2010-07-15

China provides outlets for declining social mood

In China turns netizen anger on Seoul, Peter Lee takes a detailed look at the Cheonan incident and then focuses on how Chinese netizens have been allowed to blast the South Koreans online.
The strategy would have the added benefit of using vociferous and intolerant nationalism to crowd out domestic criticism of Communist Party rule and its various shortcomings, which threaten to become a dominant theme on China's lively, massive, and indignant domestic Internet despite extensive monitoring and censorship operations and the Herculean efforts of paid sock puppets to dilute and redirect unsuitable threads.

There are increasing signs that the Chinese government prefers to repackage its own media operations as channels for expressions of useful popular feelings and unobtrusively guided image and issue management, and not just explicit platforms for official government and party positions.

A flagship for this new experiment appears to be People's Daily Online English edition. As it attempts to keep up with China's rambunctious local tabloids, People's Daily Online has made some questionable editorial choices recently, including pushing a story that the Taliban is training monkeys to attack American troops in Afghanistan with assault rifles. [4]

It has also allowed posts on its forums that serve to decouple the website from official foreign policy positions and turn it into an expression of the purported concerns and priorities of Chinese netizens.

China has been awash with posts, editorials and articles flaying the United States and South Korea for planning military exercises in the Yellow Sea. As part of that trend, People's Daily Online featured a forum post [5] including some photographs of a US aircraft carrier in flames, obviously faked but apparently also extremely gratifying to the hypernationalist audience.

In an indication of the convoluted path of content across the Chinese Internet, the People's Daily English-language post was an uncredited cut-and-paste of an EastSouthWestNorth (ESWN) post [6], itself a credited translation of a Chinese-language post at my1510.cn [7] that reposted (with a credit only to the author, Jia Qingsen) an opinion piece in Nanfang Daily [8]. The opinion piece glossed the sina.com micro-blog hoax-post that had been pulled - but not until after it had created a sensation on the Chinese Internet.

Commentary on the photos discussed the role of popular opinion, at least for an English-speaking audience:

When there is such a vigorous official opposition, it is no surprise that some Chinese netizen would make up the story that "an American aircraft carrier has been bombed". In a certain sense, this can be regarded as the interplay between the official and civilian sectors in response to the South Korea-American military exercise in the Yellow Sea.
Jia Qingsen at Nanfang Daily, while decrying the false rumor (and reproducing two of the best pictures), declared it "reflected the feelings of the netizens (I don't know if it could be elevated to the level of 'national will' or not) and is worthy of being savored and heeded."


Obviously, neither accuracy nor copyright will stand in the way of the Chinese media savoring, heeding and pushing a crowd-pleasing piece of xenophobia.

It should also be noted that the nation most vulnerable to attacks led by aggrieved netizens is not the United States, but South Korea. The Super Junior jihad in early June, before the current Yellow Sea crisis emerged, gives an idea of the latent energy of anti-Korean xenophobia on the Chinese web.
Similar focused incidents were allowed against Japan a few years ago, over the issue of Japanese tectbooks that omit references to WWII massacres.

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