China’s media realities clash over truth about war in Ukraine

More than 10,000 Chinese were in Ukraine when Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.

The “friendship without borders” announced between their countries by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping three weeks before the invasion did not prevent the Chinese from suddenly finding themselves in a war zone.

While the Chinese leadership seemed to be as surprised by the Russian 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-run newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a post on China’s social media platform Weibo, in which Beijing’s embassy in Kiev called on its citizens in Ukraine to unite amid the deteriorating situation.

The People’s Daily – along with most of China’s new media – had then united behind Russia and its war over Ukraine.

More than a year later, Chinese media coverage of the war still strongly mirrors Moscow’s narrative and sometimes amounts to mere “copying and pasting” of Russian war propaganda.

“I’ve given up trying to understand what’s going on,” 24-year-old Yu-Ling Song* from Xiamen told Al Jazeera.

There is one version of the war reported by Chinese media and Chinese people, Song said, and a very different version by the Western media and her Western friends.

It has left her very confused, she added.

Different media realities

Hsin-yi Lin from Shanghai has not completely given up trying to understand the situation in Ukraine. But she has concluded that when it comes to the war, China is in an information bubble, cut off from the rest of the world.

“I think the majority of the Chinese don’t notice because they either don’t pay attention to the war or they only get the news about it from the Chinese media,” she told Al Jazeera.

“But if you can look beyond the firewall [a term used to describe China’s draconian censoring of the internet]”You see that the war is spoken about and reported very differently in international and Western media,” she told Al Jazeera.

Early in the invasion, China’s state broadcaster CCTV alleged that the United States had funded the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories. It was also reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had fled Kiev in the wake of the first wave of Russian attacks.

Chinese media then dutifully relayed Russian claims that reports of torture and killings of Ukrainian citizens in the town of Bucha, near Kiev, were “fake news.”

All the while, the invasion was and still is called a “special military operation”, just like in the Russian media.

Despite repeated statements by China’s leadership that China is a neutral party in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the country’s state media has been far from an impartial observer of the conflict.

Brian Tang from Guangzhou keeps abreast of the war mainly through foreign media.

According to the 33-year-old, this means that he cannot talk about the war with most people in his life because they get their information largely from Chinese TV and Chinese online news, so they have no or completely different information about the war than he has.

“It means that you not only have different opinions, but also different realities,” Tang said.

There is also no point in turning to Chinese social media to share his thoughts on the war, he said. “What would be the point?” he asked rhetorically.

“Your posts may be deleted by censorship and your account may be suspended or worse.”

At the start of the war, several public figures and university professors in China shared critical views of the Russian invasion, but their posts were quickly censored and several had their social media accounts deleted.

Big goose becomes the weak goose

However, despite the censorship and information bubble, both Lin and Tang have noticed a change in how the Russian invasion is being handled on Chinese social media.

Lin saw some anti-war comments on Chinese social media when war first broke out, but the vast majority of the posts she read were pro-Russia and anti-Western.

“Now I think there are a lot more posts and comments that are critical of Russia compared to before, and they also stay longer before being removed by censorship,” Lin said.

Lin and Tang have also seen a change in online discussion of the war, with the term “weak goose” gaining prominence 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 for “goose” sound similar.

“When Russia first attacked Ukraine, we all heard that the Russians would win very quickly because people thought they were so strong and the Ukrainians were so weak,” explains Tang.

But as the Russian offensive quickly stalled, it turned out that the “big goose” wasn’t as powerful as thought — it was, in fact, a “weak goose,” Tang said.

With or without censorship, Lin thinks it’s clear to most people that the war isn’t going great for Russia, leading some Chinese to drop their support.

“They expected a short war and now no one knows how long it will last,” she said.

And as the war continues, Tang believes it will matter less and less what is posted on Chinese social media and what is reported in Chinese news media.

“In the end, Chinese people will just want the war to end,” he said.

*Names of interviewees have been changed to accommodate requests for anonymity.