Chinese internet companies have announced a crackdown on “extreme nationalism” online, particularly anti-Japanese sentiment, after a Chinese woman was fatally stabbed while protecting a Japanese mother and child in Suzhou.
Tencent and NetEase, two of the largest companies, said over the weekend that they would investigate and ban users who incite hatred.
He warning Tencent, which owns messaging app WeChat, said the incident in Jiangsu province had “attracted public attention” and that “some netizens incited confrontation between China and Japan (and) sparked extreme nationalism.”
An unemployed man, surnamed Zhou, was arrested last week for stabbing a Japanese mother and child at a bus stop outside a Japanese school in Suzhou, a city in eastern China. Hu Youping, a Chinese woman who intervened in the knife attack, died from her injuries.
Hu was praised for her heroism and bravery in online tributes and the Japanese flag was flown at half-mast at Japan’s embassy in China, but elsewhere there was an extreme nationalist response.
Weibo, a Twitter-like platform with 588 million monthly active users, said that after the knife attack some users had “posted extreme comments inciting nationalist sentiment, promoting group hatred and even applauding criminal behavior in the name of patriotism.” .
Douyin, a short-video app similar to TikTok, said it would investigate “extreme xenophobia” appearing on certain accounts, including speculation about spies associated with Japanese schools in China.
Nationalist sentiment, often expressed as hatred of Japan, has thrived in recent years on China’s closely monitored internet, with little intervention from authorities or internet companies, which are quick to censor any content perceived as critical of official government narratives.
Videos mocking Japanese schools are particularly popular, with a parody Chinese schoolchildren are shown online fighting racist Japanese teachers.
Many social media users linked online xenophobia to real-life attacks after the Suzhou stabbing. “Random attacks happen randomly, but xenophobic videos on social media that incite hatred against ordinary people and businesses should be controlled,” wrote one Weibo user. according comments collected by US news site China Digital Times.
Weibo said it had removed 759 pieces of illegal content, while Tencent said it had addressed 836 posts it said violated its rules. Both platforms said they had blocked several accounts.
Some people were unhappy with the internet companies’ plans to crack down on anti-Japanese content. One NetEase commentator accused the platform of being “a hater of the Chinese.”
Chinese authorities said the knife attack, which came two weeks after four American educators were stabbed while visiting a park in the northeastern province of Jilin, was an isolated incident.
Additional research by Chi Hui Lin