Chinese Soft Power and Media Discussion and Updates

Biscuits said:

Throughout recent history, there was a persistent fear that because USA has more netizens then we have and also a wider access to paid commentators, they will just flood in and displace all the domestic voices. Therefore splitting the Internet into our side and their side made sense.

But now things have arguably changed and what China "needs" is more engagement with English speaking internet. I put need in quotation marks because this is not an urgent nor very necessary need. Yet it doesn't cost much to do so and China has to do it eventually.

The whole system of Internet sovereignty needs an overhaul. Every type of censorship that is broadly deemed unpopular according to the will of the people by their popular representatives, as befits a people's democracy, should be removed.

What sort of people should then replace them? China should instead mainly turn to the subpopulation of the communist youth league that are chronically online.

The CIA fake of a supposed 50 cent army, as ridiculous at it sounds, is actually not a bad idea. China should adopt American style paid commentator armies, which can further be enhanced by AI. Not the way Americans apply AI by making poorly generated twitter accounts which just end up looking creepy, but by using AI to identify the target topics where human paid commentators can have the maximum impact.

China has enough netizens that it can now shift its Internet defense strategy from passive defense to active defense.

In the new framework, there will be no more visible censorship, in fact the concept of censorship itself will be censored so that if anyone brings up censorship, he/she will have their opinion buried.

Instead, grassroots encouragement, public social influencers will make up the frontline, with government/military departments armed with AIs acting as the backline, supporting and directing the grassroots patriotic with targeted assistance.

Western bots will be rooted out by these government workers. But most of them will not be quietly banned like under the current system, instead, the evidence of their capture, their exposed methods, names and national belonging will be shown to the public.

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And people who voice any kind of positive voices for China already right now, has their voice silenced (banned, shadow banned, algorithm burying their post etc).

And this already the case on say Twitter and Reddit, and sure also many other platforms (GlobalTimes is even kind of shadowbanned on twitter, and it has nearly 2 million followers).

zhangjim said:

Many people are calling for this, but it is obviously difficult to identify "who is loyal".
The people accused the propaganda department of being completely occupied by evil traitors.
A vicious speculation is that this is a strategy to incorporate the opposition and arrange them in seemingly "harmless" departments to reduce their threat.
But I think this idea is absurd.

Sadly, the Loyalists always seem to be the first to be attacked. In recent years, the handling of major public opinion emergencies has been very unsuccessful, which has disappointed many people.
The NBA event in 2019 is very representative. The enthusiasm of the people obviously cannot rival the attraction of American basketball players. Patriots are as weak as MAGA in real action. One year later, CCTV rebroadcast the NBA, which made many people feel betrayed.
The excitement I was aroused by the military parade quickly cooled down. Powerful and advanced weapons were worthless in front of a basketball, and the government seemed to lack the determination to confront the United States . In 2019, the leadership still seems to have fantasies about the United States.
This year's response to Pelosi was also quite a failure. I don't think that exercise was a deterrent to the United States. I think this time the humiliation is no less than 1996. Hu Xijin, regarded as a semi official, lost his reputation.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the government does not need self righteous and self moving loyalists at all. The government is more afraid of populists' manipulation, so they still "guard against the Right, but mainly against the Left".

Someone mentioned such an interesting fact: the staff of China's network management department is far less than that of Russia. But they manage the largest group of network users in the world. Now you can understand why their management is so bad and inefficient, right?

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Afaik up until 2022 the cabinets are mostly staffed with doves. Only the most recent one has mostly realists in it. They have yet to start and shape policy.

America came out way worse in the confrontation over Taiwan because they hardly gained anything while China normalized its defensive patrols which will permanently increase readiness speed in the event of NATO aggression.

Number of staffing issues can be a problem but I would rather say that it is because too many of these have ties to the west, unlike the young(er) people.

There should be a targeted movement o eradicate Western friendly elements within the government, anyone with Western ties, anyone who espouses western rhetoric, must be put under close scrutiny and face barriers in promotion. Only then can the full potential of the nation be used to secure China's own interests.

Michaelsinodef said:

And people who voice any kind of positive voices for China already right now, has their voice silenced (banned, shadow banned, algorithm burying their post etc).

And this already the case on say Twitter and Reddit, and sure also many other platforms (GlobalTimes is even kind of shadowbanned on twitter, and it has nearly 2 million followers).

