Last week, as rhetoric in mainland China turned increasingly vicious toward the Hong Kong protesters, China’s young “keyboard warriors” deployed over the Great Firewall en masse to defend the motherland. In organized battalions, they reported pro-Hong Kong Instagram accounts; flooded comments sections with Chinese flag emojis; and disseminated patriotic memes.
Most of the platforms on which global opinion battles are fought, like Twitter and Facebook, are blocked in China. But using a virtual private network (VPN) to conduct organized, large-scale raids on foreign social media is not a new phenomenon. The practice of chu zheng—which literally means something like “go into battle”—goes back to at least 2016, when patriotic youth scaled the firewall to bombard newly elected Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s Facebook page with anti-Taiwan independence memes after an incident involving the Taiwanese K-pop star Chou Tzuyu and the Taiwanese flag on Korean television.
This most recent wave of chu zheng, however, differs from the “Facebook expedition” of 2016. Last week’s offensive appears to have been launched from two different online youth subcultures: Diba, a long-running Baidu forum similar in some ways to Reddit; and fangirl circles, or networks of young women who organize to support their favorite K-pop or C-pop idols.
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Source: China Is Sending Keyboard Warriors Over The Firewall – Foreign Policy