Last month, a set of questionable illustrations included in primary school mathematics textbooks in China sparked a fierce debate online over quality control and curriculum standards. Most agreed that the illustrations, included in texts published by the People’s Education Press, were in poor taste. One image showed a schoolgirl with her underwear exposed; another a student being grabbed from behind.

But in a sign of how quickly tensions within Chinese society can lead to caustic speculation about foreign influence and infiltration, particularly in the midst of charged relations with the United States and the West, many Chinese saw the tell-tale signs of a foreign conspiracy, despite the fact that internal standards of political discipline within media and publishing in China are among the strictest in the world.

While such nationalistic readings of the affair were not broadly representative of Chinese public opinion, and did not appear directly in mainstream CCP media, they were influential enough to merit a cautionary comment from one of China’s most inveterately anti-Western commentators, former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin (胡锡进). In a post over the weekend, Hu welcomed an investigation announced by the Ministry of Education, but also indicated just how sensitive political nerves have become in China when he said he hoped that the investigation could “remain factual, and avoid the expansion of rectification [efforts].”

Using the highly loaded historical term “position,” or zhengdi (阵地) – suggesting ideological ground that must be held against the enemy – Hu said the errors were not an indication that “ideological positions have been lost, and educational positions taken over by hostile forces.” Instead, said Hu, the errors in were “likely to have been the result of management-level problems.” He let the cat out of the bag in terms of ultimate responsibility as he said: “It is important to recognize that the position of Chinese education is generally solid, and the entire publishing industry has long been under the leadership of the Party and in the hands of those who love the Party and love the nation.”

How did this odd affair evolve? And why did it prompt such an outpouring of nationalistic fury?

Artistic Standards and Infiltration

The controversy kicked off on May 25, as users on Chinese social media shared images from the mathematics textbooks in question. Discussions centered initially on aesthetic considerations: Were the images acceptable, or were they simply ugly?

One early post to Weibo that day noted the oddness of the illustrations and urged further investigation of the causes. “I took out my math textbooks and had a look, and I really hadn’t noticed before how the people’s eyes were less spirited than those of cats, dogs or monkeys,” they wrote. “This happens not just once or twice, but everywhere . . . In some the gazes are indifferent, in others the eyes rolling, or askant, not really looking at things or taking them in. The whole thing feels weird.”

“With so many children in the country using these texts, what is the reason for this?” the post asked. “This is a big deal, something that can’t just be passed over. There needs to be an investigation and explanation.”

Another post to Weibo at 10:28AM that day reflected generally on textbook illustrations in China, including images of the mathematics textbook illustrations that would soon be national news as well as others they felt were problematic. “The illustrations in new textbooks, whether for adults or for children, all have wide eye spacing, puffy eyes, and a puffy appearance, and mouths that are as puffy as those of dogs,” the post read. “Children are the future of our country, so what is the intention in encouraging such aesthetics in children?”

The post also bemoaned the fact that the images for professions such as doctors, lawyers and professors in children’s textbooks were often those of foreigners. “Do publishers not review these books?” they asked.

As the comments gathered, so did the outrage, and by May 26, the People’s Education Press images were becoming a full-blown national controversy. As many media would eventually note, including Hangzhou’s Metro Express (都市快报), the textbook illustrations controversy accounted for seven of the top 10 search results in China that day.

Just before 10AM on May 26, “Sichuan Observation” (四川观察), the official Weibo account of Sichuan Radio and Television (SCTV), the provincial government broadcaster, posted a video about the brewing controversy over the textbook illustrations, asking its eight million followers to weigh in with their views. Respondents expressed strong disapproval of the images, many saying that they affected the healthy development of children. “Textbook illustrations in the past were much better,” one wrote. “Now these children in the illustrations all look like they have intellectual disabilities. It’s ridiculous and leaves me speechless, and someone really needs to look into this. It distorts the aesthetics of children.”

Just minutes later, the SCTV video post was shared by the official account of the well-known magazine China News Weekly (中国新闻周刊), which has more than 60 million followers on Weibo. As users there commented on the images, speculations about a foreign conspiracy became more prevalent.  