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Imo this type of censorship should be introduced in China and used against the west.

Especially because we can see through for example tiktok, China has possibly a great lead when it comes to AI algorithms.

That means, the experts that would make up these hypothetical online armies, can create more efficient algorithms that repudiate western opinion as well as exploit holes in the west's own system and manipulate their own algorithms against them.

Example of such an operation could be, to manipulate the American regime's own search engine algorithims so that major American sites return irrelevant, crass or racist results, openly exposing the nature of the enemy and the absurdity of his censorship.

In reality the algorithim used by the Americans is often very unsophisticated and obvious, such as blanket shadow bans and shadowbans on terms. China could create better algorithims that dont outright censor western platforms, but rather subtly manipulates the viewer into seeing negative/infuriating results that will make them leave by themselves, similar to how Chinese entertainment platforms already drive positive user engagement through algorithims.

Biscuits said:

Imo this type of censorship should be introduced in China and used against the west.

Especially because we can see through for example tiktok, China has possibly a great lead when it comes to AI algorithms.

That means, the experts that would make up these hypothetical online armies, can create more efficient algorithms that repudiate western opinion as well as exploit holes in the west's own system and manipulate their own algorithms against them.

Example of such an operation could be, to manipulate the American regime's own search engine algorithims so that major American sites return irrelevant, crass or racist results, openly exposing the nature of the enemy and the absurdity of his censorship.

In reality the algorithim used by the Americans is often very unsophisticated and obvious, such as blanket shadow bans and shadowbans on terms. China could create better algorithims that dont outright censor western platforms, but rather subtly manipulates the viewer into seeing negative/infuriating results that will make them leave by themselves, similar to how Chinese entertainment platforms already drive positive user engagement through algorithims.

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Sure, but what does this really have to do with taking down the firewall and let people in China to freely go on say Twitter?

Not to mention, nowadays they can quite easily go there with a VPN if they want to, and even with the firewall down, the majority of the chinese population would probably stick to chinese websites and social media anyways.

Overlord said:

America got nothing if you see from china lens, but in reality America got military base in philippines.

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Biden started tighning more on china, made chip 4 alliance and even made Japan ans Netherlands to cooperate on semiconductor sanction against china.

Don't you see that china has cooled down. Wolf warriors are not agressively attacking on west, china is asking south korea to not do chip ban against china, china seems softer on japan too ,china feels alot of pressure while it's image has gone worse to 80s level. Chin has less influence despite it being $20 trillion of economy wheareas even russia of $2 trillion has more Influence and many people are trying to support russia in Ukraine war through social media, RT was more effective in delivering russian voice then entire Chinese news media, most of Chinese news media is jokes, except Scmp almost all Chinese media don't know how to present china voice properly.

If you're trying to go against USA then you're not going against a country but a big empire (Eu, japan,sk, Australia,uk) and other partners, that's why china can't defeat USA because in china side it doesn't have powerful allies who can follow china policy and most of the country whom you think is your partner is nothing but a swing state who can't say against china because their mouth is filled with money. USA like USSR has allies who also believes in political ideology. Communist ideology defeated with death of communist block. As democracy block keeps getting bigger than you will only see Influence of USA getting bigger & bigger. Since China doesn't have anybody who believes in it's ideology so it will always feel cornered in the world. Political ideology is like a religion, no matter how good small religion are they will remain small against Christianity and Islam , Hinduism, Buddhism. USSR got alot of support because of it's attaractive ideology but it only lost due to economy, china is winning in economy side but again big blocks of NATO can create wall around it's growth. Even without china market Hollywood movie top gun 2 earned billion.

Even without any benefits still various countries in Asia joined IPEF block. This itself shows Influence of USA. USA is an unique country and a hegemon which never existed , no country ever had this level of influence ,not even USSR, British empire. Ukraine war and Taiwan issue is only bringing nato and USA allies and partners closer .

Things may change if de-dollarisation happen and yuan become internationalized, but still many countries doesn't have faith of yuan, because it's not fre flow like USD, china need to do alot of work which might even can hurt it's economy because USA and Chinese economy are very different, great firewall itself is going to not internalltionalize Chinese social media, when tik tok would get banned, it might die within six months or would lose 80% of it's user.

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lol they didnt get that base due to incursions into Chinese territory??? Phillippines is a nation of cucks, they were colonized in the past just like Indians. No spine to defend themselves.

