Lingua Sinica Newsletter, 16 May
News, analysis, and commentary on Chinese-language media from the PRC and beyond.
Welcome back to Lingua Sinica.
From the CMP offices in Taipei, you can occasionally hear the whir of helicopters overhead as they practice for the grand, flag-carrying flyby at next Monday’s presidential inauguration.
It’s an exciting time, politically, but also a precarious one: no one is certain how China will react as Lai — a figure Beijing already reviles even more than his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen — takes office. Possibilities range from a “wolf warrior” style statement to even a major military exercise. Domestically, there are also disquieting signs that the opposition KMT is set to undermine the new president before he even governs, with legislators and party leaders declining to attend.
And this hasn’t been the only red-letter day for Taiwan-based journalists lately. Last week, the Human Rights Press Awards were hosted here for the first time. The ceremony was once a fixture in the Hong Kong media calendar, where it was hosted by the city’s Foreign Correspondents Club up until 2022, when the Club decided that the risk of “unintentionally” violating the national security law imposed by Beijing two years earlier was too great. After two years in limbo, they now have a new home thanks to the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club.
The symbolic importance of the passing of the baton from Hong Kong to Taiwan as the free speech redoubt of Asia was not lost on outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen, who took the time out of her last days in office to address the attendees, recounting the many accolades Taiwan has won international groups that measure press freedom and human rights. Less measured remarks by one of the nighty’s major sponsors, however, hinted at how Taiwan is still struggling to fit this new role as a media hub that is truly global rather than focused on cross-Strait rivalry.
But coming within a week of Hong Kong’s ban on protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” and the arrest of three in the UK — including a Hong Kong trade office official — for aggressively surveilling overseas activists, it would be hard not to appreciate just how drastically things have changed for media in our corner of the world over the past few years alone.
Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
CMP Managing Editor
SOURCE CODE
Parroting Partners
As Vladimir Putin visited Beijing today to hear Xi Jinping stress that China would "always be a good partner" of Russia, the CCP's official People's Daily ran a page-three commentary by Alexander V. Lomanov, a professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), that signaled conceptual convergence between China and Russia.
In its lede paragraph, Lomanov’s commentary gave lip service to two key CCP concepts: the notions of "true multilateralism" (真正的多边主义) and the "building of a community of shared destiny for mankind" (构建人类命运共同体) — the latter being a key concept promoted by Xi Jinping under his eponymous foreign policy banner, “Xi Jinping Diplomatic Thought” (习近平外交思想).
The concept of “true multilateralism,” first raised by Xi Jinping in 2018, differs markedly from multilateralism as understood in the UN context, describing in essence a form of “multi-bilateralism” in which, as our partner Decoding China writes, “interaction with other countries is based not on universally binding rules for international cooperation but on bilateral agreements.” “True multilateralism” appears four times in Lomanov’s commentary, alongside other CCP terms, including “Chinese-style modernization,” which the Russian professor calls “the correct choice in facing crisis and creating the future.”
For our take on a Chinese social media hubbub surrounding another Russian Alexander tied to Putin, see our Anti-Social List column lower down.
HOT TOPICS
“Take the Harbor, Not the People”
“Take the island, not the people” (留島不留人) is a common colloquialism in China used in popular discussions of the government’s claims to sovereignty over Taiwan, and possible annexation plans. Found on Chinese social media, but not in official discourse, it implies that Beijing wants Taiwan’s territory, for its strategic importance and symbolic value, but not the 23 million people who call it home — and who increasingly prize de facto independence and do not identify as Chinese.
Its Hong Kong equivalent, “take the harbor, not the people” (留港不留人), is less prevalent but it has reentered public discourse over the past couple of weeks with the recirculation of a 2020 op-ed in the pro-Beijing Oriental Daily newspaper. The piece isn’t exactly subtle. Even if two million pro-democracy Hongkongers flee the city, it argues — this being the estimated turnout for a single anti-government protest the year before — this “measly” number is nothing in a country of 1.4 billion. Let the “foreign slaves and traitors” go, it suggests: “those who stay will surely be patriots.”
The author’s tone is diabolical to the point of self-parody. Rapid depopulation will be good, the article says, because it will also shorten the waiting time for public housing and reduce pollution — long-festering issues that local authorities have been reluctant to tackle head-on. It even drops this line worthy of a comic book villain: “Don’t say you haven’t been warned! Central authorities are determined to take the harbor and not the people — the best is yet to come!”