Some users pointed out that children in the illustrations were wearing clothes sporting stars-and-stripes patterns reminiscent of the American flag. The focus on this and other such details prompted many to conclude that the images showed an adoration of American culture while looking down on more natively Chinese representations. “This is not a problem of artistic standards but a problem of ideology,” wrote one respondent. “The problem of ideological infiltration of education is really serious. Do you really not get this?”

Just after noon on May 26, the People’s Education Press issued a statement through its official Weibo account saying that it acknowledged the criticisms online, and that it was taking steps to review the illustrations in question and “further improve design quality.” But many internet users continued to reject the suggestion that this was about aesthetic standards at all.

“You make this out as about ‘artistic standards’? That really is making light of the serious!” read one furious comment on Weibo. “You bring shame to the word ‘people’ appearing in your name,” said another immediately after, vaguely invoking an ideological struggle behind the scenes.

Anger was also heaped on the illustrator responsible for the images.

Internet users had revealed quite quickly on May 25 that the images had been made by Beijing Wu Yong Design Studio (北京吴勇设计工作室), a group run by the graphic artist Wu Yong (吴勇), a graduate of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (later Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design). Wu had a varied design background that included book illustration. Many had pointed to a 2018 interview Wu had done with ZCOOL (站酷), a website for the designer community, that had included the mathematics illustrations among other work.

These biographical details, including many of Wu’s comments on design, were reported widely on May 26 by a range of media, including The Paper, which pulled out a kicker quote from Wu that came across as highly ironic given the outrage cresting online over the designer’s depiction of schoolchildren: “And so, it is among students that we most see the heart of the child. They have ideals in their hearts, pure passion and flickering sparks of wisdom. This is such a precious thing!”

These words from four years earlier contrasted starkly with the denunciations that continued online. “The ugliness of these pictures really conveys the chaotic intention behind, showing how vile the designer really is!” one user wrote in the comment space under a post by the Weibo account of Computer Weekly. “Is this Wu Yong not a traitorous dog?” asked another just below.

Hostile Conspiracies

On top of the growing list of supposedly foreign-inspired elements in the illustrations themselves, the details of Wu Yong’s background fueled conspiracies about foreign infiltration. In the ZCOOL interview, Wu had been identified as a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), a global club of graphic designers, and also as “artistic adviser” for the Beijing office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). These completely circumstantial details were taken as evidence of foreign collusion. Meanwhile, further reporting into Wu’s studio, such as a May 27 article from the Beijing Youth Daily revealing that it was not in fact registered as a commercial enterprise, further invited suspicion among the already suspicious.

On May 27, “Gathering Light Chronicle” (拾光纪事), a WeChat public account that frequently features anti-Western and anti-American content as well at attacks on more liberal media inside China, ran a provocative post called “The Infiltration of Textbook Illustrations by Hostile Forces, A Secret Conspiracy of Cultural Colonization,” which highlighted Wu Yong’s UNICEF connection. “The Wu Yong Design Studio that did the layout and illustration is backed as an artistic adviser by UNICEF, a foundation dedicated to promoting the LGBT movement among our country’s youth population,” the post read.

The post also compared Wu Yong’s illustrations in the mathematics text with more “normal” illustrations in a language text – the standard for normal apparently being those with more traditionally Chinese motifs. 

“I believe normal people would choose the drawing style on the left, because it is what we would call normal,” the post said. “No one likes the drawing style on the right because it is a weak-minded drawing style that deliberately scandalizes our Chinese children and deliberately promotes slave education to try to change our aesthetic standards by subtle means.”

Here, even before the question of ultimate foreign responsibility was posed, the reason for the existence of these hated textbook illustrations was implied. The term “slave education” (奴化教育) – used by the Chinese Communist Party throughout its past to criticize Japanese, American, British and other forms of colonialism – suggested that this was part of a process of systematic transformation and indoctrination by outsiders. “So, why is there such a big difference between the same version of the textbook?” the post continued. “There’s an answer to that, and it’s clearly intentional. This cannot be explained or washed away.”

The post then alleged that the textbook illustrations were “a trick of cultural colonization,” a clear-cut case of intrusion by “hostile forces” that had “infiltrated our education system and are recklessly changing our illustrations in an attempt to change our aesthetic standards.” For “Gathering Light Chronicle,” the core question was plain as day: “[How] did the hostile forces infiltrate our education system? How did such ghostly illustrations get so overtly into our textbooks?”

