Courcy's Special Alerts

In a Special Alert sent out on 11 August we gave details on how Beijing was setting the scene for a crackdown on social media, including on China’s equivalent of Twitter – Weibo. Since then, China’s official state media have made a great deal about the role that Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger and other new media had in the UK’s recent rioting, and they have made even more of the UK government’s suggestions that it might seek to control the use of such media in certain circumstances.

In the last few days, the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi has once again highlighted the role that social media is having within China in moulding and spreading opinion. The state media has been emphasizing the “chaos” that has accompanied the overthrow of Gaddafi and the role that the West has played, but this has not prevented the blogosphere taking an altogether more subversive line.

The official news agency Xinhua, for instance, reported the rebel celebrations in Tripoli under the headline “Full-blown riot breaks out in Libyan capital”, while the state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has captioned its reports from Libya under the title “War and chaos in Libya”.

The Communist Party’s People’s Daily said that events in Libya were the consequence of “strong behind-the-scenes manipulation by the Western powers”. Another CCP outlet, the Global Times, said that many opportunities over the past six months to end the conflict peacefully and reach a political solution “were blocked by the West”.

The response to Libyan events in the blogosphere has been very different. Here are some examples from recent days from bloggers and users of Weibo:

- “The people are celebrating their victory on the square, but Xinhua calls it a full-blow riot in Tripoli. Haha!!”

- “Xinhua has come out to shame itself again. Has anyone ever seen riots that are so happy?”

- “I’m close to tears. It’ll soon be our turn.”

The popular internet portal Sohu even went so far as to argue that one of the reasons for Gaddafi’s downfall was “violent stability maintenance” – a phrase that is often used in the Chinese media to describe what is happening in China itself.

Even some printed media has opposed the official line. The economic magazine Caixin, for instance, seemed to be drawing lessons for China when it described Gaddafi’s downfall as being due to “a rigid highly centralized system [that] led to wealth and power being concentrated among a privileged few for a long time”. It noted: “ultimately, the people rose up”.

And Qilu Wanbao, a popular downmarket newspaper in Jinan, published an article saying “only the people can dictate the directions of history...strongmen should give power back to the people as early as possible”, but the report was shortly afterwards deleted from its website.

These are nervous times for China.

END

NOTE - Source for Chinese social media quotes: BBC Monitoring