On Chinese social media, America is being blamed for the recent protests
“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 supports the idea ‘foreign forces’ are involved in the protests
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.
One of the posts, written in English, accused this Telegram group of ‘planning’ the protest in Shanghai
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.
World
Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda sign US-brokered peace deal – but doubts over success linger
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda have signed a peace deal which Donald Trump said he brokered – resulting in the US getting “a lot” of mineral rights in the process.
The deal has been touted as an important step towards ending the decades-long conflict in eastern DRC which has caused the deaths of six million people.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio called it “an important moment after 30 years of war”.
The Congo-Rwanda conflict explained
Earlier on Friday, President Trump said he was able to broker a deal for “one of the worst wars anyone’s ever seen”.
“I was able to get them together and sell it,” Mr Trump said. “And not only that, we’re getting for the United States a lot of the mineral rights from Congo.”
‘Great deal of uncertainty’
The Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group, the most prominent armed group in the conflict, has suggested that the agreement won’t be binding for them.
It hasn’t been directly involved in the planned peace deal.
Donald Trump with DRC’s Therese Kayikwamba Wagner (R) and Rwanda’s Olivier Nduhungirehe (L) at the White House. Pic: Reuters
DRC foreign minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner invoked the millions of victims of the conflict in signing the agreement with Rwandan foreign minister Olivier Nduhungirehe.
The agreement, signed by the foreign ministers during a ceremony with Mr Rubio in Washington, pledges to implement a 2024 deal that would see Rwandan troops withdraw from eastern DRC within 90 days, according to a copy seen by Reuters.
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“Some wounds will heal, but they will never fully disappear,” Ms Wagner said. “Those who have suffered the most are watching. They are expecting this agreement to be respected, and we cannot fail them.”
Mr Nduhungirehe noted the “great deal of uncertainty” because previous agreements were not put in place.
“There is no doubt that the road ahead will not be easy,” he said. “But with the continued support of the United States and other partners, we believe that a turning point has been reached.”
The chief of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has called figures by the United Nations on people killed at aid hubs “disinformation”.
The UN said at least 410 Palestinians have been killed seeking food since Israel lifted an 11-week aid blockade on 19 May, while the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said at least 549 people have been killed.
Johnnie Moore, executive director of GHF, told Sky News that there is a “disinformation campaign” that is “meant to shut down our efforts” in the Gaza Strip, fuelled by “some figures” coming out every day.
Mr Moore, an evangelical preacher who served as a White House adviser in the first Trump administration, said his aid group has delivered more than 44 million meals to Gazans since it began operations in May.
Palestinians carry humanitarian aid packages distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Khan Younis.
Pic: AP
The controversial group, backed by Israel and the United States, has been rejected by the UN and other aid groups, which have refused to cooperate with the GHF.
The aid agencies claim Israel is weaponising food, and the new distribution system using the GHF will be ineffective and lead to further displacement of Palestinians.
They also argue the GHF will fail to meet local needs and violate humanitarian principles that prohibit a warring party from controlling humanitarian assistance.
The GHF is distributing food packages, which they say can feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days, in four locations, with the majority in the far south of Gaza.
GHF chief was ‘really political, really punchy’ in Sky News interview
It was really political, really punchy, and I think the heart of the matter here is that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is too political.
The principle of aid, when applied traditionally, is that it has to be applied neutrally and that is what used to happen.
Trucks would go into Gaza, and the UN would distribute that food. Israel, for a long time, said that’s not working and they blame Hamas for that.
At a briefing by the Israeli prime minister’s office yesterday, they were saying that Hamas was still looting those aid vehicles, and it was coming out with a plan to stop that. It didn’t provide evidence for that.
When we asked for evidence, they said we shouldn’t swallow Hamas disinformation. That’s a word that’s been used. That’s very, very political.
This is a different model of doing things. And that is the concern: that rather than just handing it over to a neutral body, this is too close to Israel, it’s too close to the US, and is backed financially by the US.
What does that actually imply? Well, if you’re choosing where those sites are, it means people are going to move down there if you’re not putting them in certain places.
The number of distribution sites has dwindled. It’s attenuated. And so, actually, if there are only a few and if there are any in the south of Gaza, that encourages people to move there, that might fit a political goal as well as a humanitarian one.
Thousands of Palestinians walk for hours to reach the aid hubs and have to move through Israeli military zones, where witnesses say the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) regularly open fire with heavy barrages to control the crowds.
Both figures from the UN and the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry say hundreds of people have been killed or wounded.
In response to Mr Moore’s comments, Rachael Cummings, Save the Children’s team leader in Gaza, told Sky News that people in Gaza “are being forced into the decision to go to retrieve food from the American- and Israeli-backed, militarised, food distribution point”.
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Doctors on the frontline
“We’re not contesting at all that there have been casualties in the Gaza Strip. I mean, there’s no ceasefire. This is an active conflict,” Mr Moore said.
“I think people may not understand as clearly what it means to operate a humanitarian operation on this scale, in an environment this complex, in a piece of land as small as the Gaza Strip, and may not appreciate that almost anything that happens in the Gaza Strip is going to take place in proximity to something.”
Mr Moore said that the GHF was not denying that there had been “those incidents”, but said the GHF was able to talk to the IDF, which would conduct an investigation, while Hamas was “intentionally harming people for he purpose of defaming what we’re doing”.
Palestinians carry humanitarian aid packages near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution centre in Khan Younis.
Pic: AP
He said the GHF, “an independent organisation operating with the blessing of the US government”, was “achieving its aims” by feeding Gazans.
It comes after the US State Department announced on Thursday that it had approved $30m in funding for the GHF as it called on other countries to also support the controversial group delivering aid in Gaza.
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Gazans risk ‘death traps’ for aid
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A spokesperson from the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs told Sky News that they are “open to any practical solutions that address the crisis on the ground” and are “happy” to talk to the GHF.
The spokeswoman added that the aid distribution in Gaza was not “currently a dignified process and that the format doesn’t follow humanitarian principles”.
She said that people have to walk for miles, and that there is no scalability, with aid not reaching everyone in need.
A man guilty of murdering nine people, most of whom had posted suicidal thoughts on social media, has been executed in Japan.
Takahiro Shiraishi, known as the “Twitter killer”, was sentenced to death in 2020 for the 2017 killings of the nine victims, who he also dismembered in his apartment near Tokyo.
His execution was the first use of capital punishment in the country in nearly three years and it was carried out as calls grow to abolish the measure in Japan since the acquittal of the world’s longest-serving death-row inmate Iwao Hakamada last year.
He was freed after 56 years on death row, following a retrial which heard police had falsified and planted evidence against him over the 1966 murders of his boss, wife and two children.
Eight of Shiraishi’s victims were women, including teenagers, who he killed after raping them. He also killed a boyfriend of one of the women to silence him.
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Police arrested him in 2017 after finding the bodies of eight females and one male in cold-storage cases in his apartment.
Investigators said Shiraishi approached the victims via Twitter, offering to assist them with their suicidal wishes.
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Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorised Shiraishi’s hanging, said he made the decision after careful examination, taking into account the convict’s “extremely selfish” motive for crimes that “caused great shock and unrest to society”.
“It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still being committed,” Mr Suzuki said.
There are currently 105 death row inmates in Japan, he added.
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