The post from “Gathering Light Chronicle” was shared by other sites, including the leftist website Utopia (乌有之乡). And there were similar posts from other accounts, including this May 27 post that waxed nostalgic about the textbooks of China’s past, adding a clear note of conspiracy. “Thinking back on these details, it’s like returning to our childhood, when illustrators had a positive outlook, did not receive funding from overseas NGOs, and apparently only tried to make the characters as simple and beautiful as possible.”

Mitigating Contexts

But much of the nationalist sentiment flaring up against the People’s Education Press illustrations concealed a very basic question. How could such apparently flagrant lapses in textbook illustration quality happen at a state-owned publisher? And how had this issue escaped notice for more than a decade, these very textbooks lingering in the homes of millions of Chinese families?

In a May 27 commentary on the incident through its social media accounts, the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper said that the design and writing of learning materials required “a fierce sense of responsibility and mission, strictly upholding a correct political direction and value orientation.” As many official news outlets noted, including Jimu News, a new media channel run by the provincial Hubei Daily, book publications in China must go through a strict review process that includes three rounds of close examination and three further proof-readings. These are meant to address major problems not just in terms of content and structure, but also in political and ideological direction.

How could such political standards not be upheld in the first place – under a system that has always prioritized such controls?

One problem, according to an editor interviewed by Jimu News, is that the focus on political and ideological issues at the level of the text means that images and illustrations are often neglected. “Pictures are generally drawn by illustrators, and this does not fall within the purview of reviews and controls,” the editor said.

In fact, illustrations may even be added to a book outside the review process altogether, meaning that they completely avoid this cycle of three reviews and three proofreads. “That’s why it’s easy to make mistakes,” said the editor. “I believe this incident will become the focus of training for publishers for related censorship and reviews from here on out.”

Some Chinese commenting on social media, including a number of artists and graphic designers, advanced other arguments that provided some context for why poor-quality design might happen, including details about the publishing industry and the design profession. In a post on May 25, a Beijing-based computer graphic artist with more than three million followers on Weibo responded to the then developing controversy over textbook illustrations by suggesting that one key problem was that publishers had not kept pace in their budgeting over the past 20 years, as the cost of quality design work had grown.

This post angered many internet users, who felt that this was “mopping the floor” (洗地) – or making convenient excuses for the guilty.

On May 27, Shanghai’s Guancha Syndicate published a post in which Fu Luola (傅洛拉), an author with experience in education, gave a rather even-handed assessment of various factors that might have led to the publication of the illustrations in question, and to the controversy that exploded this year. While acknowledging some of the budget considerations noted in the earlier post by the Beijing-based computer graphic artist, Fu Luola agreed that illustrations in this case were substandard. “It was certainly unacceptable for Wu Yong’s studio to release works like this,” they wrote.

Fu suggested, however, that the decisions behind the case were probably far more basic that the conspiracies entertained by many internet users, including understandable personal and professional relationships between people at the publishing house and Beijing Wu Yong Design Studio: “But on the publisher’s side, it is likely that the first step in committing this mistake was simply that a member of the math textbook writing team happened to have connections to the studio and blindly believed in its name and its ‘artistic sensibility.’”

The author affirmed the “importance of public oversight” in the industry to avoid “problematic public opinion events.” But also at play, they said, was the larger social and political context that textbook publishers and reviewers could not have anticipated more than 10 years ago.

Specifically, the author suggested that changes in societal views about “insults to China” and the deterioration of China-US relations had contributed to the animus against the illustrations. “A second [issue] is that the standpoints of evaluation are also changing as concepts in society change. Between 2012 and 2013, when this set of textbooks was being reviewed, there had been no concentrated cases of ‘squinting’ and other ‘insults to China’ of the kind that have caused a lot of controversy in recent years.”

Buried amid the heaps of social media discussion about illustration quality, ugliness and treachery, this simple point was perhaps one of the most perceptive. A general surge in animosity towards the United States and the West in China — stemming from growing international tensions but fueled also by calls in the leadership and state-run media against criticism, containment and perceived threats to “cultural security” — was almost certainly one of the key changes in context adding shades of hostility to the recent textbook illustration controversy.

But all reason aside, this measured reading of the case was rejected by many commenting below the Guancha Syndicate post, who chose to understand the incident as a serious assault on the country.

