If you search #TheGreatTranslationMovement on twitter, you will see lots of tweets that translate Chinese social media posts into English, most of which revealing that Chinese people are brainwashed and awful.
This tweet seems to be how it started: the twitter user claimed that CCP is very mad that the foreigners started to know that Chinese people are very high on the war in Ukraine. He seemed to have credited his own earlier translation effort. He is asking other twitter users to screenshot Chinese social media posts and translate them into English (or other languages) on twitter.
He later asked people to use #TheGreatTranslationMovement hashtag and it seems to become popular enough: there are many tweets with this hashtag.
One example:
So, if you want to see the worst internet comments in China, you can use this hashtag.
Reality is much more complex than twitter though: in many ways, China and Russia are very similar.
So what Mr. Ping is like? Here is a very good article on Russian’s attitude towards the war: “A view from Russian academia”.
Even among academia, anti-war is minority. This is probably also true in China. Because universities are controlled by the government (probably the same as Russia), people can get fired easily if they stray away from the official line. If you obey the authority, university job provides privilege and security. So, you would not want to lost that, would you?
It is the West/NATO aggression that pushed Putin. On social media, and in private chat, this is the most popular view, in Russia, as well as in China. Everyone learned from Chomsky very well: the Americans rethink their past mistakes, the Chinese and Russians (who never made any mistakes, of course) use his critiques to blame everything on the USA.
“Negative influence of the USSR: beginning with the immigration after 1917 and Stalinist purges and ending with the destruction of the will to live freely to the falling apart of the country. People didn’t live normally and so don’t want to live normally now, those who protest are mostly very young.” – Replace USSR with CCP. Also, in China, there is almost no protest. And young Chinese are much more pro-CCP than my generation, in this regards, China is worse.
“A non-trivial share of the people are idiots. They can’t or, for many reasons, don’t want to absorb non-one-sided information and just want to be “outside of politics”. – And the most accessible information is, sadly, propaganda.” – True in China too. And elsewhere…
“Propaganda is literally EVERYWHERE. On TV it reaches absurd proportions, and besides that special bot farms write a huge number of online comments, forming a false public opinion and swaying those who are uncertain to their side.” – True in China too.
“The Russian government has a huge horde of policemen and Rosgvardiya [National Guard of Russia] who get paid decent money just for brutally beating people who simply show up to a demonstration (and actually get pleasure out of doing so because they are idealistic and see enemies in those who show up). Then they imprison the people for 30 days and then create problems for them in their studies or work. And any resistance leads to a huge prison sentence. I’m not even mentioning, that people can be jailed for several years for tweets or social media posts (this is not an exaggeration!)” – True in China too.
I know that for a fact. Many years ago, I went to Beijing for business, and my business counterpart was a young man who loved Japanese manga. We almost never talked about politics, except one time, we talked about the Thai King. I told him about the lèse-majesté law and how it was being used in Thailand to silence people. Without blinking, he asked me, “So, Thailand is worse than us?”
I answered, “Oh, no, we are much worse.”
With that, we knew each other’s view on the most divisive matter in China. But we never discussed politics again.
Later, I met an old couple from China and we got to know each other well. Once we understand that none of us like CCP, they told me that, in China, they would not trust any strangers protesting or criticising the government. They have lived through so many movements in China, they say, you can not trust anyone.
Once they saw someone shouting “Down with CCP” in a public space, they just passed by quickly. “Lunatic!” they say, “And perhaps he is testing the people around, the moment you respond to him, they will arrest you.”
Since the dear supreme leader tightened up control of the social media and public space, people only talk politics with those they trust, and only do it in person.
Still, through Wechat, I discovered that many in China know quite a lot. They have watched videos of Zelenskyy playing the president as a comedian, and dancing. They like him.
All that is to say, yes, there are very awful things on Chinese social media and the censorship in China is turning a blind eye to them. Meanwhile, other opinions are not tolerated.
Like, “The #SupportUkraine posters outside of Canada’s embassy in Beijing have been defaced with an anti-NATO slogan” is such a vivid picture of it all:
