“Wang Jingyu: I am the police of Qinjiagang police station, you are restricted to surrender to our office within three days, otherwise your Parents will not end well.” Wang Jingyu, 19, who is currently in the United States, tweeted that it was a text message from police in Chongqing, China.
The police also issued a public “police bulletin” publicly claiming that they were “chasing him online. In fact, the police could not really “chase” him to the U.S. What they did was to take Wang’s Family hostage and hold his parents in custody to force him to comply.
What crime has Wang committed? According to Chongqing police, he left a message on Sina Weibo to denigrate and derogate the official remarks of the hero of the border guard, causing a bad impact on society. Eight months after the June 2020 Sino-Indian border clash, the Chinese side announced the PLA casualties, saying a total of four officers and soldiers had died. As the Indian side had previously analyzed the number of Chinese casualties at 30 to 40, there was no shortage of debate and suspicion among Chinese civilians about the veracity of the casualty count. Not only have the questions been censored and deleted from the Internet, but several people have been arrested by police for their online comments. In Nanjing, Qinhuangdao in Hebei, Maoming in Guangdong, Guiyang, Beijing and Mianyang in Sichuan, at least six people have been detained by Chinese police for “defaming martyrs,” including a man who goes by the screen name “Hot Pen Little Ball.
Chinese Communist Party‘s Anxiety Over Regime’s Image
The cost of soldiers’ lives in border clashes between countries is a tragedy that is saddening. However, the Chinese Communist Party is not satisfied with the compassion for the lives of the soldiers, but has turned the tragedy into an ode to patriotism. Not only that, but the so-called patriotism is actually love for the Party, and those who died as heroes were “good sons and daughters of the Party. But this is not what is unacceptable to the Chinese people, what is unacceptable to many of them is the falsification of propaganda. “The authenticity of the stories of “martyrs” such as the Five Heroes of Wolfram and Hart, Huang Jiguang, Qiu Shaoyun and Lei Feng have all been questioned. For example, Lei Feng claimed that he liked to do good deeds secretly, “do good deeds without leaving a name”, but he left so many photos of good deeds. At that Time, there was no convenient cell phone to take pictures, taking pictures required bulky professional machines. The secret good deeds of Lei Feng, always able to and photographers “coincidental encounter”. People also wonder why Lei Feng would turn on his flashlight to read when it was clearly daytime in the photos.
This kind of questioning is not only a respect for common sense, a desire to know the truth about history, but also an awakening of the people, a distrust of the Chinese Communist propaganda, and even a rebellion against the Chinese Communist regime.
The story of the “martyrs” has also been written as a joke. As in other social ecologies under authoritarian rule, people tell and spread these jokes to counter the regime’s brainwashing Education.
The Communist Party’s response to this was first to unleash its official propaganda machine. According to one official scholar, to “defend the image of heroes,” it was necessary to win the “Battle of Shangganling on the Internet. As a result, an alley war was fought on the Internet between ordinary netizens and the official CCP and its supporters (the Internet water army Wu Mao, the Self-driven Five and the Mao Left).
The officials did not win this alley war, and even lost more as a result. There was a time when everything from scholarly historical research to casual conversations in restaurants discussed or ridiculed the “martyrs” written into textbooks by the CCP. The National Tourism Administration (NTA) once issued a special notice to tour guides asking them not to tell tourists jokes about leaders and revolutionary martyrs along the way – yellow jokes, in fact.
In 2018, China enacted the Law on the Protection of Martyrs. This law “prohibits distorting, scandalizing, desecrating or denying the deeds and spirit of heroic martyrs; prohibits the use of martyrs’ portraits and names for commercial propaganda.” According to this law, after being assessed as heroes and martyrs, their names, portraits, reputation and honor are protected by law.
However, in any case, questioning the number of dead and wounded soldiers, even this law does not provide for “defamation of martyrs”. Behind the abuse of the law is the CCP’s anxiety about the regime’s image.
The “internet chase” is alarming, but it is still essentially a strapping tactic used by the Chinese police. And as China grows stronger, the government becomes more reckless. Wang Jingyu’s case proves that the military protects the interests of the rulers, not the safety of ordinary people. As a netizen said: When I was a child, I thought that no one would dare to bully us if our country was strong; now I realize that no one would dare to help us if our country was strong.
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