“They have violated the publishing laws and criminal laws!” one user wrote erroneously. “It’s not a matter of self-correction anymore! These people are simply a fifth column planted in China by the West!”

When China Computerworld (计算机世界) was launched in 1980, the magazine was one of the most positive and exciting media developments China had experienced in a generation. The country’s first information technology (IT) related publication, its success was premised, as its publisher would later say, on “providing readers with practical information.”

It was a simple positioning – this prioritizing of the reader. But against the backdrop of two decades of Maoist sloganeering in the media, it was also a revolutionary shift. Chinese media were slowly entering a new period of experimentation and openness to the world in the early 1980s, and China Computerworld was at the forefront of these changes, an early trailblazer of a media commercialization trend that would not gain full momentum for another 10 years.

So when this pioneer of media commercialization in China’s reform period announced in April this year that it would be formally closing up shop, the news bookended four decades of print media development. It was the fizzling out of a magazine that had once played an instrumental role in the growth of China’s IT industry – spearheading a trend that in decades to come would be its undoing, as new digital media eclipsed traditional outlets.  

In a notice dated April 27, 2022, China Computerworld announced that it would immediately cease operations and enter into labor arbitration with staff members who claimed wages in arrears. The notice began by noting the extreme difficulties that had come in the past two and half years as a result of the pandemic, which had resulted in “continuous and serious losses.”

A Mass Media Extinction

But the uncomfortable fact was the China Computerworld was joining the long ranks of media that had either been folded into new digital operations – as Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post had been in 2016 with the founding of a fully digital venture ironically called The Paper in English –  or had failed to make the transition to digital.

January 2016 had brought the closure of the Morning Express (今日早报), a commercial paper under the official Zhejiang Daily, of Hangzhou’s Metropolitan Weekly (都市周报), of the Jiujiang Morning Post (九江晨报) and the Daily Commercial News (天天商报). The next year brought the closure of the Beijing Times (京华时报) and the Oriental Morning Post (东方早报), the latter a commercial paper remembered for having broken news of the poisoned milk scandal after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2018 there were countless closures, including of the Beijing Star Daily (北京娱乐信报), and of local commercial papers like the Xiangtan Evening News (湘潭晚报) in Hunan province. In 2019, the Beijing Morning Post (北京晨报), the Heilongjiang Morning Post (黑龙江晨报), Dalian’s New Commercial Post (新商报), and many others at the city and prefectural levels.

The global pandemic may have been the last chapter for some. But a mass extinction of print publications in China was already well underway by the time the virus was discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. Nearly all have been commercial newspapers, many launched in the late 1990s and 2000s as profitable spin-offs of Party-run newspapers across the country, at a time when print advertising was booming. By the 2010s, that market was already cratering, impacted by the rise of new digital platforms like Tencent’s WeChat.

In the 2020s, their former Party sponsors plod on, still supported with government funds, and still needed to conduct essential propaganda and “public opinion work.” But these commercial ventures, which in their own ways all took cues from the example first set by China Computerworld, are now confined to a fossil past in university libraries and digital archives.

Rare Species: The Sino-Foreign Media Joint Venture

Launched as a joint venture between the now dissolved Ministry of the Electronics Industry and the US-based International Data Group (IDG), China Computerworld was also the first foreign-invested media venture in China – a rarity looking back on more than four decades during which foreign dreams of media access to the country have been elusive.

During a trip to China in March 1980, IDG founder and chairman Patrick McGovern entered into discussions with the Fourth Ministry of the Machinery Industry, which would eventually be reorganized as the Ministry of the Electronics Industry, about the possibility of launching a Chinese-language edition of his IT related magazine. Computerworld‘s publications around the world were at that time all owned or controlled by IDG. But McGovern’s efforts to push for the same arrangement in China were quickly rebuffed. China, which had just embarked on its reform and opening path, refused to allow more than 50 percent foreign ownership in a joint venture. The two sides eventually agreed that China would hold 51 percent, the remaining 49 percent to be held by IDG.

Then, as now, media were a point of sensitivity for China’s leadership. The sense from the top, however, was the Computerworld would deal primarily with IT issues, and would eschew politics. Moreover, the information it would share with readers would be essential to the introduction of advanced computer technology from the West. IDG’s investment was greenlighted, and by the fall of 1980 China Computerworld had been approved by the government, becoming the country’s first industry-focused publication and its first foreign investment in the media. When China’s government later prohibited foreign investment in the news media, the magazine became the only official Sino-US joint-venture magazine – a historical first, and last.

