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BRUSSELS (AP) â Chinaâs ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media.
Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as Chinaâs ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the partyâs most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China.
Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining a following of more than 119,000 as he transformed himself into an exemplar of Chinaâs new sharp-edged âwolf warriorâ diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie.
BRUSSELS (AP) â Chinaâs ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media.
Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as Chinaâs ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the partyâs most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China.
Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining a following of more than 119,000 as he transformed himself into an exemplar of Chinaâs new sharp-edged âwolf warriorâ diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie.
Buying Silence: The Price of Internet Censorship in China
Publication: China Brief Volume: 21 Issue: 1
Image: How China’s Censors View Themselves (Image source: Central CAC).
Introduction
On Monday, November 12, 2018, the recently-appointed director of China’s Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (CAC) Zhuang Rongwen (庄荣文) summoned senior executives from WeChat and Sina Weibo for a “discussion” (Central CAC, November 16, 2018). While there is no transcript of the meeting available to the public, one thing is certain: It did not go well. For months, Zhuang had been telegraphing his discontent with the state of censorship in China and specifically, the role that social media giants had played in undermining it (New America, September 24, 2018). His official statement about the meeting, which was uploaded to the CAC’s website a few days later, accused China’s largest internet companies of “breeding chaos in the media” and “endangering social stability and th