World

On Chinese social media, America is being blamed for the recent protests

Published

3 years ago

November 30, 2022

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“Whoever introduces external forces to get involved is a complete traitor!”

“I understand the rally organised this time was by… the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of America.”

“Don’t be led astray by external forces. No matter what, you must love your country!”

These comments are far from unusual on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

A range of users – from those with a handful of followers (known as “fans” on the platform) to ones boasting millions of subscribers – have been repeating claims that “external forces” are responsible for the protests that have taken place across the country in recent days.

Rallies against China’s unusually strict zero-COVID measures spread to several cities over the weekend in the biggest show of opposition to the ruling Communist Party in decades.

The numbers of protesters have now dipped, likely in part because of low temperatures and a heavy police presence at key locations.

While the Chinese authorities have not directly commented on these rallies, they have repeatedly warned that “foreign forces” are a threat to national security and have interfered in the Hong Kong democracy protests.

This warning has been repeated by figures associated with the Chinese Communist Party, such as Ren Yi, the grandson of a Communist Party leader, Ren Zhongyi.

Ren Yi has almost two million fans on Weibo, where he writes under the username Chairman Rabbit.

In a recent post, he asks “what do overseas anti-China forces most want” from the protests and why did “foreign forces… come out to make a fuss and then withdraw”.

Popular TV pundit and commentator Yu Li, whose Weibo username is Sima Nan and boasts 3.16 million fans, jokes in one post that he wants to thank foreign forces for interfering in the protests.

He writes: “If the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy has an office in Beijing, please tell me the address and contact information, and I plan to send them a gift.”

The idea that America’s Central Intelligence Agency has been involved in the protests appears in a number of posts from Weibo users.

In particular, a screenshot of a news article reporting that the CIA is looking to hire more Chinese speakers is being widely shared.

Another image being widely posted is a snapshot of the moment a BBC cameraman was detained by Chinese police while covering the protests.

According to officials, Ed Lawrence was arrested “for his own good” in case he caught COVID from the crowd. He was released after being beaten and held for several hours.

One of the users who posted a photo of Mr Lawrence called him a “little idiot” and commented “we must not allow external forces to intervene in our internal conflicts”.

Another Weibo user made an unfounded accusation against Mr Lawrence, claiming he was a “British agent who was caught pretending to be a BBC reporter”. The account provided no evidence to back up the claim.

The BBC confirmed Mr Lawrence was a staff member and was working as an “accredited journalist”.

Accusations of foreign forces meddling in the protests are also appearing on other social media sites.

Two Chinese Twitter users with a combined follower count of 53,400 posted what they claim is evidence that Westerners are using an encrypted messaging app to plan the protest.

The message on Telegram provided a time, meeting place and instructions to bring a white piece of paper, a symbol borrowed by those protesting in China from the demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Sky News found the Telegram chat but the messages were not in it. They could have been deleted.

As this wave of jingoistic social media messages spread across Weibo and other platforms, signs of China’s notorious internet censorship rules could also be seen.

Posts mentioning Shanghai, a Chinese city which saw large protests, appear to have been deleted en masse from Weibo.

This screenshot shows a search for 上海 (Shanghai) brought up fewer than 1,000 results.

While this screenshot for 北京 (Beijing), a comparable city in terms of prominence and population, resulted in almost 40 million hits.

Weibo openly states on its platform that content is monitored and may be removed.

As well as posts being deleted, those looking for information on the protests must contend with swathes of spam messages flooding social media.

Benjamin Strick, investigations director of Centre for Information Resilience, has identified more than 3,000 posts on Twitter that include hashtags for some of the cities in China where protests are taking place.

He says these posts are being used to “spam the tags with dating ads”.

Many of the accounts were made recently and have zero or few followers. Some 2,000 of the tweets use the text “I’m single, can I get a husband on Twitter.”

“For journalists or researchers looking up what’s happening in China at specific locations. This is what they’re wading through,” Mr Strick tweeted.

It is not possible to know if the spam messages are burying protest posts by design or coincidence, nor can we measure how many posts are being taken down from sites like Weibo.

But there are some groups fighting back.

