When the media is a blank paper

Image: Joseph Chan

By Lee Je-Hoon

There was once the notion that in order to accurately read China’s inner workings, you should read the South China Morning Post (SCMP), an influential Hong Kong newspaper founded in 1903. As most of the media in China have been state-run, it was a compliment that you would only appreciate if you had read the newspaper, which reported with accuracy based on various sources inside China.

However, since the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba took over SCMP in December 2015, subtle changes have taken place within the SCMP editorial office. The number of reporters who came from mainland China with pro-China tendencies has increased, which some longtime readers attributed to the deteriorated quality of the reporting. 

The turning point further triggering the departure of competent reporters at the SCMP—be it due to incongruity or for personal reasons—was the anti-government protests in 2019, which led to the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law. In May 2020, the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) passed this law on behalf of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, and in a nutshell, put an end to political freedom in Hong Kong.

It was the first time that mainland China directly legislated a law in Hong Kong since the city was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The NPC stepped in and essentially resolved Hong Kong’s futile attempt (in 2003) to introduce a national security law, crushed by strong opposition from Hong Kong citizens and civic groups.

While China took control of Hong Kong through the the National People’s Congress, the silent repression also took place within the SCMP. The company’s higher-ups directed use of words like “riots” over “protests” to describe the anti-government demonstrations against a proposed extradition bill by the Hong Kong government. At SCMP, some reporters did not agree with such maneuvers. Two Sides of A Lie was a novel written and published in 2021 by a couple of the reporters who were inspired by real events that took place in the newsroom and in Hong Kong. 

The Washington Post, an influential American newspaper founded in 1877, adopted “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its slogan in February 2017. It was the first adopted slogan ever for the 140-year-old paper. Some say that the Washington Post’s call out on the crisis of democracy was aimed at then-President Donald Trump’s regressive policies.

In explaining his purchase of the Post in a 2016 interview, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, had used the phrase. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.”

The reason political freedom is disappearing in Hong Kong or that the crisis of democracy is being discussed in the United States boils down to one thing: politics no longer reflect the will of the people. In mainland China, people who no longer could tolerate the draconian zero-Covid policy took to the streets in November, holding “blank paper” protests and even calling for Xi Jinping’s resignation. The demonstrations can also be viewed as a failure of Chinese politics.

Although the Chinese authorities have succeeded in calming the people’s dissatisfaction by scrapping the zero-Covid strategy, they cannot prevent the outburst of anger with surveillance and control for good. Perhaps the blank paper protests represent a new voice calling out for freedom of expression in the Chinese society, which has predominantly put its emphasis on economic growth. While contradictions in the Chinese society will be difficult to resolve in the short term, conflicts and dissatisfaction will, inevitably, still increase, as would public resistance. However, if politics continues to fail, it will only raise the threshold of resistance and create antipathy.

* The blank paper represents everything protesters wish they could say but cannot.

 
Editor’s note: Lee Je-Hoon is an editor in the South Korean daily newspaper The Seoul Shinmun. This commentary was first published in Korean in the Seoul Shinmun.

Once bitten, twice shy: the world is prepared as Covid-torn China resumes international travel

Image: Kayla Kozlowski

Covid is tearing through China, and the Chinese government decided it is time to open its doors to allow citizens to travel abroad.

Chinese citizens are flooding foreign cities in droves following China’s sudden abolition of its draconian zero-Covid policy. Half the passengers on two flights from China to Milan on Christmas week were found to be infected with the virus.

Just as the rest of the world is beginning to move beyond the shadow of Covid-19 that originated from Wuhan in 2020, Beijing’s about-turn is once more upending the new normal. Millions are contracting infections in China each day, and a proportion of them are travelling abroad, while their government is increasingly evasive in the retreat from the “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy. Forget about sharing data as that would directly weigh on the credibility of President Xi Jinping’s “all-out people’s war” on the coronavirus.

Given the circumstances, it is inevitable for countries to protect their own people and avoid another global spread of infections. A growing list of them are requiring negative test results or reinstating testings on China arrivals. Beijing via its state media has predictably, railed against these foreign governments, calling the measures “discriminatory”.

