Wechat is the most popular chatting app in China. With 1.08 billions active monthly users and a blogging system, it holds one of the biggest Chinese public opinion fields. And, unsurprisingly, it also becomes a distribution platform for disinformation.

On Jan 11th, the official Wechat blog of People’s Daily, the most authoritative national news agency in China, reposted an article titled “If it weren’t for the Australian bush fires, I would’ve never known that China was so powerful 33 years ago.” 

This article relates the recent Australian bushfire to Daxinganling wildfire in China, in 1987, declaring that Chinese firefighters successfully put out the fire by fulfilling their “responsibilities” (which means self-sacrifice), while “Australian government and firefighters celebrated Christmas and took vacations when their country is in the fate of being burned into Hell”, and that’s why the Australia fire is continuing. 

This is a standard patriotic article released from a popular Wechat blog named “Youth’s Yard” (青年大院). After that article posted, it soon achieved over 10 million views, and 11,301 readers praised the author by “giving tips.” Lots of other Wechat blogs reposted it, including People’s Daily and Communist Youth League. However, within days, Fang Kechen, a former journalist from Southern Weekly, released an article in his Wechat, criticizing Youth’s Yard twisted the catastrophe into a patriotic praise. He resurfaced some news reports that written by journalists from Chinese Youth Papers (中国青年报) in 1987, showing that 193 people were burnt to death in this fire, and this fire was ignited by a series of bureaucratic reactions. Later, his article was deleted by Wechat.

I have found these reports on google. Ironically, the second link about “Chinese Youth Papers & Daxin Fire” is from People’s Daily. In 2008, People’s Daily issued an article named “21 years ago this report series marks a milestone in China’s disaster reporting”. It commends journalists from Chinese Youth Papers telling the truth, instead of praising the heroic exploits during the fire fighting, which is the usual disaster writing pattern in Chinese medias. People’s Daily says: “Disguising a funeral as a wedding, praising mild disasters as successes, treating big disasters as triumphs. Under the magic pens of journalists, these heartbreaking disasters can always turn into victory songs of Communism….Where is the real news?” 12 years later, it seems People’s Daily slapped itself.

You can read this article here.

I’m not surprise that People’s Daily refuses to delete the repost from Youth’s Yard, even though we all know, and they know we know, that this article is very inappropriate. But I’m kinda surprise that they chose to repost THAT article. I mean… that article is too bad written, with poor description and weird logic. Even for Communism news agencies, it doesn’t meet their literary requirements. So why that article? After skimming the Wechat articles from People’s Daily, and also from Youth League, I think they reposted that article just to please the youths.

In decades, national medias positioned themselves as serious news providers. They wrote boring news with a standard communist tone. No one, except elders and government officials, bother to read, and most of us have gotten used to their smileless faces. However, after China went into the digital age, things changed. Government noticed that fewer people read papers, so they upload content to social medias like Wechat blogs and Weibo (China’s Twitter). They also change their writing style, as boring political news can never compete with gossipy news. 

In last 5 or more years, Chinese national medias, headed by Communism Youth League, try their best to impress youths. They use internet slang words to communicate with readers and make jokes with memes and GIFs. In the Wechat blog of People’s Daily, you can find images like this:

They also change their content. Now, besides concise news (usually reads like news summary), they provide little warm stories about ordinary citizens, love stories between hardworking people, and inspirational stories. And, beautiful or handsome soldiers and polices.

Entertainment news is one of their topics, since celebrity is the biggest traffic attraction online.

Title: It’s shameless to be fangirls like this!

Sometimes they repost articles from popular Wechat blogs, like Youth’s Yard. Youth’s Yard is a popular Wechat blog focusing on social events, and its former account “Tonight 90s” had reached 2.3 million fans before it’s blocked. By writing with simple sentences and dramatic style, this blog has gained the favor of countless youths. However, it has a very severe disinformation problem. Last year, its former account Tonight 90s invented plots in a suicide news coverage. With the influx of angry readers’ requests, Wechat later deleted its account. After several months, Youth’s Yard emerged, and soon gained over 850,000 fans. There is no way that editors of People’s Daily and Youth League don’t know the articles from Youth’s Yard are terrible and may contain misinformation, but they still use them since they are popular. 

With the youth-oriented operation and the authoritative position in politics, People’s Daily ranks NO.1 in Wechat blog popularity. (You can find the list here) And the disinformation it posts has stronger influence. 

Currently, blogs like Youth’s Yard contribute to most of the disinformation in China, and national medias like People’s Daily expand the influence of these disinformation. Both of them are traffic driven, one for money, one for KPI customized by the Government.

While for real valuable articles, like the one written by Fang Kechen, they are deleted from the start.