More than 10,000 Chinese were in Ukraine when Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.
He “friendship without limits” Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping announced between their countries three weeks before the invasion prevented the Chinese from suddenly finding themselves in a war zone.
Although Chinese leaders seemed to have been as shocked by Russia’s invasion as the rest of the world, that shock did not translate into condemnation of Moscow’s actions, then or now.
Days after the invasion, China’s state newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a message on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, in which Beijing’s embassy in Kiev called on its citizens in Ukraine to unite amid the deterioration of the situation.
The People’s Daily, along with most of China’s new media, had by then rallied behind Russia and its fight against the Ukrainian war.
More than a year later, Chinese media coverage of the war remains strong. echoes the Moscow narrative and sometimes amounts to a mere “copy and paste” of Russian war propaganda.
“I have stopped trying to understand what is happening,” Yu-Ling Song*, 24, from Xiamen told Al Jazeera.
There is one version of the war reported by the Chinese media and the Chinese people, Song said, and a very different version by the Western media and their Western friends.
It has left her very confused, he added.
Different media realities
Shanghai’s Hsin-yi Lin has not yet completely given up trying to understand the situation in Ukraine. But he has concluded that when it comes to war, China exists in a information bubble isolated from the rest of the world.
“I think most Chinese don’t notice it because they don’t pay attention to the war or only get news about it from the Chinese media,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But if you can look beyond the firewall (a term used to describe China’s draconian internet censorship), you’ll see that war is talked about and reported very differently in international and Western media,” he told Al. .jazeera.
Early in the invasion, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV claimed that the United States had financed the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also reported to have fled kyiv after the first wave of Russian attacks.
Chinese media then diligently broadcast Russian claims that reports of torture and murder of Ukrainians civilians in the city of Buchanear kyiv, it was “fake news.”
Meanwhile, the invasion was, and still is, referred to as a “special military operation,” just as it is in the Russian media.
Despite repeated statements by Chinese leaders that China is a neutral party In Russia’s war against Ukraine, the country’s state media is far from an impartial observer of the conflict.
Guangzhou’s Brian Tang keeps up to date on the war mainly through foreign media.
According to the 33-year-old, that means he can’t talk about the war with most people in his life because they largely get their information from Chinese TV and Chinese online news, leaving them without information or completely different information about the war than he has.
“It means that you don’t just have different opinions, you have different realities,” Tang said.
It also makes no sense to turn to Chinese social media to share your thoughts on the war, he said. “What would be the point?” he asked rhetorically.
“Your posts may be removed by censors and your account may be suspended or worse.”
At the start of the war, various public figures and university professors in China shared critical views on the invasion of Russia, but their posts were quickly censored and various social media accounts were removed.
The big goose becomes the weak goose
However, despite the censorship and the information bubble, both Lin and Tang have noticed a change in the way the Russian invasion is addressed on Chinese social media.
Lin saw some anti-war comments on Chinese social media when the war first broke out, but the vast majority of the posts she read were pro-Russian and anti-Western.
“Now, I think there are many more posts and comments that are Russia critic compared to before, and they also stay awake longer before being taken down by censors,” Lin said.
Lin and Tang have also seen a shift in online discussions of the war, with the term “weak goose” becoming more prevalent in posts and comments on Chinese platforms. Russia is often informally referred to as “big goose” in China because the Chinese word for “Russia” and the word “goose” sound the same.
“When Russia first attacked Ukraine, we all heard that the Russians were going to win very quickly because people thought they were very strong and the Ukrainians were very weak,” Tang explained.
But when the Russian offensive quickly bogged down, it turned out that the “big goose” was not as powerful as had been imagined; in fact, it was a “weak goose,” Tang said.
Censorship or no censorship, Lin believes it is clear to most people that the war is not going very well for Russia, which has caused some Chinese to abandon their support.
“They expected a short war and now nobody knows how long it will last,” he said.
And as the war drags on, Tang believes it will matter less and less what is posted on Chinese social media and what is reported in the Chinese media.
“Eventually, the Chinese people will just want the war to end,” he said.
*Names of interviewees have been changed to accommodate requests for anonymity.
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