China scrambling to unplug anti-Japan hate speech – Asia Times
Following a stabbed attack at a Suzhou, west of Shanghai, on June 24 that left a Chinese mother and child inflicted in a Suzhou school bus stop, Chinese social media platforms have suspended radical nationalist posts that promote hatred of Japan, according to media reports.
According to reports, a female vehicle assistant who attempted to protect the Chinese citizens was killed in the melee.
An poor Chinese man in his 50s carried out the assault. His private problems appear to have made him liable to ultranationalist website “influencers” who specialize in stoking anger toward Japanese and Americans to draw supporters and make money.
The incident marked China’s next high-profile blade attack on foreigners in a single month. Four American university instructors were fatally shot on June 10 in a garden in north China’s capital of Jilin.
There have been several blade problems just in China, most of them against another Chinese, according to press reports. Regular Chinese do not have quick access to guns, so violent acts frequently involve weapons rather than weapon, as opposed to Americans.
The spate of knife attacks, according to a long-standing National resident in China, may be due to the stress brought on by financial difficulties, including the loss of income, which are making several Chinese men feel desperate.
There was a plethora of condolences for the Suzhou sufferers and enthusiasm for Hu Youping, the vehicle attendant, who has received praise for his lady in both China and Japan. However, Chinese social media also featured angry and jaded posts.
Writing on the Pekingnology Substack, creator and director Xichen Wang, a senior of China’s condition- operate Xinhua News Agency, wrote:
Recently, a couple users ]of social media ] have taken advantage of certain situations to incite serious nationalist views by distorting, exaggerating, or perhaps developing content to article inappropriate remarks. Examples include calling for the creation of a “modern-day Boxer Rebellion,” spreading slanderous claims that the Suzhou school bus staff who died rescuing others as” Chinese spies” and developing severe populist claims like “it would be best if all of Japan sank, leading to early cultural extinction. “
In response to such radical criticism, Douyin, NetEase, Tencent, Weibo and another Chinese social media users cracked down.
These comments have impacted the platform’s good and quiet environment and also sparked immoral behavior, according to Douyin, the Taiwanese version of TikTok. Users are asked to report inappropriate and dangerous expressions of serious nationalist sentiment and China-Japan’s incitement of conflict, according to a statement from NetEase. More than 800 of its social media platform principles have been reported to have been broken by Tencent.
China’s mouthpiece media even made its position apparent, with the state- run People’s Everyday writing that” We will also not take the hype of’ xenophobia’ and hate speech… This is undesirable …”
Former Communist Party executive Hu Xijin said that China “must avoid excessively exaggerating external challenges and hostility online, which makes extreme nationalism a commodity of hating America and Japan,” blaming most of China’s issues on external factors.
Extremism was brought up with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at a meeting held on July 1 in Beijing by a Japanese trade delegation led by senior Japanese politician Yohei Kono. Kono inquired if the attacker had any specific questions about the Japanese government. The vice premier replied,” No,” but he did.
The Chinese government’s official position is that the stabbings in Suzhou and Jilin were both “initial incidents.”
The Japanese Embassy in China has urged its citizens to remain vigilant in the wake of the knife attack in Suzhou, as well as a recent spate of stabbings in Chinese subways and parks, according to Asahi Shimbun.
Numerous Japanese commentators on social media and in the mainstream media attributed the incident to propaganda in China’s state-run media and anti-Japanese indoctrination.
In this situation, “indoctrination” appears to mean teaching the history of the Japanese invasion of China, including the notorious Nanjing Massacre, while “propaganda likely means stating China’s position on the disputed Daioyu ( Senkaku ) Islands, Taiwan, and other foreign policy issues.
In the West, ethnic Chinese are still subject to random violence as Western politicians churn up their own anti-China propaganda. A 16-year-old Chinese-New Zealand boy was attacked with a metal rod after a woman started yelling racist slurs at him on a bus in Auckland on July 1st, according to The New Zealand Herald.
Three of the boy’s teeth were knocked out and two more damaged. His bloodied face and raised hands are seen in a photo that another passenger apparently took with a cell phone.
Other passengers, some of them reportedly also ethnic Chinese, can also be seen in the photo but not the assailant. Only one of them intervened in the apparently unprovoked, racially motivated attack. To protect his privacy, the boy’s upper face has been blacked out. The assailant is being sought out by the police, who stated they are working diligently to find him.
Hu Xijin wrote in a brief video report that was published on Global Times the day after the” Hu Says” title.
” A 16- year- old Chinese student was suddenly attacked with a steel rod on a public bus in Auckland, New Zealand, last Friday, resulting in severe facial injuries and the loss of three teeth. Only a 75- year- old man intervened to protect the victim. The elderly man may also be Chinese, according to reports from Chinese media. The injured Chinese student asked the bus driver not to let her leave when the attacker attempted to leave, but the driver still opened the door.
The woman attacker managed to elude and has not been apprehended despite there being more than ten passengers on the New Zealand bus. The civil society of New Zealand is appalled by the passengers on the public bus’s weak response to the woman attacker.
Perhaps, but the story is not that simple. in a more in-depth report that was published on the news website news.com in Australia. au, also on July 2, senior reporter Frank Chung wrote:
Mao Peng, a local news blogger in China, first shared details of the alleged attack on Friday morning, the Maori New Year’s public holiday, on the social media platform WeChat.
The teen was attacked by a “woman in her 40s who looked Maori,” according to the Chinese-language report that the teen was taking a bus from East Auckland to the city.
Despite him yelling for help, a 75-year-old Chinese man on the bus who was in the crowd, said that “more than a dozen” of the other Chinese people sitting on the bus sat in their seats and did nothing.”
The 75-year-old man and the steel rod, which they wrestled away from her, are seen in the photos that accompany the report. The boy and other passengers ‘ faces are blocked out.
US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns wrote on X: Following the knife attack on American teachers in Jilin:
” The stabbing of three US citizens and a non-citizen resident of Iowa in Jilin, China, has deeply disturbed and enrages me. The 4 are currently receiving treatment at Jilin Hospital, and a US Consular Officer has visited them. We are doing all we can to help them &, hope for their full recovery”.
Not just Burns is deeply troubled by what China has formally portrayed as a singular incident involving Americans. That is in contrast to the thousands of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents that were reported in the US after then-president Donald Trump referred to the Covid-19 virus as” Kung-Fli” and” Chinese virus” in June 2020.
According to documented research on the attacks, they included racially motivated murders that involved pushing a young woman in front of a subway train, beating, kicking, and stomping, as well as at least one mass shooting.
Since Trump’s assassination, the number of such crimes and incidents has declined sharply, but senior researcher Janelle Wong of AAPI[ Asian American and Pacific Islander ] Data reported to NBC News last year that” Anti-Asian hate crimes are frequently linked to national security or other US foreign policy that heightened attention to Asian Americans in the US.”
In light of concerns that the attacks could rise once more during a second Trump presidency, Wong said,” We will expect them to go up again at some point, depending on what the national and international context is and the degree to which places in Asia are seen as a threat to the US.”
According to Hu Xijin, who wrote on Weibo,” Chinese people face far more risks outside their country than foreigners do in China.” That is probably true. However, given what transpired in the US during the pandemic, it’s still possible to see China’s internet and news media trying to defuse racial attacks on foreigners in China before they become a norm.
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