first mass expulsion of Western journalists from China since the Mao years, and a statement of “regret” from the CEO of their parent company, Dow Jones.

However, whereas the above two examples became trending topics on the Chinese internet, this latest example has only been taken up by international accounts belonging to state media – the target audience is the West, not the supposedly insulted party. The tweets make no mention of what The Economist’s argument is, only the cover — resulting in the same oversimplification and hypocrisy Chinese state media accuses Western media of. This particular “well structured narrative” is designed to form doubts as to whether a well-respected Western periodical truly “understands China”. In 2013, Xi Jinping urged cadres to solve the problem of Western media “badmouthing” China by painting it as a “threat,” pointing out that “major Western media controls world public opinion” — correcting these myths in the international community will clear up “misunderstandings.”

Certainly, Western headline writers could walk more in step with the content of the articles on their platforms. But by judging a magazine by its cover, state media have only discredited a story that — had they quoted it instead — might have served the talking points of the Chinese government, arguing that Western countries, now gripped by fear of Chinese EV imports, should keep their markets open.

Last week in China, a state-run Chinese media outlet fell victim to the state’s own efforts to ramp up anti-Japanese sentiment. In response to a devastating earthquake in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, Hainan Satellite TV (海南衛視) host Xiao Chenghao (蕭程皓) posted a video that asked, “Has Retribution Arrived?” (報應來了？)

“For such a strong earthquake to strike Japan may seem really unforeseen,” said Xiao, immediately before suggesting the temblor was directly linked to Japan’s controversial dumping into the Pacific Ocean last August of treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant. “But for such a major natural disaster to occur on the first day of the new year . . . It seems there are certain actions that should be minimized. Nuclear wastewater should not be released into the sea.”

It was the latest in a pattern of schadenfreude that rears its ugly head whenever natural disaster strikes Japan. Anti-Japanese sentiment has been more pronounced in China since last year, when state media launched a disinformation campaign on the supposed environmental damage caused by Japan’s actions (deemed harmless by UN regulators).

Although many netizens expressed concern for the hundreds dead or missing after the magnitude-7.6 quake, the idea that they deserved their fate was widespread.

In Xiao’s case, however, his employer tried to take the high road. The broadcaster announced it was suspending Xiao for “inappropriate” behavior. This caused a furore online — many believed Xiao had a right to be vocal given Japan’s historic (and supposed current) crimes. “We have been bullied and insulted so much,” a commenter wrote, “what does it matter if we say that retribution has arrived?” One netizen even reported the network’s director to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

Beijing’s official line has been more dignified, offering condolences to the victims. Even nationalist firebrand Hu Xijin posted on Weibo that Xiao had caused “damage” to Hainan Satellite TV’s image. That said, Hu did not condemn anti-Japanese sentiment — he maintained that ordinary citizens were free to “applaud” the disaster if they wished, but urged public figures to “keep a distance.”

Other media opted to educate the public in a less subtle way. In a Weibo public opinion poll, where Toutiao asked the public for their thoughts on the suspension, the only options were various forms of agreement.

It’s possible giving netizens the option of expressing hatred for the Japanese could risk demonstrating how prevalent such sentiment is, or expose the outlet to accusations of stirring up such hatred.

With Xi Jinping calling on China’s state media to make the country appear more “lovable” (可愛) to the outside world, at least some realize that gloating over the deaths of innocent foreigners is not a good look.