Another "masterpiece" of the Western media demonizing China came out. On April 6, local time, the American media Bloomberg, which usually likes to put various unwarranted hats on China, "educated" Chinese patriotic netizens this time.
The content of his article is groundless criticism of Chinese netizens' patriotic, "anti-American" and other remarks and public opinion trends, which damages the image of a kind, low-key, and responsible big country that China is shaping abroad, and also "guides" from a high place that the Chinese government should strictly manage the so-called "nationalist" remarks posted by these netizens on social media to safeguard their overseas image.
Slandering China's "hoarding of grain has caused global grain prices to rise", hyping up "China's huge demand for crude oil threatens the world" theory... The endless Bloomberg news agency this time poured dirty water on the heads of Chinese netizens.
According to the Hong Kong China News Agency, the Bloomberg review, originally titled "China's Online Nationalists Threaten Its Image Abroad," was later changed to the now milder wording of "Online Nationalists Pose a Dilemma for." China’s Image-Making）。
Bloomberg's report fiercely "criticized and educated" those Chinese netizens who are patriotic and no longer worship the United States, saying that Chinese netizens are becoming more and more "anti-American" and believe that the United States will kill itself if it commits many acts of injustice.
For example, condemning the United States for setting up laboratories in Ukraine to study the virus, and even taking Ukrainian civilians as experimental objects, a large number of Chinese netizens hope that the United States will be punished, the article said: "The Chinese media last week reported that the video of the United States conducting biological experiments in Ukraine received more than 6.5 million views and more than 83,000 likes on Sina Weibo, which also triggered a large number of 'anti-American' remarks, of which the popular comment 'who can punish American crimes' received 12,000 likes." ”
Some Chinese netizens believe that the US move is no different from the inhumane experiments of Japanese Unit 731 in World War II, which seems to have made Bloomberg quite dissatisfied. It was silent about the U.S. biological experiments, but described the crimes of Japanese Unit 731 as "notorious" in the report, with a sense of "how can you compare the two of us?"
Map of the distribution of U.S. biological laboratories overseas published by the Russian Ministry of Defense
The conversation turned sharply, and the article said that although in the past, because of the language barrier, the comments of these Chinese netizens could not be understood by anyone except Chinese users, but now someone has opened an account on Twitter to translate the representative comments of Chinese netizens and display these remarks to netizens around the world.
In this regard, Bloomberg has a schadenfreude face, claiming that China's patriotic netizens are using these so-called "nationalistic" remarks to "damage" China's image of a kind, low-key and responsible big country in the hearts of global netizens. At the end of the article, it also "guides" China from a high place, hoping that China will strictly control the "nationalist" speech on social media and thus maintain its public image internationally.
The copy of the article retweeted by Bloomberg's official Twitter account also continued to hype up the groundless accusation that "translated websites let the world see the viciousness of 'nationalist' comments on Chinese social media."
What Bloomberg is referring to is the recent "cognitive war" against China launched by various foreign forces in cyberspace - the so-called "Great Translation Movement". That is, through one-sided interception of translations Chinese some extreme remarks on social media, to convey inducing and labeling information with obvious anti-China tendencies to foreign audiences, in order to stigmatize China in the field of foreign public opinion.
And this movement, which is supposedly organized by "netizens spontaneously," has now been proven to be under the shadow of not only the old anti-China media such as the "Voice of America" and Radio Free Asia, but also the "cognitive combat" cadres such as Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party Network Army "1450."
In an interview with Deutsche Welle, some participants said that their original intention was to make people in more countries think that Chinese is "a collection of pride, arrogance, populism, cruelty, bloodlust, and no sympathy", and the purpose is to "hope that people of Chinese descent all over the world can get rid of these negative emotions, truly integrate with civilized society, and feel ashamed of their ignorance."
The "Great Translation Movement" elevates the excessive remarks of some netizens to the "inferiority" of the entire country and the entire nation, and plays a trick of partial generalization and taking meaning out of context.
Take the "ukrainian beauty vulgar remarks" hyped by the "Great Translation Movement", this kind of speech is not a unique phenomenon of the Chinese network, let alone the mainstream voice of the Chinese public opinion field, the vast majority of Chinese netizens have long expressed their opposition to such vulgar remarks; moreover, on the social media commonly used by Chinese netizens such as Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin, they have quickly punished accounts involved in such vulgar remarks.
Ironically, however, China's efforts to advocate for the upward goodness of the Internet and the building of a clear cyberspace are seen by media such as Bloomberg as a means for China to maintain its external image.
Exposing the "Great Translation Movement" is by no means to "compare it with other countries and regions", but to identify and be vigilant against the "crooked mind" of targeting China. According to the Global Network quoting a military commentator article, what we should be more vigilant about is that, unlike the daily behavior habits of smearing Chinese in the past, this action clearly blames the Chinese government for the so-called negative image of Chinese, which makes a certain cut with overseas Chinese and makes the purpose of this farce clearer, that is, to smear China's political system by smearing the Chinese people, so as to achieve the fundamental goal of setting off a "color revolution" in China.
This article is an exclusive manuscript of the Observer Network and may not be reproduced without authorization.