Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
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Last week, I told you about the terrible flooding in China’s Henan province.
Millions of people have been affected by the floods, and there’s been at least
2 billion dollars of economic damage.
The official death toll so far is 71 people, with five people missing.But the real death toll
is likely higher, since Chinese authorities usually suppress that kind of information.
In the aftermath of this tragedy,
the Chinese Communist Party knows who to blame for their problems: foreign reporters.
I’ll explain why in a moment.
But first, we’re still learning about the impact of last week’s flooding.
We saw lots of videos of flooding in Zhengzhou, the capital city of 12 million people.
But other cities, like Xinxiang, have also been hit with devastating floods.
And rural areas have as well.
More than a million farm animals died in the floods. And since Henan is a huge
supplier of pork, the flooding could lead to food shortages down the line.
China’s social media has played a huge role in response to the floods,
helping people share information about the crisis, and even speeding up rescue efforts.
People are also using social media to search for missing friends and family.
Which suggests the official number of only five missing people is way too low.
So social media can be a huge headache for the Chinese regime.
For example, people questioned why authorities weren’t more prepared for the flooding.
Zhengzhou is part of a project known as “sponge cities,” which were supposed to
use sustainable infrastructure to help absorb water and mitigate flooding.
It’s a huge multi-billion dollar infrastructure project.
So when people started to question the government’s response to the floods,
including the sponge city project, they started getting censored.
Officials defended the sponge city project,
saying that it wasn’t designed to deal with flooding this severe. I mean,
the whole point of a massive infrastructure project is that it only works sometimes.
Another issue has been the flooding in the Zhengzhou subway.
Officially, 14 people drowned in the flooded subway trains,
while 500 were rescued. Multiple videos emerged of people standing neck-deep in water.
A viral post from someone claiming to be a subway worker accused the Zhengzhou subway
authorities of causing the disaster through mismanagement. It was quickly censored.
Meanwhile, people put flowers outside the subway station to mourn the people who died.
But then authorities put up plastic barricades around the flowers.
That image went viral and was widely criticized on social media. That night,
Zhengzhou residents took down the barricades. And vowed to do it again if authorities replaced them.
Authorities did put the barricades up again, and people took them down again.
All of this shows how sensitive natural disasters are for the Chinese Communist Party.
But they have a way to deal with these disasters.
I’ll tell you more after the break.
Welcome back. Natural disasters are a problem for the Chinese Communist Party.
That’s because these events usually expose some kind of incompetence
on the part of the local or central authorities. And then people get mad.
So when disasters happen, no matter the situation,
Chinese state propaganda shifts as quickly as possible to talking about rescue efforts.
Especially about how the state is launching massive rescue efforts.
Or how rescue efforts are accelerating.
You get the picture. The state becomes the hero again.
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship instructions
explicitly tell media to report like this. We know this because China Digital Times
publishes official censorship directives that have been leaked online. Here’s an example:
“Regarding the heavy rain striking Henan and other places,
shift the focus of reporting toward post-disaster recovery.”
Instructions also say to make sure to follow the official statistics
on casualties and property damage.
Because if you don’t, like if you report on the dozens of people looking for missing
family members, you might accidentally show the official statistics are a bunch of lies.
Chinese people are used to obeying the government. But most people also don’t
trust the government. When something happens that makes the authorities look bad,
many people know that the official sources are lying to them.
For example, authorities and state-run media claimed that everyone had been rescued
from the flooded subway when people were still trapped.
“Staff at one station told a man all passengers had been evacuated but had to acknowledge that
wasn’t true after he started a video call with his wife who was still trapped on board a train.”
That’s pretty bad. And it makes Chinese people pretty angry.
But the good news, for the Chinese Communist Party,
is that they can always use social media to redirect that anger.
And in the aftermath of the Henan floods, they’ve redirected it towards foreign reporters.
It all started with this BBC news story by journalist Robin Brant,
who was reporting from Zhengzhou.
“In the last few days, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated in or around this city...But
the most troubling question remains among the stench of dirty water here
is how was it that a station on this line came to be overwhelmed by
rainwater and passengers left to die on the platform.”
Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic. But nationalistic Chinese netizens accused
Brant of smearing China’s reputation. They started an online manhunt for him.
“BBC lies” started trending on Chinese social media.
But these weren’t ordinary Chinese netizens. This type of anger is orchestrated
by the Chinese Communist Party.
Here’s a social media post from the Communist Youth League in Henan.
This is an official Party organization with over a million followers.
And they’re asking people to find Robin Brant and report his location to the authorities.
One of the replies to this post claims that there are 400 people in one group
looking out for Brant and they are going for the “first kill.”
That’s not scary at all.
This isn’t the first time that the Chinese authorities have targeted the BBC.
They’ve gone after their coverage of the genocide in Xinjiang.
They also banned BBC World News from broadcasting in China.
But this campaign didn’t just target the BBC reporter. Reporters from other foreign
media outlets in China were also harassed for reporting on the Zhengzhou flooding.
In one case, a reporter for Deutsche Welle and an LA Times reporter were surrounded
by an angry crowd. They thought the German reporter was the BBC reporter Robin Brant.
You know what they say, all white guys look alike.
The crowd kept pushing the reporter and telling him not to smear China.
Once they realized he wasn’t Brant they calmed down and some of them apologized.
And that wasn’t the only incident.
A reporter from Al Jazeera said people called the police on them when they were filming.
The same thing happened to an AP reporter.
A netizen called the LA Times reporter a Chinese race traitor.
Some reporters said they received threats of violence against their families
on their private cell phones.
Like I said, this is not just a spontaneous outburst of angry Chinese people. This is a
harassment campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party.
I’ll explain after the break.
Welcome back. The anger at foreign reporters covering China’s massive flooding is not just
a spontaneous thing from random citizens. The Chinese Communist Party is leading the charge
and redirecting people’s genuine anger, from being against the Communist Party
towards targeting foreigners.
And Chinese state-run media have joined the fray. My favorite state-run media, the Global Times,
published this article about the harassment of foreign journalists.
Basically, it serves them right for trying to discredit the Chinese government.
It essentially blames the journalists for being a political tool of the West.
It accuses them of reporting negatively on the Chinese regime
“at the service of the West’s strategic competition with China.”
Now there’s definitely some projecting going on here. Chinese state-run media is a political
tool of the state. So they assume all foreign media are political tools of other states, too.
Ironically, the Party is actually telling us what they themselves do! They use the media as
a political tool to stir up public opinion. Like by accusing foreign journalists of smearing China.
And what if the journalists don’t want to be a political tool of the West? Easy! They
should “persuade their political elites to remain rational and objective on China-related issues.”
And in case you don’t speak fluent Chinese propaganda,
let me spell that out for you. Foreign journalists should stop being a tool of the West.
Instead they should be a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.
I also find it interesting the Global Times doesn’t say reporters should persuade
their governments or the people of their countries, but their “political elites.”
Again, the Party is telling us what they’re doing. They’re targeting the
elites of other countries and bringing them over to the Party’s point of view.
Which is how we get investment company Blackrock telling wealthy Americans to
unleash the potential of Chinese bonds.
But this campaign to blame foreign journalists has been great for the Chinese regime.
They get to distract Chinese people from being angry at the Chinese authorities.
They get to intimidate foreign reporters working in China.
And they get to berate the West for being unfair to the Chinese Communist Party.
Now, how about those Chinese bonds?
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I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.