If they want to use that base to invade China, China will just bomb the whole Phillippines country, so Philippines better kick them out when hostilities are about to go down or get ready to lose some population. I mean what self defense capability they have? 4 ddgs that are contemporaries of the Luda class?

If USA is going against China theyre not just going against a single country either, they're going against a fat bloc with shit like Russia in it as well. And looking at dismal performance of NATO economies against even just Russia, these part of the US empire are just like the USSR's SSRs. Weak and borderline useless on their own.

America has never fought someone who dominates them economically and more importantly industrially. None of the weak NATO SSRs can even produce enough gear together for a regional war.

Dollarization is propped up by Chinese industrial goods, China permits dollarization because using their own currency would kill Beijing's export potential. The moment US moves too aggressively, these privileges will be ended from China's side and the only ones backing dollar will be the likes of UK, Japan, Poland and the Baltics. Good luck driving an economy with made in poland goods, especially when the energy needed to power said industry is all in the hands of China.

zhangjim said:

Lu Shuming, the actor of Guan Yu who died a few days ago, is the victim of the crime of hooliganism. He attended a dance and was sentenced as "mental pollution".
1983 was an important time point. The sentencing of "hooligan crime" was raised to death penalty. Since this is a very arbitrary crime, the severity of the sentence depends entirely on the judge and the police station.
In sentencing, the "bad social impact" is often considered. However, if the citizens demand that the criminals be punished severely and quickly, the trial results will be extremely unfavorable to the defendants.
Regardless, the charge, which was created in 1979, was finally dropped in 1997.
View attachment 103666
This book is very expensive. I will not spend expensive time and money to provide evidence for arguing with you.
There are many other similar books, but I am not a professional legal researcher, so I will not collect them. But another book has a very helpless description:
View attachment 103667
In many places, cases that are difficult to handle and define are regarded as "hooliganism".

You can't understand it this way. From a grand perspective, it seems to be "forced", but it is not a praiseworthy behavior. Later people called it "abnormal means" for a reason. In essence, this is an extreme behavior to deal with social problems accumulated from policy mistakes.

This is a very famous book at that time（1982）：
View attachment 103664
In the book, rock music is regarded as an incurable disease of capitalist society, detailed accompaniment and euphemism are regarded as promoting obscenity, and words describing women's beauty or expecting love in lyrics are regarded as frivolous and immoral.
A book severely criticizing how capitalist music is full of pornographic elements, of course, it soon became a historical joke.


Looking back on this period of history, I can only imagine a group of stereotyped guys who are at a loss in the face of a new environment they are completely unfamiliar with.
Sadly, nearly 50 years later, they still failed to understand the policy of cultural industry.

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How old are you? Did you live through the 80s or you just read some books and interpret what had happened in the 80s? It is obvious you are making up stuffs up such as kissing and holding hands that could result in death penalty. I just don't see any normal and average Chinese would be delusional enough to think that these things are real.

I have been to and lived in China for sometime during the 80s. People got arrested because they committed crime. Of course, they are going to say that I just a bystander but the truth is they probably involved in a fight. In a lenient time, they are put in jail for a few weeks but during the 80s the government was tough on crimes so many people ended up in jail for much longer time.

In my home city, we only knew a few people got arrested for rape, stealing and trouble making hooligans. Let just says things got way better after these people were put in jail.

MortyandRick said:

Wait. That's your evidence?!?
F*** why did I even take what you said seriously. Lol

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Sure，keep play dumb，I don't care. Ignore my post if you can

zhangjim said:

Many people are calling for this, but it is obviously difficult to identify "who is loyal".
The people accused the propaganda department of being completely occupied by evil traitors.
A vicious speculation is that this is a strategy to incorporate the opposition and arrange them in seemingly "harmless" departments to reduce their threat.
But I think this idea is absurd.

