Opinion | Propaganda and censorship remain China’s favoured tools of control
Cary Huang says recent court rulings rapping people who questioned the party-state’s tales about war heroes reflect Communist leaders’ insecurity over their rule
Two recent court battles over historical facts have demonstrated how tight China’s ideological control is and how anxious the party leadership is about its legitimacy of rule.
In the first case, the court convicted Sun Jie (孫傑), who had over nine million followers on Sina Weibo, and beverage company Jiaduobao (加多寶) of insulting the memory of Qiu Shaoyun (邱少雲), a communist soldier killed by a US bomb in Korea. Communist Party propaganda hails Qiu as a martyr, saying he chose to stay still and burn to death to avoid exposing his unit’s position to the enemy. Sun posted a message in 2013 comparing Qiu to barbecued meat, and Jiaduobao got entangled last year after posting a message referencing Sun’s barbecue fame.
China’s propaganda chiefs rapped by government inspectors over ‘weak’ efforts to control the internet, media
In the second case, writer and historian Hong Zhenkuai ( 洪振快) cast doubt on the accuracy of a detail in the official narrative of the “Five Heroes of Langya Mountain”, who chose to leap off the mountain rather than surrender to the Japanese invaders.