Undermining China, One Knockout at a Time

By AMY QIN

JULY 17, 2014 

Is Superman, depicted here in a mural in Beijing, a weapon being deployed to turn Chinese away from their own heroes?Credit Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency

Tensions between the United States and China over cybersecurity have risen as the two countries continue to trade barbs over hacking. But according to an essay on the website of a state newspaper that was widely republished this week, there is, in fact, a longer-running cyberwar underway between the United States and China. And the weapons employed, the essay argues, are far more sophisticated than hacking.

Lei Feng, the Chinese soldier revered as a model of selflessness.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

“America has long used the Internet to poison Chinese civilization and manipulate public opinion to influence politics,” reads the essay posted on the website of Guangming Daily, a Communist Party-backed paper aimed at intellectuals. “Hackers are only the lowest level of this cyberwar.”

Pointing to “innumerable articles and writings” circulating online, the essay argues that the “highest level” of this cyberwar has been the insidious advance of American culture, which, it says, has had the effect of “eroding the moral foundation and self-confidence of the Chinese people.”

Titled “Nine Knockout Blows in America’s Cold War Against China,” the essay takes on topics including Superman and the American education system. At one point, it even compares the “indiscriminate smearing” of China in many “fabricated or exaggerated” American news reports to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

The man behind the essay is Zhou Xiaoping, an independent commentator and, in his words, “everyday Internet user.” Last year, Mr. Zhou wrote another widely distributed essay, in which he lashed out against Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google China, accusing Mr. Lee of faking a cancer diagnosis and favoring the sexual harassment of women. Mr. Zhou was also reportedlyinvolved in a website called Fenbei.com, but he says he left before that website became involved in a pornography scandal.

“As an Internet user living on my country’s online territory, how could I not sense, how could I not know, when another country’s culture has invaded my country’s online territory?” Mr. Zhou wrote, when reached by email on Wednesday to comment on his essay.

“This is like a real-life war,” he said. “I doubt that when Americans were fighting the Civil War, ordinary citizens on both sides didn’t know or couldn’t sense what kind of weapons or tactics were being used by the other side.”

While blustering essays stoking Chinese nationalism are nothing new, Mr. Zhou’s piece seems to have enjoyed unusually broad circulation. Since it appeared on Monday on Guangming Daily’s website, it has been republished on a number of news sites, including those of the state news agency Xinhua and 81.cn, the official news portal for the Chinese military. Mr. Zhou said that though he had originally written the piece for an online forum a while ago, it was picked up by Guangming Daily only after he posted it on his microblog.

Here are some highlights from “Nine Knockout Blows in America’s Cold War Against China”: 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #1: Exterminate idols. Destroy Chinese moral models and replace them with American idols. Movies such as “Spider-Man” and “Superman” never forget to include plot elements such as a little girl being saved from a truck or helping an elderly woman cross the street. The intention of these is to emulate the exemplary qualities of Lei Feng [the Chinese soldier who won fame, after his untimely death, for his selfless good deeds] and Lai Ning [another young hero, who died trying to put out a forest fire] so that everyone’s hearts will turn to face the United States. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #2: Destroy convictions. Target the long-held beliefs of Chinese civilization, eliminate ancestor worship and replace it with the worship of Westerners and Jesus Christ. They [foreigners advocating such ideas] know the audience they’re targeting. Europeans who waste the most food admonish the Chinese people to be more frugal. The Americans, whose own elementary education system is in shambles, urge China to attach more importance to children’s education. The English, who before the 19th century did not even know what bathing meant, are advising Chinese to value hygiene. Japan, which has more homebody males than anyone, is instructing Chinese people to be more healthy. Even an illiterate country like India has been telling the Chinese to read more. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #3: Oppose humanity. Promote racism, destroy the self-confidence of this generation and the next generation of Chinese, and maintain their feeling of inferiority. This kind of indiscriminate smearing against an entire race has only been done by Hitler against the Jews. Today Americans are doing the same thing via the Internet. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #4: Oppose knowledge. Disseminate pseudoscience, promote environmental terrorism, disrupt China’s industrialization and advances in science and technology. Viral rumors in recent years such as rumors about a “high-speed train attendant suffers miscarriage due to radiation” and the commotion over “global warming and the melting of the Arctic Circle” … have been circulated all over Weibo, Weixin and social media forums, cultivating an anti-knowledge sentiment among a wide group of people. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #5: Declare China’s decline. Fabricated or exaggerated essays undermine the self-confidence of the Chinese youth and cause them to feel conflicted about China’s future, the Chinese government and the Chinese system. (In reality, very few people know that the United States itself is no olive-shaped society. According to data released by the White House we know that 40 percent of Americans hold 0.2 percent of the nation’s assets, whereas 2 percent of the population holds 40 percent of the nation’s assets!) 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #6: Forget history. Comprehensively vilify Chinese history. Comprehensively embellish American history. Almost no young Chinese person knows about how during the Civil War, [President Abraham] Lincoln gave license to his soldiers to lawfully rape women in occupied towns. [In fact, the United States government's 1863 Lieber Code of military conduct explicitly prohibited rape.] 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #7: Completely destroy credibility.When Beijing experienced torrential rains and flooding [in July 2012], even though the Chinese police worked heroically to save lives, there was one person who did not want to leave his newly bought car who drowned. And the Big V’s [verified Internet users with large followings] used photos of Japan’s hydroelectric power plants to supposedly show Japan’s sewer system and argue that the reason why Beijing’s sewer system was not as good as Japan’s was because of problems with China’s political system. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #8: Attack happiness. Flood every topic and domain that Chinese people care about with defamatory rumors. The quality of life of the Chinese people continues to improve every day, so that now ordinary citizens are turning their attention from food and shelter to quality of life issues, such as food safety, health care, health, environmental problems, marriage and other things in [American psychologist Abraham] Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But there are people whose jobs it is to blacken these issues. … Many of the more classic rumors, such as “injected watermelons” and “fake eggs” are still everywhere on the Internet. 

Cultural Cold War Knockout Blow #9: Disseminate political opium. In addition to utopian descriptions of foreign political systems, they also celebrate foreign leaders. Articles such as “[the former United States ambassador to China, Gary] Locke Sitting in Economy Class a Victory for the System,” “What Does George W. Bush Holding His Own Umbrella Symbolize?” and “Why Doesn’t America Have Corruption” … are available everywhere online. In these essays, Western society and Western officials are portrayed as being uncorrupt, in touch with the people, pure and holy, mindful of ordinary citizens, modest in the pursuit of public affairs.