China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor becamethe voice of Chinese nationalism

2021-12-15 16:29| 发布者: 刘海明| 查看: 83| 评论: 0

摘要: Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times. Composite:Getty - BloombergHu Xijin is China’s most famous propagandist. Atthe Global Times, he helped establish a chest-thumping new tone for China onthe world ...

Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times. Composite:Getty - Bloomberg

Hu Xijin is China’s most famous propagandist. Atthe Global Times, he helped establish a chest-thumping new tone for China onthe world stage – but can he keep up with the forces he has unleashed?

On 2 November, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuaiposted a long message on the social media site Weibo, accusing China’s formervice-premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault. As soon as the post went live, itbecame the highest-profile #MeToo case in China, and one of the ruling ChineseCommunist party’s largest public relations crises in recent history. Withinabout 20 minutes, the post had been removed. All mentions of the post were thenscrubbed from the Chinese internet. No references to the story appeared in theChinese media. In the days that followed, Peng made no further statements anddid not appear in public. Outside China, however, as other tennis starspublicly expressed concerns for her safety, Peng’s apparentdisappearance became one of the biggest news stories in the world.

It wasn’t long before Hu Xijin stepped into thestory. Hu is the editor of the Global Times, a chest-thumpingly nationalistictabloid sometimes described as “China’s Fox News”. In recent years, he hasbecome the most influential Chinese propagandist in the west – a constantpresence on Twitter and in the international media, always on hand to defendthe Communist party line, no matter the topic. On 19 November, he tweeted tohis 450,000 followers that he had confirmed through his own sources –he didn’t say who they were – that Peng was alive and well. Over the next twodays, he posted videos of Peng at a restaurant and signingautographs in Beijing.

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To many observers, this seemingly stage-managedfootage, disseminated by organs of the Chinese state, was not reassuring. On 21November, the International Olympic Committee spoke with Peng on a video calland declared that she was “doing fine”. When this intervention still failed toconvince many that Peng was safe, Hu took the opportunity to hammer home one ofthe central themes of his three-decade career in journalism: when it comes toChina, the western media sees only what it wants to see. “They only believe thestory about China that they imagine,” he tweeted. “I’m surprised that theydidn’t say the lady who showed up these two days is a fake Peng Shuai, adouble.” Those who continued to question Peng’s safety, Hu wrote, were trying to“demonize China’s system”.

Hu’s eagerness to reframe a story about sexualassault and censorship as a story about clashing political ideologies andanti-China prejudice is part of a significant change in the way China presentsitself to the world. From the late 1970s onwards, as China was opening up buthad yet to assume a major role in international affairs, it struggled to handlecriticism from abroad. The official response was usually some form of woundeddenial, or a stilted demand that other countries stay out of its business. Butover the past decade, as China’s global power has grown, President XiJinping has pushed the country into a more confident, aggressive posture,and Hu, more than any other Chinese journalist, has become the voice of this pugnaciousnationalism. On China’s most popular social media platform, WeChat, the GlobalTimes is reportedly the most read outlet.

“My English is almost all self-taught,” Hu oncesaid in a video on Weibo, “and in English, I’m most skilful at picking a fight.”He has hyped up the prospects of military confrontation between the US andChina over Taiwan. He has warned that if Britain infringes Chinese sovereigntyin the South China Sea then it will be treated like “a bitch” who is “askingfor a beating”. He has compared India to a “bandit” that has “barbaricallyrobbed” Chinese companies. He has referred to Australia as nothingmore than “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”. He recently concludedan article with the question: “In the face of such an irrationalAustralia, shouldn’t China be prepared with an iron fist and to punch it hardwhen needed, teaching it a thorough lesson?”

When he picks a fight with foreign officials onTwitter, Hu likes to take screenshots of the tweets and post them on Weibo, justto show his 24 million followers – most of whom are blocked from Twitter bythe great firewall – that he’s out there, defending China’s honour.“The most important thing about Hu is that he has constructed a whole style ofauthoritarian, nationalistic rhetoric,” Xiao Qiang, an expert in Chinese mediaat Berkeley’s School of Information, told me. “His readers go around repeatingthe same things and spreading the same sentiments.” Hu’s combative approach hasbeen taken up by a number of Chinese diplomats and spokespeople – often called“Wolf Warriors”, in reference to a jingoistic Chinese blockbuster movie – whopromote a “China first” philosophy and use social media to trash anyone theysee as opposing Chinese interests. But where the Wolf Warrior diplomats are arecent phenomenon, people like Hu “have been propagating this idea for 10years,” says Xiang Lanxin, a professor of international politics at Geneva’sGraduate Institute.