As recent as November, the Chinese leadership was reiterating resoluteness to uphold Xi’s hallmark policy, the basis in which it had used to claim superiority of its authoritarian model over Western democracy as evidenced by the pandemic chaos in the West particularly in the early days of containment in 2020. By the end of the month, however, China was roiled by mass public protests against the controls, triggered by a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region where the victims were trapped in the building because of lockdown measures. Many defied repercussions for political activity in the modern autocracy, backed by surveillance technologies that give protesters no place to hide, to join the most widespread demonstrations since the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In their wake, Beijing shifted course almost overnight, following the approach of “living with the virus” like the Western economies that it previously scorned at for their incompetence in containing Covid.

For now, there is no time for the ideological argument, not when the Chinese economy’s well-being hangs in the balance. Being able to ensure that the quality of life continues to improve for citizens is the unwritten pact and yardstick by which the public measures the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy to rule, more so as they tolerate rising authoritarianism. 

China’s economy is sputtering. The pandemic battered domestic consumption, the pillar to which Beijing shifted towards to reduce the economy’s reliance on exports for growth as well as exposure to external factors it can’t control. In the five years to 2019, prior to the pandemic, the share of exports in its GDP shrank from 23.5 percent to 18.4 percent. The trend has reversed since then as home-bound consumers around the world snapped up Chinese goods when Covid hit. Then, Beijing’s strict lockdowns in 2022 disrupting supply chains took a toll on export growth.

Exports dropped 8.7 percent in November from a year earlier for a second straight month, the steepest fall since February 2020 when the viral outbreak occurred. Weakening global demand due to high inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes by major economies like the US, Japan and South Korea didn’t help.

The World Bank has slashed its 2022 growth forecast for the Chinese economy to 2.7 percent from 4.3 percent. In his New Year address though, Xi said the country’s GDP exceeded  US$17.4 trillion in 2022. That would have been a 4.4 percent rise from 2021.

Officially, China has registered just more than 5,200 deaths from Covid, a tiny fraction of US’s 1.1 million, the world’s highest death toll. There is a yawning gap between the picture Beijing painted and the reality reflected in social media posts from Chinese citizens across the country. Hospital emergency wards are overflowing with patients and medical supplies are running low or out. Even shelves of pharmacies in Hong Kong are cleaned out either by relatives snapping up basic drugs to send to families in mainland China or Chinese visitors to the city.

China’s border reopening on January 8 puts Hong Kong in the first line of fire. While the Hong Kong government is eager to reopen its border with the mainland, Hongkongers are apprehensive, fearing another wave of infections among other concerns. It doesn’t need a sixth wave after the last one in 2022 claimed over 11,000 lives. 

During the Lunar New Year in 2020, the Chinese government allowed millions to travel abroad when it knew there was a new coronavirus infecting its people. It suppressed information and covered up until the virus was rapidly spread to the rest of the world.

Several mutations of the coronavirus have been identified since December 2020. China’s current outbreak is causing concern of producing a new variant, which will raise questions such as: will the vaccines still work and are people more at risk for getting sick.

There is a sense of déjà vu, but this time, the rest of the world will not be taken by surprise.

The illusions of truth

Image: David Wirzba

 

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is often attributed to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

                                                                            ***

It took a good number of years. Theresa Chu, the deputy editor at Hong Kong’s leading newspaper, the Han Herald, finally turned the newsroom into the platform she could espouse Beijing’s narrative with ease, pleasing those above and that one day, she would be awarded by the Party. She grudgingly acknowledged—just to herself—that Editor-in-chief Pax Yong’s support was vital, as was her mentor and the previous editor-in-chief, but she was the primary driver to fulfill the mission. It was her idea of a ‘sophisticated’ combination of self-censorship and indirect downplaying of issues critical to the authoritarian political masters. She set important ‘editorial benchmarks’ and that’s what mattered.

By the Herald’s ‘standards’, Theresa had questioned the death toll of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and pared down the numbers widely accepted by international organizations like the Red Cross, to come in line with China’s official figures.

‘We need to have one figure throughout our stories,’ she instructed reporters. ‘We can’t have figure A in one story and figure B in another.’ She ignored repeated protests from the reporters against her rock-solid ‘values’.

‘All these numbers reported by western media, they are unverifiable,’ she refuted. ‘The only official number we have is the one released by Chinese government, and we’re sticking with that. If you guys can find anything official from other governments, bring it to me and I’ll consider putting that in as well.’

‘But Chinese government would obviously want to downplay such a figure,’ one of the reporters rebutted, face flushed. ‘If that’s the case, we should also mention the casualty figures estimated by international civil societies, along with China’s official number then.’

‘You guys are reporters. You should all be critical. Why are you trying to be western propagandists?’ Theresa bawled and stormed out of the room.