Even if it reads more like a mad rant than a policy statement, the commentary encapsulates an official attitude that is hard to deny — one of disdain for residents who fail to toe the Party line in present-day Hong Kong. As commentators have suggested, the Oriental Daily piece may go down in history as the first instance during the ongoing national security crackdown when pro-Beijing voices felt so emboldened as to openly espouse a policy of “taking the harbor and not the people.”
REDLINES
Toxic Traffic
On May 11, the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), a CCP-affiliated professional association that ostensibly represents the media sector in the country, issued a commentary sternly criticizing official Party-state media accounts on social media for hyping and sensationalizing stories in a bid to generate traffic and “attract eyeballs.”
The commentary underscores the challenges involved as Party-state media seek to balance the drive for audience reach and impact in a crowded information space with their role as representatives and defenders of the Party’s “mainstream” path and ideology.
Under the CCP, the tightly controlled “mainstream media” are to lead the way in what the leadership calls “public opinion guidance” (舆论导向) — essentially, media control to preserve political stability. Party-state media have tended to sensationalize stories through their social media accounts, alleged the May 11 commentary, which was attributed to “Zhong Jiping” (钟记平), a homophonous pen name translating “ACJA commentary.”
For example, it said, they emphasized negative trends and reported celebrity gossip as “explosive” (轰炸式) news. It called traffic a “double-edged sword,” saying: “Traffic without attention to guidance can easily lead to distortions in conduct, the loss of orderly operation, and even create negative [social and political] impacts.”
Veiled Voices
Used since the 1990s, China’s evolving system of homophonous pennames like the ACJA’s “Zhong Jiping” is a way for official Party offices and government ministries to register their consensus views through the state-run press in a way, according to analysts David Gitter and Leah Fang, that “circumvent growing resistance to CCP propaganda by both the Chinese public and the ranks of the CCP itself.”
Early this week, another official pen name was used to sharply attack the United States for criticizing China's excess manufacturing capacity. On Monday, a commentary on page three of the CCP’s official People’s Daily was attributed to “Zhong Caiwen” (钟才文), a homophone that marks the piece as coming from the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission (中央财经委员会), a body within the CCP Central Committee that leads and supervises economic work. “Recently, certain US politicians have continued to exaggerate China’s so-called ‘excess capacity’ in new energy, and accusing China of exporting its excess capacity in new energy to the world,” the commentary began.
ANTI-SOCIAL LIST
A Cold Reception for “Putin’s Brain”
Aleksandr Dugin, the far-right political philosopher known to both Chinese and international media as “Putin’s brain,” recently opened accounts on Weibo and BiliBili to give Chinese netizens a “true picture of Russia.” But despite the rosy rhetoric around the two country’s “no-limits” friendship and Putin’s state visit to China this week, Dugin has received a frosty reception on Chinese social media platforms.
Once upon a time, Dugin was no friend to the PRC. In his 1997 book that is still required reading in Russian military academies, he wrote that China is a threat to Russia — and that Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria should be detached to serve as buffer states.
Dugin’s stance has apparently softened since he became a senior fellow at Fudan University’s China Institute in 2018. There he cozied up to China Institute head Zhang Weiwei (张维为), one of the key architects of the CCP’s current thinking on civilizational identities and soft power. He has written multiple op-eds and given interviews for the likes of nationalistic website Guancha (观察) and state-run broadcaster CGTN, echoing CCP arguments that“universal values” are a front for US hegemony, emphasizing theimportance of the Russia-China alliance, and arguing for thenecessity of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Hegemon Headspace
Dugin’s posts to Weibo and BiliBili follow the same line. He explains how, before Putin came along, Russia was a doomed country in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He asserts that Russia is now “an emerging superpower” and celebrates how China and Russia jointly oppose US hegemony. “I hope to have more opportunities for in-depth exchanges with my Chinese friends in the future,” he writes.
According to many of the comments on these posts, however, Dugin’s expressions of anti-American solidarity have not erased memories of past bitterness. Users have dredged up Dugin’s earlier stance on dismembering China, and have also surfaced past tensions between the two nations, like when Russia seized huge swathes of the Manchurian homeland from the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. Such historical fault lines are important to bear in mind as Putin visits Beijing this week to signal a “no limits” friendship.