Sadly, the Loyalists always seem to be the first to be attacked. In recent years, the handling of major public opinion emergencies has been very unsuccessful, which has disappointed many people.
The NBA event in 2019 is very representative. The enthusiasm of the people obviously cannot rival the attraction of American basketball players. Patriots are as weak as MAGA in real action. One year later, CCTV rebroadcast the NBA, which made many people feel betrayed.
The excitement I was aroused by the military parade quickly cooled down. Powerful and advanced weapons were worthless in front of a basketball, and the government seemed to lack the determination to confront the United States . In 2019, the leadership still seems to have fantasies about the United States.
This year's response to Pelosi was also quite a failure. I don't think that exercise was a deterrent to the United States. I think this time the humiliation is no less than 1996. Hu Xijin, regarded as a semi official, lost his reputation.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the government does not need self righteous and self touching loyalists at all. The government is more afraid of populists' manipulation, so they still "guard against the Right, but mainly against the Left".

Someone mentioned such an interesting fact: the staff of China's network management department is far less than that of Russia. But they manage the largest group of network users in the world. Now you can understand why their management is so bad and inefficient, right?

Click to expand...

LOLOL This Falun Gong guy's like, "Who is loyal? What is loyalty? Those who are seen as loyal can be seen as traiters while the truly loyal are attacked." LOLOL Save that shit. Those who study STEM and bring their skills to China are loyal. Those who follow the CCP's governance of China are loyal. Those who shill about China's "lack of freedoms" are traitors who need some American police brutality to teach them what's freedom.

Overlord said:

America got nothing if you see from china lens, but in reality America got military base in philippines.

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America got nothing. China got islands and got to grow them larger.

Overlord said:

Biden started tighning more on china, made chip 4 alliance and even made Japan ans Netherlands to cooperate on semiconductor sanction against china.

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America stepping on its dogs is a problem? They all know they're going to be sacrificed for no reason because it's futile to try to stop China. Both Japan and ASML have said this. If they feel like this will be a long term benefit to them, they wouldn't need to be forced.

Overlord said:

Don't you see that china has cooled down.

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No I don't see it. I see Chinese tech revving up.

Overlord said:

Wolf warriors are not agressively attacking on west,

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What does that mean? Internet guys aren't talking as loudly? What is the source to this claim?

Overlord said:

china is asking south korea to not do chip ban against china,

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No, it's South Korea saying they won't and they need the Chinese market.

Overlord said:

china seems softer on japan too

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Seems? In your imagination? What source?

Overlord said:

,china feels alot of pressure

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There is a lot of pressure because this lithography is the final hurdle. You think overtaking a superpower doesn't come with pressure?

Overlord said:

while it's image has gone worse to 80s level.

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I don't take your word for it. Looks better than ever to me. To those who disagree, it's the weakness of the 80's that they felt positively for about China.

Overlord said:

Chin has less influence despite it being $20 trillion of economy wheareas even russia of $2 trillion has more Influence and many people are trying to support russia in Ukraine war through social media, RT was more effective in delivering russian voice then entire Chinese news media, most of Chinese news media is jokes, except Scmp almost all Chinese media don't know how to present china voice properly.

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Quantify this influence because I don't believe you. When China says something, markets of the whole world responds. Honestly, only the US can rival China in influence and I don't mean "cool kids entertainement/media." This is the politician's adults only table.

Overlord said:

If you're trying to go against USA then you're not going against a country but a big empire (Eu, japan,sk, Australia,uk) and other partners, that's why china can't defeat USA because in china side it doesn't have powerful allies who can follow china policy and most of the country whom you think is your partner is nothing but a swing state who can't say against china because their mouth is filled with money. USA like USSR has allies who also believes in political ideology. Communist ideology defeated with death of communist block. As democracy block keeps getting bigger than you will only see Influence of USA getting bigger & bigger. Since China doesn't have anybody who believes in it's ideology so it will always feel cornered in the world. Political ideology is like a religion, no matter how good small religion are they will remain small against Christianity and Islam , Hinduism, Buddhism. USSR got alot of support because of it's attaractive ideology but it only lost due to economy, china is winning in economy side but again big blocks of NATO can create wall around it's growth. Even without china market Hollywood movie top gun 2 earned billion.

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If you're trying to go against China, you're going against the largest population of STEM graduates in the world made from talent that tops global academics charts from youth who fuel the fastest innovative push in history. The Western block is just a bunch of punks in disarray getting bullied by the biggest punk. They don't have directive, constantly disagree, all have self-interests and want to push the responsibility onto someone else. Ideology is a myth; it is only an excuse to be closer due to power dynamic, not a reason that holds in itself. In reality, the US has no problem with anyone's ideology as long as they follow the US directive. Everything relies on America's hard power to keep together, and that hard power is supplemented by their support but not nearly is is difrectly additive because they are, at their roots, different countries with their own benefits to think about. The Western block is like 30 people dressed up in a dragon costume against a China that is a real dragon. Their only advantage is China's low starting point. China outgrows them every year economically and technologically because their "wall" is a light show just like their alliance. This is why they can never win against a unified China.