Greatfire.org is a China-based group challenging Chinese censorship. It runs sites such as freeweibo.com which captures posts before they are deleted from the official Weibo platform and publishes them so they remain visible online.

Searching for terms like “protest” or “white paper” bring up a large number of banned comments. A link to the deleted post (which now displays as an error message) on Weibo is also provided.

Despite the levels of censorship facing Chinese citizens, protesters have been finding a way to get information out into the world, such as this video showing a man being dragged into a police car.

One of the co-founders of Greatfire.org, Charlie Smith (not his real name), told Sky News the events over the last week shows the censors are “fallible”.

He said: “These protests really highlight how the online censorship apparatus in China is fallible… [and] what has happened over the weekend shows that many Chinese are well aware of what is happening in the country.

“Yes, there is widespread censorship on social media in China, but this weekend’s protests illustrate that history cannot be erased.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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World

Migrants locked up in notorious El Salvador jail released in Venezuela-US prisoner swap

Published

9 hours ago

July 20, 2025

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Migrants locked up in notorious El Salvador jail released in Venezuela-US prisoner swap

On Friday, Paola Paiva waited in a hotel near Caracas airport, nervous but giddy with excitement to be reunited with her brother, finally.

For five months, Arturo Suarez has been detained in a notorious prison in El Salvador.

“I am going to wait for my brother to call me,” she told Sky News, “and after giving him a hug, I want to just listen to him, listen to his voice. Let him talk and tell us his story.”

Suarez was one of the more than 250 Venezuelan migrants who had been living in America but were arrested in immigration raids by the Trump administration and sent to El Salvador, a showpiece act in the president’s promise to deport millions of migrants.

Most of the men had never even been to El Salvador before. Their detention has been controversial because the White House claims the men are all part of the dangerous Tren de Aragua gang but has provided little evidence to support this assertion.

The only evidence Paola had that Suarez was still alive was a picture of him published on a news website showing the inside of the maximum security CECOT jail.

He is one of dozens of men with their hands and feet cuffed, heads shaved and bodies shackled together.

Now he is returning to his home country, one of the bargaining chips in a deal that saw the release of ten Americans and US permanent residents who had been seized by the Venezuelan authorities.

Paola had tried to go to the airport to greet her brother as he disembarked a charter plane bringing the men back from El Salvador but authorities told her to wait at a nearby hotel.

“They told us they are taking them all to a hotel to rest,” she said.

“But I managed to get someone to give my phone number on a piece of paper to my brother, so I am expecting his call tomorrow, as soon as he can access a phone.

“We heard they are going to perform some medical exams on them and check their criminal records,” she added. “I’m not afraid; I’m not worried since my brother has a clean record.

“I am so happy. I knew this day would happen, and that it would be unexpected, that no one was going to notify us. I knew it was going to be a total surprise.”

The Trump administration had paid the El Salvador government, led by President Nayib Bukele, millions of dollars to imprison the men.

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem visited CECOT last month, posing in front of prisoners for a photo opportunity.

But Cristosal, an international human rights group based in El Salvador, says it has “documented systematic physical beatings, torture, intentional denial of access to food, water, clothing, health care,” inside the prison.

A video which was seemingly filmed aboard the charter flight bringing the Venezuelan migrants back to Caracas shows Arturo briefly talking about his experience inside.

He looks physically well but speaks into the camera and says: “We were four months with no communication, no phone calls, kidnapped, we didn’t know what (the) day was, not even the time.

“We were beat up at breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he continues.

Sky News interviewed Arturo Suarez‘s brother Nelson near his home in the US in April, weeks after Arturo – an aspiring singer – had been arrested by immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) agents while filming a music video inside a house.

Nelson said he believed Arturo’s only crime was “being Venezuelan and having tattoos.” He showed me documents that indicate Arturo has no criminal record in Venezuela, Chile, Colombia or the United States, the four countries he has lived in.

Now Nelson is delighted Arturo is being released – but worries for his future.

“The only thing that casts a shadow in such a moment of joy is that bit of anger when I think that all the governments involved are going to use my brother’s story, and the others on that flight, as political gain,” he said.

