Over the summer, five scandals dominated Chinese social media: the stabbing of a Chinese school bus attendant in an anti-Japanese outburst; the suicide of a young diver after her coach raped her; the contamination of cooking oil transported by fuel tanker trucks; the trafficking of corpses to be harvested for medical resources; and the death of dozens after a Shaanxi highway bridge collapsed after heavy rains. Each touched on pressing social issues, ranging from nationalism to food safety. In many cases, reporting on the incidents was censored. While some were rankled by the censorship, many were also perturbed by the perceived “whataboutism” that substituted for rigorous follow-up reporting or consequences for bad actors.
In its foreign propaganda, China often combats bad press with examples of similar incidents abroad. Examples include denying the mistreatment of Uyghurs while decrying the genocide of Native Americans in the United States. The State Council Information Office releases a report highlighting American human rights abuses each year in response to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs often uses the SCIO response to deflect questions about China’s human rights issues. (The report might have more purchase in the United States if it was not mostly a repackaging of reporting and analysis by Western news outlets and think tanks.) A similar tendency after domestic scandals has been lampooned by Chinese netizens. A satirical bit shared with the popular X account “Teacher Li is not your teacher” captured public chagrin with pointing the finger at America:
The public has been clamoring for follow-up developments on the major news stories of the past two months. After some sleuthing, I have the following updates to share with everyone:
On the Suzhou school bus killer: It turns out that Trump’s would-be assassin was a 20-year-old Pennsylvanian named Thomas Matthew Crooks.
As it relates to the 14-year-old girl who committed suicide after being raped by her coach: In India, a female doctor was gang-raped by a group of men.
Regarding the transport of cooking oil in fuel tankers: There have been mass food-poisoning incidents at a Japanese school and an American tech company recently. [The “American” company was TikTok, a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands and owned by a Chinese company.]
As for the corpse-trafficking scandal: An American company secretly sold over 100 unclaimed bodies in cold storage. [This seems to be confusing the recent conviction of an American couple for improperly storing corpses at their funeral home.]
Concerning the multi-vehicle accident caused by the collapse of a Shaanxi highway bridge after heavy rains: Investigative reporting reveals that America’s eastern seaboard has been struck by a powerful hurricane causing many deaths and massive property damage. [Chinese]
While many of the parodic lines above contained major factual errors, there was more than a hint of truth to them. Weibo censored over a dozen hashtags related to the domestic corpse trafficking scandal while allowing one related to a similar American scandal to go viral. Netizens noticed a similar phenomenon after the cooking oil scandal, after which news about carcinogens in Japanese cooking oil trended to the top of Weibo.
The cooking oil scandal has also fueled anger over a lack of perceived follow-up. While the alleged perpetrators were fined and arrested, the government Food Safety Office declared that only two truckloads of cooking oil were exposed to fuel. While the statement confirmed the reporting of state media outlet Beijing News, it also raised eyebrows. Could journalists truly have discovered the only two loads that were so contaminated? A WeChat essay asking just that question was taken down by censors. (Another similar essay sarcastically praising journalists’ eagle eyes was not removed, however.)
Of course, “whataboutism” is not unique to the Chinese state. Scholars and bloggers have written extensively about “whataboutism” and its uses by all participants in the global “China debate.” It is so common precisely because it is an effective rhetorical strategy in international politics, argue Wilfred M. Chow and Dov H. Levin in Foreign Affairs.
In subsequent research (with the political scientist Atsushi Tago), we tested whether whataboutism had the same effect on countries allied with the United States. To do so, we recruited a representative sample of residents in the United Kingdom and Japan and asked them to answer a similar survey. Once again, we found that whataboutism worked. After hearing whataboutist retorts aimed at the United States, British and Japanese respondents became significantly less likely to support joining in Washington’s critiques. Before hearing a whataboutist critique, for example, 59 percent of British respondents and 46 percent of Japanese respondents approved of joining U.S. criticisms. After hearing it, support fell to 37 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Respondents were also less supportive of their government joining any U.S. sanctions: support fell from 58 percent to 41 percent in the United Kingdom and from 34 percent to 27 percent in Japan. Finally, whataboutism increased respondents’ tendency to see the United States and the whataboutist actor as morally equivalent. The percent of British respondents viewing the actions as equally justifiable rose from 30 percent to 42 percent. Among Japanese respondents, it went from 27 percent to 34 percent.
Interestingly, the identity of the whataboutist actor did not matter to the American, British, or Japanese publics. Whataboutism by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia, proved just as effective as whataboutist retorts by close allies. Likewise, the U.S. government could not counter whataboutism by arguing that its misdeed had supposedly benevolent intentions, such as promoting democracy. As a result, American efforts to fight back against whataboutism, as at the 1985 conference, have probably failed. So has apologizing for past misdeeds. (According to our research, U.S. government apologies, at best, very modestly counteract whataboutism’s negative effects.) There is simply no rhetorical strategy that can eliminate the technique’s power. [Source]
