Social Stability – Page 55

Propaganda and Lies: How China Produced Fake News of “Stores Are Closing” in Other Countries

To portray itself as the world leader in fighting the novel coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has painted a rosy picture that China has won the battle with the coronavirus while other countries are in deep trouble. However, this propaganda campaign backfired. Many Chinese overseas have been lured to return to China and the CCP quarantined them in the fear of infection. The CCP then started to tell the overseas Chinese not to come back.

The CCP also took on the “content farms” that spread rumors that other countries were in trouble. These farms were following the CCP’s propaganda strategy, but their “excellent achievements” contributed to the backfire.

The Paper, a newspaper in Beijing, compared some of the articles from these content farms and found they were amazingly similar in both the title and the contents throughout the article.

It gave the comparison result of two articles, one about Chinese in Ethiopia and one about Chinese in Hungry. The two articles had almost exactly the same contents, with the only exception being the swapping out of the country name, capital city, and a pseudo person (Mr. Xu vs. Ms. Liu).

It pointed out that that these articles were pushed onto many Chinese Communist websites in different countries. Three companies, all under a person named Guo Hong in Fujian Province owned those websites.

Radio Free Asia reported that Fujian police investigated Guo Hong’s husband Xue Yumin, the actual man who ran the operations in those companies, along with other fake media owners who supported the CCP’s propaganda campaign, under the charge of “fabricating fake information that led many Chinese overseas to return to China and jeopardize China’s epidemic control.”

A senior media practitioner Mr. Liu pointed out that the CCP has a long history of brainwashing overseas Chinese. Though they stay outside of China, they still rely on China’s state machine and Chinese media to obtain information. And thus, content farms have found it easy to cheat them at this time.

“World Leader”: The Coronavirus Testing Kits Czech Republic Bought from China Have an 80 Percent Error Rate

Xinhua reported that the Czech Republic bought 150,000 novel coronavirus testing kits and, on March 18, used its military plane to ship them back. “Czech Republic Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch said these kits would be sent to the locked down areas where the pandemic is severe. It can give results in 20 minutes.” Xinhua said that Czech’s traditional testing equipment needed 6 hours to give a result.

“The Czech Republic’s Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said that they received considerable help from China’s Embassy to the Czech Republic in sending a military plane to China to bring the emergency medical supplies back.”

However, on March 23, the Czech news media iROZHLAS reported that 80 percent of China’s quick testing kits produced the wrong result in their testing.

Experts reported on this high error rate at a pandemic information meeting that a regional hygienist Pavla Svrcinova hosted. Svrcinova said that these test kits produced “fake positives” and “fake negatives” when they were compared with the traditional testing results. “It is fortunate that we took this forward-thinking action (to validate the testing kits).”

Propaganda and Lies: Mainland Chinese Calling the Returning Chinese “Flying Thousands of Miles to Poison Chinese”

To portray itself as the world leader in fighting the novel coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been reporting an extremely low rate of infection cases or even a zero count in many provinces for many days.

However, this propaganda campaign has backfired. The propaganda lured many Chinese who were overseas, especially Chinese students who studied in other countries, to returned to China because it is a “safe haven” as the other parts of the world are reporting high rates of infection.

The CCP did not anticipate this and did not want them, since it was still fighting the coronavirus and had no energy to deal with returning Chinese. The CCP also worried about the potential for importing infections.

China’s official report showed 21 new infection cases on March 17, with 20 coming from overseas.

Beijing reactivated the Xiaotangshan Hospital, a hospital set up during the SARS outbreak in 2003 for the primary purpose of isolating the confirmed patients instead of treating them. Their actual death count was unknown but was guessed to be high. This time, the hospital, with over 1,000 beds, will primarily hold the people found to be at risk after a Custom’s check. It will include confirmed patients and suspected patients.

Postings criticizing the returning Chinese spread on China’s Internet, such as, “You were not here when we were developing the motherland, but you are the fastest to fly back thousands of miles to poison the Chinese here” or, “The motherland treated you as a child but you treated the motherland as a fool.”

A Weibo comment said, “Those overseas Chinese should know that you are coming back to take refuge, not to be our masters. The Chinese people are all suffering a hard time now. Go back if you can’t stand it.”

Another Weibo article made a call to move all people entering China to Wuhan. “Instead of returning to home to create the risk of getting your own family quarantined, why not go to Wuhan to pass the hard times with the people there?”

Many overseas Chinese felt hurt. “When the epidemic exploded in China,” a person said, “many people and I donated money and bought face masks and protective clothing to send to China. Now many of us are sad: we are discriminated against in foreign countries, but also cursed when we go back to China.”

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