Theresa always fled when she knew her argument didn’t stick. But as the deputy editor, she had the upper hand which she exploited to the full extent. She meticulously applied her strategy of mixing pro- and anti-Beijing narratives—with the former outweighing the latter—in stories that would on the surface, appease the ‘naysayers’. She also published what appeared to be pro-democracy opinion pieces in the newspaper’s heavily one-sided opinion section, maintaining the ratio of seven to three. When it came to sensitive issues like the Hong Kong protests or Xinjiang, she didn’t hesitate to take Beijing’s side, completely aware of what’s expected on these occasions. No one would question her devotion to justifying China’s measures of subversion, bullying and pressure.

As the biggest news organizations in the world published stories of the human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, Theresa assigned junior reporters to write articles of Beijing’s commitment to world peace by countering terrorism in the Chinese western province while delivering strong local economic growth. The turning point came when she killed a three-month investigative piece into human rights abuses through birth control in Xinjiang.

‘You failed to present strong evidence of abuse,’ she reprimanded the three reporters working on the story.

‘There are two decades worth of data on the birth rate in Xinjiang here!’ one of the trio protested.

‘They are from one foreign source, and who knows if this European institution is biased? They usually are.’

When news spread publicly of how the story was axed, Theresa issued a statement that the reporting did not meet editorial verification standards. Senior reporters avoided pitching Xinjiang stories altogether.

Theresa was proud of how she had modified and restructured the reporting process. If it weren’t for my foresight, to have set it up all so well, the 2019 pro-democracy protest coverage would have been a complete and disastrous failure, she congratulated herself.

Reporters, over time, came to implicitly understand and accept what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Editors constantly denied there was interference from Beijing or the Herald’s mainland Chinese owner, with the emphasis that the company only had close relationships with different institutions and governments in China.

‘They’ll call us to discuss if they have an issue with our reports. But Beijing doesn’t call us,’ Theresa told the China desk. The team was amused at her comment, and thought she was delusional. Everyone knew Beijing didn’t need to call. There were enough agents who would voluntarily rise to the occasion and Theresa was one of them.

Theresa loved how smoothly the newsroom was operating in serving the greater good, which boiled down to her own gain. She banished any remote possibility that she was abusing a public platform for her personal use. I can’t help it if serving those above aligned with my own goals. She felt smart and smug. Everything was perfect. Almost. There was just one blemish—her mentor and previous editor-in-chief, to whom she unwittingly looked to for guidance even though she resented his influence. She needed to get rid of the perverse mentorship once and for all.

The opportunity came sooner than she envisaged when a local university was scouting for a head of its journalism school. Through an indirect contact, she recommended her mentor to the position. The mentor—a consultant to the top editors—was keen for a change, exhausted from advising ‘intellectually unchallenging’ editors like Theresa and Pax. Having redefined journalism in the newsroom during his editorship where he also moulded a successor out of Theresa, it was now time to shift to nurturing younger and developing minds with the ‘right values’ for Hong Kong’s future.

And so, with the agreement inked with the university, what’s left for Theresa was announcing the departure of her mentor from the Han Herald, after more than two decades at the organization.

‘I was thinking, Chen laoshi, we will create a big package under the theme of how the Herald has upheld Hong Kong’s free speech environment, which essentially underscored “one country, two systems”…’ began Theresa, followed by a pause. Then, she quickly added, “of course, under your leadership.’

She looked cautiously at her mentor for the first sign of approval, as Chen held a poker face.

‘It will not just be one day, we can spread the coverage over three consecutive days…Remember how you always said that as journalists, we write about newsmakers because that’s interesting and important for our audience. You are our newsmaker this time.’

Then, Chen’s lips slowly curved upwards. Encouraged and with some ease, Theresa continued her pitch.

‘Day one will be a centrespread in the print version, a review of your illustrious career—reporting on Hong Kong and China to your impeccable editorship of one of the world’s most reputable and credible titles to report on China.

‘Day two will be your contribution to Hong Kong journalism and how society and institutions have benefited, from the perspective of these beneficiaries.

‘The final day will be your insight and vision for Hong Kong and China, after Beijing’s tremendous efforts to reboot the city post democracy movement and the pandemic. What do you think?’ she asked gingerly.

‘I have no objections,’ Chen replied. ‘Let’s do it according to your plan. Just one thing, I will announce my exit first in my weekly column. Then, we proceed with your day one story.”