Hu’s endless stream of quotable insults andinvective stands out amid a sea of bland official statements, calls to “occupynew platforms for party discourse”, and so on. Once you know his name, you seehim quoted everywhere – the BBC, NPR, the Financial Times, the Washington Post,the Times, Reuters. In the past two years, the New York Times has mentioned him46 times. “He’s willing to be quoted in the Xi Jinping era, when huge numbersof others – especially liberal commentators – have grown too nervous to goon-the-record with foreign journalists,” says Evan Osnos, who has written about China forthe New Yorker since 2008. Hu has even become the subject of headlines in hisown right. “Editor of Chinese state newspaper which routinely mocks Australiaenjoyed LUNCH at our embassy”, reported Daily Mail Australia last year.

One reason for Hu’s ubiquity is that he hasunparalleled licence to speak bluntly about politics. Hu’s domestic criticshave described him as “the only person with freedom of speech” in mainlandChina, though that freedom is partly a reflection of his adherence to the CCPline. Hu’s insistence on thrusting himself into every passing controversy hasearned him the nickname diaopan, or “Frisbee catcher” – like a loyal pet,he tries to bring every argument home for the government he serves.

Over the years, Hu has encouraged a kind ofmystique around his connection with party leadership. “To be honest, I myselfdon’t know for sure to what degree I reflect the authority’s voice,” Hu told mewhen we spoke on the phone late last year. He likes to say that the GlobalTimes’ success is a product of the market. But when I asked him if the paper isfinancially independent from the government, he eventually told me, after someback and forth, that the English edition receives government funding forproviding overseas propaganda.

Where Hu once spoke for a hardline fringe of theCommunist party, his newspaper’s aggressive China-first ideology is nowascendant. As one American author who stopped writing for the Global Times in2011 put it: “With all those Wolf Warrior diplomats, it’s like the governmenthas been Global Times-ified.”

In 2016, President Xi visited the Beijingheadquarters of the People’s Daily, the largest newspaper group in China, whichis run by the Communist party and publishes Hu’s Global Times. On his tour ofthe offices, as he passed through the exhibition hall, Xi pointedapprovingly to a display copy of the Global Times and declared himself areader. Hu, it seemed, was successfully pursuing the propaganda strategy thatXi had laid out early in his presidency.

Hu’s rise is hard to grasp without understandingthe broader story of free speech in 21st century China. In the 00s, hundreds ofmillions of Chinese citizens came online and their voices became more audible.Starting in 2008, the People’s Daily set up a dedicated team to monitor publicopinion online. Its first few annual reports presented new digital platforms ina positive light, as a way to bring the government and its people closer. Weiboand other online communities were “a good tool for citizens to participate inand discuss politics,” the 2010 report stated. During this period, journalistsin China were afforded a little more freedom to do reporting that touched uponpolitically sensitive issues, though certain topics – such as the 1989Tiananmen Square massacre, and the lives and conduct of top leadership –remained off-limits.

Starting in the early 2010s, and particularly from2012, with the rise of Xi, this more liberal approach to public discourse wasgradually reversed. “When Xi Jinping became president [in 2013], he was notinterested in the voices on the internet,” Xiao, the UC Berkeley professor,told me. “Instead, he perceived such voices as a threat to his power, andrecognised that it was time for a complete crackdown.” Posts on social media,such as Weibo, became increasingly monitored and censored. It became morecommon for web users to receive an “invitation to tea”, a euphemism for a phonecall instructing you to visit your local police station to answer questionsabout your online activities. From 2013, a growing n number of citizens were suspended or banned from online platforms,detained or sentenced to prison. Drawing on media reports and court documents,an online database recorded more than 2,000 cases in which people had beenpunished or prosecuted for their online speech since 2013. The total number isalmost certainly much higher.

President Xi Jinping visiting the People’s Daily offices inBeijing in 2016.

