Editor’s note for Tuesday, March 30, 2021

My thoughts today:

There have been two more incidents of anti-Asian violence in the U.S. caught on camera, circulating on the internet, and causing further concern amongst many of you, our readers. Here is our statement on the issue, with links to resources and relevant projects we are working on.

The nationalist newspaper and website Global Times is not representative of the Chinese government’s official position, but it offers good insights into the id of the Chinese Communist Party, and the thinking of a significant number of Chinese officials.

So it’s always worth following what it publishes. This week came a commentary (in Chinese) arguing that China needs to “actively defend” against threats to its stability both foreign and domestic coming from the internet and from Western media, and to make sure that the state controls public opinion “as a strategic task” and that the government is firmly in charge of the story that is told on the internet.

None of that is new. But this piece concluded with an interesting note:

[The party-state] should encourage young people who are thoughtful, are educated, and understand foreign languages ​​to speak up on foreign social media, so that they can become a vigorous new force in domestic and international public opinion wars.

Such young people are already speaking up. A few years ago, the investor Eric X. Li (李世默 Lǐ Shìmò) began an unofficial propaganda campaign that included TED talks and op-eds in prestigious American newspapers.

More recently, other Chinese voices who talk with less stridency are being noticed: Bloomberg profiled Chairman Rabbit 兔主席, the internet name of third-generation Red aristocrat Ren Yi 任意 and a sophisticated defender of Communist Party rule in Chinese, and more recently in English on Twitter.

The profile also mentions Wáng Zǐchén ( 王子辰), who writes, in his personal capacity, the English-language Pekingnology newsletter, where he explains, but does not usually explicitly defend, Chinese government thinking.

But China is not going to win any “international public opinion war” with Chinese diplomats who address heads of other countries as “running dogs,” and a Foreign Ministry growing more combative by the week as it struggles to explain to the world what Beijing is doing to the Uyghurs — read the latest in today’s daily press briefing in English or Chinese.

Our word of the day is domestic and international public opinion wars (国内和国际舆论战 guónèi hé guójì yúlùn zhàn).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief