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

At least 60 killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza, health staff say

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2025

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At least 60 killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza, health staff say

At least 60 people have been killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza, health staff have said.

A dozen people were killed near the Palestine Stadium in Gaza City, which was sheltering displaced people, along with eight more living in apartments, according to staff at Shifa hospital, where the bodies were brought.

Six others were killed in southern Gaza when a strike hit their tent in Muwasi, according to the hospital.

Follow latest: ‘Death to America’ chants in Tehran

The strikes, which began late on Friday and continued into Saturday morning, came as US President Donald Trump said there could be a ceasefire agreement within the next week.

“We’re working on Gaza and trying to get it taken care of,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday.

Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, will arrive in Washington next week for talks on Gaza’s ceasefire, Iran and other subjects, an official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The last ceasefire agreed back in mid-January ended in March.

The war in Gaza was sparked after Hamas launched its attack on Israel in October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people.

Some 50 hostages remain in Gaza, with fewer than half of them still believed to be alive.

More than 56,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The UN has also warned that people in Gaza are “starving”, with Israel allowing a trickle of supplies into the territory since mid-May after blocking all food for more than two months.

Palestinians have been shot at and killed while on their way to get food at aid sites, according to Gaza’s health officials and witnesses.

Israel’s military said it was investigating incidents in which civilians had been harmed while approaching the sites.

World

Chants of ‘death to America’ at funeral for Iranian military commanders and scientists

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2025

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Chants of 'death to America' at funeral for Iranian military commanders and scientists

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Tehran to mourn top military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Iran’s 12-day war with Israel.

Iran’s state-run Press TV said the event – dubbed the “funeral procession of the Martyrs of Power” – was held for a total of 60 people, including four women and four children.

Follow live: Iran hits out at Trump’s ‘unacceptable’ remarks

It said at least 16 scientists and 10 senior commanders were among the dead, including the head of the Revolutionary Guard General Hossein Salami and the head of the guard’s ballistic missile programme, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh.

Their coffins were driven on trucks into the Iranian capital’s Azadi Square adorned with their pictures as well as rose petals and flowers, as crowds waved Iranian flags.

Mourners dressed in black, while chants of “death to America” and “death to Israel” could be heard.

Attending the funeral were Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior figures, including Ali Shamkhani who was seriously wounded during the conflict and is an adviser to Iran‘s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

There was no immediate sign of the supreme leader in the state broadcast of the funeral.

Israel, the only Middle Eastern country widely believed to have nuclear weapons, said its war against Iran aimed to prevent Tehran from developing its own nuclear weapons.

The US launched strikes on three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, which Donald Trump said left them “obilterated”.

The Iranian government denies having a nuclear weapons programme and the UN nuclear watchdog, which carries out inspections in Iran, has said it has “no credible indication” of an active, coordinated weapons programme in the country.

Over the almost two weeks of fighting, Israel claimed it killed around 30 Iranian commanders and 11 nuclear scientists, before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday.

According to Iranian health ministry figures, 610 people were killed on the Iranian side, 13 of whom were children and 49 were women.

Israel’s health ministry said 28 people were killed in Israel and 3,238 injured.

World

Why critics believe Trump’s big win in Supreme Court is ‘terrifying step towards authoritarianism’

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2025

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Why critics believe Trump's big win in Supreme Court is 'terrifying step towards authoritarianism'

As the president himself said, this was a “giant” of a decision – a significant moment to end a week of whiplash-inducing news.

The decision by the US Supreme Court is a big win for President Donald Trump.

By a majority of 6-3, the highest court in the land has ruled that federal judges have been overreaching in their authority by blocking or freezing the executive orders issued by the president.

Over the last few months, a series of presidential actions by Trump have been blocked by injunctions issued by federal district judges.

The federal judges, branded “radical leftist lunatics” by the president, have ruled on numerous individual cases, most involving immigration.

They have then applied their rulings as nationwide injunctions – thus blocking the Trump administration’s policies.

“It was a grave threat to democracy frankly,” the president said at a hastily arranged news conference in the White House briefing room.

“Instead of merely ruling on the immediate case before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation,” he said.

In simple terms, this ruling – from a Supreme Court weighted towards conservative judges – frees up the president to push on with his agenda, less opposed by the courts.

“This is such a big day,” the president said.

“It gives power back to people that should have it, including Congress, including the presidency, and it only takes bad power away from judges. It takes bad power, sick power and unfair power.

“And it’s really going to be… a very monumental decision.”

The country’s most senior member of the Democratic Party was to the point with his reaction to the ruling.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called it “an unprecedented and terrifying step toward authoritarianism, a grave danger to our democracy, and a predictable move from this extremist MAGA court”.

In a statement, Schumer wrote: “By weakening the power of district courts to check the presidency, the court is not defending the constitution – it’s defacing it.

“This ruling hands Donald Trump yet another green light in his crusade to unravel the foundations of American democracy.”

Federal power in the US is, constitutionally, split equally between the three branches of government – the executive branch (the presidency), the legislative branch (Congress) and the judiciary (the Supreme Court and other federal courts).

They are designed to ensure a separation of power and to ensure that no single branch becomes too powerful.

This ruling was prompted by a case brought over an executive order issued by President Trump on his inauguration day to end birthright citizenship – that constitutional right to be an American citizen if born here.

A federal judge froze the decision, ruling it to be in defiance of the 14th amendment of the constitution.

The Supreme Court has deferred its judgment on this particular case, instead ruling more broadly on the powers of the federal judges.

The court was divided along ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.

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In her dissent, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “As I understand the concern, in this clash over the respective powers of two coordinate branches of government, the majority sees a power grab – but not by a presumably lawless executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the constitution.

“Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are… (wait for it)… the district courts.”

Another liberal Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, described the majority ruling by her fellow justices as: “Nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the constitution.”

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed during his first term, shifting the balance of left-right power in the court, led this particular ruling.

Writing for the majority, she said: “When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The focus now for those who deplore this decision will be to apply ‘class action’ – to file lawsuits on behalf of a large group of people rather than applying a single case to the whole nation.

There is no question though that the president and his team will feel significantly emboldened to push through their policy agenda with fewer blocks and barriers.

The ruling ends a giddy week for the president.

Last Saturday he ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Within two days he had forced both Israel and Iran to a ceasefire.

By mid-week he was in The Hague for the NATO summit where the alliance members had agreed to his defence spending demands.

At an Oval Office event late on Friday, where he presided over the signing of a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, he also hinted at a possible ceasefire “within a week” in Gaza.

A truly consequential week seems set to be followed by another.