“Each of them will tell a different story, making themselves the heroes, when the reality is that many innocent people suffered unfairly and unnecessarily, and many families will remain separated after this incident due to politics, immigration and fear.”

World

Ha Long Bay: At least 34 dead after tourist boat capsizes in Vietnam

Published

9 hours ago

July 20, 2025

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Ha Long Bay: At least 34 dead after tourist boat capsizes in Vietnam

At least 34 people have died after a tourist boat capsized in Vietnam, according to state media reports.

The Wonder Sea boat was reportedly carrying 53 people, including five crew members, when it capsized due to strong winds in Ha Long Bay on Saturday.

It happened at roughly 2pm local time (7am GMT). Rescue teams have found 11 survivors and recovered 34 bodies, eight of them children, the state-run Vietnam News Agency said, citing local authorities.

The People’s Army Newspaper, which cited local border guards, said authorities have not yet confirmed details about the tourists, including their nationalities, as the rescue operation continues.

Most of the passengers were tourists, including about 20 children, from the country’s capital city, Hanoi, the newspaper said.

The incident comes shortly after the arrival of Storm Wipha in the South China Sea, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and lightning to the area.

The named storm is the third typhoon to hit the South China Sea this year, and is expected to make landfall along the northern coast of Vietnam early next week.

Disruptions linked to the storm have also had an impact on air travel, according to Noi Bai Airport.

The airport reported that nine incoming flights were diverted to other airports, while three outgoing flights were temporarily grounded due to adverse weather conditions.

The winds brought by Storm Wipha reached up to 63mph (101kmph) and gusts of up to 68mph (126kmph) as it passed south of Taiwan on Saturday, according to the island’s Central News Agency.

Ha Long Bay is around 125mi (200km) north east of Hanoi and attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Of those who visit Ha Long Bay, many choose to take overnight boat tours to further explore the area.

World

Gaza: More than 30 people killed ‘as Israeli troops open fire towards Palestinians waiting for aid’

Published

9 hours ago

July 20, 2025

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Gaza: More than 30 people killed 'as Israeli troops open fire towards Palestinians waiting for aid'

More than 30 people have been killed after Israeli troops opened fire towards crowds of Palestinians waiting for aid, according to witnesses and hospital officials.

The deaths occurred near distribution hubs operated by the US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, after Israel eased its 11-week blockade of aid into the territory.

At least 32 people were killed on Saturday, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, while a further 100 people were injured, according to local reports.

Most of the deaths came as Palestinians massed in the Teina area, around 3km (2 miles) away from a GHF aid distribution centre east of the city of Khan Younis.

Mahmoud Mokeimar said he was walking with crowds of people – mostly young men – towards the food hub when troops fired warning shots as the crowd advanced, before opening fire towards the marching people.

“It was a massacre… the occupation opened fire at us indiscriminately,” he said.

Akram Aker said troops fired machine guns mounted on tanks and drones.

“They encircled us and started firing directly at us,” he said.

The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis said it received 25 bodies, along with dozens of wounded.

Seven other people, including one woman, were killed in the Shakoush area, hundreds of yards north of another GHF hub in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the hospital said.

The army and GHF did not immediately comment on Saturday’s violence.

The GFH, which has four distribution centres, three of which are in the southern Gaza Strip, says it has distributed millions of meals to hungry Palestinians.

But local health officials and witnesses say hundreds of people have been killed by Israeli army fire as they try to reach the distribution hubs.

The GHF, which employs private armed guards, says there have been no deadly shootings at its sites, though this week, 20 people were killed at one of its locations, most of them in a stampede.

The group accused Hamas agitators of causing a panic, but gave no evidence to back the claim.

The army, which is not at the sites but secures them from a distance, says it only fires warning shots if crowds get too close to its forces.

The 21-month war in Gaza was triggered when Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 others hostage.

An Israeli military offensive has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, while Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians are living through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

Israel and Hamas have been holding ceasefire talks in Qatar in recent weeks, but international mediators say there have been no breakthroughs.

US President Donald Trump said another 10 hostages will be released from Gaza shortly, without providing details.