                                                                               ***

The world’s biggest authoritarian governments are subscribers of the big lie; disinformation has been a vital tool to solidify their place in the world. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, so goes the notion throughout modern history.

In China’s Xinjiang, the UN human rights commissioner found credible evidence of torture and other human rights abuses that were likely to be “crimes against humanity”—the findings released in a report in September 2022. They brought UN endorsement to long-running allegations that Beijing detained more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims and forcibly sterilized women over the past several years. Beijing has vehemently rejected charges, insisting it was running vocational training centres in the region to counter extremism.

The Chinese narrative has naturally been propagated by the state’s media outlets and channels, as well as Hong Kong-based media-turned-mouthpieces and their agents.

The big lie is very real.

Infotainment 2.0: pervasive disinformation

Image: Camilo Jimenez

Not too long ago, infotainment was the answer to survival for news organizations on the cusp of the digitalization wave. Be what hard-core journalists might have said about the “soft news” with its entertainment nature, short of substantive and informative value, it thrived on the digital and social media.

There is nothing wrong with a demand for entertainment and even fiction. In fact, most infotainment content is built on facts, even though there will be some that stray from this underlying element. But what is disturbing has been its evolvement and usage to disinform; the proliferation of disinformation, misinformation and mal-information—fake news—made easy by technology, and manifested to desensitize readers to discern between truth and half-truths or lies. Perversely, the insatiable appetite for infotainment can very well be exploited to entrap the unwitting audience.

Last week, a report of North Korea blaming the South for its Covid-19 outbreak made headlines around the world. Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, reprimanded South Korea for sending leaflets contaminated with Covid across the border without evidential support. Any reasonable reader would dismiss the North’s argument to be nonsensical but disinformation campaigns have become so sophisticated and deeply penetrated that the consumption of information doesn’t always come with a critical eye. Authoritarian regimes in particular have the resources and motivation to go the distance in stretching the truths, or rationalizing how information is managed. There is clearly a difference between entertainment from fiction and deriving it from fake news, but that line can be blurring as consumers don’t necessarily differentiate.

China’s state media had a field day with the Taiwan visit by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US’s House of Representatives. State mouthpiece China Global Television Network claimed success of garnering “attention and the reposts” of its online and video reports, as well as social feeds on China’s countermeasures against the US over Pelosi’s visit by more than 2,000 foreign media titles including the BBC and American broadcasters ABC and NBC. What CGTN conveniently omitted was the coverage of China’s angry responses and countermeasures merely constituted to one part of the cross-strait crisis story, as any balanced news report would aim to do.

The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the US that Pelosi’s visit, ahead of her arrival in Taiwan, was “playing with fire”. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” it threatened. Barely a day after the speaker’s plane had left Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army began shooting missiles towards the waters off Taiwan in multi-day, large-scale military drills in six areas around the island that cover the approaches to three most important ports and the airspace that planes use to descend to Taiwanese airports.

They signal China’s strength as much as its anger, but they are far from making good of perishing “those who play with fire”. Beijing has nonetheless ceased cooperation with the United States on areas including military relations and climate change, as well as imposed sanctions against Pelosi and her immediate family. Pelosi has shrugged off the sanctions—“Who cares?”. Instead she stressed that the US would not allow China to normalize the new level of pressure on Taiwan it asserted with days of military drills .

Beijing’s trade curbs of Taiwanese fruit and fish imports, and exports of natural sand, a key component for the production of semiconductors were hardly an existential threat. Natural sand from China account for a tenth of the island’s sand imports. Notable was the bans did not include the chips themselves, which are crucial to Chinese manufacturers.

On the other hand, China’s ultimatums spoke more effectively to Chinese nationalists, sending many into a frenzy and fired them into a war of words online. The current regime has nurtured a paranoid nationalism that fosters Beijing’s new global order narrative, which supports the “wolf warrior” approach to foreign policy and the superiority of the Chinese governance system against the decline of the West, especially since the global financial crisis of 2007. The Covid-19 pandemic has also worked in the regime’s favour, enabling the Chinese propagandists to contrast the West’s chaos against China’s order and control of the viral outbreak, keeping death toll low and allowing normal activities to resume ahead of many countries. But that was until the Omicron variant hit, and lockdowns with draconian measures have become more frequent and increased. So have the grievances of the people, many of whom have taken to social media to protest.

