A quick reminder: Global Times, a popular tabloid nationalistic newspaper, a subsidiary of the People’s Daily, is the official mouthpiece of CCP and treated as such by foreign journalists.
I have introduced its former chief editor Hu Xijin before in newsletters 39 and 43, where he gloated on how China welcomes winners and USA only got disabled activists, and worried about social media playing too much role in Chinese society. He retired gloriously last year, and news of his retirement was covered in almost every major English newspapers. What an achievement.
Today, Global Times claimed that Donestk is Taiwan…… See it for yourself:
DW English has an article: How is China reacting to the Russia-Ukraine crisis? on China’s position as stated to the international community. In summary: it is very careful, does not want the crisis to escalate, does not like the idea of separatist region going independent, wants to work with Russia against USA, and is watching how the world reacts to prepare its invasion of Taiwan.
Domestically though, the official state media already acknowledged Donestk is a country:
The title is: “Russia is going to assist the two countries to defend against invasion.” It follows the narratives of Russian government.
Of course on Weibo, most of the comments from netizens are echoing the official media, saying this is all USA’s fault.
A Weibo account, Shimian, run by The Beijing News, a Beijing based newspaper controlled by CCP, leaked a memo by mistake. Although the memo was deleted shortly, the screenshot is enjoying an afterlife on Twitter:
(rough translation): from now on, any Weibo post on Ukraine.
Must start with Shimian first, then the Beijing News Weibo, repost from Shimian. No post that is not siding with Russia and friendly with the west.
The article must be reviewed by me before posting.
We must select the comments, post the good ones, and then post the appropriate ones. The person who post the Weibo content is in charge of the comments. You must pay real attention to the comments. Observe each post for at least two days. Make sure the responsibility is continued.
If we want to join the topic, we only follow People’s Daily, Xinhua News and CCTV.
Meanwhile, someone did an analysis on Weibo:
(rough translation) Yesterday I posted two messages on Ukraine, and triggered many pinkies (people who are pro CCP).
So I checked their timelines to see if they ever cared about Xuzhou (the chained woman).
Most of them no.
Then I went to check if they followed any fly-lava (internet slang, referring to propaganda accounts).
Majority of them did.
The user profiles are very typical.
I blocked them.
(first reply): In fact they stayed there to report you until you are suspended.
ByteDance is the maker of Douyin and TikTok.
According to Twitter, on Feb 22nd, a woman informed social media that her husband, who was 28 year old, died at the workplace.
She described the event: her husband was exercising in company gym when he felt sick, the coach and the security tried to help and he got worse, eventually ambulance was called and he died in the hospital. He had joined ByteDance for 4 years and often work very long hours. Kr-Asia with Death of 28-year-old ByteDance employee fuels ongoing controversy on overwork in Chinese tech companies has a bit more detail.
People first doubted her because they had not heard news about it. Then someone mentioned the record of an ambulance in the area. Indeed, later, the news came out.
The woman said that she is two months pregnant and she wanted to keep the baby. They just bought an apartment in Beijing, the monthly mortgage payment is 20,000 yuan (~2800 Euro), which she could not afford now that her husband, who was an engineer at ByteDance, died. Her plan was to quickly sell the apartment and move back to her hometown to raise the child with the help from her parents. She had been dating her husband for 8 years before they married three years ago. They must have been highschool sweethearts.
Once again, social media talked about overworked IT workers in China. Remember our newsletter 2 about a game programmer who committed suicide?
(rough translation) The ranking news of the day #2: A cow in Guangdong is frozen to death.
The ranking news of the day #31: Twenty eight years old employee of ByteDance died.
Comment: social cattle is worth less than animal cattle.
The investigation validated everything in the previous government announcements. We will discuss it more in the next newsletter.