Netizen Voices: In Hu Xijin Controversy, Nationalist Netizens Turn On One of Their Own

by John Chan | May 07, 2021

Last week, a Weibo post by the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, China’s top legal enforcement authority, ignited a firestorm of controversy on Chinese social media. The controversy began after the Commission’s account uploaded a post comparing the mass funeral pyres in India amid the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak with China’s recent Tianhe space station rocket launch. One focal point of the ensuing social media storm was a public spat between two prominent outspoken Party supporters: the state-backed Global Times tabloid’s...

As India is being ravaged by COVID, the most basic sympathy for those suffering as we did is fundamentally human—it has nothing to do with patriotism, it is basic decency.

-@十分正经研究所 on Weibo

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Last week, a Weibo post by the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, China’s top legal enforcement authority, ignited a firestorm of controversy on Chinese social media. The controversy began after the Commission’s account uploaded a post comparing the mass funeral pyres in India amid the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak with China’s recent Tianhe space station rocket launch. One focal point of the ensuing social media storm was a public spat between two prominent outspoken Party supporters: the state-backed Global Times tabloid’s...

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Last week, a Weibo post by the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, China’s top legal enforcement authority, ignited a firestorm of controversy on Chinese social media. The controversy began after the Commission’s account uploaded a post comparing the mass funeral pyres in India amid the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak with China’s recent Tianhe space station rocket launch. One focal point of the ensuing social media storm was a public spat between two prominent outspoken Party supporters: the state-backed Global Times tabloid’s...

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Last week, a Weibo post by the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, China’s top legal enforcement authority, ignited a firestorm of controversy on Chinese social media. The controversy began after the Commission’s account uploaded a post comparing the mass funeral pyres in India amid the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak with China’s recent Tianhe space station rocket launch. One focal point of the ensuing social media storm was a public spat between two prominent outspoken Party supporters: the state-backed Global Times tabloid’s...

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A Hong Kong court has convicted three people of rioting, jailing them for at least four years despite a lack of evidence that they played any role in the riot. This is the latest conviction since a higher court upheld the doctrine of “joint enterprise” in riot and unlawful assembly prosecutions earlier this year, vastly expanding the scope of both offenses to include people not directly placed at the scene of a protest. Hong Kong public broadcaster RTHK reported on the convictions on Thursday: The District Court on Wednesday handed down jail sentences of at least four years to...

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In early December, President Xi Jinping declared that China had eliminated absolute poverty. His announcement was the culmination of a years-long campaign that sought to raise the annual income of every person in China’s countryside above 4,000 yuan. The Economist reviewed the campaign and found it largely effective in eliminating the destitution previously endemic to China’s countryside: Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”. There are of course still isolated cases of abject deprivation. China, however, set...

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