A video clip of a prison riot in Ecuador, a South American country, was spliced and transformed into the false news of “white black people killing Chinese people in California” and spread in Southeast Asia. The series of anti-American and anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party has had a serious impact on Thai society and has caused alarm and concern among Thai scholars.
Recently, a video clip with violent and bloody scenes has been widely circulated in Chinese communities in several Southeast Asian countries, as well as on social media platforms and communication software in China and Taiwan, with a unifying theme – “What’s wrong with America?”
In the video, an Asian man is beaten by dozens of Spanish-speaking men with sticks in broad daylight, his body twisted and covered in blood, his face in pain.
The video was not labeled as to its source, but was uniformly promoted during distribution as a hate attack against Asians that occurred in Los Angeles, California, and was usually accompanied by clearly anti-American and anti-American propaganda statements, such as, “Black and white people in California are killing Chinese people, turn to the nation”. “Chinese in the U.S. should wake up and flee the U.S. as soon as possible; go back to China or move to Southeast Asian countries as soon as possible, the sooner the better”; “A Chinese person died a tragic death for nothing, and our government is still hugging the U.S. thighs?”
(Web screenshot)
Fake news about “black and white people killing Asians” in California, which was faked by the Chinese Communist Party, is spreading on social media. (Screenshot from WeChat)
However, U.S. media traced the video to a scene that had nothing to do with the United States.
According to a May 7 report by Radio Free Asia, the media found that the video was actually a scene from a prison riot in Ecuador on Feb. 23 this year after searching for the source and distribution path of the video clip. It was first uploaded to Twitter by an official of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Justice, and then circulated to the Telegram Channel, a social communication software community.
In late April, the film began appearing on communication software and social media platforms in China, Taiwan and several countries in Southeast Asia, and was misleadingly portrayed as a violent incident in Los Angeles.
The newspaper quoted Li Minzhen, a researcher who has long tracked the CCP’s information warfare, as pointing out that the dissemination of this fake news is in line with two main themes of the CCP’s information warfare: one, to shape the sense that the CCP’s model of fighting the epidemic since the epidemic is superior to the Western model; and two, to use the recent incidents of discrimination and hate crimes against Asians in the United States to promote the chaos in the United States while glorifying and shaping the CCP as “Second, using the recent incidents of discrimination and hate crimes against Asians in the U.S., while promoting the chaos in the U.S., he celebrates and portrays the role of the CCP as the “maintainer of order” and highlights the concept that “democracy is not a good way to govern people.
Li Minzhen also pointed out that since the CCP’s information warfare is often outsourced to different departments and even commercial companies, the “products are of mixed quality and easily detected”, so the dissemination of similar false information and gory videos did not cause too much of a ripple in Taiwan, where the anti-communist regime is highly vigilant and fact-checking mechanisms are gradually being established. Therefore, the spread of similar false information and gory videos did not cause too much of a ripple in Taiwan, where anti-communist vigilance is high and fact-checking mechanisms are gradually being established.
However, Lee also pointed out that the aforementioned false information has caused a lot of commotion in the Chinese community in Thailand and has fermented in Thai society. He believes that this is related to the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing infiltration and ideological indoctrination of all sectors of Thai society.
The Radio Free Asia report also noted that the Chinese Communist government made “media and information cooperation” with ASEAN member countries an important part of its “One Belt, One Road” strategy as early as 2015, and in the years since then has provided free access to Thai media through acquisitions or signings of memorandums of affiliation. In the following years, they have provided free content from official CCP media such as Xinhua News Agency and CCTV to Thai TV stations through acquisitions or memoranda.
In 2019, content from Xinhua, the CCP’s mouthpiece, appeared in Khaosod, Thailand’s third-largest newspaper, and Thai newspapers adopted the “Beijing narrative model” when a massive anti-China campaign broke out in Hong Kong. By 2020, under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party propaganda system, conspiracy theories such as “the new coronavirus may have originated from the U.S. military” were even reported in the Thai media about the CCP pneumonia epidemic.
In an interview with Radio Free Asia, Poowin Bunyavejchewin, a senior researcher at the Center for East Asian Studies at Thailand’s National University of Law and Politics, said he was troubled by the amount of money coming into Thai academia from the Chinese Communist Party in an opaque manner. Some Thai academics echo Beijing’s rhetoric in a high profile way, even advocating that Thailand should copy China’s development model exactly, and that what they say to the public is not entirely based on the real situation and not in Thailand’s true national interest, yet they manage to hold the power of speech.
Boa Ruler Moon said, “In the last five years or so, I feel as if there is an official spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party in Thai academia.”
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