President Xi Jinping visiting the People’s Daily offices inBeijing in 2016. Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy

In 2013, at the same time the party was tightening its grip onpublic discourse, Xi called a conference with propaganda officials from acrossthe country, urging them to “tell the China story well”. That meant coveringChina in a way that was positive, engaging and harnessed new digital platforms.It meant proudly celebrating China’s achievements, rather than focusing on itsimperfections.

Hu adapted fluidly to China’s new media environment, which was atonce very online, obedient to the party line and international-facing. In hisarticles, social media interventions and interviews, he played the role of bothdutiful defence attorney – there to deliver the party’s side of the story, nomatter how implausible it might seem – and aggrieved relative of the accused,yelling out to the court that the prosecution and the judge were prejudiced orcorrupt or stupid, or all of the above. It was a style that suited the tenor ofChinese social media, as well as the new self-image of the Communist party.Other party media outlets started to mimic Hu’s style, writing in a morecolloquial manner. Even People’s Daily, famously stolid and voicelessthroughout most of its history, encourages its commentators to be more “fun”and to grow personal brands.

In 2019, Xi visited the People Daily’s office again. He asked thecountry’s media workers to embrace new technology to “maximise and optimisepropaganda impact” and “to promote the voice of the party directly into variousapps and occupy new platforms for party discourse”. As Xi cruised through theoffice, the People’s Daily editorial team lined up and applauded. Among themwas Hu in a dark grey jacket, smiling ear to ear.

No event seems to distil Hu’s remarkable place in Chinesejournalism like the Tiananmen Square massacre. Journalists are always proud totell their readers that they were there when something significant happened. Hudoes the same when it comes to Tiananmen, except that he inserts himself intothis history in order to discredit it. References to the Tiananmen massacre areprohibited in China. Perhaps the only exception to this rule is the GlobalTimes. When Hu writes about the subject, he paints it as a dangerous folly. “Ifthe incident 32 years ago has any positive effect,” Hu wrote this June, “it hasinoculated the Chinese people with a political vaccine, helping us acquireimmunity from being seriously misled.”

Hu was 29 when the pro-democracy protests began. He had been borninto a poor, Christian, but otherwise traditional family. His father was anaccountant at a factory that manufactured rockets, and his mother, who wasilliterate, made embroidery with a sewing machine to bring in some extraincome. At 18, Hu joined the People’s Liberation Army and enrolled in itsforeign-language college in Nanjing, where he majored in Russian. In 1986,still a military officer, he started a masters programme in Russian at BeijingForeign Studies University. In the spring of 1989, when protests erupted acrossthe country, Hu was months away from graduation. “I went to Tiananmen Squareevery day, chanting slogans like everybody else,” Hu told a Chinese reporter in2011. (Xiao, the UC Berkeley professor, who was a student at Notre Dame in 1989and flew back to Beijing upon seeing the news on TV, laughed at the idea thatHu could have been there as a protester. He noted that the military college Huattended is sometimes known as “China’s cradle of 007s”. “If he trulyparticipated in the protest, god knows what his role was,” Xiao said.)

Shortly after the violent suppression of the Tiananmen protests,Hu joined the People’s Daily newspaper, where he spent two years as aresearcher and another two years as an editor on the night shift. At the time,China was more than a decade into Deng Xiaoping’s push to develop a marketeconomy. Hu was part of a group of journalists at the People’s Daily who soughtto create new revenue streams by launching a weekly newspaper called GlobalNews Digest.

On 3 January 1993, 20,000 copies of the first issue, whichincluded a story on Diana, Princess of Wales’s split from Prince Charles,appeared on newsstands. The front page featured a grandiose message from theeditors, which proclaimed that after 500 years of falling behind the west, and14 years of economic reform, China was “saying goodbye to poverty andbackwardness, like a giant dragon about to take off, standing tall in the eastof the world, its head held high”. Despite this lofty rhetoric, Hu claims therewasn’t a clear vision at first. “We published whatever ordinary people liked toread,” he told me.

The publication was filled with exotic stories about spies, royalromances, historical assassinations and children raised alongside wild animals.Most mainstream publications were so propaganda-heavy, so filled with partylingo and news of top leaders’ endless meetings, that the arrival of theplain-talking, eye-catching Global Times must have felt like an episode of Sexand the City beamed into the middle of a long sermon. Articles from the 90sincluded The Dark World of the Russian Mafia, From Female Slave to FashionModel, and The Unexpected Madness of Monks: Korean Buddhists’ Rivalry DousedMonastery with Blood.