Through the 1980s the magazine was an example to follow for journalists and publishers who hoped to break new ground. Even as the country’s international relations soured and its media grew bitter and insular in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, the magazine offered a crucial link with the outside. In April 1992, just weeks after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour,” which was to reinvigorate economic reforms (and bring a new commercial media renaissance), the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper noted China Computerworld as a bright spot of global engagement. The magazine’s “timely tracking of international [developments in] computer and high-tech,” the paper said, had made it “the most authoritative professional publication in our country’s computer industry.”

Profit and Professionalism

China Computerworld was sometimes also called the first “thick publication” (厚报) in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Unlike the Party-run dailies and weeklies of the 1980s (and even their commercial spin-offs of the 1990s), which might have anywhere from eight to 16 pages, the IT magazine could have at times up to 300 pages in a single issue, stuffed full not just of content but of advertising.

But China Computerworld could also get tough with the IT companies about which it reported, and its advertisers – even the powerful ones – were not always spared.

In January 2000, the magazine ran an eight-page story about Legend Computer, later to be renamed Lenovo, that detailed the early rift in the 1980s between computer engineer Ni Guangnan (倪光南) and Liu Chuanzhi (柳传志), then an official at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Called “The Painful Fracture” (痛苦的裂变), the lengthy investigative report revealed that Ni was in fact the founder of Legend, where Liu Chuanzhi had served as CEO (and identified himself as founder) since 1984. The China Computerworld report so infuriated Liu that Legend pulled nearly 20 million yuan in advertising – at the time the largest case of advertising withdrawn in China for critical reporting.

Ten years and a generation of technology later, the magazine infuriated another tech giant with a cover story called “Damned Tencent” (狗日的腾讯), which described Pony Ma’s Tencent as the internet’s public enemy, fueling bitter feuding within the industry and resorting to monopoly behavior. The feature story was brimful of bitter accusations from Tencent competitors. China Computerworld’s cover image was the iconic penguin symbolizing Tencent’s QQ service, but with three knives stabbing his plump cartoon body, drawing drops of bright red blood.

“This is Tencent, China’s top and the world’s number three internet company, a rare global full-service Internet company that does everything from instant messaging, portals, games, e-commerce, search and more. It is always quietly making preparations and appearing behind your back, popping out to stir up trouble at moments of opportunity, leaving its peers unsettled,” the story read.

The magazine then went for the jugular: “When the time is ripe, [Tencent] will ruthlessly seize its piece of the market, sometimes even acting like the Terminator to dominate the entire market.”

Tencent was understandably upset by the July 2010 cover story. But it received widespread support on the internet, and prompted China Computerworld to change its profile picture on Weibo to the same image of the bloody penguin. It was unusual feistiness for a publication majority owned by that time by the government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). But the magazine’s large base of readership with the internet industry, and among scholars and businesspeople, not to mention its enviable advertising revenue, meant that had more latitude in reporting about technology matters in China.

Falling Behind the Trends

Ultimately, though, it was Tencent that had the last laugh. Perhaps more than any other competitor in the past 10 years, the Chinese tech giant transformed the media landscape in ways that China Computerworld failed to anticipate.

From 2008 onwards, the development of new forms of internet communication, including Tencent’s powerful WeChat, launched in January 2011, would leave traditional media outlets in the dust. China Computerworld made a number of halting attempts at digital transformation, but these were ultimately unsuccessful. Wrote Shanghai’s Jiemian News, in what might be an apt epitaph for the magazine: “China Computerworld nurtured the growth of China’s IT industry, but its failure in the face of several internet transformations ultimately brought the publication down in front of its rivals.”

In recent weeks, many internet users, particularly those in the IT industry, have expressed their sadness at seeing the once-celebrated magazine suffer the same fate as so many print publications from the golden era of the commercial press in China.

A few have blamed the closure of local newsstands in recent years for circulation drops that have hit print media hard. “The wave of newsstand removals in the past few years was a devastating blow to these paper magazines,” read one recent comment under a months-old story on newsstand closures by the online publishing platform 36kr. “I would always grab a copy of China Computerworld from the newsstands after work, but now I don’t even know where I can find [such a newsstand] anymore.”

