How Great Firewall of China hides the truth
Despite weeks of protests in Hong Kong, Beijing’s propaganda machine keeps mainland opinions onside
THREE days after Fu Guohao was beaten by Hong Kong protesters and tied to an airport trolley, the Chinese mainlander emerged triumphant from hospital to a small crowd of supporters.
Outside the building in a town on the edge of Hong Kong about a dozen people waited wearing red T-shirts with the message: “I support Hong Kong police. You can hit me now.”
Scenes from the airport earlier in the week showing Mr Fu being detained by masked demonstrators were a gift to the propaganda machine in China that now labels protesters “terrorists”.
The messages on the T-shirts were spread around the country’s highly restrictive internet alongside the face of Mr Fu, a reporter for a state newspaper accused by protesters of being a spy sent to infiltrate their movement.
Solidarity with Beijing is rare in Hong Kong, a city weary from more than 10 weeks of running battles between riot police and a largely peaceful pro-democracy movement. Over the border, however, China is in overdrive to gloss over police brutality in the former British colony and blame protesters for the daily unrest.
“I hope the police can stop the turmoil and control the chaos soon,” Sun Weijie, 40, a businesswoman dining with friends in downtown Beijing, told The Sunday Telegraph. “Hong Kong is in such a disorder. I don’t really understand why they are protesting. Whatever it is, I hope it will get resolved soon.”
In a park nearby, Huang Qi, 60,
‘Most people in China, if they know what is happening in Hong Kong, don’t fully understand it’
glanced at the latest coverage in state media, and said: “Why are these troublemakers causing a disturbance on the streets? These disturbances wouldn’t happen on the mainland. I hope the police will arrest them all.”
The information war on the mainland started long ago.
At first the peaceful protests in Hong Kong were ignored in a media blackout. But when demonstrators reacted to heavy-handed policing by vandalising Beijing’s Liaison Office, the images were immediately beamed to state TV, newspapers and news websites. The damage was regarded as a direct challenge to the central government’s authority, which has angered Beijing.
Chinese state media aired footage of the national emblem defaced and condemned the vandalism. China began to ratchet up the rhetoric as the protests and violence fomented, calling the protesters rioters, thugs, mobsters, perpetrators of acts of terrorism.
Meanwhile, ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Communist revolution, Beijing’s media regulators ordered television channels to avoid airing shows that are “too entertaining”.
For the next month and a half, costume dramas and variety shows must be replaced with anything from a list of 86 approved programmes focusing on “the different stages of the Chinese nation’s struggle for a brighter future and sincere paeans toward the motherland, the people and heroes”.
China cannot afford to allow dissent to spread in a key year of sensitive anniversaries which have also included 30 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Internet restrictions are as tight as ever, with very little other than the official state line leaking through what is known as the “Great Firewall”.
On Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, users regularly call for Beijing to send the army into Hong Kong.
“Beating them to a pulp is not enough,” one user said. “Just send a few tanks to clean them up,” said another.
On Thursday Beijing’s ambassador to the UK scolded the international community and media for turning a blind eye to violence from the protesters. He warned the UK and other states not to “interfere”, with the well-worn accusation that “black hands” of foreign intervention were behind the demonstrations.
It was a sentiment parroted on the mainland. “I think there’s a mastermind behind the protesters. They are being used. Look at their behaviour,” said Liu Tong, 31, who works in the travel industry in Beijing.
China’s information restrictions are not impenetrable, however. One of the goals of the airport protests this week was to stop mainlanders as they travelled through and tell the truth about what is happening. One Chinese student in Hong Kong told The Sunday Telegraph that he travelled 20 hours from the mainland to join the protests. He said he and his friends were learning about the protests from Twitter, using software to bypass the firewall. “I have some friends who support the protests but are too afraid to come,” he said.
But he added: “Most people, if they know what is happening in Hong Kong, don’t fully understand it. On the mainland, parents and the older generation only think about leaving their children assets and money. But here in Hong Kong people want to give their children greater things like freedom and democracy.”
Dr Willy Lam, a political expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that Beijing would wait for public opinion to turn against the protesters.
Beijing also hopes to change the make-up of the population in Hong Kong through the migration of mainland Chinese to Hong Kong.
He added: “Opinion polls on the political inclinations of these new immigrants have shown that they are more sympathetic toward Beijing’s harsh line of taming Hong Kong’s democratic aspirations.”