Ryan Fedasiuk, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET), told Free Asia that the Chinese Communist Party has formed a “youth Internet army” on college campuses to wage a war on public opinion, with more than 20 million people with an average age of 19.
Ryan Fedasiuk said that in addition to professional Internet commentators, the CCP relies on a “youth Internet army” of more than 20 million people to wage a multifaceted war of public opinion. Many of those volunteers are college students. If you look at the list of volunteers posted by some university party branches, the average volunteer netizen is 19 years old. They are asked to post offensive posts online on a part-time basis to “clean up” cyberspace.
The expert said that in recent years, the practice of using “50 cents” (50 cents for a post) to wage an online opinion war has become somewhat outdated. Now, in addition to employing two million Internet commentators, the Communist Party also has more than 20 million civilized Internet volunteers. Many of these volunteers are university students, he said, because this guidance document, jointly issued by the central committee of the Communist Youth League and the Ministry of Education in 2015, requires university party branches across the country, including Hong Kong, to form teams of commentators in order to carry out online civilization volunteer work.
Most of these online armies are very young, he said. If you check the list of volunteers released by some university party branches, they are on average only nineteen years old. These people are asked to post offensive posts online on a part-time basis to “clean up” cyberspace.
The Free Asia website posts an organizational chart of the “Internet Civilization Volunteers” in China’s Shandong province, showing a volunteer net army with the province as the main team, with sub-divisions (160,000 people), brigades (8,000 people), squadrons (400 people), and teams (20 people).
According to Ferien, the nature of their work can be described as “volunteered”: “The central government and the Ministry of Education have set specific targets, saying that these schools must recruit a certain number of volunteers. Therefore, although they are called “volunteers,” the league committees of the universities need to recruit enough people.”
He said that these netizens are required to like, retweet and comment on content on microblogs, blogs, forums and other sites, effectively guiding the direction of online public opinion. The commentators employed by the Central Internet Information Office also need to delete “undesirable information” or actively resist and refute online rumors, suppress “undesirable information” and disseminate content favorable to the CCP. In many cases, some netizens have also encouraged online companies to shut down the accounts of netizens who disagree with them.
He noted that the recent more intense activity of Chinese netizens overseas is just the beginning. Their attacks on foreign companies like H&M and Uniqlo, and on foreign researchers like Xu Xiuzhong of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, are just the first shots they have fired: “The CCP is waging an opinion war with foreigners in more places in an attempt to actually improve international public opinion involving China.”
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