As the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong continue to grow, people from all over the world are watching and debating the merits of the demonstration. But on Sina Weibo, where the discussion is decidedly one-sided thanks to the Chinese government’s stringent censorship policies, the opinion of one foreigner who’s taken the Chinese government’s side has gone viral. John Ross, an English economist who’s currently a senior fellow at Renmin University in Beijing, posted this Chinese-language message on his microblog on Monday:
It’s not convenient for me to comment on the issue of the 2017 chief executive election in Hong Kong, because I’m not Chinese. But the Western media’s reporting on the Hong Kong problem is too hypocritical [vomit emoticon]. During the 150 years when England had colonial rule of Hong Kong, it never allowed Hong Kong to elect a governor, and America never protested England about that. The current system China has designed for Hong Kong is far more democratic, but America is strongly protesting the Chinese government. While I’m at it, which school teaches the best excavator skills?
(Note: the excavator bit at the end is a reference to a recent in-joke on Chinese social media, and not really a part of his argument about Hong Kong.)
In the time since it was posted, Ross’s tweet has blown up. As of this writing, it has attracted more than 34,000 comments (a few of which ChinaSmack has already translated), been forwarded more than 130,000 times, and racked up nearly 75,000 likes. Ross himself claims it has been read 37 million times.
Unfortunately, it is probably beyond the scope of my duties here to directly address Ross’s pandering, facile argument given that this is a technology blog. But I do want to point out that his post going viral is an excellent example of how Beijing can control the dialogue on social media by censoring one half of the story.
Foreigners who can speak Chinese and who take the Chinese government’s side are always going get attention, in large part because they’re pretty rare. So even on an uncensored Weibo, Ross’s post might have blown up. But in an environment where images and information from the opposing side of the dispute-the people who support Occupy Central-are being heavily censored, post’s like Ross’s are the only things related to Occupy Central that can go viral. If that weren’t the case, I suspect Ross might be competing with images like this one, which didn’t have much trouble hitting the front page of reddit:
(The image above is an animated gif; if it’s not moving for you click here to open it in a new window and it should play.)
Even casual Weibo users are aware that the site is censored, of course, but that likely doesn’t matter much. The end result is still that when Chinese users load up Weibo, the posts with the highest visibility are posts like Ross’s, and not posts about what’s actually happening in Hong Kong. Does the popularity of these posts actually reflect Weibo’s collective opinion? We have no way of knowing. But the censorship can certainly make it appear that way, and for Beijing’s purposes, that may be all that’s necessary to influence public opinion and keep dissenters from raising their voices.
Foreigner’s anti-protest Weibo post about Occupy Central goes viral in China
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