South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s late-night declaration of martial law—and the immense pushback from lawmakers and the public that forced him to rescind the order—has been the talk of the Chinese internet. Online discussion was marked by comparisons to the 1989 imposition of martial law in Beijing, which culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre; dark comedy by netizens; and uncharacteristically nimble reporting from Chinese state media. Hashtags dedicated to the extraordinary events in the Korean capital made up over 30 of the top 50 trending topics on Weibo at one point. The top five trends were: “South Korea’s President Declares Martial Law,” “What’s Going on in South Korea?” “One Belt One Road Report Card, Told in Data,” “South Korea,” and “Chinese Embassy in Korea Issues Late Night Warning.”

Videos and photographs of South Korean citizens stepping in front of military vehicles to stop their advance on the National Assembly also circulated on Weibo.

The photographs bore an unmistakable resemblance to the world famous “Tank Man” photograph of 1989, which captured an unknown Beijing citizen stepping in front of a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue, near Tiananmen Square. The Tank Man photograph—and various recreations of it—is perhaps the most censored image on the Chinese internet. The similarities between Seoul, 2024 and Beijing, 1989 were not lost on Weibo users. Underneath one compilation of photos showing people blocking military vehicles, one Beijing-based commenter (Weibo displays users’ IP addresses) sarcastically wrote, “So indecisive, just run them all over,” to which another responded, “That’s such a messed-up joke from someone with a Beijing IP address.” A third added, “In this era, we have a little thing called ‘cell phone footage.’” A final commenter put it more directly: “Back then, they should have just used riot police to clear the Square, instead they went straight for the strong stuff…” Although highly oblique, the jokes are unmistakable references to the Tiananmen Massacre. In an interview published in February of 2024, Oxford scholar Margaret Hillenbrand told CDT that the Tank Man photograph was emblematic of “the paradox of things that are fully known but are totally unacknowledgable”:

It was around that time that I interviewed Badiucao, the cartoonist. Sophie Beach [former CDT English Executive Editor] was the person who put me in touch with him. In our discussion about the Tank Man photograph, he made a really penetrating remark. He said something like, “Although [this event, June 4th], is really tightly controlled in terms of information, middle-aged people all have a kind of unspoken knowledge about it. It’s a secret closely kept by both sides.” It suddenly struck me really forcefully at that point that “secrets kept by both sides” are what photo-forms are all about. They’re artifacts that take an iconic photograph and then mask it, if you like, under a different material guise. They scramble it, in a sense, but always knowing full well what’s behind the veil because the original image is just far too famous to miss—even if the photo-form somehow warps its shape. What I realized at that point was that photo-forms articulate the paradox of things that are fully known but are totally unacknowledgeable. [Source]

Other netizen commentary tended to circle two topics: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and the 2023 film “12.12: The Day,” a historical drama based on the December 12, 1979 coup d’état that brought Chun Doo-hwan to power in South Korea, following the assassination of President Park Chung-hee and his secret service chief two months prior. Many Chinese social media users shared photographs of Kim looking through binoculars, alongside captions joking that now is the time for North Korea to invade the south. Another common theme came from video-sharing site Bilibili, where there has been a surge in popularity of fancam-style “edits” of Kim Jong-un, who netizens call “The General” in faux adoration, set to the love song “Three Winters.” After the declaration of martial law, many used hashtags related to the crisis to share the nonsensical parodic lyric “You’ve come from Dandong, dressed all in white,” a deliberate misreading of “Three Winters” that seems to imply the union of North and South. (Dandong is a city along the Chinese-North Korean border.) Other commentary focused on the film “12.12: The Day,” which is titled “Seoul Spring” in Chinese. One online commenter wrote: “Early this year, I watched ‘Seoul Spring,’ then later this year—just a few days after it won Best Picture at the Blue Dragon Film Awards [South Korea’s Oscars]—I began watching the real-life version of “Seoul Spring,” or should I say “Seoul Winter.”

Survey by a history Weibo blogger this night: do you believe that a civil war could erupt in South Korea? Answered by over 2400 people so far, mostly young Chinese. Nearly 60% doesn't believe that could happen. 26% thinks there's a chance. The rest will wait and see. pic.twitter.com/xM8n5J2mts

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) December 3, 2024

China’s official state news agency Xinhua’s Weibo feed—usually a staid compilation of Xi Jinping’s pronouncements, videos extolling new infrastructure projects, clickbait animal articles, brief wire notices on international news, and sporting updates—was full of live coverage of the declaration of martial law and its aftermath. Xinhua shared clips of state-media reporters broadcasting live from protests during which demonstrators chanted “Down with dictatorship, end martial law!” The unusually lively news coverage inspired one netizen to joke: “This is the first time I’ve stayed up late because I’m glued to Xinhua’s Weibo account 😂.” Relatively freewheeling reportage aside, comment sections under Xinhua’s posts were tightly censored, according to BBC China media analyst Kerry Allen. Hu Xijin, the gadfly commentator for the state-run Global Times fresh off a mysterious months-long social media silence, took to Weibo to write: “This isn’t the usual political gamesmanship. No, it has the flavor of a life-or-death political struggle.”

This story is still developing. CDT will follow it as it progresses.