Why the Chinese Internet Is Cheering Russia’s Invasion
By Li Yuan, Feb. 27, 2022, NYT
If President Putin is looking for international support
and approval for his invasion of Ukraine, he can turn to
the Chinese internet.
Its users have called him “Putin the Great,” “the best
legacy of the former Soviet Union” and “the greatest
strategist of this century.” They have chastised Russians
who protested against the war, saying they had been
brainwashed by the US.
Putin’s speech on Thursday, which essentially portrayed the
conflict as one waged against the West, won loud cheers on
Chinese social media. Many people said they were moved to
tears. “If I were Russian, Putin would be my faith, my light,”
wrote @ jinyujiyiliangxiaokou, a user of the Twitter-like
platform Weibo.
As the world overwhelmingly condemns Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, the Chinese internet, for the most part, is pro-
Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.
Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a victim of the West’s political, ideological and military aggression has resonated deeply with
many on social media. It dovetails with China’s narrative that
the United States and its allies are afraid of China’s rise
and the alternative world order it could create.
For its part, the Chinese govt, Russia’s most powerful partner,
has been more circumspect. Officials have declined to call
Russia’s invasion an invasion, nor have they condemned it.
But they have not endorsed it, either.
Under Xi Jinping, China has taken a more confrontational
stance on foreign policy in recent years. Its diplomats, the
state media’s journalists and some of the govt’s most influential
advisers are far more hawkish than they used to be.
Together, they have helped to shape a generation of online
warriors who view the world as a zero-sum game between China
and the West, especially the US.
A translation of Putin’s speech on Thursday by a nationalistic
news site went viral, to say the least. The Weibo hashtag
# putin10000wordsspeechfulltext got 1.1 billion views within
24 hours.
“This is an exemplary speech of war mobilization,” said one
Weibo user, @ apjam.
“Why was I moved to tears by the speech?” wrote @ ASsicangyueliang. “Because this is also how they’ve been treating China.”
Mostly young, nationalistic online users like these, known as
“little pinks” in China, have taken their cue from the so-called
“wolf warrior” diplomats who seem to relish verbal battle with
journalists and their Western counterparts.
The day before Russia’s invasion, for instance, a Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said in a daily press briefing
that the United States was the “culprit” behind the tensions
over Ukraine.
“When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all
the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive
strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it
ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to
the wall?” asked the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying.
The next day, as Ms. Hua was peppered with questions about
whether China considered Russia’s “special military operation”
an invasion, she turned the briefing into a critique of the
United States. “You may go ask the U.S.: they started the fire
and fanned the flames,” she said. “How are they going to put out
the fire now?”
She bristled at the U.S. State Dept’s comment that China
should respect state sovereignty and territorial integrity,
a longstanding tenet of Chinese foreign policy.
“The U.S. is in no position to tell China off,” she said.
Then she mentioned the 3 journalists who were killed in NATO’s
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, a tragic
incident that prompted widespread anti-U.S. protests in China.
“NATO still owes the Chinese people a debt of blood,” she said.
That sentence became the top Weibo hashtag as Russia was bombing
Ukraine. The hashtag, created by the state-run People’s Daily
newspaper, has been viewed more than a billion times. In posts
below it, users called the United States a “warmonger” and a
“paper tiger.”
Other Weibo users were bemused. “If I only browsed Weibo,”
wrote the user @ ____26156, “I would have believed that it was
the United States that had invaded Ukraine.”
The strong pro-war sentiment online has shocked many Chinese.
Some WeChat users on my timeline warned that they would block
any Putin supporters. Many people shared articles about China’s
long, troubled history with its neighbor, including Russian
annexation of Chinese territory and a border conflict with the
Soviet Union in the late 60s.
One widely shared WeChat article was titled, “All those who
cheer for war are idiots,” plus an expletive. “The grand
narrative of nationalism and great-power chauvinism has
squeezed out their last bit of humanity,” the author wrote.
It was eventually deleted by WeChat for violating regulations.
The pro-Russia sentiment is in line with the two countries’
growing official solidarity, culminating in a joint statement
on Feb. 4, when Putin met with Xi in Beijing at the Winter Olympics.
The countries’ friendship has “no limits,” they declared.
Given that the leaders met just weeks before the invasion, it
would be understandable to conclude that China should have had
better knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans. But growing evidence
suggests that the echo chamber of China’s foreign policy
establishment might have misled not only the country’s internet
users, but its own officials.
My colleague Edward Wong reported that over a period of 3 months,
senior U.S. officials held meetings with their Chinese counterparts
and shared intelligence that detailed Russia’s troop buildup around
Ukraine. The Americans asked the Chinese officials to intervene
with the Russians and tell them not to invade.
The Chinese brushed the Americans off, saying that they did not
think an invasion was in the works. U.S. intelligence showed that
on one occasion, Beijing shared the Americans’ information with Moscow.
Recent speeches by some of China’s most influential advisers to
the government on international relations suggest that the
miscalculation may have been based on deep distrust of the US.
They saw it as a declining power that wanted to push for war with
false intelligence because it would benefit the US, financially
and strategically.
Jin Canrong, a professor at Renmin U. in Beijing, told the state
broadcaster China Central Television, or CCTV, on Feb. 20 that
the U.S. government had been talking about imminent war because
an unstable Europe would help Washington, as well as the country’s
financial and energy industries. After the war started, he admitted
to his 2.4 million Weibo followers that he was surprised.
Just before the invasion, Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan U. in
Shanghai, ridiculed the Biden admin’s predictions of war in a
52-minute video program. “Why did ‘Sleepy Joe’ use such poor-
quality intelligence on Ukraine and Russia?” he asked, using
Trump’s favorite nickname for Biden.
Earlier in the week, Mr. Shen had held a conference call about
the Ukraine crisis with a brokerage’s clients, titled, “A war
that would not be fought.”
When the fighting began, he, too, acknowledged to his Weibo
followers, who number 1.6 million, that he had been wrong.
Nationalistic emotions on social media were also sparked by
the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine. Unlike most embassies in Kyiv,
it didn’t urge its citizens to evacuate. Hours into the war, it
advised Chinese people to post the country’s red flag conspicuously
on their vehicles when traveling, indicating that it would provide
protection.
The state-owned People’s Daily, CCTV and many top government
agencies posted about that on Weibo. Many people used the
hashtag # theChineseredwillprotectyou, referring to the flag.
The idea echoed a movie, the 2017 Chinese blockbuster “Wolf
Warrior 2,” which ends with the hero taking fellow passengers
safely through a war zone in Africa as he holds a Chinese flag
high. “It’s Chinese,” an armed fighter says. “Hold your fire.”
Two days later, the embassy reversed course, urging Chinese
citizens not to display anything that would disclose their
identity. Chinese people living in Ukraine advised fellow
citizens not to make comments on social media that could
jeopardize their security.
As the war drags on, and especially if Beijing calibrates its
position in the face of an international backlash, the online
pro-Russia sentiment in China could ebb. In the meantime, other
internet users are getting impatient with the nationalists.
“Putin should enlist the Chinese little pinks and send them to
the frontline,” wrote the Weibo user @ xinshuiqingliu. “They’re
his die-hard fans and extremely brave fighters.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/business/china-russia-ukraine-invasion.html
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