China's position in the Ukraine war clear?

Social media full of pro-Putin posts

Created: 2022-04-06 13:57

By: Christiane Kuehl

Chinese refugees from Ukraine on arrival in Chengdu: Censorship deleted criticism of late evacuation action © Shen Bohan/Xinhua/Imago

A pro-Russia tone dominates China's state media.

The enemy is the USA.

The social media reflect this picture.

But what is the role of censorship?

Beijing/Munich – Not even the horrific massacre of Bucha* shook China's clear propaganda line: no reports on the suffering of the Ukrainians and Russian atrocities.

The Chinese state media passed over the torture and murder of Ukrainian civilians* on Sunday evening with a disdainful report about the withdrawal of Russian troops from the town near Kyiv.

On Tuesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported on the dead and the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But Zelenskyy's quote about the "war crime" was immediately followed by Russia "refuting" the allegations.

Other reports on Tuesday also focused primarily on the Russians' denial.

The bloodbath doesn't fit into the picture - because what shouldn't be can't be.

Russia is China's* partner, linked by a commodity cooperation and a shared rejection of the US-dominated world order.

And China's policy is always the right one in the state media without any alternative.

This attitude can be found again and again in the Chinese state media.

They therefore always report in a pro-Russian manner in the Ukraine war*.

The government also

called on the media houses, according to the US news website

In early March, it stopped using only hashtags launched by centralized media outlets like Xinhua.

For example, the trivializing "#RussiaUkraineSituation".

China's social media: a reflection of state propaganda

It is difficult for people to realize that there could be another way of looking at things, because there are no independent media.

That has consequences.

The posts on China's social media platforms are a reflection of the official line: no criticism of Russia, little mention of human suffering in Ukraine — and most importantly no debate about China's stance on the conflict.

Pro-Putin sentiment dominates.

This includes the forwarding of Russian propaganda.

Contributions follow the diction of Vladimir Putin*, but “Nazis” ruled in Kyiv.

Some fans hailed the Russian President as "Putin the Great".

Many initially expected a quick victory for Russia and hailed the supposed victor before victory.

According to experts, the pro-Putin wave was mainly driven by the young chauvinists in China's online universe, known as "little pink".

At the beginning of March, China's second largest online shopping platform

a solidarity run on Russian chocolate, vodka and fabric softener in a shop called "Russian State Pavilion".

Photos of young people raising their fingers in front of a blue and yellow declaration of solidarity for Ukraine on the wall of the Canadian embassy in Beijing also circulated.

Foreigners who work in Beijing or Shanghai were particularly disturbed at the beginning of the war by the uncritical Putin euphoria of many colleagues and employees.

Right from the start, their perception of the war was very different from that in the West.

China: Widespread belief in state propaganda

"I have little doubt that a significant number of Chinese believe their government's propaganda against Ukraine," says Thomas des Garets Geddes of the Merics Institute for Chinese Studies in Berlin.

"But that's only one side of the picture," Geddes told Merkur.de.

The reason why you see so many pro-Russian views is - as is common in China - the high level of state censorship and self-censorship.

Views that do not correspond to the official account remain largely hidden.

Nevertheless, there were also thoughtful voices from the outset - although only those survived the censorship that did not directly oppose the official line: For example, when users described how emotionally burdened the outbreak of war was for them.

Pictures of the worldwide anti-war protests also circulated at times.

Some shared taunting lyrics about Russia's military failures;

some compared Putin to a disgraced tai chi master of legend who was defeated in seconds by an amateur.

Other users criticized the invasion as "Russia's imperialist expansion." State broadcaster CGTN initially showed appeals from Chinese students in Ukraine asking for peace.

Later, however, much of it disappeared.

For example, criticism of the exceptionally late evacuation of 6,000 Chinese* from Ukraine was censored.

An appeal by well-known scientists against the war also disappeared, as did the text by Hu Wei, which was also shared worldwide in English and called for a reversal in Ukraine policy* and openly spoke of “war”.

After all, Hu's contribution, who is deputy chairman of the Public Policy Research Center attached to the Chinese State Council*, was read 100,000 times in China before it was removed from the Internet.

At the same time, the microblogging service Weibo and the Chinese Tiktok counterpart Douyin deleted thousands of ultranationalist and tasteless videos and posts in the first days of the war.

Such as those from the first days of the war, in which users expressed their hope that “beautiful Ukrainian women” would flee to China.

That was too much of a good thing even for Beijing.

China in the Ukraine war: Mood difficult to discern due to censorship

Because of the censorship of positions critical of the war, it is difficult to assess the true mood, says Geddes.

“We should avoid jumping to conclusions when evaluating Chinese social media, for example.

Not all Chinese are hot-headed nationalists.” One should not forget that nationalist voices are amplified by the internet and social media.

It is not only because of the censorship that many are reluctant to position themselves with moderate views.

There's always a danger of "being shouted down and bullied by the 'little pink' trolls, who are quick to accuse 'moderates' of being 'traitors to the nation' or 'American dogs,'" Geddes said.

According to a report by

, thousands of nationalist users anonymously threatened the Chinese Wang Jixian with hate messages after he had posted authentic videos of everyday life from Odessa.

Platforms like Weibo would also have switched it off without warning.

The Chinese, on the other hand, get to see the reports of the TV journalist Lu Yuguang*, who reports for the Phoenix TV channel on the side of the Russian army from the front line in the Ukraine war, most recently from near Mariupol.

Lu is probably the only foreign war reporter in the ranks of the invading Russian forces.

Barely worth mentioning in China: the Bucha bloodbath, which became known after the city was recaptured by the Ukrainian army.

© Rodrigo Abd/dpa

Phoenix TV is also partially state-owned, but a little more independent than pure state channels.

On Monday, Phoenix TV showed the images of corpses and the mass grave in Butscha, as well as short clips of the reactions of EU politicians or NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

And it showed President Zelenskyy saying: "This is genocide, the annihilation of an entire nation, its people." But Phoenix does not deviate from the general line either.

The war is called there as everywhere: #RussiaUkraineSituation.

China in the Ukraine war: party organ ignores Zelenskyj

Head of state Xi Jinping* has spoken to many since the outbreak of war, but not to Zelenskyy.

Instead, at the beginning of the war, China's state newspapers continued to spread Russian disinformation, according to which the president had fled Kyiv to Poland.

The central Communist Party organ

Selenskyj has not mentioned a single word since the beginning of the war.

The only time the Ukrainian president appeared in the paper in 2022, according to David Bandurski, was in a report marking the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two states - on January 5.

Bandurski is director of the China Media Project in Hong Kong, which has been analyzing state media, propaganda and censorship in the People's Republic for many years.

"The conspicuous absence of Zelenskyy from the party's flagship newspaper is a clear example of China's alignment with Russia," he writes.

Ukraine itself has hardly played a role in perception so far: China's media largely follow the Russian narrative that the country does not act independently but is controlled by the USA.

China sees the country as a transit buffer between East and West that is as neutral as possible – “a bridge instead of a battlefield,” as Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying put it.

Bandurski also addressed why China's diplomats and state media have continued to trumpet Russian conspiracy theories about alleged US biolabs in Ukraine.

This is intended to place the Ukraine war in a larger context, says Bandurski - one that considers "the aggressive actions of Russia and its dictator against the background of an alleged threat to global security posed by the irresponsible and hegemonic behavior of the USA".

Suddenly the culprit is someone else: "As soon as we focus again on the specter of American hegemony, we become receptive to the alternative world view that Putin and Xi Jinping affirmed in their joint statement in early February*: