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Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin: Anti-Vaccine Propaganda on a Large Scale
Photo: Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images
When China's President Xi Jinping spoke at the virtual world economic forum this week, he had brought pathos with him: one had repeatedly learned that "doing it alone, falling into arrogant isolation will always fail."
The Twitter accounts of spokesmen for the Chinese Foreign Ministry tried to get this aspect of the speech out into the world as far as possible.
China, so the message, is looking for cooperation.
One of the multipliers was Zhao Lijian.
He and similarly communicating mouthpieces of the Chinese government are nicknamed "Wolf Warrior", named after a Chinese action hero.
Lijian has almost 880,000 followers on Twitter.
It stands for a new aggressiveness in Chinese external communication.
Sources from Bulgaria, India, Russia
A few days before Xi's speech, the wolf warrior was even less forgiving on Twitter.
On January 15, a presenter on Chinese state television, Liu Xin, sent one of many tweets on her current favorite topic: sowing doubts about the western corona vaccines and insinuating a cover-up.
“I can't verify independently,” it said, “but it's worrying.” In Germany, ten people died “within days” of being vaccinated with the Biontech / Pfizer vaccine.
As evidence, Xin included two screenshots of media reports, both with alarmist headlines.
Wolf warrior Zhao Lijian from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs passed the tweet on to his 880,000 followers.
Christian Stöcker, arrow to the right
Photo: SPIEGEL ONLINE
Born 1973, is a cognitive psychologist and has been a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since autumn 2016.
There he is responsible for the "Digital Communication" course.
Before that, he headed the Netzwelt department at SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The two sources the two cited: a Bulgarian website called "SeeNews" and "Republic World", the website of an Indian TV station which, as it describes itself, is "essentially nationalist".
The "SeeNews" article allegedly quotes the German press agency.
Then it has to be right!
If you click on the link to the alleged source, you do not end up with the dpa, but with the Arabic-language offer from Russia Today, the Kremlin's international propaganda medium.
Russian and Chinese disinformation go hand in hand.
A snippet of fact, bloated, twisted, scandalized
In fact, there is a dpa report about a message from the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which, among other things, deals with ten people who died in Germany close to their Covid 19 vaccination.
A spokeswoman for the institute is quoted as saying that they were "very seriously ill people with many underlying diseases".
It is assumed that “the patients died of their underlying disease”.
To make the yardstick clear: At this point in time, 800,000 people in Germany had already received their first dose of vaccine.
The Russian state broadcaster RT is a favorite source of all those who like to rant about the "system press" in Germany.
The pattern that emerges here has long been known: a harmless message is so mutilated and twisted that it can be turned into a flaming accusation of an alleged cover-up.
This twist then takes its way over various obscure platforms and is finally amplified and spread where one can hope for a long range, but does not risk an annoying source check.
The Chinese TV presenter who spread the two strange anti-vaccine messages wisely only embedded screenshots in her tweet, not links.
You don't want to make it too easy for those who want to check the claim.
Somewhere in the core of the propaganda spin is a snippet of real news.
The rest is done by the affirmative distortion of the sympathetic audience looking for fodder for their own conspiracy ideas.
Meanwhile, Liu Xin complains on Twitter that Western media are reporting on this propaganda campaign without contacting them beforehand.
This shows that these media are "no longer sure of their own dominance."
A new quality of disinformation
China has been promoting media propaganda not only internally but also externally for many years.
The Chinese regime has acquired platforms that are supposed to carry its messages out into the world.
The tabloid "Global Times", for example, has been publishing in English since 2009, and the station CGTN is a kind of Chinese counterpart to Russia Today (now known by the operators as RT).
In addition, according to »Reporters Without Borders«, more and more foreign media are being bought up in whole or in part.
In Germany, China has so far mainly financed inserts in renowned newspapers, which has caused a lot of displeasure.
These media have always represented the party line, praising the communist leadership in Beijing and enjoying everything that goes wrong in the West.
Tone tightened, learned from Russia
In the meantime, however, at the moment primarily in the context of the pandemic and its fight, narratives are being promoted that fit perfectly with conspiracy theories that are circulating in the West.
China has apparently copied this from Russia, because Putin's propagandists have been actively working for many years to feed anything that could sow division, confusion and doubts about institutions in the West.
The Russian state broadcaster RT is a favorite source of all those who like to rant about the "system press" in Germany.
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Russia, of course, also conducts anti-vaccine propaganda on a large scale.
Every message that can somehow be turned in the desired direction will be gratefully taken up, both for a domestic and for an international audience.
If necessary, you create your own messages, for example by interviewing the Iranian foreign minister, like RT, who then dutifully declares that his country will use "only Russian, Chinese, Indian and, if available, its own vaccines against Covid-19".
For the propagandists from Russia and China, it is a communicative tightrope act: You don't want to demonize vaccinations in general, you just want your own vaccines to be excellent, while those of others are portrayed as dangerous, useless or both.
German opponents of vaccinations are unlikely to understand this differentiation and perceive the inflated non-reports as confirmation of their own fears.
Tapping new sales markets soft?
In addition to nationalist motives, the propagandists are also interested in tough business interests: There are still a lot of countries outside of Europe to which one would like to sell one's own vaccines.
Somewhere in the core of the propaganda spin is a snippet of real news.
Something is coming up
The Kremlin's propaganda troops have "perfected the art of lying with half-truths", as the EU propaganda guards at "EUvsDisinfo" call it.
And they know their target group.
The fact that China is now also following the same strategy fits in with a general trend in state propaganda in the country: It is becoming more aggressive, keyword wolf warriors.
People are no longer looking primarily at their own propaganda topics - Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., but instead actively claiming their own claim to global supremacy by denigrating "the West".
In addition to the vaccine narrative, the thesis that democracies are generally unstable and weak is a popular topic.
Probably nowhere was the joy of the storming of the US Capitol as happy as in the editorial team of the Global Times.
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Twitter, for example, has taken this development into account, among other things, by now marking Chinese state media and government accounts as such.
According to the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, this has already had an impact: since the change in August 2020, tweets from corresponding accounts have been liked and passed on less frequently.
Should China's government, however, go over to the international business of disinformation to destabilize other nations with the same verve, similar strategy and effort, as Russia has long since done, Western societies will face completely new challenges.
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