Chinese nationalism has been carefully shaped by the regime. Teaching of patriotism was ramped up after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, which effectively blurred the line between loving the party and the country. Humiliation suffered at the hands of foreigners all the way back to the opium wars launched by the British where the Chinese were victimized was emphasized. But the party would make China strong again. As such, China as a rising superpower resonated with its people, and unification with Taiwan is at the core of the national rejuvenation.

After all the threats and strongman speak, the challenge for Chinese President Xi Jinping is he cannot appear weak, especially with a few months to the 20th party congress in the autumn where is expected to be crowned the “people’s leader”, elevating him to the venerated stature of Mao Zedong. An attempt to conquer Taiwan would place Xi in a position that no other leader has ever done, but a full-blown military confrontation with the US will destabilize the Chinese economy which is already under the weight of the frequent pandemic lockdowns.

At the end of the day though, Xi does preside over one of the world’s most extensive propaganda and censorship mechanism. The apparatus is already at work to address the perception that Chinese responses are not strong enough.

When the tail goes hi-tech

Image: Nika Akin

A few years ago, I interviewed one of thousands of startups in Shenzhen, China’s southern tech hub. The company is an AI chip maker for visual recognition and big data analysis used in public security and social governance. The product is in demand, assured by the company’s biggest client whose needs only grow over time. That client is the nation’s public security bureau – the police.

“Our biggest client is the public security bureau,” the company spokesman said, “at least two-thirds of the country’s provincial police use our chip.”

Surveillance is an age-old practice in China. Throughout recent history, the Chinese Communist Party has watched its people closely. As a foreign correspondent previously based in China, I experienced Big Brother’s watchfulness for a number of years – phones were tapped and minders were never too far away and sometimes, these people appear in one’s physical orbit. The surveillance tactics were analogue and generally harmless, it was just the way things were under the system. It was also a different regime, under a different leadership.

But technology has advanced the art of Chinese surveillance to cover more scope and ground, and faster. It has hugely bolstered the Party’s control mechanism domestically, as well as expanded its influence and political manipulation as a rising power abroad.

Within China, Skynet, the national network of monitoring system of cameras, the internet and apps, including the ones allowing individuals to report on each other – to keep a lid on the people’s movement. Traffic lights are installed with cameras that capture and record the action live – you can see yourself on a monitor below the lights – as you cross the road. Industry research firm IHS Markit estimated that by the end of 2021, there would have been about 1 billion surveillance cameras in the world where 540 million of them in China.

The boon and bane of technological advancement is profoundly felt in today’s society.

“We live in a high-pressure cooker,” a highly successful Shanghai entrepreneur said. “We dislike the scrutiny but the technology has brought so much convenience into our lives that we are completely sucked in.”

The mass surveillance is closely connected to the Social Credit System, a set of databases managed by the national economic planner, the central bank and the court system to assess the trustworthiness of individuals, companies and government entities.

Failing to retain a certain level of social credibility may result in punitive measures imposed, including banning one’s mobility, access to the best schools, well-paid jobs and high-speed Internet subscription, as well as being publicly shamed as a bad citizen.

China’s economic rise has also changed its political posturing to the rest of the world, with an increased aggression to reshape the international order that it views as having deferred its interests. Chinese tech companies – many of which are affiliated to the government – supplied AI surveillance technology to most of the world in 2019 according to a report by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

More recently, researchers at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that studies global cybersecurity found that the COVID-19 contact tracing app MY2022 mandated for athletes, the press and spectators attending the Winter Olympics last month identified flaws in data transmission. For instance, hackers can intercept data being sent from the app to servers or sensitive information containing metadata is transmitted without encryption, making personal information like medical history, travel and passport details vulnerable. The app also contained a censored keyword list that can filter politically sensitive topics, according to Citizen Lab.

Chinese tech companies are often marred by allegations of privacy and infringement breaches. One of its largest Huawei Technologies is alleged to have the ability to retrieve sensitive information from the data that flows through the wireless networks and systems it built and sold around the world, which it has vehemently denied.

Meanwhile the AI surveillance chip maker in Shenzhen, responsible for most of the Chinese police’s surveillance platform, says it is accelerating its expansion globally.

 

Debunking disinformation

Image: Dimitar Belchev

As we sat down to pen our first blog, we spent considerable time thinking of what to write. There are many issues to talk about, yet there is also little. In a sense. Disinformation has never been more rife, used by those with motivated ills to impose authoritarianism. And circumstances have appeared to be on their side. The global pandemic has stifled economic growth, exposed economic vulnerabilities and geopolitical risks as well as thrown Western democracy into a deeper crisis. They present these regimes with the power and the means to mislead.