GOING GLOBAL
China’s answer to national soft power challenges has become hyper-localized.
Within two days of one another, the cities of Ningbo in Zhejiang and Nanning in Guangxi both launched their own municipal International Communication Centers (国际传播中心), or ICCs.
Since at least 2020, multiple provincial-level ICCs have sprouted across China, harnessing their province’s official media outlets for what the CCP leadership hopes will super-fuel its push for more effective external propaganda — transmitting the Party’s good deeds to the world. Some of these provincial-level centers, like Sichuan’s, have launched platforms helping lower-tier cities and counties to meet the nationwide remit to tell their stories abroad.
Other cities, typically those with higher profiles and more local infrastructure, have launched their own ICCs. These include provincial capitals like Chengdu, Lanzhou, and Hangzhou, as well as manufacturing and industrial hubs like Yiwu and Ordos and sites of cultural significance like Dunhuang and origin points for Chinese diaspora like Quanzhou.
CMP has documented 21 city-level ICCs so far, with Shandong and Zhejiang boasting three each, but Guangxi in the lead with four:
And more are coming. According to an article this March from an official think tank, the task of international communication has become mandatory for government authorities and media organizations at every tier of the country, from top to bottom.
Media Friends in Hungary
During Chinese president Xi Jinping’s trip to Hungary last week, three of the PRC’s biggest state media outlets signed agreements to team up with just one company: the Hungarian Media Service Support and Asset Management Fund (MTVA).
The clunky name belies MTVA’s importance. It’s a state-owned institution responsible for the majority of Hungary’s free-to-air broadcasting, hosting the country’s national news agency and some of its biggest radio and TV stations. European media watchdogs have accused MTVA of serving as a platform for Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz, which have themselves been accused of corruption and hollowing out Hungary’s democracy to remain in power.
According to the agreement, the Fund’s outlets will exchange news bulletins with Xinhua, partner with the People’s Daily, and “deepen cooperation” with China Media Group (CMG). Their executive director was quoted in the People’s Daily about how closer media cooperation will build a bridge between their two countries’ peoples.
The two have been inching closer for some time. MTVA agreed to share economic information with Xinhua in 2019, to pair up on production processes with their “Chinese counterparts” in March 2023, and to sign a full-on cooperation agreement with CMG by October that year.
Exact details of cooperation agreements with Chinese state media are not usually disclosed, but evidence of the convergence was on full display. MTVA and CGTN anchorssmiled at each other across a video screen during a joint interview, with MTVAexpressing wonder at how well Xi’s visit was being reported in Chinese state media andinternational coverage, as well as enumerating the benefits that deeper ties with China will bring.
WORD GAMES
When Winning is Stealing
Seeing history rewritten in real-time can be a surreal experience. Especially when the history in question is just a few years old, and feels like it was barely yesterday.
That’s the current situation for Hong Kong residents who remember witnessing, voting in, and reporting on the territory’s local elections in 2019, which pro-democracy candidates won in a historic landslide — or stole, if we accept the latest narrative recast by state-linked media and pro-Beijing politicians in the city.
Silent Majority or Loud Minority?
As mass protests continued to roil the city in November 2019, the vote was seen as a referendum on the movement. Authorities had long maintained that a “silent majority” of upright, law-abiding citizens supported them, despite the millions of people marching on the streets.
Polling day should have been their time to shine, but instead, a record number of voters turned out to deliver the pro-democracy camp a landslide victory, sweeping all but one local council. About as soon as the results came in, efforts were underfoot to overturn them. Most councilors were disqualified or resigned en masse, while reforms were quickly drafted to ensure that “unpatriotic” individuals could never again stand — let alone win — an election in Hong Kong.
But that still leaves a problem: how should authorities reframe this historic defeat?
In the years since 2019, a few narratives have emerged. Pro-establishment figures have accused elected candidates of using the protests as a “smokescreen” to “sneak into” office, “politicizing” the election and “using voters’ emotions” to win. State-run outlets in the city, like the CCP-backed Wen Wei Po, have also laid the blame at the feet of unspecified “interference” from “Western powers.” Bauhinia Magazine, which has become a new voice for CCP theory in Hong Kong (see our March 8 newsletter) has even suggested that the high turnout rate in 2019 negated the election’s outcome.