An anti-US protest in Beijing in 1999.

An anti-US protest in Beijing in 1999. Photograph: StephenShaver/AFP

A few months into his stint at Global News Digest, Hu’s career wastransformed when he was dispatched abroad to cover the Bosnian war for thePeople’s Daily. In his memoir about the experience, published in 1997, herecalled thinking that the fact of a Chinese journalist reporting on a foreignwar “was likely more newsworthy than whatever articles he has to file”. To Hu,the conflict in Bosnia became the backdrop for a private battlefield in hismind, as he began measuring himself against the western journalists around him,whom he both admired and resented. “To be a soldier in a modern news war, Icouldn’t defeat the western reporters, but I congratulate myself for being ableto even join them for a fight,” Hu wrote in his memoir. (Almost a quarter of acentury later, his Twitter avatar is a photo of him in Sarajevo, sitting on thecurb taking notes.)

The book is sprinkled with a mixture of pride and vulnerability,as Hu struggles with his own inferiority complex: “Why can’t I be the one whocreates a sensation? Why can’t a Chinese reporter be in the limelight?” hewrites at one point. He admits that he spent his time obsessing over how to“look more like a real reporter”, rather than focusing on reporting. “Icouldn’t stand being looked down upon, not only on a personal level, but alsoon the account of being Chinese – a fact that brings with it a kind ofunbearable pressure for me.” He carried this chip on his shoulder everywhere hewent. On one occasion, he turned up to a news briefing that was in Albanian. Hedidn’t understand a word, but that didn’t stop him from asking a question inEnglish – not to seek an answer, just to assert his presence.

Hu returned to Beijing in 1996 and soon became Global NewsDigest’s deputy editor. “I was a war and international affairs reporter, and mypersonal interest was fused into our coverage,” he told me. In 1997, the paperchanged its name to the Global Times, and in the next two years, circulationtripled. “China was becoming integrated with the world,” Hu said. “In the past,international news were merely pieces of knowledge or information from remotecorners of the world. Gradually, international news became more and morerelated to China, and the Chinese audience developed a keen interest in what’shappening outside the country.”

One international incident from this period symbolised that newreality. On 7 May 1999, a Nato bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade,killing three Chinese journalists. Officials from the US claimed that it was anaccident and that the real target had been a Yugoslavian defence agency a fewhundred metres down the road. But many people in China believed it was adeliberate attack, and anti-American protests erupted across the country. Twodays after the bombing, the Global Times published a special issue, featuring areport by a Global Times journalist who had been speaking with the ambassadorin the building just minutes before the explosion. According to Han Rongbin, aprofessor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, events such asthe embassy bombing strengthened a collective sense of aggrieved nationalidentity. “That’s why some nationalists like to say that it was America whomade them so nationalistic,” he said.

As the Global Times grew, China’s most powerful politicianswatched with admiration. In 2004, when the paper published a column thatcriticised Chinese journalists for unthinkingly accepting American medianarratives about the “war on terror”, the foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, saidthat he’d long been waiting to read such an article. “Journalism might bewithout borders, but journalists do have motherlands,” wrote Li – in the GlobalTimes – shortly after.

Later that year, the president of the People’s Daily publishinggroup, Wang Chen, spoke at a seminar to discuss the “Global Times phenomenon”.Wang said that the minister of foreign affairs and the head of the overseaspropaganda office had repeatedly told him how much they loved the paper, andthat the Global Times exemplified how to make propaganda readable. Inpresentations to advertisers during this period, the publication would tout itsclose ties with top leadership, claiming that its readers included “nearly 200key leaders of the country at the party central, the state council, the centralmilitary commission and the National People’s Congress”. As soon as each issuewas published, the presentation claimed, special messengers would deliver thepaper to Zhongnanhai, the walled compound where much of the Communist partyelite live and work.

Since 2005, when he took over the paper as editor-in-chief, Hu hasexpanded the Global Times to an operation of 800 staff, publishing six days aweek in Chinese and in English. “We needed to expand our influence, and wecouldn’t do that without using English,” Hu told me, explaining the decision tolaunch the English edition in 2009.