In fact, here’s how the editors from Two Sides of A Lie will posture themselves to craft the Han Herald’s stance on Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

“The situation is tricky,” editor-in-chief Pax Yong said, cupping his chin with his palm, face slightly frowned. “As a major media organization, the world will expect to hear from us on where we stand.

“Our position is that Russia’s attack is wrong in principle but we don’t condemn it. As China said – and it is justified – Russia has legitimate security concerns of Nato’s expansion,” he looked at the two other editors and the pair of editorial writers in the meeting room. “I want to hear your ideas on how can we build out this position.”

“Easy,” Theresa Chu, the deputy editor jumped up, “Ukraine and Russia are both key components of China’s Belt and Road strategy. If there’s a long-standing unrest in that part of the world, BRI will be paralyzed.

“China takes a world view with BRI, a policy that benefits the global economy. Condemning and pointing fingers doesn’t serve the interests of the world.”

“You mean it doesn’t serve the Party’s interests,” muttered one of the editorial writers, Sam, under his breath.

Aloud, the writer said pointedly, “If we don’t condemn, we are condoning. War is wrong, however you argue. It’s a regression in humanity. As a media, we have a social responsibility to inform the public about…”

“Not when we are protecting national security,” snapped Pax.

“Where’s the threat to national security here? Or are we again propagating the Party’s agenda?”

“We have to be fair and take a global view on this,” Pax ignored Sam’s retort. “China is a superpower with the integrity that we don’t interfere in other nations’ internal affairs and we don’t take sides, in this case with the Americans and their allies.”

The editorial published the next day began with:

Russia’s military action against Ukraine violates international norms. The Western allies of Ukraine have condemned the air and land strikes and contended it as war, but Moscow’s claim of a long-standing security threat that propelled it to act must not be ignored. National security is arguably the biggest concern of any sovereignty and nothing should stand in the way of a government protecting its interests, hence its citizens.

In reality, Beijing has refused to recognize Russia’s assaults as an invasion and abstained from a United Nations vote condemning the country. Vladimir Putin is hailed by China’s nationalistic internet trolls – “little pinks” – to be fighting against the West’s political, ideological and military aggression, which dovetails with the Chinese narrative of the US and its allies’ fear of the mainland’s rise and the alternative world order it wants to create. The little pinks also snapped up products from an official Russian online store, the Russian State Pavilion, on China’s e-commerce platform JD.com in an apparent show of solidarity that is in fact Chinese jingoism.

Many, especially those outside China, have interpreted Beijing’s noncommittal position of acknowledging Russia’s “legitimate concerns” and caveating the sovereignty argument as a pretext for the future when it reclaims Taiwan, which the leadership reiterates that it will do, even if it has to use force.

The parallels between what is happening in Russia and Ukraine and the possibility of what China might do to Taiwan are glaring to those who have witnessed and experienced Beijing’s hard-handedness.

In China, five renowned Chinese historians wrote an open letter denouncing the Russia invasion and called for peace, in the hope to persuade Beijing to make its stance clearer: that what Russia is doing is wrong. “Historically, the biggest catastrophes began with local conflicts,” the intellectuals wrote. The open letter survived online just for a couple of hours before it was taken down by internet censors, followed by pro-war Chinese trolls calling out on the authors “traitorous”.

What worries the Chinese Communist Party most is how its own people will read the invasion and their worldview. Just as it does with high-stake issues, it has doubled down on manipulating and controlling discussion about Ukraine in the press and social media.

China’s aggressive mouthpiece Global Times accused the US, which it called the world’s biggest war machine, of creating greater chaos with its propaganda tools operating at “full throttle”, referring to a New York Times article that described Chinese netizens as pro-war and pro-Russia. “The tone of the article’s argument sounds as if China and its netizens are standing on the opposite of the rest of the world,” said the state-owned media.

China has taken a more confrontational stance on foreign policy in recent years. Hawkish diplomats, the state media and some of the government’s influential advisers have also helped to nurture a generation of online warriors who see the world as a zero-sum game between China and the West, especially the US.

And then there is the global network of agents, painstakingly built under China’s United Front strategy, ever ready to move at Beijing’s bidding. The only way to counter disinformation, misinformation or mal-information is to keep fighting and exposing the truth.