Others were more resigned to the irreversible trends transforming the media. “There is nothing we can do about it,” one user commented under a story at Sina.com on the closure of China Computerworld. “The era of print media has passed, and all of them will fall under the onslaught of online media.”

Stella Chen contributed research for this story.

In a meeting with local media on May 20, Sun Shaocheng (孙绍骋), the Party secretary of Inner Mongolia, emphasized that the news media are the mouthpieces of the Chinese Communist Party – and that they must “speak politics” and uphold “correct guidance of public opinion.”

But in a rare caution against the overuse of Party jargon and sloganeering, Sun also urged media to “change [their] style of writing” (改文风), achieving in practice the goal of “brevity, truth and novelty” (短, 实, 新). “The shorter the reports on my activities, the better,” Sun said. “Letting people know what was done is enough, then more space can be left for the people.”

“Speak the truth, and speak of real things that truly reflect the situation at the grassroots level,” Sun said. “Don’t bother saying those words that even you yourself do not believe.”

These remarks from Sun, who formerly served as deputy governor of Shandong province, are an interesting reflection of the challenges facing Party-state media as they try on the one hand to maintain loyalty to the CCP and to Xi Jinping – loyalty often signaled through dense official-speak – and on the other hand strive to remain relevant to increasingly savvy news consumers.

This is by no means a new issue. From the “news reform” (新闻改革) of the early 1980s, when media sought to throw off the “falsehood, bluster and emptiness” (假大空) of the press during the Cultural Revolution, to the commercialization drive of the 1990s and the “Three Closenesses” of the early 2000s, CCP leaders have sought to have their control and their development too — what could be called “bounded innovation.”

These innovations have always to a great extent been held back by the internal bureaucracy of the Party-led media, and by the imperative of public opinion controls. Officials, like Sun, have spoken periodically over the years about the need to simplify media reporting, or to cut down on dense and alienating rhetoric. But the inescapable fact is that news media in China are tethered like moons to the planet of Party-speak (提法) and its irresistible pull.

Just over a decade ago, veteran journalist Luo Changping (罗昌平), then deputy editor-in-chief of one of China’s most influential magazines, was a stand-out example of the best in Chinese journalism – a professional dedicated to the facts and to the hard-nosed techniques needed to ferret them out in a challenging environment. In November 2013, his work exposing official corruption earned him back-to-back international and domestic honors, first the “Integrity Award” from Transparency International, and later the China Hero Award from NetEase.

But the days are long gone when journalists in China can be openly lauded as heroes for asking hard questions about those in positions of power. On May 5, Luo Changping was sentenced to a seven-month prison term for “infringing the reputation and honor of national heroes and martyrs.” His punishment is a potent illustration of how profoundly values have shifted in Chinese media and society under the iron-fisted rule of Xi Jinping.

Luo’s sentencing comes almost exactly seven months after he was summoned by police on October 7, 2021, after making several posts to Weibo in which he questioned China’s role in the Korean War as depicted in a blockbuster propaganda film called The Battle at Lake Changjin (长津湖). Commissioned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, the film is a cloying war epic glorifying the deeds of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) at the outset of the Korean War in 1950, as they faced off against an American-led United Nations force near at the Chosin Reservoir, about 100 kilometers south of the current border of China and North Korea along the Yalu River.

The real facts behind what Americans call the Battle of Chosin Reservoir are more tragic than glorious. But even when fictionalized to the point of absurdity, the Party’s version of the truth is not to be questioned. In October last year the film was a core feature of official commemorations of the Party’s centennial, and by design it became a national craze, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. The miseries facing the People’s Volunteers during that bitter winter 72 years ago, as they waited in vain for the delivery of even basic winter uniforms, were uplifted as dazzling sacrifices for the communist cause. Chinese schoolchildren screening the film were given frozen potatoes to eat so that they could appreciate the toughness of the so-called “ice sculpture company” (冰雕连), the thousands of soldiers who eventually froze to death that winter. Videos of filmgoers eating frozen potatoes – even at the cost of lost teeth – proliferated on social media.

Addressing this wave of national foolishness, Luo did the unthinkable. In a post on October 6, 2021, he questioned the authenticity of the film’s treatment of history, even referring to the “ice sculpture company” as depicted in the film as the “foolish sculpture company” (沙雕连).