Looking back, the first few years of the English-language GlobalTimes can seem like a strange interlude in the paper’s history. Located in arented office building outside the People’s Daily compound, the Englishoperation was largely separated from the Chinese one. Rather than rigidlyfollowing the nationalistic line, it afforded journalists some space to reporton more sensitive topics. Around the time of the English edition’s launch, theGlobal Times hired a dozen foreign editors. Their job was to ensure thatstories in English read smoothly, but they had little say on editorialdecisions. The English-language content was written mostly by Chinesejournalists. James Palmer, who worked at the Global Times for seven years andis now a deputy editor of the American magazine Foreign Policy, told me that inthe early days, the newspaper’s English content was about 60% “banal”, 20% “madnationalistic stuff” and 20% “genuinely interesting”.

Hu differentiated his paper from the other English-language partyoutlet, China Daily, by running stories on subjects such as dissidents andLGBTQ rights. “The Global Times was trying to make waves,” Jemimah Steinfeld, aBritish former editor, told me. Staffers from this period remembered that Huliked to paint himself as a force for progress. All reforms begin withrule-breaking, Hu told a Chinese magazine in 2013. If your type ofrule-breaking helps the country, eventually the government will give itapproval. This, he said, is how progress in China works.

A copy of the Global Times in Beijing on 21 January 2021, the dayafter Joe Biden’s inauguration in the US.

A copy of the Global Times in Beijing on 21 January 2021, the dayafter Joe Biden’s inauguration in the US. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

According to Wen Tao, a Chinese reporter who worked for theEnglish edition, Hu told staff to avoid self-censorship and to pursue whateverthey considered newsworthy. Wen’s pieces captured the everyday struggles oflife in Beijing a decade ago: a poet criticising his local government’s plan tocut down 20,000 trees in order to extend a road; a father trying to advocatefor food safety, after his children got ill from adulterated milk formula, onlyto be put on trial himself. In February 2010, he broke a story about thedissident artist Ai Weiwei and other local artists protesting in downtownBeijing against the demolition of a residential complex. Afterwards, Ai visitedthe newsroom of the English edition, and was warmly welcomed.

The divergence between the English Global Times and the ChineseGlobal Times was striking. “Their reports depicted two different Chinas,” wroteWen on his personal blog in 2016. Where the Chinese edition demonisedinternational voices, the English edition reported “some realities” in anattempt to show the outside world that the Chinese, too, enjoyed a free press.“If you didn’t look at the byline or the name of the paper, it could have verywell been a story from the Wall Street Journal,” Wen told me.

It did not last. Not long after his Ai Weiwei story, Wen was askedto submit his resignation. “The paper was looking to push boundaries, but Iprobably overdid it a little bit,” Wen told me. Around that time, he ran intoHu in the elevator. Wen recalled the older journalist expressing frustration:sometimes you write your stories, hoping to make room for more reporting likethis – only to find yourself being told to take a big step back. (Palmer toldme that the Global Times “had a culture of two ‘serious mistakes’ every sixmonths” and that Hu was “very regularly” told off by the propaganda authoritiesand other ministries.)

It is hard to tell to what extent, if any, Hu’s English-languageGlobal Times reflected his own journalistic ideals, or whether, as Wen suggested,the licence given to its reporters was itself a kind of propaganda exercise,intended to give foreigners the impression that the Chinese press enjoyedgreater freedom than it really did and that he, too, was a real reporter. Atthe very least, it seems that during this period, at the English edition, Huwas fairly committed to performing the role of a liberal-leaning editor. Palmerrecalled that in their first meeting, Hu told him, unprompted, that he wanteddemocracy and freedom of speech in China, but that reform had to be gradual. InWen’s view, Hu is a deeply conflicted figure. “On the one hand, he wanted to dojournalism professionally, but on the other hand, he couldn’t change hisposition as a party man,” he said.

By 2011, as the government line on freedom of speech hardened, sodid the editorial line of the Global Times. That year, the authorities detainedAi Weiwei for 81 days, and the Global Times denounced him in a series ofChinese and English op-eds, including one headlined “Ai Weiweis will be washedaway by history”. “It was a very sudden pivot,” Palmer remembered. “And afterthat it just became worse and worse.” The American author who no longercontributes to the Global Times told me: “Their business model seems to haveswitched to being completely provocative and just to piss people off.”

Sometimes, one former editor told me, when an article seemedparticularly inflammatory or outrageous, “we sent up a red flag, and they wouldbe like, ‘No, that’s exactly what we want to say.’”

