Hong Kong propaganda: What China tells its citizens

The incident was bad, and that's why he fit into Hu Xijin's communications strategy.

On his Twitter account, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese newspaper Global Times posted a video in the night of Wednesday showing a man kneeling on a light gray stone floor. His hands raised above his head are tied with cable ties, people in dark clothes fumble with it. Hu writes that the man is one of his reporters, "seized by demonstrators at Hong Kong airport." He demands that his colleague be released. So it came shortly afterwards.

Fu Guohao, reporter of GT website is located at HK airport. I affirm this man is tied to this video is the reporter himself. He has no other task except for reporting. I sincerely ask the demonstrators to release him. I ask for help of West reporters pic.twitter.com/sbFb0L3s92

That was an unjustifiable deprivation of liberty by a journalist. However, this incident on Tuesday night is only a tiny episode, a small section on the sidelines of the Hong Kong protests.

Millions of people have been peacefully taking to the streets for more than ten weeks, and the demonstrators even split their garbage. Even if the few radicals produce spectacular images of them, the overwhelming majority of the protest movement still behaves non-violently.

Vincent Thian / AP

Protesters at the protest in Hong Kong airport

Who follows the Twitter appearance of editor-in-chief Hu, however, can gain the impression, as half of the city run amok. In his timeline: Molotov cocktails that explode between police officers. An excavator driver in the demonstrator outfit, who seems to wantonly damage a street. A mob that wrestles two men, allegedly police officers out of service.

This is a very selective selection of what is happening in Hong Kong right now - and yet exactly the image Chinese propaganda wants to convey to the world and to its own citizens. The demonstrators, according to the message, were violent, disrespectful and decadent - and, moreover, controlled by dark powers from abroad.

Who hurt the young woman?

The information about what's going on in Hong Kong is only being passed on selectively in mainland China; The leadership in Beijing has one of the most effective censorship agencies in the world. Using the example of Hong Kong, it can also be seen that another strategy is being used for strict censorship: Chinese media create and disseminate alternative realities.

An example is the case of a young woman injured in the right eye protests. In a photo that spread viral in the network, she is surrounded by rescue workers to see her blood dripping from the eye on the asphalt. Many demonstrators in Hong Kong expressed their solidarity with the young woman, now covering her right eye. Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong's most famous opposition figures, tweeted that she had been shot in the eye by police officers with a rubber bullet.

The young woman who was shot by Hong Kong in the eye with her and her tactic. Calls for a mass rally at the airport this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/x4FjB6asFY

Even the woman has not spoken, her version is unknown. In Chinese media circulates but now a completely different account of the incident: According to the woman was not injured by police, but by another demonstrator. On the website of the Chinese ZTV channel CCTV also pictures are published, where the woman is supposed to see how she distributes money to protesters. This is yet another theory from Beijing to be proved: The insurgents are actually paid riot.

So far, it has been characteristic of the Chinese information strategy that a consistently positive image of the People's Republic should be drawn. Disinformation campaigns, on the other hand, were more likely to be seen in Russia, where official reports continue to cause confusion until there is no certainty in the public discourse - such as the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 five years ago.

Solidarity with Hong Kong police on the mainland

For Beijing, the roles in the protests are clearly divided: the protesters spread chaos, were even recently branded by China as "terrorists". The city police, on the other hand, are upright patriots in this reading, establishing law and order.

Heroic images of Hong Kong policemen and expressions of solidarity are now being shared by millions in social media on the mainland. The hash tag "Protect Hong Kong" now has more than five billion views, according to the website "Whatsonweibo" on the news platform Weibo. Another hashtag that went viral on the network is, "Officials, we support you."

This is opposed by a report by the UN Human Rights Office. The denounced that the police in Hong Kong with disproportionate force would endanger the lives of the demonstrators. Beijing rejected this immediately.

Weibo

Image shared on the Weibo network: "I too support the Hong Kong police"

But the Chinese state media have yet another purpose: to intimidate residents of the financial metropolis. So the "Global Times" spread over Twitter in recent days pictures of armored vehicles in Shenzhen, not far from Hong Kong. The police in Shenzhen are ready to ward off "riots, violence, crime and terrorism", it said. On Tuesday, a Global Times article said, "If the insurgents in Hong Kong do not understand the signal that armed policemen are getting ready in Shenzhen, they're asking for self-destruction."

The People's Armed Police have been assembling in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, in advance of apparent large-scale exercises, obtained by the Global Times have shown. https://t.co/3KgaXeHw3C pic.twitter.com/YXAORMay0W

Officials at press conferences have also repeatedly raised the horror scenario that Hong Kong-based People's Liberation Army troops should be deployed in a crisis situation - a Defense Department spokesman said just a few weeks ago. Even US President Donald Trump claims that his intelligence agency has information that Chinese troops are being contracted on the border with Hong Kong. Trump tweeted that on Wednesday.

"What is America planning to do?"

What he himself should have to do with the protests, he does not understand, pushed after Trump. In fact, another story from Beijing is that the demonstrations in Hong Kong are controlled from the west, especially the US. As proof is to serve a photo of the US diplomat Julie Eadeh, who had met in a luxury hotel, including with Joshua Wong. It was distributed by CCTV, among other things, to the question was asked: "What is going on in America?". "Global Times" chief editor Hu defends the spread of the photo - it proves a "criminal diplomacy".

HK media has the right to report on US diplomats who are being interfere in HK situation, and help people understand what they're doing. The US administration is instigating turmoil in HK the way it stoked "color revolutions" in other places worldwide. This is thuggish diplomacy. pic.twitter.com/4hkH7eYyEH

In Germany too, the Chinese news platform WeChat seems to be increasingly turning against the protest movement. "I've watched this since the protests started in Hong Kong," said a member of WeChat's Nuremberg Mothers' Group, where Chinese-speaking families exchange news. There, for example, the arrest of the "Global Times" reporter was posted at the airport. The person who is a member of the chat group does not want to be named in the media. She asks herself: "How many agents does the Chinese state security have in Germany?"