But earlier this month, the state-run Ta Kung Pao newspaper turned over a new leaf in revising history when it casually suggested that democrats had not won the 2019 election but “stolen” it. The suggestion came from He Junzhi, vice-president of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies. Looking back, the same wording — “steal” (竊取) — seems to have first been used by Ta Kung Pao in March 2021, during the rollout of electoral changes to ensure the principle of "patriots ruling Hong Kong."
While use of the term is still far from ubiquitous, expect to see it dropped more often as the latest, official version of events justifying Hong Kong’s dwindling freedoms and democratic backsliding continues to crystallize. At a time when 47 pro-democracy politicians are being tried for conspiracy to commit subversion over their plan to win a legislative majority, this is precisely what one has to believe — that, for the opposition, winning an election is a criminal act.
QUOTE/UNQUOTE
INAUGURAL INFLUENCE
Taiwan’s next president, Lai Ching-te, is just days away from taking office. Ahead of his inauguration on May 20, reports have suggested that China is ramping up pressure to signal its displeasure with a third consecutive presidential victory for the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP), which seeks closer ties with democratic allies to shore up Taiwan’s autonomy.
For more, we spoke with Fang-Yu Chen (陳方隅), Chief Editor of US Taiwan Watch and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Taiwan’s Soochow University.
Lingua Sinica: One assessment analysts have had in recent days is that China has made increased efforts in the run-up to Taiwan's presidential inauguration to apply pressure through influence campaigns. Do you share this assessment? How do we see these influence campaigns generally taking shape?
Fang-Yu Chen: China has taken various measures against the Taiwanese government, including diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, military coercion, and information warfare. The frequency of these threats is increasing. For example, we see more and more fighter jets and warships around the Taiwan Strait, with some now regularly passing the median line.
Recently, there have been more and more "grey-zone activities," including the use of fishing boats to enter restricted waters around Taiwan's remote islands. We also see Chinese officials blame the ruling DPP all the time, especially on sovereignty issues and Taiwan's linkages to democratic alliances. Online, we observe a huge amount of cognitive warfare, as part of China's strategy of "public opinion warfare." They utilize social media to spread propaganda, positive stories about China, and negative stories about democratic countries.
LS: What are China's primary objectives with these campaigns?
FYC: The main purpose is to push Taiwanese public opinion toward policies favorable to China. China wants to induce demands from the people and make them pressure their government to compromise on sovereignty issues. It also aims to demonstrate the costs of not supporting closer ties to China.
Since 2016, the ruling DPP has refused to recognize China's claim to Taiwan, and there is no possibility that the incoming Lai Ching-te administration will turn back the clock to accommodate China. We see no signs that China will change its approach to Taiwan in the near future.
LS: How do you assess Taiwan's preparedness for influence attacks from China? In your view, what more could or should be done — either by the government or civil society in Taiwan — to ensure greater resilience?
FYC: The fundamental principle is to strengthen self-defense determinants and deter a potential armed conflict. The Taiwanese government should speed up the military reforms and try to mobilize people in the defense system, providing necessary training to all. It also needs to build up alliances with neighboring countries. Furthermore, Taiwan should carefully respond to hybrid warfare, including attacks on public opinion in the global and domestic context.
As for civil society, we see more and more training programs for civil defense and more research being done on China's influence. Overall, Taiwan needs to carry out more training, pursue more cooperation with allies, and take a whole-of-government approach to strengthen defenses.
LS: How vulnerable do you think Taiwanese media are to PRC influence, and what more should be done in these areas specifically to combat "public opinion warfare" from across the Strait?
FYC: I would say that Taiwan's media environment is very vulnerable to China's influence campaigns. We have seen that our media, whether it’s for more clicks or for ideological reasons, have already spread a lot of content that echoes official PRC views.
Some media, especially online, tend to publish first and fact-check later, which helps to spread misinformation. On social media, there are many Chinese operations like content farms, fake accounts, and groups that pass themselves off as local and nonpolitical but are in fact run by foreign administrators and are used to spread propaganda and political content.
We do not have the legal framework to regulate foreign funding for advertisements. We need to pass laws such as the Foreign Influence Transparency Act, which demands more information about funding from foreign governments and agencies. The government should cooperate with civil society to build up a robust ecosystem to defend against cognitive warfare.
TAIWANESE POLITICS GO VIRAL
The presidential election that Lai Ching-te won earlier this year was one like no other. It saw the rise of a new, third party that was propelled to popularity by social media, which defies traditional media’s split between the country’s two main political parties. Could this be the beginning of a new era for both Taiwanese media and politics?