Luo’s clear intention with this remark was to highlight the plain stupidity of one scene in the film in particular, in which a detachment of American soldiers comes across Chinese volunteers literally frozen into their battlefront positions, snowflakes dusting faces set like wax museum sculptures. Soaring music plays as the camera sweeps across the line of dead soldiers still gripping their rifles, and we see the American general, Oliver P. Smith, visibly moved by the display. He salutes, and then says: “Fighting against men with such strong will like this, we were not ordained to win.”

For viewers not desensitized to China’s overwrought propaganda, this scene, like so many others in The Battle at Changjin Lake, is hyperbole so outlandish it might easily prompt laughter. From a purely creative standpoint, it hardly seems an unfairness to call the scene “foolish.” Is there really a better word? The temptation to humor, so at odds with the intended reverence, was duly noted by international critics. As Phil Hoad, reviewing the film for The Guardian, wrote: “It’s straight-up propaganda – almost comedically so at times.”

Puncturing the inflated mythologies surrounding the Battle of Changjin Lake, and their shameless mobilization to legitimize CCP power in the 21^st century, could be regarded as an act honoring the lives of the thousands of men who were asked to face bitter winter against a well-equipped enemy with only thin cotton uniforms and simple canvas shoes.

But in Xi Jinping’s China the lines are clear. Heroes are heroes. Martyrs are martyrs. The Party’s vision of history must be commemorated with a teary eye, and perhaps even a broken tooth. And the crime of “historical nihilism” must be eradicated with the tool of the law. Luo Changping’s questions came in the face of a law introduced in 2018 on the protection of heroes and martyrs that seeks to propagate the spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, and “stimulate strong spiritual power in achieving the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

After being summoned by police on October 7, the day after his allegedly defamatory remarks, Luo deleted his posts and issued a public apology through WeChat. The court decision notes this fact as a sign of contrition on Luo’s part, but also makes clear that the content had already by that point “been widely disseminated on the internet, triggering strong public outrage and having a deleterious social impact.”

A decade ago in China, questioning established truths was an act of heroism that merited recognition. It was possible, even in the face of Party controls on the press, for journalists to explore the secrets lurking in the Party’s fictionalized past, and to expose acts of corruption that had been plastered over with myth-making. A journalist like Luo Changping could proudly address young, aspiring journalists on the art of pursuing the facts, as he did in his November 2011 lecture at Beijing Foreign Studies University, titled “How Caijing Investigates.”

But by November 2013 the terrain for journalism had fundamentally changed. By the time Luo was honored with Transparency International’s “Integrity Award,” a chill had already swept through Chinese journalism. Ten months earlier, propaganda officials in Guangdong had effectively tamed Southern Weekly, long a vanguard of in-depth, factual reporting in a challenging political environment. April had brought a high-level Party directive with a shortlist of strict prohibitions that included “the West’s idea of journalism,” stressing that no challenge would be permitted to the notion that “the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.”

On November 27, 2013, the day after Luo received the China Hero Award from Netease, having been chosen by internet users for his reporting on official corruption, news came that he had been forcibly transferred from his senior position at Caijing for skirting censorship guidelines. In another act of heroism that month, he had posted his latest corruption scoop to social media. Facing strong pressure from the authorities, Luo quit journalism altogether the next year.

In the years since Luo Changping’s departure from journalism, the space has narrowed substantially for those small acts of heroism by which Chinese seek to hold officials to account. Heroism is an act of sacrifice frozen into the landscape of the Party’s past. In the present, meanwhile, the only acceptable act is obedience to the Party’s version of history, and to the narrative of national rejuvenation.

Mandating his public capitulation to falsehood, Luo Changping was ordered by the court in Hainan to issue a written apology through Sina.com, the Legal Daily and the People’s Liberation Army Daily. But perhaps most poignant for the past recipient of the China Hero Award was the demand he pay 80,000-yuan in “public interest damage compensation” to a memorial in Dandong, Liaoning province, the “hero city” along the Yalu River from which tens of thousands of volunteer fighters crossed into Korea more than 70 years ago.

These are chilling plot twists in a very real saga for China’s journalists. But for heroes like Luo Changping, the front has become bitterly cold.