Opinion | China should take government trolls to task, after recent fiasco with India
- Government social media pages that recently mocked India’s dire Covid-19 crisis later deleted the posts without apologising
- While China has rules governing its official social media accounts, it needs to go further
On Sina Weibo, one post by the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission – the country’s top law enforcement body – juxtaposed an image depicting China’s successful launch of the Tianhe module into space with another showing grim cremation pyres in India. “China lighting a fire versus India lighting a fire”, the caption said.
In an earlier post, the commission noted that a crematorium for dogs in New Delhi had been transformed into a human crematorium.
Another post which appeared on the Ministry of Public Security’s microblogging account compared China’s “fire god mountain” – the name of the emergency Covid-19 hospital built in Wuhan last year – with a photograph of a mass cremation in India.
All the posts were deleted after they sparked outrage, including from Chinese netizens who admonished the departments for lacking sympathy and rejoicing in the tragedy of others. However, there were no clarifications from the accounts in question.
The nationalistic “wolf warrior” approach by China’s diplomats has captured international attention but one could argue that while unpalatable, they have not overstepped the boundaries of human decency.
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The recent trolling behaviour raises questions about what Chinese government departments deem to be acceptable conduct, and if Beijing realises such antics could sabotage its ongoing bid to help its neighbours cope with the devastating fallout of the pandemic.