Is Xenophobia on Chinese Social Media a Source of Real Hatred?

The video, posted on Chinese social media last year, showed more than 100 Japanese children, reportedly from a Shanghai elementary school, gathered in their schoolyard. Chinese subtitles quoted two students leading the group shouting, “Shanghai is ours. Soon, all of China will be ours.”

The reports were alarming and infuriating in China, which had invaded Japan during World War II. Except that the scene was actually set in an elementary school in Japan. And the students weren’t stirring up hatred against China; they were swearing an oath to play fairly in what appeared to be a sporting event.

The video was only removed after it had been viewed more than 10 million times.

Xenophobic online content like the schoolyard video is currently the subject of debate in China. Last week, a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese mother and her son in eastern China. Two weeks earlier, four visiting teachers from an Iowa college were stabbed in northeastern China. Some Chinese are questioning the role of online speech in inciting real-world violence.

China has the world’s most sophisticated system for censoring the internet at will. The government imposes strict rules on what can and cannot be said about politics, the economy, society, and the country’s leadership. Internet companies deploy an army of censors. Private citizens censor themselves, knowing that what they post could get their social media accounts deleted or, worse, put them in jail.

Yet the Chinese Internet is full of hate speech against Japanese, Americans, Jews, and Africans, as well as against Chinese who are critical of the government. False information about Japan and the United States regularly tops the popular search lists and receives a lot of reposts and likes.

What happens online is influenced by the rising nationalism that has been promoted in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has adopted a China-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality. One of China’s responses to rising tensions with its rivals has been “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term used to describe an ultranationalist and often hostile approach to geopolitics.

Of course, online hate speech and disinformation are not unique to China. But the Chinese government has a well-oiled public opinion machine that tolerates and even encourages such messages when they target certain countries and their people. The authorities silence voices that attempt to correct the falsehoods or reason with their suppliers. The internet companies make money from the online traffic that the chauvinistic content attracts. And social media influencers, the grassroots and some of the most prominent intellectuals and writers of the Xi era, get traffic and revenue.

In February 2023, the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, was widely covered by Chinese state media. Influencers spread many conspiracy theories. One of them called the incident the equivalent of Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear accident, and said that most of Ohio had become uninhabitable. The theory claimed that the US government and mainstream media were trying to cover it up, similar to what happened with Chernobyl.

Duan Lian, an online misinformation consultant with 1.7 million followers on the social media platform Weibo, posted an article about the tragedy in eastern Palestine in which he attempted to separate fact from fallacy. He urged the public not to fall for the trap. The article was reposted more than 1,000 times and then deleted. His Weibo account was suspended for about three months, with Weibo citing violations of online regulations.

“The space for freedom of expression has shrunk,” he told me in an interview.

Mr. Duan has been active on Weibo since 2010 and is known for his insightful work in combating disinformation.

“In the past, if CCTV made a significant error in reporting, you could make fun of it, right?” he said, referring to China Central Television, the state broadcaster. “But now, even if they are outright lying, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Liu Su, a science blogger from Shanghai, was censored for trying to tell the truth about a coordinated government campaign targeting Japan.

In 2023, China spread disinformation about the safety of the Japanese government’s decision to dump treated radioactive water from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean. There was fear and outrage over what is known in China as “nuclear-contaminated wastewater.”

After Mr. Liu wrote several articles that contradicted what was being said, someone reported him to the Shanghai Internet regulator. Mr. Liu removed the article, posted a apology and promised to refrain from commenting on current affairs. Subsequently, his public WeChat social media account was suspended for six months.

Mr. Liu is one of many Chinese intellectuals who have voiced concerns about the online condemnation of foreigners. In another article on WeChat this year, he criticized the trend of praising traditional Chinese medicine and disparaging Western medicine. He was reported again.

“When the backbone of a society is completely overwhelmed by the tidal wave of nationalism, the future fate of the country is predictable,” he wrote.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople said the recent attacks on foreigners were isolated crimes. Local authorities did not share much information. But many comments on social media praised the attacks and the perpetrators.

Another force for spreading online hate is a popular genre of short dramas on Chinese video platforms like Douyin. In the videos, influencers stage scenes in which Chinese people are humiliated by Japanese people and then beat them up with martial arts moves. Or sometimes an entire scene is just about insulting and beating up Japanese people.

Anti-American sentiments are also popular.

“I have been concerned for over two years about the Chinese government’s very aggressive efforts to smear America, to tell a distorted story about American society, American history, and American policy,” said Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China. The Wall Street Journal in an article last week. “It happens every day on all the networks that the government has available here, and there is a high level of anti-Americanism online.”

It’s telling to look at the times when Chinese censors intervened quickly and effectively to remove something they didn’t like.

In 2021, after tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former senior national leader of sexual abuse on her Weibo account, it took censors 20 minutes to remove the post and almost all other posts about it. This is known as a blanket ban.

A year earlier, to prevent the Chinese public from talking about Mr. Xi, a social media platform censored 564 names that users had come up with to refer to him, including “a man in Beijing,” “a big deal,” and “the last emperor.” In 2016, a regulator issued a video platform a database of more than 35,000 terms about Xi that needed to be checked.

On Friday, Chinese people learned that a 52-year-old woman named Hu Youping, who had tried to stop the attack on the Japanese mother and son in eastern China, had died from her injuries. Many people mourned her on social media. Some said they wondered whether the crime, which targeted Japanese people, had anything to do with China’s nationalist online environment.

In a rare move, China’s largest internet platforms have issued a statement announcements over the weekend they cracked down on hate speech targeting Japanese people and stoking extreme nationalism. The questions are: How long will this go on? How much can it change an ecosystem that sows hate? And what will happen if it is politically convenient for the government to use Japan and the United States as bogeymen again? The statements themselves have received a lot of nasty reactions.

“In this great drama that plays out every day, some are directors, some are actors, some are stagers, and some are audiences,” wrote Peng Yuanwen, a former journalist. He called the attacker in last week’s incident a victim of nationalist brainwashing. “He is too deeply involved in the drama and finds it difficult to break free,” Peng said.