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.
Related postings on Chinascope:
- Propaganda and Lies: Mainland Chinese Calling the Returning Chinese “Flying Thousands of Miles to Poison Chinese”
- Propaganda and Lies: Overseas Chinese Fell for the Propaganda That China’s Epidemic Was Over
- Propaganda and Lies: The Truth about the Video “An American Spread Virus in Wuhan Subway”
- Propaganda and Lies: Italian Media Called out CCP for Spreading Fake News
- Propaganda and Lies: Chinese Bots Flooded Twitter to Spread That U.S. Is the Origin of the Coronavirus