To learn more, we also spoke with Dartmouth College scholar Herbert Chang, who recently co-authored a new journal article on “The 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election on social media: Identity, policy, and affective virality.”
Lingua Sinica: When we look at Taiwanese elections, we're used to viewing political divisions in terms of the Blue camp led by the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Green camp led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — and assuming that, come polling day, voters are going to cast their ballots on the China issue. But your research suggests this could be changing. What are the issues driving discussion and virality online?
Herbert Chang: I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily changing. However, China as an issue is so ubiquitous candidates need more ways to differentiate themselves, especially with more people favoring the status quo. In this election, discussion about the United States and technology generated the most online traction. These are all topics that are conditional on geopolitics.
As typical of elections, though, what generates the most virality is feel-good posts about one’s own party and bad posts about other candidates.
LS: This year's election saw the emergence and relative success of a new third party, former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je’s Taiwan People’s Party. What points of leverage in the national debate did they use to achieve this? Also, could you spell out what you mean by "positive and negative engagement with national identity"?
HC: One thing we find consistent with existing commentary is that Ko’s supporters focus on domestic policy issues. Only Ko’s posts that involve domestic policies — for example, housing and energy — generate significant increases in virality.
A novel thing we measure is what Ko avoids. Politicians can engage with Taiwanese identity at two levels: the group level and the self level. Group refers to references to Taiwan as a whole, whereas self refers to the individual, cultural level. We find that Ko’s supporters engage less with the group level and appeal at the national level. Ko elicits strong, negative reactions from Taiwanese identity groups whereas independent candidate Terry Gou elicits strong positive reactions from Republic of China groups.
So the flip side of Ko’s engagement with domestic issues is a certain distance from discussing in strong terms foreign affairs, compared to the KMT and DPP.
LS: After the Blue-White alliance fell apart, there was a lot of talk about the TPP getting “frozen out” (封殺) by traditional pan-Blue media, but it seems like they still remained relevant and highly talked about. Do you think this is due to their success at virality on social media?
HC: Most people receive some news from social media and more attention is shifting online. A good parallel might be how Donald Trump, as a novel candidate to the US Republican Party, bypassed the traditional media using Twitter in 2016. Given Ko’s more youthful supporters, he certainly could access them on platforms like TikTok – channels that provide him free media exposure.
Although we consider Facebook as “new media,” it may no longer be that new anymore for the youngest of voters.
LS: Domestic issues are coming to the fore in Taiwan at an interesting time, globally, when we're seeing foreign policy and geopolitics play a bigger role in places like the United States. Do you see this trend continuing or will geopolitics and Taiwan's place in the world remain critical and a divisive question?
HC: We have a survey that looks exactly at this! In general, Taiwan’s place in the role will still be the crucial issue to Taiwanese voters, though adjacent topics such as US-Taiwan relations may become more salient.
One challenge is that even though domestic issues are growing more important, sufficient differentiation amongst candidates is necessary for electoral impact. For instance, the policy stances on housing inequality were fairly similar across the candidates. It’s hard to fix. So these hard-to-fix issues will likely negatively impact the incumbent party, rather than a specific party. This is what we are seeing in survey results at the tail end of the Tsai Ing-wen administration.
LS: If the issue of Taiwanese vs Chinese identity is no longer the wedge issue it once was, how do we account for this? Is it because there's something approaching a consensus on ethnic/state identity, particularly among younger voters? For example, a coalescing around Taiwanese ethnic identity but a pragmatic bias toward accepting the ROC as a state identity.
HC: This is a great question. My sense is the salience of pragmatic bias depends on geopolitical events. In the 2020 Presidential election, Taiwanese identity played an important role due to the Hong Kong protests. Brian Hioe [New Bloom Magazine co-founder] and Wen Liu call this feeling a sense of “National Doom.” This time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict was what appeared in the news feed. In tandem, more people prefer the status quo instead of overt independence or unification.
In some sense, pragmatic bias operates opposite of national doom. In sum, Hong Kong led to high salience; Ukraine led to low salience. The importance of Taiwanese versus Chinese identity is sensitive to external geopolitical stimuli. In other words, the nationalistic discourse we are used to seeing will be modulated by conflicts elsewhere.
LS: Is it fair to say that Taiwan's relationship with the US has become more of an electoral issue than its relationship with China?