There are many ways to be an editor in chief, Hu told me as hismobile phones rang in the background. “Some people might use their energy onmanaging, but I devote more of my energy to content.” On the phone, Hu waspolite and warm, in contrast to his aggressive online persona. He took longpauses before answering most questions, as if to compose mini-essays in hismind. Every day, he told me, his team “monitors” the internet in search ofpopular subjects, and once they land on an idea, they prepare a summary of theissue and brief Hu on it. Then Hu gets to work, turning it into a column. Foreach piece, his staff typically interview two or three experts, mostlygovernment thinktankers and professors from top universities. According to Hu,this means that his columns “don’t only reflect my own opinion, but absorb theopinions of many people in our society. We represent a somewhat mainstream takein China.”

As the space permitted to alternative views has shrunk, it hasbecome increasingly difficult to judge what proportion of China’s 1.4 billionpeople share the Global Times’ worldview. Scholars, journalists, writers,lawyers and activists have found their social media accounts suspended orerased because of their unspecified violation of the platform’s rules. Thesecases are so common and seemingly minor that they attract little internationalattention, but their collective effect is suffocating. In mainland China today,censorship and self-censorship are like the weather – you can complain aboutit, but you have to adapt to it. To rebel is to submit to the possibility ofhaving your life ruined. Early last year, a 36-year-old woman, Zhang Zhan,decided to report from Wuhan as a citizen journalist. She was soon arrested andsentenced to four years in prison, and now, several months into a hungerstrike, she is on her deathbed. Most people in China don’t know about ZhangZhan, and those who do tend not to think about what she represents – to do sowould only lead to trouble.

That doesn’t mean that party-approved figures such as Hu arebeyond criticism in mainland China. Hu’s critics include former contributors tothe Global Times, who feel that since 2010, he has grown into an increasinglyabsurd, even dangerous, caricature of himself. “You might have noticed that Irarely write for them any more,” Shen Dingli, a professor of internationalrelations at Fudan University, who is on the Global Times’s go-to list ofexperts, told me in an email. “The reason is their inclination towards extremenationalism.” Xiang Lanxin, who is based outside China, told me somethingsimilar, having been put off by Hu’s increasingly crude politics. He used to bea frequent contributor to the Global Times, but he stopped in the early 2010swhen he sensed that Hu was “no longer interested in meaningful debates”.

Hu’s critics are particularly alarmed by enthusiasm for militarysolutions to problems. After a recent border scuffle in the Himalayas withIndia, Hu argued that the Chinese army should “ready themselves to launch intobattle at any moment”. In another column, Hu suggested that China should buildup an arsenal of 1,000 nuclear warheads. In September, the Global Timespublished an op-ed headlined “People’s Liberation Army jets will eventuallypatrol over Taiwan”. When I asked Hu about critics who accuse him ofwarmongering, he became agitated and denied suggesting that China should starta war. “What I said is that if Taiwan started to assault us, then we must fightback with overwhelming force,” he told me. (One wonders what kind of actionwould constitute an “assault” in his view.)

To Xiang, Hu’s influence is far more important than that of theheadline-grabbing Wolf Warrior diplomats. Where diplomats can be silenced withone word from the top, the feelings of Chinese superiority that the GlobalTimes stokes every day are far harder to control. “This newspaper has beenleading popular mood in a nationalist direction for a long time, and theconsequences of this are not to be taken lightly,” Xiang told an interviewerlast year.

Occasionally, it can seem as if Hu is becoming a stranger in asphere he helped build. In May, the Weibo account of the Central Political andLegal Affairs Commission posted an image titled China Ignition vs IndiaIgnition, contrasting a recent Chinese rocket launch with Indian cremation – areference to the country’s surging Covid death toll. When Hu criticised thepost and expressed sympathy for India’s plight, he was attacked by nationalistsfor being too soft on one of China’s principal rivals. A decade ago, on socialmedia, Hu had seemed to be the No 1 flag bearer for Chinese nationalism. Nowhis status is not so certain. On Weibo, while Hu was being criticised forinsufficient national pride, one Global Times journalist asked: “Has Hu Xijinchanged? Or, have the times changed?” The answer seemed clear.

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman who spent two years in areeducation camp in western China.

‘Our souls are dead’: how I survived a Chinese ‘re-education’ campfor Uyghurs

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编辑：何晓琴