Overlord said:

Even without any benefits still various countries in Asia joined IPEF block. This itself shows Influence of USA.

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Why don't we compare the 13 countries that joined that block to how many joined RCEP to show the influence of China? LOL When China opened the AIIB, over 100 countries from all over the world swarmed in pushing American clowns out of the way as they tried to tell them not to. That's the greater influence of China.

Overlord said:

USA is an unique country and a hegemon which never existed , no country ever had this level of influence ,not even USSR, British empire. Ukraine war and Taiwan issue is only bringing nato and USA allies and partners closer .

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LOLOL America is no hegemon any more. We just keep using it because we've gotten used to it over the decades. A hegemon has domination and control; it does not get into tussles and lose. America lost the trade war with China, is losing the tech war, and spent a year getting no one to join its tech ban on China. This is a has-been, not a hegemon.

Overlord said:

Things may change if de-dollarisation happen and yuan become internationalized, but still many countries doesn't have faith of yuan, because it's not fre flow like USD, china need to do alot of work which might even can hurt it's economy because USA and Chinese economy are very different, great firewall itself is going to not internalltionalize Chinese social media, when tik tok would get banned, it might die within six months or would lose 80% of it's user.

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Lots of work ahead but China is the last country to be afraid of work. Your predictions are useless and ignorant. There are 700M TikTok users in China alone.

To members who don't read Chinese：

If you are interested in exploring more common Chinese people's view on various topics，I strongly recommend you follow the way I did when I try to study specific countries. Which is surf native language forum with the help of translation software，DO NOT rely on informations from english version forum unless the the majority of that country's population are fluent in english.

This is especially true for countries like China Russia Japan Korea etc. If you do this，I promise you that you will find a whole different world that is vastly different from the english version XX country's forum，SDF included. Make no mistake，english version forum DO NOT represent the majority common folks opinion，native language forum is the real deal. For China，even domestic forum is under strict censorship and tons of topic is forbidden to discuss，you'd still get much more authentic experiences than the "international version China forum" like SDF.

I know it's labourious to navigate in non-english forums with translation software，but if you really want to dig deep into regular local people's mind，it's absolutely worth of the time.

BTW, I surf Russian native forum recently，and I can tell you people's opinion over there is totally different from the english language Russia Defence Forum.

KYli said:

How old are you? Did you live through the 80s or you just read some books and interpret what had happened in the 80s? It is obvious you are making up stuffs up such as kissing and holding hands that could result in death penalty. I just don't see any normal and average Chinese would be delusional enough to think that these things are real.

I have been to and lived in China for sometime during the 80s. People got arrested because they committed crime. Of course, they are going to say that I just a bystander but the truth is they probably involved in a fight. In a lenient time, they are put in jail for a few weeks but during the 80s the government was tough on crimes so many people ended up in jail for much longer time.

In my home city, we only knew a few people got arrested for rape, stealing and trouble making hooligans. Let just says things got way better after these people were put in jail.

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I don't plan to waste too much time on this issue（It also deviates from the theme too much. I just want to say the long-standing conservative atmosphere in China）, because the cost of checking relevant papers is very high：

A 1985 paper elaborated the problems in the punishment of "hooligan crime". The biggest problem is that there is no strict standard for "other hooliganism", which leads to any behavior that is intolerable to conservatives will be reported as "hooliganism".
For convenience, I reprint the article of Luo Xiang（罗翔）, a famous Chinese legal authority：

He mentioned many details, for example, the family dance was considered to be a mass sexual act at that time, the invitation of women as human models in painting was considered as a "hooligan act", and even the temporary cohabitation of men and women was considered as a "hooligan act".

You may think that some defendants are indeed too "licentious", but I agree with this legal scholar that "hooligan crime" has too strong moralistic color, so no matter how many judicial interpretations are made, it will lead to a legal provision with too broad management scope.

I don't have the energy to look up those newspapers, magazines, periodicals, papers and news. If you think this is not enough, then I won't waste time again.