HC: With attitudes shifting toward maintaining the status quo, Taiwan’s relationship with the United States is one clear way for candidates to differentiate themselves. We see this clearly from the candidates this year. The DPP is perceived as supportive of closer ties to the US and skeptical toward China; the KMT traditionally advocates for deeper ties with China and bears skepticism toward the USA. Ko presents himself as a middle ground, with skepticism toward both.
We have a study coming out soon on US-skepticism misinformation, and one thing we observe is China’s turn to sharp power. We’re seeing a ton of misinformation attacking the US rather than trying to tell the China story well. So not only will it become more of an electoral issue, but a weakness that can be exploited by foreign actors.
SPOTLIGHT
“You use it first, mum!”
As China, like much of the world, was celebrating Mothers’ Day last week, these words spun up a storm online. They appeared as the advertising slogan for a new laundry detergent marketed by the brand Blue Moon. The selling point? An elegant, lightweight pump bottle design that means your aging mother won’t have to break her back when she loads the washing machine for you. It was about “expressing gratitude to mothers,” Blue Moon said.
But consumers and critics took it another way. They saw the image of a frail woman, apparently doing the family’s laundry unaided, as reinforcing outdated gender stereotypes. “Making ‘mother’ synonymous with ‘housekeeper’ and calling that ‘gratitude’ is simply outrageous,” said one commenter. Soon, the controversy made it into China Consumer Report (中国消费者报), a publication under the State Administration for Market Regulation, which expressed concern for “sensitive young women” who may be offended by the advert. On the other side, China Women's News (中国妇女报), the official publication of the All-China Women’s Federation, found fault with the ad: “Bundling the role of mothers together with household chores and calling this ‘gratitude’ is way off the mark,” said the publication. (For more on China Women’s News, see our recent interview with feminist pioneer and China Women’s News veteran Lü Pin.)
Initium Media (端媒體), a Singapore-based independent news outlet, also took the opportunity to ask a larger question: What does it mean to be a mother today?
In the piece, Hong Kong writer and doctor Muk Lam explores this question through her own personal journey and professional insights. She reflects on the enduring social pressures and expectations on women to sacrifice their careers and accept wage disparities in exchange for an image of motherhood that is often over-romanticized.
The article advocates for informed decision-making, reproductive autonomy, and the celebration of diverse motherhood experiences that transcend traditional stereotypes. It underscores the importance of empowering women to choose their own paths — whether that means embracing motherhood or not — and highlights the urgent need to challenge the societal norms that constrain women's choices and perpetuate inequality.
Read “On the Road to Motherhood, What Women Need is Not Praise but Advice and Support” in full here.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Hua Chunying’s Fraud-ian Slip
In recent years, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has gone on the media offensive with colorful and provocative remarks in press conferences that have the potential to seed viral content across both Chinese and international social media platforms. But the MFA’s tub-thumping style of speaking also runs the risk of turning back on the speaker — as the official Douyin account of a small county “media integration center” in Shandong province found out this month.
Dong’e Fusion Media (东阿融媒) is a fairly run-of-the-mill propaganda account that recycles CCP news, seeks to humanize the PLA, and posts saccharine banners declaring the love the CCP has for the people. On May 9, however, the account uploaded a video of an MFA press conference hosted by spokesperson Hua Chunying in 2020 that contained a potential bombshell of a verbal gaffe.
Hua, who has a penchant for provocation, often throwing in CCP phrases and common Chinese aphorisms, meant to say in her 2020 remarks that love for the Chinese people love for the CCP is a “universal,” or pǔbiàn (普遍), conviction. Instead, she mistakenly said that this conviction was pǔpiàn (普骗), or a “universal swindling” of the Chinese people.
For viewers at Dong’e Fusion Media, the surfacing of this four-year-old slip of the tongue offered an opportunity for venting frustration over a range of issues — from long work hours to low pay, and even a few veiled references to the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Many comments highlighted the hypocrisy and corruption in the leadership. The most-liked comment casually noted the elegance of Hua’s outfit: “That dress isn’t cheap,” it said.
The video was eventually removed from Douyin, although recommendations from the platform’s search algorithm suggest many netizens have been looking for it. At a time when most Chinese state media are pushing eagerly for more clicks and views on social media, it is likely a bitter pill for Dong’e Fusion Media that its most successful post is a lightning rod.
